Open Veins of Latin America Read online

  organized blockade by intensive trading with the West European countries. A third of Cuba's exports earn dollars--that is, convertible currency; the rest is on a barter basis with the Soviet Union and the ruble zone. This system of trading creates certain difficulties:while Soviet turbines for thermoelectric installations are of excellent quality, like all Soviet-made heavy equipment, this is not true of consumer goods produced by its light or medium-sized industry.) Imports of machinery and industrial installations have risen by 40 percent since 1958; the economic surplus generated by sugar has been mobilized to develop basic industries and to see that neither lands nor workers are condemned to idleness. Cuba had 5,000 tractors and 30,000 automobiles when the Batista dictatorship fell. Today it has 50,000

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  tractors--although they are to a large extent wasted because of organizational deficiencies--and nothing remains of that fleet of automobiles, mainly luxury models, except a few specimens fit for scrap-iron. The cement industry and electrical plants are growing with extraordinary speed; big fertilizer factories created by the Revolution have enabled Cuba to use five times more fertilizer than in 1958. Reservoirs built all over the island today contain seventy-three times as much water as was available in 1958, and Cuba has made a seven-league-boot advance in areas under irrigation. New highways throughout Cuba have broken what once seemed to be the eternal isolation of many regions.

  Holstein bulls, brought in to increase the meager milk production from Cebu cattle, have produced 800,000 cross-bred cows by artificial insemination.

  Much progress--but still not enough--has been made in the mechanization of sugarcane cutting and loading, mainly using Cuban inventions. A new work system is being organized, with difficulty, to replace the old one which could not survive the changes brought by the Revolution. Professional macheteros, canecutters who are prisoners of sugar, are an extinct species: for them too, the Revolution meant freedom to choose other less grueling work, and for their children the chance of scholarships to study in the cities. Unavoidably, the sugar workers' liberation has resulted in serious upsets in the economy. In the 1970 harvest Cuba had to use three times as many workers as before, mainly volunteers or soldiers or people from different jobs, thereby harming other rural and urban activities--the harvesting of other products, the work-rhythm in the factories. Here one must bear in mind that in a socialist society, unlike in a capitalist one, workers are not motivated by fear of unemployment or by avarice. Other drives--solidarity, collective responsibility, awareness of the duties and rights that move a man beyond selfishness--must be brought into play. And the conscience of a whole people is not changed in a moment. When the Revolution came to power most Cubans, according to Fidel Castro, were not even anti-imperialists.

  Cubans became radicalized along with their Revolution as challenges and responses, blows and counter-blows between Havana and Washington followed one upon the other, and as the Revolution proceeded to turn its promises of social justice into solid facts, It built 170 new 76

  hospitals and as many polyclinics, and made medical care free. It multiplied by three the number of students enrolled at all levels and also made education free; more than 300,000 children and youths benefit today from scholarships, and boarding schools and kindergartens have proliferated. A large part of the population pays no rent and no one pays for water, light, public telephones, funerals, or sporting events. Spending on social services increased five times in a few years. But now that everyone has education and shoes, necessities multiply geometrically and production can only grow arithmetically. Cuba has been compelled to escalate its exports, and sugar continues to be its major resource. Many products are in short supply: In 1970, fruit and refrigerators and clothing. Queues, part of the daily routine, are not solely due to disorganized distribution. The essential cause of scarcity is the new abundance of consumers: the country now belongs to everyone, consumption is by all, not just a few. Thus it is scarcity of an opposite kind to that in other Latin American countries. The Revolution is indeed living through the hard times of transition and sacrifice. The Cubans themselves have learned that socialism is built with clenched teeth and that revolution is no evening stroll. But after all, if the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.

  The Revolution is forced to sleep with its eyes open, and in economic terms this also costs dearly. Constantly harassed by invasion and sabotage, it does not fall because--strange dictatorship!--it is defended by a people in arms.

  The expropriated expropriators do not give up. The brigade that landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 was not only made up of former Batista soldiers and policemen, but also of the previous owners of more than 370,000 hectares of land, nearly 10,000 buildings, seventy factories, ten sugarmills, three banks, five mines, and twelve cabarets. Guatemalan dictator Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes provided training camps for the expedition in return, as he later admitted, for U.S. promises of cash (which was never paid) and an increase in the Guatemalan sugar quota in the U.S. market.

  In 1965 another sugar country, the Dominican Republic, was invaded, this time--according to their commander, General Bruce Palmer--by 40,000 U.S.

  Marines ready "to stay indefinitely in this country in view of the reigning confusion." The vertical drop in sugar prices had been a factor in setting off popular indignation; the people rose against

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  the military dictatorship and U.S. troops arrived promptly to restore order, They left 4,000 dead in battles fought by patriots, body to body, in a crowded Santo Domingo slum, between the Rio Ozama and the Caribbean.(After the invasion, President Lyndon johnson's special envoy to the Dominican Republic was Ellsworth Bunker, the chairman of the National Sugar Refining Company. National Sugar's interests in this small country were safeguarded under Bunker's attentive eye: the occupation troops withdrew, leaving in power, after very democratic elections, Joaquin Balaguer, Trujillo's right arm throughout his brutal dictatorship. The Dominicans had fought in the streets and on rooftops, with sticks, machetes, and guns, against the foreign forces' tanks, bazookas, and helicopters for the return to power of constitutionally elected President Juan Bosch, who had been overthrown by a military coup. History plays derisively prophetic games. On the day when Bosch began his brief presidency, after thirty years of Trujillo tyranny, Lyndon Johnson, then vice-president, brought his government's official gift to Santo Domingo: it was an ambulance.) The Organization of American States--which has the memory of a donkey, never forgetting where it eats--blessed the invasion and supplied it with new forces.

  The germ of another Cuba had to be exterminated.

  FROM THE SACRIFICE OF THE SLAVES IN THE CARIBBEAN

  WERE BORN JAMES WATT'S STEAM ENGINE AND

  GEORGE WASHINGTON'S CANNON

  Che Guevara said that underdevelopment was a dwarf with an enormous head and a bloated stomach: its spindly legs and stubby arms do not fit with the rest of the body. In yesterday's Havana fashionable avenues glittered and putted with Cadillacs, and luscious starlets undulated to the rhythms of Lecuona's famous band in the world's largest cabaret; meanwhile in the Cuban countryside only one in every ten peasants ever drank milk, barely 4 percent ate meat, and the wages of three out of five (according to the National Economic Council) were three to four times lower than the cost of living.

  But sugar did not only produce dwarfs. It also produced giants, or at least contributed generously to their growth. The sugar of tropical Latin America gave powerful impetus to the accumulation of capital for English, French, Dutch, and U.S. industrial development, while at the same time mutilating the economy of Northeast Brazil and the Caribbean islands and consummating the historic ruin of Africa. The fulcrum

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  of the triangular trade--manufactures, slaves, sugar--between Europe, Africa, and America was the traffic in slaves for sugar plantations. As Auguste Cochin wrote: "The story of a grain of sugar is a whole lesson in political economy, in politics, and also in morality."

  West Af
rican tribes fought among themselves to add prisoners of war to their reserves of slaves. They were in Portugal's colonial orbit, but when the slave trade boomed the Portuguese, lacking ships and industrial articles to offer in exchange, became mere middlemen between African potentates and slaver captains of other nations. The English were the champions in buying and selling human flesh until it ceased to be convenient for them. The Dutch, however, had longer experience in the business--Charles V had given them a monopoly in shipping slaves to the Americas before England obtained the right to introduce slaves into the colonies. As for France, the "Sun King" Louis XIV

  shared with the king of Spain half the profits of the Guinea Company, formed in 1701 to facilitate the slave trade to the Americas; and his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the architect of French industrialization, had good reason to describe the slave traffic as "recommended for the progress of the national merchant marine."10

  Adam Smith said that one of the principal effects of the discovery of America "has been to raise the mercantile system to a degree of splendour and glory which it could never otherwise have attained to."11 According to Sergio Bagu, the most potent force for the accumulation of mercantile capital was slavery in the Americas; and this capital in turn became "the foundation stone on which the giant industrial capital of modern times was built." The New World revival of Greco-Roman slavery had miraculous qualities: it multiplied the ships, factories, railroads, and banks of countries that were not originally involved in Africa or--with the exception of the United States--in the fate of the slaves crossing the Atlantic. From the dawn of the sixteenth to the dusk of the nineteenth centuries, many millions of Africans--no one knows how many crossed the ocean; what is known is that they greatly exceeded the number of white emigrants from Europe, although many fewer survived. From the Potomac to the Rio de la Plata, slaves built the houses of their masters, felled the forests, cut and milled the sugarcane, planted the cotton, cultivated the cacao, harvested the coffee and tobacco, and were entombed in the mines. How many Hiroshimas did these successive

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  exterminations add up to? As an English planter in Jamaica remarked, "It's easier to buy niggers than to breed them." Caio Prado estimates that up to the beginning of the nineteenth century between 5 and 6 million Africans arrived in Brazil alone, and that Cuba was then as big a slave market as the whole Western hemisphere had been before.

  Back in 1562 Captain John Hawkins had smuggled 300 blacks out of Portuguese Guinea. Queen Elizabeth was furious: "It was detestable and would call down vengeance from heaven upon the undertakers," she cried.12 But Hawkins told her that in exchange for the slaves he had a cargo of sugar, hides, pearls, and ginger in the Caribbean, and she forgave the pirate and became his business partner. A century later the Duke of York was branding the initials "DY" on the left buttock or breast of each of the 3,000 blacks his concern annually took to the "sugar islands." The Royal African Company, whose shareholders included Charles II, paid 300 percent in dividends, although only 46,000 of the 70,000 slaves it shipped between 1680 and 1688 survived the crossing. On the voyage many Africans died of epidemics or malnutrition; others committed suicide by refusing to cat, hanging themselves by their chains, or throwing themselves into a sea bristling with sharks' fins.

  Slowly but surely England broke Holland's slavetrade hegemony. The South Sea Company was the chief beneficiary of the asiento, the royal monopoly on the slave trade which Spain had conceded to England, and leading figures in British politics and finance were connected with the company. Its business topped all others, agitated the London stock exchange, and set off reckless speculation. Traffic in slaves raised the shipping center of Bristol to the rank of Britain's second city and made Liverpool the world's greatest port. Ships sailed with cargoes of duly blessed weapons, cloth, gin and rum, baubles and colored glass, the means of payment for Africa's human merchandise and for the sugar, cotton, coffee, and cacao of American colonial plantations. The British established their reign over the seas. At the end of the eighteenth century, Africa and the Caribbean were providing work for 180,000

  textile workers in Manchester; Sheffield produced the knives, Birmingham produced 150,000 muskets a year. African chiefs received the products of British industry and delivered the human cargoes to slaver captains. This provided them with new weapons and plenty of liquor to embark on the next manhunts in the villages. They also supplied ivory, wax, and 80

  palm oil. Many of the slaves came from forest areas and had never seen the sea; they mistook its roaring for that of some underwater beast waiting to devour them, or (according to a slavetrader of the period) believed, not entirely without reason, that "they are carried like sheep to the slaughter and that Europeans are fond of their flesh... "13 The cat-o'-nine-tails could do little to contain the Africans' desperate suicides.

  The "bundles" who survived the hunger and disease, the weeks of lying crammed together below decks, were exhibited in rags--mere skin and bones--

  in the public square after being paraded through colonial streets to the sound of bagpipes. Those arriving too exhausted could be fattened up in the slave barracks before showing them to buyers; the sick ones were left to die on the piers. Slaves were sold for cash or on three-year credit. The ships sailed back to Liverpool carrying various tropical products: in the early eighteenth century three-quarters of the cotton used by the British textile industry came from the Antilles, although Georgia and Louisiana later became its chief sources; by midcentury there were 120 sugar refineries in Britain.

  At that time an Englishman could live on L6 a year; Liverpool slave merchants garnered more than L1.1 million a year in the Caribbean alone, not including their fat profits from the additional trade. Ten big concerns controlled two-thirds of the traffic. Liverpool installed a new system of docks; more, longer, and heavier ships were constantly being built. Silversmiths offered "silver padlocks and collars for niggers and dogs," elegant ladies paraded about with monkeys in embroidered jackets and child slaves in turbans and ballooning silk trousers. An economist described the slave trade as the basic and fundamental principle of all the rest, like the mainspring of the machine which sets every cogwheel in motion." Banks proliferated in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, London, and Glasgow; Lloyds piled up profits insuring slaves, ships, and plantations. From the beginning, London Gazette announcements advised that fugitive slaves should be returned to Lloyds.

  Slavetrade profits financed the building of Britain's Great Western railway and of industries such as the Welsh slate factories. Capital accumulated in the triangular trade made possible the invention of the steam engine: James Watt was subsidized by businessmen who had made their fortunes in that trade.14

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  Early in the nineteenth century, Britain became the leader in the anti-slavery campaign. British industry needed international markets with more purchasing power, which led it to preach the gospel of wages. But the introduction of wages in Britain's Caribbean colonies gave renewed advantage to Brazilian sugar, with its comparatively lower costs from using slave labor.

  (The first law expressly banning slavery in Brazil was not Brazilian, It was--and not by accident-

  -English. The British parliament voted it on August 8, 1845.) The British fleet now attacked the slavers, but the traffic to supply Cuba and Brazil continued growing. Before a British ship could reach a pirate ship, the slaves were thrown into the sea; all that remained on board were the smell and the laughing captain on deck. Repression of the traffic raised prices and further pyramided profits.

  By the middle of the century slavers were selling vigorous slaves, whom they had got for an old rifle, for more than $600 a head in Cuba.

  The little Caribbean islands had been far more important to Britain than its colonies to the north: Barbados, Jamaica, and Monserrat were forbidden to make so much as a needle or a horseshoe for themselves. But the situation was quite different in New England, and this facilitated both its economic development and its political inde
pendence. In New England the slave trade gave birth to a large part of the capital that produced the U.S. industrial revolution. In the middle of the eighteenth century Northern slave ships carried barrels of rum to Africa from Boston, Newport, and Providence; they exchanged the rum for slaves, sold the slaves in the Caribbean, and from there brought molasses to Massachusetts, where it was distilled and converted into rum, completing the cycle. The best Antillean rum, "West Indian Rum," was not even made in the Antilles. With capital obtained from this trade in slaves, the Brown brothers of Providence installed the foundry that provided George Washington with guns for the American Revolution. Caribbean sugar plantations, condemned as they were to cane monoculture, were not the dynamic center of development for the "thirteen colonies" solely because of the impetus the slave trade gave to naval industry and to the New England distilleries; they also provided a large market for the export of foodstuffs, timber, and sugarmill implements, lending economic viability to the farm and budding factory economy of the North Atlantic. Ships built in the colonists'