A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba.

Randall, Stephen J.

by Alejandro De La Fuente. Envisioning Cuba series. Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xi, 449 pp. $55.00 U.S. (cloth), $19.95 U.S. (paper).

State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940, by Robert Whitney. Envisioning Cuba series. Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xii, 255 pp. $49.95 U.S. (cloth), $18.95 U.S. (paper).

During the second half of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth, Cuba and Cubans struggled with a range of political, economic, and social challenges, some of them domestic and others related more to the place of Cuba in the international system. Until the end of the nineteenth century the main challenge was to assert autonomy and then independence from Spain, but the end of the war against Spain found the United States filling the vacuum left by the departure of Spanish authorities. For the next half-century and more, Cuban nationalists sought to reduce and then eliminate the power of the United States. Part of that history is the history of bilateral and international relations, but interwoven into that quest for decolonization were issues of ideology, political structure, class, race, and power which continued to defy easy solution even in the aftermath of the successful revolution under Fidel Castro. Both of these studies provide considerable insight into the socio-economic and political dynamic that characterized Cuba in the twentieth century.

Robert Whitney's analysis of mass mobilization and political change in Cuba between the world wars is the more focussed of the two. Exceptionally well-researched in the archives of Cuba and the British Foreign Office, the volume advances a highly convincing case for the importance of these years in establishing the modern Cuban state with the displacement of the more traditional oligarchic state that dominated Cuba into the 1930s. It is Whitney's contention that the breakdown of the oligarchic state was primarily a consequence of the effective mobilization of the popular classes against the traditional oligarchy, and he gives appropriate credit to Fulgencio Batista for his contribution to that end following the 1933 revolution that unseated Gerardo Machado. Whitney provides a sophisticated, reflective, and insightful analysis of the contending political forces in the 1920s that preceded the 1933 revolution. These forces included the failed revolt in the early 1920s by the veterans of the Spanish-American-Cuban war, the emergence of young, radical, and largely middle class nationalists such as Ruben Martinez Villena and Julio Antonio Mella in the 1920s, the rise of organized labour, especially in the sugar industry, the formation and role of the Cuban Communist Party through the depression decade, and the capacity of Batista to mold these and other contending groups into a political force.

Whitney traces the emergence of these young radical nationalists through the 1920s, and he rightly observes that it was not just the emergence of nationalism and radical political groups, but the crisis of the economic order with the depression that followed 1929, and the virtual collapse of the Cuban sugar industry that brought the old order to its knees and caused the collapse in 1933 of the Machado government that had dominated Cuba for much of the previous decade. Machado's departure for exile in Mexico was followed by the ill-fated liberal government of the popular University of Havana academic, Ramon Grau San Martin. Grau was never able to gain the confidence of U.S. officials or to consolidate his power among contending Cuban political interests, and the "sergeants' revolt" brought an end to the short-lived government and ushered in a decade in which Batista was the power behind elected officials until he was elected in his own right as a popular presidential candidate in 1940.

Historians have tended to portray the 1933 revolution that briefly brought Ramon Grau San Martin to power as a failed revolution in which the United States, in particular U.S. ambassador Sumner Welles, worked with traditional Cuban political groups to restore order. In that interpretation Fulgencio Batista is cast as a counter-revolutionary. Whitney demonstrates effectively that Batista, himself of humble origins and a mulatto, viewed himself as part of that revolution, and that it was part of his political skill that he was able in the course of the 1930s, especially between 1937 and 1940, to develop a social and political program that was not inconsistent with the goals of the 1933 revolutionaries. In mobilizing the popular classes, Batista demonstrated that he was not simply another caudillo of the old school. As Whitney suggests, Batista managed to "repress, co-opt, balance, and neutralize such disparate groups as traditional politicians, sugar interests, organized labor, communists, radical nationalists, and the United States" (p. 179). Whitney's study does more than outline and analyze the course of Cuban politics and this is to some extent the link with Alejandro De la Fuente's volume on race and politics. Whitney also provides carefully researched and argued sections on the composition of the labour force in interwar Cuba, the impact of the depression on organized labour, and the ways in which the Cuban governments under Batista in the 1930s dealt with the issue of domestic versus imported foreign labour. Race relations was an integral part of that labour dynamic, of course, and this is the area on which De la Fuente has provided an insightful and detailed analysis.

Based on exhaustive research in Cuban archives in Cienfuegos and Havana, in the U.S. National Archives state and war department records, and specialized collections at selected American universities, De la Fuente has produced a provocative analysis of the ways in which post-independence Cuban nationalism and racism or anti-racism played off against one another in the course of the twentieth century. He draws the inspiration for the title of the volume from the vision of Jose Marti--"a nation for all"--which envisioned a nation which would be inclusive regardless of race or class, a nation of Cubans. In meticulous detail he traces the course of race relations in politics, education, and the labour market in culture from the early republic through the post-Castro revolution, suggesting that at each stage there were tensions, indeed contradictions, between the ideals of Cuban nationalists and later socialists and the reality that was attained. De la Fuente paints a convincing portrait of the emergence of a segregated society during the republican years, fuelled to some extent by the racial assumptions of American officials during the years of occupation and the views of foreign and white Cuban employers who controlled the major labour market in the sugar industry. Whatever racial idealism there had been in the years leading up to independence from Spain was sublimated in the decades that followed, a phenomenon that was facilitated by the failure of the revolutionary generation to dominate politics in the 1910s and 1920s. De la Fuente's analysis of post-1959 Cuba may be more controversial, since he again provides a critical portrait of race relations under the Castro government, in marked contrast to a pervasive view that post-revolutionary Cuba was a model of racial equality. De la Fuente notes that the segregated Black social clubs and societies that had been established in the republican years to serve the Black community were dismantled by the Castro government since they were visible manifestations of a racist society. Their dismantling did not, however, end facial tensions. As De la Fuente suggests, a change in policies did not necessarily change attitudes, or to use his words, "it takes more than structural change to build a racial democracy" (p. 18).

These are outstanding works of scholarship that address important issues in twentieth-century Cuban history and deserve to be widely read not only by Cuban scholars but also by those who seek to understand the evolution of race relations in the Americas in the past century.

Stephen J. Randall
University of Calgary