It’s amazing how little Americans know about neighboring countries. Actually it’s amazing how little Americans know about America, but that’s another matter. Miami is closer to Havana than it is to Orlando or Atlanta and yet a lot of people couldn’t name the capital of Cuba if you asked them. What some people do know abut Cuba doesn’t extend much farther beyond cigars, salsa, and communism. Obviously there is so much more and a lot of Cuban history has been directly influenced by American politics and business. Hugh Thomas’s Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom gives an epic rundown of Cuban history that is far from complete. Yet with about 1.500 pages, you can’t fault the author for leaving a few things out.
This history book, which weighs weighs about as much as an iron dumbbell, doesn’t start with the Taino or Arawak Indians. It doesn’t even start with the arrival of Columbus. It starts with the British invasion of Havana led by Lord Albemarle. This might be a strange starting point considering how minor an event it is in Cuban history and all that came after, but as stated before, a book of this length wouldn’t benefit from any extra information. In any case, the 18th century was when Cuba became an island of central importance to colonial businessmen in the Caribbean. The tropical jungle island had a perfect climate for sugarcane and tobacco farming and its location made it ideal as a hub for distribution and transport of cargo. This led to an influx of Spanish criollos and, regrettably, a thriving trade of slaves brought over from West Africa and indentured servants from China.
The most interesting parts of these early chapters include descriptions of the social lives of Cuba’s inhabitants. It’s especially interesting to learn about how the plantation and factory owners allowed the slave laborers to practice their traditional religions, something that helped them to cope with slavery and later catalyzed the thriving of African diaspora religions in the Caribbean. It’s also interesting that slaves were allowed to buy their own freedom and a class of African craftsmen grew in Havana as a result.
Yet as agriculture and industry in Cuba grew, more Africans were brought in from Jamaica and Haiti, making them the dominant demographic of the colony. The Spanish criollos grew uneasy because small slave rebellions broke out, setting off a long string of political violence and rebellions that culminated in the Cuban Revolution of 1958. On the other side of that was a small group of Spanish businessmen who wanted Cuba to be annexed by the United States. At this time, Cuba was owned and politically dominated by the Spanish crown who paid little attention to the distant island. Simultaneously, the economy and industry were largely influenced, if not outright controlled, by the U.S.
The annexation movement may have been obscure and ineffective, but it did inspire a nationalist movement and an eventual War of Independence. During this time in the 19th century, the journalist and poet Jose Marti emerged as the voice of Cuban independence. Rebellions were led from the eastern province of Oriente by the mulatto captain Antonio Maceo as well. Both of these men are considered to be Cuba’s first national heroes. Adding to the turbulence of the 1800s were also the boom and bust cycles of sugar production and their reliance on the fickle international market. Sugarcane was the dominant crop of Cuba’s agriculture and the island’s economy relied heavily on the sugar market, something that could be easily offset by the farming of sugar beets in Europe and the United States where transport costs were lower and import tariffs non-existent if grown locally.
By the end of the 19th century, the Spanish-American War had broken out. As the Spanish Empire grew weaker and they began to lose control over their overseas territories, the U.S. used the explosion of the battleship Maine, anchored off the coast of the Florida Keys, as an excuse to “liberate” the remaining colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. For the Cubans, this meant the much desired nationhood they craved, but it also meant a subservient position to the United States. The Platt Amendment was attached to the first Constitution of Cuba, giving the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuban affairs under certain circumstances. This remained a sore point in the minds of nationalists who wanted complete independence. But Thomas argues that some guidance was necessary for the fledgling nation. Early Cuban politicians lacked political will and expertise, and the economy was largely dependent on businesses owned by Americans. The American government was paternalistic and patronizing to Cuban politicos and this caused friction with the Cuban populace, something that Americans were too blind and arrogant to see.
Eventually, a democracy emerged on the island nation, but it was fraught with difficulties and instability from the beginning. The term “gangsterismo” was coined to describe the Cuban political style. After the election of Fulgencio Batista to his first term of office, corruption and violence took hold of the government. The lines between politics, organized crime, and guerilla warfare became blurred as different factions emerged out of the underground to fight for power. These political gangs had less to do with ideology than they did with violence, graft, and loyalty, a factor that made Havana volatile and sporadically dangerous until the middle of the 20th century. After a string of corrupt and ineffective presidents who were constantly under threat of assassination, Batista returned to power as a dictator; at first he was welcomed as a savior, but the Cubans quickly turned against him when they saw he was all about business as usual.
Enter Fidel Castro.
The future Cuban dictator was raised by a wealthy family of sugarcane farmers. After passing the bar exam, the young intellectual worked for a law firm of no importance before assembling a small army and launching a raid against the Moncada military barracks. After a stint in prison, Castro went to Mexico and met up with his right hand man Che Guevara. The two of them trained a small band of guerillas, sailed a decrepit boat through a storm to Oriente province in Cuba, and launched a revolution that caught on in the rural areas and mountains of the island nation. It is important to note that Fidel Castro was never an ideologue. He was an adventurer and a natural born leader with outsize charisma. This goes a long way in understanding what the Cuban Revolution of 1958 was all about. To the surprise of many, the revolution quickly gained momentum and soon the CIA and American media were lending some reluctant support to his cause. The CIA, seeing Batista as a weak leader, convinced him to step down and allow Castro to take over the country. Castro’s success did not come solely from his charisma; his revolutionary message about Cuban independence was sufficiently vague enough to appeal to varied groups of people, many of which had opposing points of view. One thing they all had in common was the weariness of political instability and economic backwardness, something they ironically coped with by nurturing a strong and passionate culture.
After the rise of Castro, Hugh Thomas revisits the state of Cuban society around the time of the Revolution. It’s an interesting contrast with the section at the beginning of the book that addresses the same issues as they stood in at the turn of the 19th century. The book ends with America’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also ends with an analysis of Cuban politics and society after the Revolution. Thomas is certainly biased against Castro although he does a fair job of presenting nuanced views of the country in the 1960s. Living standards rose for some while going down for others. Massive amounts of refugees left to settle in the United States. Castro, with no political experience or ideology, grasped on to communism and made everything up as he went along. He appointed Che Guevara to manage Cuba’s industry and economy, but Guevara made a mess out of that due to his similar lack of experience in the real world. Thomas accuses Guevara of being a quasi-fascist due to his enthusiasm for political violence and warfare over the less exciting nuts and bolts of economic policy. Fidel Castro essentially turned Cuba into a personality cult.
Due to its length, this book is not for readers looking for a quick and easy understanding of Cuban history. It starts out strong with its sociological history of the colony in the 1700s. The author clearly identifies and outlines the key events, rebellions, wars, and political movements of the subsequent century. His analysis of the sugar and tobacco industries is top notch in its detail even if it is a bit dry. But some of the politics get bogged down in excessive detail. There are a lot of obscure arguments made by obscure men with obscure intentions over obscure issues. There are times when the reader has to keep a stiff upper lip while plowing through all the muck. The same can be said for some passages of the democratic and gangsterismo era of the 20th century that led up to the Revolution. The peaks of early and mid Cuban history are fascinating enough to keep the narrative going though. And Fidel Castro’s Revolution is one of the most exciting political adventure stories I know of. As a reader, Thomas makes it easy to see how people could get caught up in all the intrigue. I have read better accounts of the Cuban Revolution though.
The worst part of this book is the way Thomas insists on listing the names of every single person who contributed to the Revolution so that you get long lists of people like Jose Garcia Ecehvarria Gonzales y Fuentes de las Casas. I’m not saying this to make fun of Spanish names. I’m just saying that these lists can be off-putting to even the most dedicated of readers especially because most of these people never reappear in the narrative after being mentioned once. It’s like reading the genealogies in the Old Testament. It’s the kind of information that should be included in an appendix.
The chapters on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis are hasty and brief; there are far better accounts written in more recently authored books. The chapters on post-Revolutionary Cuba are interesting, but since this book was published in 1972, it is obvious that the author did not have the sufficient historical distance to give a well-rounded perspective. It would be interesting to read accounts of life inside Cuba from the time of the Revolution up to the present.
By the end a pattern emerges. From early slave rebellions to independence movements and liberation from the domination of the United States, Cuban history is marked by a desire for freedom. Ironically, the price they paid for national independence was a dictatorship that restricted civil liberties and political opposition while being somewhat under the wing of the Soviet Union and still economically tied to the turbulent international sugar market. The subtitle of this book is appropriate as it gives form to the chaos of Cuban history. Fortunately, Thomas does not over-emphasize this thesis since doing so would have contained the narrative in an unnecessarily narrow theory of interpretation. Perhaps Cuba’s shortcomings in the pursuit of freedom are overridden in the cultural expressions of their music, dance, and easy going lifestyle as well as the thriving of the African diaspora religious societies known as Abakua, Palo Monte, and Santeria or Lukumi. When political oppression is all-pervasive, passions for freedom can be expressed in other creative ways.
After finishing Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom by Hugh Thomas, it is clear that the author is anal retentive in attention to detail, yet it is written without losing sight of the bigger issues guiding the study of Cuban history. At times, the writing is dense, but when you break through to the more interesting parts, it becomes clear that this is a monumental achievement both for the author and the reader who has enough patience to see it through to the end.
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