State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940

Whitney, Robert.. State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

The main argument in State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940 is thatthe transition from oligarchic rule to the modern state came about primarily because of mass mobilization against the elites. Although Robert Whitney reveals numerous episodes of mass mobilization during the second and third decades of the twentieth century in Cuba, he contends that the 1933 Revolution led by Ramon Grau San Martín, a popular university teacher in Havana, was the quintessential event of mass mobilization leading to the creation of the modern Cuban state.

Whitney, an assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of New Brunswick at St. John in Canada, explains that most of the scholarly writing about the 1933 Revolution shares the central idea that "its significance is found largely in reference to what happened (or failed to happen) in the 1950s (p. 12). One school of historical interpretation holds that had the frustrated 1933 Revolution been successful it would have precluded the more radical 1959 Revolution. U.S. support for Fulgencio Batista's January 1934 coup convinced Grau and his supporters that the Good Neighbor Policy was business as usual. As such, Fidel Castro merely tapped into the frustration of the Cuban people caused by the failed 1933 Revolution. Castro's success, therefore, was not so much of his own making; it was due to the inability of reform-minded Cubans to implement sustained democratic changes after 1933. A second school of historical interpretation places emphasis on the inability of the U.S. government to fully understand the important political implications of the 1933 Revolution. The fear that Grau and his supporters could not protect U.S. investment convinced the U.S. to deny recognition to Grau's provisional government. U.S. support of Batista's 1934 coup made the 1959 Revolution inevitable. A third school of interpretation sees the 1933 Revolution as the dress rehearsal for the 1959 Revolution (p. 12). As such, the failure of the 1933 Revolution proved that it was impossible to change the neo-colonial political system without a genuine social revolution.

Historians, therefore, generally view the 1933 Revolution and Grau's provisional government as part of Cuba's long search for social justice and political independence. For most historians, this search culminated (for better or worse) in Fidel Castro's 1959 Revolution. Whitney, however, had a different objective. Beginning his study in 1920, he wanted to examine the impact of the 1933 Revolution on the Constitution of 1940. Although many Cubans in the 195Os felt that their political aspirations had been crushed by Batista, the author examines how their hopes and expectations were raised in the first place. Thus, unlike most historians who emphasize the impact of the aborted 1933 Revolution on Castro successful 1959 Revolution, Whitney sets out to examine concrete political changes that took place in Cuba between 1920 and 1940.

For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Cuban political economy was controlled by an elite comprised of wealthy landowners, professional politicians, merchants, bankers, and sugar mill owners who disregarded the opinions and desires of the masses. By the early 1930s, however, the combined pressures of mass mobilization, revolution, economic crisis, and the threat of foreign intervention from the United States led to the breakdown of the established political order. Worker and peasant mass mobilizations pushed inexperienced revolutionaries into power in early September 1933. A loose coalition of activists, students, middle-class intellectuals, and low-rank military officers led by Grau overthrew Gerardo Machado's unpopular regime. Grau promised a new Cuba free of the restrictions of the Platt Amendment, which his government unilaterally abrogated. In an attempt at genuine social reform and social justice for all classes, Grau granted women the right to vote, decreed an eight-hour work day, and established a minimum wage for cane cutters. According to Whitney, for the first time in Cuban history, the country was governed by people who did not negotiate the terms of political power with Spain (before 1898) or with the United States (after 1898) (p. 101). The organizational weakness of the popular sectors, combined with the factionalism of the revolutionaries and reformers, however, undermined the strength of Grau government.

Grau was overthrown by a coalition of right-wing civilian and military actors in January, 1934. Nevertheless, although the U.S. supported Batista's overthrow of Grau, the symbiotic alliance between Cuban elites and U.S. interests had been severely altered. According to the author, the experiences of revolutionary struggle and mass mobilization became a part of the Cuban political landscape (p. 2). Politicized groups in Cuba after 1934 contended that the state should intervene in society to modernize the country's political and economic structures. The culmination of the reformist impulse begun in 1933 was the Constitution of 1940. Batista, who dominated Cuba political system after 1934, supervised Cuba's transition from a military dictatorship in 1934 to a nominal constitutional democracy in 1940. In Whitney's study, Batista is transformed from a low-echelon military figure with corporatist ideas into a legitimate president of a democratic Cuba with populist pretensions (p. 16). The author contends that "Batista saw himself as a leader of the revolution of 1933 and not as a counterrevolutionary dictator" (p. 123).