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Much Has Been Written About Fidel Castro's Sierra Maestra Guerrilla

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Much Has Been Written About Fidel Castro's Sierra Maestra Guerrilla bs_bs_banner LANDS AND 276 JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY Badgley, C., J. Moghtader, E. Quintero, E. Zakem, M. J. Chappell, K. A-Vazquez, A. Samulon, and I. Perfecto. 2007. Organic agriculture and the global food supply. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22 (2): 86–108. Bloch, E. 1986. The principle of hope (three volumes). Cambridge: MIT Press. Engel-Di Mauro, S. 2014. Ecology, soils, and the left, an eco-social approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hudak, M. 2015. Claims that livestock grazing enhances soil sequestration of atmospheric carbon are out- weighed by methane emissions from enteric fermentation: A closer look at Franzluebbers and Stuede- mann (2009), Available at: www.mikehudak.com Meyer, R., B. R. Cullen, and R. J. Eckard. 2016. Modelling the influence of soil carbon on net greenhouse gas emissions from grazed pastures. Animal Production Science 56 (3): 585–93. Schramski, J. R., D. K. Gattie, and J. H. Brown. 2015. Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind. PNAS 112 (31): 9511–7. Schwartzman, D. 2015. Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming? A Critique of Biodiversity for a Livable Climate’ claims, www.solarutopia.org. Taber, S. 2016. 7 Facts that will make you rethink the “Sterility” of hydroponics, http://blog.brightagrotech. com/7-facts-that-will-make-you-rethink-the-sterility-of-hydroponics. Cushion, Steve. A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016. 272 pp. $23.00 (paperback). Much has been written about Fidel Castro’s Sierra Maestra guerrilla victory over the Cuban Fulgencio Batista dictatorship and his triumphal journey from Santiago to Havana in early January of 1959. However, Steve Cushion gives us a larger, more muted, understanding of the societal forces that forged that victory and, with his book, he provides an important historical corrective and insight into the complexities of revolutionary change. Cushion provides a narrative of the role of workers in the Cuban Revolution through massive archival research and multiple interviews. My only reservation with his otherwise excellent book is that it is highly focused on the varying groups’ strategy and tactics and only secondarily develops the ideological and structural differences between Fidel’s essentially nationalist aspirations (as an ex-Orthodoxo party member his focus was on returning to the provisions and platform of the Cuban liberal and progressive constitution of 1940) and those of the Communist PSP party. The rebel army’s triumph over the Batista dictatorship is well known, but Cushion makes a major contribution to the literature of the Cuban revolution by bringing to the readers’ attention the role of the Cuban working class, partic- ularly its underground factions that continually confronted the capitalist manag- ers and the Cuban state. After all, the Cuban workers were the real victims of the Cuban capitalist-dictatorship, more so than the Fidelista leadership group. It was the workers’ growing self-consciousness that eventually complemented the military struggle against the Batista regime. Cushion’s book describes well the history of the Cuban revolution from the guerrilla Granma landing in December, 1956 to the general strike in January 1959. He gives the Cuban workers as well as the PSP and the students (Federa- tion of University Students-FEU) important places in the revolutionary Book Reviews 277 struggle, often ignored by the focus on the Fidelista 26th of July Movement that certainly played the crucial role in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship. But they were not alone in that struggle. Epicurus’ revelatory notion in the 4th century BCE of the swerve accounting for bodies (atoms) not only falling through space but touching and rebounding off each other can help explain the historical relationships in the developing Cuban revolution among the union leaders and rank and file workers, the Cuban Communist party, the PSP (Popular Socialist Party) and the 26th of July guer- rilla movement as their interactions, disagreements, and varying approaches finally came together for a time to oust the Batista capitalist state. These interac- tions have not been thoroughly plumbed until now with Steve Cushion’s book. Cushion did massive archival research in journals, underground newspapers, leaflets, personal collections, and interviews with elderly participants in Cuba. It is really a rich lode of accumulated data that deepens and enhances our understanding of working class relationships with a revolutionary struggle. The author makes very clear in his study that one needs to differentiate a coopted union national leadership from various union locals and their militant activists. Cushion does a comprehensive job in reprising the history of union locals’ single enterprise strikes, often without the help of the central Cuban Workers’ Con- federation (CTC) and the leadership of Eusebio Mujal, essentially coopted and bought off by the state. The various sugar, transport, bus driver, railway workers, bank employee, telephone workers’ failed strikes in the 1955–1957 period opened the Cuban working class to see the 26th of July movement as the only way out of a capitalist state unresponsive to their needs. As the labor movement continually lost strikes by way of repression they began to go underground and make connections with the Fidelistas in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Through the organizing efforts of the Cuban Communist Party-the PSP, a joint labor organization was formed in late1958 known as the Workers’ United Front (FONU) which significantly created close connections between Cuban labor and Fidel’s 26th of July move- ment. This development occurred despite the Cold War anti-communism rampant in Cuba prior to 1959 and the Cuban CTC collusion in the repression of leftist workers. Cushion makes clear that the PSP publically announced its support of the guerilla armed struggle by early 1958 when the rebel victory was far from a foregone conclusion. And importantly, the massive Revolutionary General Strike of January 1, 1959, supported by thousands of union activists and by the PSP, allowed for the 26th of July movement to consolidate its power and deter a possible post-Batista preventive military coup, then supported by the U.S. embassy. The working class in historical perspective is always attached to society by way of their role in production and it is usually common that they accept the untoward conditions of capitalist-labor relations. The Cuban working class did not necessarily see the Cuban state, whether republican bourgeois or dictatorial, as an institution subject to their deeply felt grievances. However, at certain his- torical conjunctures their consciousness of exploitation was raised to another.
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