The lesson of the Cuban War of 1868-1878
The lesson of the Cuban War of 1868-1878
The need for unity of purpose rooted in objective conditions
On October 10, 2024, in the Cuban online news outlet Cubadebate, there appeared an article by Francisca López Civeira, a well-known Cuban historian, on the initiation of the first Cuban War of Independence on October 10, 1868. On that date, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared from his Demajagua Estate in Manzanilla the launching of a war of independence from colonial Spain.
López informs us that prior contemporary events had been favorable for the pronouncement of independence. In 1866-1867, a reformist effort in Spain had failed, thus strengthening the independence cause. Conspiratorial groups emerged across the island, especially in the eastern and central regions. In September 1867, the Glorious Revolution resulted in the overthrow of Queen Isabella II, initiating division and instability in the Spanish government that would last several years. Puerto Rico launched an independence uprising on September 23, 1868; and on the continent, Latin American states that had attained independence during the first quarter of the century were experiencing processes of liberal reform, which rejected any effort by Spain to reconquer her former possessions.
The conspiratorial groups, López informs us, were composed fundamentally of landholders and professionals tied to particular regions in Cuba. Their strong regional affiliations influenced their views on key issues confronting the Revolution, including the question of slavery.
Céspedes demonstrated his commitment to the abolition of slavery on October 10, when he not only announced the initiation of a war of independence, but he also proclaimed liberty for his slaves and called upon them to join in the independence struggle under conditions of equality. Subsequently, the Constitution of Guáimaro, in establishing the Republic of Cuba in Arms on April 10, 1869, declared that “all the citizens of the Republic are entirely free.” On December 25, 1870, Céspedes, as President of the Republic of Cuba in Arms, declared the total abolition of slavery.
However, the independence war of 1868 failed to attain its goals. The 1878 Pact of Zanjón with Spain ended the war without conceding the independence of Cuba, and it granted liberty only to those slaves who had fought in the insurrectionist ranks. Various factors contributed to the failure of the Ten Years’ War: the opposition to the struggle on the part of the Western landholders, who feared that the unfolding forces would unleash an uncontrollable revolution from below; divisions between the executive and legislative branches of the Republic in Arms, which led to the destitution of Céspedes as president in 1873; the deaths of Céspedes in 1874 and Ignacio Agramonte in 1873, the two principal leaders of the revolution; and a tendency toward regionalism and caudillismo in the revolutionary army. In essence, the Revolution of 1868 did not attain the necessary unity of the people, and it lost its exceptional leaders.
There were objective economic factors in the failure of the Revolution of 1868 to attain the necessary unity. In the eastern provinces, sugar production and slavery were less developed, and therefore, cattle haciendas continued to be prevalent in some of the eastern provinces. The cattle haciendas fulfilled a semi-peripheral function in the world-economy, supplying beef to the sugar plantations of the western provinces, which in turn exported sugar to the commercial centers of the world-economy. In their semi-peripheral role, eastern cattle ranchers were embedded in the internal market, and they therefore had a long-term interest in the expansion of the internal market and in an autonomous Cuban economic development sustained by the greater purchasing power of the people. This meant that the cattle ranchers had a long-term interest in alliance with slaves, freed slaves, workers, small farmers, and professionals, all of which would benefit from an autonomous economic development that casts aside Cuba’s peripheral role.
At the same time, not all the eastern landholders were cattle ranchers; some were owners of sugar plantations, which fulfilled a peripheral function of supplying raw materials to Spain and other core nations. They sought to include the western estate bourgeoisie, owners of sugar plantations, in the independence movement, by making concessions to their interests and concerns. The western sugar bourgeoisie was hesitant to support a war of independence due to fear that it would unleash a slave revolution, as had occurred in Haiti. These class, ideological and regional divisions prevented the independence movement initiated in 1868 from attaining the unity necessary for the taking of political power.
López notes that on January 24, 1880, in a famous speech in New York City before Cuban revolutionary emigrants, a 27-year-old José Martí declared that the daily lives of Cubans living in the areas controlled by the Cuban revolutionary forces during the Ten Years’ War had been essentially changed, as a result of the fact that different social groups were interwoven in the terrain of struggle. The mass of combatants of the revolutionary army was composed of the middle strata of society—including intellectuals, peasants, and freed slaves—who on the basis of their performance were promoted in the military structure, and they also were elevated in popular recognition. After the Revolution of 1868, the Cuban people would not be the same, in spite of its failure to attain its principal goals of independence and abolition.
Since the independence war of 1868-1878, the Cuban revolution has passed through different stages. The Independence War of 1895 to 1898 attained formal political independence, but true sovereignty was denied by the U.S. military intervention of 1898 to 1902. Moreover, the death in battle of Martí in 1895 meant that the Cuban Revolution was deprived of an exceptional leader who uniquely possessed the depth of understanding necessary for confronting U.S. neocolonial intentions. Subsequently, the people’s revolution of the 1920s and the 1930s, which included an independent reformist government of 100 days, was frustrated by U.S. support in 1933 for the future dictator Batista. In 1953, Fidel announced, with the attack on Moncada, a new stage of the Cuban Revolution, which he declared was a new stage of war in the single Cuban revolution that was initiated in 1868.
Thus, the pronouncement of October 10, 1868, would be the beginning of the process of revolutionary transformation, recognized as such by Martí and Fidel. López writes that “the Revolution of '68 was a fundamental event for the consolidation of the nation and for new revolutionary projects. October 10 was its birth, its foundational moment.”
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The necessary unity of the people is ultimately attained
Fidel Castro possessed an exceptional capacity for understanding, which enabled him to discern the objective possibilities for establishing the necessary unity of the people’s revolutionary struggle. And he possessed the capacity to explain to the people, enabling him to forge a unity rooted in objective-political conditions, thus bringing the Revolution of 1868 to its culmination.
As the Revolution approached triumph in 1958, Fidel was able to forge an anti-Batista political coalition. But for the Revolution in power, a more substantive political-economic unity would have to be established.
In 1959, the representative democracy of the neocolonial republic had been discredited, and Fidel began to speak of the need for some form of direct democracy or humanist democracy. Initially, this took the form of mass assemblies, mass organizations, and popular participation in a nationwide literacy campaign. The initiative culminated in the development of people’s democracy, characterized by people’s power, mass organizations, constitutional assemblies, popular consultations, and a vanguard political party.
People’s Democracy in Cuba: A vanguard political-economic system
With respect to the economy, Fidel understood the need to end Cuban dependency on the production of sugar for export and a system of forced agricultural labor in the form of low-waged plantation labor and low-income tenant farming, which reinforced the underdevelopment and the poverty of the country. He understood the need to modernize and diversify the economy, thereby stimulating economic growth that would provide resources for high quality free public education and public health as well as for housing and transportation.
Fidel’s envisioned economic program required mutually beneficial trade with the USA, in which Cuba would purchase from the United States not consumer goods, as in the past, but machines, equipment, parts, and supplies necessary for Cuban industrial production and modernized agricultural production of a diversity of crops. And the program would be strengthened by the participation of the Cuban industrial bourgeoisie, insofar as it did so in a spirit of cooperation with the national project.
With these requirements in mind, Fidel arranged for substantial participation of the national bourgeoisie in the revolutionary government that was formed on January 1-2, 1959. And Fidel undertook an eleven-day trip in April 1959 to the United States, where he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors; gave speeches at Harvard, Colombia, and Princeton universities; addressed a multitude of 40,000 in New York’s Central Park; had ten interviews with various representatives of the news media; and held several press conferences. Fidel’s message was that Cuba will undertake an agrarian reform program in order to expand its agricultural production, thereby enabling it to buy machines for its industrial production in Cuba. He declared that he anticipated that Cuba would buy more from the United States than in the past but buying things necessary for Cuban production.
Even though the United States possessed the political and economic conditions to accept Fidel’s proposal of cooperation with Cuba, the American power elite was incapable of considering it. We now know from unclassified documents that the USA at the time of Fidel’s visit was well-entrenched in a project of regime change with respect to Cuba. But Fidel continued to hope that the United States would see the advantages of cooperative relations with revolutionary Cuba.
For its part, Cuban big industry rejected Fidel’s call for participation in the Cuban revolutionary project. It balked at the measures being adopted by the Cuban Revolutionary Government, which were designed to break the neocolonial relation with the USA. It opted to abandon the country and to join the United States in its project of regime change.
Thus, in accordance with real unfolding dynamics, the unity that was forged during the 1960s by the triumphant revolution became a unity of the people, including professionals, peasants, workers, students, and women in a project of sovereign economic development, based in cooperation with the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. It did not include the Cuban national bourgeoisie, which incorporated itself in the Cuban counterrevolution, based in south Florida.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, the Cuban revolutionary socialist project has been able to sustain the unity of the various sectors of the people, albeit with some erosion, and without the emergence of viable opposition. At the same time, Cuba has adjusted to the collapse of the Soviet Union through the deepening of relations of mutually beneficial cooperation with other countries, first with Europe and Canada, then with Latin America, and subsequently, with the emerging economies and anti-imperialist states of the Global South and East. Cuba has taken a leading role, along with other nations of the Global South and East, in the construction of a more sustainable and more just world-system.
Since 1980, the United States has evolved to a decadent, aggressive form of economic and militarist imperialism, to the detriment of its own economic development and prestige in the world. Its self-destructive policies, combined with the sound structures of the alternative project of the Global South and East, point to a good possibility for the future emergence of a more just and peaceful world, unless this possibility is destroyed by imperialism in decadence.
Cuban persistence in the context of difficult worldwide dynamics is remarkable, and it is rooted in the unity of the various sectors of the people in the construction of a socialist nation, as the best option to protect their interests.
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