| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Robert Whitney, State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2001)

ROBERT WHITNEY STATES his case at the outset: During the period under study, 1920-1940, mass mobilization, revolution, economic crisis, and the threat of US intervention obliged Cuban politicians to come to terms with the popular social classes, the clases populares. The force of popular sectors was such that established oligarchic mechanisms of social and political control no longer functioned. The issue then was how "the masses" were to be incorporated into the political process. After eight years of corporatist Machado rule, the masses exploded into social revolution in summer 1933, after which Cuba was a different country. Between 1934 and 1940 a new consensus based on authoritarian and reformist principles emerged, whereby the new and modern state should intervene in society to modernize the country, a process culminating with the 1940 Constitution. Following seven years of behind-the-scenes control, overseeing a transition from military to constitutional democracy, Batista became president of Cuba, cementing Cuba's transition away from oligarchic rule.

Whitney's prime argument as to how and why this came about is the mass mobilization of the clases populares and resulting change in political culture. This leads him to challenge Cuban historiography that sees 1933 as part of Cuba's "long revolution" for independence and social justice; one that "began" in 1868–78 and 1895–98, and continued through the "frustrated" revolution of 1933, which, had it been successful, might have pre-empted the more radical socialist revolution of 1959. The corollary to this is that, had the US understood better the implications of 1933, history might have taken a significantly different turn. He questions those who see 1933 as a pre-revolution, prologue to, or dress-rehearsal for, 1959, when neither the subjective nor objective conditions existed to guarantee its success. In all such historiography, 1933 is appraised not in its own right but in terms of its centrality to what happened subsequently in the 1950s. Whitney's study takes a different approach, which is to focus on the complex interplay between popular mobilization and state formation during 1920-40, in and of itself.

The book is divided into seven chronological chapters, four on the build-up to 1933, one on 1933 itself, and two on the post-1933 years. Chapter 1 provides a background overview of politics under the oligarchic state up until the early 1920s, with the popular rebellion of the Veterans and Patriots Movement of 1923–24 for the moral high ground and political and economic reform within existing state structures. The movement failed but led to rethinking the relationship between society and state and questioning Cuba's neocolonial condition. Chapter 2 explores radical nationalist politics in the immediate aftermath of 1924–8, in the context of ideological crisis occasioned by defeat of the veterans and Machado's rise to power. This was the new social, political, and economic force of the "masses" responding to capitalist modernity. Chapter 3 homes in on the increasing crisis of oligarchic rule with the economic depression of 1929–32 and the increasing political consciousness of large sectors of the clases populares. Chapter 4 forefronts the collapse of that rule in 1932–33, in the context of emerging new nationalist visions of the modern state on the part of middle-class political groups as an alternative to oligarchic capitalism, alongside more radical groupings.

In Chapter 5, on the revolution of 1933, the crux of the argument is that mass mobilization is what undermined oligarchic rule and placed a revolutionary government in power. Despite organizational weakness and factionalism, the balance of power shifted away from the oligarchy and toward other social classes. Chapter 6 charts the immediate post-1933 years, 1934–36, not as a restoration of oligarchic rule but rather a continuation of the process of Cuba's evolution to nominal democracy. In Chapter 7, the populism of 1937–40 is grounded on earlier state violence undermining autonomous forms of political organization: the clases populares needed to be "disciplined," to become the basis of corporatist, "organic," restrained democracy. Only thus could Batista be transformed from shadowy military figure with conventional corporatist ideas into public political figure with populist pretensions, and legitimate president of democratic Cuba.

The analysis leads to an ambivalence with regard to Batista. On the one hand, we see a Batista who can maneuver to keep rivals Grau and the Autenticos as well as the US at bay. On the other, we have the Batista state which redistributes wealth as part of social policy — the redistributionist demagoguery of Cuban populism accompanied by real, if modest, reforms; recognition of labour unions; and restrictions on foreign capitalists who no longer can act with the impunity of pre-1933. The 1940 Constitution represented a political arrangement that reflected a new balance of power, to which foreign capitalists would have to adapt. The error of historians, Whitney claims, is to view Batista as counterrevolutionary because of 1959, without observing the populist base of 1937–40 and the reasons why Cuba became a formal democracy in 1940. Under Batista, for the first time in Cuban history, segments of the popular classes were incorporated into the public domain organized by the state, as under Roosevelt in the US and Cardenas in Mexico. Batista was both American ally and populist nationalist. Yet, the consensus of 1940 proved fragile; the state structure was too weak and crumbled, and the post-1940 years would be witness to the growing widespread feeling that corrupt politicians cynically betrayed and manipulated popular sentiments.

Previous revisionist historiography of Cuba has lent primacy to the middle rather than the popular classes, and, in this, Whitney's study makes a welcome addition to our growing knowledge of the period. He marshalls an impressive array of important primary sources, drawing on the press, especially the Havana Post and Daily Worker, and archival holdings in Cuba, the US, and Britain. His use of the University of Florida's Braga Collection and of British consular reports and Foreign Office correspondence in the London Public Record Office is particularly enlightening, the latter juxtaposed against US accounts.

And yet, this reader is left questioning. To what extent can the force of the masses be characterized as new, when there were strong antecedents, not least in 19th-century abolitionism and independence? Why do the clases populares remain so amorphous, with only passing reference, for example, to sectors of workers, regions, gender, or race? Why are so few links made with labour more generally in Cuba and the Caribbean, as well as South and North America, Britain and the European continent — links such as those between labour and political parties, and with the whole Popular Front period?

These questions aside, Whitney has regaled us with an important, if somewhat traditional, political study of a crucial period in 20th-century Cuban political history, whose main message is embedded in the mobilization and control of mass support, a lesson no doubt not lost on post-59 Cuba, which bore within it the fundamental issue of not whether the state should be popular and national but what being popular meant and which sectors of the people were true representatives of the nation.


Jean Stubbs London Metropolitan University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.