State and Revolution in Cuba by Robert Whitney

Author:Robert Whitney [Whitney, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Caribbean & West Indies, General, Historiography, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy
ISBN: 9781469621562
Google: syE6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-11-01T00:34:27+00:00

Groping Our Way Like a Blindman with His Cane: The Radical Opposition, 1934-1937

After the general strike of 1935, the radical opposition entered a period of defeat and ideological crisis. The roots of this ideological crisis date back to the fight against the machadato. In many ways the events of early 1935 marked the end of an era in Cuban politics. Since 1923 the opposition to the Plattist state had grown into a mass social and political movement that reached its high point in the summer of 1933, when General Machado was ousted. How-ever, the ideological weaknesses of the anti-machadista movement existed long before the dramatic events of August 1933.

When Justo Carrillo of the Directorio Universitario Estudiantil proclaimed in early 1933 that “Machado's got to be toppled... No matter who comes afterwards,”72 he was certainly expressing the popular will of most politically aware Cubans, but he could not have imagined that it would be Batista who would come after Machado. The moral indignation directed against the machadato might have been central to the demise of oligarchic rule, but the radical opposition tended to confuse mass mobilization against the oligarchic state with mass support for their programs. What was “popular,” as one scholar writing on populism has pointed out, was not specific to any particular politics; rather, popular politics “represents the ideological crystallization of resistance to oppression in general.”73 The Cuban radical opposition rode the wave of popular resistance to “oppression in general” under the Plattist state, but it could not channel popular insurgency into a viable political alternative with mass support. Batista guaranteed that the radical groups would not be able to forge strong organizational ties with the masses. But opposition groups also had very little awareness of what can be called “oppression in particular”: popular rebellion, especially in the countryside, was fueled by local circumstances and concrete moral and social values. As a result, such diverse groups as the ABC Society and the conservative menocalistas on the right, the DEU and Grau's backers in the political center, and radical leftists such as the Guiteristas and the Communist Party competed for mass support, but they all failed to establish strong organizational and ideological connections between themselves and the clases populares. While the opposition's collective efforts managed to destroy the Plattist state in 1933, they were unable to prevent Batista, with his control over the army and the police along with his populist rhetoric, from stealing their victory against Machado.

After the defeat of the 1933 revolution, four political trends represented the moderate and far left of Cuban politics. The first group were the Grauistas, who in early 1934 founded El Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico) (PRC-A). The second group formed around Grau's former minister of the interior and war, Antonio Guiteras: in May 1934, Guiteras, who went underground after the coup of January 1934, founded the political and military organization Joven Cuba (Young Cuba). A third and more diverse group of people formed smaller groups which maintained more or less cordial relations with the PRC-A and Joven Cuba.

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