COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 5-Continued

CUBA: 100 Years of Struggle

INTRODUCTION

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The decade just finished hopefully baptized at its outset "The Development Decade" by the United Nations is now referred to by some as "The Disaster Decade". During the past ten years it has become increasingly clear that throughout the world rich nations and people are growing richer, while poor nations and people continue to grow even poorer, despite numerous concerned statements and a great variety of well-intentioned, piecemeal efforts.

The roots of this situation are complex. indeed. United States economic, military, and political influence abroad, especially in Latin Americà, are seen by many as the major force which prevents poor countries from shaping their own future and moving toward narrowing the presently widening gap between rich and poor.

Cuba is one exception to this general situation. An island of 8 million peo-
ple, Cuba lies 90 miles off the coast of Florida. During the 11 years of its rev-
olutionary life, the population has been able to mobilize itself to develop at a
rapid pace.
National resources have been re-utilized and the nation's wealth re-
distributed for the benefit of the majority of the population. The result of these
efforts, painful and arduous as they have been, is that the poor are getting richer
and the rich poorer.

Even though there are differing opinions of these advances, and the sacrifices required to achieve them, the overall improvement of life for the majority of the populace cannot be denied. In order to become better acquainted with those adtheir roots, goals, expressions, difficulties we have put together this resource packet on CUBA: 100 YEARS OF STRUGGLE.

vances --

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Such a focused study seems now especially timely for North Americans. Many
of our number, especially young persons, are vigorously questioning the ties the
U.S. has cultivated with countries around the world. They ask: Why do we support
dictatorial regimes in Brazil, in Greece, in Southern Africa, in Taiwan, in South
Korea? Why do we try to export our patterns of consumer culture to the poor of
the world, hoping they will become addicted to quenching their thirst with Coca."
Cola? Why are corporation profits more important than the health and well-being
of people? Why must we impose our anti-communist phobias and middle-class values
on the rest of the world? Cuba is a country which in 10 years has done away with
its historic U.S. domination. This nation now provides a context for examining
some of the issues of the relation of social and political change to the develop-
ment of people.

It is our intention to present an overall view of the Cuban revolutionary struggle. The bulk of material available in the U.S. fits an image of Cuba shaped by Cold War needs. The sizeable Cuban exile community in this country and the North American business interests which were adversely affected by nationalization of their holdings in Cuba are largely responsible for this view. We have here tried to assemble materials which are more sympathetic to the Revolution and also less easily accessible to U.S. audiences.

COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 5-Continued

The section on Cuban history contains two papers discussing the development of the Revolution since 1868, as well as documents of U.S. relations with Latin America which specifically pertain to policies towards Cuba. Writings of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Fidel Castro are included as essential for understanding. Cuban socialism and the Cuban concept of the "new man". These materials lead naturally to information about changes in health care, the position of Cuban women since the Revolution, and views of Cuban Christians on the Revolution. In the section on statistics, we have attempted to give concrete evidence of the progress of the Cuban Revolution in areas such as education, health, and land reform. The booklet of Cuban poetry expresses some thing of the spirit and mood of contemporary Cuba. Much about the Cuban Revolution has implications for and reverberations in the international scene; some of these aspects are dealt with in the article about Cuba and the United Nations. Finally, despite individual differences there are several similarities in the economic and political situation of all developing nations. We have included two articles on pre-revolutionary situations elsewhere in the world: one, by a churchman, on revolutionary ferment in Latin America; the other, by a New York Times reporter, on the life of a sugar cane cutter in the Philippines, a life which sounds remarkably similar to that of Cuban cane cutters 15 years ago.

We believe that this packet contains enough basic information on Cuba to enable you to begin to reassess your understanding of contemporary Cuba and the steps being taken to achieve the stated goals of the Revolution, and to draw your own conclusions about how and whether it is achieving these goals. We hope that your reading will lead you to further study and push you to action. For this purpose

we commend to you the section of additional resources entitles DO IT! July, 1970

Helens Erver Alice Hageman Sonja Hedlun

NOTE ON SECOND EDITION

The second edition of "Cuba: 100 Years of Struggle" has been revised and updated. We have added Fidel Castro's July 26, 1970 speech, an interview with Protestant ministers doing volunteer work during the 1970 sugar cane harvest, and an article on Cuban education. A page has been added to the resource section ("Do It!") and the statistical portrait. of Cuba has been substantially revised.

February, 1971

COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 5-Continued

cuba

vs.

u.s. imperialism

by Edward Boorstein

Cubans were among the first
persons in the world to under-
stand U.S. imperialism. They
were among the first to be
menaced by it, to suffer from
it.
American dreams of annex-
ing Cuba go back to the early
1800's. Modern U.S. imperial-
ism capitalist imperialism
based on the large corporation

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began in Cuba. Cuba was the first great foreign market of American capitalism. In 1880, direct U.S. investment in the Cuban sugar industry began; by 1896 U.S. investment in Cuba totalled $50 million.

Jose Martí, leader of the Cuban independence movement which later culminated in the revolutionary war against Spain in 1895-1898, became the first great analyst of imperialism. His views are of special interest today because his focus was on U.S. imperialism and because he is the intellectual precursor of the Cuban and Latin American Revolutions.

11

Martí, exiled from Cuba in 1871, spent the years from 1881-1895 in the United States. "I have lived in the monster," he wrote, "and I know its entrails." In. 1891 25 years before the appearance of Lenin's classic Imperialism he pointed out that: "The people that buys, commands. The people that sells, serves. It is necessary to balance (diversify) commerce to assure liberty. A people that wants to die sells to only one people....The excessive influence of one country on the commerce of another converts itself into political influence." Marti was not thinking only of Cuba in these comments. They were made in an article on the problem of U.S. domination of all Latin America.

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EDWARD BOORSTEIN, an economist, author of The Economic Transformation of Cuba, has worked for the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the War Production Board and as a consultant in Washington and Latin America. From 1960 through 1963 he worked for the Cuban National Bank and Ministry of Foreign Commerce. Presently he writes and teaches economics.

COMMITTEE EXHIBIT NO. 5-Continued

Martı knew Latin America. He lived in Mexico, Guatemala,
and Venezuela for six years, was directly acquainted
with several other Latin American countries from short
visits, and wrote on the whole area. To him, Latin
America was "our America," a term that Che Guevara later
adopted. Always he stressed that to solve Latin Amer-
ica's problems, it is necessary to understand Latin
America's conditions. And always Martí spoke of freedom.
"The hour has come," he wrote in 1889, "for Latin America
to declare her second independence."

Martí was a revolutionary. As early as 1882 he wrote,
"Cuba...has once again arrived at the point of under-
standing the futility of a policy of conciliation and
the need for a violent revolution." Marti's great fear
was that Spain would be eliminated from Cuba only to be
replaced by the United States. We wanted Cuban indepen-
dence of the United States not only for its own sake, but
for the rest of Latin America. A Cuba and Puerto Rico
enslaved would be "mere pontoons" for the spread of
American power.

From a military camp in Oriente Province in 1895,
Marti wrote a friend that his great aim was to assure
the independence of Cuba so as to prevent the U.S. from
spreading across the Antilles and then descending on all
of Latin America. But two days after he wrote this,
Martí was killed by the Spaniards. And soon thereafter,
what he feared from the U.S. began to come to pass. The
U.S. took over Cuba and Puerto Rico and began to spread
its empire southward.

The Platt Amendment, which the U.S. forced into the Cuban
constitution in 1901, gave it the right to "intervene"
in Cuba while it imposed on the Cuban government the ob-
ligation to "sell or lease to the United States lands
necessary for coaling or naval stations..." There were
many gross interventions. The U.S. landed troops in
Cuba in 1906, 1912, and 1917. In 1933, during the lib-
eral presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the U.S. sent
a number of warships into Cuban waters to help bring

down a government it did not like. Although the Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934, part of it still lives on: the U.S. still occupies the Guantánamo Naval Base obtained under the Amendment.

But American domination of Cuba was far more than a matter of the Platt Amendment. There were the ordinary natural workings of the large American corporations and the U.S. government which backs them up.

Under the shelter of the American military occupation which followed the war with Spain, American corporations began to move into Cuba on an increased scale. Investments were made by the United Fruit Company, the National City Bank of New York, the Cuban-American Sugar Company, the Cuban Telephone Company. From $50 million in 1895, U.S. investment in Cuba soared to $205 million in 1911. Eventually in 1959, the year the Revolution cane to power, it reached about $1 billion.