The U.S. Department of Commerce reported in 1956: "The only foreign investments of importance are those of the United States. American participation exceeds 90% in the telephone and electric services, about 50% in the public service railways, and roughly 40% in raw sugar production. The Cuban branches of American banks are entrusted with almost onefourth of all bank deposits...."

Even this does not give the full picture. American domination went far beyond ownership of assets in Cuba. American interests dominated all strategic sectors of the Cuban economy. The U.S. monopolized Cuba's foreign trade, accounting for over 75% of the exports and 80% of the imports. Cuba's tourist industry depended on Americans. The U.S. dominated Cuba's internal market; by far most manufactured goods consumed in Cuba came from the U.S. Most retail stores depended on American goods.

The American corporations turned Cuba into an appendage of the U.S. economy-a gigantic sugar plantation, an outlet for American manufactured goods. Sugar dominated the Cuban economy. It made up 80% of Cuba's exports and paid for the bulk of its imports. The sugar companies controlled 70% of the arable land; they owned two-thirds of the railroad trackage; most of the ports and many of the roads were simply adjuncts of the sugar mills.

The

The sugar industry was seasonal, unstable, and stagnant, and it imparted these characteristics to the whole Cuban economy. It employed 400,000 to 500,000 workers to cut, load and transport the cane during the 3 to 4 month harvest season, and left them to starve during the rest of the year. price and demand for sugar rode up and down with war and peace, prosperity and depression, taking the whole, Cuban economy with them. Since export outlets for Cuban sugar were growing only slowly, the whole Cuban economy stagnated.

The large American manufacturing corporations pumped their goods into Cuba. Most of these goods went to the local oligarchy and part of the middle classes which formed foreign oriented enclaves in Havana and the other large cities. In the countryside, where the average per capita income was less

than $100 per year, most people could afford rice, beans, dried cut fish and little else.

The U.S. corporations naturally operated in their own business interest, rather than for the benefit of the Cuban people. Because it was good business, they acquired enormous tracts of land, much of which they kept idle as a reserve. That there were several hundred thousand landless campesinos who could have used the idle land to grow food for their hungry families was not the concern of the corporations.

Just by selling their manufactured goods in Cuba, the giant corporations of the north were choking off the possible growth of Cuban manufacturing. But they were responsible for profits to their stockholders, not for Cuba's economic development.

Along with economic domination went cultural penetration. There were the American movies, American-type TV programs and commercials, American news services, American books and magazines including True Romances and the like.

On top of everything else was political domination. "Until the advent of Castro, "according to Earl T. Smith, former American ambassador to Cuba, "the U.S. was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba...that the American ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba, sometimes even more important than the president." Actually, the president and other Cuban officials could only act within limits fixed by the U.S. The United States wielded ultimate political power in Cuba.

Fidel and the other leaders of the Revolution understood the problem of American imperialism from the beginning. They were not--as some people have pictured them--simply wellmeaning humanitarians, indignant over Batista's coup d'etat in 1953. They knew about American imperialism from living under it and observing its day-to-day workings, from the U.S. intervention in 1933 which was still a fresh occurrence when they were at school and the university. And Fidel and the others were followers of Martí--Martianos. The importance of this has not been fully understood in the United States; it should be emphasized as the Cuban leaders themselves have done. Martí was proclaimed by Fidel to be the intellectual author of the attack on the Moncada Fortress in 1953. The Second

Declaration of Havana and Che Guevara's Message to the Tricontinental begin with quotes from Martí.

The Cuban leaders enjoyed a rich Cuban revolutionary tradition. Since 1868, Cuba has been having revolutions at intervals of no greater than 40 years. For Cubans, revolution was not something remote, to be read about in the book but something vivid, close. And again there were the doctrines of Martí--on the futility of conciliation, on violent revolution.

This background helps explain many characteristics of the Cuban Revolution--its freshness and anti-dogmatism, its vision and firmness in the fight with imperialism, its emphasis on revolution throughout Latin America. Their own direct understanding of imperialism and revolution under Cuban conditions gave Fidel and the others selfconfidence in dealing with doctrines from abroad. They studied seriously; Fidel has emphasized, for example, that he read Lenin's State and Revolution at the University. They read not for little formulas to follow slavishly and mechanically, but for basic ideas; not to copy, but to apply.

Fidel, Che, and the others knew from the time they went into the mountains that getting rid of Batista was the first, not the last, step in the Revolution. In a letter from the Sierra in June, 1958, Fidel wrote: "When this war finishes, there will begin for me a new one, bigger and longer, the one I'm going to carry out against them (the Americans)." Their perspective on the long, deadly struggle to be fought with imperialism helped the Cuban leaders to fight it well; they thought ahead, they prepared.

to have him replaced by someone else satisfactory to Washington. But Fidel announced that the revolutionaries would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Batista's army; he called for a general strike against a last-minute attempt at a coup d'etat. The maneuver in which the U.S. was conniving to forestall the revolutionaries from taking power failed.

As soon as the Revolution came to power, Fidel and the other leaders began to prepare for the struggle against imperialism. They mobilized the people with speeches, rejecting U.S. attempts to tell the Revolution what it should and shouldn't do. They began to buy arms and build up the Revolutionary Armed Forces for the U.S. armed intervention that they knew would come.

The U.S. objected to the actions of the revolutionary government from the beginning-to the trial of war criminals, to the lowering of electric power and telephone rates. But the hostility jumped when the Revolution got into basic measures--land reform and increased trade with the socialist countries. Planes began to fly in from Florida and drop incendiary bombs on cane fields in June, 1959, the month in which the land reform law was signed. As signs of Cuban independence grew, PresidentEisenhower unwittingly voiced one of Marti's points as seen from the imperialist's side: he could not understand Cuba's actions, he said. "After all, we are her best customer." Other American officials threatened even more openly that if Cuba did not behave, her sugar quota in the U.S. market would be taken away. Fidel responded by saying that there could be no political independence without economic independence and that Cuba proposed to trade with everyone. Cuba entered into trade agreements with the socialist countries, first in mid-February, 1960, with the Soviet Union, and then with others.

In June-July, 1960, things came to a climax. Crude oil from the Soviet Union arrived and the giant foreign oil companies--Standard, Texaco, and Shell--refused to accept it for their refineries. The U.S. eliminated Cuba's sugar quota and Cuba nationalized American property in Cuba. A few months later--in November, 1960--the U.S. imposed an embargo on exports to Cuba; for a time, food stuffs and medicines were excepted, but the excep

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