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The Peasantry in the Cuban Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Gil Carl Alroy
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Extract

The involvement of peasants in the rebellions and revolutions of the distant past has been impressive in certain respects, but never acquired quite the importance attributed to it in our own time. In terms of the sheer weight of their numbers, the vastness of the peasants involvement in some internal wars of the past may perhaps never be duplicated. Over twenty million Chinese peasants' were killed in the terrible T'ai-p'ing (1850–1864). Nor was the significance of these colossal figures limited to sheer mass, as the Mexican Revolution illustrates. But never before has so much reliance been put on the peasants for so ambitiously revolutionary plans as in our time. Particularly since the Chinese Communist Revolution, the peasantry has displaced the industrial proletariat as the crucial revolutionary class in the dogma of the most militant Marxists. We have been told repeatedly that Mao, Guevara, Giap, and their disciples have put their hopes in the peasantry and the countryside not merely for radical upheavals through revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries, but also for global revolution. The role the peasants actually play in such revolutionary wars is among the crucial problems of our time.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , January 1967 , pp. 87 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1967

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References

1 “The Meaning of ‘Peasant Revolution’: The Cuban Case,” International Review of History and Political Science, II, No. 2 (1965); and “The Meaning of ‘Peasant Revolution’: What Next?” in the subsequent issue of that journal.Google Scholar

2 Edwin Lieuwen, Arms and Politics in Latin America (New York, 1963), p. 264. Estimates of the total number of fighters in the rural areas in the whole campaign vary from 1000 to 3000. At a fairly late stage of the war, April, 1958, Castro's entire fighting force consisted of only 180 men.

3 Cuba, Anatomy of a Revolution (New York, 1960), p. 57.Google Scholar

4 “The Cuban Revolution: An Analysis,” Problems of Communism, September-October 1963, p. 4.Google Scholar

5 The Cuban Dilemma (New York, 1962), p. 95.Google Scholar

6 Fidel Castro, La revolutión cubana (Buenos Aires, 1960), p. 274 (for Castro's remarks) and pp. 428–429 (for Guevara's). Support for this contention by a Batista colonel, who for a time commanded troops fighting Castro, is cited in Boris Goldenberg, The Cuban Revolution and Latin America (New York, 1965), p. 145 note.

7 Communication by Professor Nelson to the author, dated 07 8, 1966.Google Scholar

8 The Crisis in Cuba (Derby, Conn. 1963), p. 62Google Scholar

9 Paul, A. Baran, “Reflections on the Cuban Revolution,” Monthly Review, 01 1961, p. 467.Google Scholar

10 Cited in Jules Dubois, Fidel Castro (Indianapolis, 1959), p. 196.Google Scholar

11 Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities (New York, 1962), p. 15.Google Scholar

12 Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare (New York, 1961), p. 5.Google Scholar

13 ibid., pp. 7–8.

14 ibid., p. 70.

15 Cf. for instance, Joseph North, Cuba: Hope of a Hemisphere (New York, 1961), p. 16Google Scholar; Edwin Lieuwen, op. cit., p. 264Google Scholar; Morray, J. P., “Cuba and Communism,” Monthly Review, July-August 1961, p. 8Google Scholar; Johnson, Paul, “A Caribbean Suez?” New Statesman and Nation, 07 9, 1960, p. 43.Google Scholar

16 Guevara, who has forcefully affirmed that “the campesino fights because he wants land” in numerous ways (this particular phrase appeared early in Verde Olivo [April 9, 1961]), was alleged to have said soon after victory, with special reference to the Sierra peasants, that “the guajiros did not really want to be landowners” (reported by Victor Franco, in The Morning After, New York, 1963, p. 14).Google Scholar

17 The fact that land hunger was weak relative to other expressed desires of the Cuban campesinos generally has been noted by the more discriminating students of the revolution, following Lowry Nelson's findings to this effect and other evidence. It is believed, however, that the peasantry of the Sierra Maestra, which differs significantly from the rest of the Cuban peasantry, also differs from them in that it “shows its love for the possession of land most aggressively,” as Guevara put it in one place (Monthly Review, July-August, 1961; but is reported to have contradicted himself in another, as indicated above). The author has sought to establish whether Nelson's data confirmed this belief. Unfortunately, Nelson no longer has the differentiated data for the several regions, which together make up Table 54 in his Rural Cuba. Nor could he recall any great variations for Alto Songo, the region closest to the Sierra Maestra.

18 According to Draper's later work on Cuba (Castroism: Theory and Practice [New York, 1965] p. 72), of the approximately 50,000 peasants in the Sierra Maestra, 500–1000 were in the Castro fighting force and “some thousands more … helped the guerrilla cause in one form or another.”Google Scholar

19 Cuba:Tragedy in Our Hemisphere (New York, 1963), p. 64.Google Scholar

20 Irving Peter Pflaum, Tragic Island (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1961), p. 19 (italics added).Google Scholar

21 This and the subsequent quotation from Sartre on Cuba (New York, 1961), pp. 50–51.Google Scholar

22 Dubois, Fidel Castro, p. 145

23 Nelson recalls a press report according to which the peasants came asking for gifts—according to the usual custom—from the strangers who were then waging war on their government.

24 Insofar as this may be more than skin-deep, we may have to borrow the term “mimetism” from Gaetano Mosca, as “the tendency of an individual's passions, sentiments and beliefs to develop in accord with the currents that prevail in the environment.” The Ruling Class (New York, 1939), p. 184.Google Scholar