The Making of the Cuban Revolution

This chapter explores the roots and unfolding of the 1950s revolutionary movement in Cuba, in which Fidel Castro’s small guerrilla army triumphed against all odds over the powerful U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista regime. Castro’s army thrived in Cuba’s Oriente Province, where they tapped into a decades-old battle for land between planters and independent peasants and squatters. In this sense, Castro found a movement more than he founded one. The rural insurrection was complemented by an equally important urban uprising that helped destabilize and delegitimize a dictatorship beginning to crumble from within. The chapter integrates the urban, rural, and multi-class dimensions of the Cuban insurrection. In doing so, the chapter sheds light on the complexity of revolutions more generally and the way successful struggles depend on coalitions built among groups with often contradictory interests and goals. The chapter also demonstrates how political aims and alliances shift dramatically in the context of struggle, amid changing perceptions of the possible and new political opportunities, constraints, and alternatives.

The Indigenous Caribbean

This chapter confronts the challenge of telling a long-term history of the indigenous Caribbean. It emphasizes that this history is ongoing, with indigenous peoples still very much shaping the present and future of the region. We explore the deep history of indigenous presence in the region, Columbus’ journey, the history of indigenous peoples in the Eastern Caribbean who became known as “Caribs.” We also tell story of the Garifuna, a community that emerged in St. Vincent from the encounter between Africans who had escaped enslavement and indigenous communities on the island.

Transformation in Jamaica, Grenada, and Haiti

In the last decades of the twentieth century, the Caribbean saw multiple and dramatic political efforts to transform state and society. New governments sought to embrace popular classes as equal members of society as almost never before and to create unprecedented forms of equality, both economically and culturally. This chapter explores three such attempts at transformation: Jamaica under Michael Manley, Maurice Bishop and the Grenada Revolution, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first government in Haiti. Unlike the Cuban Revolution, these leaders excited expectations for change within still mostly capitalist economies. Manley and Aristide led democratic governments, while Grenada sustained one-party rule. The outcomes of reform efforts in these three nations varied from enduring progress to poignant tragedy. The chapter explores the powerful challenges these new Caribbean governments faced, domestic and foreign, economic and political. It shows how after the English-speaking Caribbean gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, their trajectories began to overlap with that of the older independent Caribbean, as national sovereignty made them suddenly more vulnerable to the region’s predominant twentieth-century empire, the United States.

Introduction

This provides an overview of the key themes of the book, explaining our focus on struggles land as a key aspect of Caribbean history. We introduce Jean Casimir’s the idea of the “counter-plantation system,” which guides our analysis. And we provide summaries of the various chapters.

The Worlds of the Plantation

By first retracing the long history of slavery in Europe, this chapter explores the rise of plantation slavery in the Caribbean as a key moment in global history. It shows how economic, cultural, and social forces converged in the creation of this new order based on racial slavery. It also emphasizes the complex contradictions of plantation society, notably through an exploration of the plantation gardens and provision grounds that enslaved people cultivated and sought to turn to their own ends, and which lay the foundation for agricultural autonomy in the post-emancipation period.

Revolution and Intervention in Cuba and the Dominican Republic

This chapter examines the tragic dialectic between Caribbean governments seeking to implement socioeconomic change in the 1960s and U.S. opposition and intervention in response. The chapter explores, first, how after the 1950s Cuban insurrection triumphed, a radicalizing dynamic unfolded between popular support for deep socioeconomic changes, leadership eager to implement those changes, and U.S. economic and armed intervention to stop them (including the Bay of Pigs invasion). U.S. opposition began in a serious way following Cuba’s sweeping agrarian reform, which came at the expense of vast U.S. sugar and ranching interests. U.S. economic warfare pushed the Castro dictatorship to develop trade and eventually build an alliance with the Soviet Union. Second, the chapter illuminates the dynamics of reform, revolution, and intervention in the neighbouring Dominican Republic. There, Juan Bosch’s reformist and nationalist social democratic government was overthrown by a military coup backed by conservative elites. The coup leaders had reason to expect and soon received U.S. government recognition, despite the overthrow of a liberal democratic government and Bosch’s relatively modest agrarian and other reforms. When Dominicans took to the streets to restore Bosch to office, a U.S. military invasion of the island quashed their effort.

Emancipation and the Rooting of Freedom

The history of emancipation in the Caribbean stretches from the first struggles of maroon communities to free themselves through the ongoing struggles that have emerged after slavery. We trace this long history first by exploring the history of the maroons, then by turning to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution and in the British Caribbean in the early 19th century, through a focus on the role of rumors of abolition. We then turn to a focus on how the formerly enslaved anchored their freedom in forms of family land ownership that continues to shape life in the Caribbean.

Epilogue

The epilogue summarizes the broad themes of the book, notably the focus on land and the counter-plantation, and argues that a better understanding of this past can help craft different Caribbean futures.

U.S. Occupations in the Independent Caribbean

This chapter focuses on the three largest and only independent nations of the Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century – Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic – and their vulnerability to and struggles with a new overseas power in the region, the United States. At the time, hard-earned forms of popular land access and their defence against expanding U.S. plantations and local land owners by armed rural bands and others impeded the development of central state control over rural populations and economies, control sought by both local elites and the U.S. government and corporations. This peasant autonomy and resistance, and what U.S. leaders perceived as overall failed central states in their “backyard,” shaped long and repeated U.S. military occupations of these countries. Resistance to U.S. rule was fierce, widespread, and armed, but the U.S. military withdrew only after it established powerful national militaries and effective central states expected to be dutiful to U.S. interests. These militaries were crucial to the post-occupation rise of some of the most ruthless and long-lasting dictators in Caribbean history.