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At the end of 1954, the Batista government had two pressing industrial problems on its agenda. The falling price of sugar meant that the industry’s employers were demanding wage and job cuts. They were particularly insistent as their demands for such cuts the previous year had been largely ignored pending the elections.1 Additionally, financial problems in the U.S.-owned Ferrocarriles Consolidados (FFCC Consolidados), the railway company that operated the network in the eastern end of the island, meant that its owners also wished to cut their wage costs and staff numbers.2 The government’s confrontations with the workers in these two powerful industrial sectors, as well as with some other important groups of workers, made 1955 an important turning point in the history of labor mobilization in Cuba. The outcomes of these disputes were different in each industry, and the political trajectory of the leading protagonists was correspondingly different. The degree to which each group of workers were successful or not in their aims helped determine whether the politics of the PSP or the MR-26-7 would come to dominate the anti-Batista opposition in different industries and regions.
If the role of workers in the Cuban insurrection has been overlooked, the role of women workers has disappeared completely from view. When we speak of workers confronting the government and their employers, it is important to recognize that women frequently played an important role. The importance of working-class women in day-to-day labor struggles, and in the final triumph of the revolution, will be referred to frequently in this and succeeding chapters. An examination of contemporary sources, particularly photographs, demonstrates the significance of women both as workers themselves and as family members of workers in struggle: women railway office workers, bank workers, and shop assistants, as well as the solidarity provided by the wives and families of sugar and port workers. Two examples of this that are better documented, the office workers of Camagüey and the sugar workers of Delicias y Chaparra, serve as an illustration of women’s wider involvement.
The account of the events of 1955 can be given sector by sector with only minimal disruption of the chronological sequence, because the government was careful to avoid a generalized confrontation and therefore engineered disputes in one industry at a time, beginning with the Cuban transport industry, continuing with the bank workers’ dispute, then a number of single-enterprise strikes in industries such as brewing and textiles before getting to the sugar workers’ strike. This sugar workers’ strike not only involved half a million workers in the island’s major industry, it also involved student activists, thus forming a link that would have a significant impact on the developing revolutionary situation. From this account, it emerges that the failure of these strikes at the hands of a repressive state and a corrupt trade union bureaucracy led a significant group of militant class-conscious workers to seek a different approach to the defense of their economic interests. To present a rounded picture, it is also necessary to address the apparent success of the port and tobacco workers in resisting the employers’ offensive when, all around, their compatriots were suffering defeat after defeat. Reflecting on why the employers’ productivity offensive was successful in some industries and not in others is key to understanding the later political development of different industrial sectors within the labor movement.
Batista planned his attack on working conditions carefully. He had reached an accommodation with the CTC but could not move too quickly because, if he undermined Mujal’s base, that accommodation would be useless. Moreover, Mujal was accustomed to influencing government policy to a greater extent than would have suited Batista, and the new dictator took a little time to subordinate Mujal to his project. We shall see how Mujal’s relationship with the government changed over time and how he became increasingly identified with the regime. Having established a good relationship with the CTC leadership, Batista adopted an approach that would be reprised thirty years later by the Thatcher government in Britain using an approach that became known as the Ridley Plan: an attempt to restore profitability by defeating workers sector by sector, making sure that the field of battle is always chosen by the government and that any chance of generalized and united industrial action is avoided.3 Once the government had decided that the time was right to confront a particular group of workers, it acted with considerable brutality to overcome resistance. Nevertheless, the government did not always win, and particularities of each sector will be examined below along with the political conclusions each group of workers drew from their victory or defeat.
Public Transport
The first significant confrontation between the Batista government and organized labor came in the transport industry. The Cuban railways were suffering from a particularly severe crisis as a result of years of underinvestment, though transport workers were well organized and had maintained a significant level of independence, particularly in Oriente Province at the eastern end of the island. The disputes in the transport industry in 1955 signify the first real defeat suffered by organized workers at the hands of the government and employers. The government managed the conflict so that the railway workers were not given reason to go on strike until after the sugar harvest was in, thereby denying them the opportunity to make common cause with the sugar workers, with whom they had traditional relationships of solidarity. The railway companies also had substantial holdings in the bus industry, which had led to links between the workers’ organizations in both industries. It also meant that cost-saving measures would be applied on the buses as well the railway. It was in the bus industry that the new de facto government made its first attack on the labor movement, relatively quickly after the coup.
In July 1952, with no warning, one of Havana’s two bus companies was placed under military control; the leader of the union, Marco Hirigoyen, was arrested; and 600 out of the company’s 6,000 drivers were dismissed.4 This served the double purpose of removing one of Mujal’s internal enemies in the CTC and weakening one of the most militant groups of workers in the capital, thereby reinforcing Mujal’s sense that his future lay with the regime.5 Such decisive action by the government also served to impress upon both the business community and foreign observers that Batista was serious in his intention to confront organized labor.6 The British ambassador, wrote that Autobuses Modernos, one of the two bus-operating companies in Havana, “had from the point of view of graft, rank inefficiency and financial loss become a crying scandal.” He went on to “report this incident as an example of what can be achieved in Cuba by a strong man who is fearless of intimidation and is bent on cleansing public services of gangster and surplus elements. It is to be hoped that similar action, if required, will be taken at the appropriate moment to place the United Railways on an economic basis.”7
The United Railways to which he refers, called Ferrocarriles Unidos (FFCC Unidos) in Cuba, was the railway company that operated services in the western half of the island. It had a majority of British shareholders and was practically bankrupt. The British owners had been trying to extract themselves and their remaining capital from the company for some time, a fact that gave the British embassy another reason to look kindly on the new Batista government: “The existence of a strong Government in Cuba greatly improves the chances of a settlement of the United Railways claim, which has been made more difficult by the attitude of organized labor in Cuba.”8
Railways had developed early in Cuba, initially as a freight network that linked the sites of sugar production to ports on the coast; a passenger network uniting the major centers of population on the island was a later development. This association between sugar and railways was reflected in a history of solidarity between railway workers, dockers, and sugar workers that dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century.9 The main railway trade union, the Hermandad Ferroviaria (Railway Brotherhood) had a socially conservative leadership that had close ties to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), but this attitude was far from universal within the organization and the local organizations, known as delegaciones, could be remarkably militant, particularly in the east of the island.10 By the middle of the century, the network was divided between two companies, the British-owned Ferrocarriles Unidos which operated in the west of the country and the U.S.-owned Ferrocarriles Consolidados in the east. Both companies were in financial difficulties, but FFCC Unidos seemed to be in permanent decline.
The FFCC Unidos network infrastructure had badly deteriorated and was in need of massive capital investment.