Havana is deceptively calm in the 1950s video above.  Urban opposition to Batista was growing. I mentioned this in an  earlier post.  Soon everyday life in the city would be disrupted on an everyday basis.  The idea of a general strike preceded by direct action from the masses was a central tenet of the urban underground.

The main objective of what was to be a countrywide action was to create the kind of general confusion and chaos which would result in public violence.

While work stoppages and street fighting were going on throughout the cities of Cuba, Castro and his guerillas would move into the valleys, engage the regular troops, and occupy populated areas in the countryside.  Once this was accomplished, a general uprising would be assured.

In order to assure maximum success, Havana was to be divided into various operational zones: Centro Havana; Regla; Guanabacoa; Vedado; and Miramar.

Miramar  was to serve as the general headquarters for the insurgents.

Other bases were set up in Vedado, the middle-class neighborhood close to the center of Havana’s business section where many US backed hotels were located.  In addition, the underground had use of 40 to 50 houses for communications, arms depots, and hideaways.

Religious institutions and leaders also had critical input in the strike preparations as they made plans to care for and hide militants as necessary.  In fact, the pastor of Havana’s First Presbyterian Church was already active in the urban underground resistance. At the Dispensario Clinico of his church, bombs were manufactured, manifestos written, and enormous quantities of medicine were made available to urban cells and later to guerillas.

Two acts of sabotage were to take place: the first was to blow up the electric company in Havana.  Second, since there were no arms on hand, the Youth Brigade was to attack an armory in Old Havana where weapons were stocked in unknown amounts.  Some of these acquisitions would be given to the cadres, and the rest would be distributed at prearranged points throughout the capital.

The strike began on April 9. However, nothing went as planned.

Government forces were waiting and the urban underground was largely dismantled.

In the aftermath of the event, the few remaining urban cadres agreed to launch an all-out united offensive against the regime.  The objective was to demoralize the authorities through psychological warfare.

“Operation Rescue” was the first action.  It called for “rescuing” as many arms as possible from the hands of the authorities.

Policemen were ambushed in lonely alleys, disarmed, undressed and then turned loose.

When the police began to patrol the streets in groups of two or three, “Operation Pep-Rallies” was initiated. Underground agitators would attack the government in public places for a few minutes.  Their retreat was then covered by other underground fighters who would divert the attention of the authorities by throwing Molotov cocktails or a handful of revolutionary leaflets.

The government countered these campaigns by increasing its secret police forces.  Eventually the streets of the city were filled with blind beggars who were not blind, street vendors with no merchandise and a whole array of clumsy government spies.

When it was no longer possible to conduct these campaigns, the urban fighters reached people by radio.  Radio stations were taken over, brief manifestos read to the nation, and news about the progress of the insurrection circulated before the police had a chance to arrive.

Cuban urban guerillas followed the maxims applied in Palestine during the 1940s and Algeria during the 1950s which purported that in cities guerillas must attack daily to create a climate in which government forces are kept off balance. Lacking expertise in urban counterinsurgency, the regime’s techniques were mostly crude demonstrations of terror.

In addition to the arms transfers and training assistance that we alluded to in our post on US Military Involvement in Cold War Cuba, Washington maintained military, naval, and air force missions.

A military assistance and advisory group (MAAG) was stationed on the island for the professed purpose of equipping and training Cuba’s defense forces to meet their ‘hemispheric defense’ responsibilities.

Also, the Central Intelligence Agency sought to develop a network of reliable assets within the Cuban state and society. They considered Cuba a “safe precinct.”

The bulk of US military assistance grants to the Batista regime were authorized between 1954 and 1958, coinciding with the expansion and intensification of the nationalist (revolutionary) struggle. While executive branch officials continually rationalized the provision of this type of aid on the grounds of regional defense commitment, as early as December 1957, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report had reached a far different conclusion as regards its primary use:

We have a military mission in Cuba and the Batista government from time to time requests that we sell Cuba arms to supply the Government forces. These arms are, of course, used by the interlocking Army and police to maintain the Government’s power.

By March 1958, it was conceded that ‘the Cuban Government is certainly using the military equipment which it has at its disposal to beat back armed insurrection…’

In practice, therefore, the provision of American military assistance served two essentially overlapping purposes: it bolstered anti-communist ‘hemispheric defense’ requirements at the same time that it provided crucial support for the Batista government in its efforts to maintain itself in power.

It is important to note, that most of the weapons on record as having been supplied to the Batista regime were not of a type that could be easily used against the population.  Major weapons supplies were limited in contrast with those supplied to other client states during this time frame, and many related solely to the transport of cargo.

On the other hand, since small arms are less easily traced and many observers state that such weapons were smuggled from Miami to the rebels, they may have made a substantial contribution to Batista’s effort.

It was the arms embargo debate inside the administration during early 1958 that led to a major reassessment of the most crucial issues bearing on US support of the military dictatorship.

In the debate leading up to the decision to place an arms embargo on Cuba, the central bureaucratic antagonists were located in the Departments of State and Defense.  The Defense Department argued against the application of an arms embargo on both ideological and strategic grounds:

The [Cuban] Government has traditionally supported the United States…in the United Nations against the onslaughts of responsibilities which we have, and which Cuba shares with us, of course, under the Rio Treaty.

State Department officials viewed the continuation of the arms program, in association with Batista’s refusal to accede to US government requests to reduce the level of political repression and state corruption, as the forerunner of a widened conflict. These concerns were not new.

For quite some time, American policymakers had expressed concern over the scope and persistence of corruption within the peripheral state apparatus noting:

Every government activity was milked–the lottery, the school lunch program, drivers’ licenses, parking meters, teachers’ certificates.  The police routinely extorted millions in protection money from Havana merchants.

Officials of the US Department of the Treasury were especially critical of the regime’s fiscal and monetary policies, its inability to control inflation due to administrative disorganization, the lack of an effective tax system, and the failure of Batista sufficiently to assert his dictatorial powers in ‘resisting more firmly most of the demands of labor for continuous wage and other benefits.’

In practice, however, the differences were enveloped and marginalized within the larger political-economic framework that accommodated US interests in Cuba.  Even the inter agency conflict surrounding the arms embargo was anchored within a unified commitment to maintain a secure environment for capital accumulation in Cuba.

The US government instituted an embargo on military materials and all forms of combat arms to the Batista regime in March 1958.  Nevertheless, even after the embargo was established, the Defense Department continued to maintain its various armed forces’ missions in Havana.

Pentagon officials continued to maintain ‘liaisons’ through the operations of their army, naval, and air force missions, and shipments of non-combat equipment–communications materials, for example–continued.

The partial nature of the rupture allowed American military officials to contribute important logistical and tactical supports to their peripheral counterparts up until the moment of the nationalist victory.  The Havana Embassy also maintained lines of communication to Batista’s military command.

The arms embargo decision had important repercussions within the US business community in Cuba, forcing American investors located in Havana to reassess their dismissal of the guerilla threat. Subsequently, this segment became the most active capitalist class supporters of political confrontation with the Castro movement.

The business community was important because, with respect to direct investment flows and undistributed earnings during the 10 year period 1950-1959, Cuba had received well over twice as much per capita as the average for other Latin American countries.

Direct investment flow is loosely defined to include the flow of equity and loan investments from US residents to foreign firms controlled by US interests.

The book value of direct investment enterprises includes the US ownership of equity capital, loan capital, branch accounts, and inter company accounts in foreign firms controlled by US interests.

By 1957 American direct investment totaled $850 million, and portfolio investments amounted to $210.9 million.  These were the only foreign investments of any importance in Havana.  British holdings were practically eliminated after 1945, and Canadian investments were placed at only $9.4 million.

While Havana was the site of extensive capitalist investment from the United States, the city’s population was growing increasingly displeased with Batista, the so-called “American man in Havana.”

The growing defections of the bourgeois (and petty bourgeois) elements from the class alliance that supported Batista…and the appearance of a large-scale nationalist movement with a substantial urban working-class component under the leadership of rural insurgents raised new serious problems for Washington.

By early 1958, the increasing social polarization and expanding nationalist opposition to Batista forced executive branch officials to question the continued viability of the military government and its capacity to safeguard US politco-economic interests over the long term.

When Batista’s major military offensive against the guerillas collapsed in June and July of 1958, Washington interpreted the growing fragmentation and disintegration of the Cuban armed forces as a primary threat to the collective interests of the capitalist class in Cuba. However, finally there was a decision to support the Batista government to the extent of complying with our commitments and contractual agreements.

The US would not give moral support to the revolutionary opposition.

By the late 1950s, the US was ambivalent in its support for Batista.

The governments of Cuba and the US had signed a military assistance pact 72 hours before Batista’s coup on March 10, 1952. Article 2 of the pact stated that the US would supply the Cuban government with arms for the purpose of “implementing defense plans under which the two governments will participate in missions important to the defense of the Western Hemisphere.” However, the pact provisions clearly stated that such military assistance was not to be used for “purposes other than those for which it was furnished” without prior consent of the US government.

It was now obvious that military equipment received under the military assistance pact was being used to fight what had become a civil war.

Applying this framework, US support of the Batista regime was clearly implied.

Arguing for the imposition of an arms embargo, many Cubans and Americans contended that the Batista regime was using American-made arms to counter the activities of those Cubans who wanted “to restore freedom and justice in their own country.” Once the Batista regime had been overthrown, they argued, the people of Cuba would feel that the US had been Batista’s partner in the murder of thousands of Cuba’s young people.

This group concentrated on finding ways to influence US public opinion against all arms shipments to Cuba, and on mobilizing influential members of Congress to take the message to the White House.

Eventually, after supporters of the embargo provided photocopies of documents proving that US arms were being shipped to Cuba, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that Washington’s guidelines in supplying arms would be

the need of a country to have defense against possible aggression from without [and the need for] a normal police force….We don’t like to have a large shipment of arms, particularly of a large caliber…go where the purpose is to conduct a civil war.

As a result, in March 1958, an arms embargo was finally enacted.

To Batista the arms embargo meant that the US had assumed a “neutral position” vis-a-vis the Cuban conflict. And within the Cuban political context, such “neutrality” was equivalent to US withdrawal of support for Batista.

Actually, aside from an order for 1,950  Garand rifles from the US which was confiscated, arms seem to have continued arriving aboard unmarked planes.

Nevertheless, the arms embargo had great psychological impact in favor of the insurrection, and it came less than a month before the urban underground attempted a general strike on April 9, 1958.

Along with the social disparity we talked about in Havana 1958: The Economy Nears Collapse, problems associated with government spending continued to surface. Deficit spending depleted the reserves accumulated during the 1940s.

By 1958, Cuba had amassed a 400-million-peso deficit with the United States and monetary reserves had dwindled to 100 million pesos from 571 million in 1952.

Public works expenditures alone added up to more than 1 billion pesos.  Less than 50 percent of projects covered their actual costs; the rest went for commissions and profit margins. Nevertheless, the issue of corruption was not addressed.

The new development banks granted Batista supporters generous loans and declined modest requests from nonpartisans. Hacendados and colonos who condemned the new levels of corruption suffered reduced quotas and fewer business opportunities. As one observer notes, “the military regime subordinated the incipient development infrastructure to the logic of corruption.”

Opportunism was visible in the most mundane activities of daily life and permeated all strata of the society.

Most officers in the national police (regardless of level) had become involved in a system of corruption known as the forrajeo. This was an instrument of extortion that was managed by police officers throughout the country. It was especially predominant in the municipal zones of Greater Havana–Regla, Guanabacoa, and Marianao–where most small stores and medium and large business centers were located.  Through the forrajeo every business, regardless of its size, had to contribute daily to the police precinct in each locality.  Thus, payoffs permeated every corner of Havana’s daily economy and were easily observed since all transactions were carried out openly.

Citizens witnessed corruption as they went about their everyday household chores.

For example, approximately 3,400 bodegas (small grocery stores usually owned by a single family) were located in Greater Havana, and each bodega had to pay a “tax” of one to two pesos daily, in addition to whatever consumer goods the police demanded from the owner.  This “tax” was collected by the local patrol car every afternoon.

Havana’s 180 bakeries and all snack bars supplied the police with their products, plus paying three pesos daily to the foot patrol.

Nearly 400 service stations paid one peso daily, and serviced free of charge all police officers’ private cars.

Some 940 butcher shops had to contribute two to three pounds of meat every day, plus one peso to the local patrol officer.

Beer trucks were “taxed” for two pesos daily.

Two hundred cigar delivery trucks paid one peso daily, plus products on demand.

Milkmen were assigned a quota of two liters per day, or two pesos in cash.

Even street vendors were required to make a contribution.

Activities that were offensive to all decent citizens–prostitution and drug trafficking–were also common.  However, gambling was the most profitable  business for the police and many habaneros were themselves addicted.

Six banks controlled gambling, each contributing an estimated $400 a day to various high-ranking police officers. (One bank–owned by a consortium of government officials– was exempt.  Another bank paid $1,000 per day in order to be permitted to expand into new areas of the city.) In total, the banks’ share to the forrajeo system and other “taxes” amounted to approximately $1 million a year paid to high-ranking officers.

Around 2,000 small vidrieras ( gambling booths) were scattered throughout the capital where numbers were played every hour on the hour. The vidrieras were taxed on a daily basis and income was distributed to the bureau of investigation, the district police commander, and the captain of the local precinct.  Also, the vidrieras had to allow each local police officer $2 daily for his personal gambling. All told, the vidrieras represented an income to the police of about $3.8 million a year, which was divided up from the rank of majors, through captains, to regular patrolmen.

Prostitution was also an important income opportunity for the police. Each of Havana’s approximately 2,000 houses of prostitution paid an amount calculated by local patrolmen who figured out the number of clients per night and the fees charged each one.  Very humble casas would pay from $50 to $70 per night, while the richest contributed from $3,000 to $5,000 nightly.  The transaction occurred in front of any clients who happened to be present. Moreover, police officers sometimes served as pimps with prostitutes often peddling drugs supplied by the police.

Drug traffic mostly supplied the rich and American tourists. However, not all police officers, even those with high rank, participated in the drug trade.  This business was controlled by organized crime from the United States.  Nevertheless, a substantial percentage of the profits reached the highest governmental circles.

By 1958, Havana’s economy was approaching collapse.

Public works programs such as tunnel construction came to a halt and unemployment increased.  Seventy-eight thousand people in the capital were totally without employment and many of those working were receiving marginal wages.  The effects of these developments were clearly visible in Havana.

Urban slums ringed the capital.  The neighborhoods of Luyano, Jesus del Monte, and Las Yaguas were crowded with tens of thousands of poor, unemployed, and unemployable, living in squalor and destitution, eight to a room in hovels of tin sheeting and cardboard without sanitary facilities, garbage collection, sidewalks, or street lighting, and increasingly without hope.

Many wandered about aimlessly without work and some without motivation, many crippled, maimed, and ill, living off public welfare and private charity.   Many were petty criminals, peddlers, and panhandlers, or, at best, bootblacks, newspaper vendors, car washers, and dishwashers.

More than five thousand beggars walked the streets of Havana in 1958, many of whom were homeless women with children.

Signs of social stress appeared in other ways. Havana was transformed into a center of  commercialized vice of all sorts, underwritten by organized crime from the United States and protected by Batista’s police officials.

Illegal drugs were plentiful.  Gambling casinos emerged as a major industry. In 1957, receipts reached $500,000 a month.  Pornographic theaters and clubs were expanding everywhere in the capital.

Brothels multiplied through the early 1950s; by the end of the decade, 270 brothels were in full operation.By 1958, an estimated 11,500 women earned their living as prostitutes in Havana.

Throughout Cuba crime was escalating as was juvenile delinquency.

Also, suicides were rising.  By the mid 1950s, more than 1,000 Cubans a year committed suicide and another 3,000 attempted to end their lives.

The condition of women was also deteriorating. Even though 12% of the working labor force in 1953 were women, an estimated 83% of all employed women worked less than ten weeks a year.  Only 14% worked year-round.  Nearly 65 % of all women employed in 1953 were engaged in the service sector.

The Afro-Cuban population during the 1950s was similarly marginalized.  In 1953, people of color made up 27% of the total population and constituted approximately the same percentage of the labor force.  Afro-Cubans tended to be over-represented in entertainment, construction, and domestic services and under-represented in banking and finance, professional and technical occupations, and government.  Few Cubans of color reached the upper levels of public administration.

In the main, Afro-Cubans occupied the lower end of the socio-economic order.  Blacks tended to constitute a majority in the crowded tenement dwellings of Havana.  They suffered greater job insecurity, more unemployment and underemployment, poorer health care, and constituted a proportionally larger part of the prison population.  They generally earned lower wages than whites, even in the same industries.  Afro-Cubans were subjected to systematic discrimination, barred from hotels, resorts, clubs, and restaurants.

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe.

In the 1950s, so far as the Cuban economy was concerned, any comparison to the Latin American regional context seemed irrelevant.

While Cuban currency and wages remained comparatively stable throughout the 1950s, consumption of foreign imports, particularly North American products, increased dramatically from $515 million in 1950 to $777 million in 1958.  Cubans paid North American prices at a time when the purchasing power of the US dollar was declining and the US consumer price index was rising.

Obviously, the United States, not Latin America, served as the social and economic frame of reference for the island’s urban population.

Using this baseline, the Cuban per capita income of $374 was insignificant against the United States per capita of $2,000, or even that of Mississippi, the poorest state, at $1,000.

This context was particularly challenging since Havana also ranked among the world’s most expensive cities — fourth after Caracas, Ankara, and Manila.  As a consequence, life in Havana was considerably more expensive than in any North American city.

A privileged minority of Cubans, concentrated mainly in the capital, enjoyed a pseudo-American lifestyle and preferred American produced goods. Moreover, privileged habaneros flouted their  wealth.  For example, in 1954, Havana had the largest number of Cadillacs per capita of any city in the world.

In contrast to the conspicuous consumption of the more affluent, middle-class Cubans were struggling.  They knew that their standard of living was eroding, especially since they were falling far behind income advances in the United States.

Per capita income in Cuba in the 1950s declined by 18 per cent, neutralizing the slow gains made during the postwar period.  In 1958, the Cuban per capita income was at about the same level as it had been in 1947.

Falling income levels were met with mounting inflation, and real estate values, especially, were soaring.

Land in Vedado selling in 1941 for $12 a meter had increased by 1957 to $200 a meter.

With the average industrial wage approximating $120 a month, the prospects of home ownership were clearly diminishing.

Cuba’s housing situation before the 1959 revolution reflected the country’s general level of development.  Real estate was a major investment arena and rampant real estate speculation was the norm after World War II.

Because housing was so unaffordable,  a large percentage of Havana’s residents were renters. In fact, by 1953, tenants represented nearly three-fifths of households in all urban areas and three-fourths of those in Havana.

Tenancy was so popular that, in the two decades before the revolution, renters acquired a series of protections and rights even more advanced than in most jurisdictions in the US today.  For example, Cuba instituted rent control in 1939 and has continued it in one form or another until the present.

Despite rent control, tenants paid on average nearly one-fourth of their incomes for rent, high compared to other countries at the time. Also, landlords devised numerous ways to circumvent restrictions. The most frequent were subletting, furniture fees, and “key money.”

Ultimately, investors responded to the rent laws by developing condominiums rather than rental units. The shift to condominium construction was also in response to rent laws establishing a “right to occupancy” which meant that eviction was possible only with just cause.  Despite this right, an estimated 70,000 evictions a year were ordered in the mid-1950s out of a total urban rental stock of 460,000 units.  In fact, condominium construction dominated the Vedado landscape throughout the 1950s. The new apartments were sold on the installment plan, with mortgage holders charging usurious rates.

Despite Havana’s problems, its middle class continued to receive a disproportionate share of national revenues.  Almost 20% of the population living on 0.5% of the national territory accounted for 80% of all construction, 70% of the consumption of electricity, 62% of salaries and wages, 73% of all telephones, and 60% of all automobiles.

Approximately 95% of the city’s dwellings had electricity and 80% had running water.  This was in sharp contrast to rural dwellings where 90% had no electricity or running water.

These advantages were not enough for middle-class residents who observed that the proportion of children attending primary school in the 1950s was lower than in the 1920s, and the purchasing power of Cuban exports between 1952 and 1956 was no more than it had been thirty years earlier.

Thus:

social undercurrents ran deep during the late 1950s and contributed to transforming the struggle against Batista from a political contest between elite power contenders into a more ambiguous movement for socio-economic change….By the late 1950s, protest and unrest among different classes had given the anti-Batista struggle the character of a  protest movement drawing on social frustration, economic loss, and political anger.

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe.

Batista’s honeymoon with Havana’s inhabitants was short-lived and the capital soon harbored a modicum of discontent, “a function of deepening socio-economic frustration as well as of growing political grievances.”

Despite the fact that during the 1950s, Cuba ranked among the top five countries in Latin America on a wide range of socioeconomic indicators such as urbanization, literacy, per capita income, infant mortality, and life expectancy, a sense of recurring stagnation characterized the Cuban economy.

Increasingly, Cuban-American reciprocity was perceived to exacerbate the city’s economic distress.

In 1956, the National Bank called attention to impending crisis by issuing a report delineating  the consequences for living standards if dependence on sugar were to continue.  With the benefit of hindsight they observed that in 1955 Cuba would have needed a sugar harvest of more than 7 million tons to have maintained 1947 standards of living.  In actuality, the 1955 harvest was less than 5 million tons.

The centrality of sugar underscored a structural crisis of economic stagnation, affecting other Cuban exports as well. For example, under the Sugar Act of 1956, the United States formally secured a Cuban commitment to purchase rice in exchange for continued preferential treatment of sugar.

Between 1955 and 1959, rice imports grew by more than 40 percent with Cuba purchasing approximately 70 percent of all US rice exports.  The relationship became so institutionalized that soon Cuba’s state banks refused funding for domestic rice production.

Clearly, the Cuban-US reciprocity mentality dictated that safe-guarding the country’s sugar quota in the US market was the priority. Internal sugar interests resisted reforms aimed at protecting the Cuban market for national industry for fear that the United States would lessen the preferential treatment of sugar.

In addition to sugar, there were many other links to the American economy. So many, in fact, that Havana’s relationship with the United States was noted for its dependent economic–rather than militaristic–aspects.

The dependency relationship was geographically expressed by the city’s proximity to the Florida peninsula which provided highly accessible markets and quick turnaround time for supplies and inventory.

By the mid-1950s, the US Department of Commerce estimated combined Cuban short-term assets and long-term investments in the United States at $312 million, of which $265 million were in the form of short term assets, especially real estate.

While Cubans favored the markets in New York and South Florida, Americans were investing  heavily in Cuba, especially in Havana.

Since three-fourths of all manufacturing outside of sugar was located in the capital, American commercial  investment disproportionately affected the city.  Americans owned or dominated the majority of key manufacturing plants as well as the largest chain of supermarkets, several large retail stores, and most major tourist facilities.  Moreover, 25% of all bank deposits were held by branches of American banks.  Investors from the United States owned 50% of the public railway system and over 90% of the telephone and power industries. Consequently, Cuba was integrated directly into the larger United States economic system and its concomitant consumption patterns.

Even though Cubans (particularly those living in Havana) enjoyed a remarkably high per capita income in Latin American terms, they lived within a North American cost of living index, enjoying a material culture underwritten principally by imports from the United States.

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe.

Batista’s focus was on the economy, and the US–anxious to protect its business investments in Cuba–quickly proffered its support to the new regime.

Batista “pledged order, stability, and labor tranquility” to the Cuban business community and respect for foreign capital to the United States.  Not surprisingly, American and Cuban capitalists responded favorably.

Between 1954 and 1956, new foreign investment quadrupled, flowing into almost every strategic sector of the Cuban economy: petroleum, public utilities, petrochemicals, mining, non-sugar manufacturing, tourism, and construction.

By 1957, new direct US private investment since the military coup totaled in excess of $350 million.

The most important ‘growth’ sector in the economy under Batista was the largely American-financed expansion of the tourist industry.

A wide array of government concessions and supports resulted in the construction of 28 new hotels and motels at an overall investment cost of more than $60 million.

Each new building received substantial tax exemptions and, in the cases of the luxury Havana Hilton and Havana Riviera hotels in the Vedado section of the city, direct government financial assistance during the process of construction. This type of investment remained highly profitable in comparison with equivalent investments in the United States, even beyond the ten year period of tax exemption.

In actuality, US capital operations in Cuba were not only granted specific tax exemptions but, for all practical purposes, were excluded from any significant tax burden whatsoever.  American multinationals were able to profitably exploit the island’s existing tax laws for their own benefit, and there were relatively few obstacles to the repatriation of profits to the metropolitan center.

In September 1958, Batista issued a decree that transformed Cuba into a foreign tax base country:

Under this decree US corporations may control from a central office in Cuba all transactions originating or consummated outside of Cuba without being subject to Cuban taxes.

As a result, major quantities of new US investment capital flowed into the Cuban economy for almost the duration of the Batista dictatorship.

By the end of 1958, the total book value of US enterprise in Cuba was, with the exception of Venezuela, the highest in Latin America; the lack of controls on capital remittances between 1952 and 1958 had enabled American capitalists to channel some $378 million in corporate profits back into the US.

The advantages of locating in Batista’s Cuba were substantial and compared more than favorably with most other countries in the region.

US companies that encountered specific problems always had immediate formal and/or informal access to the relevant government agencies and officials.  As one American businessman noted:

I would have to say that under Batista there was more cooperation from the government than under any other government.  If there were problems with different government departments, or if legislation was unfair, there was apt to be more cooperation.  Batista was an easier man to get to.Few US multinationals had, or required, public relations offices in Havana because all you needed was to find a way to get a phone call to Batista and he could fix it.

The accessibility of regime officials was facilitated by the activities of the American Embassy which functioned, in part, as a ‘service’ organization for US investors.

Photograph by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe