Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution (review)

The citizens of the city of Guantánamo must deeply resent the fact that the only way most people outside Cuba have ever heard the name of their home-town is through the U.S. prison camp on the base in the bay which bears the same name. By taking an approach that looks at the history of the Cubans who have worked on that base, this book takes us deep into the history of the Eastern Cuba, an area that has been sadly neglected, even by historians on the island and thereby gives us a much more rounded idea of Guantánamo. It is also refreshing to see a book which treats social class as the principle division in society and clearly places other divisions and oppressions in the context of a hierarchical class society.

The central theme of the book is the struggle of the workers on the base for their rights to a living wage and job security along with more abstract concepts of fair and dignified treatment. This narrative demonstrates in a very practical way the reality of working-class life in pre-revolutionary Cuba and paints a useful picture of the neo-colonial period.

The Guantánamo naval base has its origins in the U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Liberation and the protectorate that was set up to oversee the nominally independent Republic of Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century. In return for formal independence, the first Cuban government accepted the “Platt Amendment” to the constitution which, amongst other things, gave the U.S. the right to intervene militarily to protect U.S. property. As part of this arrangement, the U.S. gained a lease to set up a “coaling station” in Guantánamo bay; a lease which survived the abrogation of the Platt Amendment following the revolutions of the 1930s. However, it was the 1940s and the Second World War which saw the real expansion of the base and the involvement of large numbers of Cuban and other Caribbean workers in the construction and maintenance of the vastly expanded facility. Thus the book provides an illustration of the economic and social structure of Cuba at this time as we see hundreds of unemployed workers, many more than the number of jobs available, flocking to the area in the hope of work, while the local Guantánamo bourgeoisie profited from selling entertainment to the increased numbers of servicemen on the base.

The Snare Corporation had a major part of the contract to enlarge the base in the early 40s, funded on a “cost plus” basis that guaranteed their profits and which provided a useful example of that “divide and rule” which is so useful in industrial relations. The workers directly employed by the U.S. Navy received higher wages than the temporary contract workers and were paid in dollars, while the base authorities took no responsibility for the employment practices of the corporations to whom they contracted the work. The existence of the base in a legal no-man’s land, so useful today to the American government in its bid to maintain an internment camp outside judicial control, allowed the employers to pick and choose between Cuban and U.S. employment regulations, or indeed to ignore them both as they chose. This led to the base workers’ desire to form a trade union, while the manner in which the employers dealt with this, described in considerable detail in the book, gives us a practical example of the way in which such matters were handled in Cuba, particularly in the period of the Cold War and the Batista dictatorship.

The main trade union federation, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) was highly bureaucratised and dependent upon its relationship with the government. The CTC bureaucracy, headed by general secretary Eusebio Mujal, was utterly corrupt and had gained control of the unions by ousting the communists...