Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic

6 We Come to Discredit These Leaders: Political Change and Challenges to the Black Political Elite

CHAPTER SIX We Come to Discredit These Leaders Political Change and Challenges to the Black Political Elite In May 1936, on the eve of Cuba’s first constitutional elections since Gerardo Machado took office in 1925, the editors of Atómo (The Atom), a new youth-run black newspaper, threw down the gauntlet. They called out the political machine that had dominated Cuban politics since the republic’s inception and that had betrayed blacks: “There are those corrupted by experience . . . and their thirst for sinecures . . . who seek to . . . exploit the collective anguish of a Race.”1 Speaking to politicians of all colors generally and to black politicians in particular, Atómo’s editors blasted Cuban leaders who placed their own individual interests above those of the racial collective . In leveling their accusation against black leaders, they also asserted their right to a more actualized relationship to kith and country: “We come to discredit these leaders in the name of youth who know that our parents, having paid in blood currency their contribution to winning the republic, give us the right (inalienable as are all things dignified) to demand from the Patria, or its administrators that we [blacks] be permitted, without psychological coercion, to fully develop all of our faculties.”2 Atómo’s demands fit in with a wave of radical nationalism sweeping the island by the 1920s. A coalition of activist groups expressed deep resentment and frustration with the national government and called for structural change, such as agrarian reform, national economic development, public health programs, and jobs. Within a decade, their wrath had swelled to revolution.3 Arguably, no issue better bound them in common struggle than the government corruption and political mismanagement that had taken hold at the republic’s birth in 1902. As social commentator and economist Alberto Arredondo lamented in 1938, “Our politics has been a trick. . . . Parties without programs, without principles, without intimate links to the pressing needs of our country; vehicles of utter laziness and apathy have traveled the field of Cuban politics.”4 Arredondo might have been speaking ten years earlier  WE COME TO DISCREDIT THESE LEADERS 171 about the political frustration and antigovernment sentiments already brewing among Cuban capitalists.Their appearance as a political constituency coincided with the sugar industry’s postindependence resurgence during the years of World War I, which facilitated growth among domestic investors (entrepreneurs, manufacturers, professionals, and industrialists).5 To safeguard their interests against damaging government policies, several sectors of domestic commerce, industry, and business joined forces under the banner of the National Federation of Economic Corporations, which represented Cuban producers, property owners, and two organizations: the Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Navigation of the Island of Cuba and the Friends of the Country Economic Society.6 As early as 1922, for example, investors founded the National Association of Cuban Industrialists and quickly urged protectionist policies to protect domestic Cuban industry from foreign interests. That same year, a group of young businessmen established the Committee of One Hundred, which almost immediately demanded an end to political misconduct.7 These local Cuban business executives expected government trade policies to reflect national economic interests rather than the interests of those who were plundering Cuban resources from abroad. For example, the 1903 Reciprocity Treaty had reduced tariffs on Cuba-U.S. trade, ultimately undermining national economic development.8 From the vantage point of these young businessmen, lively economic activity would strengthen the national economy. And they expected to have an increasing role in national political affairs. Cuban political elites, however, who scarcely tolerated political challenge from among their own ranks, were unwilling to respond to domestic capitalists on the issue of national economic protections .9 When, in late spring 1920, sugar prices plummeted, sending the economy into a downward spiral, Cuban capitalists were among the many infuriated antigovernment camps. Cuba’s economic crisis continued a boombust cycle through the early 1930s, when it crashed, leaving many unemployed , underemployed, and even those fully employed without pay. For sectors clamoring for greater political participation, the year 1923 was especially portentous. In March, Julio Antonio Mella, Carlos Baliño, and others formalized Cuba’s first Communist organization. In April, the first National Congress of Women met in the National Theater in Old Havana.10 In August, the Veterans’ Association gathered en masse in Havana to fight rumored pension cuts.11 Attacking “Yankee imperialism” and promoting “new vernacular art” were the agendas of prominent elite white youth groups, such as the Grupo Minorista (1923–28...