On the 'Fidel freed your family's slaves' meme
As a short one-off since this comes up a lot
First off, don’t worry, I don’t plan to spend my precious time constantly debunking popular misconceptions that are contradicted by even 5 seconds of time looking something up on Google. This is just something that comes up enough that I decided, eh, why not do a write-up where I offer actual context. My afternoon was free because something I need to enter an archive today hasn’t come through. This isn’t some super urgent or deeply researched post. It’s just a longer form explanation using things I know off the top of my head from a decade of studying Cuban history. Seemed like an easy post and I’m trying to use this blog more.
If you talk about Cuba online for long enough you’ll eventually run into it. Someone, probably an anonymous account, saying that Cuban exiles are only mad because ‘Fidel took away your family’s slaves’.
To start, no, Fidel didn’t take away anyone’s slaves, since slavery was abolished in the 19th century. This is like saying that LBJ passed the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1960s. By the time that Fidel Castro’s Spanish father first came to Cuba in the 1890s, to fight for Spain in Cuba’s second and final independence war, slavery had already ceased to exist. True, like all abolitionist processes this didn’t happen overnight, and doubtless there was some kind of remote estates somewhere in which the land owner enforced slavery as if it still existed by law, but the legal institution of slavery was already dead by the time Cuba became a republic in 1902.
The big problem of post-1902 Cuba was not slavery as such but land concentration. The term for large landed estates in Spanish is latifundia, which also exists in English but is far less common. It comes from the Latin term for large landed estates dating all the way back to the Roman Empire, and has continued to be used as the term for large landed estates in various romance languages ever since.
Land concentration had certainly already been a problem for quite some time by the late 19th century, when slavery was finally abolished by law, but this problem was exacerbated by the two independence wars that razed much of Cuba to the ground. And I mean that quite literally. The strategy of the ‘tea’ (torch), by which Cuban rebels would set fire to cane fields to deny Spain income from the export of sugar made from their juice, was a staple of both independence wars. In addition, the first independence war (1868-1878) took place during the final decades of slavery, and the rebels - despite often having been planters themselves - actively recruited slaves to join them in rebellion in exchange for promises of freedom. This both provided them with a steady stream of committed troops as well as robbing planters of their main labor force and the capital invested in importing slaves from Africa.
Slavery was abolished by Spain in the 1880s as a result of a combination of pressures, with the most important being
abolitionist pressure from the UK, a key Spanish creditor and also the great maritime power of the 19th century, which used its power to actively pursue slaver ships, driving up the price of slaves
a crisis of the plantation slavery model, because slaves were growing ever more expensive slavery was also keeping away white immigrants who might be drawn to Cuba, as Italians were being drawn to the US, Argentina, and later Brazil
and
the desire to rob future rebels of a potential source of recruits for new uprisings against Spain as well as a deeper racist fear of ‘Africanizing’ Cuba shared by Spaniard and colonist alike.
From the ashes of the second Cuban independence war (1895-1898) came what is often called the First Republic (1902-1933). Thanks to the Platt Amendment, imposed as a condition of the end of the US occupation that resulted from the Spanish American War (1898), Cuba spent the first third of the 20th century as an unofficial US protectorate. It was just one of a number of Caribbean countries to suffer this fate, a list including but not limited to Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.
The destructive nature of the second independence war left much of Cuba’s agricultural sector in ruins. Worse, many of Cuba’s rural inhabitants had died not only from the ravages of war but through General Valeriano Weyler’s horrific ‘reconcentration’ strategy, which is what it sounds like; a series of concentration camps for rural people in Cuba who had to live in cramped and unsanitary conditions with little food or water for months, leading to tens of thousands of civilian deaths before these camps were shut down.
Into this devastation leapt eager American capital. Cuban farmlands were still potentially rich, they just needed massive injections of capital to get them going again, with most of Cuba’s domestic capital stocks long since destroyed or consumed. This, unsurprisingly, meant American investors and Cubans lucky enough to have preserved some capital during the war got to grab large swaths of Cuban farmland for almost nothing. The end result of both wars of independence was the birth of a new degree of land concentration unseen even in colonial era Cuba.
Already in the 1920s and 1930s the demand for some kind of land reform was a major national issue. In the late 1920s important intellectuals were writing whole books arguing for it, like Ramiro Guerra’s classic Sugar and Population in the Antilles (1927). When the progressive 1940 constitution was passed under Fulgencio Batista’s first period in power, with Cuban Communist Party support, a key clause of the constitution promised land reform. The trick here was that it kicked the actual specifics of any kind of law on land reform down the road to some kind of act of congress, which never materialized.
When twelve years later the second republic (1933-1952), which was born of the 1933 Revolution, was in turn overthrown by Batista, the problem of land reform remained not only incomplete but had not even been begun.
A year after the coup, a young Fidel Castro, a lawyer by training who had had his own political aspirations dashed by Batista, attempted and failed to take the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, the second largest military base in the country. While the attack failed, in his legal defense - famous for the line ‘history will absolve me’ - Fidel not only called for the restoration of the 1940 constitution that Batista had overthrown but its fulfillment through a major national land reform which would break up Cuba’s latifundia (that is, big landed estates).
At this point, in the 1950s, many of the big land holdings had stopped being American owned and had reverted to Cuban control. Following the profound political instability of the 1920s and 1930s, as the price of sugar went through several booms and busts but tended ever more towards decline, the US had stabilized the price by giving Cuba a guaranteed cut of the domestic market through a sugar quota system, though at controlled prices. This meant that while the sugar sector was no longer in freefall, it was not growing either. Profits could be had much more easily by simply reallocating capital to other more buoyant Cuban sectors, like tourism, or by Americans simply repatriating their capital and investing it somewhere else.
The sugar sector of the 1950s was on life support. Of the grand sugar fortunes of the era, like the famous Julio Lobo, many of these were often more about savvy commodity speculation and market manipulation than sugar production per se. A large part of the rural discontent in the 1950s was specifically the stagnation of the sugar sector as the urban-rural divide grew ever larger, leaving sugar’s massive rural proletariat without enough work to go around, an especially big problem given that these workers often had large families to feed in addition to themselves. This then helped to fuel massive rural immigration to the country’s cities, as well as fueling immense poverty and discontent among those stuck in the countryside. In addition to seasonal wage laborers, who lacked steady work much of the year, the sugar system of the 1950s also depended on sharecropping. In this system, landowners would let landless peasants work the landowner’s farmland in exchange for a cut, often a substantial one, of their agricultural output. As in the American South in the 1950s, this was a brutal, exploitative, and profoundly unjust system, one stacked in favor of the land owner. This goes a long way to explain why the Cuban rebels of the 1950s had such strong support in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Eastern Cuba, where this problem was worst. However, it should also be remembered that the coffee growing peasantry of the Escambray Mountains, in Central Cuba, not only didn’t have this problem but were usually the owners of their plots. When land reform came to the Escambray after 1959 it divided up medium sized landholdings that the peasants not only felt belonged to them but which also, due to the fact that coffee grows on uneven terrain, were part of coffee farms that required larger extensions than fertile river valley plots with higher agricultural output per hectare. This is why the Escambray would become the one rural part of Cuba to support an anti-communist guerrilla war in the 1960s, ending only with the forced mass relocation of the region’s peasantry to purpose made small rural towns across the country.
When Batista fled in 1959 and the Revolution was swept into power, with Fidel Castro consolidating control over the movement and its future, the situation in rural Cuba was dire, but slavery was long gone. The problem, which his government did address, was the breakup of latifundia through land reform, organized through the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA). The large estates were broken up, landless peasants - especially in the poorer East - were given title to their lands, and the grand latifundia of the past died. In the decade that followed much of this land was reincorporated into state control through the development of Soviet style state farms that were only nominally run for and by the country’s peasantry. The idea that Fidel Castro took away anyone’s slaves is not only incorrect but not even something the Cuban government itself claims.
It’s been really frustrating to see this myth of Fidel ‘taking away your family’s slaves’ repeated, time and again, either in bad faith or - worse - seemingly genuinely. In response to a frustrated tweet about this problem, @David_Jorgonson on Twitter replied with a guess that might actually be the origin of the misconception. That is, that since latifundia isn’t as common of a term, perhaps someone just translated Fidel’s breakup of the latifundia - which often produced sugar - as his breaking up ‘sugar plantations’. This honestly makes a lot of sense, since I could see people using sugar plantation as an easy shorthand for latifundia and because I can see how someone hearing about sugar plantations would assume that these had slaves (given how synonymous the two are in the US). If someone hears that Fidel broke up ‘sugar plantations’, and knows little to nothing else about Cuban history, it stands to reason that they might assume that plantations meant Cuba also had slavery at the time.
On the off chance that someone like this has genuinely made this mistake, is open to persuasion, and has made it this far, thanks for reading and being open to the possibility that you’ve been misled by people who either didn’t know better either or - worse - knew better but didn’t care that they were misleading you. It’s ok to be misled. I’ve also been there. It sucks. Especially when it comes from someone you trust, or at least trusted, to know better or to be honest with you. Hopefully armed with this information you’ll have a more nuanced perspective on the topic and will be better able to talk with people about Cuba, and its really fascinating history.
Thanks for reading.
I appreciate this post but I think it needs to be mentioned that this phrase is not as literal as you make it out to be. Likely its in reference to extremely low wage workers that privileged households would employ (i.e "the help").