Public Intellectuals and Politics in Cuba: A Case Study of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza (1872–1956)

Notes

1. The Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution was a requirement of the McKinley administration to transfer sovereignty to Cuba. It was a logical outcome of two major objectives of the US as an emerging empire. First was to establish a strategic base in the Caribbean to protect the projected Panama Canal and the trade route it represented. Article VI provided the US the right to construct a naval base on the Island at Guantánamo. From the perspective of the Cubans, including Torriente, Article III of the Amendment was most problematic to Cuban sovereignty by providing the US the right to intervene in Cuban politics ‘for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty …’ It was aimed at providing the political stability required for economic development and investments in the Island, which led to repeated interventions in Cuban politics undermining the legitimacy of the Republic (Lane 1972: 325). Torriente's career as a diplomat was dedicated to the objective of its abrogation. His concrete actions towards that end are discussed in this article.

2. The Union Nacionalista (UN) was a political movement of segments of the old parties representing in large part the interests of the sugar bourgeoisie tied to foreign interests. The UN was led by Mario García Menocal, Carlos Mendieta, Cosme de la Torriente in opposition to the Machado dictatorship. It represented an alliance of ‘outs’ excluded from power by the Machadato. Torriente's contribution to the UN was to lead efforts to convince the US to intervene against Machado, and, failing that, to obtain enough pressure on Machado to force him to open up the political and legal arena to electoral contestation. Torriente led one effort before the Supreme Court to legally challenge the Machado regime. It could be argued that its influence was limited by the contradictory character of the UN alliance, which led to divisions in their goals and tactics. Its influence was also limited by the fact that the emerging industrial bourgeois and sectors of the state and bureaucracy benefitting from the regime's import substitution policies aligned with the authoritarian regime (Benjamin 1977: 78).

3. The US was reluctant to support Cuban insurgents as belligerents in the independence war with Spain. In his 1897 inaugural address, President McKinley said, ‘we want no wars of conquest’ with respect to a possible intervention in Cuba. The sinking of the Battleship Maine in February 1898 precipitated the war, but the underlying causes of the war were found in America's turn to an imperial role in the 1890s requiring a different policy on the Cuban conflict. In effect, violence in Cuba ‘created a spectacle of an America unable to master affairs close to home’ with potential to undercut its ability to project its new ambitions for a global role (Gould 1982: 50).

4. The political frictions between the Provisional Government and the General in Chief involved the civil-military relationship in the Revolution. Its immediate causes were the limits that the Provisional Government sought to place on the conduct of the war effort. Torriente played a significant role as a mediator trying to reconcile the divisions that he believed weakened the belligerents. On the question of state power and more specifically the role of the military, it appears from his actions at the La Yaya constitutional convention that he was wary of the caudillismo, which represented a retrograde form of rule incompatible with the long-term interests of the bourgeois.

5. Torriente's thought on the importance of Cuba's international personality is found in Lugo-Viña's Un Internacionalista representativo, emphasising that he consistently related the expansion of Cuba's international presence to the misguided Platt Amendment that he opposed and sought to abolish through his diplomatic missions affirming that ‘Cuba is and by rights should be free and independent’ (Lugo-Viña 1924: 95).

6. In October 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a second military occupation of Cuba to quell a political uprising against the government of President Estrada y Palma citing the right of intervention under Clause III of the Platt Amendment to secure ‘life, liberty and property’ when the Cuban government was unable to do so. America's reluctant intervention in 1906 was provoked by partisan conflicts among the veterans of the war based largely on disputes over state patronage. Both President Estrada y Palma and his Liberal opponents appealed to the Platt Amendment – asking for US support. The Liberals having lost the 1906 presidential election due to voter fraud and intimidation hoped the US intervention would produce better terms for the party and its supporters. The practical effect was to change the meaning of Article III of the Amendment (Thomas 1971).

7. The doctrine of ‘domestic virtue’ in the Republic came from noted public intellectuals and gained some acceptance among the population. It can be understood to have elements in common with Barrington Moore's bourgeois ethos – support for representative democracy, an end to party and state political corruption, respect for free and fair elections, defence of civil liberties. In Cuba, the proponents were advocates of liberal thought who deployed these doctrines to remedy political and institutional conditions that produced US military interventions under the Platt Amendment. While these doctrines were subject to different interpretation, they served as an ideological platform for those who hoped for political stability and a relative state autonomy from foreign meddling while accepting the parameters set by the Island's economic dependence on the US. Among its most noted proponents were Raymundo Cabrera, Rafael Martinez Ortiz and Manuel Márquez Sterling. The latter best defined the thesis in his article ‘La Nación’ published on February 1917 (Sterling 1985: 525–30).

8. Cuban society was changing rapidly during the first two decades after independence with the growth of foreign-owned large-scale sugar mills concentrating sugar workers into enclaves giving rise to new social forces in politics, including colono (small property owners and renters) and labour movements, although it was not until the 1920s that economic crisis and political repression under the administrations of Alfredo Zayas and Gerardo Machado under the Cuban National Confederation of Labor and the Habana Labor Federation that the labour movement is mobilised and organised as a political actor (Domínguez 1978: 50; McGillivray 2009: 151).

9. Torriente's appointment as Ambassador was probably due to President Alfredo Zayas' pursuit of greater autonomy in its dealings with the US by having a respected nationalist opposed to the Platt Amendment as the Island's leading diplomat in Washington. The political crisis caused by post-World War I collapse of sugar prices and partisan conflicts during the presidential election cycle of 1921 led to US interference in Cuba during the Zayas administration. The US agreed to support Zayas financially and politically with the condition that the latter accept US envoy Enoch Crowder vetting of Zayas' Cabinet and approving administrative decisions. Zayas' government was under attack from political opponents who chaffed at its corruption, including the appointment of twelve of the President's relatives to high posts on Customs (nephew), Public Works (brother), the Department of Interior (nephew), sub-Treasury (nephew) and the national lottery (son; New York Times 1922). Crowder imposed a ‘moral cabinet’ on President Zayas while working to ‘stabilize’ the Island's economy. A few months later, Zayas was forced to accept the demands of J.P. Morgan via the State Department for the creating of a commission acceptable to the US to administer a new loan and the revenues pledged to its repayment (Benjamin 1979: 23).

10. Torriente's character traits predisposed him as a public intellectual to play for the most part the role of grand strategist and architect behind the scenes as he did in the political mediations of the 1930s and 1950s, while others did the political grunt work. His tendency was to renounce office when his ideas and proposals came under partisan questioning, preferring to engaging in long and arduous debates with others. This trait was less evident in his diplomatic missions in the US and League of Nations. Torriente felt more at ease in that more rarefied world of diplomacy and apparently managed the rough and tumble of international diplomacy with aplomb.

11. Research on the social and economic basis of the opposition to Machado remains to be done. The literature generally characterises the disputes as purely political rooted in the exclusion from power of segments of the traditional political parties by the dictatorship. We suggest that it would be worthwhile to explore the ties between the emerging industrial bourgeoisie sponsored by the Machado import substitution industrialisation strategies and the failure of a bourgeois ethos to establish hegemony.

12. Cuban representatives to the negotiations of the 1934 Treaty of Reciprocity in which Torriente played a principal role advocating for an agreement including broad trade concessions on the part of the US for a more favourable treatment of the Cuban sugar quota and lowering US tariffs on Cuban exports. The US position of the US delegation, however, prevailed and Cuba relented in the fact of the economic crisis facing the Island during the Great Depression. Luis Perez has argued that the final outcome led to a less favourable treaty than the Treaty of Reciprocity negotiated in 1903 (Perez 1988: 280).

13. The Communist Party was founded on 16 August 1925 by Carlos Baliño y Julio Antonio Mella. It adopted the ‘united front’ strategy of the Communist International in favour of alliances between the working classes and the national bourgeoisie. Concretely, in the period under discussion, it advocated an alliance with the conservative forces represented by Batista. The CNOC for the most part became an extension of the Communist Party once the repression against the anarchists largely removed their influence. In 1939, Batista legalised union, a development that led to the founding of the CTC (Confederation of Cuban Workers).

14. Torriente perceived the Constituent Assembly of 1940 as flawed due to the role of Batista in framing it to divide the opposition through provisions that would multiply the number of small political parties. He was, furthermore, sceptical of the alliance between Batista and the Liberal Party sectors that had backed Machado.

15. The Communist Party (which had become the Popular Socialist Party in the late 1940s) was excluded from the public gathering at Muelle de la Luz in large measure due to Torriente's influence; he was an avowed anti-communist suspicious of the motivations of the party in joining with the opposition. Prior to the Muelle de la Luz protest, he made public pronouncements that the communist representatives to the meeting were Kremlin emissaries and publicly rejected their inclusion in the programme, although he did not oppose their attending as part of the general public. Furthermore, in light of his extensive experience in diplomacy and intimate knowledge of American politics and foreign policies, he likely understood that in a robust communist party presence at the event would raise alarms in the State Department and undercut whatever opportunity might exist to enlist US support for the democratic opposition to Batista.

16. The FEU (Federation of University Students) was founded in 1922 by Julio Antonio Mella, which was a student organisation with an active and influential role in Cuba politics. In 1954, José Antonio Echeverría became its president and led the grouping into a direct confrontation and challenge to the Batista regime. He was killed on 13 March 1957 leading an assault to overthrow the regime by taking over the Presidential Palace as a prelude to a mass popular uprising against the dictatorship.

17. The reformist alternative supported by public intellectuals associated with Torriente's political thought encapsulated the principles of the bourgeois ethos in Cuban politics of absolute respect for democratic institutions and processes as embodied in the Constitution of 1940, an end to corruption in government and politics, advancing the social gains and welfare state created in the 1940s, strengthening the national economy within a framework of capitalist development. This reformist alternative meant continuing the advances of the previous decades without dismantling capitalism as occurred after 1959.

18. Perez-Stable in ‘Reflections on Political Possibilities: Cuba's Peaceful Transition That Wasn't, (1954–1958)’ emphasises the role of leadership, mostly the failure of the SAR leadership to produce a leader able to appeal to the mobilised civil society in early 1955 and to enlist it in support of the mediated solution. She speculates that a different outcome could have been produced had a leader emerged with a more inclusive ‘vision’ such as Luis Muñoz Marín at the head of the reform forces more able to appeal to Cuban youth increasingly supportive of Fidelista-led revolution (Perez-Stable 1998).