The European Effect: Part 2 (Updated)

I promised to talk about the author's response, and here it is. I am cherry picking here, I admit, but there are a few points here I want to address:

While not wishing to offend any individual Americans, I was refering to the American big businesses who according to every book I have ever read (and there have been many) about Cuba, owned much of the Island's wealth. I am refering to the companies who owned the oil refineries,who controlled the banks, who controlled, bought and sold the sugar, who owned the hotels, the trains, the casinos, the telephone companies and just about everything else that one can think of...

“...it is very doubtful whether Cuba would have reached even the relative prosperity which it did in fact achieve had it not been for large American investments.”

With all its problems, the most important of which was political, Cuba in
1958 remained one of the more advanced and successful Latin American societies.
The revolutionary version of pre-Castro history has been so widely diffused
in the American and European media during the last four decades that
such an assertion seems preposterous on its face. It is not, however, an opinion
confined to disaffected Cuban exiles or Anglo-Saxon conservatives. No less an
authority than veteran Communist Party chieftain Aníbal Escalante is on
record as avowing that “Cuba was not one of the countries with the lowest standard
of living of the masses in Latin America, but on the contrary one of those
with the highest standard of living.”

Quotes from Cuba: The Morning After by Mark Falcoff

Before I go any further I must add that my article which was not intended to be political but which has obviously upset some of you, used the phrase about rich Americans exploiting Cuba because that is quite simply the way that it is portrayed in Britain and Europe.

Ah, my point exactly, this is the European perspective that is making its way back to Cuba.

My mother witnessed at first hand the barbarity and repression of Batista's police and the poverty which many Cubans lived with at the time. She witnessed a small boy of no more than 8 years old being shot by Batista's police in cold blood and yet you say that Cuba was more tolerant than Britain before 1959, people were not being murdered by the police in 1950's Britain!

My first source (see above) does a more than adequate job of discussing Batista.

I don't know about you, but my mother brought me up with a saying that had there been no ---------- (can't remember the date of Batista's coup), there would have been no 26th of July. But Basista's regime was a far cry from what replaced it.

One of the many books that I have read and which goes into detail about the living standards of Cubans before Castro is Dr Eric William's `From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969. The late Dr Williams was the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and no communist or apologist for Castro but a well respected democraticaly elected politician and Historian. Perhaps you should read this book and the many others like it, that will tell you of what living standards Cubans had before Castro.

Here's a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) report on Cuba circa 1957 : "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by Social legislation, a higher percentage then in the U.S." (Movie Critics Aghast at Andy Garcia's The Lost City by Humberto Fontova)

My father was an exile from Batista and from what my parents have told me, the ones who fled the Island in the immediate aftermath of Castro's revolution were the crooks of the Batista government and US criminals whom the FBI were arresting as they got off of planes in Miami.

Here, I take offense. Is this meant to imply that people who got out early when they saw the writing on the wall were criminals of supporters of Batista? While a striking vignette, I assure you, my parents weren't.

On the subject of de Valera, the Irish writer Tim Pat Coogan who wrote a recent biography failed to find any verification of de Valera's father's identity, although he quite possibly was a Cuban. Another connection between Cuba and Ireland that you failed to mention although there might be a reason for this is that Che Guevara's mother's family came from Co. Galway.

The father of the modern Irish republic was Eamon de Valera, who was born in New York in 1882. His father, Juan de Valera, although technically a Spaniard, was really a Cuban, born in Cuba (which was part of Spain back then), the son of a Cuban sugar planter and escaped to New York during the Independence Wars with Spain. There he earned his living as a piano teacher. He met and married Irish immigrant Catherine Coll. Juan died shortly after the birth of their son Eduardo. After Juan's death, his wife sent Eduardo to Ireland, where her family changed his name to the Gaelic version of Eduardo: Eamon. (found this quote here While not intended to be scholarly, it jibes the with what I read years ago in a Catholic publication, and the blogger picked it up in Cuba.)

Read the whole discussion on Cubanology

I'm happy to report that we came to a rapprochement of sorts in the comments section. So, if I was too harsh in this post, I apologize. Cuban Americans spend so much time battling the inaccuracies propounded as truth that we tend to get a tad strident. What, Cubans passionate? Nah.