May 27, 2019
“Owner of nine plants (sugar mills), a bank, three airlines, a paper mill, a contractor, a road transporter, a gas producer, two motels, several radio stations, a television station, newspapers, magazines, a construction materials factory, a shipping company, a tourist center, several urban and rural properties, several colonies, several American firms, and multiple other interests.”
The above is the record of dictator Fulgencio Batista in Guillermo Jiménez’s book Los propietarios de Cuba 1958 (The Owners of Cuba 1958), which presents the properties, public offices and family relations of the 551 most prominent members of the Cuban oligarchy at the triumph of the Revolution. It is not a politicized book, it only exposes data, but it illustrates how less than one percent of Cuban society -which at that time had a little more than five million inhabitants-, owned the nation’s wealth while unemployment, unhealthiness and illiteracy was the scourge of the majority of Cubans.
About Batista and his relationship with the U.S., John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave a very illustrative comment about him when he campaigned for the U.S. presidency:
“Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years, a greater proportion of Cuba’s population than the Americans who died in the two great world wars… Administration spokesmen praised Batista, exalted him as a reliable ally and a good friend, at a time when Batista was murdering thousands of citizens, destroying the last vestiges of freedom and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people”.
It is known that among those 551 owners, those closest to the dictator fled the country on December 31, 1958, (leaving their country behind them bloody and depleted) with four hundred million dollars from the Cuban public treasury in their luggage. Most of the rest of those owners also emigrated, leaving their properties on the island convinced that the aggressive policy of the U.S. government would return the island to their hands, although it is fair to recognize that some of them put some of their effort to recover them, adding to the terrorist acts and invasions that the CIA executed against Cuba during those years.
Prior to the revolution in Cuba there were more owners and more powerful people, to whom first the U.S. interveners and then the rulers servile to Washington handed over practically the basis of the Cuban economy. A handful of U.S. companies owned the best lands, most of the banks and sugar mills, telephony, electricity and railroads, as well as the very few non-sugar industries existing on the island. They had arrived at the end of the 19th century, especially after the intervention in the struggle that the Cubans carried out for thirty years against Spain when the latter could no longer prolong its dominion over the Island and was absolutely defeated.
If there is any doubt about the consequences of this penetration, one can also turn to Kennedy’s description..:
“In 1953 the Cuban family had an income of six pesos a week. Fifteen to 20 percent of the work force was chronically unemployed. Only a third of the houses on the island had running water, and in the last few years before Castro’s Revolution this abysmal standard of living dropped even more as the population grew, which did not participate in economic growth”.
The Cuban rulers’ relationship with the U.S. mafia that invested in Cuba in casinos and hotels was notorious. Most of the most important hotels were owned by the North American mafia and Havana occupied the place that Las Vegas occupies today as a destination spot for gambling, prostitution and excess. The second part of the film The Godfather eloquently illustrates this when the main mafia bosses cuts a cake, illustrated with the map of Cuba, into portions.
The effects of the latifundia( large agricultural estates owned by a single family – edit) on agriculture were collected by a survey of Cuban Agricultural Workers conducted by the Catholic University Association (ACU) in 1956-57:
During this time There were 350,000 agricultural workers (2.1 million including families, 34% of the population). Only 7.3% had electricity. They relied on river water and wells as there was little running water and only 2.1% had indoor toilets. Over 60% of the houses were made out of wood, guano and earth.
Literacy under Batista was under 50% and those that could read were mostly at a 3rd grade level.
Today Cuba is Malaria free but then the rate was 31% were suffering from the disease and 36% reported they had some type of parasite.
That is the reality that the Cuban revolutionaries inherited when they overthrew the Batista regime, and complying with a new Constitution, they decreed an Agrarian Reform that included compensation and was less radical than the one carried out by the American occupiers in Japan after World War II, but in that country there were no U.S. latifundistas.
The Cuban Revolution, immediately accused of being the enemy of property, turned millions of Cubans into owners through the laws of Agrarian Reform and Urban Reform. The U.S. government reacted by demanding immediate compensation when the Cuban coffers had just been emptied by the same murderers and torturers that Washington supported in the Cuban government and protected as fugitives in its territory. Thus began an all-out war that continues to this day, one that has included all economic, military and psychological weapons. Not recovering property, which is actually the most recent of the pretexts when all the previous ones -alliance with the USSR, support for national liberation in Latin America and Africa, Human Rights… – have been losing their foundation, but they never give up their desire to crush the uncomfortable successful example of defiance of their regional and global domination. The heirs of the Batista people settled in South Florida are nothing more than an allied instrument at the service of U.S. imperialism, as they were in Cuba before its overthrow.
The Helms-Burton law, approved in 1996 by President Bill Clinton in an electoral concession to the Cuban-American extremist lobby, sought to make it impossible to repeal the economic blockade against Cuba and to make the re-establishment of US domination the final nail in the coffin for the end to the Revolution that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and to discourage foreign investment in the Island.
Believing that it was enough to press a little harder for Cuba to fall, they conceived of postponing the application of Title III of that law -which allows for the claim in U.S. courts of the properties that the Batista and his minions abandoned in Cuba without being U.S. citizens, as well as those whose compensation the U.S. government prevented the U.S. companies from negotiating. If the end of the Revolution was near, or in the worst case scenario it would not survive the biological end of its founders, why create a problem with its European and Canadian allies?
But the year 2019 arrived. A new foreign investment law in Cuba is beginning to succeed and the flow of capital to the blocked island is growing, to top it all, since April 2018 a person born after 1959 is at the head of the Cuban government and has more and more consensus among the people.
For more danger of the extremist sector that in Miami dreams of “three days to kill” after the end of the Revolution, the government of Barack Obama, after his predecessor W. Bush tightened the blockade -limiting even those born there residents in the United States. He had attempted a “normalization” even thought he set a record in the handing out of fines to third country banks for doing Cuban transactions and in funds for subversion, and started the economic war to destroy the main Cuban ally, Venezuela, he advanced towards a climate of détente between Washington and Havana and adopted some measures that encouraged the hope of seeing the end of the blockade soon.
Since the Law was passed, Cuba has implemented its antidote legislation; Law 80, “reaffirming Cuban sovereignty and dignity” of 1999, which declares “null and void any claim of natural or legal persons, whatever their citizenship or nationality” based on the Helms-Burton and has ratified businessmen with investments in the Island its total support and the inapplicability of any decision of U.S. courts in its territory. This has also been supported by both the European Union and Canada.
The Cuban government has declared defense and the economy an absolute priority and has concentrated its developmental strategy on tourism, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries; the electro-energy sector related to renewable energy sources, food production; the export of professional services and construction, while seeking to eliminate bureaucratic obstacles to make the state-owned company more efficient and its integration with the national private sector and foreign investment.
Faced with a siege that has also limited Cuban income by sabotaging its medical collaboration in Brazil and Venezuela and has pressured the Island to withdraw its support for the Bolivarian process, but Cuba has not lowered its head. The permanence of the Venezuelan revolutionaries in Miraflores and the failure of the successive coup attempts against President Nicolás Maduro have also constituted a defeat for the enemies of Havana. The fact that in Washington they had to accept the dialogue that both the Venezuelan and Cuban governments have always defended is a defeat for those who, from Miami, promote aggression against Venezuela as a way of destroying the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba faces great challenges, but there is absolute awareness among its people that none can be resolved by pleasing those who have been waging war on it for sixty years.
http://www.rguama.icrt.cu/en/what-properties-do-they-claim-from-cuba-and-who-owned-them/
Source: Cubadebate, translation Radio Guama