Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class

by Maurice Zeitlin

In 1962, the author got into Cuba and interviewed workers on the subject of the Revolution. Professor Zeitlin examines the effects of the revolution, and the influence of such factors as age, race, and skill on the workers' attitudes.

Originally published in 1967.

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Genres: Nonfiction

318 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Professor of Sociology

Reviews

[Julio En Voyage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maurice Zeitlin is an old colleague of mine at UCLA. A signal of his genius is that when he dived into Latin American history, whether Chile and "the legacy of unfinished bourgeois revolutions" or in this case Cuba, he came back up with pearls. He tells us at the outset of REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS AND THE CUBAN WORKING CLASS that this was his "dissertation project, of which it now bears little resemblance". I wish he had let us readers in on that first draft, since I remain unconvinced that he has proven his contention that prior to Castro's Revolution of 1959 the Cuban working class was revolutionary at all. Cuban trade unions in the Fifties posed no threat to dictator Fulgencio Batista, and some, in the tradition of Latin American "vendepatria" (country-seller) unions actually supported him. Trade unions under the wing of the Cuban Communists carried little weight with the urban working class. Attempts by the Communists to organize rural trade unions among sugar cane cutters failed miserably and met with savage government repression. Contrary to what Zeitlin, and his publisher suggest, Cuba's large Black working poor showed little trace of either race or class consciousness. The verdict on the Zeitlin thesis of a revolutionary labor movement carried over to Castroism: Not Proven.