Robert J. Alexander traces organized labor from its origins in
colonial Cuba, examining its evolution under the Republic, noting
the successive political forces within it and the development of
collective bargaining, culminating after 1959 in its transformation
into a Stalin-model labor movement. In Castro's Cuba, organized
labor has been subordinate to the Party and government and has been
converted into a movement to control the workers and stimulate
production and productivity instead of being a movement to defend
the interests and desires of the workers.
Starting with the organization of tobacco workers and a few
other groups in the last years of Spanish colonial rule, Robert J.
Alexander traces the growth of the labor movement during the early
decades of the republic, noting particularly the influence of three
political tendencies: anarchosyndicalists, Marxists, and
independents. He examines the generally unfavorable attitudes of
early republican governments to the labor movement, and he
discusses the first central labor body, the CNOC, which was at
first under anarchist influence, and soon captured by the
Communists. The role of the CNOC vis-a-vis the Machado
dictatorship, including the deal with Machado in 1933 is also
discussed. Alexander then looks at the unions during the short Grau
San Martine nationalist regime of 1933 and the near-destruction of
organized labor by the Batista dictatorship of 1934-1937; the
revival of the labor movement after the 1937 deal of the Communists
with Batista and the establishment of the Confederacion de
Trabajadores de Cuba, as well as the struggles for power within it,
resulting in a split in the CTC in 1947, with the dominance of the
Autentico-party controlled group. During this period regular
collective bargaining became more or less the rule. He then
describes the deterioration of the Confederacion of Trabajadores de
Cuba under the Batista dictatorship of 1952-1959. Alexander ends
with a description of organized labor during the Castro regime: the
early attempt of revolutionary trade unionists to establish an
independent labor movement, followed by the Castro government's
seizure of control of the CTC and its unions, and the conversion of
the Cuban labor movement into one patterned after the Stalinist
model of a movement designed to stimulate production and
productivity--under government control--instead of defending the
rights and interests of the unions' members.
Based on an extensive review of Cuban materials as well as
Alexander's numerous interviews, correspondence, and conversations
with key figures from the late 1940s onward, this is the most
comprehensive English-language examination of organized labor in
Cuba ever written. Essential reading for all scholars and students
of Cuban and Latin American labor and economic affairs as well as
important to political scientists and historians of the
region."
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