Perfidious Albion?

Jean Stubbs reviews some of the historical connections between Cuba and the United Kingdom in our first themed issue.

The idea for a Cuba-UK themed issue of the IJCS arose out of a meeting in Havana in early 2008, with Jorge Ibarra Renato Guitart, before the journal was even born. The idea was well-received by the editorial board back in London, where an issue was mapped out that would include both historical and contemporary perspectives.

It seemed fitting to follow the classic papers by Winston Churchill (Issue 1) and José Martí (Issue 2) with the 1963 article by British historian Alistair Hennessy on the roots of Cuban nationalism. A gem to this day, written by Hennessy at his erudite best, the article begins by posing the conundrum of Castroism as "the best insurance against Communism" or "a cloak for Communism" (p.1). There could be no simple explanation for Castro's personality and thinking, Hennessy argued, but two things were clear: bedevilled by Cold War classifications, the 1959 revolution was sui generis, rooted in Cuban history, and Castro "sought to recreate the lost paradise of Martí's populist myth" (p.14). He concluded: "Revolutions are sustained by utopian visions; without these they are but rebellions. The visions may be those of nationalist mythologies or socialist ideologies. It is the unusual interweaving of such threads which has given Castro's Revolution its unique texture" (p.16).

The five articles that follow are by Cuban and British historians who explore little-known facets in over a century of pre-revolutionary intertwined histories linking Cuba and the UK. The first, titled 'Running from Albion', is by Jonathan Curry-Machado, who documents the rôle of British migrants - merchants, professionals and above all workers - and their contribution to commerce, trade, technology and modernisation, occupying an ambiguous space in nineteenth-century Cuba's slave society. He maintains that, while there is little evidence of a 'British' community or identity, they played a catalyst role such that their significance outweighed their numeric proportions.

Jorge Renato Ibarra homes in on an early confrontation between UK and US interests in Cuba in the nascent republic during the first decade of the twentieth century. Fast on the heels of US occupation and the Platt Amendment, Washington set out to guarantee exclusivity through a reciprocal trade agreement, at a time when London aimed to protect its own interests through a UK trade treaty. Seen through diplomatic correspondence, the dispute whose outcome was a victory for Washington is a salutory reminder of how Cuba, throughout its history, has been coveted and fought over by major powers. Yet the British economic presence continued over the first three decades of the century, as outlined by Michael Cobiellas. He highlights British and Anglo-Canadian capital investments in Havana in three specific sectors of the urban economy - the railroads, docks and insurance. His argument is that they helped build an infrastructure critical for export agriculture and the service sector, but equally helped maintain a dependent and underdeveloped economic system.

UK-Cuba history is taken up in the post-World War II period, as Chris Hull puts the lens on British diplomacy and British attempts to regain ground lost to US trade interests during the war years. However, competition was stiff from other countries, including newly independent Canada, and there were labour and political issues conspiring against British interests, including nationalistion of the British-owned United Railways of Cuba. Nonetheless, in the post-1952 Batista period the British government were still avid for commercial openings. Steve Cushion furthers the analysis of the Batista period by delving into the intricacies of Batista's drive for increased productivity and thereby reduced costs through repression of the hitherto strong Cuban labour movement; and how British diplomacy supported this. His reading of British diplomatic reports demonstrates how central the labour issue was to the support Batista received from both local and foreign capital and business interests.

All five articles leave us with the tantalising question of what happened next: after the 1959 revolution and especially after 1960 when the US imposed its trade embargo which is still in place today. The UK, of course, has always maintained diplomatic and trade relations, albeit chequered at times and something of a chink in the UK-US 'special relationship'. This relationship found itself tested in the 1960s over the supply of British Leyland buses to Cuba; and documented cases more recently suggest considerable US diplomatic and business pressures being brought to bear against UK companies investing in and/or trading with Cuba under the US Helms-Burton Act as of 1996.

In my own field of research, on the Havana cigar, just the possibility of Obama ending the US embargo has intensified a legal and lobbying fight between Swedish Match, linked with the big US company General Cigar, and the British Imperial Tobacco Group, linked with the other big US company Consolidated Cigar. Each wants exclusive rights to sell Cuban-made brands in the US, the world's largest market for premium cigars. Swedish Match sells Cuban brands made by Cuban émigré manufacturers in Honduras and the Dominican Republic while Imperial markets Cuban-made cigars globally, under many of the same brand names, through an agreement with the Cuban government monopoly, Cubatabaco. While US consumers dream of legally being able to buy and smoke a real premium Havana cigar from the island, this is a pleasure that has never been denied smokers in the UK - nor, indeed, US smokers who frequent London's cigar shops!

Clearly, there is much more to the UK-Cuba relationship than is common knowledge. While there are features in this issue that refer to aspects of the post-1959 UK-Cuba relationship, and other aspects have been recounted elsewhere, it is to be hoped more good work will be undertaken by both Cuban and British historians.

Jean Stubbs is Director of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University and Co-Editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies.


Copyright

Copyright for this work is held jointly between Jean Stubbs and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

IJCS Volume 2 Issue 1 June 2009