Republic of Cuba

For fifty-seven years the republic grew sugar, sold it to the United States, imported almost everything else, and alternated between constitutional government and armed factionalism. It survived two American occupations, a racial massacre, the collapse of its banking system, a dictatorship, a revolution, a second dictatorship, and the most progressive constitution in the hemisphere — and it ended, on 1 January 1959, with a strongman flying into exile before dawn and a lawyer from Oriente province preparing to take power.

Its importance is out of proportion to its size. The Platt Amendment made Cuba the laboratory in which the United States worked out what it meant to be an empire without colonies, and the Cuban response to that arrangement — a nationalism that ran from the labour movement to the University of Havana — became a template for the rest of Latin America. The revolution of 1933 produced the constitution of 1940, which promised land, work, health and dignity and then delivered very little; the gap between that text and Cuban life is the immediate background to the revolution of 1959. And because 1959 remade the country so completely, the republic before it is still fought over: a lost democracy to some Cubans, a neocolony to others, and to most a place that was neither as golden nor as wretched as the two camps insist.

At a glance

Why did the United States take Cuba in 1898?

The war that ended Spanish rule began as a Cuban war. The uprising of 1895, organised by the Cuban independence movement and led in the field by Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, had by 1897 worn the Spanish army down to holding the towns while the countryside belonged to the insurgency. Spain's answer, under General Valeriano Weyler, was to concentrate the rural population in fortified zones; the result was famine, epidemic disease and the death of tens of thousands of civilians, a catastrophe that Cuban propagandists in New York turned into the most effective publicity campaign of the decade.

The United States intervened in April 1898 on its own terms. Congress attached the Teller Amendment to the declaration of war, disclaiming any intention of annexing the island, but it never recognised the Republic in Arms that the insurgents had proclaimed in 1895, and it excluded Cuban officers from the surrender negotiations at Santiago. The war in Cuba lasted ten weeks. The Treaty of Paris, signed on 10 December 1898, transferred Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States; Spain gave up the largest remaining empire in the Americas for a payment of $20 million, and no Cuban was in the room.

Occupation began on 1 January 1899, with General John R. Brooke in charge and an army of occupation ashore. Brooke's successor from December 1899, General Leonard Wood, ran the most energetic reconstruction programme the United States had ever attempted in a conquered territory: schools, roads, courts, a rural guard, a census, and above all the campaign against yellow fever, in which Walter Reed's board confirmed Carlos Finlay's mosquito theory by experiment and Havana was cleaned up within a year. Wood governed as a proconsul, and he governed well by the standards of the time, which is precisely why the Platt Amendment was so bitter: the Americans who had built schools and drained mosquito-breeding pools then told the Cubans what their constitution would say.

That constitution was drafted by a convention elected in 1900 and signed in February 1901. It provided for universal male suffrage, a directly elected president, a bicameral congress and the separation of church and state — the last a real break with the Spanish past, and one that the Church never forgave. It said nothing about the United States. That was left to the rider attached to the American army appropriations bill on 2 March 1901 by Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut, drafted in the War Department by Elihu Root, and presented to the Cuban convention as the condition of withdrawal.

What did the Platt Amendment actually bind Cuba to?

The Platt Amendment was not a treaty and not, strictly speaking, Cuban law until the Cubans wrote it into their own constitution. Its eight articles were brief and, in the reading that mattered, unlimited. Cuba was forbidden to make treaties impairing its independence or to permit any foreign power to acquire "lodgement in or control over any portion of said island" (Article I); forbidden to contract a public debt beyond what ordinary revenues could service (II); required to consent to American intervention "for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty" (III); required to validate every act of the military government (IV); required to carry out sanitation programmes (V); required to leave the Isle of Pines outside its boundaries pending a future treaty (VI); required to sell or lease land for coaling and naval stations (VII); and required to embody all of it in a permanent treaty (VIII).

Article III was the one that mattered. It had no procedure, no time limit and no definition: the United States decided for itself when Cuban government had broken down, and the Cuban government had already agreed in advance that it might. The Cuban convention fought it, sent a modified text to Washington, was refused, and accepted the original in June 1901 by a narrow margin, with indefinite occupation as the alternative. The permanent treaty of 22 May 1903 turned the eight articles into obligations between two sovereign states, and the naval station agreements — signed by Cuba in February 1903, by the United States the same month, and supplemented that July — leased Guantánamo Bay, with the United States exercising "complete jurisdiction and control" while Cuba retained "ultimate sovereignty". That formula outlasted every other part of the arrangement.

Two consequences followed that were not written in the text. The first was that Cuban politics became a contest conducted in front of an American referee, and Cuban politicians learned to appeal to Washington against each other. The second was economic. The reciprocity treaty of 1903 gave Cuban sugar and tobacco a 20 per cent reduction in the American duty, in exchange for preferences of 20 to 40 per cent on American goods entering Cuba. Sugar exports to the United States rose, American manufactures drove local ones out of the market, and the island's prosperity became a function of a single American tariff schedule.

Cubans never stopped objecting. The demand for repeal was the common ground of every opposition movement from 1902 onwards, and it was achieved in 1934 — not by Cuban pressure alone, but by Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, which wanted a hemisphere that did not look like a set of American protectorates on the eve of a world war. The Treaty of Relations signed at Washington on 29 May 1934 abrogated the 1903 treaty outright, validated the acts of the military government, and quietly continued the Guantánamo lease "so long as the United States of America shall not abandon the said naval station". Nobody in Havana mistook that for independence, but the intervention clause was gone, and with it the legal architecture of the protectorate.

How did the first republic govern itself?

The republic's first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, was a veteran of the independence struggle who had spent years in New York as the movement's diplomatic agent, and he began with almost no organised opposition. His administration was honest by the standards of what followed, ran a budget surplus and spent heavily on schools. It also had no party system to speak of: Estrada Palma governed with a personal following, and when the Liberals organised for the 1905 election he had their rallies broken up and the results arranged.

What followed set the pattern for a generation. The Liberals abstained, Estrada Palma was returned unopposed, and in August 1906 a Liberal general, Faustino Guerra, raised a revolt that the government could not suppress. Estrada Palma, rather than compromise with the men he had cheated, asked Washington to intervene, and when Roosevelt sent the secretary of war, William Howard Taft, and the assistant secretary of state, Robert Bacon, to mediate, the president resigned on 28 September and took his entire cabinet with him, leaving no government at all. Taft proclaimed a provisional government on 29 September 1906 and was replaced in October by Charles Magoon, who governed the island until January 1909.

Magoon's occupation was mild and expensive. He drafted the organic laws that gave Cuba a civil service, a municipal system and an electoral code, built roads to soak up unemployment, and spent the inherited surplus and a good deal more on patronage. The 1907 census that his administration took was the first proper count of the republic's people, and the 1908 elections, held under American supervision, brought the Liberals to power. Magoon left on 28 January 1909. The episode established the grammar of Cuban politics for the next quarter-century: an incumbent who tried to stay, an opposition that armed itself, an American mediation that split the difference, and a settlement that left everybody resentful. It happened again in 1917, when the Liberals rose against Menocal's re-election and American marines were landed, some of them staying in Oriente until 1922; and it happened a third time in 1920, when the same dispute was settled by an American envoy, General Enoch Crowder, who then stayed to supervise Cuban finances.

What happened in the war of 1912?

Independent Cuba's official ideology held that the nation was raceless. José Martí had written that a republic "with all and for the good of all" could not be built on racial distinction, and the 1901 constitution duly abolished the legal categories that Spain had used to separate whites from free people of colour. The reality was otherwise. Afro-Cubans had supplied the bulk of the Liberation Army's ranks and a minority of its officers, and after 1902 they found themselves excluded from the diplomatic service, from most public employment and from the candidate lists of both established parties.

The response was the Partido Independiente de Color, founded in 1908 by black and mixed-race veterans, with Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonet among its leaders. Its programme was not separatism but equality: free university education, public employment open to all, land for veterans, and an end to the practice of reserving offices for whites. It was the first black political party in the Americas, and it was immediately treated as sedition. Governor Magoon had recognised it and let it contest the 1908 elections; a subsequent amendment to the electoral law, carried by the Afro-Cuban Liberal senator Martín Morúa Delgado, forbade parties organised on racial lines, and the party was outlawed. Its petition to Washington invoking Article III of the Platt Amendment — a remarkable irony — was ignored.

On 20 May 1912 the party's supporters rose in Oriente, with smaller outbreaks in Las Villas, in a show of force meant to reopen the question rather than to win a war. The government of José Miguel Gómez suspended constitutional guarantees, gave the repression to General José de Jesús Monteagudo, and asked for American help; marines were landed and American warships moved into Cuban ports, nominally to protect foreign property. Estenoz was killed in June, Ivonet was captured and shot, and the surviving rebels were hunted through the hills. Estimates of the dead run from about 2,000 to 6,000, the higher figures including civilians killed in the weeks of reprisal that followed, when black Cubans were attacked in towns that had seen no fighting at all.

The war was over by July. Its consequences were not. The claim that the rebels had sought a separate black republic — a claim the government made and the press repeated — became the standard justification for the massacre, and it is still repeated in reference works. What the party had demanded was inclusion. The deeper consequence was silence: for decades afterwards Cuban public culture insisted that racism was an American import and that the republic had solved the race question, while the colour bar in clubs, beaches and broadcasting persisted. Until the 1990s the dead of 1912 were barely commemorated.

How did sugar make and break the republic?

Sugar was not a Cuban industry so much as the Cuban economy. Cane was grown by colonos, independent farmers who sold to a mill, and ground in centrales — vast plants that after 1900 were increasingly owned by American corporations. The mill owned the railway, the port, the store and often the town. Around it, work was seasonal. The zafra, the harvest, ran from January to May; the rest of the year was the tiempo muerto, the dead season, when the cane fields employed almost nobody and rural Cuba lived on credit. Sugar and its derivatives made up about 85 per cent of exports by 1920, tobacco about 8 or 9 per cent, and almost nothing else counted.

The First World War made the island briefly rich. European beet production collapsed, the belligerents and neutrals bid for Caribbean sugar, and Cuban output rose from about 2.6 million tons in 1913–14 to nearly 4 million in 1918–19. The price climbed with it: the New York monthly average for raw sugar was 12.99 cents a pound in January 1920, 17.65 in April and 20.93 in May. That spring was the peak. Planters, banks and brokers borrowed against the expectation that it would keep rising, bought crops that had not been cut, and mortgaged land at values based on a price that had already turned. By October the monthly average was 8.33 cents, and it went on falling into 1921.

This is the episode Cubans call the Dance of the Millions — la danza de los millones — and it did more lasting damage than the crash itself. On 10 October 1920 President Menocal proclaimed a fifty-day moratorium: notes, bills and mortgages falling due before December were frozen, depositors could draw only a fraction of their balances, and several banks never reopened. American creditors foreclosed on mortgaged mills and estates, so that the consolidation of the industry into foreign hands that had begun under the occupation was completed by debt. By the later 1920s American capital controlled a large part of the mills and the best cane land, and Cuba, with about a quarter of world sugar production, was as dependent on a single commodity as any economy in the world.

The republic never escaped the trap, and the reason was political as much as economic. Diversification was discussed in every administration; tariffs to protect domestic manufactures were tried; tobacco, citrus, mining and tourism all grew. But sugar paid for the state, and the state was run by coalitions of mill owners, colonos and party bosses who had no interest in reducing the value of the crop they controlled. When the world depression came, the American Hawley-Smoot tariff and the collapse of sugar prices destroyed Cuban export earnings, and the country that had been among the richer in Latin America in 1925 was bankrupt by 1932. Washington's answer, in the sugar acts of 1934 and 1937, was a quota: Cuba kept a guaranteed share of the American market, and every Cuban government thereafter negotiated its economic policy in Washington rather than in Havana.

Why did Machado's modernising dictatorship collapse?

Gerardo Machado was elected in 1924 on a platform of moralisation, and for four years he was the most effective president the republic had had. He balanced the budget, raised tariffs to protect Cuban industry, built schools and hospitals, and began the two projects that still define Havana's skyline: the Central Highway running the length of the island and the Capitolio, finished in 1929 at a cost that would have funded a generation of rural schools. He also built the machinery of a modern police state, and he never intended to leave.

In 1927 his majority in Congress pushed through a constitutional reform, promulgated in May 1928, which abolished the vice-presidency, extended the presidential term to six years and allowed Machado to stand again. He duly won the 1928 election in which he was the only candidate, with the opposition boycotted, exiled or in prison, and his term was now due to run to May 1935. Cuban politics had produced its first dictator, and it had done so by legal form.

The Depression destroyed him. Cuban trade collapsed within a year of the Wall Street crash, unemployment rose, and the government borrowed heavily while cutting imports. Repression escalated in step. The University of Havana was closed; the student generation of 1930, organised in the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario, turned to street confrontation and then to arms; the secret society known as the ABC answered police killings with bombings and assassinations. Machado's gunmen — the porra — killed opposition figures in the streets of Havana, and the countryside was left to the rural guard. By 1932 the regime had lost the middle class, the press and, fatally, the confidence of Washington.

Franklin Roosevelt's new administration sent Sumner Welles to Havana as ambassador in May 1933, with instructions to mediate. Welles's mediation was not neutral: he proposed a government of national concentration that excluded Machado's machine and included the opposition parties, and his presence convinced the army that the president was no longer worth defending. In August the Havana bus drivers struck, the strike became general, and the army itself revolted and demanded the president's resignation. Congress granted Machado a "legal absence"; he left Havana on the night of 12 August and reached Nassau at dawn on 13 August, and he died in Miami in 1939. His nominee, General Alberto Herrera, was president for less than a day. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a diplomat and the son of the independence leader, took the oath on the morning of 13 August at the head of a cabinet of national conciliation.

What did the revolution of 1933 actually change?

Welles got his provisional government, and it lasted three weeks. On 4 September 1933 the non-commissioned officers at Camp Columbia in Havana arrested their officers and took over the army, an action organised by a stenographer-sergeant named Fulgencio Batista while the president was out of the capital. The Student Directory joined immediately and turned a barracks mutiny into a revolution. A five-man executive was formed, lasted five days, and gave way on 10 September to Ramón Grau San Martín as provisional president, with Antonio Guiteras at the interior and Eduardo Chibás at public works.

The government of the Hundred Days that followed was the most radical Cuba had seen. Grau set aside the constitution of 1901, decreed an eight-hour day, created a ministry of labour, required every enterprise to employ a workforce at least half Cuban, granted autonomy to the university and announced that a social revolution had begun. Guiteras ran the interior with an energy that alarmed Washington. The officers who had been deposed barricaded themselves in the Hotel Nacional and were shelled out. Roosevelt refused recognition and waited for the government to fall; it fell on 15 January 1934, pushed out by Batista, who had made himself chief of the armed forces and had concluded that Grau's reforms were costing the army its friends.

Batista then governed for six years through a succession of presidents: Carlos Mendieta, in whose name the new Treaty of Relations was signed at Washington on 29 May 1934 by Cuba's ambassador, Manuel Márquez Sterling; José Agripino Barnet; Miguel Mariano Gómez, elected in January 1936 in the first Cuban general election in which women voted, and impeached within a year; and Federico Laredo Brú, who did the actual work. Under Laredo Brú the state took a hand in the sugar industry for the first time, organising small growers into cooperatives, legalising the unions that merged in 1938 into the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, and extending social insurance. The colonels' republic, corrupt and authoritarian, was also the period in which the Cuban labour movement acquired the rights it would defend for the next twenty years.

The constitutional assembly elected in 1939, with some seventy-six delegates from nine parties, met in February 1940 and signed its work at Guáimaro on 1 July 1940, on the site where the insurgents of 1869 had adopted their first draft constitution. The result ran to 286 articles and was, for its time, the most advanced constitution in the Americas. It created a prime minister and a semi-parliamentary executive, a Court of Constitutional and Social Guarantees, and a bill of social rights that included a minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, the right to strike, protection against dismissal without cause, and — in Article 90 — the outright proscription of the latifundio, with a mandate to restrict foreign ownership of land. Its drafters borrowed from the Spanish constitution of 1931 and from Weimar.

Almost none of it was implemented. The enabling legislation was never passed, the latifundia were never broken up, and the labour code was enforced in Havana and ignored in Oriente. What the constitution did do was supply the vocabulary of every subsequent Cuban reform movement, including the one that destroyed the republic. When Fidel Castro was tried for the Moncada attack in 1953, the restoration of the 1940 constitution was among the first demands of his defence.

Was Batista's first presidency a dictatorship?

No — and that is what makes the later Batista so damaging to the republic's memory. Batista gave up his command of the army at the end of 1939, ran for president with the support of a coalition that included the Communist Party, and won the election of 1940 against Grau. He took office under the constitution he had helped to make, governed with a congress that contained a real opposition, and in 1944 lost the presidential election to Grau and handed over power without a fight. Whatever else he was, he was the first Cuban head of state of working-class and mixed-race origin, and the only one between 1902 and 1959 to leave office at the end of his term and go home.

His presidency coincided with the war, and the war was good to Cuba. After Pearl Harbor the island declared war on the Axis and became the Caribbean's principal American base and sugar supplier; under the purchase agreements of the war years the United States bought the Cuban crop at prices fixed above the depressed world level, with duties cut to a fraction of a cent. Sugar production rose, reserves accumulated, and Batista spent the money on schools, hospitals, public works and wage increases. He also opened relations with the Soviet Union, cultivated the unions, and allowed the Communist Party a legal existence it had not enjoyed since the 1920s. Corruption continued, and the gangsterism that would disfigure the 1940s began to take root, but the political system worked.

The 1944 election is the republic's high-water mark. Grau, running for the Auténticos with Communist support, defeated Batista's chosen successor, Carlos Saladrigas, and Batista left for the United States. For a moment Cuba looked like what it claimed to be: a country where governments lost elections and went home. It did not last. Grau's second presidency, and the presidency of his protégé Carlos Prío Socarrás from 1948, were marked by a level of graft and political violence that destroyed the Auténtico party's legitimacy and, with it, the legitimacy of the constitutional order itself.

Why did the democracy of the 1940s fail?

The mechanism of failure was patronage and the gun. Cuban parties had always distributed public jobs to their supporters, but in the 1940s the practice became an industry, and the proceeds of the national lottery, the public works budget and the customs houses were divided among party bosses who maintained armed gangs to protect their shares. Political violence — pistolerismo — killed scores, perhaps hundreds, in Havana and Santiago between 1944 and 1952, most of it connected to competition within and between the Auténtico factions. Grau's government was widely believed to be venal; Prío's was believed to be worse, and did little to dispel it. Congress and the Supreme Court, which the 1940 constitution had strengthened, were packed and bought.

Opposition to this state of affairs took constitutional form first. Eduardo Chibás, a former student leader, left the Auténticos in 1947 and founded the Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxo), which made administrative honesty its central demand and used a weekly radio broadcast to denounce ministers by name. Chibás was the most popular politician in Cuba by 1951 and the probable winner of the next election. On 5 August 1951 he shot himself at the end of a broadcast, having failed to produce the evidence for a final accusation against a cabinet minister; he died on 16 August. His funeral was a mass demonstration, and his party inherited his following without his talent. Its candidate for 1952 was a university professor, Roberto Agramonte, who led in the polls.

Batista had returned from the United States, won a senate seat in 1948 and built a coalition of his own. Every poll put him third. On 10 March 1952, three months before the election, he took the Camp Columbia garrison, occupied the trade unions and the radio stations, and declared himself provisional president. There was no resistance worth the name. Prío fled to Mexico, the 1940 constitution was replaced by a set of "statutes" drafted in the presidential palace, congress was dissolved, and the United States recognised the government within three weeks.

The ease of the coup is the central fact about Cuban democracy in the 1940s: almost nobody defended it. The Auténticos had squandered their claim to be the party of the revolution, the Ortodoxos had lost their leader, the unions were bought off with wage settlements, and the middle class was disgusted rather than alarmed. Batista promised elections and did not hold them until 1954, when he ran against a divided opposition and, with Grau withdrawing on the eve of the poll, was elected president on a turnout so low that his second inauguration in February 1955 was itself a rebuke.

How did a failed assault become a revolution?

The first challenge came from the Ortodoxo youth. On 26 July 1953, a force of about 160 men attacked the Moncada barracks at Santiago de Cuba and a smaller garrison at Bayamo, hoping to seize arms and trigger a general rising. The attack failed within hours; dozens of the attackers were killed, many of them after surrender, and the survivors were tried in a hospital ward because the courts would not guarantee their safety. Fidel Castro, a young lawyer who had been a candidate for the Ortodoxo ticket in the aborted 1952 election, conducted his own defence and used the courtroom to deliver the speech later published as "History Will Absolve Me". He was sentenced to fifteen years.

The Moncada attack would have been a footnote had Batista not made it a founding myth. The regime's torture and murder of prisoners, the censorship, and the arbitrariness of the "statutes" turned the imprisoned rebels into a moral cause, and a broad campaign of lawyers, priests and students secured their amnesty in May 1955. Castro left for Mexico in July, where he organised an expedition with the Argentine doctor Ernesto Guevara and a group of Cuban exiles, and on 2 December 1956 eighty-two men landed from the yacht Granma at Playa Las Coloradas in Oriente. More than half of them were killed or captured within days. The survivors — about twenty — reached the Sierra Maestra.

What followed was a rural guerrilla campaign combined with an urban underground of remarkable effectiveness. The 26th of July Movement, as Castro's organisation was called, was not communist; its programme was nationalist, democratic and reformist, and its allies included the middle-class professionals of the llano wing in the cities, whose sabotage and strikes did as much as the guerrillas to paralyse the regime. Batista's response — police torture, the murder of the Santiago organiser Frank País on 30 July 1957, the bombing of civilian areas — destroyed his remaining legitimacy. The United States suspended arms deliveries in March 1958, and in the summer of 1958 Batista threw some 10,000 men into the Sierra Maestra in Operation Verano. The offensive failed, and the army's morale went with it.

The end came faster than anyone expected. In the last week of December 1958 Guevara's column, with Camilo Cienfuegos and the Revolutionary Directorate, fought through Santa Clara, the last provincial capital between the Sierra and Havana. Batista had already decided not to fight for the city; in the early hours of 1 January 1959 he resigned, flew to the Dominican Republic, and left the country to a military junta under General Cantillo that survived barely a day. Manuel Urrutia was sworn in as provisional president on 3 January, and Castro reached Havana on 8 January to a crowd that filled the airport road.

What kind of country did the revolution inherit?

By Latin American standards Cuba in 1958 was rich, and by some measures it was rich by any standard. Income per head was among the highest in the hemisphere — fifth, by one contemporary calculation — and infant mortality, at about 32 per 1,000 live births in 1957, was among the lowest in the Americas and lower than in much of southern Europe. Its newspapers, radio stations, cinemas and universities gave Havana a cultural life closer to a European capital than to its Caribbean neighbours, and it had a middle class whose habits, cars, appliances and holidays resembled those of the United States.

Those averages concealed a second country. In 1953 more than two-fifths of Cubans lived in rural areas, where cane work lasted four months and the dead season was the normal condition of life; by one contemporary estimate the seasonal unemployment of the sugar belt touched more than a third of the national population. Illiteracy in the countryside was estimated at up to 40 per cent against a national rate of about a quarter. Rural housing was the bohío: palm thatch, earth floor, no latrine. The 1946 agricultural census, the last before the revolution, is generally summarised as showing that roughly 1.5 per cent of landowners held close to half the farmland, although published percentages vary widely with the definitions used. Only a minority of rural families drank milk regularly; meat, eggs and fish were occasional.

The gap was measurable in things a government could count. A survey of rural Cuba in 1950 found electricity in 9 per cent of country dwellings against 87 per cent in the towns, running water in 2 per cent against 53, and 75 per cent of rural homes classed as unsanitary against 34 per cent in the cities; 5 per cent of country people ate meat or fish regularly and 11 per cent drank milk. In the last years of the republic the position worsened: between 1955 and 1957 meat consumption per head fell and the share of family spending going on food rose from 40 to 57 per cent, as the terms of trade turned against sugar and the government's public works programme ran out of money.

Havana was the other extreme. The city held a quarter of the island's population and most of its wealth, its universities, its newspapers and its cinemas. From the mid-1940s it was also the Caribbean's casino, run with the connivance of the state: the American mob's Havana conference of 1946 set the terms, and the hotel and casino building of the 1950s was financed on the assumption that gambling and tourism would replace the sugar the island could no longer sell at a profit. American firms still owned the telephone and electric companies, most of the refineries and a large share of the mills, though Cuban buyers had been taking over mills since the 1930s. Race compounded class: Afro-Cubans were disproportionately represented among the rural poor and the urban unemployed, and after 1912 they had largely withdrawn from national politics. The republic's own statistics, in other words, sustained both the revolutionary indictment and the exile nostalgia, which is why the argument about 1958 has never been settled by evidence alone.

What is left of the republic?

The republic's institutions did not survive it. The 1940 constitution, restored in name by the revolutionary government in 1959, was set aside within two years and replaced in 1976 by the socialist constitution that still governs the island. The congress, the courts, the parties, the press and the unions were dismantled or absorbed. What remained was the name — the Cuban state is still the Republic of Cuba — and the territory, minus the naval base at Guantánamo that the 1934 treaty left in American hands and that no Cuban government has recognised as legitimately ceded.

The memory is contested in a way that few twentieth-century states are. For the exile community and for many Cubans on the island, the republic is the lost country: a place of elections, of a free press, of a middle class that travelled and read and built, destroyed by a revolution that promised the 1940 constitution and delivered a one-party state. For the revolutionary tradition, and for most of the Latin American left, the republic is the neocolony that came before: a country whose governments were watched from Washington, whose economy belonged to American banks, whose poor were illiterate and landless, and whose democracy was a game played by lawyers in Havana while the countryside starved. Both descriptions can be documented, which is why they have survived so long.

The historical judgement that has emerged in the last thirty years is less comfortable than either. The republic was a genuine if fragile democracy that was destroyed from within before it was destroyed from without; its failure was the failure of its own political class to make the constitution of 1940 mean anything, and the corruption and violence of 1944–52 did more to prepare the ground for dictatorship than any American conspiracy. That failure is also the reason the revolution could promise everything and be believed. The map cannot show any of this. It draws a territory, not an argument.

Common myths about the Republic of Cuba

Timeline of the Republic of Cuba

What the map shows next

At 1906 on the map the map shows the republic suspended: the second American occupation, when Charles Magoon governed the island and the Cuban army and congress ceased to exist. The colours return to Cuban hands in 1909 — though the layer skips 1908–10 — and stay there through the sugar boom, the crash of 1920 and Machado's dictatorship.

At 1933 on the map the map shows the year of the general strike that ended Machado, with Céspedes in the palace and the sergeants' revolt three weeks away. 1958 on the map is the last full year of the republic, with the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra and the state still holding the cities; the entry on socialist Cuba takes the story from 1959.