Defending the Revolution through Labor Organization and Spontaneity in the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in Cuba, 1961–1965

Abstract

The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) were one of the most important mass organizations in revolutionary Cuba. During the 1960s, the CDR developed a slew of actions among the Cuban masses, organizing cultural, political, and economic activities that shaped the revolutionary process from below. Through their work, the CDR gave meaning to their own idea of Cuban socialism. In the context of revolutionary upheaval, they were born as mass organizations to organize political surveillance against counterrevolutionary enemies. But the CDR also deployed productive power that sought to improve the lives of fellow Cubans. Organizing workers to solve local problems helped to reimagine the purpose of labor as a resource for public utility. For moments, the CDR even became the state. This article highlights the crucial role of the CDR members in the revolutionary process and their impact on the everyday lives of Cuban people.

Resumen

Los Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (CDR) fueron una de las organizaciones de masas más importantes de la Cuba revolucionaria. Durante la década de 1960, los CDR desarrollaron una serie de acciones entre las masas cubanas, organizando actividades culturales, políticas, y económicas que dieron forma al proceso revolucionario desde abajo. A través de su trabajo, los CDR dieron sentido a su propia idea del socialismo cubano. En el contexto del levantamiento revolucionario, nacieron como organizaciones de masas para organizar la vigilancia política contra los enemigos contrarrevolucionarios. Pero los CDR también desplegaron un poder productivo que buscaba mejorar las vidas de sus compatriotas cubanos. Organizar a los trabajadores para resolver problemas locales ayudó a reimaginar el propósito del trabajo como recurso de utilidad pública. Por momentos, los CDR incluso llegaron a ser el Estado. Este artículo destaca el papel crucial de los miembros de los CDR en el proceso revolucionario y su impacto en la vida cotidiana del pueblo cubano.

Created in 1960, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) played an important role in building cross-class, subaltern hegemony in revolutionary Cuba. Under the leadership of local agents from the revolutionary movement, the subaltern classes engaged in a process of mass organization and political formation that produced the CDR. The main political goals of the CDR were to defend the revolution to build socialism. In this article, I offer a glimpse of the daily work of the CDR in local communities in Cuba. I base my analysis on reports of interviews produced by the CDR of other cederistas around the island during the first half of the 1960s. The CDR worked closely with the Cuban state and was indispensable to the process of building cultural hegemony among the Cuban masses. Any study of the Cuban Revolution should consider the centrality of the CDR and analyze its constitutive relationship with the state. Despite their relationship of cooperation, the CDR members had an important degree of autonomy that allowed them to build popular power from below. In other words, the CDR was not mere agents of the revolutionary government. They played an integral part in the development of the revolution. ¹ As such, the CDR changed Cuban lives and political culture on the island. Cederistas (members of the CDR) changed the world of cubanos and cubanas, particularly in the city, but also in the countryside, through the impact they made as members of the CDR and through their social campaigns, organizing cultural activities, sports events, and political efforts. Their work organizing workers to solve local problems helped to reimagine the purpose of labor as a resource for public utility. Studying the role of the CDR helps us to see the Cuban Revolution beyond its vanguard, focusing on the agency of the Cuban masses that ultimately made the revolutionary process possible. Significantly, this approach is different from most histories of the Cuban Revolution, which focus on the leadership of the Castro brothers and the revolutionary vanguard (Guerra 2012; Farber 2011), and from more recent works that highlight the revolutionary government’s increasing authoritarian tendencies across the period (Hynson 2020). Instead, I situate this article alongside the work of Sara Kozameh (2019a), Katherine Gordy (2015), and Michelle Chase (2015), among others, as part of a growing scholarship that seeks to understand the revolution’s history from below, as it was experienced by those many actors who have been thus far overlooked by scholars (see also Adrianzén Ponce, Kozameh, and Wood 2022).

The role of the CDR in building hegemony in revolutionary Cuba shows awareness by revolutionary agents that it was not enough to take control of the state to build a revolution. We define hegemony as the process of power building but also the result of that process. It is a process of constant persuasion to build consent among the masses, trying to create a different social behavior and new cultural practices which are intimately related to novel sensibilities in a society in constant change. The revolutionary government knew that creating a new narrative was crucial to achieving broader hegemony. A new hegemony needed a new media, stories, representations, and ways to help people feel hopeful and involved. After all, CDR members were well aware of the inherent, hegemony-building propaganda of capitalism, which new socialist projects needed to counteract. For liberal democracies like the United States, prevailing notions around the concept of propaganda were reserved for communist states, which they argued did not represent the will of the people and instead had to manufacture it by tricking them. In the context of US strategy against the revolution, the assumption was that propaganda emanated from Fidel Castro. However, studying the CDR allows us to see that their propaganda was not dictated by Fidel or the Cuban state. I offer a different way to think about propaganda in the Cuban context and more broadly. ² My analysis instead takes from other approaches that have argued for a more neutral definition of propaganda as “a process for the sowing, germination, and cultivation of ideas” and not necessarily a distortion of facts (Taylor 2003, 2). Indeed, propaganda in revolutionary Cuba was conceived of differently and implied much more complexity than ideas about manipulating people with exaggeration and lies did. In Cuba, “propaganda” was about building revolutionary enthusiasm for a new Cuba. My analysis builds on this more neutral definition of propaganda by considering how it can be generated from within the masses rather than implemented from the top down. Moreover, I show how the CDR produced both propaganda and avenues for democratic involvement in the revolutionary process. ³

The CDR was fundamental to the revolutionary process over fifty years, and the political commitment of CDR members helps explain the resilience of the Cuban Revolution. The CDR played a significant role in forming Cuban revolutionary subjects. For these reasons, one of the goals of this article is to analyze the role of mass organizations like the CDR in this historical process. In this manner, the CDR engaged in a project of popular democracy beyond formal elections and traditional political parties, developing social relations that expose the relevance of mass organizations pushing from below on the political agenda of the state. Greg Grandin (2011, 6) argues that the Cold War in Latin America was a struggle between two different forms of democracy: one liberal, electoral, and representative, “which, since the mid-nineteenth century, had functioned primarily as an elite justification of domination,” and the other popular, participatory, and, consequently, radical in its practice. Democracy “now came to be advanced not just by urban political elites but by mass movements.” The deepening of a mass democratic practice in Cuba was a historical process that created new revolutionary subjectivities amongst a variety of people and then integrated these subjects into the political project. Women, students, peasants, professionals, and workers helped to build the CDR and would defend the revolution. ⁴

The interviews I analyze (my main sources for this article) help us identify behaviors, beliefs, practices, and sensibilities that became fundamental in the political formation of the members of the CDR as revolutionary subjects. These interviews were based on the daily experience of thousands of Cubans working inside the CDR to improve their everyday lives. The events I analyze ahead actually happened, but then mobilized into particular narratives. The people who wrote these reports embellished narratives by ignoring conflicts. The omissions helped build consent through a coherent narrative that was used to persuade fellow Cubans about the capacity of the revolutionary project to improve their lives.

With these interviews, the CDR built a narrative of dignity, sacrifice, solidarity, and resistance. National dignity against American arrogance that wanted to dictate the future of Cuba; revolutionary sacrifice for a better future, that is, the sacrifice of the present for a better world to come; socialist solidarity, where cooperation was more important than competition, where the collective well-being was more relevant than individual satisfaction; and resistance to international harassment. ⁵ This resistance was also resistance to the pessimism of the national reality. It was resistance to the frustrations of a revolution whose fruits would not come in the short term. Finally, it was resistance to the bitterness of increasing international isolation in a country that was, as a matter of fact, an island. Studying the creation of such narratives from the experiences of cederistas is indispensable to understanding how the CDR helped build hegemony for the revolution. In this article, I first explore how the CDR was created and some of the daily activities that helped produce revolutionary subjects within the committees, such as the night watch and organizing labor for projects meant to improve the lives of local people. In undertaking these activities, cederistas helped to influence the trajectory of the Cuban Revolution. I then examine some of the narratives created in the CDR publications that helped engender hegemony for the revolutionary project. Throughout this study, I carefully balance the influence of the state and the revolutionary vanguard with the agency of everyday Cuban people.

Building the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution

Richard R. Fagen wrote the best analysis of the CDR published in English. He identified five main functions of the CDR as mass organizations: (1) as integrator, defining the CDR as centros de aglutinamiento popular, that is, centers of popular agglutination; (2) as socializer, through the work of education and instruction; (3) as mobilizer, through the work of communication and organization in the masses; (4) as implementer, through social programs and social labor in the local communities; and (5) as protector, through vigilance activities, collective surveillance and night watch patrols (1969, 80–96). I argue that the most relevant function of the CDR in the local communities was not the role of protector—as it is usually thought—but as implementer. Fagen’s analysis of the functions of the CDR, though valuable, is quite brief. It is mostly a description of functions. Fagen does not provide examples, and he did not work with interviews published by the organization. Throughout this article, I show the importance of the CDR as implementer using interviews published in the 1960s.

Without any doubt, the protector role has usually been highlighted as the most significant by scholars, including Fagen. It was a function that worked hand in hand with another key aspect of the CDR organization: repression. The dynamics of social control deployed by the CDR members are widely acknowledged among scholars of Cuban history (Guerra 2012; Farber 2011; Fagen 1969). However, specific information about what kind of repression cederistas practiced in their everyday activities is harder to find. What forms of repression were practiced by the CDR? Above all, the CDR engaged in something that we can call “low intensity” activities related to social harassment in their neighborhoods, like pushing fellow Cubans to participate in activities in which they did not necessarily want to be involved. As far as the evidence shows, the CDR did not kill anybody; their actions were limited to different dynamics that involved daily harassment. For example, the constant vigilance of others to identify every unknown subject who came to the neighborhood. Nonetheless, these activities had a significant negative impact on the lives of many Cubans who did not fit the revolutionary standards imposed by the vanguard. Jonathan Brown, for instance, highlights that “the CDR served as neighborhood watch groups,” adding that “they turned in the names of suspected counterrevolutionaries to the security police.” Brown goes deeper, arguing that cederistas eventually “gained the privilege of redistributing properties belonging to families going into exile.” In addition, Brown points to the role of the CDR organizing “people in the neighborhoods for voluntary work in the countryside” (2017, 112). Brown provides more information about the CDR in the context of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of April 1961. In that context, he points out that “the CDR collaborated in apprehending one thousand potential enemies of the revolution” (2017, 117).

Activities related to the repression of political enemies practiced by the CDR were mostly linked to neighborhood surveillance. Michelle Chase points out that those activities tried to “keep organized watch over bodegas to make sure people were purchasing in ‘normal’ rather than ‘excessive’ amounts.” These activities, in any case, were already in practice even before the government gave its blessing. Chase points out that these local vigilantes were mostly women, “for CDR membership in this period was predominantly female” (2015, 148). When it came to the question of provisions, Chase argues, “grassroots actors”—like cederistas—“often outpaced leaders’ directives” (2015, 148). Even though she defines the CDR as “organizations entrusted with revolutionary vigilance at the local level,” Jennifer Lambe highlights the role of cederistas working with mental health physicians, collecting information about local members of the community who had mental problems in order to provide them with health services (2017, 154). These kinds of activities in the local community represent the core of the CDR’s daily work around social control. As Chase highlights, they “confronted vendors, called on state inspectors, weathered interminable lines, improvised distribution schemes, and demanded increased state intervention” (2015, 149). In general, Chase’s description of CDR activities, which implied some level of coercion, does not seem to be at a high level of political repression. She quotes one CDR leader announcing that “the revolution wouldn’t permit (some people to have) more and other less or nothing, like before; everything was going to be distributed in equal shares, equitably” (2015, 149). This was precisely the context in which cederistas deployed their surveillance and organizing activities.

Samuel Farber, contrary to what I argue in this article, contends that “the primary purpose of the CDR was vigilance and repression.” He adds that the CDR “functioned as a major mechanism to enforce political conformity and social control.” According to him, the CDR “frequently chastised people regarded as social deviants.” Farber points out that all Cubans were expected to be part of their local CDR; failure to do so could carry “serious educational and employment repercussions” (2011, 17). Farber highlights that, after some years, the CDR spent most of their time and efforts “in other tasks such as the control of ever-increasing criminality and infectious diseases, urban agriculture, reforestation, and the collection of scrap and recyclable materials” (2011, 17). Nevertheless, Farber points out that one of the tasks of the members of the CDR related to social control was the collaboration to provide “information to the intelligence agencies” (2011, 24). Furthermore, Farber assures that CDR members “organized mob action to yell obscenities, throw eggs and garbage, and paint demeaning slogans on the walls of the houses of those leaving the country.” According to Farber, these actions were usually carried out against “those labeled as social deviants, especially gays” (2011, 26).

It is widely known that homosexuals suffered discrimination, harassment, and hostility in Cuba during the early decades of the revolution. There was even an infamous institution where many homosexuals were sent to experience a different kind of forced labor: the UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). According to Garcés Marrero, the Cuban state created the UMAP to reform possible “social deviations,” mainly through agricultural labor, to isolate those who carried “enemy tendencies.” Their goal was, as a result, economic, repressive, and ideological (2019, 110). The CDR, even though separated from the UMAP, also developed homophobic activities during the 1960s. Those activities were mostly linked to social harassment and different manifestations of political hostility. Similar actions were deployed against dissidents who were, Farber tells us, “confronted by rapid response brigades attempting to break up their usually small demonstrations, and by organized mobs stoning and defacing their homes” (2011, 27). There was, as we can see, a logic of public humiliation engaged by some of the CDR members during the 1960s. For Farber, many of these actions can be explained following the nature of the CDR as an organization that worked “as a transmission belt for the implementation of party and governmental policy” (2011, 172), something that Michelle Chase disagrees with, arguing that sometimes it was mass organizations like the CDR that influenced the vanguard from below.

The purpose of this article is not to deny the reality of these dynamics. Doubtless, elements of social control are part of the historical process addressed here. Criticism of these practices can even be found in the work of prestigious Cuban writers like Reinaldo Arena and Leonardo Padura. Instead, my goal is to provide a glimpse of the type of work of CDR members during the 1960s that went beyond this kind of repression. Social control and coercion were just one part of the work practiced by cederistas. Other dimensions of their work, usually overlooked by historians, offer a much more nuanced idea of their social labor among the Cuban masses and one that allows us to see a more humane face of the thousands of women and men who fought to build a better world for their families and friends. They had dreams and they followed them. They made mistakes, certainly, sometimes serious mistakes that had a negative impact on the lives of fellow Cubans. Focusing solely on the repressive aspect, however, is reductive and fails to take account of the range of experiences lived by Cubans in the early revolutionary period. Their everyday work to improve their lives and the life inside their local communities deserves as much historiographical attention as the history of repression during the 1960s and beyond.

Thus, the history of the CDR allows us to see the Cuban revolution from below and in all its complexity. As we can see, it is evident that the CDR used their reports as propaganda. The goal was to show the success of the organization as embedded within the success of the revolution. All this was in the context of literacy campaigns, the nationalization of banks, and a successful Agrarian Reform, which had started even before 1959. ⁶ Even though the CDR was a hierarchical organization, the main social, economic, and cultural activities were deployed by rank-and-file members (cederistas). The CDR developed their social and political work through fronts (frentes); for instance, the front for voluntary work recruited labor for various local projects. During the 1960s, the National Direction of the CDR published several reports detailing the work of the CDR among the Cuban masses. Baltasar Enero, of the rank and file, wrote a report in 1965 about the work of the fronts in the organization. This document had several purposes, one of them being to inform fellow cederistas about the successful work of the organization around the country. This report was published the same year by the National Direction of the CDR. It was titled Un invento cubano, “A Cuban invention.” It was part of a group of documents published together under the title Pueblo organizado. ⁷ Baltasar Enero conducted several interviews of CDR members, mostly in Havana. His report allows us to have a general idea about the organization of the CDR at the national level. In addition, he narrates several events related to the role of the CDR in the early stage of the revolution. Here, I analyze some of these interviews and events. A group of important journalists, writers, poets, and artists contributed to this document. Some of them constantly worked as occasional editors of the CDR magazine, Con la Guardia en Alto.

Pueblo organizado: The CDR in the daily struggle

Enero offers an anecdote about Elba Gomez Aldecoa, a member of a local committee: “I oversaw a warehouse for 4 months … it was a nationalized warehouse. The district of the CDR sent me to administer it … people criticized me. They thought it was wrong that I oversaw a warehouse.” She continues: “But I assure you that if I have to go out to the streets with a wheelbarrow because the revolution needs it, I go out with my wheelbarrow without fear or shame.” ⁸ She then highlights the work of Ángel Vargas, in charge of the Popular Defense and Propaganda Front: “Vargas teaches in his home to five people, including his wife.” ⁹

According to Enero, “Elba Gomez speaks for everybody, and we observe the energy of this woman, mother of two children, and member of the Cuban Women Federation (FMC), who has transformed her home into a revolutionary point of surveillance.” The report highlights that “Elba says: ‘We are sorry that our comrade Maria Isabel Moreno, responsible for Public Health, is not here. She is sick and she could not come to the meeting … this comrade has a lot of merit. During the anti-polio campaign, she visited every house until she made every child have their pill.’” The interview continues: “Then, the apologies of their moms … the child hasn’t got breakfast … you can imagine … she would come back until she was able to provide the vaccine to the child.” ¹⁰ This is the CDR as implementer, providing a basic social service to the community. More relevant, we can see through these interviews that the CDR was mostly run by women. ¹¹

Elba adds, “Before, we had the idea of inviting just the people that we knew to be revolutionaries to be part of the committee, those who liked the revolution. In that way we forgot those who did not care about the revolution, those who were indifferent.” Then she adds a quite interesting thought: “People used to be a little afraid of the committees.” However, she affirms that “now things have changed. They know from their own experience about the help of the committees to the families on the block. Fear has disappeared: when they have a problem with the store or the butcher, they come here and we guide them, we take them to the sectional, we help them in everything that we can.” ¹² This is a good example of the CDR’s role in the community. After all, cederistas were part of the community as well. In this manner, we can see that the CDR had a more positive role than just surveillance. They helped people in the block. They worked every day to improve, at least just a little, the lives of many Cubans in the humblest neighborhoods around the country. This is, once again, the CDR as implementer. Moreover, ordinary community members became revolutionary subjects as they performed this work; they, too, became implementer or protector rather than just housewife or worker. There was, indeed, a transformation of identities by which they recognized themselves as historical agents with the capacity to change their daily worlds through everyday practices. In some cases, their homes literally became sites of the revolution.

Another text written by Julio Hernández in February 1964, titled El proselitismo, also helps us rebuild the work of the CDR fronts in the daily life of Cubans. The title allows us to see the intention of the CDR beyond providing information to fellow members. More relevant for them was to convince Cuban people of the success of their work in the community. One of the members of the CDR, Fidel Pereira says: “When we started, we found some obstacles, above all with housewives. Their husbands did not share the idea that women also were members of a revolutionary organization. They complained: ‘I am the man and I belong to everything. Men are for the streets, but women should be at home. It is enough with me working for the revolution.’” ¹³

First, it is clear the obstacles were not with the housewives; the obstacles were with men, with the husbands. They did not want their wives to be in the streets at night. In this traditional view, women were part of the private space. Women should not be in the public space, at least not by themselves. However, the revolution began to change this dynamic because, for some CDR members, there was no longer any public or private space. That was a “bourgeois illusion.” Thus, the revolution revolutionized the liberal division between private and public space. For some, there was no distance between state and civil society, because there was not any civil society, in the liberal sense, anymore. The revolution took place both in the home and in the streets, just as politics were no longer relegated only to the public sphere. Women in the CDR could be alone, at night, working for the revolution, fighting the counterrevolution, being part of the most efficient system of surveillance on the island. Husbands had to learn to deal with that. Fidel Pereira’s report certainly lets us see that CDR women eventually overcame the obstacle of men stopping their wives from doing revolutionary work on the streets.

The same cederista provides more information about the impact of the CDR on the daily lives of Cubans outside of Havana. Fidel Pereira remembers: “Before, meat did not reach up there [in Cuzco, Candelaria District]. We have talked to the butcher and now meat reaches there. The same used to happen with some streetlights. No doctor used to go over there either. We talked to the sectional and now there is a doctor that is going there every week.” ¹⁴ In short, the narrative was that “before the CDR, life used to be harder.” Through these kinds of improvements, the CDR wanted to convince Cuban people that the revolutionary project was the best for all and that the committees were an efficient institution for implementing changes. Óscar Rodríguez, a cederista from Bayamo, argued that “to convince the masses the best is to be inside the masses.” ¹⁵ And the CDR was inside the masses because their members came from the masses. The CDR integrated thousands of Cubans into the revolutionary struggle. They were centers of popular agglutination. This is the CDR as integrator. It is not a coincidence that the title of the text describing these events was proselytism, the CDR attempt to convert people to their revolutionary beliefs.

Voluntary labor: Miners, peasants, and workers in the CDR

Through their work, the CDR also gave new meanings to labor in Cuba. For them, labor became inseparable from a new popular culture. This new popular culture appreciated labor in ways unthinkable before the revolution. Labor was no longer something related just to wages. By the same logic, business was no longer for profit. For the CDR, in revolutionary Cuba, labor was a human activity to build and improve socialism. For this reason, voluntary labor became quite popular among members of the CDR during the 1960s. Therefore, through the work of cederistas, labor acquired new meanings in socialist Cuba.

With the work of the CDR, this new meaning of labor also proliferated throughout rural areas. Another report from the same text addresses CDR activities in the mine El Ponupo, in the district of Alto Songo. Ricardo Villares, the cederista that describes the events, says: “We went out with Victor Reyes Urdaneta, coordinator of the sectional of the work center of the mine … our purpose: to see the mine and tell the workers and their families the time of the commemoration (homage to Jose Maceo, event organized by the CDR, in the Loma del Gato).” Villares adds that in the mine, “there is an old Catalan miner, who told us how the manganese used to be exploited in the place, almost since the beginning of the republic, that in 1937 it was bought by Cuban Miner, and later it had some Cuban administrators, around the 1950s, until its nationalization.” The cederista highlights that “only in that moment it started to be fully exploited, with the right equipment. It helps agriculture as a catalytic fertilizer. And currently it is exported to socialist countries, after its processing.” ¹⁶ The text is from July 1964 and highlights the role of the CDR beyond political surveillance, organizing local communities and recovering local stories with significant value to rebuild popular culture. Thus, we can see that the CDR had hegemonic capacity that was indispensable to the creation of new narratives to strengthen the revolutionary project.

The sugarcane harvest was always one of the main activities of CDR’s economic goals. Another cederista, Jimmy Hirzel, a worker on a people’s farm in Cauto Cristo, highlights that in 1963, the workers of the farm harvested just 200,000 arrobas of sugarcane. After some calculations, the farmers reached a conclusion: the goal for 1964 would be 742,000 arrobas. ¹⁷ How did they divide the labor for such a large increase? Collectively, the workers of the farm had to cut and store 550,000 arrobas. This included not only agricultural laborers but also office employees, people in the workshop, store employees, workers from the comedores populares, and construction workers. The peasants of the nearby village La Espina, where there were several local committees that belonged to the sectional, were assigned a total of 142,000 arrobas of sugarcane. Some CDR members were assigned specific goals related to the cane harvest of 1964. They also created a commission in charge of checking the progress of the harvest each day to see whether the daily goal was achieved or had been overcome. ¹⁸ The source is from February 1964, although it does not say whether the goal was ever achieved. The point underlines the work of the CDR as implementer, organizing voluntary labor with specific goals. More important, the achievement of the CDR as implementer reverberated in the success of the revolution as a hegemonic project.

Voluntary labor was an essential role for every member of the organization. Martha Vignier, another cederista, points out that 105 members of the CDR that worked in the Unity 25, Company of Agricultural Equipment from Santiago de las Vegas, agreed to work one hour of voluntary labor every day. She highlights that a worker, Carlos Rodríguez Amaya, was a great example of voluntary work, with 377 hours in one year. This means an average of a little more than one hour per day during the whole year. This worker was a highly creative individual, according to the interview. He created “a mechanical unit used for melting different kinds of metals, an aluminum cutter, an oven for the recuperation of materials, and a cleaning equipment that does the job of sixteen men.” ¹⁹ This worker may seem exceptional; there are not many examples of this creative capacity in the CDR. However, after the end of industrial relations between the United States and Cuba, many workers had to cope with the absence of specific technological equipment and mechanical pieces. The solution was that Cuba had to create its own replacements for the equipment on the island. From this perspective, the work of Carlos Rodríguez appears less exceptional. Revolutionary spontaneity was not just about political strategy; it was also about the productive labor of the workers and their capacity to overcome the obstacles provoked by the international economic blockade.

Ricardo Villares wrote another text, this time related to the work in public health. He talks about “nine female comrades that came (to the CDR) to help as midwives.” However, he assures, “Of course these girls will not be midwives [parteras; in other words, women without a proper medical training], because in our socialist future every Cuban mother will be assisted by doctors.” The nine women, training to become doctors, participated “as part of their training, helping the professional doctors.” He also highlights the brigade of primary care of the CDR the nine women were a part of. He describes the lessons about preventive medicine, anatomy, and obstetric knowledge that would allow them (the nine women) to deliver primary care to people who suffered accidents and to assist patients and pregnant women, in order to organize faster access to the hospital and doctors. At the same time, according to Villares, these women helped in the tasks of hygienic work, sanitary campaigns, and vaccinations that the public health front organized. The course in which they participated lasted three months. ²⁰ The text provides valuable information about the participation of the CDR in organizing primary health care in local communities. More importantly, it also shows the problematic idea of modernity that prevailed in the Cuban Revolution: an idea of modernity that differed very little from European notions of modernity, where an uncritical approach to science prevails. Thus, we can see that the Cuban Revolution reproduced logics of modernity that would undermine the radical character of the project. Popular parteras would not have a role anymore; with the revolution, Cuba would become a place for scientific experts, a place for doctors.

The CDR constantly had to deal with daily troubles in their neighborhoods. It is in this context that their function as implementer is more evident, helping to reimagine and repurpose labor as a public good. Garbage on the streets was one of these troubles. Maria Cortina Delgado, president of the CDR Luis Sera, explains how her committee found the solution to the problem of garbage. She remembers that the situation “was horrible for the health of everybody and, above all, for the children that live here. But what bothered me more was that on one occasion, we got an invitation for a meeting in our district to organize surveillance, and the letter was addressed to the ‘committee of the garbage.’” She continues: “In that moment I called for a meeting with eleven comrades from my committee and I told them: ‘This is enough, until today this committee has been ‘the garbage,’ now it will be Reparto Miramar (the real name of the neighborhood),’ and I told them about the necessity to finish with this center of infections.” ²¹ Then, they organized the committee and cleaned the street. Maria Cortina adds: “We spoke with the administrator of the Central, to request the end of the garbage on the street and, with 18 comrades, we started to work. After that, the rest of the members of the committee joined the labor. In total, the 87 comrades of our committee worked for 76 days to clean the place, including the work to level the ground [balastre], leaving the space for the creation of a collective farm.” ²² So the CDR did not just find the solution to the problem of the garbage; they transformed a dump into a place for local production. They recovered a previously lost public space.

The labor described here was not only the work of cleaning and hygiene related to public health and voluntary work; it also brought other benefits for the community related to recuperating raw materials and containers. According to Gil Blas Sergio, the person who wrote the report, these cederistas got “20 tons of iron, 18 quintals of bone, one quintal of copper, zinc, plastic, etc., and 24,430 glass containers.” ²³ Then, everything “was delivered to the Consolidated Company of Recuperation of Raw Materials, according to the receipt that they got and showed to me.” ²⁴ For this job, this committee won first-place prizes for socialist emulation in its sectional, its district, and even the province. They were assured that, eventually, they would win “at the national level as well. Write that! Because here, 20 hours after the arrival of guidelines from an orientation, we have a meeting, the 87 members, to discuss the issue.” ²⁵ These highly motivated members of the CDR earned national recognition. According to the report, in September 1963 the committee became the “national example” after winning first place in the socialist emulation of 1963.

Another local concern around which the CDR organized was dealing natural disasters. In 1963, Hurricane Flora destroyed several towns on the island. The CDR were there to help in the reconstruction. Ricardo Villares contributed with another text in the report that helps us to analyze the CDR in their function as integrator. This time in Mayari Arriba, a district of “high integration,” more than 60 percent of adult inhabitants belonged to the 408 local committees. Usually less than half of the adult population of a place was a CDR member. In this district, Villares interviewed members of a rural sectional, Armando Medina, in the village of La Cotuntera, in July 1964, nine months after Flora. These cederistas “in total repaired 168 houses and they built 17 new ones.” Furthermore, “precisely this Sunday the direction of the district was ready to help the comrades in sectional three to cut wood in order to build three schools.” The same committees played an important role after Hurricane Flora. Manuel Quevedo, coordinator of the district, remembers that “we rebuilt three kilometers of roads destroyed by the hurricane, but the Mayari river was too big to cross it … we had to walk.” The committees built four houses, and they rebuilt sixteen more, as well as more than eighteen kilometers of road. Everywhere in the Sierra Cristal the CDR worked to rebuild what Flora had destroyed. ²⁶

Climate was another problem confronted by the CDR. The same Blas Sergio quoted earlier describes how the CDR confronted the drought in Santa Clara, at the center of the island, in July 1963, just two months before the hurricane. Popular initiative was the main force. Somebody proposed digging water wells, and then the neighbors started to meet in local committees and seriously discuss the issue. Motivated by these events, the Party (PURSC) called the Provincial Office of the CDR, the JUCEI (Juntas de Coordinación, Ejecución, e Inspección), the CONACA (Corporación Nacional de Acueductos y Alcantarillados), and the Public Health Department to reach an agreement: the CDR in the blocks would meet, write a report, get funding from the local community, do volunteer work, and hire people to dig the wells. The JUCEI installed the pumps, tubes, concrete, and other materials. The Public Health Department made sure that the water was potable and would chlorinate it. ²⁷ In this case, the role of the CDR as protector seems evident: this was not just about surveillance but also protection against potential diseases. In addition, we can see that the CDR were working as an intermediary, bringing the local concerns of the people to the central organizations of the revolution that had resources and power to do something about it. In this way, popular organizations like the CDR helped build hegemony by ensuring that the concerns of local people were addressed by the revolutionary project.

In this task the CDR helped to build almost five hundred wells. The specific role of the cederistas was to mobilize volunteers and organize everything for materials and people to be in the right place at the right time. After the wells were built there was another issue: keeping them working. The CDR were more efficient than any other mass organization in organizing this maintenance. Most of this work was organized by the Committees’ Supply Front. Later, the people in charge of the Public Health Front inside the CDR also participated. To maintain the wells, it was necessary to coordinate with the Department of Public Health. This state institution gave the CDR some envelopes with chlorine that they had to put in the water occasionally to keep the water clean without any kind of risk for the local community. ²⁸

It is evident that the voluntary labor of the CDR and their fronts was usually coordinated with the Cuban state. Tania Díaz Castro describes the work of cederistas in Cabañas, a small town in the province of Pinar del Rio, in the western part of the island. Three dairies had the goal to provide—with the help of other dairies that belonged to city hall—enough milk for the population of Cabañas and other rural zones around the town. These dairies were owned by the municipality but organized by the CDR. The average was a production of 170 to 180 liters per day, ad with 250 cows, 60 were “actually producing milk.” According to Díaz Castro: “There is no mortality among the cows in their plant. The kinds of cattle are Cebu and Holstein coming recently from Canada, which need a more careful treatment to be used in a milk program run by the state.” ²⁹ Here we can see the role of the CDR in the process of governmentality during the Cuban Revolution. ³⁰ The CDR built a productive power that shaped Cuban socialism from below. The work of the CDR improved and in many ways even made possible the socialist project of the Cuban state. Much of the work of the CDR members was also voluntary labor. Ramón Díaz, cederista in charge of a dairy, says, “The CDR fully embraced the voluntary work until finishing the construction of the necessary infrastructure to start to work on the three dairies of this farm.” ³¹ In only four months, 340 cederistas built six houses, fifteen toriles, three houses that worked as drinking places for the cattle, and 21 caballerias de cerca. ³² The document is from February 1965 and helps us to understand the productive power of the CDR as implementer.

Significantly, this labor was successful because the coordination with the Cuban state was also successful. The Cuban state could not adequately perform some local functions, and so it needed the help of the local CDR. The CDR, therefore, was indispensable for the socialist project in Cuba. They could organize more labor as it was built on the cultural hegemony of the revolution in which people, as a matter of fact, wanted to work; after all, they could actively help to produce more milk for their city and the region. As a result, it was a socialization of the process of production of milk and the milk market. In addition, the Cuban state needed the help of the CDR not just because it did not have the capacity to act for itself but also because it needed to integrate the masses into the revolution. The participation of the masses, in this case, the CDR members, was essential to creating a radical democracy in a revolutionary context.

Progress, development, and revolution

Although these reports contained real stories and interviews, the CDR consistently presented them in such a way as to build a narrative of progress and development in the revolution. For example, Ana Pérez’s description of her work in the CDR follows this story of improvement. When the CDR from the district of Abreus was looking for students for the school of assistant nurses, Ana offered her help. First, she studied and developed a practice in the town of Cayo Ramona, Ciénaga de Zapata, in the mountains of the Escambray at the center of Cuba. Then, at the end of 1964, she had to spend six months in Jibacoa, where she founded a “small but modern hospital.” She said she started to work with enthusiasm, and she could see with joy how the CDR worked when they provided the polio vaccine to every child in the zone. ³³ Through her story, the CDR showed that “development and progress” were not just propaganda but a plausible reality in revolutionary Cuba. After all, children were getting proper medical care, many for the first time. Nevertheless, this testimony is also evidence of the uncritical approach to the ideas and principles of modernity, specifically the concepts of development and progress by the members of the CDR and the revolutionary project in Cuba. Moreover, by highlighting just the successful projects, the reports tended to ignore regional differences within the experience of the revolution.

In this narrative of progress, the reports often tell of many projects on which the CDR worked with other mass organizations. By working together, these organizations helped inculcate new forms of collective labor under the goal of general social improvement. In this vein, Ricardo Villares describes the work of the cederistas in harvesting coffee in Guisa, in the Sierra Maestra region. At the end of October, there were 4,388 voluntary workers, 1,617 of them mobilized by the CDR, 1,893 by the ANAP (Asociación Nacional de Agricultores Pequeños), and the rest mobilized by the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and the Peasant Union. Together, they filled six hundred thousand cans of coffee. The voluntary workers formed mixed groups; in the first two weeks of October 1964, the Julio Antonio Mella brigade was in first place. It was composed of five members of the ANAP and five from the CDR, which averaged 6.02 cans per person per day. The best worker in the district’s coffee harvest was from the town of Vegueta Larga; the person picked 130 cans in ten days. ³⁴ This is a good example of how the CDR worked together with other mass organizations like the ANAP. The CDR was not a sectarian organization. The role as integrator was quite successful. They were open to cooperation and collective work. Nevertheless, the mass organization that was usually closest to the CDR, working, mobilizing, and organizing, was the FMC.

Many rank-and-file members embraced this narrative of progress and used the CDR to bring modern amenities to their communities. The modernity promoted in these narrative arcs emphasized familiar themes, such as the importance of increased national economic production and the primacy of technology and science. However, the story of revolutionary progress also provided some new ways of viewing development. In particular, the act of solidarity was always emphasized in these reports as a sign of improvement. These views of progress can be seen in a report by Ramón, from the Front of Voluntary Work of the CDR in Pinar del Rio. The local front had a particular problem: they needed a bridge, and the state could not provide one in the short term. After they had enough workers willing to spend some precious time working for free, the first problem was where to find building materials. They decided to go to the provincial delegation of the Ministerio de Construcción (MICONS), the Department of Construction in Cuba, to request everything they needed. According to Ramon, the comrades in the MICONS were amazed when they heard about their idea of building a bridge. They said, “You will need an engineer, at least,” adding: “We do not have assigned budget for that. We would like to help you, but in the rest of this year it is impossible.” ³⁵

The same group of cederistas kept trying. They got cement, tools, wood, stone. They got access to some credit from the regional providers, that is, the companies that produced materials. All this would be paid for later by neighbors when they organized a community fundraiser. The materials were brought in trucks whose owners were members of the same sectional. The Department of Urban Reform provided some materials that they did not use in other constructions. The cederistas started to build the bridge without an engineer. Bricklayer Octavio Victores technically directed the work. Saturdays and Sundays above all, voluntary workers—not just from the local committee Dionisio San Roma but from every CDR of the sectional—participated in the construction. They finished the bridge in front of some amazed neighbors who had been skeptical about the project. Due to this success, the neighbors decided to engage in other tasks: to pave and improve several streets of the neighborhood. ³⁶ In 1963 the CDR was already a well-organized nationwide apparatus, with a capacity to mobilize thousands of Cubans. The organization already worked as implementer. It was also a time of fervent revolutionary enthusiasm among the CDR members. Cederistas understood the revolution as a project of progress and development, a project to improve their everyday lives. Certainly, this was a result of the hegemonic capacity of socialism in Cuba. Building a bridge was not just an infrastructure achievement; it was also a symbolic triumph of modern technology over nature. The cederistas built ground where there was none.

According to the report, in this sectional everybody worked. On weekdays, women, mostly housewives, were in charge of the construction of the bridge. Saturdays and Sundays were the men. One morning, for example, “around 5 a.m., Ortega saw in one of the streets two women that were putting water on the stones. He asked: ‘Why are you up so early?’ They answered: ‘we are working. In that way, when the roller truck will come to work on the streets, the stones will be wet and would be easier for the truck.’ The other woman added: ‘we have to do it fast.’” ³⁷

The CDR likely exaggerated and embellished the story to promote the revolutionary project. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm was real; they built a pedestrian bridge. By reproducing this story, the CDR emphasized the idea that the revolution could bring a sort of modern progress to the countryside. Moreover, their sort of modern progress came from the organization and labor of local people. The solidarity in such stories indicated that the progress of the revolution was not just implemented by the vanguard; rather, it was something in which regular, everyday people could participate.

Conclusions

For Antonio Gramsci, a class does not take state power; it becomes the state—“the subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘State’” (2010, 52). To become a state, a class has to build a new hegemony. It must create a project with the ability to generate broad, popular support for a new political order. In other words, it must have hegemonic capacity. ³⁸ Thus, to produce a successful revolution, subaltern classes must build cross-class alliances, revolutionary ideology, and political leadership. These three components are essential to establish a new, popular political culture. Mass organizations are an indispensable strategy in pursuing these three aims. When a revolutionary project is successful in promoting mass organizations and political participation, involvement in such activities creates a revolutionary subject who is ready to engage in a new radical democracy. Mass organizations create these revolutionary subjects, and, in turn, these new subjects extend the work of these mass organizations into a viable and long-lasting revolution.

It is possible to see through these interviews that at the middle of the 1960s the CDR was concerned with persuading those Cubans still skeptical of the revolutionary project. One of their main goals was ideological. It was to convince the community outside of the CDR of the desirability and ability of the new political project. Yet the defense of the revolution, their main goal, was not just about surveillance and night watch patrol. It was also about the ideological defense of the revolution. In the struggle for hegemony, cederistas were one of the most important agents in the Cuban Revolution. The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution worked as ideological weapons against the vestiges of the old regime and its capitalist hegemony. The defense of the revolution was the defense of one specific narrative: socialist progress and development. The struggle against the enemy was also fought with ideas, stories, and representations. We can see that there was a transition in the CDR in the early 1960s from a mass organization whose focus was the defense of the revolution through political surveillance to an organization with more concrete ideological goals related to the political formation of new, revolutionary Cuban subjects.

The CDR created a productive power that shaped Cuban socialism from below. The labor of the CDR improved—and, in many ways, even made possible—the socialist project of the Cuban state. On many occasions, the CDR reached places where the Cuban state could not; cederistas arrived where the agents of the state did not. For some moments during the 1960s, above all, in rural areas, the CDR became the state. They provided health services, education, housing, social assistance, and basic food supplies for the population of the local communities. When necessary, the CDR deployed policing activities to bring order and discipline, disseminating fear and paranoia among the locals. They became the state for better and for worse. Consequently, they embodied the idea of an alternative modernity in Cuba—a socialist modernity, but modernity after all, uncanny in its roots and results. With all its vices, failures, and perversions. But also with its alluring promises of a better world to come.

Overall, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution constitute one of the key mass organizations that explain the long success, consolidation, and resilience of the revolution as a hegemonic project. Their role in the process of governmentality made the success of the Cuban revolutionary project possible in the context of constant international harassment. Through the CDR, the revolutionary government brought hegemonic ideas of socialism to the poorest neighborhoods in the country. More importantly, through this dynamic, the CDR impacted the revolutionary project in ways that the Cuban state could not foresee. They gave meaning to their own idea of socialism, which was not always in harmony with the official version. ³⁹ In other words, governing the country was easier with the CDR on the streets. This is a key aspect that explains the resilience of the revolution in Cuba. Since the beginning, the revolutionary leadership understood that the revolution would be successful only by incorporating the masses into the socialist project. Only with the masses becoming the state.