The Spanish Civil -Cuba sent more volunteers per head of population

Per head of population, Cuba sent more volunteers to the Republican armies of the Spanish Civil War than any other population. And that, you remember, was 1936-39, two decades before Castro’s liberal revolution. Their story had been forgotten, the Cuban archives destroyed in the 1940s or 1950s. But Cuban journalist Enrique Cirules and his historian wife María Mercedes Sánchez Dotres have turned up the extraordinary details in the Comintern archives in Moscow.

They discovered that Cubans travelled to Spain from all over the island, many of them members of Cuba’s anti-fascist organisations. They had been radicalised by the increasingly repressive dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales, and by American interference in the chaotic years that followed his overthrow in 1933. By 1935 the right wing Fulgencio Batista had been installed as Army Chief of Staff, a puppet of the Americans, and effectively in control of government. Some who left for Spain were military officers disgusted by Batista’s takeover.

Other Cubans were already in exile in New York and crossed to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in January 1937. The Battalion was mostly made up of American dockers, miners, steel workers, teachers and students. Many were socialists. Some were Jewish or black, and – unlike the US Army – the Battalion treated them on an equal basis. One of the African Americans, Oliver Law, would become its commander. Among the Cubans already in New York was the writer Pablo de la Torriente Brau. He wrote a series of columns from the Spanish War for the Mexican newspaper El Machete before he was killed in the defence of Madrid in December 1936. Other Cubans who fought on the Republican side were already in Spain – including the Avant Guard painter, Wilfredo Lam, who escaped in 1938 to Paris, where he linked up with the surrealists and cubists.

In all Cirules and Sánchez Dotres have discovered 1225 Cubans in the Spanish Republican forces, almost all in their twenties. Back in Havana the National Association of Aid for the Spanish People sent what it could. They also supported child refugees from Spain, over 400 of whom docked in Havana harbour in May 1937 aboard the Mexique en route to exile in Mexico. Many of them never went home.

Before that, on 22 May 1937, 4000 exhausted and terrified child refugees from the war had arrived in Southampton but were moved on.

'The British government was extremely reluctant to accept the refugees, preferring to adhere to a non-intervention agreement that the German and Italian fascists were clearly ignoring. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, thought the climate would not be to the liking of the children. The eventual agreement was that the children would only stay for a few months and that no public money could be used to support them; the tents provided by the army were actually rented to the organisers.' - Daniel Vulliamy?and?Simon Martinez,?The Guardian?

What the Cuban volunteers in Spain reveal is a growing rapprochement with left-wing ideas among Cuban workers and intellectuals, decades before Castro was persuaded to associate his revolution with the Soviet Union. It was not straightforward, since Cuba was also a Catholic country (and Castro himself a Catholic) and the Church deeply distrusted communists. That Castro was pushed over to the Soviet side is one of the great blunders of American foreign policy – an egregious mistake it repeats every day it extends its illegal blockade.

Thanks to Luis Santamaria, ‘The Forgotten History of Cuban Internationalists in the Spanish Civil War’, Cuba Sí Summer 2021, pp. 20-21.

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