IB History Social Factors Notes

Social Factors: A Divided Island

Cuba's East-West Divide

1. Cuba's social geography was shaped from the nineteenth century onward by a deep divide between its western and eastern regions.
2. European immigrants settled overwhelmingly in the western provinces, where political power, trade, and economic development became heavily concentrated.
3. The east, separated from the west by the rugged Sierra Maestra mountains, remained comparatively isolated and neglected by colonial and later national governments alike.
4. Ocean currents reinforced this geographic divide in practice, since Cuba's main trading ports were all located in the wealthier western provinces.
5. By the late nineteenth century, most Black Cubans lived in the eastern province of Oriente, while Cubans of Spanish descent were concentrated in the wealthier west.
6. Oriente became the island's poorest and most politically rebellious region, the site of numerous uprisings by enslaved people during the colonial period.
7. Spain finally abolished slavery in Cuba in 1886, partly as an attempt to undercut growing demands for full independence.
8. Formerly enslaved people and their descendants were nonetheless left to face crippling poverty and near-total political powerlessness in the eastern provinces afterward.
9. In 1895, Jose Marti launched his war for Cuban independence specifically from Oriente province, cementing the region's identity as a source of revolutionary energy.
10. This regional and racial divide continued to shape Cuban politics well into the twentieth century, long after formal independence from Spain in 1898.
11. Migration from Oriente toward Havana and other western cities was common throughout the early twentieth century, as rural families sought work unavailable in the neglected east.
12. This migration created pockets of Oriente-born poverty within western cities too, meaning the east-west divide was not always a simple matter of geography alone.

Oriente: Poverty and Revolutionary Memory

1. By the 1950s, despite decades of limited reform efforts, Oriente still had Cuba's lowest literacy rates and accounted for nearly 30 percent of the country's total unemployment.
2. Fulgencio Batista's own rise to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s drew heavily on this economic gap between the impoverished rural east and the more urbanised, affluent west.
3. Batista promised social and economic reforms explicitly framed around lifting up regions like Oriente, helping him build broad early support among the rural poor.
4. Fidel Castro deliberately chose to launch his own 1953 uprising in Oriente, consciously echoing Jose Marti's earlier strategy from 1895.
5. This choice was not accidental: Castro understood that Oriente's combination of poverty, isolation, and revolutionary memory made it uniquely fertile ground for armed resistance.
6. When his guerrilla campaign later regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountains after 1956, described in detail elsewhere in this unit, Castro was building directly on this same regional foundation of grievance.
7. The wealthy west, by contrast, remained comparatively insulated from the worst effects of Cuba's social inequality, at least until the revolution's final stages in 1958.
8. This uneven geography of hardship meant that Cuba's social crisis was never experienced uniformly across the island but was always sharpest in the neglected east.

1. Cuba's sugar economy, described in more detail in the economic factors article elsewhere in this unit, relied heavily on seasonal labour drawn disproportionately from Oriente's rural poor.
2. This economic dependence on Oriente's labour, combined with the region's political neglect, created exactly the kind of resentment a revolutionary movement could mobilise.

Race and Class in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba

1. Race added a further layer of complexity to Cuba's social divisions that does not fit a simple narrative of unified popular support for revolution.
2. Black and multiracial Cubans were, for much of the 1930s and 1940s, more likely to support Batista than to back later revolutionary movements led by Castro.
3. Batista himself came from a humble, non-white background and was, in a meaningful sense, Cuba's first ruler to emerge from outside the traditionally dominant white elite.
4. As head of the military from the 1930s onward, Batista improved pay, conditions, and promotion prospects specifically for soldiers of colour, securing their loyalty to him personally.
5. Castro and most of his early guerrilla fighters, by contrast, were of Spanish descent and in this sense resembled Cuba's traditional white ruling class more than its Black and multiracial majority.
6. This racial dimension helps explain why Lieutenant Pedro Sarria, a Black officer who spared Castro's life after the Moncada attack, felt no particular sympathy for Castro's cause despite this act of mercy.
7. Understanding this racial complexity is essential for any nuanced Paper 2 answer on the social factors behind Castro's rise, since race and class did not simply align in a single, uniform direction.
8. Castro's later policies after 1959 would attempt to address racial inequality directly, but the social base of his original guerrilla movement was itself racially uneven.

Illiteracy, Health, and Everyday Deprivation in Rural Cuba

1. Beyond unemployment statistics, everyday deprivation defined rural life across much of Cuba, and especially in Oriente, in the years before the revolution.
2. Illiteracy in some rural areas of Oriente exceeded 80 percent, leaving most of the rural population unable to read government notices, contracts, or even basic health information.
3. Access to trained medical care was similarly scarce, and many rural Cubans had never been examined by a qualified doctor before the revolution began.
4. When Che Guevara, a trained physician, joined Castro's guerrilla column in the Sierra Maestra, he often provided villagers with the first proper medical attention they had ever received.
5. This combination of illiteracy and poor healthcare access made rural Cubans acutely receptive to any political movement that credibly promised schools and clinics.
6. Landless rural workers frequently depended entirely on large landowners for both employment and housing, leaving them with little practical independence in disputes over wages or working conditions.
7. Seasonal unemployment tied to the sugar harvest cycle, described further in the economic factors article elsewhere in this unit, compounded this everyday insecurity for much of the rural workforce.
8. These conditions were not new in the 1950s but had persisted, largely unaddressed, through decades of formally independent Cuban government since 1902.
9. This long history of unaddressed rural deprivation is essential context for understanding why Castro's later promises of education and healthcare, covered elsewhere in this unit, resonated so strongly once his movement gained a foothold.

Social Fracture: Corruption, Gangs, and Political Violence

1. Political corruption and organised violence further fractured Cuban society during the Autentico governments of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
2. President Grau's first act in office was to reward violent Havana political gangs with official appointments, such as chief of police or state director of sports.
3. In exchange, these armed gangs provided the Autenticos with a loyal support base, sometimes functioning as personal bodyguards or an unofficial private police force.
4. Violence, intimidation, and bribery became routine tools against political opponents, and murder was used when other methods failed to silence critics.
5. Fidel Castro himself, then still a law student in Havana, survived at least one assassination attempt during this period of intense gang-related political violence.
6. This culture of organised criminal violence operating alongside, and often through, the formal machinery of government deepened ordinary Cubans' distrust of the entire political system.
7. Social trust in electoral politics collapsed further as successive governments proved unable or unwilling to prosecute politically connected criminals.
8. This erosion of trust in formal politics is a crucial social precondition for understanding why armed revolution came to seem, to a growing number of Cubans, more realistic than electoral reform.

1. Professional syndicates representing lawyers, doctors, and teachers occasionally issued public statements criticising government corruption, even under the risk of official reprisal.
2. This willingness of some professional groups to speak out, however cautiously, showed that elite discontent extended well beyond students and the youngest generation of activists.

Urban Middle-Class Discontent

1. Social discontent before 1959 was not confined to Cuba's rural poor but extended significantly into the urban middle class, particularly in Havana and Santiago de Cuba.
2. University students and young professionals, including Castro himself, frequently found their career prospects limited by a political and economic system dominated by entrenched elites and foreign corporations.
3. Corruption scandals under successive Autentico governments alienated many middle-class Cubans who had initially supported reformist promises in 1944.
4. Small business owners and professionals resented the privileged position of large US-owned corporations within the Cuban economy, a grievance covered in more depth in the economic factors article elsewhere in this unit.
5. This urban middle-class discontent gave Castro's movement crucial recruits with legal, medical, and organisational skills that a purely rural guerrilla movement would have lacked.
6. Figures such as Frank Pais, a schoolteacher, and other urban professionals who joined the Movimiento 26 de Julio's underground network exemplified this middle-class contribution to the wider movement.
7. Historian Sebastian Balfour has argued that the war in the Sierra Maestra could not accurately be described as a purely peasant war, given how essential this urban middle-class support proved to be.
8. Social discontent in 1950s Cuba therefore spanned both the impoverished rural east and dissatisfied sections of the urban middle class, rather than being confined to a single social group.

Historiographical Debate: Structural Inequality or Elite Corruption?

Housing Conditions in Havana's Slums

1. Rapid, unplanned urban growth left large sections of Havana housed in overcrowded tenements and informal settlements with inadequate sanitation.
2. These urban slums existed in visible proximity to the wealth of central Havana's casinos, hotels, and elite neighbourhoods, sharpening the sense of inequality.
3. This stark visual contrast between urban poverty and elite luxury became a recurring image in revolutionary propaganda both before and after 1959.

Education Access Before the Revolution

1. Rural school attendance rates lagged far behind urban Cuba, with many rural children receiving little or no formal education.
2. Teacher shortages in Oriente and other rural provinces meant that even where schools existed, consistent instruction was often unavailable.