How Did Cuba’s Crony Capitalism Really Work? Corruption and Collaboration Under Fulgencio Batista, 1930s–50s

Two of the least contested aspects of Cuba’s history are the heightening degrees of corruption under the military regimes of General Fulgencio Batista (1934-1940) and (1952-1958) and the fact that Fulgencio Batista’s closest associates included prominent members of Cuba’s business, judicial, cultural, and political communities. As Phillip Bonsal, US Ambassador to Cuba in 1959, there was “no other country ...where the diversion of public treasure for private profit reached the proportions it attained in the Cuban Republic”.

In January 1959, when Batista’s flight from power gave way to the quick consolidation of a revolutionary government, a ministry charged with investigating embezzlement and related crimes was established first, quickly proving to be the most popular branch of the new state. Yet the dirty and inconvenient details of who some key members of these elites were, when they collaborated with Batista, and how Batista’s kleptocracy worked “in real time” were quickly lost to the drama of Cuba’s communist transition. Aside from works that focus on Batista’s ties to the US mafia, the historiography reflects mostly silence because the Cuban government bars access to key archives in Cuba, including those produced by the Batista regimes themselves and those created after 1959. This paper illuminates how Batista insinuated corruption into the very fabric of not only state craft but daily life. I explore how Batista’s publicists harvested massive wealth from average Cubans who subscribed to Batista’s newspapers hoping to win a family home and participated regularly in a national lottery that Batista and his wife personally controlled. I also trace how Batista created his own government banks, granted extra-constitutional “concessions” to critical sites of national territory, including the Havana airport, and then distributed loans to beneficiaries of such concessions in the name of “urgently addressing” Cuba’s chronic underdevelopment.