Reinterpreting the State-Class Relationship

This study seeks to challenge conventional wisdom regarding the nature of stateclass relations and U.S. policy toward the Cuban Revolution during 1959 and 1960. Standard literature holds that American policy was narrowly reactive to the interests of particular capitalists and that the U.S. state was somewhat in disarray, that it had a vague coherence about being generally anticommunist and basically muddled through its relations with the revolutionary regime.' The central argument here is that, during the early period of the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. as an imperialstate was at the center structuring issues, establishing agendas, defining problems, and taking initiatives in support of aggregate U.S. economic interests on the island. I distinguish between the seemingly ineffective behavior of American capitalists as political actors and the historical, global, class-conscious vision of the imperial-state which enabled it to provide the needed cohesion and formulate appropriate strategies in the interests of multinational capital in Cuba.2 Officials of the U.S. executive branch fashioned and executed a strategy for dealing with the Castro regime that corresponded to their own conception and time schedule. By contrast, the American capitalist class in Cuba was fragmented and particularistic in outlook, lacked a coherent political perspective, and was notable for the absence of a degree of class consciousness adequate to confronting the immediate challenges. The broader underlying thesis here is that, while capitalist social forces are crucial to fashioning the boundaries of U.S. imperial-state operations, the state is the major instrumentality which interprets, defends, and even defines the interests of the U.S. capitalist class in moments of crisis affecting investments abroad

Class (philosophy · Epistemology · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · Cuban History and Society · Philosophy

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