Autobiography of a Cuban Businessman in the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

Autobiography of a Cuban Businessman in the 1940s and 1950s Jorge J. Domínguez and Jorge I. Domínguez (bio) Jorge José Domínguez (1921–2012), hereafter JJD, served as executive vice president and de facto chief executive officer of a Cuban family's construction materials company. He began work at the family company in the early 1940s through July 10, 1960. In those years, the company was best known as Calera Santa Teresa, a lime factory. Its largest subsidiary would become Cemento Santa Teresa, the first wholly Cuban-owned cement company in Cuba and one of the country's three cement factories in the late 1950s, which upon expropriation in 1960 came to be known as Mártires de Artemisa. The company's founder was Manuel Domínguez Morejón, JJD's father, who served as board chairman until 1960. In time, JJD's brother-in-law (Rafael Puig) would become chief engineer, his brother (Manuel Domínguez Silveira) would become chief accountant, and his father-in-law (Antonio de la Carrera) corporate counsel.1 The starting dates of JJD's employment, and his eventual promotion to CEO, are unclear. In December 1941, he was a senior at Columbia University in New York.2 Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he sought to volunteer to join the US Armed Forces; he was rejected because he was not yet twenty-one years old (in the years ahead, the United States would change this rule). He asked his father for permission, but his father denied it. JJD returned to Cuba to wait for his twenty-first birthday on June 1, 1942. After some weeks of JJD not doing much, his father explained that the economic depression of the 1930s had badly hurt the business, and he asked JJD to work for a bit. JJD did, and he continued doing so uninterruptedly for twenty-five hours per day for the following eighteen years. As noted at the start of JJD's account, below, he wrote his memoirs in 1995 because one of his granddaughters asked him—she was age twenty-three; he was age seventy-four. He wrote for her in English and, to respect his choice of language, so too are these text and footnote annotations in English. These pages, now being published for the first time, are an extract (less than a tenth of the total) from that much-longer text. The remainder of the memoir tells stories of JJD's business experiences in South America, Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe, and the broad Middle East. [End Page 345] JJD was a great storyteller who, among other traits, hated hypocrisy. In the years following 1960, he would become particularly upset upon hearing stories of prerevolutionary Cuba that, he thought, were airbrushed fantasies. He had no hesitation to challenge such accounts. Nor did he have any hesitation to use stories from his own professional life to make a point, even when some might be offended by the story. Some of these stories below will no doubt upset some readers, and JJD always understood that, but he believed that telling his truth as he saw it was intrinsically important as well as an act of personal integrity, even when the story might put him in a bad light in the eyes of others. In the late 1990s, his son (this annotator) asked for JJD's authorization to use the pages published here as one of the readings for a course on Cuban history. JJD agreed, and near the end of his life he also agreed to the publication of this text to assist readers in understanding aspects of life and business in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. The text appears as JJD wrote it, with slight stylistic corrections, always clearly marked. JJD did not date the stories in this publication. The tax inspector story is most likely from the 1940s. The labor union leader story's principal point is from the 1940s, and then the story jumps to well-labeled events in 1958–1959. The business opportunity story obviously dates from the early 1940s soon after the United States and Cuba enter the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The...