The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Cuba

Abstract

HENRY W. CATLIN OF GENERAL ELECTRIC arrived in Cuba in 1922, on a revolutionary mission. Armed with $8 million from a G.E. subsidiary, Catlin acquired most of Cuba's primitive, electrical generating network within eighteen months. Sweeping in behind Catlin came accountants and engineers, the troops of the United States' second industrial revolution. Within a few short years, they transformed the island's generating plants into a modern power network and revamped the work relations of their Cuban labor force. Working and middleclass resistance to these changes generated a wave of popular protest that swept G.E. into the vortex of the Cuban Revolution of 1933. As American corporations set up businesses in every part of the globe at the beginning of this century, they triggered responses that had profound and far-reaching effects on the societies they encountered. Despite an increasingly rich historiography on the rise of modern American corporations, our understanding of their encounters with Third World societies remains rudimentary. Historians have previously traced many of the forces in American society that shaped multinational enterprises. Business and social historians have examined the organizational and technological revolutions that forged these corporations, worker resistance to rationalization of the workplace, and the emergence of the new professional classes as mediators between labor and capital. Studies of multinational corporations have enhanced our understanding of the forces that propelled them overseas and of the corporate culture they carried with them. Yet, aside from structuralist studies of economic development, we know little about the interaction between American multinationals and the societies in which they functioned. This study of the G.E. experience in Cuba addresses some of the basic issues surrounding the effects of globalizing American corporations. It explores the salient features of the culture these companies carried with them and the responses of the Cuban working and middle classes to the activities of a business