Tony Guiteras

This chapter explores the surprisingly influential role Cuban student activists played in Ramón Grau San Martín’s one-hundred-day provisional government (1933–34). The transcendent figure of this period was Antonio “Tony” Guiteras, a former pharmaceutical student, who, at the age of twenty-seven, held down three posts in Grau’s cabinet. His saga was emblematic of an idealistic, if ultimately tragic, strain of Cuban student radicalism. In just over three months, Guiteras pushed through landmark legislation, which had as its objective a fundamental redesign of the island’s land and labor relations. His call for an autonomous, egalitarian revolution, free from external influence, whether from Washington or Moscow, won him the admiration of many of his peers. But Guiteras’s principled stance and a dogged unwillingness to compromise unnerved and threatened elements across the political spectrum. He was assassinated by a strongman (Batista) and became a martyr for the cause of Cuba libre. Not surprisingly, Guiteras would be an inspiration to Fidel Castro and his followers.