US tried to surrender Cuba with the suspension of sugar quotas

The transformations initiated by the Revolution with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959, the reduction of rents and the application of other measures in favor of the people were enough to justify the blockade actions by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who limited the sugar quota that the U.S. bought annually from the island.

On July 6, 1960, it rejected the purchase of 700,000 tons, which represented 95 % of the total amount to be invoiced and which would leave the country practically without financial resources.

That contracting was the result of a trade agreement dating back to 1934, which established the purchase by the United States of a certain amount of sugar from the Caribbean nation, thus prolonging the dependence on the U.S. market of the Cuban economy based on sugarcane monoculture, which had been developed for more than half a century after the establishment of the pseudo-republic in 1902. On July 2, 1960, the White House abrogated that agreement.

Such a blow was well conceived, since in the first year of the revolutionary triumph that system of domination was intact as Cuba exported almost the totality of its sugarcane production to the northern territory, from where it acquired 72 % of its imports.

With the implementation of the blockade shortly thereafter, the purchase of Cuban sugar would be totally cancelled, with which the circles of U.S. power calculated that any possibility of subsistence and resistance from the neighboring island would be broken.

However, the White House would not limit itself and gave the green light to a CIA plan that included the promotion of counterrevolutionary organizations, uprisings, espionage operations, media campaigns, attacks and terrorist programs, including the blowing up in Havana Bay of the French steamship La Coubre, which was carrying arms for the Rebel Army, resulting in a hundred dead and more than 400 wounded.

Although the optimism of the aggressors could be justified on the basis of the unfavorable economic and social context presented by Cuba, after breaking the ties of imperial domination, Washington failed in calculating the fighting capacity of the Cuban people and above all in assessing the capacity of the leadership, especially that of its Commander in Chief.

Faced first with the reduction and then the elimination of the sugar quota, leader Fidel Castro proclaimed before the people: "...in this attempt to take away the quota, pound by pound, we will take it away plant by plant! and we will take away, penny by penny, every last American investment in Cuba! and not only that, but pound by pound, we will suspend all American imports into Cuba! because the world is wide and we will buy from those who buy from us."

Under the principle of responding to each U.S. aggression with a greater radicalization of the revolutionary process, the oil companies and their refineries in the country and all the interests of the Union, including the sugar mills, were nationalized.

Thus, the Revolution faced the suppression of the quota and its elimination more than 60 years ago, and defeated those first hopes of the strategists of the White House who thought that by eliminating the sugar quota in the nation, chaos, hunger, misery and finally surrender would prevail, objectives that remain unchanged with the tightening of the anti-Cuban policy and the increase of the economic, commercial and financial blockade.