Cuba protects itself by nationalizing U.S. interests in the country

On the instructions of Commandant Ernesto Che Guevara, president of the National Bank of Cuba, Law No. 891 referring to the nationalization of the Banks was drafted and proposed, approved by the Council of Ministers on October 13, 1960, "with the objective of definitively eliminating the economic power of the privileged interests that were conspiring against the people" and to guarantee that the banking function would only be carried out by the State as the only way of exercising the economic sovereignty of the nation.

The text of the legislation included a historical assessment of the role of U.S. banks: "One of the most effective tools of imperialist meddling in our historical development has been represented by the operation of U.S. commercial banks, which have served as a financial vehicle to facilitate the monopolistic actions of U.S. companies in Cuba and for the massive invasion of the country by imperialist capital (...)".

In October 1960, U.S. and private banks related to Yankee interests were operating on the island, which during the pre-revolutionary period played an essential role in the corruption of the state apparatus, with the theft of national wealth promoted by the governments in power, which facilitated the evasion of taxes and tariffs.

This binomial of financiers from the North, along with the internal lackeys as remnants of the neocolonial power structure, formed an important bulwark for the first aggressive plans and actions that were orchestrated in Washington against the Caribbean territory.

The law affected five parastatal credit institutions and 44 private banks, six of them foreign, and declared the Cuban National Bank as the only remaining of all those private institutions.

Another decree law, 382, applied the same provision to large companies owned by the bourgeoisie, among them 105 sugar mills, 37 banks, as well as their 300 offices spread throughout the archipelago. The legislation also determined the forced expropriation of 382 companies, including the aforementioned 105 sugar mills; 18 distilleries, alcoholic beverage, construction, transportation and food companies, among others.

That nationalization of the private business sector, completed with the same procedure in the banking system, struck a decisive blow to the internal sectors allied to the imperialist plans against the country, which in that distant 1960 wanted to reinstate the neocolonial republic, while opening the way to the profound and definitive economic and social changes of the Revolution.

The media campaigns, historically enemies, have presented these first expropriations as disproportionate and unjustified acts by Cuba against Yankee interests and as the causes that provoked, from the beginning, the deterioration and breakup of relations between the two nations, since Washington had no choice but to defend its violated interests.

However, more than six months before the enactment of those laws, on March 16 of that same year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the first "Covert Action Program against the Castro Regime", which included intelligence operations, economic blockade, international isolation, terrorist plans, subversion, propaganda and finally direct aggression to put an end to the Cuban Revolution.

The program also revealed the use of U.S. businessmen with companies in Cuba to finance and serve as cover for CIA activities to support the internal counterrevolution.

Although before Eisenhower's approval of this plan, in practice it was applied in all its magnitude in sabotage in the cities, burning of sugar cane, uprisings, terrorist attacks such as the one that occurred on March 4 with the blowing up of the steamship La Coubre that was carrying arms and ammunition acquired by Havana in Belgium, which was considered by the Cuban leadership as "a prelude to the aggressions.

Sixty-two years have passed since those measures were taken, but beyond their important legal significance, history has shown that they were also actions in defense of the nation against the beginning of the most widespread economic war waged by U.S. imperialism against a country.