Gerardo Machado Morales

Officer of the Liberation Army in the War of Independence. President of the Republic from 1925 to 1933. He headed one of the most repressive regimes in Cuban history. Overthrown by a popular revolution.

Son of Colonel Gerardo Machado y Castellón, he was born in Santa Clara. He joined the War of Independence in Camajuaní, (Las Villas), alongside his father and his brother Carlos. He performed his first actions as head of the escort of Major General Manuel Suárez Delgado. He was promoted by Commander-in-Chief General Máximo Gómez to the rank of colonel. He operated in Camajuaní and other territories in the central region of the Island.

With the republic established, he was appointed lieutenant colonel. When the Rural Guard Corps was organized, he was assigned to his native province, Las Villas, where shortly after he became mayor and began private business ventures.

He acquired the Electric Plant of Las Villas, and extended his private activities by forming the Electric Company of Cuba, in partnership with Orestes Ferrara Marino and Laureano Falla Gutiérrez.

In 1908 he was the Liberal Party candidate for governor of Las Villas, but was not elected. When President José Miguel Gómez took office, he appointed him brigadier general, designating him second commander of the Permanent Army, and created for him the position of Inspector of the Armed Forces. He also served during Gómez's government as Secretary of Interior.

He organized the Unionist Liberal Party which presented him as its representative to Congress in 1912. In 1916 he took up arms against the reelection of then President Mario García Menocal.

In 1920 he supported the presidential candidacy of José Miguel Gómez, but later accepted the nomination of the Cuban Popular Party, which presented Alfredo Zayas Alfonso's candidacy for the republic's highest office.

On August 23, 1924, Zayas withdrew his candidacy and offered an alliance to Machado's liberals, who, once nominated as a candidate, launched a vigorous campaign against his political rival, Mario García Menocal.

Machado reached the Presidency on May 20, 1925, through solid alliances with the U.S. oligarchy, particularly with the Morgan group and other prominent figures in the financial world. He also established alliances with elements of the Cuban oligarchy; especially with Viriato Gutiérrez, who was designated Secretary of the Presidency in the first Machado cabinet. He also established ties with major Spanish merchants and elements of the non-sugar bourgeoisie.

The progressive decline in sugar prices starting in 1925 obliged the president, vested with exceptional powers by Congress for solving economic problems, to take a series of measures.

The Verdeja Law, approved by the Congress of the Republic on May 3, 1926, limited the 1926 sugar harvest to 10% of the estimated output of each sugar mill and authorized Machado to apply the same policy to the 1927-1928 harvest, in addition to establishing a reduction in the cultivable sugar cane area. As compensation for the consequences generated by the policy of sugar restriction—and particularly for the increase in unemployment—the executive of the republic urged Congress to approve the Public Works Law, a vast program that included the construction of the Central Highway, from Pinar del Río to Santiago de Cuba; the construction of the National Capitol or Government Palace and the expansion of the University of Havana, in addition to repairs of streets, schools, hospitals and aqueducts.

The plan served as a palliative, to some extent, to growing unemployment, and contributed to the enrichment of personalities associated with the government; particularly Machado himself and his Secretary of Public Works, Carlos Miguel de Céspedes.

Another of the measures designed to compensate for the consequences resulting from sugar restriction was tariff reform, for which the Technical Tariff Commission was created.

Meanwhile, the administration sought, through various means, to have the U.S. government apply tariff reform that would grant Cuba an increase in sugar preferential treatment of 40%, higher than that established by the Commercial Reciprocity Treaty of 1903. This mission was assigned to Orestes Ferrara, Cuba's ambassador to the United States.

On the political front, Machado reacted violently against his opponents, whatever their ideological orientations. He threatened journalists of opposition newspapers with death, and carried out his threat in the case of Liberation Army Commander Armando André Alvarado, director of the newspaper El Día, who was assassinated on August 20, 1925.

That same month and year saw the founding of the National Labor Confederation of Cuba (CNOC) and the Communist Party of Cuba, opposed to Machado's oligarchic policy. Repression against the rising workers' and student movements, and against progressive intellectuals, would constitute another constant of the regime.

Among the victims of repression were Alfredo López Arencibia, founder of the Labor Federation of Havana and of the CNOC, and Enrique Varona González, president of the railroad union La Unión, of Morón, province of Camagüey.

Other opponents, such as the Canarian teacher José Miguel Pérez y Pérez, first general secretary of the Communist Party, were expelled by presidential decree from Cuban territory.

Against the student body and progressive intellectuals, the president issued measures such as Decree No. 2491 of December 26, 1925, through which he dissolved the University Assembly and granted full powers to the rector, the General Collegiate, the University Council and the Board of Inspectors.

Shortly before, he had reinstated professors expelled for academic impropriety, and succeeded in having the Discipline Council of the Faculty of Law sanction Julio Antonio Mella with temporary expulsion from the university grounds. The student and labor leader would be imprisoned a second time, accused of planting explosives in the Payret theater. Once the student movement was suppressed, the university administration granted Machado the honorary degree of Doctor of Public Law.

The repressive climate and press censorship intensified on the eve of the celebration in Havana of the VI Inter-American Conference, from January 16 to February 20, 1928.

On November 1, 1928, Machado was reelected unopposed for a new presidential term, once constitutional reform and the extension of his mandate to six years had been achieved.

Persecution and assassination then increased in proportion to growing discontent with the regime. One expression of the violence unleashed was the plot hatched by Machado's government in 1929 to assassinate Julio Antonio Mella, who resided in Mexico.

Faced with the world crisis of 1929 to 1933, Machado's government protected the interests of the sugar oligarchy through new restrictive measures, embodied in the Chadbourne Plan and the International Sugar Agreement of 1931.

Meanwhile, rebellion against the regime's tyranny spread to broad sectors. On March 20, 1930, a general strike broke out, organized and directed by the Communist Party and the CNOC; months later the University Student Directory (DEU) was organized and hostilities against the tyranny broke out, which was given the name of the student "Tángana" of September 30, in which the student Rafael Trejo lost his life and Pablo de la Torriente Brau was wounded, among others.

In 1931, traditional political leaders, along with progressive personalities such as Antonio Guiteras Holmes, launched an armed uprising, which was organized by Mario García Menocal and Carlos Mendieta Montefur, which failed.

Between 1931 and 1933 other anti-Machado organizations would emerge of the most diverse ideological signs, such as the ABC, Guiteras' Revolutionary Union and the Left-Wing Student Wing (AIE).

The mediation efforts to resolve the Cuban situation that the U.S. government entrusted to its ambassador, Benjamin Sumner Welles, did not bear fruit, and the strike of August 12, 1933, forced Machado to resign, fleeing with much of his entourage to the Bahamas.

He died in Miami, United States, on March 29, 1939.