Raúl Cepero Bonilla

Economist, historian, and journalist. Also prominent in the sphere of international economic relations. Minister of Trade of the Revolutionary Government.

Raúl Cepero Bonilla was born in the city of Sagua la Grande, in the former province of Las Villas. He graduated as a bachelor in 1938 from the Instituto de El Vedado in Havana. Simultaneously, he worked as a professor of Moral and Civic Education.

In 1942, with his doctoral thesis titled "Law According to the Materialist Conception of History," he obtained his Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Havana. In 1951 he also graduated from the Manuel Márquez Sterling Professional School of Journalism. He developed a prolific body of work, of broad national and international relevance, in journalism specialized in historical and economic topics.

The multidisciplinary approach to social, historical, and economic topics makes it difficult to classify Cepero Bonilla's works, as his intellectual output and political projection are marked by the combination of historical and economic elements, both in his journalistic and essay texts. In that sense, his first book, Sugar and Abolition. Notes for a Critical History of Abolitionism, constitutes an indispensable work in Cuban historiography.

Consistent with his line of thinking, Cepero Bonilla defended the necessity of Agrarian Reform to truly guarantee national sovereignty. Already then he took sides with just causes and for the militant defense of the interests of the Cuban people.

From his earliest works, the critique of the role played by United States intervention in Cuba in 1898 became evident, which maintained latifundia and, in general, the structural conditions of dependence of the Cuban economy.

In 1951 he was part of the Cuban delegation that attended the Sugar Conference of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), held in London, and throughout the entire decade he displayed intense political, intellectual, and insurrectional activity in opposition to the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista. Through the written press, especially in the magazines and newspapers Prensa Libre, Carteles, Bohemia, and Acción y Tiempo, he lashed out against the economic policy of the Batista government and the penetration and control of the United States over the Cuban economy, denouncing in particular the governmental sugar policy.

His most important economic work is Sugar Policy—published clandestinely in 1958—in which he made a well-founded critique of the economic policy of the Fulgencio Batista government, which had economist Julián Alienes as one of its most vehement promoters. Although Cepero Bonilla acknowledged that, analyzed from a strictly technical standpoint, that economic policy could have allowed a certain level of growth, in practice it caused an increase in public debt, as resources were squandered in investments unrelated to true economic development. He termed this policy, with irony, "policy of cheerful spending." The multiplier effect of these investments from public financing was ephemeral, as it was not directed toward the productive sector, the permanent generator of employment.

He believed that the Keynesian formula—from American economist John Maynard Keynes—of investing in the public sphere to emerge from the economic crisis that was shaking the country—valid for developed countries with solid industrial diversification—under conditions of underdevelopment favored artificial demand that stimulated imports rather than industrial development of the country. Based on such assessments, Cepero Bonilla reached the conclusion that this policy favored and subsidized mainly United States production, as the principal exporting country to Cuba.

In Sugar Policy, he denounced the role played by the Cuban Sugar Stabilization Institute (ICEA), controlled by friends and people close to Batista, in regulating production, internal quotas, prices and wages, to the detriment of workers, which favored governmental corruption. In that work he defended the appropriate means for sugar commercialization and opposed the restriction and speculation in prices, based on withholding of sugar volumes to artificially raise them in the world market. In practice, the policy applied brought disastrous consequences for the country and for workers, as other nations sold what Cuba stopped selling.

Cepero Bonilla questioned the corruption and inefficiency of the Bank of Economic and Social Development (BANDES), as well as its character as a fraudulent instrument for Batista's electoral campaigns, with which he sought to give a democratic image to his dictatorial regime and prevent the triumph of revolutionary forces. He likewise unmasked the mechanism of public debt financing which, he believed, compromised Cuba's future. Similarly, he sharply criticized the prices of civil works—mostly unproductive—financed by the government, and denounced the theft by the main figures of the regime.

Another topic to which he devoted repeated attention was the critique of the position defended by Julián Alienes, in collusion with the government, on wage freezing as the principal means to increase efficiency in the sugar sector. Based on the actual profit levels of that key sector of the Cuban economy, he demonstrated that the ideal path was technological improvement, since the non-raising of wages, in addition to social harm, meant a repatriation of profits, as American investment constituted more than 80% of total investments in the sector.

Specialists recognize the scientific rigor of Raúl Cepero Bonilla's historical analyses on the causes of the structural deformation of the Cuban economy, from the colony to the republic. He demonstrated that the protection of the Spanish crown for the sugar industry, first by promoting the slave trade and later through tariff concessions to the United States, had generated that, by prioritizing the sugar industry, agricultural and industrial diversification was limited. These are, according to the author, the roots of monoculture and of the economic and political dependence of Cuba, first on Spain and later on the United States.

What stands out in his work, on the other hand, is the necessity of achieving an organic link between economy and education. In that line, he was one of the main proponents of the creation of a National School of Economics, having foreseen that the political changes that were developing in the republic would require profound economic modifications.

In 1959 he was appointed Minister of Trade of the Revolutionary Government, a position he held until 1960, when he was promoted to President of the National Bank of Cuba, from which he promoted a popular savings campaign. During that period he was also a member of the Cuban Sugar Stabilization Institute. Furthermore, he was part of the founding group of the Advisory Council on History of the newly created Academy of Sciences of Cuba. Continuing his intellectual work, he published several articles in the magazine Cuba Socialista.

He was one of the decisive figures in the international projection of the Cuban Revolution. He chaired numerous economic delegations that represented his country in England, France, Italy, Spain, Federal Republic of Germany, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Denmark, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. In 1962, as President of the National Bank of Cuba, he chaired the Cuban delegation to the Seventh Conference of the Organization for Agriculture and Food (FAO), held in Rio de Janeiro.

On November 27, 1962, during a return trip to Cuba, an airplane accident occurred in which he died, along with the delegation accompanying him, at the age of forty-two. As a tribute to his life and work, a high school in Havana bears his name.

Source: EnCaribe.org