how castro failed - norman gallcommentary how castro failed norman gall you call yourself, if i am...

Commentary

How Castro Failed

Norman Gall

You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a rev-olutionist. But you err in holding that futurerevolutions will issue in freedom. In the pastfive hundred years, the principle of freedom hasoutlived its usefulness. An educational systemwhich still conceives itself as a child of the ageof enlightenment, with criticism as its chosenmedium of instruction, the liberation and cultof the ego, the solvent forms of life which areabsolutely fixed-such a system may still, fora time, reap an empty rhetorical advantage;but its reactionary character is, to the initiated,clearly beyond any doubt. All educational or-ganizations worthy of the name have alwaysrecognized what must be the ultimate and signifi-cant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolutemandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice,the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of thepersonality. And lastly, it is an unloving mis-comprehension of youth to believe that it findspleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure liesin obedience.... Liberation and developmentof the individual are not the key to our age,they are not what our age demands. What itneeds, what it wrestles after, what it will create-is Terror.

-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

SPANISH colonial governor of Cubaonce said, in the midst of a series of

19th-century slave revolts, that the island couldbe easily governed con un violin y un gallo: witha fiddle and a fighting cock. No Cuban ruler ofthe past century has borne out this old aphorismmore fully than Fidel Castro Ruz-Prime Ministerof the Revolutionary Government, First Secretaryof the Cuban Communist party, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and President ofINRA (Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agrar-ia). For the past thirteen years Fidel Castro,with his genius for propaganda and psychologicalreward, 'has dominated his island and conductedits diplomacy with the art and authority of a Re-naissance prince, while leading his countrymenthrough the most drastic social revolution LatinAmerica has seen in this century. At the age of

forty-four Castro has more seniority in powerthan any major world figure except Tito, Franco,and Mao Tse-tung (all now approaching eighty)and has confirmed the old rule of Caribbean pol-itics that these islands are small enough to bekept in the pocket of a shrewd and tenacious dic-tator for a very long time. No dictator withinmemory has combined Fidel Castro's prodigiouspersonal powers: great physical stamina and au-dacity; a memory of near-total recall; an amazingvirtuosity at intrigue and maneuver; an imposingplatform presence and an overpowering orator-ical style drawing with equal effectiveness oncomic and sentimental histrionics. These gifts haveenabled Fidel Castro to obtain great sacrificesfrom the Cuban people while retaining a degreeof popularity that has been extremely rare amongLatin American governments of comparable lon-gevity. Indeed, it is hard to see how the CubanRevolution could have survived at all under theleadership of a lesser man. The reach of Fidel'spowers of persuasion is shown in this account bythe French agronomist RenC Dumont from hisotherwise critical book, Cuba: Est-Ill Socialiste?("Cuba: Is It Socialist?") :1

During the first few days I was in Cuba in lateJune 1969, I believed that an imminent transi-tion to a Communism without marked priva-tions was feasible. I did continue to registervery explicit reservations about the projected15 per cent annual increase in agricultural prod-ucts, which was to be spread over a 12-yearperiod. Yet in the course of the six-and-a-half-hour tour I made with Fidel Castro . . . hisassurances were rather convincing. .... WithFidel I had the impression of visiting the islandguided by its proprietor, who was showing mehis fields and pastures and cattle, if not alsohis men.

Dumont's Cuba: Est-Il Socialiste?, written by aveteran French Marxist with an internationalreputation as an expert in tropical agriculture,2

I Editions de Seuil, Paris. No English translation of thisbook has yet appeared, but excerpts were published in theSeptember 1970 issue of Dissent.

2 Dumont's writings on tropical agriculture go back near-ly four decades to his first book (1935) on rice culture inthe Tonkin delta. His books in English translations are:False Start in Africa (Praeger), Cuba: Socialism and De-velopment (Grove Press), and Lands Alive (Monthly Re-view Press).

45

NORMAN GALL, whose most recent article in COMMENTARYwas "Latin America: The Church Militant" (April 1970),is now an associate of the American Universities Field Staffin Latin America.

46/COMMENTARY NOVEMBER 1971

is one of three major books on Cuba to appearrecently which, taken together, constitute an im-portant political event that has seriously under-mined what might be called the literary repu-tation of the Cuban Revolution. The two otherbooks are Hugh Thomas's great history of Cubafrom the British capture of Havana in 1762 tothe October missile crisis two hundred years later,3

and K. S. Karol's Guerrillas in Power: The Courseof the Cuban Revolution,4 a disillusioned left-wing critique of the Castro regime by an uprootedPolish Marxist who writes in French and worshipsat the throne of Mao Tse-tung.

The impact of these books helps to explainFidel Castro's furious quarrel earlier this yearwith a large group of intellectuals in Paris andNew York, including several Latin Americans re-siding abroad, who in effect withdrew their long-standing support for the regime in protest againstthe arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla and hissubsequent "confession" of guilt for having madefalse and deprecatory statements about the Rev-olution to foreigners (among them Karol and Du-mont, both of whom have been branded as CIAagents by the Castro regime). It might seemstrange that people who in their past fervor forthe Cuban Revolution were generously willing tooverlook the fact that Castro was, by his own ad-mission, holding 20,000 political prisoners,5

would now march like penguins in the oppositedirection because of the arrest of a single poet(who "confessed" after only a month, placing hiswife and his best friends in the dock, while otherslike the guerrilla comandante Hubert Matos andthe labor leader David Salvador have spent morethan a decade in prison without accepting "re-education"). It might also seem that the loss ofsome of these people to the Cuban revolutionarycause is a slight loss indeed; for example, Jean-Paul Sartre's uncritical enthusiasm after a fewweeks' visit to Cuba in 1960 was at best very pre-mature and evoked a Voltairean image of Dr.Pangloss in the tropics. Nevertheless the Padillacase did point to something greater than itself.What it pointed to was the destruction of eventhe limited degree of freedom of discussion andcriticism which Castro had once seemed to acceptand the complete and open rupture this entailedwith the Western intellectual tradition.

Until these literary-political events occurred,the Cuban Revolution had been winning moreand more admiration for its feat of survival in ahostile sea and for its announced intention ofcreating an agrarian socialism that would realizethe Guevarist ideal of a "New Man" free of ego-ism and avarice and joyfully dedicated to laboringfor the common good. However fanciful these in-tentions may have been, they were given a certainplausibility by the heightened tenor of public lifein Cuba as compared with the gangsterism andcorruption of previous decades. Moreover, de-spite recurrent economic failures, the Castro re-

gime had delivered two dramatic and immediatebenefits to the poorest Cubans-education andfull employment-while providing more perva-sive and sophisticated attention to the peasantrythan that class enjoys in any other country of theregion.

EFORE the Revolution, the ethnog-rapher Fernando Ortiz wrote in his

classic Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar:

A large part of the working class of Cuba hasto live all year on the wages earned during twoor three months, and the whole lower class suf-fers from this seasonal work system, beingreduced to a state of poverty with an inade-quate, vitamin-deficient diet consisting prin-cipally of rice, beans, and tubers, which leaveit undernourished and the ready prey of hook-worm, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases.

This contrasts dramatically with the descrip-tion of the Argentine-born journalist Carlos Wid-mann 6 of his visit to a sugar mill in OrienteProvince on the eve of the 1970 harvest:

From the commercial point of view, the Revolu-tion is bad business. In the 1950's productioncosts per pound of sugar were between 3.8 andfour cents. Since the Revolution the cost ofCuban sugar has more than doubled. Abovethe noise of the Urbino Noris mill in Oriente,a young and good-natured foreman explainedthe situation to me: Before Castro, 960 milllaborers worked here three or four months peryear at $3.85 daily; in the nearby town therewas just one doctor and a private school forthe children of white-collar employees and afew year-round laborers. Today 1,200 men workin the mill all year at $5.20 per day, and havefree lunches, housing and schools for their chil-dren. Now there are eight doctors, and all thechildren go to school. It is easy to calculatethat the production costs at the mill havedoubled at least only through salary increasesand giving the men year-round work. Produc-tion, meanwhile, has declined at the mill from7,000 tons per day in 1957 to 6,500 now. "Buton the other hand, we have doubled the capacityof our machinery," the radiant foreman added."Next year we will produce 15,000 tons daily."Let God hear his words. In all of Cuba's 152sugar mills the situation is the same.

But God did not hear his words, and this wasthe scene of economic disintegration in Cuba de-scribed by Fidel Castro in his "self-critical"speech of July 26, 1970:

Industrial goods pile up in the provincial ware-house of the Ministry of Domestic Trade inHavana. The plan for transportation of raw

3 Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, Harper & Row, 1696pp., $20.00.

4 Hill & Wang, 624 pp., $12.50.5 See the interview with Castro in Lee Lockwood, Fidel's

Cuba, Cuba's Fidel (Macmillan, 1967), p. 205.6 Report aus Cuba (Munich, 1970).

HOW CASTRO FAILED/47

materials used for soaps and detergents, as wellas the finished product, was not fulfilled. Thetransportation of silica sand for the productionof cement and bottles, the transportation ofsteel bars, the transportation of fodder for theanimals on state farms and the transportationof bagasse for the paper factories in Las Villaswere insufficient. There was a work stoppagein the nail factory in Santiago de Cuba due toa lack in the transportation of raw materials;and the national fertilizer production plan wasnot met because of low extraction of the finishedproduct. There was a 36 per cent drop in thenumber of railroad passengers, compared with1969 in the January-May period, caused by thetransfer of locomotives to the sugar harvestand the withdrawal of coaches from circulationdue to lack of spare parts.... Our enemiesare jubilant and base their hopes on our prob-lems. We said they were right in this, that, andthe other. They are only wrong in one point:in thinking that the people have other alter-natives than the Revolution; in thinking thatthe people, seeing the difficulties of the Revolu-tion . . . would choose the road of counterrev-olution. [Shouts of "No!"] That is where theygo wrong! That is where nobody will concedethem the slightest grain of truth! That is theirmistake!

Dumont's book is full of sad spectacles, viewedthrough a specialist's eye, like that in the CautoValley of Oriente where "some hundreds of hec-tares of banana tress were dying because theyhad been planted in a much too wet locale withvery poor drainage. Any ordinary peasant wouldhave avoided this gross mistake; in a state enter-prise that justifies its existence only on thegrounds of its technical superiority, such an erroris inadmissible." Later on he writes:

The Castro regime first eliminated a capitalistagricultural system that had many defects-bothmen and land were underemployed-but wasquite efficiently organized. The new socialistagriculture, of cooperatives and state farms,mobilized all available resources and was mech-anized, even overmechanized, but it could notdevelop the same abilities for organizing work.Its failure is implicitly recognized in the presentreorientation-the Special Plans7 ....

7 The Special Plans are the pet projects of Castro andhis closest associates. AlbAn Lataste, a Chilean who spentsix years in Cuba and rose to Vice-Minister of the CentralPlanning Agency, says the Special Plans "tend to place theparty in the role of being directly responsible for opera-tional economic administration, displacing the regularorgans of the state." While other ruling Communist partiesconfine themselves to a leading role of "political orienta-tion, coordination, and control," the idea in Cuba "is toeliminate the separation between government and party,so the latter becomes the government itself." The SpecialPlans "follow budgetary methods, but without subjectingthemselves to budgetary discipline like other state enter-prises," thus diluting the scarce resources allotted to regulareconomic operations. (Cuba: Hacia Una Nueva EconomiaPolitica del Socialismo?-"Cuba: Toward a New SocialistPolitical Economy?")

A PART from analyzing the familiar butsurprisingly persistent economic fail-

ures, the three books by Thomas, Dumont, andKarol agree on two important conclusions: thatCuban society has been increasingly militarized,and that one-man rule has had a destructive im-pact on all efforts to develop civilian institutionsthat would consolidate a Marxist "dictatorship ofthe proletariat." Indeed, with each passing yearCuba appears less a socialist republic than a classicLatin American military dictatorship with Marx-ist-Leninist trappings. To the extent that a largeportion of the Cuban people still support theRevolution, their loyalty is not to the system butto Fidel. After thirteen years in power, Fidel'sgoverning style is still that of the guerrillero: hemaintains no office and is constantly in hiding oron the run, with only a few intimates knowinghis whereabouts at any given time and with noneed to account to anyone. According to Karol,"most ministers have adopted Fidel's peripateticstyle of life, so that it is extremely difficult tocatch any of them in their offices." Political powerremains so personalized that the ten-year-old Cu-ban socialist state is still without a constitutionand its Communist party has still to hold its firstcongress, which was announced for 1967 and thenmysteriously cancelled. The "party" is really Cas-tro and his train of courtiers, most of whom holdparty and government posts simultaneously.

Thomas calls Cuba's 200,000-man armed force"by far the largest military undertaking in LatinAmerica." Both the party and the economy havebeen so militarized that most of the hundredmembers of the party's central committee aremilitary officers, while the army's increasinglyprominent role in the economy has made it re-sponsible for the bulk of mechanized agriculture.In the cabinet shift that followed the failure ofthe "Ten-Million-Ton" harvest of 1970-only 8.5million tons were produced, at the cost of greathardship and dislocation-an army officer wasnamed Minister of Education. Following the Pa-dilla affair earlier this year, another army officer,from the political section of the Defense Minis-try-who was editor of the magazine which madethe first major attack on Padilla-was named headof the National Culture Council. Dumont writes of

a takeover by the army of a faltering socializedagriculture, for the army directs all motorizedactivities. .... As of March-April 1969, themen in charge of the machinery on the statefarms were replaced by lieutenants and themilitarized tractor drivers were assigned fixedwages (thereby eliminating overtime pay),military schedules, 25 days of continuous workwith no Sundays off, and a five-day leave oncea month-work permitting.... Militarizationwas pushed forward to cope with the generaldisorder, such as the passive resistance of agrowing percentage of unwilling workers. TheCuban people were made increasingly subser-vient to the party and the army, and it was


becoming more and more difficult to distinguishbetween the two inasmuch as both groups woreuniforms and carried revolvers.

As a journalist who has just completed his firstdecade of reporting from Latin America, I haveread Thomas, Dumont, and Karol with appre-hension and dismay. If the bleak picture theydraw, writing from three distinct points of view,is as accurate in its general outlines as I think itis-and as both the internal evidence of Castro'sown speeches and the testimony of such otherwriters of Marxist persuasion as Alban Latasteand Michel Gutelman s seems to suggest it is-then the rest of the hemisphere will once againhave to suffer a loss of hope in the possibility of arevolutionary solution to its terrible social andpolitical problems and may have to confront, as ageneral condition, the recurrent and expandingcounterrevolutionary terror and violence thathave been appearing in Latin America during thepast few years.9

II

HATEVER the long-range factors, theimmediate cause of the crisis in

Cuba was the zafra (sugar harvest) of 1970, withits goal of ten million tons. The Ten-Million-Tonzafra involved the most dramatic and importantpolitical mobilization in Cuba since the 1961 Bayof Pigs invasion. But this fevered mobilization in1970 had a rather lyric and speculative quality,like that of the long-delayed movement for Cubannational independence that began a century agoas Cuba was becoming thoroughly integrated intothe U.S. economy. And the same quality could befound in the boom-and-bust sugar cycles whichwere the only gamble possible in a one-cropeconomy that was always in debt to its foreignsuppliers, whether of slaves or of machinery,when the sugar industry was not owned outrightby foreigners. Of these cycles Thomas writes:

The sugar production of Cuba between 1850and 1925 mounted by an average of 8 per centa year, even though the country had sufferedtwo serious civil wars, one of them ruinous.This advance could be maintained if the world'sbuying power increased; and it did not. Hencethe origin of a whole series of fantasies whichFidel Casitro, Cuba's first international politicalfigure, would eventually satisfy.

Emerging as a national goal after the failure ofChe Guevara's Bolivian expedition to replace thereceding goal of continental revolution as Cuba'sgreat political objective, the Ten-Million-Tonzafra represented, in Castro's words, "far morethan tons of sugar, far more than an economicvictory; it is a test, a moral commitment for thecountry. And precisely because it is a test and amoral commitment we cannot fall short by even

a single gram of these ten millions...." To max-i.mize the accumulation of sugar for the great har-vest, cutting and grinding for 1970 actually beganin July, then was suspended a .few weeks later tostart again in October, a most unusual procedureon an island whose traditional zafra season is inthe dry months from January to April."'Throughout Cuba, men were summoned to battlein the canefields as if the country were at war.Before sunrise each day hundreds of thousandsof men and women with machetes filed quietlyalong country roads strewn with wasted scraps ofcane that filled the air with a pungent molasses-sweetness. Beneath the towering chimneys of thegreat sugar mills, built by the Americans but nowrenamed for revolutionary heroes, the enginesground day and night like great magnets polariz-ing all the energies of people in towns and fieldsfor miles around. Huge trucks moved slowly likeelephants in tandem along the fringes of thefields, dropping off students, office workers, pris-oners, and soldiers to cut cane among the greatphalanxes of uncut stalks, and picking up the cutstalks to deliver them to the mills. ThroughoutCuba, at mills and schools and government min-istries and army barracks, signs and posters pro-liferated bearing this simple legend: Palabra decubano: van: los diez milliones de toneladas van("A Cuban's word: they're coming: the ten mil-lion tons are coming") .

The urge to maximize sugar production be-comes understandable if we look back to a 1955study in which the Cuban National Bank esti-mated that to give the Cuban people in 1965 thestandard of living attained in 1947 a sugar cropof more than nine million tons, worth nearly $800million, would be needed. However, while theCuban population figure in 1965 was one millionhigher than the estimate of 6.5 million projectedby the National Bank a decade earlier, sugar pro-duction in the 1960's averaged roughly 5 per centper year below that of the previous decade. Forthe Castro regime, in a vain effort to break thetyranny of sugar monoculture, undertook a pro-gram of industrialization and agricultural diver-sification which, among other things, involved theuprooting of some 350,000 acres of cane. Thus,as Thomas notes, "the Cuban Revolution ne-glected in fact the only crop which, like it or

8 Gutelman is a Belgian economist who spent three yearsin Cuba drafting production programs for state far-ms, andhe is also the author of La Agricultura Socializada en Cuba("Socialized Agriculture in Cuba").

9For detailed accounts of this new right-wing para-military terror in Latin America, see my "Slaughter inGuatemala" and "Santo Domingo: The Politics of Terror,"New York Review of Books, May 20 and July 22, 1971respectively.

10The rains that normally come before January andafter May sharply dilute the sugar content in the cane.Dumont reports that this unseasonable harvest producedonly 200,000 tons of sugar with yields from the cane of5.5 per cent sucrose, compared with 11 or 12 per cent inthe regular harvest season.


not, they could live on in totalitarian conditions;for sugar can be cut by an army or by machinesand it is ground by an industrial proletariat." Yet,as Thomas also notes, "even if the ten milliontons had been achieved, Cuba would still havebeen producing less sugar per head of popula-tion than she was in 1925, while the long-termcosts of this grand Potemkin-type harvest cannoteasily be measured."

The strategy for the Ten-Million-Ton zafra wasdrafted at a meeting of the Cuban leadership inSanta Clara on November 26 and 27, 1966. Theregime's technicians pored over every aspect ofCuba's previous record harvest-7.3 million tonsduring 110 days of grinding in 1952-the waymilitary academy classes study one of Napoleon'sgreat battles. Since two-thirds of Cuba's 152 millswere built in the 19th century, the newest of themin 1927, and since maintenance of this equipmentin the early years of the Revolution had beenpoor, a task of enormous proportions was at hand.To expand the acreage, grinding, and transportcapacity of the mills so as to put them withinreach of producing ten million tons, the regimein 1965 had programmed investments adding upto more than one billion dollars, a sum greaterthan the total assets of the sugar industry in1965.11 New machinery was installed in scores ofmills, and sugar-cane acreage was to be expandedby 40 per cent, or an additional 3.5 million acres,with new cane varieties and fertilizers introducedto prolong the zafra into the rainy season. In theold U.S.-built mills, the cane was washed in newFrench filters, the sugar crystals separated in EastGerman centrifugal machines, loaded by Czechcranes onto Rumanian railroad cars which tookthem to the ports where new Japanese suction-loading equipment poured them directly into thehulls of Soviet ships. Even with these improve-ments, nearly 20 per cent of the harvest still hadto be hauled to the mills in oxcarts. All in all, thegreat harvest mobilized 36,000 oxcarts, 6,000 trac-tors, 6,000 trucks, 80 locomotives, and 29,000railroad cars.' 2

T HROUGHOUT the history of the Cubansugar industry, labor was always the

scarcest factor of production, and many expertsdoubted for that reason that the Castro regimewould be able to mobilize enough labor to bringin a harvest of ten million tons. Thomas writesthat during the sugar boom of the early 19thcentury, "slaves were the biggest single invest-ment on all Cuban sugar plantations," consti-tuting roughly one-third of the cost. Karol ex-plains the scarcity and low productivity of man-power in the zafras under Castro in this way:

Cuba no longer has the old professional ma-cheteros who can cut 400 to 500 arrobas [unitsof 25 pounds] of cane per day. These men havenow become independent thanks to the agricul-tural reforms or else they have moved to town

in search of more regular and less strenuousemployment .... In the past, whenever a par-ticularly good harvest was expected, Cuba wouldrecruit seasonal workers from Haiti or fromJamaica; her own labor force could not copewith any zafra greater than four to five milliontons. It goes without saying that since the Rev-olution the import of foreign semi-slaves hascompletely stopped. Who then cuts the cane?Much of the work is done by volunteers-soldiersand students . . . [and] every factory or depart-ment is expected to send part of its labor forceor staff into the fields on a rotational system....The norm (per volunteer) is now fixed at 100arrobas per day-i.e., at less than 25 per cent ofthe alleged output of a good machetero beforethe Revolution. And yet, most of the casuallaborers from the town seem to find it difficultto reach even that goal-Havana puts theiraverage output at 60 to 80 arrobas per day.These figures (from official sources) set a prob-lem in elementary arithmetic: if a five-million-ton zafra called for 400,000 macheteros cuttingsome 400 arrobas per day before the Revolution,how many nonprofessional macheteros, cuttingbetween 60 and 80 arrobas per day, are needed'to bring in a ten-million-ton zafra? The result isclearly beyond the capacity of a country with amere seven million inhabitants.... It shouldbe noted that, because the volunteers are paidtheir normal wages no matter how low theirsugar output, the zafra is a major generatorof inflation, and so helps to depress real wages.

Nevertheless, in Fidel Castro's detailed publicaccounts of the failure of the Ten-Million-Tonzafra, a manpower shortage was not given as oneof the reasons. In his speech of July 26, 1971,Castro recalled that some 360,000 macheteroswere mobilized at the peak of the 1970 harvest,and that most of Cuba's 315,000 secondary, tech-nical, and university students had been spendingfrom four to five months annually cutting cane.l3

If one adds to these some 130,000 professionalcanecutters, 100,000 army troops, and an unde-termined number of prisoners and detaineesawaiting expatriation to the United States, onecould conservatively calculate a work force ofmore than 700,000 for the 1970 zafra, apart fromthe industrial workers of the sugar mills. In histelevised speech of May 20, 1970, when he firstexplained why the ten million-ton goal would notbe reached, Castro said:

What very often happened was this: In Oriente

11 Gutelman observes that the ten million tons wouldhave been much more feasible in 1972 than in 1970, sincenew milling capacity could be installed and surroundinglands shifted into sugar without causing massive disloca-tions in the economy. As it turned out, some mills had highmilling capacity but insufficient cane, while others wereswamped with cane they could not process.

12 James Kutas, "La realidad del azzicar" ("The Realityof Sugar"), in Vision, September 12, 1969. Also MichelTorguy, "La Gran ZaIra" ("The Great Harvest"), ElUniversal, Caracas, March 24, 1970.

13 From Granma, Havana, July 27, 1971, p. 3.


Province, for example, all those giant sugarmills had all the necessary manpower, trucks,cane loaders, everything, waiting for the millsto reach their scheduled levels of grinding ca-pacity. The result? Constant breakdowns andstoppages. Therefore, in order not to have anaccumulation of cut cane lying on the ground, itwas necessary time and again to paralyze 40,000or 50,000 workers. Farmers mobilized from themountains of Baracoa or the Sierra Maestra,from all over, who had gone to these canefieldsmoved by tremendous enthusiasm, were askedto stop cutting. And this had a tremendousdemoralizing effect.... We-we alone-are theones who have lost the battle. The administra-tive apparatus and the leaders of the Revolutionare the ones who lost the battle. The peoplehave measured up to the ten million-and toeleven million as well.14

It seems, then, that the headlong rush to pro-duce ten million tons generated two major mis-calculations. First, the Castro regime's plannerswere, as usual, grossly over-optimistic in whattheir sugar yields were to be; indeed, the yieldsin 1970 seemed the lowest in thirty years. Second,large amounts of new equipment had been in-stalled in the mills without being properly tested,and so broke down at first use. When, said Castro,this began happening repeatedly in Oriente prov-ince, which contains the largest amount of caneand grinding capacity,

it was decided to call a halt on all road con-struction work on highways and mountainroads that was not directly related to the harvest,all the road-building equipment was con-centrated on the building of roads for haulingcane in that province. This concentration ofbuilding equipment included the equipmentwhich was getting ready to start the buildingof several dams.... The situation remainedunchanged in January and, therefore, thingswere getting worse. The railroad line in theGuiteras sugar mills was insufficient to handlethe problem. Now it was not a matter of 7.5million hundredweight but almost 17.5 millionhundredweight of cane left over, and no solu-tion in sight.

The frantic building of feeder roads and thelaying of railroad track in the midst of the greatharvest to save huge expanses of ripe sugar cane,taxing even further the overworked labor brigadesof volunteers and soldiers and prisoners, gave theTen-Million-Ton zafra an epic quality worthy of-the battle on the ice in Alexander Nevsky or Ce-cil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments. Theconsequences of this cinematic spectacle were de-scribed in Castro's speech of July 26, 1970:

In reality we have some debts pending withirony, with the illusion we have indulged in attimes. We have some debts pending with our

14 Fidel Castro, speech of May 20, 1970 (official transla-tion), Ediciones COR, Havana.

needs. We have debts pending with poverty.We have debts pending with underdevelopment.And we have debts unpaid with the suffering ofour people.... One of the many tragic thingsin our country . . . is our lack of cadres, ofmen with a high enough level of training andintelligence who are carrying out the complextasks of production. These tasks are apparentlyeasy. Most of the time we make the mistakeof minimizing the difficulties . . . and we haveseen this happen to a number of well-trainedcomrades, comrades well-known for their ironwill and their desire to do a good job . . . wehave seen them, in a specific task, going throughwhat is practically an apprenticeship that lastsone, two, or even three years before they beginto do an efficient job. If only we could solveour problems by simply replacing these men!We have to make changes. There is no questionthat many comrades have worn themselvesout.... I am in no way trying to pin the blameon anyone not in the revolutionary leadershipand myself. [Applause] Unfortunately, this self-criticism cannot be accompanied by other logicalsolutions. It would be better to tell the peopleto look for somebody else. [Shouts of "No!"] . . .I believe that we, the leaders of this Revolution,have cost the people too much in our processof learning. The people can replace us wheneverthey wish-right now if you so desire! [Shouts of"No!" and "Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!"] One of ourmost difficult problems-and we are paying forit dearly-is our heritage of ignorance.... Andif the enemy makes use of some of the thingswe say and causes us deep shame, let us welcomeit! [Applause] The embarrassment will be wel-come if we know how to turn the shame intostrength, if we know how to turn the shame intoa will to work, if we know how to turn theshame into dignity, and if we know how to turnit into morale [Applause and shouts of "Fidel,Fidel, Fidel!"]

However, Castro rehabilitated himself withintwo months. He fired his Sugar Industry Minister,and in September 1970 he told a provincial assem-bly of the Cuban Workers Confederation: "Thosetechnocrats, geniuses, super-scientists assured methat they knew what to do in order to producethe ten million tons. But it was proven, first, thatthey did not know how to do it and, second, thatthey exploited the rest of the economy by receiv-ing large amounts of resources ... while there arefactories that could have improved with a betterdistribution of those resources that were allocatedto the Ten-Million-Ton plan." This is what sev-eral of Castro's economic advisers had been sayingall the time.

III

HUGH THOMAS'S Cuba: The Pursuit ofFreedom is surely one of the finest

histories to be written in English in this century;it is the product of ten years of labor by a pro-digious talent who in 1961, at the age of twenty-


nine, had already published a 900-page classic,The Spanish Civil War. Not only does Thomas'sCuba give us the island's history in rich and vol-uminous detail; it also makes Cuba a kind of mi-crocosm of the struggle of tropical peoples, issu-ing from the poisoned womb of slavery, to achievea political economy that would transform anddignify traditional modes of labor.

The detonator of this social struggle was thegreat slave revolt in neighboring Haiti in the1790's (the first fully successful slave revolutionin modern history and an event to which the re-sponse in the rest of the Americas uncannily resem-bled the response to the Cuban Revolution nearlytwo centuries later) .

After the Haitian revolt was organized, underthe leadership of a black coachman named Tous-saint L'Ouverture, by means of voodoo drumstransmitting messages between the plantations,roughly 1,000 estates were destroyed and 2,000whites were killed (more victims, Thomas says,than under the guillotine of the French Revolu-tion). "The savagery and completeness of therevolution," Thomas writes, "was a revelation,though it would not 'have occurred in a colonyless filled with feverish hatreds, itself derivingfrom the recent import of a huge mass of newslaves and the arrival of new and anxious money-grubbing proprietors." In the ensuing years allof the slave economies of the New World feltthemselves threatened with an extension of theHaitian revolt which, on a lesser scale, was arecurrent experience in their own lands. Six dec-ades after the Haitian uprising, U.S. diplomats inEurope attempting to negotiate the purchase ofCuba from Spain reported back to the Secretaryof State in Washington:

We should be unworthy of our gallant forefathersand commit base treason against our posterityif Cuba were to be "Africanized" and becomeanother Santo Domingo [Haiti], with all its at-'tendant horrors to the white race, and suffer theflames to extend to our neighboring shores,seriously to endanger or actually destroy thefabric of our Union.

In view of the ever-present danger of a slaveuprising, Cuba refrained from participating inthe national independence movement led bySim6n Bolivar in Spanish America in which for-mer slaves played a critical role. The possibilitiesthus remaining to Cuba in the early 19th centurywere three: being ravaged by the kind of slaveuprising that had just occurred in neighboringHaiti, outright annexation by the United States,or the immediately easier course of remainingnominally within the Spanish empire while be-coming integrated into the U.S. economy. Theseeconomic ties had become so strong that in 1826-before the destruction of the Spanish empire inSouth America had been completed-783 of the964 ships that entered Havana harbor were Amer-ican. Throughout the 19th and early 20th cen-

turies there were powerful annexationist partiesin both Cuba and the mainland. Typical of thisattitude was Secretary of State John QuincyAdams's letter to the U.S. minister in Spain:

Cuba . .. has become an object of transcendentimportance to the commercial and political in-terests of our Union. Its commanding position... its safe and capacious harbor of the Havana. . . the nature of its productions and of itswants ... give it an importance in the sum ofour national interests with which that of noother foreign territory can be compared andlittle inferior to that which binds the differentmembers of the Union together.

Thomas concludes, and I agree, that annexa-tion would have been preferable to the ambig-uous condition of total economic dependence onthe U.S. and fig-leaf political sovereignty thatexisted from the departure of the Spanish in1898 until Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959.Several attempts at annexation by purchasenearly succeeded, but all foundered on questionsof race and slavery. In 1868, after the U.S. CivilWar ended the prospects of Cuba's being annexedas a slave territory and after a new revolutionoccurred in Spain, an insurrection seeking Cubanindependence and led mainly by white plantersbroke out in Oriente province. The independencerevolt soon developed social-revolutionary over-tones as fugitive slaves from Oriente proclaimedthemselves rebels. Among conservative financialbackers of the independence movement the fearbecame so strong that a "black republic" wouldbe founded by Antonio Maceo, the leadingmulatto general, that Maceo wrote in 1876 toCuba's provisional President: ". . . I must protestenergetically with all my strength that neithernow nor at any time am I to be regarded as anadvocate of a Negro Republic."

THE 1868 revolt finally was put downten years after it started, but as a re-

sult of it slavery was ended in Cuba and the econ-omy of the island became more and more closelytied to the United States. American merchants andengineers arrived, bringing with them new millmachinery that dramatically expanded grindingcapacity. American consortiums voraciously ab-sorbed Cuban mills and plantations; the UnitedFruit Co. was incorporated in 1899-the yearafter President McKinley sent troops to Cuba tosupport the second Cuban independence uprising-and immediately bought 200,000 acres of cheapland in Oriente. A U.S. military government wasorganized the same year, which brought in moneyand machines, civil servants, missionaries, andschoolteachers. One of the finest passages inThomas's long history is this vignette on thechildhood of dictator Fulgencio Batista, whichgives so vivid a sense of how the Cuban peoplelived from that time until the 1959 Revolution:

Batista's birth had been during the year (1901)


that the Boston mill had been built by theUnited Fruit Co. so that it is reasonable to sup-pose that his father (a sugar port laborer) hadgone there 'to seek work. Both Batista's parentsappear to have been mulatto. .. . The youngFulgencio had had a childhood both variedand disorganized. He went to a public schoolat Banes and afterwards to a Quaker school atnight: in 'the day he was already cutting cane.He left home at the age of 14 when his mother,Carmela, died, and worked on a sugar planta-tion at Holguin. Then he became water-boyat a plantation in San GermAn, and afterwardsthe timekeeper of a workgang. Thereafter, hewent back to Banes and worked as a cane cutter.After that, he lingered around the railway sta-tion at Dumois doing odd jobs for some time,and then went to the sugar port of Antilla.There a contingent of the army was posted,because of a threatened strike, real or suspected.Batista then began to work for the army, wash-ing bridles and again doing odd jobs. He wasknows as the mulato lindo (the pretty mulatto).He went on to Alto Cedro, working again as acane cutter, and then returned to Holguinwhere he became first a tailor's, then a car-penter's apprentice, and after that a hand boyat a barber's. He also for a time found workas a brakeman on the Consolidated Railways.This shiftless and feckless career was unusualonly in that most Cubans did not have suchgood fortune at finding new work as soon asthey had lost their old employment.

HE so-called Sergeants' Revolt of 1933,which Batista led while serving as an

army stenographer in Camp Columbia outsideHavana, was the most important political eventin Cuba during the 20th century until Fidel Cas-tro's rise to power. Sergeant Stenographer Batista,whose "knowledge of all parts of Cuba and allsections of society would make him when hegained revolutionary power a most formidableopponent," brilliantly channeled to his own endsthe student and popular agitation that led to thefall of Dictator Gerardo Machado, who was close-ly linked to U.S. sugar and financial interests.After Machado's fall, U.S. Ambassador SumnerWelles, Franklin Roosevelt's old school chumfrom Groton, became so frightened of a Com-munist takeover that he got on the phone toSecretary of State Cordell Hull in Washingtonthe day after the Sergeants' Revolt to ask for thelanding of U.S. Marines.' 5 Although this re-quest was refused, Washington steadfastly denieddiplomatic recognition to the government of Grau

15 Thomas reproduces the transcript of this remarkabletelephone conversation, which is strikingly similar to Pres-ident Johnson's version of his phone talk with AmbassadorWilliam T. Bennett in Santo Domingo before dispatchingU.S. troops there in 1965. A moderating influence onRoosevelt was exercised by Josephus Daniels, his Am-bassador to Mexico, who later labored so effectively toavoid an open rupture with Mexico over the expropriationof foreign oil firms.

San Martin (which had taken over in the wakeof the revolt) while U.S. banks refused to financeharvesting of the 1934 sugar crop. Grau retainedthe support of radical politicians and studentleaders like Carlos Prio, but he was ultimatelyforced to resign, clearing the way for a decade ofrule by Batista: six of these years manipulatingpuppets from behind the scenes at Camp Colum-bia and the rest in his glory as constitutionalPresident.

By the final year of Batista's first Presidentialterm (1940-44), amid the cordiality generatedby the Allied effort in World War II, the politicalrelations among the United States, Batista, andthe Communists who supported him had becomeso cozy that Blas Roca, then the Communists' Sec-retary-General and today a member of Cuba'sPolitburo, could write that "the imperialist erahas ended, as Sumner Welles has pointed out."Thomas observes that, although he enriched him-self greatly,

Batista's national regime left behind a statewhere, it seemed, in the shadow of the NewDeal, the most overt and outrageous side of U.S.involvement in Cuba had been removed andwhere the state had made an apparently deci-sive step towards a form at least of socialism.There were few countries in the Americaswhere the trade unions were so well establishedand exercised such a powerful role.

Batista had respected his own 1940 constitu-tion-one of the landmark democratic charters inLatin America-and thus could not put acrosshis own candidate to succeed him. Back came theold popular idol Grau San Martin, and that wasthe beginning of the end. Thomas writes:

The trust which the people of Cuba had in[Grau] was wasted in a revel of corrupt govern-ment which . . . exceeded that of Batista. Al-ready a rich man because of an extensive private[medical] practice and the fortune which heinherited from his father, Grau turned his pres-idency into an orgy of theft ill-disguised byemotional nationalistic speeches. He did morethan any other single man to kill the hope ofdemocratic practice in Cuba.

Thus, for example, Grau's Education Minister ar-rived in Miami in 1948 with $20 million in hissuitcase after just two years in Grau's cabinet. Andwhen Grau himself was accused of corruption byhis successor, Carlos Prio, he demanded a publicinvestigation to clear his name, but as soon as thehearing had begun six masked men broke intothe courtroom with guns and stole thirty-five filesof evidence. Throughout the Grau and PrioPresidencies gangsterism and political assassina-tion were rife, especially in the labor movementand the universities. Rolando Masferrer, the ex-Communist who was then a pro-government Sen-ator and later, with his private army of "Tigers,"a pillar of Batista's second dictatorship, "rodearound Cuba in his Cadillac like a pirate king,


surrounded by bodyguards." When a friend ob-jected to him that his prospective 1952 Presiden-tial candidate was a gangster, Masferrer replied:"Yes, chico, but we're all gangsters. What do youexpect? This isn't Europe. Only Chibas is not agangster and he's mad."

Senator Eduardo ChibAs, a wealthy former stu-dent leader, was the most brilliant orator of thetime and yet another Cuban messiah; he wasleader of the opposition to Prio, and his greattheme was corruption. But unable to prove somecharges he had made against the Education Min-ister, he delivered a hysterical radio speech andseconds later shot himself in the stomach. Chibis'ssuicide hastened the fall of Prio in much thesame way as the self-immolation of the bonzes inSaigon a dozen years later led to the collapse ofthe Diem regime. Batista had already announcedhis Presidential candidacy for the 1952 elections,but under pressure from friends he decided tostage a coup a few months before the election.Thomas concludes:

Batista had always been popular outside edu-cated circles in the past and something re-mained of that popularity; and then, who caredabout the fall of Prio outside the constitutionalmiddle class? Chibis had done his work ofdestruction too well: no one believed in Prio'ssystem. Most indeed settled to accept Batistawith relief.

A year after Batista's coup of March 1952, theCuban historian Herminio Portell Vili met aformer student of his, Fidel Castro, in a Havanabar and was told by the young man that heplanned to strike a spectacular psychologicalblow at Batista by attacking the Moncada armybarracks at Santiago. The professor tried to dis-courage Castro, but the attack was carried out onJuly 26, 1953 as the kind of operatic gesture wor-thy of Chibas and Marti. But Fidel Castro sur-vived, and this has always been the difference. Ofthe 111 men participating in the attack, 68 werekilled, but Castro's political career was launched.

IDEL CASTRO was the kind of youngman that Latin American Commu-

nists like to speak of as having "a low politicalculture." His father, like Batista's, had been a la-borer for the United Fruit Co. in Oriente, butAngel Castro was white--a veteran of the 200,000-man Spanish army that had come to suppress theCuban insurrection of 1895-and as a UnitedFruit caretaker "hacked his farm out of forest,perhaps sometimes on moonless nights, perhapsby stealing title deeds." Fidel was the second offive children born to Angel Castro's cook, whomhe later married after his first wife died. AngelCastro grew rich and sent Fidel to the aristo-cratic Colegio Belen, run by the Jesuits in Ha-vana, where he obtained high marks without

much effort and won a prize in 1943-44 as Cuba'sbest all-around schoolboy athlete.

When Castro entered the University of Havanahe plunged at once into the gangsterized studentpolitics of the time. Within a week he got him-self elected president of his first-year class in theLaw Faculty after challenging the student bodypresident to a fight, then tried to form a cabalamong the other class presidents to oust the olderleader. In 1947 he participated in an abortiveinvasion of the Dominican Republic by Domin-ican exiles and Cuban "action groups." Severalmonths later he was arrested, but then released,in connection with the gangland-style murder ofManolo Castro (no relation) who was State Sec-retary of Sports and virtual dictator of the Uni-versity of Havana. Shortly thereafter, in April1948, he was in Bogoti with a student delegationprotesting the Pan American ministerial confer-ence there to organize the Organization of Amer-ican States when the Colombian liberal idol JorgeEliecer GaitAn was fatally shot, leading to theterrible Bogotazo, a long orgy of looting andshooting that cost an estimated 3,000 lives.' 6

Summing up Castro's career in student politics,Thomas says:

The revolutionary violence which had charac-terized the students who had overthrown Ma-chado [in 1933] never lost its fundamentallyromantic appeal. The future leader of theCuban socialist revolution was bloodied in pol-itics during the machine-gun and big-car erain the time of Grau and, whatever part he per-sonally played, it is evident that he learnedmuch about the nature of Cuban political in-stitutions, their feebleness, their susceptibilityto violence and 'their corruption.

Nevertheless, neither this nor any other book hasundertaken to explain why the pervasive gang-sterism and corruption of traditional Cuban pol-itics disappeared so suddenly following Castro'srise to power in 1959.

Given this background, it is indeed remark-able that in succeeding years Fidel Castro wasable to generate a mystique about himself as therevolutionary savior of Cuba. Yet while there isstill about him something of the style of the stu-dent leader writ-large, the charisma of his publicpersonality was created with the Moncada attackin 1953, his spectacular trial defense and year injail, his exile in Mexico and the two-year guer-rilla insurrection in the Sierra Maestra that ledto his triumphant march across the island andinto Havana in January 1959. Thanks to HerbertMatthews of the New York Times who secretly

16 Castro's presence in Bogota at the time has often beencited as "proof" that he was always a Communist. However,after reviewing the evidence, Thomas concludes, "It is truethat Castro did get involved in the riots, but obscure howmuch fighting he did; it is evidently incorrect to supposethat Castro was an agent of the riots...."


went to the mountains of Oriente in February1957-barely two months after Castro had estab-lished himself in the Sierra Maestra!-the youngrebel was transformed in the public mind from ahunted guerrillero whose survival was doubtedeven by his own followers to an "invincible"prophet on a mountaintop, "an educated, dedi-cated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and ofremarkable qualities of leadership." Matthews'sexaggeration of the size of Castro's force, an errorhard to avoid in this kind of situation, helpeddraw more city people into the revolutionarycause. By mid-1957 the heads of the CIA stationin Havana were supporting Castro, and explicitlyencouraged the September 1957 naval mutiny inCienfuegos that was organized by Castro's July26th Movement.

The apogee of Castro's popularity with the CIAcame during his April 1959 visit to Washington,when he was prevailed upon to meet the agency'schief expert on Communism in Latin America,a Central European named Droller, who waslater to appear in Miami as the famous "Mr.Bender," the CIA's operational chief directingthe preparations for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.However, when Mr. Bender emerged from histhree-hour meeting with Castro in 1959, he toldthe Cuban Finance Minister: "Castro is not onlynot a Communist, he is a strong anti-Communistfighter."

Castro seems to have realized very early that toconsolidate his personal power two steps wereneeded: the delivery of dramatic and immediatebenefits to Cuba's poorer classes, and a disen-gagement from the political influence of theUnited States. So house rents and installmentpayments were cut in half, loan-sharks were ar-rested, racially-segregated clubs and beaches wereopened to all, army barracks were turned intoschools, popular militias were organized, and ex-propriated haciendas became workers' coopera-tives. All this was accompanied by guerrilla-likeskirmishing, featuring both blandishments andrecriminations, with U.S. business and diplomaticinterests in Cuba, until a complete break oc-curred in 1961. But the program never worked.According to Thomas:

The political revolution following the captureof power in 1959 was 'to have been accompaniedby, first, an immediate increase in standards ofliving; second, a rapid industrialization; andthird, a switch away from that emphasis on sugarwhich had played for so long such a large and,as many thought, destructive part in Cubansociety. None of these things occurred.

Instead, the prophecy made thirty years beforeby Cuba's leading historian was being fulfilled:"The day that Cuba finally becomes one hugecane plantation, the republic and its sovereign-ty will vanish, and we are embarked on thiscourse."17

IV

S. KAROL is one of those true believ-. ers who worships Revolution like a

distant star but finds great difficulty in coming toterms with its tarnished, earthly realities. Al-though Karol's book, Guerrillas in Power. is ser-iously flawed by prejudice and errors of fact thatare wrought by his livid hatred for the SovietUnion, it is of considerable value as a chronicleof the changes in the Cuban Revolution sinceChe Guevara's death in Bolivia in October 1967.

Karol, having just published a book praisingthe Chinese Cultural Revolution, returned toCuba in mid-1967 for the first time in six yearsto discover that a "Cuban heresy" was beingbrashly advanced by Fidel Castro under the nosesof his Soviet benefactors. In the almost giddy at-mosphere of the founding conference of the Lat-in American Solidarity Organization (OLAS)-a kind of Castroite Comintern for guerrilla insur-rections-under huge portraits of Che, who wasstill fighting in Bolivia, Castro told Karol: "Iwonder whether Lenin did not make a mistakein signing the peace of Brest-Litovsk. Whoknows what might not have happened, had theyoung Soviet Republic taken the risk of waginga revolutionary war, thus helping the Westernproletariat to free itself." President OsvaldoDortic6s, a Communist in his youth and later awealthy lawyer and commodore of the Cien-fuegos Yacht Club, and yet described by Karol as"a man of very great simplicity who has takenChe Guevara's place as the top theorist of CubanCommunism," also told him:

We are about to build Communism. The aim ofour revolution is not to build a socialist state,but to move with minimum delay toward fullCommunism. It is pure illusion to think thatCommunism will come automatically, just assoon as the conditions are right. We have toprepare for it here and now, by partial trans-formations of our society.

When Karol asked him if that meant there werefundamental differences between the Cuban andRussian views, Dortic6s replied: "Well, yes. Wehave our little heresy."

This "Cuban heresy" meant, in essence,"armed struggle" throughout Latin America andsimultaneous construction of socialism and Com-munism at home. The move toward Communismmeant attempts at eradicating the last vestigesof capitalism in Cuba, shifting from "material"to "moral" production incentives, espousing Gue-vara's ideal of the "New Man" (as best ex-pounded in his last essay "On Man and Social-ism in Cuba"), and eliminating the use of

17 From Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and Societyin the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agricul-ture. Originally published, Havana, 1927; English edition:Yale University Press, 1964.


money for such public services as water, electric-ity, phones, sports events, movies, and housing.Said Castro to Karol:

Listen to me. The Chinese may be doing in-teresting experiments but we are trying to gomuch farther than they have. Money remainsat the core of their social program, even thoughits sights are set on equality while the Russiansdeliberately encourage differences in income.We intend to get rid of the whole money myth,rather than tamper with it. We want to abolishmoney altogether.

EFLECTING upon this "Cuban heresy,"Cuba's Soviet allies might well have

found echoes of their own recent past. Guevara's"New Man" after all was not very different fromKhrushchev's "New Soviet Man" as described inthe Soviet Communist party's 1962 program, whichalso promised the abolition of money as part of arapid march toward Communism. The ascendan-cy of moral over material incentives was a majorfeature of the Soviet experience in the late 1920'sand 1930's, symbolized by the Stakhanovite super-workers glorified during Stalin's first great indus-trialization drive. The Cuban Stakhanovites arethe "millionaire cane-cutters,"' 8 as well as thespecial brigades of labor heroes such as the 24,000-member Centennial Youth Column of Cama-guey and the Mariana Grajales Feminine Brigadeof Macheteras.19 However, even though moralincentives operate through a romanticization ofwork, they tend to breed feelings of resentmentand degradation among the workers themselves.Soviet workers in the 1930's occasionally smashedmachines and murdered Stakhanovite labor he-roes; Dumont reports a similar reaction fromCuban workers when

84 Soviet tractors arrived in Oriente in thespring of 1969 equipped with headlights fornight work. Tractor-drivers working at nightgenerally live in overcrowded barracks with badventilation, very hot during the day, makingit very hard to sleep well. To avoid night work,some of them unscrewed the headlights and tossed-them into the canals. This was not the CIA atwork, or counterrevolutionary sabotage, but asimple reaction of self-defense by exhausted peo-ple, of resistance against efforts demanded ofthem which, if they are not labor heroes, werefelt by some to be excessive and badly com-pensated.

Be all that as it may, the rhetoric of "the Cu-ban heresy" quickly receded into the backgroundfollowing Che's death in Bolivia just two monthsafter the OLAS conference. At the same timePravda published an article by the ArgentineCommunist theoretician Rodolfo Ghioldi attack-ing "petit-bourgeois nationalists" for their "ex-treme adventurism" and for "creating the con-cept of local or continental exception in order tojustify deviations from Marxist-Leninist teach-

ings."20 Karol says the Russians later apologizedto the Cubans for the article. Nevertheless, amove toward Soviet orthodoxy seems to have be-gun with Guevara's death and to have gainedmomentum with Castro's very qualified endorse-ment of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakiaten months later.2 '

In January 1968, soon after Karol's return toHavana, there occurred the so-called "microfac-tion" trial of Anibal Escalante and other leadersof the old Partido Socialista Popular (PSP),Cuba's pre-revolutionary Communist party.Karol's account of this sensational political trialis very sketchy, but the documents published inthe party newspaper Granma at the time are ex-tremely revealing. Escalante, who organized theCastro regime's first revolutionary political ap-paratus before he was purged in 1962 for "sectar-ianism" and power-grabbing, 2 2 was accused be-fore the Central Committee by Defense MinisterRaul Castro of leading a pathetic corridor con-spiracy of ex-PSP cadres who met secretly atwakes and funerals and at the farm Escalantewas managing. The conspirators agreed that theCuban Revolution was being run by "petit-bour-

18A millionaire cane- cutter has cut one million arrobas(one arroba=25 lbs.) of cane; Cuba has its double andtriple millionaire macheteros.

19See, for example, "Tres Aos de CJC," in Bohemia,Havana, July 9, 1971, p. 34. The Centennial Youth Columnwas one of Castro's astute political maneuvers, sendingmany thousands of working-class youth to study trades, cutcane, and clear lands in Camaguey Province, a naturallyrich but underpopulated and traditionally conservative area.The earlier mass mobilizations of the Cuban Revolutionhave been analyzed in Richard Fagen's The Transformationof Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford University Press,1969).

20 This article is quoted more fully in my "The Legacyof Che Guevara," COMMENTARY, December 1967.

21In that speech, while supporting the invasion, Castroaudaciously censured the Soviet Union with the question:"Could it be imagined that at the end of 20 years of Com-munism in our country-of Socialist revolution-a groupof honest revolutionaries in this country, terrified at theprospects of a retrogression toward counterrevolutionarypositions and imperialism, would see the need of askingthe aid of friendly armies to prevent such a situation fromoccurring? Cuban visitors and scholarship students havemany times returned [from Eastern Europe] saturatedwith dissatisfaction. They have said the youth there arehighly influenced by all the ideas and all the tastes ofthe Western European countries; in many places there theyonly speak about money; in many places all they talkabout is material incentives of all sorts, about profits andwages; and really an internationalist, a Communist aware-ness is not being developed."

22 An excellent analysis of the 1962 "Escalante Affair" isgiven by Theodore Draper in his "Five Years of Castro'sCuba," COMMENTARY, January 1964, and in his books,Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities and Castroism:Theory and Practice (Praeger, 1962 and 1965). Escalantehad served a long apprenticeship in Russia during the1930's; he was the PSP's Organizational Secretary and theeditor of its newspaper Hoy from its founding in 1938until 1959. He was also, at the beginning, one of the fewPSP leaders to urge party support for Castro's guerrillainsurrection.


geois elements," that Che Guevara was a "Trot-skyite" whose departure from Cuba was "a salu-tary event for the Revolution," that promotionof guerrilla activities in Venezuela was "an adven-ture." They allegedly had said: "No one under-stands Fidel: he is mad." But much more impor-tant was Escalante's prediction that Cuba wouldfail to reach its 1970 harvest goal of ten milliontons, and thus would be driven decisively underthe influence of the Soviet Union. According tothe published statement attributed to OctavioFernandez, a key "microfaction" member:

Anibal explained that from 1970 on the dif-ficulties will increase because economically wewon't be able to reach the ten million tons ofsugar, since the measures needed to achieve thisare not being taken and the rhythm of presentzafras shows that we will have to increase by fourmillion tons in two years. The scarcity of bothfood and industrial products will not be re-lieved as planned, and for all this the offersmade to the people will not be realized, suchas the freedom from rents in 1970. Politically,the Latin American Communist parties willbe stronger . . . and they will be in conditionto direct more fully the struggle in their respec-tive countries.... With respect to the SovietUnion, we will become much closer in all policy,eliminating a series of discrepancies that wepresently have....23

It is fairly clear that Castro used the "micro-faction" trial to get rid of his pro-Soviet opposi-tion inside Cuba and show himself again as ab-solute master of the island while, at the sametime, yielding to irresistible pressures to reach acloser understanding with the Soviet Union. Butit also appears that poor Escalante was right.Not only did the 1970 harvest fail and not only dothe acute shortages of consumer goods continue,but the position of the pro-Soviet Communistparties in Latin America has been greatlystrengthened by the Chilean Communists' keyrole in the 1970 election victory and the UnidadPopular government of Salvador Allende inChile. Moreover, the second fall of Escalante hasbeen followed by both a militarization of the Cu-ban economy and society and an open break withWestern intellectual tradition, which means thatthe libertarian pretensions of the Cuban Revolu-tion are at an end.

V

HE "pursuit of freedom," in Thomas's1 phrase, is over, then, but the question

of survival remains. Survival in itself has beenthe greatest achievement of the Cuban Revolu-tion which, despite many errors and privations,apparently has conserved the consent of the gov-erned to an appreciable degree without any ex-ternal coercive force, such as the presence of for-eign troops. Cuba under Castro-like the SovietUnion-has been spared the internal convulsions

suffered by the Western democracies, and espe-cially the United States, in the past ten years. Onereason for this relative stability is that the regimeenjoys a monopoly of propaganda, political or-ganization, and armed force, which makes anyalternative to what already exists almost incon-ceivable. But the social fabric of Soviet-style re-gimes is also tightened-intentionally or not-byrestricted personal consumption, excesses ofwhich have seriously undermined the cohesionof Western societies through the exaggerated in-dividualism of its members. While Soviet-typesocieties, including Cuba, have characteristicallyfailed to attract or generate enough technologyto compensate for their burdensome social over-head costs and deficient human motivation, theydo seem to be equipped with the internal con-trols to deal with the declining ration of goodsthat must come with the projected doublingof world population in the next three decades.Such controls will become more important asmankind's political economy is governed increas-ingly by the ethos of stability instead of growth.

These longer-range considerations, of course,cannot begin to justify the fact that the Cubanfamily of today is rationed to one roll of toiletpaper, 2.5 cakes of soap, and one package of de-tergent per month. Moreover, despite the factthat in this decade Cuba has received more eco-nomic aid per capita than any nation on earth,with an incredibly high investment rate of nearly30 per cent of GNP, mainly in agriculture, theisland's food production has declined in per-cap-ita, and perhaps also in absolute, terms since1958.24

It is true that the incapacity to absorb newcapital resources rationally is not confined toCuba alone among the Latin American countries.It is also true that great social revolutions, left tothemselves, tend to revert initially to simpler so-cial forms. Thus Cuba's shift back from an ur-banized, commercial society to a plantation econ-omy resembles the return to African-style sub-sistence agriculture after the Haitian slave revolt,the revival of pre-industrial forms of mineral ex-ploitation after the tin mines were nationalizedin Bolivia, and the peasant ejido (or communalland-ownership) after the civil war and agrarianreform in Mexico. Cuba, however, is in theunique and especially difficult position of beingthe first of the traditional export economies ofLatin America to become part of the socialist

23 Granma, January 31, 1968, p. 2.24 Cuban economic statistics are often ambiguous and

contradictory. The most careful scholarly studies of Cuba'srevolutionary economy are by Professor Carmelo MesaLago of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Inter-na.tional Studies. See his "Availability and Reliability ofStatistics in Socialist Cuba," Latin American Research Re-view, Vol. IV, Nos. I & 2 (1968), and his essays on centralplanning and production in an anthology edited by him,Revolutionary Change in Cuba: Polity, Economy andSociety (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971) .


system, divorced from its neighbors and naturalmarkets, a hardship that the new socialist gov-ernment of Chile is trying to avoid.

Economically, the Cuban Revolution seems nowto be doubly cursed. On the one hand, the elim-ination of businessmen, technicians, and foreigncapital has deprived Cuba of the very respectablegrowth of manufacturing that has been achievedby other Latin American export economies likeChile, Peru, and Venezuela. On the other hand,although the Ten-Million-Ton zafra of 1970 wasundertaken in the same spirit as other greatsurges of socialist nation-building like China'sGreat Leap Forward, Stalin's industrializationdrive of the 1930's, and Khrushchev's New Landsand petrochemical production campaigns of the1950's, and although they too failed to reachtheir stated goals, the difference is that they werepart of an extraordinary process of capital ac-cumulation and industrialization in large nationsthat were historically self-sufficient in supplyingtheir internal markets, while Cuba's conversionto sugar socialism has involved a process of de-capitalization of the economy as a whole. The is-land has been left with an over-specialized, under-productive export economy that shows a decliningcapacity to pay for the imported supplies onwhich Cuba has always depended, and on whichit depends even more today.

As a result of the growing discontent stemmingout of this economic disaster, Fidel Castro hashad no choice but to expand his repressive ap-paratus. The recent penetration of the "RebelArmy" into key positions of economic, govern-mental, and party control is strikingly similar to

the increasing military-political power in Chinaof Lin Piao and the "Party Soldiers" which beganin the disarray following the Great Leap Forwardof the late 1950's and which was consummated bythe Cultural Revolution. 2 5 Indeed, Fidel andMao share an affinity for militarism and popu-lism that characteristically leads them to trustmore in the army or in great popular mobiliza-tions than in an entrenched party apparatus. InChina the deification of Mao in combinationwith the spread of much real power among pro-vincial military commanders has overtones oftraditional Confucianism and warlordism; inCuba the absolutism of Castro and his militaryretainers suggests the traditional cultural form ofthe Latin American caudillo.

For the Cuban Revolution, however, the assign-ment of the military to production tasks is a des-perate and dangerous move that could severelytest the army's loyalty if the economic mess con-tinues. This underlines the fact that Fidel Castrohas survived in power so far by personal politicalbrilliance, while neglecting the work of institu-tionalization that might have given the CubanRevolution a life of its own, and that might inaddition have prevented the squandering of thegood will and economic resources both of its ownpeople and of its friends abroad. This may in theend constitute the real tragedy of the Castro re-gime.

25 The militarization of the Chinese Communist partyis ably described by Ralph L. Powell in his "The IncreasingPower of Lin Piao and the Party Soldiers 1959-66,"China Quarterly, No. 34, April-June 1968.

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