Fidel Castro
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Bad Times, Good Times
War and peace with Moscow
With Che Guevara’s death, Castro lost not only a friend but an ideological mentor. As if to scotch the rumors, he demonstrated how strong the substantive agreement between the two men had been until the end, and how much their old friendship had survived differences in practical politics, when in November 1967 he again declined to take up an invitation to Moscow. This time, moreover, it was the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution for which he sent a third-rank delegation in his stead.
Shortly afterwards, Castro provoked the Kremlin with a frontal attack on the arrested development of its orthodox brand of Marxism. Pay related to productivity, as well as the obligation for enterprises to prove their economic viability within a planned economy, reminded him of the old capitalist days. He therefore called for advances to the next stage, where the “new man” would be a central feature. The spirit of Che Guevara seemed to be finding a voice.
In Castro’s eyes, the cautious reforms under Brezhnev in the Eastern bloc, especially in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, were further decentralizing the state-directed economy and introducing market elements into the system, thereby discreetly opening it up to the West and even to a more extensive regression. Castro’s more centralist view favored national accumulation of the economic results that enterprises were able to achieve – whether these showed a gain or a loss. Investment in further development, and the funding of social policy, should also remain centrally controlled; only this could ensure that surpluses were fairly distributed, and that the whole population, both urban and rural, had access to healthcare, education and training, as well as housing fit for human habitation.
In mid-January 1968, at the end of a week-long international cultural congress in Havana that won him and his colleagues considerable attention, Castro took the opportunity to put Moscow-style attitudes in the ideological dock before several hundred artists and intellectuals from 70 countries, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell:
There can be nothing so anti-Marxist as dogma. There can be nothing so anti-Marxist as the petrifaction of ideas. And there are ideas that are even put forward in the name of Marxism that seem real fossils.… Marxism needs to develop, overcome a certain sclerosis, interpret the realities of the present in an objective and scientific way, behave like a revolutionary force and not like a pseudo-revolutionary church.1
Filled with disquiet, Castro made a statement to the effect that the working people were growing ever more distant and alienated from the real goal of an ideal classless society no longer ruled by money. Finally, he delivered a sweeping blow against the orthodox Communist parties, charging that they “remained completely removed from the struggle against imperialism,” and that they preferred slavishly to follow the Soviet Union rather than take part in the “just struggle.” “These groups,” he went on, had not once raised “the banner of Che” since his death, and would “never be able to die like him, or to be true revolutionaries like him.”2
The real reason why Castro had stayed away from the October celebrations in Moscow, and why he now decided to launch a blistering attack, was that Moscow had some responsibility for the fact that Cuba stood on the brink of economic collapse. Not only had Soviet deliveries been unreliable; in October, Moscow had denied a request that it should raise its oil exports to Cuba by 8 percent and replace the existing annual trade agreements with one lasting three years. Evidently intending to punish Castro for his lack of discipline, the Soviets then let the time pass when a trade agreement was due to be signed for 1968. Since Cuba was totally dependent upon Soviet oil supplies, Castro found himself compelled in January 1968 to announce precautionary rationing.
Nevertheless, the Soviets were only part of the problem. The Cubans themselves were the other part. Serious planning mistakes combined with erratic corrections and repeated improvisation, incompetence and mismanagement, constant interference by the Máximo Líder at every level, rash compliance with his spontaneous ideas and suggestions (which, though often correct, were not adequately coordinated) had been leading to chaos, especially in agriculture. In the end there was too little capital, and too little efficiency, to fulfill all the ambitious hopes. The last straw was that small businesses and small farmers had established a parallel economy in the shape of a flourishing black market, which was putting too much into the pockets of traders rather than those of the revolution.
The Soviets and their East European allies, who could rely on strong diplomatic missions to keep a tight and closely coordinated watch on events, and who for nearly a decade had been discussing and agreeing among themselves the level of political, economic, and military support to extend to Castro, continued to blame him personally for the problems in the economy. Nothing in his autocratic style of leadership seemed to have changed in the intervening years. Ever since 1960 GDR diplomats, for example, had been critically informing East Berlin of his “partisan manner” and lack of a socialist team spirit, and it may be worth quoting a few of their reports to help us understand the developing tensions between Cuba and the Eastern bloc. The way in which they characterized Castro over the years shifted between mounting irritability and resignation, giving a vivid impression of the cultural peculiarities and mentalities that clashed with each other at an international level.
It is interesting that the phenomenon of fidelismo is never mentioned in the reports, although, for the broad mass of the population, it is not “Marxism-Leninism” but this concept signifying the opposite of collective leadership which still today defines the political system in Cuba. The Cubans’ identification with fidelismo means identification with a caudillo, with a figure who embodies and defends the national consciousness, whether as a Christian, a Marxist-Leninist, or a democrat. The caudillo is the product of their thinking; he is the nation’s father figure, a patriarch, who may have his shortcomings but is still trusted and obeyed. Cubans, like most Latin Americans, have traditionally known how to cope with such a figure better than with a seemingly anonymous collective leadership, whether in a Communist or a democratic system. Lack of due consideration for this factor created a permanent misunderstanding of the Cuban Revolution and its leader – and not only in East European capitals.
For years, then, the GDR reports complained about the lack of “collective work in the leadership of the Party and state apparatus,” without making the effort to find anything deeper than the trivial notion that that was what Castro was like. We read, for instance, in one confidential report from the GDR embassy in May 1964:
He has not yet overcome … his original strong inclination to a partisan style of work, to nationalism and left radicalism, to personal decision-making on all important matters, to subjective evaluation of trends and their causes, to decisions purely his own on how to guide the popular masses from a basically emotional point of view (through speeches, discussions, etc.), to a dramatic “letting off steam” against the “main enemy” in difficult situations, and his violent reaction to suggested corrections of certain of his ideas and practices.3
In any event, it was recognized that “his person … is still surrounded with the legendary glory of a people’s hero, of the leader of all Cuba’s revolutionary forces,” and that there was no way of getting around him. The “genuine and complete support of the broad masses” for Castro remained “very strong.” “They have confidence in him, and equate the leading role of the Party with his behavior.” This made it “even more difficult” for older leading comrades “to make effective corrections.” He had a following especially among those strong “circles of middle functionaries, who have taken few or no steps to become real Marxist-Leninists.” Against this background, “the holding of the Party’s founding congress [and conversion of the PURS into the PCC] was still seriously in doubt in 1964.”
The founding congress eventually took place in 1965, but even then it seemed more like a token event to keep Moscow and its sate
llites happy. The PCC leadership was, of course, not properly elected but chosen by Castro. And he kept his East European friends waiting another ten years before the first regular Party congress, originally scheduled for 1967 at the latest, met to adopt a program and statutes. So far, the East German comrades remarked, “Fidel Castro’s speeches” constitute the “fundamental programmatic basis of ideological and political work;”4 and for the time being there were no signs of a learning process, selfdiscipline, or readiness for a collective style of work, as required by the Party doctrine to which he now subscribed. As the Soviet embassy noted at the end of 1964, Fidel Castro himself remained “the root of all the considerable difficulties and imperfections.” He still wanted “to have the only say in deciding all important issues,” and had “evidently taken great pains to ensure that no one (not even his brother Raúl or a Party leadership committee) encroached upon his towering position on the inside or the outside.” In a confidential report on a conversation with the Soviet deputy ambassador, his GDR colleague wrote back to headquarters that the Soviets did not think Castro was truly prepared “to develop collective leadership activity,” because he did not want to “subject himself to the resulting discipline” or to encourage this in “the leading cadres around him, who are even more petty-bourgeois than he is.”5
Castro’s leadership style, marked by “constant suspicion” of other officials and “deficient knowledge about members of his own council of ministers,” resulted in some “extremely curious phenomena.” Thus, at one session of the Cuban Council of Ministers, at which Finance Minister Rom gave a report on the financial situation, “Fidel Castro listened to the report … and eventually asked the man seated next to him who this Rom was and whether he might have connections with the counterrevolution; after all, he (Rom) knew very many internal details about the country’s economic situation, and that was a danger for the Revolution.” In Cuba at that time, noted the comrades from the Eastern bloc, the type of functionary who prospered and found favor with the head of state was one who eagerly obeyed his every wink or nod. All of them reported for duty with the slogan: “Comandante en fefe, ordene!” [Commander-in-chief, give us your orders!]. The Soviets regarded Ramiro Valdés, the interior minister in charge of state security, as an example of this kind of official.
In the end, however, for higher reasons of strategy, Moscow learned to live with the Caribbean party leader and his peculiarities, to accept him as he was. Whether or not the Cuban Party develops “in the way we know from our own parties, and the corresponding path of socialist construction is taken in Cuba, … we will still help them in either case,” Soviet Ambassador Alekseev reassured his GDR counterpart Friedrich Johne, a former officer, in early June 1964. “So, we start from that assumption and support them as positively and as well as possible.”6 Threequarters of a year later, when all of a sudden Alekseev’s deputy aggressively demanded greater understanding for the Cubans and asked for them not to be judged “too harshly,” the obvious ideological hardliners at the GDR embassy considered it “a kind of new tendency” on the Soviets’ part and were rather disgruntled to hear of it.
Moscow’s order for tolerance would be severely and repeatedly tested over the following years. In September 1964, the comrades in East Berlin were horrified by a report from Havana that Castro and “the left-radical extremists ever more closely surrounding him” had gone on a “real rampage,” which “must be effectively stopped.” It seemed that they had “wagered everything … on making it brutally clear in practice to those around them that they were deeply serious in their aims.”7 The “left-radical extremists” were Guevara supporters critical of Moscow: although Che was then no longer living in Cuba, he continued to have a large following to which the ideologically unpredictable Castro was thought to belong. And this group was trying to save not only Guevara’s idealistic economic concept of the “new man,” but also that of “world revolution.” It became clear that, despite their disagreements, Castro’s thinking was in many respects still similar to Guevara’s, when, after the latter’s departure from Cuba in 1965, he criticized the Soviet failure to give adequate support to North Vietnam against the American bombing that had begun in February of that year. He complained that “even the attacks on North Vietnam have not had the effect of overcoming the divisions within the socialist family.”8 And in May 1966 he even spoke of “ending the Vietnam War through the massive deployment of units of the socialist armies.” The “escalation to world war” that would have been a likely consequence was “not accepted by him as an argument,” the East German correspondent in Havana soberly remarked.9
Eastern-bloc diplomats noted that the Tricontinental Conference planned for Havana in spring 1967 was intended to ignite larger centers of conflict in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and that there was even some idea of starting a revolution in a Latin American country. Che Guevara sent a message from Bolivia for the occasion, the famous “Message to the Peoples of the World,” in which he called for the creation of “a second, third Vietnam in the world.”10 It was a carefully considered idea, more than just a slogan for students in revolt to carry on their banners in the streets of Europe. But the East Europeans, who were more interested in a policy of peaceful coexistence with capitalism, reported that Guevara’s “left-extremist” supporters were urging “the creation of a Latin American Vietnam by concentrating all forces and sources of aid” on a single country. Their goal, it was claimed, was “to ignite simultaneous continent-wide actions from the victory or the flames of this revolutionary center, and, if possible, to commit the socialist countries more extensively than before.” This “revolutionary center,” the GDR embassy suspected in an alarm-raising letter of September 1966, “might be Venezuela.” That was the country which Castro had first visited after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, and whose government had exposed itself by brusquely rejecting his request for a loan.
The comrades from Latin American Communist parties showed little enthusiasm for such ideas. Most of them had long been seeking to achieve power by peaceful means, through participation in elections. East European observers noted growing “outrage among Latin American Party representatives over the way in which the Cuban leadership was behaving,” and warned that it was “plunging headlong into unintentional self-isolation, as a result of which it could only further lose responsible control over its own actions.”11 The Communist parties of Chile and Argentina, in particular, were reported to be putting up strong resistance to the Cuban thinking. Castro attacked them for this and accused them of not showing sufficient solidarity. The aim of his “frontal attack on the fraternal parties in Latin America,” according to a GDR embassy analysis, was, “if not to win over the socialist countries, then at least to tie them down to their positions of patient waiting, hesitation and non-interference, so that unlimited freedom of action would be assured for undermining a number of CPs in LA [Latin America].”
The Venezuelan Communists strongly protested at Castro’s attempts to interfere in their country’s politics, arguing that his “intemperate speeches were tolerated [only] because Cuba stood in the front line of the struggle against imperialism.” A Venezuelan Politburo statement of March 13, 1967, unusual for Communists in its unsurpassable frankness, claimed the right to pursue its own policy “without any interference.” It went on:
Cuba has creditably followed a hard revolutionary path … ; but we want to make it clear that we were never and will never be Cuba’s agents in Venezuela … We … never accept being told what to do. Fidel Castro enjoys … again playing the role of judge over revolutionary activities in Latin America, the role of the super-revolutionary who has already carried out the revolution in the place of the Latin American Communists.… We categorically reject his claim to be the only one who decides what is and is not revolutionary in Latin America.12
Visibly affected by the aggressive tone of this statement, which was also widely distributed in the United States, Castro replied in a half-angry, half-scornfu
l speech lasting several hours, large parts of which served a didactic purpose. He summed up in one sentence his verdict on the Venezuelan comrades and their role: “These so-called Communists … are getting together with the political castes of the bourgeoisie to wage war on the heroic guerrilla fighters.”13
The GDR mission noted, however, that a “considerable loss of prestige” among fraternal parties induced the Cubans “to give up their basic tactical line of simultaneously making the revolution throughout Latin America.”14 In this context, it is worth noting the false suspicion prevalent among Latin American Communists in the summer and autumn of 1966 that Che Guevara was already inside Venezuela, a country then shaken by political crises. They were not unaware “that for some time Cuban officers and men have been trained for use in LA [Latin America].” Possibly the original idea had indeed been for Guevara to trigger and lead a revolution in Venezuela, and he switched to Bolivia when he failed to receive any support from the Venezuelan comrades. He had also thought of returning from Africa to fight in his own homeland, Argentina, but the police detection and murder of an advance party of two close comrades had forced him to abandon that project.
Late in January 1968 Castro again provoked his Soviet friends, by arresting 37 members of a “sectarian micro-faction” inside the new Communist Party of Cuba who had been “conspiring” with Moscow. Most of those in question were well-known people from the old PSP, again led by Aníbal Escalante, who had been allowed to return from a brief exile in Moscow to take part in the founding of the PCC in 1965. In a speech to the Central Committee of the PCC, Raúl Castro raised the monstrous accusation that comrades from the CPSU, the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), and the Czechoslovak Communist Party had been openly conspiring against the Cuban Party leadership; and that, in particular, they had leveled criticism at Castro’s ideological and political conceptions. At a trial before a revolutionary court, Escalante and the others were charged with having worked with the KGB since 1962 to topple Castro. Apparently Escalante had tried to talk the Soviets into ending their aid to Cuba, in order to bring down Castro and replace him with a regime loyal to Moscow. But this time Escalante, who had been caught red-handed at a secret meeting with a Soviet officer, did not get off so lightly: he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. After an early release, he became manager of an agricultural enterprise and died a few years later.15