Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  Moscow and East Berlin were beside themselves over the accusations made by Cuba’s Number Two, Raúl Castro:

  The open and sharpest-yet attack on the CPSU, our Party and other fraternal parties, which has come about through these internal measures within the [Cuban] CP, are a provocation against the unity of the international Communist movement. It is intended to discredit our parties before world public opinion, to undermine trust in the sincerity, honesty and correctness of their relations with fraternal parties.… It has raised anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist behavior to an official state attitude in Cuba.

  The language of this internal statement issued by the International Department of the SED Central Committee could hardly have been sharper.

  At the end of March Castro gave a further turn of the screw in the doctrinal struggle when, in an allusion to China’s “Great Leap Forward,” he launched a “Great Revolutionary Offensive” to nationalize all 58,012 remaining small businesses (from car repair shops to ice-cream stalls), denouncing them as relics of the bourgeoisie and offering them up on the altar of ideology.

  The drive was announced in a speech lasting many hours before an audience of several hundred thousands. Taking aim at “those who do not work, the loafers, the parasites, the privileged, and a certain kind of exploiter that still remains in our country,” he found it “an incredible thing” that “there still are nine hundred and fifty-five privately owned bars,” and surprised his audience with a number of revelations: for example, that, according to “the results of investigations of these bars … , a great number of people who intend to leave the country are engaged in this type of business, which not only yields high profits but permits them to be in constant contact with lumpen and other anti-social and counter-revolutionary elements.” Among the owners of hot-dog stands, he claimed, “there was the greatest percentage of those not integrated into the revolution … ; of forty-one individuals who answered this item, thirty-nine, or 91.5 percent, were counterrevolutionary.” To general applause and laughter, he exclaimed:

  Are we going to construct socialism, or are we going to construct vending stands? … We did not make a revolution here to establish the right to trade. Such a revolution took place in 1789 – that was the era of the bourgeois revolution, it was the revolution of the merchants, of the bourgeois. When will they finally understand that this is a revolution of socialists, that it is a revolution of Communists … that nobody shed his blood here fighting against this tyranny, against mercenaries, against bandits, in order to establish the right for somebody to make two hundred pesos selling rum, or fifty pesos selling fried eggs or omelettes? … Clearly and definitely we must say that we propose to eliminate all opportunities for private trade.16

  From then on, there was still less to buy; everyday life was still more joyless. Cuba became the Caribbean island with the dreariest choice of leisure activities; Havana, a city legendary for its Parisian joie de vivre, sank to the cultural level of the rural province of Oriente. Under the watchful eyes of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, collective labor, thrift and abstinence became the defining elements of the Cuban zest for life.

  After Castro further distanced himself from Moscow, refusing in February 1968 to send a Cuban delegation to the world conference of Communist parties in Bucharest where the consequences of the ideological rift with Beijing were to be discussed, the Kremlin answered in March with an intensification of economic pressure. Trade would not be increased, as in previous years, by just under a quarter, but only by 10 percent; and Cuba would have to deliver 5 million tons of sugar in 1969, even though the 1968 harvest would barely suffice to meet its obligations and to cover its own needs. In the end, the harvest was a mere 5.3 million tons, a million less than in the previous year and 3 million below the plan target, and all the forecasts were that the results for 1969 would be even lower. Thus, at the end of the first decade of the revolution, Cuba’s sugar arrears to the Soviet Union were fast approaching a total of 10 million tons, and it was increasingly doubtful whether Castro’s undertaking to achieve a harvest of 10 million tons in 1970 could be achieved.

  In the middle of 1968, Moscow seemed to be gradually nearing the point when it would say enough was enough. In July, in an explosive letter sent in “strict confidence” to Party leader Walter Ulbricht, the East German foreign minister, Otto Winzer, said that the Soviet ambassador in Havana had raised with his GDR counterpart the question of “whether, given that the Cuban side was evidently unwilling to develop friendly relations, Soviet aid and support could continue as before.”17 Under the rules of the game in Eastern-bloc diplomacy at the time, such a grave option would not have been casually tossed out; it served as a disguised warning, with the possible consequences certainly present in the minds of both men involved in the conversation.

  Castro seemed to feel – as if the message had finally reached the person for whom it was intended – that the Soviet leaders’ patience with deviationists was running out. Things must have suddenly become crystal-clear a few weeks later, when Moscow set a brutal example by occupying Czechoslovakia in the early hours of August 21, 1968, with a force of Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops, to provide “fraternal support” (for someone or other) against the reform Communism of the Alexander Dubcek government. It was true that the Kremlin could not simply move against Castro by means of a similar attack by land. If the recent Escalante affair had really been a Moscowdirected conspiracy, then the next option, after its collapse, would be one day to proceed in the way that the ambassador had outlined.

  Yet the crushing of the “Prague Spring” – a move that aroused great controversy in the socialist camp – offered the practical politician in Castro an unexpected and spectacular opportunity to return to the Moscow fold. On August 23, after two days of silence, he surprised everyone with a dialectical balancing-act on television which left nothing wanting in clarity: “What cannot be denied here,” he began, “is that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak State was violated.… And the violation was, in fact, of a flagrant nature.”18 But he also said: “We acknowledge the bitter necessity that called for the sending of those forces into Czechoslovakia; we do not condemn the socialist countries that made that decision.”19 Condemning the liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia and other socialist countries, he stressed that it had been absolutely necessary to prevent Czechoslovakia from “falling into the arms of imperialism.”20

  Nevertheless, relations with Moscow did not improve overnight. On the centenary of Cuba’s first liberation struggle, he gave a patriotic speech in the east of the island praising José Martí and other heroes of Cuban history, and failed to say a single word about Marxism-Leninism, socialism, the Communist Party, or the Soviet Union. And again in 1968 he sent only third-level figures from the Cuban leadership to the annual commemoration of the October Revolution in Moscow. A rapprochement must have been taking place behind the scenes, however, because all of a sudden everything seemed to change and the friendship was booming again. On the tenth anniversary of the victory over Batista, Castro made a speech filled with praise for the Soviet Union. In February 1969, a new trade agreement was signed that took account of the difficulties facing the Cubans: the Cuban trade deficit with the USSR was already 4 billion dollars; military aid over the previous decade was estimated by Castro to have totalled 1.5 billion dollars.21 Throughout 1969 there was again a busy exchange of official visits, and in June the Cuban delegation to a conference of Communist parties in Moscow finally condemned the “sectarianism” in Beijing. The Kremlin was content. Shortly afterwards, in July, a squadron of eight Soviet ships put into Havana, and when Soviet defense minister Marshal Andrei Grechko visited the Cuban capital in November he was seen cutting cane beside the Castro brothers.

  Ten million tons

  Castro officially called 1970 “the year of the ten million tons.” But it became a year of only 8.5 million tons. At least this was the largest sugar harvest in Cuba’s history, but it was still 15 p
ercent below the ambitious target. For Castro it was a personal defeat, the worst in his career as a revolutionary: “The ten million ton harvest represents far more than tons of sugar, far more than an economic victory,” Granma quoted him as saying in October 1969. “It is a test, a moral duty for this country. [Therefore] we cannot fall a single gram short of the ten million.… Even one pound below the ten million tons – we say this before the whole world – would be a defeat, not a victory.”22

  The propaganda machine had wound the whole country up for the target, invoking the Bay of Pigs spirit of victory. Additional land had been sown, so that 1.4 million hectares were available. New methods permitted several cycles of sowing and harvesting during 334 days from July 1969 to July 1960, instead of the usual three months at the turn of the year. Even the weather played its part. All other economic activity had to slow down, because virtually the whole population – mothers and children, school and university students, industrial workers, pensioners, whitecollar workers, army personnel – assembled with machetes for “voluntary” work in the sugarcane fields, to lend a hand to the 250,000 professional cutters. Nearly every day Fidel Castro himself put in four hours.

  Even Christmas was abolished for 1969. Already on January 3, 1969, Castro had deleted it from the calendar, on the grounds that every day had to be used for the record harvest: “Now begins a year with eighteen months. The next New Year’s celebrations will be on 1 July, the next Christmas between 1 and 26 July [1970].”23 (When Cuba later reverted to the old calendar, the promised reintroduction of Christmas was not part of it. Only in 1997 did the festivities appear again, when the Pope requested it shortly before his visit to the island.)

  Yet all the effort was of no avail; the target of 10 million tons had been set too high. Worse, the rest of the Cuban economy fell between 20 and 40 percent, as men and machinery were mobilized for the sugar harvest.

  When Castro appeared before the waiting crowd on July 26, 1970, for the commemoration of the Moncada attack, he did not try to put a gloss on things. In a self-critical speech, he offered the resignation of himself and the Cuban Party leadership, although naturally none of those listening wanted that. Even in defeat, Cubans were prepared to follow their charismatic leader. Besides, what alternative did they have? “We proved incapable of waging what we called the simultaneous battle.… The heroic effort to raise production, to raise our purchasing power, resulted in dislocations in the economy, in a fall in production in other sectors, and in general in an increase in our difficulties.” Recognizing “the responsibility of all of us and mine in particular,” he stressed:

  The battle of the ten million was not lost by the people, it is us, the administrative apparatus, the leaders of the revolution who lost it.… Most of the time we fell into the error of minimizing the complexity of the problems facing us.… there are comrades who are worn out, burned out; they have lost their energy, they can no longer carry the burden on their shoulders.

  Finally, he spoke of the need for greater democracy at leadership levels, more effective delegation of responsibilities, and critical analysis of the course of the revolution:

  It is easier to win twenty wars than to win the battle of development. The fight today is not against people, … we are fighting against objective factors; we are fighting against the past, we are fighting with the continued presence of this past in the present, we are fighting against limitations of all kinds. But sincerely this is the greatest challenge that we have had in our lives and the greatest challenge the Revolution has ever faced.24

  Despite all the efforts, falling output in the transition from the first to the second decade of the Cuban Revolution also revealed a waning of revolutionary energy among the population. Guevara’s and Castro’s concept of “moral incentives” was no longer working. Absenteeism was spreading dramatically at the workplace: in August and September 1968 alone, some 20 percent of employees took time off, and in Castro’s home province of Oriente the figure in August was as high as 52 percent. “Perhaps our greatest illusion,” Castro said, “was to have believed that a society … could become, at a stroke, a society in which everyone behaved in an ethical and moral fashion.”25 Somewhat resignedly, he was at last indicating a willingness not to insist on “moral incentives” as the only motivation for work. At the same time, he called upon the workers “to democratize themselves, to constitute a strong and powerful labor movement.”26

  The last thing Castro had in mind, however, was political pluralism. What he wanted was a way of channeling criticism of the system: employees should be more closely involved both in decision-making processes and in responsibility for production; the problem of idling could then also be better controlled. Together with a comprehensive reorganization of the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) over the next three years, a new “anti-slackers” law was introduced in 1971 which prescribed severe penalties for the “work-shy.” Material incentives (already used for a time between 1963 and 1966) were again envisaged as a means of increasing work motivation and therefore productivity. Castro argued:

  Together with moral incentive, we must also use material incentive, without abusing either one, because the former would lead us to idealism, while the latter would lead to individual selfishness. We must act in such a way that economic incentives will not become the exclusive motivation of man, nor moral incentives serve to have some live off the work of the rest.27

  By 1972 the whole governmental apparatus was reformed and restructured. Collective leadership responsibility was supposed to have at last replaced Castro’s personal decision-making, so that, in day-to-day politics, there would now be limits to his ability to extend his rule into literally every area. This new degree of predictability in Cuban politics was also a concession to the Soviet fund-providers. Yet Castro’s position in power was untouched, as his own person stood above the law and his authority to set guidelines was as absolute as before.

  The next step towards a formal institutionalization of the Cuban Revolution was the drafting and adoption of a constitution. Soon after the victory of the revolution, Castro had moved away from his original intention to reintroduce the 1940 Constitution that Batista suspended in 1952, and had ruled instead on the formal ground of the Basic Law promulgated early in 1959 and of thousands of subsequent laws and ordinances. In 1974 a commission was set up under the 76-year-old Blas Roca, a long-time Communist, to prepare a new Constitution; a first draft was published half a year later and presented for public discussion in all the structures of society.

  This Constitution of “the state of all workers and farmers and all other toilers by hand and by brain” mainly followed the Soviet model. The Communist Party (PCC), as the “highest leading force of society and the state … in the construction of socialism and … the formation of a communist society,” was the supreme political authority. One novelty was the introduction of “People’s Power” (Poder Popular) as the organ of local self-administration. Unexpectedly, the issue of whether candidates for the National Assembly should be directly elected by the people to avoid manipulation, or whether they should be sent there by local bodies, the poderes populares, gave rise to such heated debates that a decision was postponed when the main body of the text was submitted to a constitutional referendum on February 15, 1976. After this pruned draft was adopted by 97.7 of the vote, the central drafting commission under Castro’s chairmanship blocked all impulses toward direct democracy from below. In the 1990s, a change to the system finally allowed the population itself to elect candidates for the National Assembly. But for the time being, “the National Assembly [would be] composed of members selected by the local assemblies.” Preparations were made for 3,000 delegates to vote on the issue at the five-day congress of the PCC in December 1975; it would be the first regular congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, permitted only after Castro’s annoyance with the old Communists and the comrades in Moscow had subsided, and they in turn had given him unqualified recognition.

  The Constitution f
inally came into force on February 24, 1976. Castro took over as head of state from Osvaldo Dorticós, who became a government minister as well as a member of the PCC Central Committee and Politbureau. (Dorticós committed suicide in 1983, at the age of 64.28) Castro was thus unrestricted leader of the Cuban Revolution, in effect the Máximo Líder for life: head of state and Party, but also commander-in-chief of the armed forces and (as chairman of the 31-member Council of Ministers elected by the National Assembly) prime minister. His brother Raúl was his deputy in all posts, as well as having his own position as defense minister.

  If Castro had not changed tack in the early seventies and made his peace with Moscow, his position after the “year of the ten million tons” would scarcely have remained so uncontested. But as it was, the Soviet Union could soften the blow to his reputation, and the economic consequences of a defeat for which he readily blamed himself, by agreeing to supply additional goods and loans. In June 1972, following Castro’s first trip in eight years to the Soviet Union, Cuba was accepted as the ninth member of the Eastern bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Aid. The Soviet Union hoped thereby to share out among Comecon’s memberstates the economic costs of Cuban integration. But for Cuba, ten years after the missile crisis, it meant economic and military guarantees as well as recognition as a full member of the socialist community.