Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  When the talks began, Castro was visibly nervous. He apparently feared that Gorbachev would try to win him to his new creed, drawing him into discussing the polemics he wanted to avoid. He need not have worried. After the preliminaries were over, the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee asserted, “I am not going to impose on you my model. You can do whatever you think fit.” From then on, Castro relaxed.54

  The tension had never been greater since the missile crisis of 1962. For Cuba’s political and economic existence ultimately hung on one word from Gorbachev, the man whose policy Castro had long considered a betrayal of the principles of Marxism-Leninism. It was a paradoxical situation: this stubborn man of all people, who for decades had been difficult for Moscow to discipline and bring into line, was now, with his Caribbean ideological mish-mash of fidelismo, presenting himself as the last defender of an outmoded doctrine.

  Castro had long feared another betrayal as in the 1962 missile crisis, when the Soviet Union would once again sacrifice Cuba’s interests on the altar of world politics.

  There are two kinds of survival and two kinds of peace, the survival of the rich and the survival of the poor; the peace of the rich and the peace of the poor. That is why the news that there may be peace, that there may be detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, does not necessarily mean that there is going to be peace for us.55

  The centerpiece of Gorbachev’s visit was a speech before the Cuban National Assembly. Though at first appearing jovial and conciliatory, the Soviet leader used the opportunity to signal in diplomatic language that he expected some rethinking from Castro. Aware of his own popularity among Cubans, he warned Castro not to be left behind by history and developed his oft-quoted theme that “life punishes those who arrive late:”

  Human civilization is at the crossroads. It is moving, as it were, from one phase to another. One cannot yet predict what its new image will be like. But one thing is already clear, namely, that today success will come to those who keep pace with the times and draw appropriate conclusions from the changes produced by the advent of high technologies and the decisive role of science and intellectual effort. . . . Either we continue moving down the old muchtraveled track toward even greater stagnation and the economic, social, and even political dead-end, with the ensuing risk of being pushed to the sidelines of progress, or we embark on an arduous but vitally important path of our society’s revolutionary renewal, of imparting to socialism a new qualitative dimension that would meet the highest standards of humanism and progress.56

  There was some hard talking as Castro and his guest visited the sights of Havana. When his chief negotiator, Vice-President Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, and his six-man team tried to discuss the shape of the next trade agreement with their Soviet counterparts under Vice-President Vladimir Kamenzev, they discovered that it would run for not five years but only one year, and that only the basic framework would be decided at government level. The finer points, including the range and conditions of the commercial exchange, would have to be directly negotiated between individual enterprises – and, what is more, settled in convertible currency, on a dollar basis.

  Castro did not show any obvious reaction to the Soviet general secretary’s speech. Instinctively, however, he appeared to sense that the Moscow reforms had released centrifugal forces that could no longer be reined in, and that they would soon carry Gorbachev and the whole Soviet system into a blind alley. This made him all the more determined that his revolution would politically outlast Gorbachev. In Camagüey for the Moncada anniversary celebrations on July 26, 1989, just a few months before the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and two years before the Soviet Union itself became history, he made a speech full of foreboding:

  We warn imperialism that it shouldn’t have so many illusions about our Revolution, thinking that our revolution won’t be able to stand firm if there’s a catastrophe in the socialist community. If, tomorrow or another day, we should wake up to the news that a huge civil war has broken out in the Soviet Union or even that the Soviet Union has disintegrated … Cuba and the Cuban Revolution would keep on struggling and keep on standing firm.57

  The others who kept on struggling and standing firm were the comrades in the GDR, with whom (next to Moscow) Cuba had had the closest political and economic relations in the Eastern bloc since the 1960s. Apart from numerous trips at Politbureau or ministerial level and by a wide range of Party and trade union organizations, as well as an intensive program of student exchanges, there were four state visits by one side or the other in the space of eight years. Twice, in 1972 and 1977, Castro went to the GDR, and twice, in 1974 and 1980, Honecker traveled to Cuba and received the kind of reception only previously given to Soviet state and Party leader Leonid Brezhnev. In addition, the two men met a number of times at Eastern bloc summits, as in 1984 and 1986 in Moscow.

  Castro knew of the ideological reliability of the SED apparatus and shared its critical and anxious view of developments in the Kremlin. Straight after Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba, therefore, he sent Politbureau member and Central Committee secretary, Jorge Risquet, to discuss with Honecker and Hermann Axen from the Politbureau in East Berlin and, more generally, to fill in the GDR leadership about his talks with the CPSU general secretary. From the notes on Honecker’s meeting with Risquet on April 17, 1989, it emerges that Gorbachev “personally showed extraordinarily great understanding for Cuba’s path, its problems and its specificities,” and that he “in no way adopted a paternalist attitude or tried to impose his will.” The East German leadership’s unease about Gorbachev’s course in Moscow, and its sympathy with Castro’s uncompromising stance, led Honecker to follow on and state that “Cuba’s steadfastness … as underlined in Fidel Castro’s speeches during M. Gorbachev’s visit,” was “very highly appreciated” in the GDR. “We are in agreement with the Cuban fraternal party that the complex nature of present international trends calls for a very firm position to be taken. . . . Vigilance is therefore always required. On this question we fully agree with Fidel Castro.”58

  If we compare the minutes, it turns out that on April 13 Risquet expressed more frankly with Axen than with Honecker “a certain concern” in the Cuban leadership about “the increasingly serious difficulties in the Soviet Union.”59 Despite Gorbachev’s instructive explanations, “the leadership of the [Cuban] CP continued to view with concern certain elements in the development of socialism.” In some countries, a gradual abandonment of the leading role of the Party was already discernible, and in Cuba’s eyes one position after another was being given up. A gradual development of socialist countries toward capitalist relations would apparently have to be taken into consideration. “Risquet spoke of a discrepancy between the way in which M. Gorbachev explained things and theories and viewpoints propagated by the Soviet media.”

  The Cuban certainly made no secret of Havana’s worries about a US intervention. Axen reported him as saying:

  In view of the fact that Cuba is not a member of the Warsaw Pact, Cuba must have a central idea about how it can use its own forces to resist attacks by the USA. Apart from the regular armed forces, there are two million Cubans under arms, well trained and motivated, who have enough deterrent potential to dissuade the USA from an attack.60

  “Of course, there are two kinds of Communists: those who let themselves be killed easily, and we Communists who won’t let ourselves be killed easily. What can still scare us, who 27 years ago had the experience of the October [missile] crisis? … Nothing in the world can make our revolutionary people quake in our boots,” Castro scornfully thundered at his Moncada rally in late July 1989, to continual applause interrupted with shouts of “Fidel! Fidel! Give it to the yankees!” In bitter defiance he added: “[Never before] has a US administration acted with such crazed triumphalism or given speeches so confident of victory as this one is doing now.” The Bush government speaks as if “the community of socialist states is on its way out, [as if] socialism is finished and
will end up in the dustbin of history that the great strategists and creative geniuses of the socialist movement reserved for capitalism itself.”61

  Yet it was the supposedly stable GDR which found itself there a few months later. Shortly before, in early September 1989, Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl had paid another top-level visit to East Berlin, on his way to the conference of non-aligned states. In retrospect, his conversation with Politbureau member Axen eerily registers how unprepared the GDR leadership was, even in its inner circles, to contemplate the reality that would soon lead to the fall of the Wall. Cuba’s number two, referring to the threat of US military intervention against Panama and to fears that this might “have immediate knock-on effects for Cuba and Nicaragua,” expressed his “great satisfaction” at having such “reliable allies.” “The stability of the GDR,” the minutes record him as saying, “is of exceptional importance for us. It can be safely said that trends in the GDR are stable and dynamic. . . . The GDR is a solid barrier, a firm bulwark on that sensitive frontier in the heart of Europe.”62

  Soon the GDR and other Eastern bloc states were falling like dominoes. Only Cuba held out. But, in comparison with what the country soon had to face, the rectificación period would appear as a mere prelude to the unknown. Castro had to steer the country into an economic and political storm at the end of the century, without knowing how long it would last, whether he would be able to ride it out, or whether at the end he would find himself captain of a wreck.

  The fall in world sugar and oil prices in the eighties, leading to Castro’s debt moratorium as an emergency response to Cuba’s inability to repay creditors in both East and West, had a number of fateful consequences. The block on further Western loans suddenly left Cuba looking at a 30 percent shortfall in foreign currency, so that the island could no longer afford the imports via countries other than the United States (mainly of technology) that had been running at US$1.6 billion a year. This situation arose at the very moment when the shock therapy administered to the bankrupt socialist economies of the Soviet Union and Cuba was leading them in diametrically opposite directions, under the names of perestroika and rectificación respectively. Yet, instead of loosening as quickly as possible Cuba’s dependent economic ties to the socialist bloc, Castro was compelled by sheer necessity, and against all reason, to bind the country to it still more firmly.

  At one point, when the dependence on the Eastern bloc was already around 90 percent (two-thirds of it on the Soviet Union alone), Cuba and the USSR agreed in the protocol signed during Gorbachev’s visit an 8 percent increase in mutual trade from 1989 to 1990 that carried it to a record level of 9.2 billion rubles.63 Everything was now being gambled on one card. But on the Soviet side, too, there was still a strong interest in the extension of trade relations. Thus, the paper Sovietskaya Rossiya quoted Leonid Abalkin, vice-president of the Soviet Council of Ministers, as saying:

  The supply of [4 million tons of ] Cuban sugar satisfies up to 30 percent of the Soviet domestic demand; 20 percent of the cobalt produced in the USSR is derived from [Cuban] nickel-cobalt concentrate. Without the supply of [30,000 tons of] Cuban nickel, the factories in the Urals would not be able to produce high quality steel. [Cuban] shipments of citrus fruits represent the base 40 percent of our national market. If we did not have these levels of [Cuban] supplies, it must be understood that we would feel quite differently, for we would have to pay capitalist countries between 1.5 to 2 billion dollars for the same production. Similarly, the Cuban economy would not be able to survive without the supply of Soviet petroleum.64

  This was the same Abalkin who, in April 1990, a year after Gorbachev’s visit, spent a week in Havana working out a new annual (rather than quinquennial) basis for trade agreements between Cuba and the Soviet Union. The outcome was a joint protocol that envisaged a further increase in trade up to a volume of $14 billion.

  Back in Moscow, Abalkin came under heavy fire, as the Soviet Union was no longer in any position to meet the delivery obligations he had agreed in Havana. Of the 700 or so products on Cuba’s list, the Soviet planning authorities had access to only a tenth – including oil, rice, and spare parts for vital production plant. All the rest were subject to direct negotiations with individual enterprises.

  Soon after Gorbachev’s visit to Cuba, the disintegration of the Soviet Union accelerated to such an extent that economic and political–military ties began to unravel altogether. All agreements and previous arrangements to which the Cubans still clung as their final hope became virtually worthless from one day to the next.

  On September 28 Castro gave a gloomy report on relations between the two countries:

  At this moment we do not know what the level of our trade with the USSR will be next year. Right now no one knows how much they are going to pay us for our sugar, for our exports, or how much they are going to charge us for the products they supply us, or how much fuel we are going to receive. No one knows anything about this right now despite the fact that there are only three months left before the end of the year.65

  At that time, the Soviet Union was already nearly 2 million tons behind with its oil deliveries – more than 15 percent of the usual annual quantity. Moreover, as a result of the crisis in the Gulf, the price of crude oil soared from $14 a barrel to $40 between the middle of 1990 and late September, further limiting Cuba’s ability to purchase oil on the free market.

  “But,” according to Castro, “the really brutal cuts took place at the moment when the USSR collapsed and we had to face what was in effect a double blockade [from the USA and now, indirectly, from Russia].”66 As 1991 turned into 1992, the facts and figures of Cuba’s economic decline pointed to a looming catastrophe – a direct result of the dissolution of Comecon in June 1991 and the Soviet Union in December 1991.

  Within three years, the oil deliveries fell by nearly a half from the 1989 figure of 13.3 million tons, and they had to be paid for at the world-market price instead of the earlier preferential rate. Nothing was left any more for reselling – besides, it would no longer have been economically advantageous. At the same time, the Soviet side halved the price it was prepared to pay for Cuban sugar. According to Castro:

  One of our most serious problems is our grave shortage of convertible currency. . . . There used to be convertible currencies and settlement currencies: the ruble, the GDR mark, the currencies of the socialist countries. Today we must pay for everything in convertible currencies, especially for the fuel that keeps the country moving. And we have a special problem with fuel, which makes the situation extremely acute.67

  In the early years of the revolution, Cuba received 8 tons of fuel for 1 ton of sugar. “Today, since oil fetches a monopoly price and sugar on the world market gets, as we have often said, a junk price, a minimal price, we can buy only 1.4 or 1.5 tons of oil for 1 ton of sugar.”68 By 1993 Cuba had to worry whether it would receive even a quarter – 3.3 million tons – of the 1989 oil delivery, and whether at least 1.5 million tons – a third of the former total – would be taken in return. Since the old Eastern bloc economies were increasingly using market criteria and demanding transactions in hard currency, Cuba’s import capability shrank at least 70 percent by 1992, from $8.1 billion to $2.2 billion. As supply problems became dramatically worse, Castro’s complaints had something desperate about them. “Where are we to get the foreign currency for food … ? Where are we to get foreign currency for the medicine we need every day? We know that some three hundred different medicines are lacking. Where are we to get raw materials like cotton or fertilizer base?”69 No answers were forthcoming.

  On July 26, 1993, the fortieth anniversary of the Moncada attack that marked the heroic beginning of Castro’s revolution, the country and the leadership celebrated in a mood of deep depression. “The year 1992 was hard,” said Castro in his speech for the occasion, “but, as if our trials were not enough, very bad signs appeared in another respect to make our situation more acute. The second half of 1992 was very dry, and the first half
of 1993, in terms of climate, was really hellish.” To make matters still worse, the storm of the century swept across the island, “at a time when there is usually not any bad weather or cyclones.” He spoke of damage “estimated at approximately one billion dollars.” “Our sugar production, which in 1992 was 7 million tons, … fell back sharply. [ … ] Output in 1992–93 fell to 4.28 million tons, that is, down 2.75 million tons. . . . In the year we lost income of approximately 450 million dollars. . . . And for this year we expect imports of approximately 1,719 million dollars.”70

  After 1992 there were no more loans from the former Eastern bloc – which, according to Castro, had until recently amounted to some $1.5 billion a year from the Soviet Union and approximately $160 million from the rest of Eastern Europe. Cuba’s accumulated debt to the old Soviet republics was difficult to calculate in those turbulent times. Estimates fluctuated, depending on the partner and the interests at stake, between 15 and 25 billion rubles: that is, at the most favorable exchange-rate, roughly $2 billion, and at the least favorable rate (the 0.62 rubles to the dollar used for trade with the West) more than $15 billion. The hard-currency debt was on top of that: another $6.5 billion.71

  The oil situation was repeated in relation to other vital supplies. At the time of Gorbachev’s visit, Cuba still received 100 percent of its wheat from Eastern bloc countries, 100 percent of its vegetable oil, 63 percent of its powdered milk, and 40 percent of its rice. Thus, in the year of the end of the Soviet Union, Havana could feel happy if Moscow still met 40 percent of its supply commitments to Cuba. An expected delivery of 100,000 refrigerators suddenly failed to materialize, as did 128,500 washing machines. The production of clothing ground to a halt because zips were not being delivered, and beer could no longer be brewed because Czechoslovakia and Germany failed to come up with the agreed 45,000 tons of malt. So it was across all branches of the economy.