Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  In the months after the Ochoa trial, when the days of Noriega’s rule already seemed to be numbered, there were several major purges in the Cuban security apparatus, the ministries of culture, agriculture, and construction, and the tourism and film industries. The fact that the interior ministry was placed under the defense ministry, and its top echelons replaced with loyal army officers, points to the dramatic nature of the events. It may be that the Ochoa affair was no more than the tip of an iceberg.

  The new boss at the interior ministry, which was also responsible for the personal security of the state leadership, was the secondhighest officer in the FAR, General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra. He had been a close companion of Ochoa’s in Angola, but he was also one of the panel of military judges who had passed sentence of death on Ochoa and the others. In the ensuing purges and reshuffles, more than two-thirds of FAR officers in the west of the island (where Ochoa had been due to assume command) were replaced.81

  Nearly a decade later, in June 1998, a journalist and former employee of Cuba’s Prensa Latina news agency, Raúl Martín, told El Nuevo Herald (the Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald) that between 1987 and 1989 he had been involved in a covert KGB operation against Castro, the aim of which had been to work with discontented elements in the army to overthrow Castro and open the way to a Cuban version of perestroika.82 It was completely unsuccessful, however, because at that time Cuban intelligence was keeping a close watch on Soviet military experts and KGB people in the country. Was Ochoa perhaps a new Aníbal Escalante within the officer corps? The answer, if there is one, lies in the Cuban secret archives. As far as official propaganda was concerned, the Ochoa case served as a warning that corruption and counter-revolution had still to be ruthlessly hunted down.

  It was not only the Ochoa affair that convinced the Castro brothers of the need to restructure their security apparatus. Events in Eastern Europe and signs of decomposition in the Warsaw Pact confronted Cuba’s military and secret services with a quite new challenge: the island was now completely on its own in the Western hemisphere. The first task was to prevent perestroika from seeping into the most politically sensitive of all domains. For some time Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, with help from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, had had the reputation of being one of the best-trained and best-equipped armies in the Third World. It was able to field 300,000 men when a US invasion threatened in the early sixties, and it still numbered 250,000 at the end of the decade. By the mid-seventies it was down to just under half that strength, but then it expanded again in response to Cuba’s growing international commitments. In 1990–1, when the Warsaw Pact (of which Cuba was not a member) began to unravel, the London-based Institute for Strategic Studies put an estimate of 180,500 on the FAR. By the mid-nineties that figure had gone right back down to 105,000.

  For a time, Cuba counted as the numerically strongest military power in Latin America. It was also the only Third World country which, over a long period of time, deployed large contingents of troops in an overseas region of conflict – in this case, Africa. No other developing country played such an active and influential role in providing “international solidarity,” both civilian and military, in regional conflicts. Despite thousands of dead and wounded in Angola (precise figures are not available), Washington’s calculation that it would become Cuba’s Vietnam-style national disaster proved to be wide of the mark.

  After a first intervention on Algeria’s side in its border conflict with Morocco in 1963, Castro sent troops three years later to Congo (Brazzaville), where they helped to shore up the military regime for almost a quarter of a century. In the early seventies, Cuban soldiers also appeared in South Yemen and Syria. But these were all small expeditions, in comparison with the contingents of up to 70,000 men later based in Angola and Ethiopia. Altogether, it is estimated that 300,000 Cubans served at various times outside their country. In Latin America, Washington’s declared sphere of interest, Havana’s military role was limited to advice and instruction for its political friends in Surinam, Grenada, and Nicaragua, as well as for the guerrilla movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Colombia; the bulk of its effort went into civilian assistance in humanitarian fields.

  The end of the Soviet Union, however, brought an end to Cuba’s foreign military commitments. After Angola, South Africa, and Cuba worked out and signed a comprehensive peace plan for southern Africa, the last Cuban troops were on their way home by May 1991. Castro then declared that Cuba’s high-prestige but costly military support for liberation movements and friendly governments in the Third World was at an end.

  Cuba’s growing political and economic isolation, especially as a result of developments in Eastern Europe, forced the country’s leadership not only to ensure that its armed forces were still loyal to the regime, but also to include them in the necessary restructuring of society. The size of the standing army had to be drastically reduced, the period of military service shortened, and the modernization of combat units put on ice. But, above all else, military doctrine had to be adjusted to the new conditions: the tasks required of soldiers, whose loyalty was more indispensable than ever, had to be redefined in a convincing manner. In other Latin American countries, similar cutbacks would long have raised the danger of a coup. If Cuban troops remained exceptionally loyal in these difficult times, military experts put it down to the success over the years in creating a high degree of identification between the armed forces and the nation and its political leadership.

  This may have been due to the fact that in Cuba, unlike elsewhere in Latin America, the traditions of the armed forces were rooted not in the nineteenth-century struggle for independence from Spain, but directly in the person of Castro and his revolution.83 The victory on January 1, 1959, shattered the old Batista army, and any useable remnants were integrated into the newly formed Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias. The doctrine of this new “people’s army” then consistently involved a mixture of conventional and guerrilla warfare, based on a combination of Soviet training and the experience of the Castro brothers and Che Guevara (the latter written up in the form of a guerrilla manual).

  Along with permanent readiness to defend the country against the arch-enemy to the north, the army saw its role as one of providing military support for Castro’s internationalist commitments in the Third World. Overseas expeditions, such as the one in Angola, made a major contribution to the development of national consciousness among the soldiers and the population at large – despite growing concern over the high number of casualties and a sense of disillusionment at not being able to win the Third World over to the Cuban model.

  The internationally recognized efficiency and fighting morale of the Cuban army had a deterrent value that should not be underestimated, even if Washington was never prepared to admit this in public. Castro’s concept of defense involved turning Cuba into a second Vietnam in the event of a US invasion. The fact that for decades the United States dismissed any thought of a landing on Cuba was thus not due only to Kennedy’s promise at the time of the missile crisis; it was also bound up with the possibility that it might turn into another lengthy, costly, and ultimately disastrous enterprise.

  Significantly enough, rumors began to circulate that a military option was again under consideration in Washington just at the moment when the collapse of the Soviet Union and growing economic difficulties were affecting the Cuban military and its capacity for defense. For not only the reductions in troop strength, but also the withdrawal of the Soviet brigade, the shortage of spare parts, and the lack of technical modernization soon rubbed the shine from the once-proud FAR. According to US State Department figures, in 1990 Cuba still received military support from the Soviet Union in the order of roughly $1.5 billion, but after 1990 it got nothing more. The delivery of “several dozen” MIG fighters, agreed many years before, had still not happened.84 As to morale, it is true that a few men in the upper ranks of the air force went over to the United States, and in April 1999 Castro’s chief
bodyguard, a ranking captain, defected to the US embassy in Santo Domingo, on the margins of a summit meeting of the Association of Caribbean States. But there was no sign of the rapidly collapsing morale hoped for in the West, still less of an actual disintegration of the armed forces. Not the least reason for this was an awareness in the officer corps of what awaited it if the system went under; the Cuban exile community had always made it plain how impatient it was to regain control of the island and to clear up the political and military hierarchy.

  Of course, it would not be as easy to pull off as people in Miami imagined. It was not just a question of the Revolutionary Armed Forces; there was also the MTT (Milícia de Tropas Territoriales), a kind of armed civil guard set up in 1980 to cover the whole island, which had as many as 2 million members by the mid-nineties. The founding of the MIT, in response to the aggressively anti-Cuban rhetoric with which the Reagan administration accompanied its official duties, was supposed to provide support units for the regular army, in accordance with the Cuban military conception of an “all people’s war” (guerra de todo el Pueblo). In addition, there was the 100,000-strong Ejército Juvenil de Trabajo (Young Labor Army), a paramilitary force set up in 1973 to help with the harvest, to which the least well-qualified soldiers and officers belonged. These auxiliaries helped to offset, at least quantitatively, the successive thinning out of the professional army.

  One political question of major concern (not only abroad) in connection with the ideological reversals of the early nineties was whether the Cuban military would be deployed if the worsening supply crisis led to disturbances inside the country. But this became a topical issue only once, when public demonstrations of discontent took place in the summer of 1994 in Havana and a mass exodus similar to the one of 1980 began to take shape. Thousands of Cubans risked their lives trying to escape the prevailing gloom on anything that floated. Castro held back the army and avoided an escalation, and eventually it was the United States which refused to accept all the refugees and asked Castro to find an end to the situation. The regular police had only to intervene and it was all over. There were no bloody clashes in the streets. Order was restored virtually overnight.

  Nevertheless, the army general staff let it be known in this connection: “[W]e would rather use our weapons against the foreign aggressors, but we warn its internal fifth column that our revolutionary people have never had a vocation to be puppets. If anyone tries to strike our cheek, we will not turn the other. Instead, we will act with firmness.”85 The final option of the Cuban leadership probably would be to use the army against the civilian population, but it is by no means certain that this would produce results. For, unlike in other Latin American countries, where the military has always been a kind of state within the state and has more often pointed its guns at its own citizens than at external enemies, such action in Cuba would contradict the FAR’s strong awareness of itself as a “people’s army.”

  It must be appreciated that Cuban civil society – in its organization, activity, and language – has always also been a militarized society, rooted in the Sierra Maestra guerrilla tradition that was able to survive and win through only with the help of the population. The unbroken capacity for rapid mobilization of the masses, whether for rallies or for harvest labor, is typical in this respect. Whereas rulers elsewhere feel an identification of the people with the military as a threat to their power, it has fallen to Cuba to bring about a fusion of civilian and military society in the politicalcum-military concept of the revolution.

  In the nineties it was especially clear that not only the interior ministry, but also such key bodies as the transport ministry, the ministry for heavy industry, the communications ministry and the sugar ministry were being run by generals. Of the 1,700 delegates to the Fourth Party Congress in 1991, 240 belonged to the armed forces; military men constituted powerful factions in the Central Committee and the Politbureau, as well as in lower Party structures right down to local level. This helps to explain the unavoidable “self-discipline” of the Cuban population in hard times. On the other hand, Castro has in the Milícia de Tropas Territoriales a large civilian force which, should the need arise, could be used to hold the soldiers and their commanders in check. A military putsch would thus carry a high risk of failure, as well as threatening to develop into a civil war.

  It is testimony not only to Castro’s great self-assurance but also – for all the prophecies of doom – to the enormous stability of his system, that he could allow a fifth of the population to bear arms in the dramatic economic circumstances of the eighties and nineties, without having to fear that the guns would be suddenly turned on him. For Castro, of course, this kind of civil defense is not a militarization of society but an expression of its democratization:

  We don’t just have the vote, we have the weapons in the hands of the people. Can a people who have weapons in their hands be enslaved? Can a people who have weapons in their hands be oppressed? Can a policy be imposed on a people who have weapons in their hands? And how is such a miracle possible unless there is total identification between the people and the nation, between the people and the Revolution?86

  This Cuban variant of the “citizen in uniform” idea makes the penetration of society by oppositional forces appear a hopeless enterprise. It also permits the use of soldiers as a reserve army in agriculture and industry in times of necessity – a kind of crisis management that would be unthinkable, or probably lead to an uprising, in other Latin American countries. From Argentina to Venezuela, such a request would offend the pride of the military. But not in Cuba. In 1991, when the Soviet imperium was falling apart and the Soviet presence in Cuba was being wound up, Castro set out a new line of advance: “[O]ne of the Armed Forces’ missions at this time is to help the economy.”87 As in the sixties and seventies, soldiers and officers now had to change for work in the factories, the fields, and the bureaucracy. The ending of Soviet military assistance meant that the armed forces had to make a sharp turn toward self-sufficiency, whether it was a question of spare parts for equipment, or farming and stock breeding, or the production of ammunition and their own multipurpose aircraft, the AC-001 Comas. Military maneuvers off the Cuban coast, and the heightened fears of a US invasion following the Gulf War, made the army leadership pull out all the stops to build huge underground tunnel systems for the storage and protection of weapons and equipment. The armed forces also involved themselves more and more in civilian activities, especially joint ventures with foreign, mostly European and Canadian, investors in the tourism industry. This was supposed to lift some of the burden of military expenditure from the state budget. And, indeed, in 1995 the high command reported that it had managed to fund a third of the military budget from its own efforts and its own enterprise – a kind of self-help that would again be unimaginable anywhere else in the world.

  War economy in peacetime

  Cuba was now all alone. Surrounded by enemies and opponents, the government saw only one possible path if it was to avoid falling into line with the “new world order:” the path of autarky. For Castro, this was personally and politically the greatest challenge of his life, but also a macabre opportunity for genuine independence under the least favorable circumstances.

  “Socialism or death! Venceremos!” From September 1990, Castro’s rhetorical formula with which he always ended his speeches was put to such a test that he could not have imagined it in his worst nightmares. The country seemed to be plunging into its death agony. Without pausing for breath, it had to move from rectificación to the período especial. Julio Carranza Valdés, from Cuba’s Center for American Studies (CEA), argues that changes introduced in the period of “rectification” had not provided for “any structural adjustments such as the economy would later have to make, when the crisis of the socialist camp broke with full force.”88 And Castro thought that:

  in no historical epoch did any country find itself in the situation in which ours found itself, when the socialist camp collapsed and we rema
ined under the pitiless blockade of the USA. No one imagined that something as sure and steady as the sun would one day disappear, as it happened with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.89

  The “special period” was Castro’s answer to neoliberalism, even if everyone doubted his judgment. Although his decision to hold out seemed like political adventurism, he scarcely had any other choice if he was not simply to throw in the towel. And so, he put his trust in his own instinct and his unbroken will to political survival. His security services would have given him a reliable picture of the limits of endurance of the Cuban population, and he seemed convinced that he could ask of it the extra sacrifices of a “war economy in peacetime,” without provoking a mass revolt. In October 1991, just a few months after old-style Communists had launched their abortive coup in Moscow, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union was already hard fact and Cubans had been through a summer of growing deprivation, Castro announced at the opening of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba: “We will defend ourselves on our own, surrounded by an ocean of capitalism. . . . The Cuban people went its own way during the long years of the American blockade, relying on the solid pillars of the socialist camp and the Soviet Union. Those pillars have collapsed.”90 Cubans now had to accomplish a “real miracle:” that is, “to produce more milk, meat, rice and vegetables with minimal amounts of fodder, fertilizer and herbicide.”