by Patrick Iber
The court did not listen to “History” and sentenced Castro to fifteen years in prison. But he was not idle and was able to smuggle letters out of jail to his sympathizers, who continued to work against Batista from the outside. His supporters had the responsibility of editing and indeed creating “History Will Absolve Me” for publication as a pamphlet—as published, it was a statement longer than he could possibly have delivered in court. It was a lengthy attack on the unconstitutional government of Batista and a defense of Castro’s own actions, intended to circulate throughout the country as useful propaganda. A nationalist text, it lacked, save for one reference to the “capitalist class,” any sign of Marxist influence. Castro called for the restoration of legitimate power via the constitution of 1940 and a program of land reform, profit sharing, the punishment of ill-gotten gains, and solidarity with the democratic peoples of the continent. Its distribution throughout Cuba made Castro more famous than he ever had been as a free man and created new adherents, including liberals and professionals.
Several sympathizers helped smuggle out “History Will Absolve Me,” edit it, and prepare it for public distribution. The most important among them were members of the anti-Communist Left. Castro wanted Jorge Mañach, the distinguished writer and social democrat, to edit the document, and many have since asserted that Mañach was its author. However, Luis Conte Agüero, an Ortodoxo journalist who had known Castro since their student days together at the University of Havana in the 1940s, claims that he protected Mañach by doing the work himself. Whatever the case, both Conte Agüero and Mañach experienced a similar fate when the revolution triumphed. In March 1960, some fifteen months after the victory of the revolution, Conte Agüero made a public criticism of Castro’s increasing closeness with the Soviet Union. Accused of betrayal and facing calls for his death, he fled Cuba for exile in Miami. Mañach, too, left his country in 1960, going to Puerto Rico, which took in many Cubans with social democratic political views at that time, and died the following year.18
During the anti-Batista struggle Castro was far from the only insurgent leader. Student organizations played an important role in the cities. And although the Auténticos were divided, the official Democratic Left had plenty of experience with clandestine operations and did not give up its attempts to play a role in reclaiming power in Cuba. Carlos Prío left office a wealthy man and, from his exile in the United States, tried to use his fortune to secure himself a place in the post-Batista era. “I stole lots of money from Cuba,” Prío reportedly said. “But the money that I stole will return to Cuba. If anyone goes to Cuba and fights against Batista, I consider myself well-paid.” While Castro was in prison, Aureliano Sánchez Arango remained free, suspected of being with Prío in Mexico or the United States but in fact back on the island, where he had formed a small political group around himself known as the Triple-A, which probably stood for the Asociación de Amigos de Aureliano. Sánchez Arango also plotted Batista’s downfall, but by the end of 1954 he turned himself in to the Uruguayan embassy, asked for asylum, and was granted safe conduct from the country. In his absence the Triple-A ceased to function.19
In 1955, hoping to tamp down internal opposition, Batista granted an early release to Castro, who left for exile in Mexico and began a period of military and political training to prepare to return to Cuba. Castro increasingly declared his independence from the Ortodoxos—among whom he still had many supporters—and named his organization in exile the Movimiento 26 de Julio, the 26th of July Movement, commemorating the day of the assault on the Moncada barracks. Still, Castro sought support almost wherever he could get it, including from disgraced former president Carlos Prío and parts of the Cuban bourgeoisie. After the victorious revolution turned against anti-Communism, this period of cooperation would prove embarrassing to both sides. Neither the anti-Communist Left nor the bourgeoisie wanted to admit the role that it had played in bringing Castro to power, and Castro’s partisans did not want to admit that his liberal and social democratic supporters had not, in fact, meekly acquiesced to Batista’s rule but had had an important part in making opposition to Batista respectable. Both sides settled on narratives of betrayal to explain what had happened.20
In fact, Castro depended on the anti-Communist Left to make his victory possible. Even the CCF’s Cuban affiliate played a significant role in the defense of Castro. The Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom was formed the same year as Castro’s release from prison, in 1955, in the midst of anti-Batista ferment. Made up mostly of the well-educated elites in Havana, the association drew on several distinct currents of thought. Jorge Mañach, the first vice president of the group, represented the first: a well-educated and now middle-aged group that had been, during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the cultural vanguard involved with anti-Machado activities. Although Mañach had briefly been part of the wartime Popular Front government of Batista (he was foreign minister for half of 1944), he did not accept the unconstitutional version of Batista’s power. Mañach, during the 1950s, was also involved with a civic group known as the Movimiento de la Nación, which, like the ABC of the early 1930s, of which he had been the spokesman, sought a negotiated end to the dictatorship.21
Pastor del Río, by contrast, served as the second vice president of the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom and represented a Pan-American current of thinking within the group. Del Río had been the editor of the Cuban magazine América, the organ of the quasi-governmental Asociación de Escritores y Artistas Americanos (AEAA), since its inception in 1939. América’s Pan-Americanism was a reflection of the moment of its creation. Optimistic for the future of U.S.–Latin American relations, the first issue featured the text of Lázaro Cárdenas’s speech at the International Congress against War alongside one by Cordell Hull of the U.S. State Department. Although it was based in Cuba, the AEAA had a continental presence, with national associations in many countries throughout the Americas. Pan-Americanism, as an ideology of continental unity, had most recently been mobilized in order to combat the threat of Nazism and to win a war against it. But when that war ended, América changed very little; it continued to defend the president of the United States unconditionally and reported cheerily on the events of groups hated by cultural nationalists as evangelists for Anglo-U.S. culture, such as the Rotary Club and the Boy Scouts. It was a far more pro-U.S. publication than anything that the CCF ever published.22
In the early 1950s the AEAA received an elegant new building in the wealthy Havana neighborhood of El Vedado, adorned with flags of the American republics and featuring a map of the two continents above its entrance. Known as the Casa Continental de la Cultura, this building symbolized Cuban hopes to play a leadership role in international cultural affairs, hosting visiting dignitaries and cultural ambassadors, as well as local events. Despite the differences in their outlooks, there was substantial overlap in membership between the AEAA and the Cuban Association of the CCF. The CCF held a series of conferences at the facility of the Casa Continental and even hoped to use it as a permanent headquarters.23
Alongside elite democracy advocates and AEAA-affiliated Pan-Americanists, there was also a more politically radical contingent within the Cuban Association of the CCF. Its most active representative was the journalist Mario Llerena. He too had come of age under Machado and in the mid-1950s worked as a journalist on the staff of the popular Cuban weekly Carteles, where he often wrote about the activities of the CCF. Like Mañach, Llerena was a middle-class liberal who wanted a democratic and reformist revolution. He differed from his more august counterpart only in that Llerena did not seek alternatives to Castro’s victory, instead working openly on Castro’s behalf. He tried to use the Cuban Association of the CCF to form a pro-Castro bulwark. Under his guidance the Cuban Association of the CCF became a gathering point for a young group of Cuban intellectuals who openly began to support the 26th of July Movement in 1956.24
Given that he would become Castro’s foreign minister after the revolution, it is a considerable iron
y that Raúl Roa held some of the strongest anti-Castro views among the membership of the CCF. Roa had been a member of Sánchez Arango’s clandestine Triple-A. As dean of the social sciences at the University of Havana, he had seen the corrosive effects of violence among student groups and, knowing Castro’s past, came to describe him as a “gangster.” In Mexico for the Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom of September 1956 at the same time when Castro was nearby preparing an invasion of Cuba, Roa refused to meet with him. As the other Cuban delegate to the Inter-American Conference for Cultural Freedom, Llerena made the opposite decision. He carried papers to Castro, who tested the terrified Llerena’s revolutionary mettle by driving him speeding around mountain curves in the dead of night. For approximately two years thereafter, Llerena made working for Castro his full-time job. Llerena’s position and salary with the Cuban Association of the CCF made his work for Castro possible for part of this time.25
The Cuban Revolution, indeed, could not have succeeded without its liberal and social democratic supporters. Although his words and actions suggest that Castro’s plans to confront the United States predated his victory, he was careful to maintain a broad coalition to oppose Batista. Batista, at least, understood the threat. Secret police narrowly missed arresting Llerena at his house and at that of a friend in 1957. He ran straight to the Mexican embassy after the second attempt, was granted asylum in Mexico, and from there left for New York with the help of Rodrigo García Treviño and other friends in the CCF. Mañach, host of a popular radio discussion program called University on the Air, was beaten by police along with other members of the staff. Batista’s customs officials refused to allow into the country a pamphlet written by Julián Gorkin about Marx and the Soviet Union and confiscated the thirtieth number of Cuadernos, which contained an article by Mañach that described the violence of the Batista regime and speculated on the prospects for Castro’s military victory. The same issue also contained a supplemental manifesto cheekily invoking José Martí and issuing a call for democratic awakening in the Americas. In exile in New York, Llerena was named by Castro as director of public relations for the 26th of July Movement outside Cuba, and he became responsible for representing the movement to a curious U.S. press. When charges appeared that the 26th of July Movement was Communist inspired, Llerena refuted them, assisted by the liberals and socialists at the IADF.26
Llerena also played an essential role in the most significant propaganda coup of the battle against Batista: smuggling Herbert Matthews of the New York Times into the mountains for a conversation with the rebel leader. Matthews’s reporting was demoralizing to Batista, disproving his government’s contention that Castro had already been killed. Che Guevara later described Matthews’s presence in the Sierra Maestra as “more important for us than a military victory.” In his memoirs Batista acknowledged that the interview “was of considerable propaganda value to the rebels.” With it, Batista argued, “Castro was to begin his era as a legendary figure” and, in his view, “end as a monster of terror.” Matthews’s reporting also strengthened Castro’s position within the anti-Batista groups, making him the most romantic and appealing figure among the opposition. When official censorship aimed to prevent the Times articles from ever reaching Cuba, it was Llerena who, from New York, arranged for thousands of copies to be printed and mailed to prominent members of Cuban society, who could then distribute them further. Later, Llerena arranged for Robert Taber of CBS News to meet secretly with Castro, and Taber portrayed him on television as a democrat and a fighter for social justice.27
Nor were the anti-Communist Left’s contributions to military success trivial. Castro had forded the Rio Grande to meet with Prío in southern Texas; that trip earned him the money that purchased the famous yacht Granma, which he used to return to Cuba. Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who trained Castro and his guerrilla fighters in Mexico, had for years been the military tutor of the anti-Communist Caribbean Legion. When Castro traveled to Costa Rica to seek arms in 1956, President José Figueres decided not to receive him directly, but once Castro returned to Cuba and was fighting in the Sierra Maestra, the anti-Communist Figueres sent him an arms shipment through a Cuban intermediary, Huber Matos, who eventually became the commander of a column of Castro’s rebel army. As military victory drew closer throughout the course of 1958, the coalition that supported Castro included parts of the divided anti-Communist Auténticos and Ortodoxos, the Communist PSP, and groups of student radicals. Even the CIA, hedging its bets, seems to have sent some money to the 26th of July Movement in 1957 and 1958. The United States cut off aid to Batista in 1958, and although there was some sympathy for Castro in the CIA and in the State Department, the main lines of U.S. diplomacy hoped to secure a political solution that would proffer an alternative to both Batista and Castro. They could not achieve it.28
Batista fled the country on 1 January 1959, and Castro marched into Havana a week later as the uncontested leader of the revolution. Castro’s first cabinet was made up of judges, lawyers, and economists—professional and generally liberal men who were part of the politically moderate groups that had supported him. His choice for president, Manuel Urrutia, was a provincial judge who had ruled that armed revolt against Batista’s government was legitimate. Urrutia had also appeared in April 1958 alongside Mario Llerena in the offices of the IADF in New York to declare before the U.S. press that the 26th of July Movement would repudiate collaboration with the (Communist) PSP, which had just declared that it would seek to work with the 26th of July Movement. Raúl Roa had experienced another change of heart and, in spite of his earlier criticisms of Castro, became Cuba’s ambassador to the Organization of American States in February and was promoted to foreign minister in May. On 13 January 1959 philosophy teacher and CCF member Pedro Vicente Aja wrote to Julián Gorkin from Havana to assure him that the language of the revolution was “democratic and nationalist,” without Communist infiltration. Castro declared the revolution “humanist” and neutral with respect to the Cold War.29
In the first months of revolutionary victory there was a range of views regarding the future course of the revolution, and many people projected their own hopes, aspirations, and views onto Castro. Pedro Vicente Aja wanted the reorganized and reactivated Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom—which had declared itself unable to operate in late 1957 in the face of repression from Batista—to provide a kind of technical counterweight to Communist influence in Cuba, supporting democratization and helping solve the country’s economic problems. He was convinced that Castro would look favorably on this activity. Although some members of the CCF had already soured on Castro, most had not. Llerena had broken with Castro in August 1958 and had written to Gorkin to ask the Spaniard whether the struggles for power that he saw taking place within the guerrilla groups were normal for revolutionaries who had not yet even taken power. In Mexico, concerned by reports of executions in Cuba after the victory of the revolutionary forces, Rodrigo García Treviño sent a cable to Castro in the wake of military victory that was only tepidly congratulatory. But on 20 January the experienced revolutionary Gorkin dismissed the negative reaction of the U.S. and Mexican press to Castro’s government. In a letter to Aja, he echoed Castro’s own arguments: “The North Americans and the Mexicans seem to have forgotten their own histories; and, what is more, those who never protested against the mountains of cadavers that Batista’s regime created are those who now most loudly decry the passionate acts of a people that has suffered so much. You feel, as I do, ever less inclined toward violence and bloody acts. But we understand that one does not escape a situation like [Batista] without breaking some eggs.” By April the restructuring of the Cuban Association for Cultural Freedom was complete. Mañach served as president, Aja as secretary general, and Raúl Roa simultaneously as vice president and an official in Cuba’s new government.30
The victory of the Cuban Revolution made possible the transformation of Cuba’s social life and institutions with a speed a
nd dedication that would have been impossible in an ordinary democracy. Life changed quickly in ways that improved conditions for the poor: during 1959 many rents were slashed in half by decree; agrarian reform broke up large estates; and foreign companies were nationalized. But to bridge the divide between cosmopolitan, urban Havana and the many poor people of the countryside would require missionary zeal and, furthermore, new cultural institutions. The most concentrated effort would come in 1961, with a literacy campaign that mobilized hundreds of thousands to teach the illiterate the rudiments of written communication—and how to write a letter of thanks to Fidel, the final assignment that served to mark their status as newly lettered.
But the process of cultural transformation began almost immediately after the victory of the revolution. In March the government created a national press and the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica to support Cuban film and to bring film arts to Cubans with little or no access to the quintessential modern art form. In April Castro’s government issued a proclamation to create a new cultural organization, Casa de las Américas, that would serve as a way of coordinating cultural efforts, projecting the influence of the revolution. Casa de las Américas took over the Casa Continental de la Cultura that had belonged to the Pan-American AEAA, replacing the moribund institution with one that had a revolutionary mandate. Haydée Santamaría, a veteran of the assault on the Moncada barracks, was designated to run the new organization. The new Casa de las Américas began publishing its eponymous magazine in 1960 and sponsored famous prizes for literary and artistic works. In time, this magazine and institution would come to be seen, as the World Peace Council had once been, as the chief rival to the CCF in Latin America. But in the beginning Casa de las Américas was more like a companion of the CCF than a rival to it. Jorge Mañach himself served on the jury for the first literary contest, which was awarded to a story about agrarian reform.31
