The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The immediate target of the nationalists, however, was the corrupt American-backed dictator Batista. The Ortodoxo party – with its demands for social and land reform – soon became Batista’s main opponent. Castro proved a tireless revolutionary: after his exile following the failed 1953 coup, he rallied his small force, now dubbed the ‘26th July Movement’, and returned from Mexico to Cuba in 1956, on the Granma (Grandmother) – a rusty motorized yacht. The landing was a disaster, and only twenty-two revolutionaries of the original eighty-two managed to regroup, eventually establishing a base in the inaccessible Sierra Maestra – a poor region in the east of the island with a long-established tradition of peasant rebellion. From here Fidel and his band waged a guerrilla war, whilst at the same time urban rebels – the llano – carried out a campaign of strikes and violence in the towns.27 However, the failure of the urban general strike in the spring of 1958 weakened the llano and increased the power of Castro and the rural guerrillas. Batista responded to the guerrilla violence with more violence and support for him ebbed away, not only within Cuba but also in Washington. On New Year’s Eve, Batista, correctly sensing which way the tide of history was flowing, fled, and Castro and Guevara entered Havana two days later.

  Compared with the Vietnamese and Chinese revolutions, the Cuban revolution was remarkably swift and easy. The roots of Batista’s support were shallow, whilst the opposition included a large, vocal urban middle class, and links between towns and the rural proletariat were stronger than elsewhere in Latin America. Castro was buoyed by enormous popular support for an end to the Batista regime, and he insisted that his was a nationalist revolution, not a Communist one. Indeed, in a speech on 1 January, he placed his revolution firmly in the tradition of past nationalist risings:

  This time Cuba is fortunate: the revolution will truly come to power. It will not be as in 1895 when the Americans intervened at the last minute and appropriated our country… No thieves, no traitors, no interventionists! This time the revolution is for real.28

  Castro announced a cabinet of liberals headed by Judge Manuel Urrutia, and declared that his regime would be ‘humanist’, not capitalist or communist. Unlike Raúl and Che, he was no Communist; indeed Che wrote in 1957: ‘I always thought of Fidel as an authentic leader of the leftist bourgeoisie.’29 As late as May 1959, Castro could declare that ‘capitalism can kill man with hunger, while Communism kills man by destroying his freedom’.30 And the 26th July Movement’s economic programme was not initially that radical.31 It proposed a relatively moderate land reform and the development of domestic ‘import substitution’ industries to diversify away from sugar. Castro was clear that national capitalists – excluding the big landowners and foreign companies – were part of the revolution, and many capitalists saw great opportunities in the new regime’s industrialization policies.

  Nevertheless, Castro’s 1959 revolution was far more radical than his 1953 coup had been. Che Guevara – radical by temperament and immersed in Marxism – was clearly an important influence, and many of his views were shared by Raúl. But the tough guerrilla life of Sierra Maestra, where Castro’s compañeros (‘comrades’) lived in close proximity with poor peasants for the first time, also had an impact; it forged an egalitarian revolutionary culture.32 It was in Sierra Maestra that the guerrillas adopted their trademark unkempt beards, a ‘badge of identity’ which became such an essential part of the revolutionary image in the 1960s and 1970s.33

  In contrast to 1953, therefore, the rebels of 1959 were committed not just to nationalism and industrialization, but also to ruling in the interests of the ‘popular classes’ (‘clases populares’) as opposed to the propertied ‘clases económicas’.34 Unsurprisingly, the poor now harboured high hopes, and the guerrilla forms of mobilization that had emerged in the Sierra Maestra encouraged them. They therefore demanded more radical reforms, and Castro’s Rebel Army, which had a great deal of power on the ground, was sympathetic to them.35 There also seems to have been popular support for the summary trials and executions of Batista’s supporters, presided over by Che Guevara himself. Some of Che’s old Argentinian friends were dismayed by his transformation from curer of the sick into violent dispenser of revolutionary justice, but he was unapologetic; as he told one of them, ‘Look, in this thing either you kill first, or else you get killed.’36

  Inevitably this radicalism alienated many, including liberals, the propertied and the United States. Washington was naturally suspicious of Castro’s revolution, fearing his Communist connections, but, initially reassured by his anti-Communist statements, it had recognized his regime. However Castro’s emerging commitment to economic nationalism and land redistribution inevitably fuelled conflict with Cuban-based American-owned firms. The trials and executions of Batista supporters, and the cancellation of elections, also convinced Washington that Castro had been lost to Communism and could not be won back. Relations with the United States deteriorated, and by March 1960 Eisenhower had asked the CIA to plan a coup with the help of anti-Castro émigrés.37 They were determined that Castro should suffer the fate of Arbenz five years before.

  In 1959 the Cubans and the Soviets knew little of each other, but in March 1960 Castro, convinced that the Americans were about to invade, asked for a meeting with the now well-travelled and cosmopolitan Anastas Mikoian, who happened to be in the region. Mikoian arrived in Havana, and they hit it off: the Cubans saw the USSR as a source of economic and military aid, and Khrushchev’s Politburo regarded the Cuban revolution as a chance to extend their influence, and to infuse some youthful spirit into the ageing body of Soviet Communism.38 Mikoian excitedly described Castro as ‘a genuine revolutionary, completely like us. I felt as though I had returned to my childhood.’39 The Soviets agreed to send arms and oil in exchange for sugar, and despatched a group of Spanish Communist officers who had lived in exile in Moscow since the end of the Spanish Civil War to reorganize the Cuban army.40

  Castro was right to fear American intentions. Eisenhower and Dulles were indeed planning to support a full-scale émigré military invasion with American air cover, but the Cubans had a piece of luck in the form of a change of regime in Washington. With the election of John F. Kennedy, American foreign policy was again more synchronized with that of the USSR. Kennedy came to power – much as Khrushchev had – promising a new way of pursuing the struggle with the rival super-power that would be both more idealistic and more intelligent. Shocked by the ‘loss’ of Cuba, the greatest defeat since the ‘loss’ of China a decade before, he was determined to jettison the crude military methods of the Eisenhower era and to distance himself from European imperialism and its epigones in apartheid South Africa. As he explained, America had to be ‘on the side of the right of man to govern himself… because the final victory of nationalism is inevitable’.41

  Under Kennedy, Washington began to acknowledge more fully that Communism could be the product of economic and political inequalities. Modernization theory, as developed by academics like the Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow, was the answer. Rostow and his followers maintained that all societies were on a similar ‘modernizing’ path to liberal democracy, but in the transitional stage, before they reached full maturity, they could catch the disease of Communism. The best solution was to accelerate the process of modernization, and the interests of the world were best served by trying to promote rapid development through financial assistance and the promotion of democracy.42 In 1961 Kennedy even mobilized thousands of youths to spread American modernization throughout the world through the ‘Peace Corps’ and its ‘community development’ programmes. Hard power – the military option – remained, but it had to be conducted through intelligent counter-insurgency campaigns, tempered with appeals to hearts and minds, or soft power.

  When it came to Cuba, Kennedy had real doubts about Eisenhower’s planned invasion, and feared that if it went wrong it would damage America’s reputation. Even so, he was as eager as his predecessor to eradicate Communist influence from the United States’ ba
ckyard and decided to go ahead, though with a more covert, guerrilla-style operation and without air cover. The hope was that strategic landings by armed exiles would provoke spontaneous sympathetic uprisings amongst ordinary Cubans. The result, the ‘Bay of Pigs’ landing of April 1961, was a complete fiasco. The expected pro-exile uprisings failed to materialize, and Castro’s civil defence forces proved highly effective. Most of the invaders were captured, and the image of the United States in the Third World further besmirched. The Bay of Pigs invasion was also counterproductive, and merely pushed Cuba even further into the Soviet sphere. Castro was convinced that another invasion was imminent (and indeed new plans were being drawn up in Washington). Meanwhile, the CIA embarked on a long series of outlandish attempts to assassinate Castro – from exploding cigars to fungus-infected diving suits – and even to damage the supposed source of his charisma, his beard; Castro has claimed that over the years 600 attempts have been made on his life by the CIA and Cuban émigrés.43

  Greater reliance on the Soviet alliance was accompanied by a turn towards a more disciplined style of government at home, as the Cubans became convinced that the informal, participatory rule through the Rebel Army was not suited to national defence and state-building. Diverse revolutionary organizations were integrated into a single body, the Integrated Revolutionary Organization (ORI), and Castro increasingly relied on the well-organized old Cuban PSP Communists to provide an administrative infrastructure.

  The culmination of the Soviet alliance was Khrushchev’s offer to station nuclear weapons on Cuban soil. Castro seized the opportunity, believing that the Soviet nuclear umbrella would finally guarantee his revolution against an American attack. But the subsequent Soviet capitulation to American threats during the missile crisis of October 1962 (without consulting Cuba) was deeply disappointing for Castro; and whilst Kennedy gave a verbal assurance that invasion would not be attempted again, he did not trust the American. Meanwhile, ample proof had been provided that the USSR could not be relied upon. Castro proceeded to turn against the Soviets. Earlier that year, Castro had asserted his control by purging the PSP Communists and along with Che Guevara he had made it clear that the harsh, technocratic Marxism which underlay the Stalinist model was no longer welcome in Cuba. ‘Humanist Marxism’, as Che called it, would be the alternative. This was a version of Romantic Marxism, though one that was not afraid to use an explicit language of morality. Che defined his Marxism with explicit reference to the young Marx, in whose works he was steeped:

  Economic socialism without communist morality does not interest me. We are fighting against poverty, yes, but also against alienation. One of the fundamental aims of Marxism is to bring about the disappearance of material interest, the ‘what’s in it for me’ factor, and profit from men’s psychological motivation… If communism fails to pay attention to the facts of consciousness, it may be a method of distribution, but it is no longer a revolutionary morality.44

  In practice, the Cuban regime sought to blend the struggle against poverty and state weakness with mass participation just as Radical Communists had in the past – through guerrilla Communism (in Cuba termed guerrillerismo). Citizens, or unselfish ‘new men’, were to be soldiers in an egalitarian, brotherly army of labour, giving their all so that Cuba might achieve extraordinary levels of development. This, then, was an ascetic Communism. Cubans were mobilized to work for their homeland for little individual reward. But collective reward was a different matter, and huge efforts were made to improve education and health for the whole population, and especially for the countryside, which was the main beneficiary of the new regime. The literacy campaign of 1961 became one of the iconic movements of the era. Some 250,000 school and university students were trained, mobilized in ‘literacy brigades’ and sent to the countryside for six months to live with peasants, where they would teach – and ‘revolutionize’ – the illiterate. As so often in Communist history, campaigns like these, appealing to youthful idealism, seem to have been enormously popular, whilst also transforming the lives of the illiterate.45 One American visitor remembered the atmosphere of celebration when the students returned to Havana for a week of games, cultural activities and parades:

  Dressed in the remnants of their uniforms, often wearing peasant hats and beads, and carrying their knapsacks and lanterns, the brigadistas swarmed into the capital, singing and laughing and exchanging stories of their experiences. The similarities between the joyous return of the literacy army and the triumphal entry of the guerrilla troops only three years earlier was not lost on the population.46

  Public expressions of joy, of course, were central to all Communist regimes, as Milan Kundera showed so well. But it is no surprise that Cuba was especially appealing to the global left at the time. Cuban Communism was as puritanical and militaristic as any other form of guerrilla Communism, and non-conformity and dissent were punished, most notoriously in labour camps established between 1965 and 1969. But in the early years the Cubans were more successful than many other Communist regimes in emphasizing the enthusiasm and heroic spirit brought by militarism, at the expense of its more unpleasant features – violence and repression. This was partly a matter of leadership and the culture of the party: Che and Castro tried to present their Marxism as one that genuinely relied on persuasion and ‘consciousness’, and unlike Mao and the Chinese leaders, they had not been brought up within a Soviet-influenced party culture of institutionalized self-criticism and purges. But it was also the result of the relative ease with which the revolutionaries took power, owing to the weakness of internal opposition. The peasants of the southern region of Escambray did rebel during a six-year-long insurgency, which was put down by force. But many opponents simply left the island. After the revolution and between 1965 and 1971, many of the middle class migrated to the United States, with the agreement of both governments. The Cubans therefore avoided the systematic ‘class struggle’ or mass persecution of the bourgeoisie seen in so many other Communist regimes.47 Meanwhile, the sense of being a David besieged by a bullying American Goliath inevitably bolstered the legitimacy of Castro in the eyes of those left behind, at least for a time.

  Yet Cuban Communism was far from free of the other great disadvantage of Radical Marxism: the economic trauma and dislocation it tended to bring in its wake. The direction of economic policy became clear very early on, when Che emerged not only as the main strategist of agrarian reform, but also Minister for Industry and head of the Cuban Central Bank. Che relished the incongruity of this last appointment, and humorously claimed that he had got the job by accident: at the cabinet meeting to decide on the post, Castro had asked for a good ‘economista’ to volunteer, and was surprised when Che put his hand up. ‘But Che, I didn’t know you were an economist!’ he exclaimed, to which Che replied, ‘Oh, I thought you needed a good comunista.’48 Che actually went on a crash course in economics, but the Communist won over the economist. Like all voluntarists before them, Che and Castro insisted that harnessing popular willpower would permit Cuba to leap from agrarian poverty to Communist plenty, and the regime pursued a highly ambitious policy of rapid industrialization. Predictably it ran into a combination of chaotic central planning, American sanctions and the loss of middle-class expertise to exile. Che himself later admitted that ‘We dealt with nature in a subjective manner, as if by talking to it we could persuade it.’49

  The result, by 1963, was economic crisis, and Che found himself fighting a losing battle against Soviet-supported technocrats who favoured a less ambitious, more Modernist approach. Che, wholly unsuited to the practicalities of economic management, became disillusioned – according to one of his friends his spirit was ‘smothered under the mountains of statistics and production methods’.50 It was during these debates over the direction of the economy that he began a fundamental reconsideration of the Soviet Union. Che recalled to another friend how he had been converted to Marxism in Guatemala and Mexico by reading Stalin’s works: they had convinced him that ‘in the Soviet
Union lay the solution to life, believing that what had been applied there was what he had read about’. But when he actually worked with the Soviets ‘he realized they had been tricking him’; the result was a ‘violent reaction’ against Stalinism in 1963–4.51

  Castro, however, took a more pragmatic view, and had more sympathy with the Soviets. From 1964 he realized that Che’s recipes were too ambitious: labour enthusiasm alone could not make tiny Cuba into a self-sufficient, industrial power; Soviet-style material incentives and the Soviet market for Cuban sugar would be needed for some time. Che, defeated, gave up on his efforts to apply guerrilla Communism to the economy, and decided to employ it in a more appropriate area: spreading the Cuban model of revolution to the rest of Latin America and Africa. He resigned all of his offices, even renouncing his Cuban citizenship, and spent the rest of his short life as a revolutionary nomad. But the reconciliation between Cuba and the USSR was to be short-lived. Following the Sino-Soviet split and the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, the USSR seemed to be an increasingly unreliable protector, and from 1965 Castro yet again began to pursue a radical politics of mass mobilization to develop the Cuban economy. After zigzagging between Radical and Modernist Marxism, the Cubans were to retain their guerrilla model of economic development until the end of the decade, but they were now to do so under the auspices of a disciplined, vanguard party: the Cuban Communist Party, founded in 1965. The early experiments in participatory democracy of 1959–60 were finally at an end. Even so, the Cubans avoided following the more technocratic Soviet model for some time. They believed their revolution was uniquely democratic and suited to the developing world, and were committed to exporting it.