Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  Despite these efforts by both countries to develop a rapprochement, the Kennedy administration reactivated its assassination program aimed at the top Cuban leaders and in June 1963 renewed its support for anti-Castro terrorists.7 President Lyndon Johnson stopped supporting them in 1964, worried that the so-called autonomous groups had become too independent after one attacked a Spanish freighter, the Sierra Aranzazu, believing it was a Cuban vessel.8 Confronted by what seemed to be an ongoing US threat and a worthless Soviet defense commitment, Cuba’s leaders in 1963 modified the country’s foreign policy and aimed it at three goals: to acquire economic and military security; to transform the third world through revolutions that would change the world’s balance of power in favor of the poor; and to establish Cuba’s independence from foreign domination.

  Deploying a New Foreign Policy

  Repairing Relations with the Soviet Union

  The Cuban leaders’ angry reaction to the Soviet withdrawal of missiles, bombers, and patrol boats generated so much tension that it actually threatened the Cuban-Soviet relationship. Attempting to prevent a break in January 1963, Khrushchev wrote a 27-page personal letter to Castro, inviting the Cuban prime minister to visit the Soviet Union. Castro recalled in 1968 that “It was a bucolic letter, poetic in many ways.”9 Khrushchev recommended that Castro travel when the weather would be warmer, and the Cuban leader arrived on April 27.

  During a five-week grand tour, Fidel was treated repeatedly to red-carpet welcomes and large enthusiastic crowds. He returned to Havana with an agreement for military hardware, including anti-aircraft guns and eighty World War II–vintage tanks, construction equipment, development loans, oil shipments, and a Soviet guarantee to defend Cuba from aggression, even if that required the use of nuclear weapons. Khrushchev also agreed to leave a three-thousand-person brigade in Cuba to act as a kind of trip wire against a US invasion.10

  In turn, Castro promised that Cuba would abandon economic plans for import substitution and increase sugar production with guaranteed deliveries to the Soviet bloc. Most important from Khrushchev’s perspective, the Cuban leader agreed to moderate his stance on armed struggle by conceding that the path to socialism should be determined by the people in each country according to their circumstances, in order to achieve “the Leninist policy of peaceful coexistence.”11

  The trip provided Cuba with the economic and military security it sought. Castro’s success on the trip was partly due to a card in his hand, which he played deftly—the China card. Sino-Soviet hostility had intensified by 1963 as both countries claimed to be the natural leader of the third world. Cuba was one of the twenty-five founding members of the recently created Non-Aligned Movement, which had become the principal forum for the world’s poor countries. Were Cuba to break with the Soviet Union and favor China, it could have been a significant blow to the legitimacy of Soviet aspirations for leadership, especially in Latin America.

  In reality, Castro would have gained little from actually playing the card, because China had far less than the Soviet Union did to offer Cuba. Indeed, when we asked him in a 2002 interview why Cuba had opted for close relations with the Soviet Union instead of China in the Sino-Soviet split, President Castro told us succinctly, “The Soviet Union had oil.” By late 1964, it was clear to the Chinese leaders which side Cuba had chosen. They even rebuffed Che Guevara, seemingly the member of Cuba’s leadership most favorably inclined to China, when he went to Beijing in January 1965 seeking to assuage Chinese anger toward Cuba.12 Still, in May 1963 Khrushchev could not be certain about the decision Cuba would make.

  Exporting Revolution

  The risky and unconventional second part of Cuba’s strategy was the support of revolutions throughout the third world. The full extent of Cuba’s contributions to antigovernment guerrilla groups and independence movements in the 1960s still remains uncertain. We do know that Cuba put more effort into such support after the missile crisis.

  Cuban leaders reasoned in 1963 that they could not base the country’s long-term development on hopes of the US embargo ending, or on the goodwill of an untrustworthy Soviet Union that had its own economic problems. Cuba needed trading partners that could potentially remove themselves from either superpower’s sphere, such as resource-rich third world states that were still colonies or were in neocolonial relationships with the advanced industrial countries. If these states gained their independence and shared Cuba’s revolutionary ideology, then they might provide an alternative to dependence on the United States or the Soviet Union.13

  In addition, all the world’s poor could benefit from this plan, which enhanced its attractiveness to Cuba’s leaders. Indeed, from the start they had asserted the Revolution was committed to “proletarian internationalism,” a loosely defined concept that conveyed the idea of a historic mission grander than the liberation of only one country. Castro proclaimed a version of this vision in the 1962 Second Declaration of Havana when he declared, “The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. It is true that the revolution will triumph in the Americas and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by.”14

  The policy of exporting revolution would seem to have contradicted Cuba’s security goal—the centerpiece was reducing the US threat—because supporting third world revolutions was likely to antagonize the United States. But Castro remarked in a 1992 conference that he believed US hostility had little to do with Cuba’s actual behavior. “The United States is always inventing something new in connection with Cuba,” he said. “You never know what the next reason is going to be.”15

  Applying what could be called a “strategy of the weak,” Castro hoped that by fanning the flames of revolution in a wide variety of locations, Cuba would force the United States to “overextend” itself as it attempted to suppress insurrections everywhere, and at the same time its attention would be distracted away from Cuba.16 Che Guevara famously alluded to this idea in his 1967 message “from somewhere in the world” to the Organization of the Solidarity of the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). He wrote, “How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe.”17

  Avoiding Foreign Domination

  After the missile crisis, Cuba and the Soviet Union locked horns on several issues, as Fidel tried to demonstrate that Cuba would not allow itself to be controlled by the Soviet Union. Despite Soviet requests, Cuba refused to sign both the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty and the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which declared Latin America a nuclear-free zone. When the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe allies broke diplomatic relations with Israel during the June 1967 Six-Day War, Cuba maintained its diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Che Guevara, speaking on behalf of the Cuban government at a 1965 conference in Algeria, castigated the Soviets for their regressive ideological views and for their immorality in not adequately supporting liberation movements.18

  In January 1966, Cuba frontally challenged the Soviet Union’s claim to be the natural leader of the third world. It brought more than five hundred delegates to Havana from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to the Tricontinental Conference. The purpose: to initiate an organization dedicated to promoting and supporting armed liberation struggles on the three continents.19 Soviet leaders nominally endorsed the Tricontinental Conference, which they hoped would undermine China’s influence with revolutionary movements. But they repeatedly admonished Castro—before and after the conference—to back away from supporting armed struggle.20

  Soviet officials thus were startled by the conference’s open call for global violent revolution. (They also may have been affronted by the barely veiled criticisms during the meeting of alleged weak Soviet support for North Vietnam.) Castro received prolonged applause when he declared in his closing speech that “the world is big, and the imperialists are everywhere, and for the Cuban re
volutionaries the field of battle against imperialism spans the whole world.”21 Even worse, from the Soviet viewpoint, the Tricontinental Conference established OSPAAAL, headquartered in Havana, to spearhead the global struggle. Subsequently, Cuba invited mostly noncommunist revolutionary movements to the first meeting of the Organization for Latin American Solidarity, an OSPAAAL offshoot.22

  Meanwhile, with Cuba’s support, Guevara had gone to Africa in 1965 to work with insurgents in the Congo and Guinea-Bissau. He returned briefly to Cuba in 1966, and then headed to Bolivia with a small group of revolutionaries to begin a guerrilla struggle there against the government.

  In June 1967, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin pointedly told Castro that he should have informed the Soviets in advance about Guevara’s expedition, and that such activities in Latin America only harmed the communist cause. Unbowed, Castro responded critically that the Soviet leaders had abandoned their own revolutionary tradition.23

  From Fidel’s perspective, the Soviet reaction to his criticism was a nearly unforgiveable act. In October 1967, Bolivian rangers supported by a US Special Forces team captured and killed Guevara. It was a terrible blow to Castro. He blamed his comrade’s death on the Bolivian Communist Party and, by implication, on their Soviet masters.24 Shortly afterward, both Fidel and Raúl Castro were conspicuously absent at the fiftieth anniversary celebration in Moscow of the “Great October Revolution,” and they chose to absent Cuba from a Soviet-organized preparatory meeting of world communist parties in Budapest.25

  The fault line in the Cuban-Soviet bond was widening. Support for national liberation movements had exactly the opposite strategic value for the Soviet Union and Cuba. The Soviets believed that their own security depended on easing tensions with the United States, a policy they called “peaceful coexistence.” To Cuba, peaceful coexistence meant accepting US domination of Latin America. It also seemed to imply an acquiescence to informal deals between the two superpowers at the expense of small, poor countries such as Cuba.26

  A Fateful 1968: “We Will Follow Our Own Road”

  Cuba was now at a crossroads. Castro could not allow the Cuban-Soviet relationship to reach a breaking point. He had no other option but to reduce the tension and cease his open challenges to Soviet leadership. This was underscored by a Soviet decision to reduce Cuba’s anticipated oil shipments for 1968. On January 2, 1968, Castro publicly reported the troublesome news about oil deliveries, warning Cubans that the shortfall would require new limits on gasoline purchases, greater conservation efforts, and a reliance on alternative sources of fuel to run sugar mills. He held out the hope that the hardships would be temporary, lasting at most for three years.27 By achieving a goal of harvesting ten million tons of sugar in 1970, the Cuban leader promised, Cuba would earn enough hard currency to be self-reliant.

  While Fidel would tone down his public criticism of Soviet foreign policy, he would not have Cuba play the role of supine lapdog. He was determined to make the Soviet Union give Cuba respect befitting an equal, or at least a fully sovereign country. Cuba’s effort to traverse a narrow strait—between the rocks of a total break with the Soviet Union and the shoals of total capitulation to its superpower patron—made 1968 a fateful transition year.

  Purge of the “Micro-Faction”

  The journey began on January 23, at a meeting of the entire Cuban Communist Party (PCC) Central Committee, the first such conclave since the new Communist Party’s founding in October 1965. The main purpose was to conduct a “trial” of thirty-seven party members, labeled the “micro-faction.” Most prominent among them was Aníbal Escalante, a leader of the PSP before 1959 and an ardent pro-Soviet critic of Castro. Raúl Castro, supposedly the brother who was most sympathetic to the Soviet Union, chaired the sessions, which found the Escalante contingent guilty of “treasonable and counterrevolutionary activities.” They had conspired with Soviet embassy officials, according to Raúl’s report, and provided the Soviets with false and viciously anti-Castro information. What made this behavior treasonable was the unproven claim that the conspiracy’s ultimate objective was a Soviet-backed coup, a transfer of power to a group of Moscow-aligned communists led by Escalante.28

  While official denunciations of the micro-faction avoided blaming the Soviet Union directly, Castro’s message to Soviet leaders was evident: if you want to work with Cuba, you will need to work with Cuba’s revolutionary government. Moscow seemed to have understood the message.29

  Questioning Soviet Commitments: “Feeble-Minded Bureaucrats”

  The micro-faction trial was reported in Cuban newspapers and was open to Communist Party officials from other countries. But a closed session ensued after the trial during which Fidel Castro castigated the Soviet leaders for their lack of both loyalty to Cuba and commitment to revolutionary goals. The text of the speech was secret, and remained so for more than thirty years. In it, Castro recounted the history of the 1962 October Crisis from the Cuban perspective.30

  Castro was unable to ascertain Escalante’s popularity among the members of the Central Committee because the new group was so new. The Cuban leader apparently believed he needed to justify the micro-faction purge in terms that went beyond the formal charges, and he used the missile crisis as an object lesson about Soviet incompetence and unreliability. In effect, he argued that the purge was necessary to protect Cuban sovereignty, because the micro-faction allegedly wanted to turn Cuba into a Soviet pawn, which would have placed Cuba’s fate in the hands of “feeble-minded bureaucrats.”31 Despite the speech’s secrecy, the Soviet leaders apparently learned what Fidel had said and responded by suspending shipments of military supplies to Cuba and curtailing their technical assistance and training.32

  Undaunted, in March 1968, Fidel proclaimed the beginning of a “revolutionary offensive,” which further unnerved those in Moscow who wondered about the wisdom of continuing the current relationship with Cuba. In a passionate speech on March 13, he announced the government would nationalize 56,000 small businesses—restaurants and bars, barbers, taxis and street vendors, and consumer services such as shoe and car repair shops—and shutter nightclubs such as the famed Tropicana. The order in effect closed all of the remaining private enterprises in the country other than small farms. “Gentlemen,” the Cuban leader thundered, “a Revolution was not made here in order to establish the right to do business.”33

  Thus seemingly focused on the domestic economy and against a culture of materialism, the “offensive” was closely linked to Cuba’s evolving foreign policy. Fidel made this point clear in the same speech, declaring: “We will follow our own road, we will build our Revolution and we will do it fundamentally by our effort. . . . Let us fight bravely, among other reasons, to minimize our dependence on all that is foreign.”

  Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: “Not the Slightest Trace of Legality Exists”

  Castro had made clear his position about Cuban sovereignty. It was time to let the Soviets know that he would not push them to the breaking point. That opportunity arose on August 21, 1968. Armored divisions of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces moved across Czechoslovakia’s borders, crushing the “Prague Spring,” an attempt to construct what its leader Alexander Dubček called “socialism with a human face.” Western European socialist and communist parties uniformly condemned the Soviet intervention and declared sympathy for the Czech reformers. Even Cuban media coverage of developments in the months preceding August had a striking pro-reform bias. Cubans saw the reformers as brave pioneers, trying to construct their own approach to socialism independent of the Soviet Union.

  Apart from their sympathy for the goals of the Prague Spring movement, Cuban leaders were wary of Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev’s justification for the invasion. In what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, he said that a great power had the right to intervene to control an errant smaller power within its sphere of influence. If Cuba accepted that justification, it would have
endorsed a rationale the United States had used repeatedly to intervene in Latin America.

  These considerations were tempered by charges that the United States and its allies had taken advantage of Czechoslovakia’s new openness to manipulate the movement’s leaders and Czech public opinion, in the very way Cuban leaders imagined the United States would try to penetrate an “open” Cuban society and encourage antirevolutionary behavior and values.34 This was one reason Castro emphasized in his March “revolutionary offensive” speech that a true revolutionary is someone motivated by moral incentives, not materialism. He was targeting US counterculture attitudes that had become increasingly popular among Cubans under thirty, which Cuban leaders viewed as individualistic. The fear of the counterculture as a leading edge of US cultural imperialism was so great that Cuban officials banished the music of the Beatles from the island.35

  Fidel waited for nearly three days after the Soviet invasion to give Cuba’s response. His silence during that period was resounding. By 1968, Cuba had become the reference point for anti-imperialism globally. Protesters at Columbia University who seized campus buildings, students in Mexico City who were beaten (and later killed) by police, and reformers in Prague who threw rocks at Soviet tanks wore T-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara’s image. Hopeful idealists throughout the world wanted to know Fidel Castro’s reaction. Would he be willing to risk a break with the Soviet Union by denouncing the invasion?

  The decision weighed on him heavily. When he was ready to speak, on August 23, he chose an austere setting—alone at a desk, on a television set, with only a Che Guevara portrait and the Cuban flag behind him. Castro somberly opened his address to the nation uncharacteristically, almost with an apology: “Some of the things that we are going to state here will be, in some cases, in contradiction with the emotions of many; in other cases, in contradiction with our own interests.”36 Saul Landau, a US filmmaker and historian, was in the television studio at the time, working on his prize-winning documentary, Fidel. He recalls that “Fidel was obviously uncomfortable. He read his speech—he usually spoke without notes—and then he just rushed out.”37