by Tad Szulc
CHAPTER
4
Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy belonged to the same generation. Both had superb minds and a vision of history. They had never met but were fascinated by each other as adversaries and as national leaders. I know it from discussing Castro with Kennedy in the short years when they were simultaneously in power in their respective countries, and discussing Kennedy with Castro over a quarter of a century later. Each was intensely interested by everything concerning the other. There was an intellectual respect between them. Historically, they had an immense impact on one another and their nations: Castro's existence pushed Kennedy into the tragedy of the Bay of Pigs and, in a strangely contradictory manner, into launching the Alliance for Progress programs for Latin America. Kennedy's presence, still feared by Castro after the Bay of Pigs, led to the Cuban request for Soviet military guarantees and to the subsequent installation of Soviet nuclear weapons on the island, causing the great missile crisis of 1962, the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear confrontation.
In this sense, Castro and Kennedy had a common destiny. To this day, Castro believes that had Kennedy lived, they would have, sooner or later, settled intelligently the basic Cuban-American dispute. To Castro, himself an assassination target, Kennedy's death came as a tremendous blow, and he frequently returns to the theme. Whether Kennedy would have wished a settlement that left Castro in power is a question without an answer; American historians hold differing opinions on this subject.
What is beyond question is that Castro played a central role in the history of the Kennedy presidency, and that Kennedy and his policies were crucial in Castro's ultimate attitudes toward the United States as well as the Soviet Union. Finally, Castro was the issue that forced the two superpowers to rethink and revise their fundamental nuclear strategies; in the case of the Soviet Union, the fiasco of Khrushchev's Cuban nuclear adventure resulted in the decision to accelerate efforts to attain at least nuclear parity with the United States, if not to gain superiority. In other words, the history of the Cuban revolution in the 1960s is to a very large degree the story of Fidel Castro's and John Kennedy's impact on each other.
Nineteen sixty-one, denominated by Castro the "Year of Education," was the third year of the revolution—and its ideological turning point in terms of openly embracing the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. For the United States, it was the year when Fidel Castro was to be liquidated as the Kennedy administration proceeded with the invasion plans secretly formulated by the Eisenhower administration.
Eisenhower's farewell gesture toward Cuba was to break diplomatic relations on January 3, the day after Castro demanded his speech on the anniversary of the revolution that the American Embassy in Havana be reduced to eighteen diplomats—the same number the Cuban Embassy had in Washington. The United States had over sixty diplomats in the Cuban capital, principally because American interests on the island were so sizable in every way, and Eisenhower chose to regard Castro's request as a provocation and as justification to sever diplomatic ties. Now the United States felt even freer to pursue every conceivable course of action to oust Castro. Even as John Kennedy was being inaugurated in Washington, Cuban exiles were being trained for the invasion at the CIA's secret camps in Guatemala. Castro, a believer in the strategy of crying wolf, used the anniversary celebrations to warn that "imperialism" remained a mortal danger despite the change in administrations in the United States, and he underlined it by presiding over the first revolutionary military parade in Havana. Rebel soldiers and militia units, no longer ragtag guerrilleros, happily displayed new Soviet, Czech, and Belgian weapons.
This display, of course, also symbolized the nature of Castro's essential dilemma of striving to take the revolution beyond rhetoric and of the simple dismantling of the pre-1959 economic and social order. Because he really did face a lethal danger from the United States, he was forced to divert much manpower, resources, energy, attention and leadership to defense—and away from "revolutionary construction." On the other hand, as he has often said himself, external danger was necessary to keep alive the revolutionary spirit, particularly when tough realities of daily life replaced the romantic euphoria of the victory days. To compound matters, Castro had no clear economic policy in the first years of the revolution, and then he went on to alter, rewrite, and replan as required by changing circumstances. Moreover, he lacked economists and managers on the policy level after dispensing with the "moderates" by the mid-1960s: For years, the Cuban economy was conducted from INRA by Castro personally with advice from Che Guevara, Captain Nuñez Jiménez who was a geographer and an ideologue, and, later, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a charming intellectual and the best politician Cuban Communists had produced.
The events in Cuba directly involving Castro, during just one week at the start of 1961, illustrate the pressures on him and the way in which he allowed himself (or forced himself) to be pulled in every imaginable direction. During 1960, Fidel had made up his mind that Cuba's principal priority had to be to make the population literate if it was to enjoy any progress, the fact of the revolution notwithstanding. When the revolution triumphed, roughly 40 percent of the six million Cubans were illiterate (as was most of the rebel army), and Castro calculated that there was a shortage of ten thousand elementary school teachers in the rural zones. In the course of its first two years in power, the Castro regime had added ten thousand classrooms to the educational system, but it lacked teachers for them. The notion of a crash literacy campaign was born from these realities, and beginning in mid-1960, the government formed "literacy brigades" of university students and high school seniors in the cities who fanned out all over the countryside. Training teachers would be the next step, and Castro's plan was to make 1961 the "Year of Education," himself directing the literacy campaign along with defense and the economy. This, then, was Fidel's week:
On New Year's Eve, he dined with ten thousand elementary teachers at the old army Camp Columbia in Havana, converted earlier into a school complex, to launch the literacy campaign, but to warn, at the same time, that "imperialist" agression was imminent. A few hours earlier, he had gone downtown to direct firemen in efforts to put out a fire that destroyed the vast La Época, and that in his opinion was an act of sabotage. He had also ordered that day general mobilization against an American invasion. On January 1, Castro officially inaugurated the National Literacy Campaign, declaring that Cuba needed "a revolutionary conscience that it is shameful not to know how to read and write." On January 2, he watched the military parade on Plaza Cívica, and demanded the cutback in the staff of the American Embassy. On January 4, Fidel donned his battle fatigues and a brown beret to join, rifle in hand and compass on his left wrist, the militiamen fighting the bands in the Escambray, having first signed in Havana documents creating a National Culture Center. On January 5, word reached Castro in Havana that Conrado Benítez García, a volunteer student teacher participating in the literacy campaign, had been assassinated by "counter-revolutionaries" in an Escambray village where he had just begun working with the local peasants.
Benítez now also belonged to the pantheon of the martyrs of the revolution, and his murder, too, was put at America's door by Castro because the Escambray hands were CIA-supported. Wherever he now went, Fidel heard the chant "¡Cuba sí, Yanqui no!," the latest revolutionary slogan. Then came "Fidel, For Sure, Hit the Yankees Hard!," which schoolchildren still chanted in 1985 to greet Castro. He sheepishly explained to an American friend when they went together to visit a Pioneers children's camp: "They don't know that you are American. . . ." A teacher said, "Yes, we're supposed to teach it to the kids," but, strangely, there was no touch of hate in the children's voices or in the teacher's explanation. It was simply revolutionary folklore, turning into living history twenty-five years later; the teacher had not been born when the slogan was first sounded in Cuban streets.
But slogans and revolutionary fervor could not shore up the economy as it foundered in 1961, unguided and improvised from day to day, a
nd brutally severed from the American economy of which it had always been an appendage. The central problem was that Castro desired to refashion the Cuban economy rapidly but had no real concept or blueprint for it. As René Dumont, a leading French agronomist whom Castro consulted in the early 1960s, wrote later, "Cuba in 1959–1960 confusedly searched for truly original socialism," but in the next decade it committed "an impressive series of economic errors . . . that did not happen by chance." (After Dumont published critical but well-meaning conclusions in a 1971 book, he was classified, in effect, as an enemy of the revolution because Castro does not take kindly to criticism. Dumont has since died.) This "truly original socialism" never really acquired an identifiable shape inasmuch as it degenerated into ill-conceived imitations of orthodox Soviet central planning, administrative and managerial chaos, new vested ideological and bureaucratic interests, and brusque course corrections. Castro lost his way in implementing his pledge that in every sense "the Cuban revolution will be as Cuban as the palm trees. "
In stating late in 1960 that the Moncada Program, contained in the "History Will Absolve Me" discourse, had been fulfilled, Castro led his nation to mistake the decision to carry out the objectives of "History" for actual results. Nationalizations and the agrarian reform laws meant that the revolutionary regime had embarked on a new approach to the industrial, trade, banking, and farming segments of the Cuban economy, but it was not spelled out what this approach would represent in terms of production, the distribution of resources, and so on. Che Guevara wrote, for example, in the October 1960 issue of the army publication Verde Olivo that "the laws of Marxism are part of the development of the Cuban revolution" and that between the landing of the Granma and the victory of the revolution there had been "ideological transformations" of its leaders. But he offered no clue as to what these Marxist laws were supposed to be or what they portended for the third year of the revolution. For one thing, Guevara, running as usual ahead of the more cautious Fidel, was the first top leader to use publicly the word Marxism to describe the revolution. In proclaiming that same month that the Moncada program had been completed, Fidel did announce the start of a new revolutionary era, but he eschewed ideological adjectives.
In terms of fundamental economic policy, which should have been practical as well as ideological and political, Castro and Guevara, the principal planners, long could not make up their minds about the role of sugar in the Cuban economy. Though sugar had always been Cuba's mainstay, the revolutionary chiefs developed during 1959 and 1960 the daring notion that the island should end forthwith its dependence on it—presumably because it was a bitter reminder of the American-dominated "colonial" past. Consequently, production dropped sharply in the harvests between 1962 and 1964, plantings having been reduced starting in 1959. Then, economic realities—such as the fact that Cuba had only sugar to pay even in part for the mounting Soviet aid and that nothing had yet replaced canecutting as a gainful rural occupation at a time of endemic national unemployment—forced Castro and Guevara to abandon the idea that industrialization could overnight be the new fountainhead of wealth. In 1965, therefore, the Cubans (possibly under Soviet pressure) returned to sugar as their main production priority, then went to the other extreme of shooting for record harvests, which also turned out to be a painful error.
Fidel Castro, ever the great teacher, kept the nation informed of this shifting course through a formidable array of statistical data, lengthy projections, and interpretations. He always concluded on the note that whatever decision was being announced or explained by him on a given day represented the collective wisdom of the revolution, and the adoring crowds cheered and chanted, "We Shall Win! . . ." Fidel's word was never questioned by the masses, and there was not enough expertise around to sort it all out. Colossal errors, as Castro later acknowledged, were committed by INRA's military administrators of nationalized lands, especially on the cattle ranches where their absolute inexperience and politically directed demand for immediate increases in meat production combined to destroy the herds and the industry.
Castro had launched from the outset a series of grandiose but nevertheless rational and promising food-production and diversification schemes, ranging from much higher rice yields and a huge increase in vegetable farming (as China had done successfully at about the same time) to a poultry industry on a national scale to provide rapidly cheap and abundant protein supplies from chicken and eggs. In 1959—as in 1986—Castro was convinced that perfect, state-of-the-art technology in agriculture or anything else could alone solve great economic problems. But he lacked resources, personnel, patience, and the art of the follow-up to transform his dreams into reality. Thus nothing was accomplished along those lines while the rest of the economy deteriorated, and Fidel rushed restlessly from a rice experimental station to a new stand of eucalyptus trees, exploding with bursts of impatience and bursts of new ideas the length and the width of his island.
This was still the romantic period of the revolution, but above all it was the obsession of Fidel Castro to do away with human, social, and economic underdevelopment in Cuba. To understand Castro and his revolution, it is essential to comprehend this concept of underdevelopment as a crucial psychological attitude in Cuba, probably to a greater degree than elsewhere in the Third World. To Fidel and the revolutionary generation, underdevelopment means illiteracy and disease, economic inadequacy, dependence on the West under the shackles of "neocolonialism," and the thinking patterns of people in poor countries. To him and his disciples, underdevelopment is the shame of a society's cultural and economic poverty, it is a mental prison, it is third- or fourth-class citizenship in the world. In Cuba since the birth of the revolution, this word is used constantly since the birth of the revolution in speech and print by Castro and everybody else: It expresses degradation, a justification for failures and insufficiencies of the system and of individuals, and even a sense of defiance in response to criticisms. The expression appears in endless articles, novels, films, and conversations as Cubans keep alive the psychology of underdevelopment year after year and decade after decade in the life of their revolution. In fact, one of the most popular—and one of the best—Cuban post revolution movies was Memories of Underdevelopment, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, dwelling on this theme.
To eradicate underdevelopment in all these meanings was, indeed, Fidel Castro's magnificent obsession from the beginning, and this was what the social-justice aspects of the Moncada program were all about, long before he chose to apply Marxist language to it. Once in power, social-improvement goals were paramount to Castro, and from the first day they commanded an enormous share of the revolution's time and attention. Clearly, decisions on sugar and industry were vital, but such was the mood in those early years that what really captivated him as a human being were the literacy campaign, the classrooms in the Sierra Maestra, the creation of a public-health network (including forty-five new hospitals built in one year) that showed instant results, especially among children, decent peasant housing, country roads, and that new Cuban sense of pride that really meant more to Fidel than anything else. He spoke of racial equality and of the "new Cuban man (or woman)," before he turned to "the new socialist man (or woman)," and naturally the masses adored it. Through the first agrarian reforms, Castro gave peasants land (before, in effect, taking it away again), and through urban reforms he halved the rents and banned ownership of more than one dwelling per person (before the state went massively into the city landlord business in a subsequent revolutionary paroxysm). It was all marvelous, but it cost money, and it required a functioning economy that Cuba simply lacked at that revolutionary stage.
Castro, therefore, turned to improvisations—and to an ever-increasing dependence on the Soviet Union for the economy and for defense. He was both economically and militarily vulnerable, and he knew that a moment of awesome confrontation with the United States, now under President Kennedy, was both inevitable and imminent. To put his house in order in anticipation of the great clash,
Castro tried to tighten up the economy at home through the creation in February of three new ministries: Industry under Che Guevara, who gave up the presidency of the National Bank (after delightedly signing new banknotes with his nickname "Che"), Foreign Trade, and Internal Trade. Guevara had just returned from a lengthy visit to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—his first trip to Moscow—where he joined the Soviet leadership at the Kremlin in reviewing the October Revolution military parade and signed a new trade agreement providing for Russian purchases of one half of the Cuban sugar crop (2. 7 million tons) at a price above the world market. Guevara sold another 1. 3 million tons to other Eastern European countries, also Cuba's new allies. Six months earlier, Nuñez Jiménez had gone to Moscow, heading the first Cuban trade mission to the Soviet Union, and returned with a commitment that thirty Soviet industrial plants would be installed in Cuba. This was the Cuban leadership's concept for industrializing the island—but sugar had to be grown to pay for the plants and oil and everything else being sent by Moscow.
