Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Che's first point was that "the development of the countries which now begin the road of liberation must be underwritten by the socialist countries," and he took the Russians to task for imposing excessively harsh terms on the recipients of their largesse. "There should be no more talk of developing mutually beneficial trade based on prices that the law of value and unequal international trade relations imposed on backward countries," Guevara said. "If we establish that type of relationship between the two groups of nations, we must agree that the socialist countries are, to a certain extent, accomplices in imperialist exploitation. . . . It is a great truth, and it does not do away with the immoral character of the exchange. The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West. . . . There must be a great change of concepts on the level of international relations. Foreign trade must not determine politics, but on the contrary, it must be subordinated to a fraternal policy toward the people. "

  This was not language that the Soviets would normally accept from a client state, but they could not afford an open break, and Guevara received no public response to his charges. As it happened, Raúl Castro and Osmany Cienfuegos, then construction minister, arrived in Moscow on the same day that Che Guevara spoke in Algiers, to attend a preparatory meeting for a conference of world Communist parties being planned for March. Cuban support was important in the Soviets' rivalry with China, and clearly they were not going to make an issue of Che's maverick attitudes. Whatever Fidel thought of Che's speech, he made a point of greeting him at the airport in Havana on March 15, which was a gesture for the Soviets' benefit too.

  At this point, of course, the thread was broken and Che was never seen again—except dead, two and a half years later in Bolivia. It is an absolute mystery what happened, whether there was a breach in Castro and Guevara's friendship, as has been alleged, and whether Che really left of his own volition. Given Fidel's character, it is unlikely that he would turn for political or ideological reasons on so loyal and intimate companion as Guevara. Che certainly was not a rival. It is true, however, that in 1965 there really was no more place for him in the Cuban revolution. Fidel rebuffed his plans for the economy and at the same time resumed personal control over Cuban agriculture by returning to the presidency of INRA. Internationally, Che was losing his usefulness to Castro because the Communist community now regarded him with suspicion. In the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, it must be assumed that they jointly agreed on Guevara's permanent departure from Cuba. Apparently, it happened on April 1. And indeed it would be difficult to imagine him today as an aging revolutionary, approaching the age of sixty, in a subordinate position to Fidel and Raúl. Such a thought must have crossed Che's very proud and sensitive mind.

  It would be wrong, however, to conclude that with Guevara's disappearance Fidel renounced their revolutionary objectives or become more tractable to Moscow and its local friends. In November 1964, for example, he had fired Joaquín Ordoquí, an "old" Communist leader, from the post of deputy defense minister, and arrested him and his wife, Edith García Buchaca. Both had been involved in the "sectarian" purge in 1962, and in the Rodríguez trial in March 1964, but Castro struck at them immediately after the change of leadership in the Kremlin as if to remind the new men they were not to interfere with Cuban Communist politics. The trade agreement for 1965 was signed on February 17, well behind schedule, a week before Che Guevara's denunciations in Algiers. Guevara was still abroad when Castro engaged in his own criticism of the Russians for not helping North Vietnam more effectively, and for not reacting more forcefully against the American bombings that had begun in February. "We are in favor of giving Vietnam all the aid that may be necessary, we are in favor of this aid being arms and men, we are in favor of the socialist camp running the risks that may be necessary for Vietnam," he said in a speech on March 13. And Castro abandoned his pro-Soviet stand in the Moscow-Peking dispute to protest this split, saying that "even the attacks on North Vietnam have not had the effect of overcoming the divisions within the socialist family. "

  Fidel naturally was helpless when the United States landed troops in the Dominican Republic in April 1965, intervening in the civil war there on the side of the local generals against the left-of-center defenders of constitutional government. President Lyndon Johnson had ordered the invasion to stem what he claimed to be a Communist threat, probably inspired from Cuba, but in this instance it was Castro who derived most political profit. He had nothing to do with the civil war (though the defeated constitutional leaders later established close links with him), yet the spectacle of American troops fighting Dominicans had superb propaganda value for Fidel's "anti-imperialist" strategies at home and abroad.

  Both Vietnam and the Dominican Republic were most convenient as revolutionary arguments when Castro convoked the "Tricontinental Conference" in Havana in January 1966 to reach out for Third World leadership. The conference spawned OSPAAAL (Solidarity Organization of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and OLAS (Latin American Solidarity Organization), both with headquarters in the Cuban capital. Among those attending the conference was an Angolan rebel leader, a poet named Antônio Agostinho Neto, who headed the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the independence war against Portugal. Neto, a remarkably gifted and intelligent man, and Castro became friends, and soon MPLA guerrillas began to be trained secretly on the Isle of Youth along with a growing number of other African and Latin American revolutionary groups. These were the deep roots of Cuba's subsequent massive military involvement in Angola and, later, Ethiopia. From Brazil the Cubans brought Francisco Julião, the leader of peasant leagues demanding land reform in the drought-parched Brazilian northeast, but he never developed into a serious revolutionary.

  A month after the Tricontinental Conference, the Soviet Union, swallowing its distaste for Castro's costly new revolutionary instruments, signed the 1966 trade agreement, bringing two-way commerce that year to $1 billion, a record figure, and granting Cuba $91 million in fresh credit. As usual, his risk calculations were correct, and in the course of 1967, Fidel had the satisfaction of denouncing the Soviet Union and being courted by it at the same time.

  In a speech on March 13, he attacked the Venezuelan Communist party, which was loyal to Moscow, for its failure to help the guerrillas fighting the country's elected democratic government; the guerrillas were being betrayed, he charged. In April a session of the reconvened Tricontinental Conference in Havana received a message from Che Guevara, radioed from his Bolivian jungle hideout, with this exhortation: "How closely we could look into a bright future, should two, three, or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism." In an implicit message to the Soviets, Che remarked: "The solidarity of all progressive forces of the world with the people of Vietnam is today similar to the bitter agony of the plebeians urging on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory. "

  Undaunted, Soviet Premier Kosygin landed in Havana on June 26, 1967, to spend four days with Castro immediately after his summit meeting with President Johnson in Glassboro, New Jersey, a remarkable gesture of courtesy. In his speech on July 26, Fidel informed the world that in the case of aggression, Cuba would fight alone and never accept a truce, an obvious allusion to the Soviet-American settlement of the 1962 missile crisis. Early in August, Castro presided over a OLAS conference of Latin Americans, repeating his attacks on the Venezuelan Communist party and charging that the Soviet Union was aiding and supporting reactionary governments in Latin America. He specifically mentioned Venezuela and Colombia (both with elected democratic governments and both fighting Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements), exclaiming indignantly that "if internationalism exists, if solidarity is a word worthy of
respect, the least that we can expect of any state of the socialist camp is that it refrain from giving any financial or technical aid to those regimes." A resolution approved by the OLAS conference warned that revolutions and armed insurrection would occur even without Communist parties, and that, in effect, it was not necessary that revolutionary leadership be in Communist hands.

  Now Fidel was clearly provoking the Russians, in a game of brinkmanship that he seemed to be playing mainly for the sake of proving his revolutionary theory. He had nothing to gain from confrontation: He had already made his point so many times, the Russians had demonstrated a patience they had never had with anyone else, and therefore there was no need to bait the bear. Yet, it is a Castro trait to see how far he can go; first, with the Americans, then with the Soviets.

  On October 9, Castro learned that Che Guevara had been killed and his body mutilated by the Bolivian rangers. He proclaimed official mourning in Cuba, and one should not doubt his grief: He was immensely attached to Che, notwithstanding any differences they might have had in trying to hammer together Cuban communism. Whether or not Guevara's death had a subsequent influence on relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union, they hit rock bottom that autumn. Castro, in effect, ignored the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution by refusing an invitation to go to Moscow, and by sending a delegation headed by the health minister, José R. Machado Ventura (the previous year, Raúl Castro and President Dorticós had gone to Moscow for the anniversary). Fabio Grobart, the Polish-born cofounder of the old Cuban Communist party—not Castro—delivered the main speech at anniversary celebrations in Havana. The Castro brothers, Dorticós, and the rest of the leadership deigned to attend the reception at the Soviet embassy on November 7, but they were greeted by the chargé d'affaires; the ambassador happened to be away in Moscow. Presently, the Soviets decided that the time had come to teach Fidel Castro a lesson.

  For Castro and for Cuba, 1968 was the worst year since the revolution: everything seemed to be coming apart, and only through the sheer force of his personality, and thanks to his security mechanisms, was Fidel able to prevent a complete collapse. In their own way, the challenges of 1968 were greater and more complex than the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis because they dealt with the essence of revolutionary rule. Curiously, however, the Johnson administration was unaware of how extremely vulnerable Castro had become. Perhaps it was too distracted by the Tet offensive in Vietnam and its aftermath to pay much attention to the little island in the Caribbean, not an imminent threat to the United States.

  In tribute to Che Guevara, 1968 was designated the "Year of the Heroic Guerrillero," which was exactly what Fidel had to be at that juncture to survive. He had the worst of all possible worlds; while the Cuban economy was tottering on the edge of catastrophe because of appalling planning (actually, Castro had no coherent economic plans at all, only grandiose ambitions) and frightening mismanagement, he was antagonizing the Russians, who were Cuba's last hope for saving the revolution. And, to be consistent, Castro crushed the supposedly pro-Soviet faction of the "old" Communists now incorporated in his brand-new Cuban Communist party. In a conversation in August 1967 with K. S. Karol, a French left-wing journalist, Fidel said that "in a year or two" Cuba could be self-sufficient economically because its exports would expand to the point where it would no longer depend on a single market and a single supplier. For this reason, Castro told Karol (whose name and books are banned in Cuba because of his "leftist" criticisms of Fidel), he need not fear the loss of Soviet support as a consequence of his ideological independence and defiance. Reality, however, turned out to be quite different—and quite painful—and he should have known it.

  The first reality was the state of the economy. Though as far back as 1960, Castro had created JUCEPLAN, a central agency based on GOSPLAN, the central Soviet planning organization, he was personally responsible for its failure to function adequately. This was so because Fidel's impatience led him into continuous shifts between short-, medium-, and long-term planning as well as into endless improvisations. No concept was given reasonable time to produce results (or to be proven unsatisfactory), overall coordination was therefore lacking, and political or visionary pressures pushed Castro into sudden decisions to undertake grandiose projects the economy could not possibly handle. The notion of producing the largest sugar harvest in history in 1970 was a case in point. At the same time, large capital investments in industrial or agricultural development programs that had not been adequately studied cost Cuba precious resources diverted from normal economic activities. Inevitably, production dropped in all sectors, shortages became even more acute than before, and Cubans were exhorted (or forced) to sacrifice for the revolutionary future.

  By 1968, Castro had personally assumed the planning and execution of economic policies, shutting off any alternative ideas and, naturally, brooking no argument. It was an intriguing turning point in his career. Now in his early forties, and no longer the young man of the Sierra, Fidel had become transformed into a total dogmatist ideologically, societally, and economically, in absolute disregard of the experiences of other men and other societies, but also in contemptuous rejection of many Marxist and Soviet views. When the Russians finally imposed their will on him, Fidel knew how to bend with the wind, suspending his public displays of independence for as long as it appeared to be prudent, but never abandoning his personal dogmatism, ever ready to reassert it. Meanwhile, the economy approached bankruptcy. The ravages of Hurricane Inez in 1967 and the great drought in 1968 aggravated the situation. Cuban production nearly ground to a halt: René Dumont, the French agricultural specialist and the most perceptive foreign observer of the Cuban scene in the late 1960s, remarked later, "There was nothing to buy, for which reason there was no stimulus to work." Elsewhere in the Communist world, notably in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, planners were just then beginning to experiment with market economies so that there would be something to buy. In Cuba Castro seemed determined to prove that to go backward in Marxist economic history represented progress.

  On March 31, 1968, the anniversary of the students' attack on the Batista palace, Castro proclaimed a new radical revolution in Cuba, which in a sense was his equivalent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that was beginning to wind down in China. Although Cuba had no Red Guards and no blood was shed, Fidel moved to nationalize the entire retail trade sector still in private hands—58,012 businesses, ranging from auto mechanics' repair shops to small stores, cafés, and street vendors of sandwiches and ice cream—for reasons of ideology. Like Mao Zedong, Castro must have felt that revolutionary fervor was eroding among his people, and that a powerful injection of radicalism was urgently needed to make the juices flow again. He called it the "Great Revolutionary Offensive," imposing revolutionary purity by eliminating the remnants of the "bourgeoisie" he so despised, and by mobilizing Cuban manpower on a gigantic scale (voluntary extra work by everybody) for agricultural production, and especially the record sugar harvest he was planning for 1970.

  This latest milestone of the revolution was unveiled by Fidel in one of his most intricate (and long) speeches, which he delivered at Havana University before an audience of hundreds of thousands. He unfolded, mostly from memory, massive statistics on milk production and imports, province-by-province rainfall measurements, prices of sugar over the past sixteen years, rising egg production, population growth, fish catch, gross national product comparisons worldwide, per capita incomes, economic development investments, food distribution from schools to workers' dining rooms, education, and sports. This economic state-of-the-union message, emphasizing the very impressive revolutionary conquests in the social realm, then turned into a bitter indictment of "those who do not work, the loafers, the parasites, the privileged, and a certain kind of exploiter that still remains in our country. "

  Castro is a master at the use of big and obscure facts and statistics to score political points, heaping scorn and ridicule on the objects of his attacks, and vastly amusing his au
dience in the process. On this occasion he reported that in Havana "there still are 955 privately owned bars, making money right and left, consuming supplies," which he described as "an incredible thing" nine years after the revolution. He went on for nearly an hour reciting the results of investigations of these bars and other private businesses, offering such conclusions as "the data gathered on hot dog stands . . . showed that a greater number of people who intend to leave the country are engaged in this type of business, which not only yields high profits but permits them to be in constant contact with lumpen and other antisocial and counterrevolutionary elements." Pursuing this linkage between hot dogs and counterrevolution, Fidel informed his listeners that "the greatest percentage of those not integrated into the Revolution was among the owners of hot dog stands; of forty-one individuals who answered this item, thirty-nine, or ninety-five point one percent, were counterrevolutionary." As the crowd laughed and applauded, Castro exclaimed, "Are we going to construct socialism, or are we going to construct vending stands? . . . We did not make a Revolution here to establish the right to trade! Such a revolution took place in 1789—that was the era of the bourgeois revolution, it was the revolution of the merchants, of the bourgeois. When will they finally understand that this is a Revolution of socialists, that this is a Revolution of Communists. . . that nobody shed his blood here fighting against the tyranny, against mercenaries, against bandits, in order to establish the right for somebody to make two hundred pesos selling rum, or fifty pesos selling fried eggs or omelets . . ."

  The crowd roared its approval when Castro announced that "clearly and definitely we must say that we propose to eliminate all manifestations of private trade!" He had made the point that through the 1968 nationalizations, Cuba had firmly advanced toward true "socialism," and that it would continue hurtling down the ultrarevolutionary road. While the relationship between prices and wages has bedeviled Marxist economics for decades, Castro was naïvely prepared to tell K. S. Karol in 1967 that "it is absolutely necessary to de-mythicize money and not to rehabilitate it. In fact, we plan to abolish it totally. "