Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  All these new efforts were consistent with the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive, but quite obviously Czechoslovakia had a big impact. In a conversation early in 1984, Fidel Castro told me he had thought all along that Dubček and the other "liberal" Communist leaders were acting in deep error and that they should have been "aided" in time. Then we spoke of the recent events in Poland, and Castro said that the Polish Communist party had mismanaged the situation, largely because of corruption, with the resulting emergence of Solidarity, the free trade-union movement. Fidel clearly disliked the Solidarity idea—other Cuban officials hinted that there had been some concern in 1980 and 1981 that it might start catching on in Cuba—and he suggested that General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Communist premier, had saved Poland from a Soviet invasion by imposing martial rule and outlawing Solidarity. The official viewpoint had quickly spread to the Cuban cinema industry: I heard Cuban directors in private conversation angrily criticize the Polish director Andrzej Wajda for producing Man of Iron, the inspirational picture about Solidarity that won a Cannes Film Festival award.

  Among many facets of revolutionary Cuba that developed disturbingly in the first Castro decade—and have continued since—included the very same Communist party mismanagement and deadening bureaucracy that Fidel had observed with such alarm in Poland in the pre-Solidarity years. There was also the stolid conformity in thought and word that, for example, made Cuban filmmakers denounce Wajda for his Solidarity movie only because that followed the official line. Even by 1968, it was already commonplace for Castro and Granma to deplore periodically and liturgically the excesses of bureaucracy without achieving the slightest progress in streamlining it. In truth, the revolution and the creation of the new Communist party had spawned a new privileged ruling class built around and below Fidel by the party, the security apparatus, and the military—and inevitably this elite reposed on a faithful bureaucracy. The Castro cult of personality was derived from this form of political organization of the society, and it instantly raised the question of whether in a relatively short time Fidel had actually become isolated from the realities of his people.

  His initial concept of governance was to commune with the masses through the dialogue mechanism of preaching and teaching, then ask the crowds for approval of proposed policies, and assume that a revolutionary consensus had thereby been achieved. Clearly, however, this was not consultation in any sense of the word, and after a while Castro no longer knew what people thought and what bothered them. Having abolished the "liberal bourgeois freedom of the press" in the early 1960s, he could not learn much from reading his own newspapers and magazines, and palace courtiers do not normally generate or deliver bad news. In the first years of the revolution, a favorite Fidel occupation was to bounce around the countryside in his jeep, stopping here and there, chatting with people, asking with genuine interest what they did and what problems they had. This, too, had its limitations, but it gave Castro some sense of his people. I asked him about this old practice one day in January 1984 when we were driving in his jeep on the outskirts of Havana. He turned around in the front seat where he sat next to the driver and shook his head sadly. "No, I don't get to do that very much anymore," he said. "You know, now I have all the responsibilities of running the state, attending meetings, receiving ambassadors and so on—so there is no time."

  As early as 1968, visitors from abroad who spent much time with Castro—such as Frenchmen K. S. Karol and René Dumont—began to wonder whether Fidel insisted on running everything personally because he hungered for total power or whether he was the victim of the system he had devised. Viewing Castro more than a quarter-century after the revolution, the conclusion is that both judgments are correct, and that really he is his own prisoner for life.

  This is so because for Fidel Castro the revolution is a permanent struggle, not necessarily a Marxist, socialist or Communist struggle, but a Cuban national struggle. On October 10, 1968, he flew to Oriente province in a downpour to deliver a patriotic speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the first Cuban uprising against Spain. The theme throughout was "one hundred years of struggle," with the emphasis on it being only the beginning for Cuba. Not once did Castro mention Marxism-Leninism, socialism, the Communist party or the Soviet Union: His text was dedicated to Céspedes and Martí and all the other heroes of liberation struggles—and to sugar production. Two days earlier, he said proudly as applause soared around him, Cubans had planted exactly 33, 230 acres of sugarcane across the island in a single day in tribute to the independence anniversary and the memory of Che Guevara. In Fidel's mind, the record sugar harvest he was planning for 1970 would represent the start of the second "hundred years of struggle," and he knew that the inspiration for the great effort had to be patriotic and not ideological.

  To achieve the goal of ten million tons of sugar in 1970, a goal Castro had linked to the "honor of the Revolution," the nation was mobilized as if for war, and he designated 1969 as the "Year of the Decisive Effort." At the same time, Fidel ordered changes in harvest methods so that actual work would start in July 1969 and end in July 1970. Normally, the harvest lasts the three months of winter, but the unprecedented magnitude of the planting and acreage made it necessary to devote the whole year to it. Canecutting thus became the principal and most obsessive economic effort in Cuba during 1969, limiting everything else to an absolute minimum. Industrial and commerce workers, students, old people, and children as well as "brigades" of foreign visitors were assigned to cut cane weekdays and weekends, and holidays were abolished. The army too was drafted for canecutting, and Fidel and all his top companions were televised and photographed cutting cane on certain days as an example to the nation. However, this activity requires skill, endurance, and strength, and the inexperienced "volunteers" often were in the way of the quarter million professional macheteros. Nevertheless, "voluntary" work was a political requirement to justify the economic near-paralysis of the country, and so the harvest lasted 334 days. Since drought was a menace to the crop, Castro announced that "we have made a pact with rain." And rain kept its word in 1969, providing just the right pattern.

  Fidel was an incurable optimist about the revolution, never discouraged by the initial failures. Not only did he want that record sugar crop in 1970, but speaking on the tenth anniversary of his victory, he pledged that Cuba's overall farm production would increase by no less than 15 percent annually over the next twelve years—the highest growth rate in world history. Given the sharp drop in farm production in the first decade of the revolution, which Castro was the first to acknowledge, this promise seemed totally out of touch with reality. Yet, his word was not questioned. Fidel said that to meet his objectives, Cuba had to import 8,000 tractors annually for ten years, train 80,000 tractor operators, and provide 180,000 farm workers with mechanization skills. When it came to imports, however, Castro again had to rely almost entirely on the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. By 1969 the Russians, having had their way, were ready to resume large-scale aid—and to think again of the strategic importance of Cuba.

  The Cuban-Soviet economic relationship was based principally on the concept that deliveries of Cuban sugar would pay at least in part for Soviet shipments of petroleum, machinery, automotive equipment, industrial goods, and just about everything else a modern economy required (weapons were a grant). But even though Moscow calculated the value of the sugar at prices well above the world market (following the example of the United States import quota), Cuba was ten million tons in arrears by 1969 because the crops had been so low in past years. Therefore, Castro opened the year by announcing sugar rationing at home so that more would be available for export in anticipation of the record harvests he projected. He provided the nation with a series of most convincing explanations for the rationing.

  Meanwhile, the entire relationship with the Soviets was improving. Deputy Premier Novikov, the Kremlin's full-time expert on Cuba, was on hand for the tenth-anniversary celebrations, and Castro's speech was full
of praise for the Soviet Union. In February a very favorable trade agreement was negotiated. In April the love feast continued with a Castro speech on the anniversary of Lenin's birth and praise for the Soviet Union for aiding Cuba to become the "first socialist state" in Latin America. The same day, Fidel presided over the ceremony inaugurating the Soviet-Cuban Friendship Association. In June Carlos Rafael Rodríguez led a delegation of the Cuban Communist party to Moscow for an international conference boycotted by the Chinese, North Korean, Albanian, and North Vietnamese parties (the Cubans had evidently quietly set aside their professed friendship with Vietnam). Rodríguez, the "old" Communist who became a top Fidelista in the new Caribbean communism, pleased his hosts when he declared that "Cuba is convinced of the importance of the unity of action of the Communists" in order to develop "a broader offensive against imperialism and the forces of reaction and war. "

  Having absorbed Castro back in the ideological and economic fold, the Russians now turned their attention again to the strategic equation in Cuba for the first time since the 1962 missile crisis. An eight-ship Soviet naval squadron arrived in Havana on July 20, and the Castro brothers, along with the entire top leadership, attended a reception given by Rear Admiral Stepan Sokolan, the task force commander. Then, Fidel and his government went on a cruise on the flagship Groznig; Fidel and the admiral celebrated the 26th of July anniversary together by cutting cane near Havana along with a contingent of sailors from the cruiser—no doubt, an unforgettable experience. The Soviet defense minister, Marshal Andrei A. Grechko, was the next military chief to wield a machete during a November visit with Fidel and Raúl. (On December 30 the entire staff of the Soviet embassy in Havana spent a day cutting cane in what had become an act of piety for foreigners, comparable to the laying of wreaths at national monuments.) As the decade of the 1960s came to a close, Cuban-Soviet friendship was stronger than ever—with Fidel Castro frequently expressing his gratitude for the economic and military assistance from Moscow. By the end of 1969, the Cubans owed the Russians $4 billion, representing the difference between the value of Soviet deliveries to Cuba and vice versa. Castro himself calculated that during the decade, Cuba had received, free, $1. 5 billion in military equipment, including jet aircraft.

  Nineteen seventy was called "The Year of the Ten Million Tons"—but it was not. Despite good weather and the incredible effort expended by the whole nation on Fidel Castro's orders, Cuba fell short of the goal, producing 8. 5 million tons. Actually, it was a record crop (the previous record was six million tons in 1965), but even this volume was not commensurate with the social and economic costs to Cuban society. It was the result of Castro's astonishing penchant for making commitments and promises without having the slightest idea whether they could be kept—his weakness was the political grand gesture, a prohibitively expensive habit. Apart from the self-inflicted sugar fiasco, he repeated the same error with milk when he promised in December 1968 that production would quadruple within two years; but in 1970 the production was running 25 percent below 1969 levels (probably because the energies of the peasants had been channeled into sugarcane cutting).

  However, Castro was painfully honest about the failures. Describing the agricultural shortcomings in a speech on July 26, 1970, he said that "the unquestionable inefficiency of all of us . . . signified that we were incapable of waging what we called the simultaneous battle on all the fronts of production." He admitted that "the heroic effort to increase the sugar production led to imbalances in the economy, in diminished production in other sectors and . . . in an increase in our difficulties." Then he warned somberly that the next five years would be even more difficult, adding that "I want to speak of our inability in the overall work of the Revolution. . . . We must face our responsibility in these problems, and my [responsibility] in particular. . . . Our apprenticeship as leaders of this Revolution has cost too much." Earlier, Fidel had observed that "the battle of the ten million was not lost by the people: It is us, the administrative apparatus, the leaders of the Revolution who lost it. . . . Our ignorance of the problems of the sugar mills prevented us from remedying in time all the difficulties." However, René Dumont, who was in Cuba during that period, remarked that sugar experts who attempted years earlier to call Castro's attention to these problems "were simply sent away. "

  Still, no reverses could slow him down or diminish his interest in everything, everybody, everywhere. He refused to settle for any kind of status quo. In terms of intellect, a comment Walter Lippmann once made about H. G. Wells might also apply to Fidel: "[He] seemed to win by a constant renewal of effort in which he refused to sink either into placid acceptance of the world, or into self-contained satisfaction with his vision." Thus in the second half of 1970, Castro could turn away from the depressing domestic scene and its economic problems to the international problems and controversies on which he thrived.

  Two such situations developed in September 1970, and Fidel was involved in both of them, directly and indirectly. The first was the victory of his friend Salvador Allende Gossens in a three-way race for the presidency of Chile on September 4. Allende, a frequent visitor to Havana, was of Marxist persuasion and headed the Chilean Socialist party, and this was the fourth time he had run for president. In 1970 the CIA and American corporations vainly invested tens of millions of dollars in secret support for Allende's right-wing opponent, Jorge Alessandri, and in anti-Allende propaganda. However, Allende obtained only a 36. 3 percent plurality, and a runoff with Alessandri the following month was required under the Chilean constitution.

  The Nixon administration's reaction to the idea of a democratically elected Marxist president in Latin America was naturally alarmed revulsion, and the immediate fear in Washington centered on the nightmarish scenario of a Castro-Allende revolutionary axis. Fidel, just as naturally, was delighted for obverse reasons, but he took great care to avoid gloating, which could give Nixon justification to intervene in some way (it was only two years ago that the application of the Brezhnev Doctrine to Czechoslovakia contributed to a certain legitimacy for invasions in one's corner of the world). While the administration drew up overt and covert plans to defeat Allende in the October 24 runoff in the Chilean congress, a new crisis over Cuba suddenly erupted.

  About a week after Allende's first victory, a U-2 spy plane brought back photographs showing new barracks, communication towers; and antiaircraft sites being constructed near the naval base of Cienfuegos in southern Cuba. Also appearing in the photographs was a new soccer field, and inasmuch as the Cubans do not play this game, CIA photo interpreters concluded that the field was being prepared for the Russians, who do play it. As it happened, a Soviet naval squadron arrived on a visit to Cienfuegos on May 14, and another squadron appeared on September 9. The second squadron included a submarine tender, a 9,000-ton Ugra-class vessel, and two towed barges which the CIA believed were for storing radioactive waste from reactors on nuclear submarines. Finally, a Soviet nuclear submarine was spotted in the general area of Cuba. Instantly, Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger concluded that the Russians were establishing a nuclear-submarine base in Cienfuegos. Given the memories of the 1962 missile crisis, this was not an unreasonable suspicion, even though the Russians had committed themselves at that time to keep offensive weapons out of the Western Hemisphere. The administration could not be sure that Brezhnev would reject a Khrushchev-type adventure in Cuba.

  Nixon and Kissinger kept the U-2 discovery and their conclusions a secret, planning to deal with the Soviets through quiet diplomatic channels. But on September 16, Kissinger summoned Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and confronted him with the aerial photographs. Then, he held a press briefing to discuss the dangers of the Allende victory in Chile and to warn the Soviets against "operating strategic forces out of Cuba, say, Polaris-type submarines." He added that "we are watching these events in Cuba." Now Castro and Allende seemed to form part of an interlocking crisis, but neither of them chose to polemicize with Kissinger. In October th
e Soviet Union privately assured Kissinger that it was building no bases in Cuba, and TASS subsequently repeated this publicly. Castro has never said a word on the subject in public, and this Cuban minicrisis served chiefly to reassert the 1962 "understanding" between the superpowers over their mutual guarantees on Cuba. Still, the Americans thought that Brezhnev might have been "testing" them by dispatching naval squadrons to Cuba and openly engaging in military construction in Cienfuegos. Fidel certainly would not have minded such a test. On October 24 he learned with vast pleasure that Allende had been confirmed as president by the Chilean congress. He saw this as the beginning of a long and profitable relationship and promised to visit Allende the following year.

  In June 1961, when Fidel Castro told a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals that there was full creative freedom in Cuba "within the Revolution," but nothing "against the Revolution," he was establishing a relatively relaxed set of cultural standards. It took the hard-line ideological offensive in 1971, evidently inspired by Castro, to demonstrate how brutally these standards had changed in a decade. For reasons that defy understanding when one considers Castro's own intellectual wealth, shortly after 1961 he was willing to impose (or allow to be imposed) in Cuba a grotesque and repressive travesty of cultural life—always in the name of the revolution.

  The onslaught on supposed "counterrevolutionary" intellectuals began around 1965, when the regime started to arrest those it considered as "antisocial elements," especially if they were homosexuals, and to put them in the UMAP forced-labor army battalions. This was done as part of a broader ideological offensive against homosexuals in general during the political power struggles of the 1960s. In 1968, when the political climate turned unusually harsh, specific writers became targets of the party ideologues. The award of a poetry prize to Heberto Padilla and a theater prize to playwright Antón Arrufat that year by the official Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC), a Castro creation, led to an internal ideological clash typical of the changing cultural environment. As a compromise, UNEAC decided to publish the prize-winning works along with a note from the union's editorial board, expressing its disagreement with them because "they are ideologically contrary to our Revolution." In murky Marxist ideological jargon, Padilla was accused of "ambiguity" and "antihistorical attitudes," and Arrufat, of disseminating an "imperialist-type" reality. Shortly thereafter, a Writers' and Artists' Congress was held in Cienfuegos, approving a resolution that each writer "contribute to the Revolution through his work and this involves conceiving of literature as a means of struggle, a weapon against weaknesses and problems which, directly or indirectly, could hinder this advance." No Cuban author knew what it meant.