The Red Flag: A History of Communism (68 page)

However, the Cultural Revolution had resolved absolutely nothing. Mao, like Stalin, had hoped to remobilize the country to build a new society, but only violent chaos had ensued. Political leadership in Beijing remained weak and the economy had been wrecked. The Cultural Revolution officially may have continued until 1976, but it was already clear as early as 1968 that the old Radical class struggle waged against the Communist bureaucracy had brought disaster to China and its people.

With sputnik’s launch in October 1957, the international reputation and self-confidence of Communist regimes reached their zenith. As in Frazer’s
Golden Bough
, it seemed as if the sacrifice of Stalin, the mythical king, had permitted a reinvigoration of the system. The use of rocket technology to conquer space for the whole of mankind suggested that Communists really had devoted their energy to the service of peace and humanity rather than war and division. By the late 1960s, however, it was clear that efforts in Yugoslavia, the USSR and China to expand the appeal of the regime beyond the rigid Stalinist party, whilst finding new forms of radical mobilization to achieve economic successes, had failed. Tito had, to all intents and purposes, abandoned mobilization and was beginning his journey to the market and the West; Khrushchev found it difficult to escape the crude militarized methods of the 1930s; whilst Mao’s extremism had demonstrated how fearsome and destructive a highly radical, egalitarian Communism could be. But at the same time as these three Communist regimes were finding it difficult to transform their own societies, they found new opportunities abroad, in Latin America and an Africa in the throes of decolonization. And they were joined by a new Communist competitor in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Third World: Cuba.

Early in 1954, a young Argentinian was to be found in the centre of Guatemala City peddling bulb-illuminated pictures of Guatemala’s ‘black Christ’. As the icon particularly appealed to the numerous poor Indians of the city, the trade was surprisingly lucrative. The idea of manufacturing the icons had originally come from Antonio ‘Ñico’ López, a Cuban exile and sometime participant in Fidel Castro’s failed coup of 1953. But it was the Argentinian Ernesto Guevara (nicknamed ‘Che’ after his frequent use of the indigenous Guaraní term meaning ‘hey, you’) who sold them. Though a qualified doctor, Che had been unable to get a job, and he was forced to make ends meet however he could. In a letter home, Guevara described his sales patter: ‘I am selling a precious image of the Lord of Esquipulas, a black Christ who makes amazing miracles… I have a rich list of anecdotes of the Christ’s miracles and I am constantly making up new ones to see if they will sell.’
¹

Guevara and López were just two of an eclectic group of Latin American leftists – from Venezuelan Social Democrats to Nicaraguan Communists, from opponents of the Argentinian strong-man Juan Perón to rebels against the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista – who had come to see the new radical Republic of Guatemala. Rather like the Europeans who had flocked to Republican Spain eighteen years before, many Latin Americans on the progressive left saw Guatemala, ruled by the socialist Jacobo Arbenz, as the hope of the continent. Guevara himself, still only twenty-six, was a charismatic figure, brave or reckless depending on one’s perspective. But he could also be a tough disciplinarian; he endorsed the Stalinist position on the legitimacy of violence, and his brusque and moralistic manner alienated some. This austere demeanour, however,
was leavened by a self-satirizing sense of humour: one of his favourite literary characters was Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the ridiculous would-be knight errant, fighting for hopelessly lost causes.
²

Born to an aristocratic but now impoverished family, Che was a sickly child, whose severe asthma had turned him bookish – he often retreated to read in the family bathroom to escape his chaotic environment. Though physically fragile, he was determined to overcome his physical weakness through willpower and brain-power, and as a youth he set off on his now-famous motorcycle tours of the Latin American continent, when he saw the enormous inequalities between indigenous Indians and affluent whites.

However, for Che such inequalities were not merely about race, or even class. Like many Latin American intellectuals, he saw them as the consequence of imperialism and colonialism, and of the power of the United States over the continent: its companies’ capitalist exploitation of natural resources, and its cadre of local dictators who maintained semi-imperial control. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Communist-sympathizer and Che’s favourite poet, captured this anger in his 1950 poem ‘The United Fruit Co.’, in which he painted a picture of swarms of tyrant-flies feasting on the rotten fruit of imperialism and corruption.
³

It was Arbenz’s attempts to nationalize the vast lands of
el polpo
(‘the octopus’) that had attracted many radicals to Guatemala, including Guevara:

El polpo
, however, proved resilient, and it was not United Fruit that capitulated but the Arbenz regime. Local conservatives fought back, assisted by the American CIA, which directed a year-long campaign of political and military subversion against Arbenz. Guevara was determined to stay and defend the ‘Guatemalan revolution’, braving the aerial bombing of Guatemala City just as the Communists had defended Madrid. But Arbenz refused to fight and fled the country. Guevara himself, sheltering in the Argentinian embassy, only narrowly avoided arrest at the behest of the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who was determined to stop revolutionaries regrouping elsewhere. In September 1954 he fled to Mexico.

The fall of Arbenz galvanized the Latin American left, just as the fall of Republican Spain had radicalized it in the 1930s, and Communists took advantage. As in the 1930s, Moscow allowed Communists to ally themselves with other ‘bourgeois’ forces and Communists argued that their combination of modernity and hard-headed discipline could best rid their countries of foreign imperialism. For Che Guevara, certainly, Soviet-style Communism provided the answers, and he criticized Arbenz for failing to embrace Stalinist ruthlessness and organization. His uncompromising approach might have been expected given his upbringing. His father had led campaigns to support the Spanish Republic and, as a child, Che had named their family pet dog Negrina after the pro-Moscow Spanish President Juan Négrin.
⁵

Even so, there were naturally enormous differences between 1950s Latin America – with its history of foreign interventions – and 1930s Europe, as there were between the Communisms of the period. Communism had become a much more diverse movement, and the success of Asian Communism offered an alternative, rural guerrilla model of revolution to the Third World. From the mid-1950s Moscow began to lose control of international Communism to rival capitals, and Havana, following Castro’s and Che’s Cuban revolution of 1959, was to be one of them. Che, who had once signed a youthful letter to his aunt ‘Stalin II’, gradually became disillusioned with the Soviet tradition, and his
nom de guerre
certainly suggested he had a different revolutionary style. ‘Hey, You’ was no ‘Man of Steel’, but a much more Radical, even Romantic Marxist.

Che became an iconic figure, and for a time Cuba became one of the most attractive models for radical nationalists. But the Cubans were not alone: the ‘parricidal’, post-Stalin regimes of Tito and Mao were competing fiercely to attract the new, nationalist Third World leaders. And under Khrushchev, the Soviets themselves were presenting a more idealistic face. They had also abandoned their old Stalinist sectarianism and adopted a more inclusive strategy, forging alliances with non-Marxist-Leninist groups. This was a fluid era in which Soviets, Chinese and Cubans supported an eclectic range of left-wing groups – Radical Marxist guerrillas, Soviet-style modernizers, moderate Communists willing to collaborate with nationalists, and non-Marxist nationalists. After a long
period of Stalinist neglect, Communism was now speaking to a wider audience in the Third World at a time when the West was also presenting a more attractive face under the leadership of John F. Kennedy. However, Cuba’s guerrilla Communism was no more successful in sustaining itself than the other Romantic Communisms of the 1960s, whilst the new Communist activism in the Third World caused instability and frightened its opponents, leading to a backlash and a string of Communist defeats. The era of optimism, on both sides of the ideological divide, was not to last.

Almost a year after the fall of Arbenz, on 18 April 1955, twenty-nine delegates from Asian and African countries assembled in the West Javan city of Bandung to hear Indonesian President Sukarno’s thunderous welcoming speech:

Sukarno’s ‘Storm over Asia’ was a reference to Pudovkin’s 1928 film of that name, a drama about a Mongolian descendant of Genghis Khan who, in 1918, switches allegiance from the imperialist British to the Bolsheviks.
⁷
There were, then, echoes of the old Comintern in Bandung, and, like the Baku conference of ‘Peoples of the East’ of 1920, it was seeking to unite the global ‘South’ in the struggle against imperialism. However, this was categorically not a Communist congress. The Mongolians had not been invited, nor had any other nationalities deemed too close to the Soviets – whether the Soviet Asian republics or the North Koreans. Of the Communist regimes, only the Chinese and North Vietnamese were there. And whilst some of the leading delegates – India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesia’s Ahmed Sukarno – were socialists (and Nehru had a great deal of sympathy for Soviet-style planning), they were indigenous nationalist socialists, determined to
meld socialism with local political traditions, rather than Marxist-Leninists. Being nationalists, they also refused to identify themselves too closely with any bloc, whether Eastern or Western. Indeed, some delegates were strongly anti-Communist – six of the twenty-nine had recently aligned themselves with the United States and Britain. Carlos Romulo, representative of the Filipino regime that had recently suppressed the Communist Huk rebellion, famously quipped: ‘The empires of yesterday on which it used to be said the sun never set are departing one by one from Asia. What we fear now is the new empire of Communism on which we know the sun never rises.’
⁸

The Chinese refused to accept that their Soviet allies had an empire in Eastern Europe, and the meeting was a fraught one, as delegates argued about the conference’s attitude towards the superpowers. However, Zhou Enlai made a masterful attempt to charm the Bandung leaders, presenting China as a moderate, tolerant friend of the global underdog. He recognized that Marxism-Leninism was a rarity in the new decolonized world, and that compromises were required if China was to have any influence. Romulo complained that he behaved as if he had ‘taken a leaf from Dale Carnegie’s tome on
How to Win Friends and Influence People
’.
⁹
But Zhou had more respectable theoretical backing for his charm offensive than Dale Carnegie: the Chinese Communists were in their ideologically moderate ‘New Democracy’ phase, and were happy to sanction Communist alliances with bourgeois nationalists.

Bandung saw the birth of the ‘Third World’ as a new entity, independent of both the ‘First’ West and the ‘Second’ East. The conference agreed on the need to escape economic dependence on the First World – described by Sukarno as colonialism in modern dress – through economic cooperation. It also resolved to fight against the dangers of nuclear war. In his rousing speech to the conference, Sukarno urged the African and Asian South to deploy the ‘moral violence of nations in favour of peace’, standing up to the militarism of the two Cold War blocs.
¹⁰

The Bandung Conference marked the entry of an identifiable ‘South’ into world politics, and the power of anti-imperialism. Though the old empires were clearly waning, many were clearly determined to hang on, or at least retain influence after decolonization by shaping the politics of the successor states. By the early 1960s, only a few states remained under white control – the Portuguese colonies, mostly in Africa, South Africa and Rhodesia. Nevertheless, many Third World leaders still saw
imperialism as a powerful force, and notions of ‘neo-colonialism’ and informal empire were much discussed, especially in connection with the United States and its prominent role as the new supporter of old, pro-Western collaborators.