The Red Flag: A History of Communism (70 page)

The United States may have succeeded in distancing itself from European imperialism by backing Diem’s temporarily stable regime in South Vietnam in 1954, but in the same year it seemed as if Washington were following a Marxist-Leninist manual on how to be an imperialistic capitalist: it really did look as if it was promoting imperialism, and that imperialism really was the highest stage of capitalism. Jacobo Arbenz’s threat to the interests of United Fruit led to lobbying in Washington – the company’s tentacles reached the New York law firm of John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the head of the CIA. More worrying to the White House, however, was Arbenz’s willingness to work with the Guatemalan Communist Party, and despite minimal Soviet involvement, the administration was convinced that Guatemala threatened to become
a launching-pad for Communism across the continent. The covert CIA campaign of subversion, ‘Operation Success’, finally toppled Arbenz in 1954.
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The operation may have lived up to its name in the short term, but it would eventually have a profoundly damaging effect on America’s image. In Latin America, it helped to push some of the post-Bandung generation towards radicalism, and the first sign of this process was evident only 90 miles from the shores of the United States, in Cuba.

As the Americans had feared, after his fall, Arbenz’s radical supporters merely fled the country and continued their struggle elsewhere. Flushed out of Guatemala, Che Guevara, his Cuban friend Ñico López and other radicals made their way to the Mexican capital. Mexico City hosted a number of revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, who were in exile but planning to return to Cuba. Che, unlike Fidel, was now a convinced Marxist, but he was still willing to join Fidel’s liberation movement. As Castro remembered:

The son of a Spanish immigrant who had leased land from United Fruit and planted sugar, Fidel Castro was from a wealthy, but far from aristocratic or well-connected background. He was a rebellious child, and his politics were profoundly different from those of his Franco-sympathizing father. Nevertheless, he valued the ‘military spirit’ of his Jesuit boarding school, and he enjoyed the ‘kind of healthy, austere life I lived in those schools’.
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Whilst studying law in Havana, he became involved in radical politics – though he had little in common with the Cuban Communist party (PSP), which had forged alliances with Batista in the 1940s. Rather, he joined the Ortodoxo party with its roots in the radical nationalism of the nineteenth-century poet-cum-revolutionary José Martí.

Cuban intellectuals felt the power of American neo-imperialism and capitalism particularly keenly. Following the end of Spanish rule in 1898, Cuba was occupied for four years by the United States, and even after formal independence it remained tightly tied to its northern neighbour. Indeed, its economy was almost wholly integrated into that of the United States. It was highly dependent on income from sugar exports to the United States (and sugar quotas depended on the goodwill of the American Congress), and foreigners owned a large number of the plantations. Havana itself was a cosmopolitan city, full of American expatriates, who were blamed by nationalist moralizers for transforming the city into a centre for organized crime, gambling and sex tourism. It seemed to many educated Cubans that their country was trapped by sugar and the United States in a position of permanent subordination. Only radical change could restore its self-respect.

The immediate target of the nationalists, however, was the corrupt American-backed dictator Batista. The Ortodoxo party – with its demands for social and land reform – soon became Batista’s main opponent. Castro proved a tireless revolutionary: after his exile following the failed 1953 coup, he rallied his small force, now dubbed the ‘26th July Movement’, and returned from Mexico to Cuba in 1956, on the
Granma
(
Grandmother
) – a rusty motorized yacht. The landing was a disaster, and only twenty-two revolutionaries of the original eighty-two managed to regroup, eventually establishing a base in the inaccessible Sierra Maestra – a poor region in the east of the island with a long-established tradition of peasant rebellion. From here Fidel and his band waged a guerrilla war, whilst at the same time urban rebels – the
llano
– carried out a campaign of strikes and violence in the towns.
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However, the failure of the urban general strike in the spring of 1958 weakened the
llano
and increased the power of Castro and the rural guerrillas. Batista responded to the guerrilla violence with more violence and support for him ebbed away, not only within Cuba but also in Washington. On New Year’s Eve, Batista, correctly sensing which way the tide of history was flowing, fled, and Castro and Guevara entered Havana two days later.

Compared with the Vietnamese and Chinese revolutions, the Cuban revolution was remarkably swift and easy. The roots of Batista’s support were shallow, whilst the opposition included a large, vocal urban middle class, and links between towns and the rural proletariat were stronger than elsewhere in Latin America. Castro was buoyed by enormous
popular support for an end to the Batista regime, and he insisted that his was a nationalist revolution, not a Communist one. Indeed, in a speech on 1 January, he placed his revolution firmly in the tradition of past nationalist risings:

Castro announced a cabinet of liberals headed by Judge Manuel Urrutia, and declared that his regime would be ‘humanist’, not capitalist or communist. Unlike Raúl and Che, he was no Communist; indeed Che wrote in 1957: ‘I always thought of Fidel as an authentic leader of the leftist bourgeoisie.’
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As late as May 1959, Castro could declare that ‘capitalism can kill man with hunger, while Communism kills man by destroying his freedom’.
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And the 26th July Movement’s economic programme was not initially that radical.
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It proposed a relatively moderate land reform and the development of domestic ‘import substitution’ industries to diversify away from sugar. Castro was clear that national capitalists – excluding the big landowners and foreign companies – were part of the revolution, and many capitalists saw great opportunities in the new regime’s industrialization policies.

Nevertheless, Castro’s 1959 revolution was far more radical than his 1953 coup had been. Che Guevara – radical by temperament and immersed in Marxism – was clearly an important influence, and many of his views were shared by Raúl. But the tough guerrilla life of Sierra Maestra, where Castro’s
compañeros
(‘comrades’) lived in close proximity with poor peasants for the first time, also had an impact; it forged an egalitarian revolutionary culture.
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It was in Sierra Maestra that the guerrillas adopted their trademark unkempt beards, a ‘badge of identity’ which became such an essential part of the revolutionary image in the 1960s and 1970s.
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In contrast to 1953, therefore, the rebels of 1959 were committed not just to nationalism and industrialization, but also to ruling in the interests of the ‘popular classes’ (‘
clases populares
’) as opposed to the propertied ‘
clases económicas
’.
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Unsurprisingly, the poor now harboured high hopes, and the guerrilla forms of mobilization that had emerged in the Sierra Maestra encouraged them. They therefore demanded more
radical reforms, and Castro’s Rebel Army, which had a great deal of power on the ground, was sympathetic to them.
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There also seems to have been popular support for the summary trials and executions of Batista’s supporters, presided over by Che Guevara himself. Some of Che’s old Argentinian friends were dismayed by his transformation from curer of the sick into violent dispenser of revolutionary justice, but he was unapologetic; as he told one of them, ‘Look, in this thing either you kill first, or else you get killed.’
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Inevitably this radicalism alienated many, including liberals, the propertied and the United States. Washington was naturally suspicious of Castro’s revolution, fearing his Communist connections, but, initially reassured by his anti-Communist statements, it had recognized his regime. However Castro’s emerging commitment to economic nationalism and land redistribution inevitably fuelled conflict with Cuban-based American-owned firms. The trials and executions of Batista supporters, and the cancellation of elections, also convinced Washington that Castro had been lost to Communism and could not be won back. Relations with the United States deteriorated, and by March 1960 Eisenhower had asked the CIA to plan a coup with the help of anti-Castro émigrés.
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They were determined that Castro should suffer the fate of Arbenz five years before.

In 1959 the Cubans and the Soviets knew little of each other, but in March 1960 Castro, convinced that the Americans were about to invade, asked for a meeting with the now well-travelled and cosmopolitan Anastas Mikoian, who happened to be in the region. Mikoian arrived in Havana, and they hit it off: the Cubans saw the USSR as a source of economic and military aid, and Khrushchev’s Politburo regarded the Cuban revolution as a chance to extend their influence, and to infuse some youthful spirit into the ageing body of Soviet Communism.
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Mikoian excitedly described Castro as ‘a genuine revolutionary, completely like us. I felt as though I had returned to my childhood.’
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The Soviets agreed to send arms and oil in exchange for sugar, and despatched a group of Spanish Communist officers who had lived in exile in Moscow since the end of the Spanish Civil War to reorganize the Cuban army.
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Castro was right to fear American intentions. Eisenhower and Dulles were indeed planning to support a full-scale émigré military invasion with American air cover, but the Cubans had a piece of luck in the form
of a change of regime in Washington. With the election of John F. Kennedy, American foreign policy was again more synchronized with that of the USSR. Kennedy came to power – much as Khrushchev had – promising a new way of pursuing the struggle with the rival super-power that would be both more idealistic and more intelligent. Shocked by the ‘loss’ of Cuba, the greatest defeat since the ‘loss’ of China a decade before, he was determined to jettison the crude military methods of the Eisenhower era and to distance himself from European imperialism and its epigones in apartheid South Africa. As he explained, America had to be ‘on the side of the right of man to govern himself… because the final victory of nationalism is inevitable’.
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Under Kennedy, Washington began to acknowledge more fully that Communism could be the product of economic and political inequalities. Modernization theory, as developed by academics like the Kennedy adviser Walt Rostow, was the answer. Rostow and his followers maintained that all societies were on a similar ‘modernizing’ path to liberal democracy, but in the transitional stage, before they reached full maturity, they could catch the disease of Communism. The best solution was to accelerate the process of modernization, and the interests of the world were best served by trying to promote rapid development through financial assistance and the promotion of democracy.
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In 1961 Kennedy even mobilized thousands of youths to spread American modernization throughout the world through the ‘Peace Corps’ and its ‘community development’ programmes. Hard power – the military option – remained, but it had to be conducted through intelligent counter-insurgency campaigns, tempered with appeals to hearts and minds, or soft power.

When it came to Cuba, Kennedy had real doubts about Eisenhower’s planned invasion, and feared that if it went wrong it would damage America’s reputation. Even so, he was as eager as his predecessor to eradicate Communist influence from the United States’ backyard and decided to go ahead, though with a more covert, guerrilla-style operation and without air cover. The hope was that strategic landings by armed exiles would provoke spontaneous sympathetic uprisings amongst ordinary Cubans. The result, the ‘Bay of Pigs’ landing of April 1961, was a complete fiasco. The expected pro-exile uprisings failed to materialize, and Castro’s civil defence forces proved highly effective. Most of the invaders were captured, and the image of the United States in the Third World further besmirched. The Bay of Pigs invasion was
also counterproductive, and merely pushed Cuba even further into the Soviet sphere. Castro was convinced that another invasion was imminent (and indeed new plans were being drawn up in Washington). Meanwhile, the CIA embarked on a long series of outlandish attempts to assassinate Castro – from exploding cigars to fungus-infected diving suits – and even to damage the supposed source of his charisma, his beard; Castro has claimed that over the years 600 attempts have been made on his life by the CIA and Cuban émigrés.
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