The Red Flag: A History of Communism (71 page)

Greater reliance on the Soviet alliance was accompanied by a turn towards a more disciplined style of government at home, as the Cubans became convinced that the informal, participatory rule through the Rebel Army was not suited to national defence and state-building. Diverse revolutionary organizations were integrated into a single body, the Integrated Revolutionary Organization (ORI), and Castro increasingly relied on the well-organized old Cuban PSP Communists to provide an administrative infrastructure.

The culmination of the Soviet alliance was Khrushchev’s offer to station nuclear weapons on Cuban soil. Castro seized the opportunity, believing that the Soviet nuclear umbrella would finally guarantee his revolution against an American attack. But the subsequent Soviet capitulation to American threats during the missile crisis of October 1962 (without consulting Cuba) was deeply disappointing for Castro; and whilst Kennedy gave a verbal assurance that invasion would not be attempted again, he did not trust the American. Meanwhile, ample proof had been provided that the USSR could not be relied upon. Castro proceeded to turn against the Soviets. Earlier that year, Castro had asserted his control by purging the PSP Communists and along with Che Guevara he had made it clear that the harsh, technocratic Marxism which underlay the Stalinist model was no longer welcome in Cuba. ‘Humanist Marxism’, as Che called it, would be the alternative. This was a version of Romantic Marxism, though one that was not afraid to use an explicit language of morality. Che defined his Marxism with explicit reference to the young Marx, in whose works he was steeped:

In practice, the Cuban regime sought to blend the struggle against poverty and state weakness with mass participation just as Radical Communists had in the past – through guerrilla Communism (in Cuba termed
guerrillerismo
). Citizens, or unselfish ‘new men’, were to be soldiers in an egalitarian, brotherly army of labour, giving their all so that Cuba might achieve extraordinary levels of development. This, then, was an ascetic Communism. Cubans were mobilized to work for their homeland for little individual reward. But collective reward was a different matter, and huge efforts were made to improve education and health for the whole population, and especially for the countryside, which was the main beneficiary of the new regime. The literacy campaign of 1961 became one of the iconic movements of the era. Some 250,000 school and university students were trained, mobilized in ‘literacy brigades’ and sent to the countryside for six months to live with peasants, where they would teach – and ‘revolutionize’ – the illiterate. As so often in Communist history, campaigns like these, appealing to youthful idealism, seem to have been enormously popular, whilst also transforming the lives of the illiterate.
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One American visitor remembered the atmosphere of celebration when the students returned to Havana for a week of games, cultural activities and parades:

Public expressions of joy, of course, were central to all Communist regimes, as Milan Kundera showed so well. But it is no surprise that Cuba was especially appealing to the global left at the time. Cuban Communism was as puritanical and militaristic as any other form of guerrilla Communism, and non-conformity and dissent were punished, most notoriously in labour camps established between 1965 and 1969. But in the early years the Cubans were more successful than many other
Communist regimes in emphasizing the enthusiasm and heroic spirit brought by militarism, at the expense of its more unpleasant features – violence and repression. This was partly a matter of leadership and the culture of the party: Che and Castro tried to present their Marxism as one that genuinely relied on persuasion and ‘consciousness’, and unlike Mao and the Chinese leaders, they had not been brought up within a Soviet-influenced party culture of institutionalized self-criticism and purges. But it was also the result of the relative ease with which the revolutionaries took power, owing to the weakness of internal opposition. The peasants of the southern region of Escambray did rebel during a six-year-long insurgency, which was put down by force. But many opponents simply left the island. After the revolution and between 1965 and 1971, many of the middle class migrated to the United States, with the agreement of both governments. The Cubans therefore avoided the systematic ‘class struggle’ or mass persecution of the bourgeoisie seen in so many other Communist regimes.
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Meanwhile, the sense of being a David besieged by a bullying American Goliath inevitably bolstered the legitimacy of Castro in the eyes of those left behind, at least for a time.

Yet Cuban Communism was far from free of the other great disadvantage of Radical Marxism: the economic trauma and dislocation it tended to bring in its wake. The direction of economic policy became clear very early on, when Che emerged not only as the main strategist of agrarian reform, but also Minister for Industry and head of the Cuban Central Bank. Che relished the incongruity of this last appointment, and humorously claimed that he had got the job by accident: at the cabinet meeting to decide on the post, Castro had asked for a good ‘
economista
’ to volunteer, and was surprised when Che put his hand up. ‘But Che, I didn’t know you were an economist!’ he exclaimed, to which Che replied, ‘Oh, I thought you needed a good
comunista
.’
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Che actually went on a crash course in economics, but the Communist won over the economist. Like all voluntarists before them, Che and Castro insisted that harnessing popular willpower would permit Cuba to leap from agrarian poverty to Communist plenty, and the regime pursued a highly ambitious policy of rapid industrialization. Predictably it ran into a combination of chaotic central planning, American sanctions and the loss of middle-class expertise to exile. Che himself later admitted that ‘We dealt with nature in a subjective manner, as if by talking to it we could persuade it.’
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The result, by 1963, was economic crisis, and Che found himself fighting a losing battle against Soviet-supported technocrats who favoured a less ambitious, more Modernist approach. Che, wholly unsuited to the practicalities of economic management, became disillusioned – according to one of his friends his spirit was ‘smothered under the mountains of statistics and production methods’.
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It was during these debates over the direction of the economy that he began a fundamental reconsideration of the Soviet Union. Che recalled to another friend how he had been converted to Marxism in Guatemala and Mexico by reading Stalin’s works: they had convinced him that ‘in the Soviet Union lay the solution to life, believing that what had been applied there was what he had read about’. But when he actually worked with the Soviets ‘he realized they had been tricking him’; the result was a ‘violent reaction’ against Stalinism in 1963–4.
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Castro, however, took a more pragmatic view, and had more sympathy with the Soviets. From 1964 he realized that Che’s recipes were too ambitious: labour enthusiasm alone could not make tiny Cuba into a self-sufficient, industrial power; Soviet-style material incentives and the Soviet market for Cuban sugar would be needed for some time. Che, defeated, gave up on his efforts to apply guerrilla Communism to the economy, and decided to employ it in a more appropriate area: spreading the Cuban model of revolution to the rest of Latin America and Africa. He resigned all of his offices, even renouncing his Cuban citizenship, and spent the rest of his short life as a revolutionary nomad. But the reconciliation between Cuba and the USSR was to be short-lived. Following the Sino-Soviet split and the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, the USSR seemed to be an increasingly unreliable protector, and from 1965 Castro yet again began to pursue a radical politics of mass mobilization to develop the Cuban economy. After zigzagging between Radical and Modernist Marxism, the Cubans were to retain their guerrilla model of economic development until the end of the decade, but they were now to do so under the auspices of a disciplined, vanguard party: the Cuban Communist Party, founded in 1965. The early experiments in participatory democracy of 1959–60 were finally at an end. Even so, the Cubans avoided following the more technocratic Soviet model for some time. They believed their revolution was uniquely democratic and suited to the developing world, and were committed to exporting it.

Shortly after the revolutionaries had taken power, Che Guevara dictated his thoughts on his experiences, and they were published in May 1960 under the title
Guerrilla Warfare
. This was partly a ‘how-to’ manual. Guerrillas were instructed in the use of Molotov cocktails, as well as the best ways of bringing social reform to their peasant hosts. Advice was also given on what to wear and carry – a hammock, a piece of soap and notebook and pencil (for writing messages for fellow guerrillas) were all recommended. But Che was also defending a rural guerrilla strategy as an exemplar for all Southern revolutionaries, regardless of the peculiarities of the Cuban revolution, and carefully ignoring the importance of the Cuban urban insurgency. Placing himself in the guerrilla Communist tradition, from Mao’s Yan’an to Ho Chi Minh’s struggle against the French and the Americans, and explicitly distancing himself from the Soviet tradition (and even from the anti-German partisans of World War II), Che was arguing that the
foco
– the small, vanguard guerrilla band – could ignite revolutionary fires throughout the Third World.
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The book was primarily written for revolutionaries in Latin America. In part, Castro and Che regarded it as their duty to help the oppressed throughout the continent. But there were also strong practical reasons to foment revolution abroad. As Castro explained, the United States ‘will not be able to hurt us if all of Latin America is in flames’.
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Castro did signal that he would abandon his support for foreign revolution in return for peaceful coexistence with the United States, though it is unclear whether he would have kept to this promise. But whether seriously meant or not, his overtures came to nothing. Kennedy continued to support anti-Castro forces, and his successor from 1963, Lyndon Johnson, was even more unwilling to compromise.

Efforts to spread the revolution were directed by ‘Comandante’ (‘Commander’) Che Guevara. The Cubans trained more than 1,500 revolutionaries from the continent, but more important than practical help was the galvanizing example of Cuba itself. As a leader of the Venezuelan Communist Party remembered, the Cuban revolution was like a ‘detonator’.
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The ease with which the Cubans had taken power gave rise to extraordinary optimism. It seemed that the
foco
could
swiftly seize power everywhere. One Venezuelan guerrilla recalled that he took to the mountains believing ‘our war was going to be a Cuban-style war’; ‘We thought that the solution to our problems was no more than two or three years away.’
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The Cuban example inspired numerous Communist guerrilla movements to take up arms across the continent, whether Castroist, Maoist, pro-Soviet Communist or Trotskyist. However, most were small and lacked popular support. They only had any real impact in Venezuela, Guatemala and Colombia, where brief periods of left-wing success had been followed by the victory of the right.
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In Guatemala, a series of dictatorships had followed Jacobo Arbenz’s rule, and following the suppression of a left-wing military revolt in 1960, two officers set up a guerrilla group in alliance with pro-Soviet Communists and then Trotskyists. In Colombia, the Communist party had controlled peasant enclaves for some years, and when the military succeeded in putting them down in 1964–5, the Communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas
, or FARC) emerged to fight back. Meanwhile, the Venezuelan guerrillas, supported by the Communist party despite Moscow’s displeasure, benefited from their participation in ousting the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in 1958, and then from some popular resentment at the economic austerity imposed by the democratically elected centre-right.

Nowhere, however, did the guerrillas pose a serious threat to the regimes. In Venezuela, a mixture of liberal democracy and repression damaged them. Elsewhere, guerrilla forces were no match for governments’ military forces. Kennedy and his successors were determined to thwart Cuban plans for revolution and poured money into local militaries, even if that meant setting aside his more ambitious plans for modernization and democracy. Between 1962 and 1966, nine military coups took place in Latin America, and in at least eight they were designed to replace governments that were felt to be too left-wing or soft on Communism.
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