Castro

Sebastian Balfour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317864134
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The story of Fidel Castro has few parallels in contemporary history. None of the outstanding Third World leaders of the twentieth-century played such a prominent and restless part on the international stage and none survived as head of state for as long. Over almost 50 years, he was one of the most controversial political figures in the world, and his legacy has yet to be fully evaluated. Some of his most cherished plans were realized and are a model for many Third World countries. Yet despite enormous sacrifices by Cubans, his grand vision remains unfulfilled and its continued pursuit is full of risks.

The fully revised third edition of this respected political biography provides the first full retrospect of Castro's remarkable career right up to his illness and withdrawal from power in February 2008, incorporating analysis of:

• the renewed crackdown on dissidents in Cuba from the mid 1990s on
• the major geopolitical reconfiguration of Latin America in the late 1990s, and the new Cuban-Venezuelan relationship under Hugo Chavez
• the Helms Burton Act and the continuing US embargo
• The Cuban economy in the first decade of the new millennium

It also revisits earlier events in Castro's career, for instance the various assassination plots against him, the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the light of documents released by Cuba and the US over the past decade and a half.

CHAPTER 1

Pictures of the Past, Visions of the Future

‘Revolutionary governments are driven by pictures of the past as much as by visions of the future’

Hugh Thomas, Cuba: the Pursuit of Freedom

When Fidel Castro entered the world of university politics in 1945 as a 19-year-old law student, two great historical events dominated the political rhetoric of his peers: the independence struggles of 1868 to 1898 and the revolutionary movement of 1927 to 1933 that had led to the overthrow of the dictator Machado. For student radicals, both events were interwoven into a picture of Cuban history as an incomplete and thwarted revolutionary process.

The largest island in the Caribbean, commanding the approaches northwest to the Gulf of Mexico and south to the Caribbean Sea, Cuba had been an important strategic centre of the Spanish empire in the New World. Almost 20 years before its conquest in 1511, Columbus had been struck by its beauty and also by its commercial potential. Topographically, Cuba is very varied. Three mountain ranges dominate the island, one in the centre and the others at its western and eastern ends, the tallest and most extensive being the Sierra Maestra in the east. Between the mountain ranges stretch wide and fertile plains on which are situated the main towns and where all but 5 per cent of the population lives. The island’s shoreline is also diverse, from the low marshlands of part of the south-western coast to the mountains that rise sharply from the south-eastern shore. The coast is dotted with innumerable small natural harbours and a few miles offshore on each side of the island lie hundreds of tiny uninhabited islands and keys.

Under Spanish rule, Cuba had been dominated by the military, the clergy and the colonial administrators. Beneath this top echelon had been an elite of Cuban-born Spaniards or Creoles and much further down the social scale, the mulattos of mixed black and white race. The indigenous Indian population had been wiped out by conquest, disease and maltreatment, and so black slaves or ex-slaves occupied the bottom rung of this rigid hierarchy, providing the bulk of the labour force for the wealth that flowed to the metropolis from the sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations. Cuba thus became, in its racial mix, a typically Caribbean island, though with a stronger presence of whites than elsewhere in the area. Of its present 11.3 million inhabitants, 51 per cent are mulattos, 37 per cent are of European descent, 11 per cent are black and 1 per cent are Chinese.¹

The Republic of Cuba had been born in 1902 after 400 years of colonisation by Spain. The battle for independence, waxing and waning for 30 years, had been a destructive and bloody affair, particularly in the final war of 1895–8; the toll it had taken of the male population was such that there were few men in their sixties when Castro’s revolution took place in 1958.² It had also been a revolutionary struggle against slavery. The rank and file of the Cuban armies that threw themselves at the Spanish troops were black ex-slaves. A bitter war of attrition had been fought against the planters; many a former slave returned to burn down the canefields of his old master. In the first War of Independence, the mulatto general who led one of the armies, Antonio Maceo, had refused to enter into peace negotiations with the Spaniards unless they included the question of the abolition of slavery.

The struggle for independence had also been a fight against imperialism; on several occasions Castro described Cuba as ‘the nineteenth century’s Vietnam’.³ Some of its leaders feared that once Cuba had broken away from Spain it would be swallowed up by the United States, which was at the time in a particularly expansionist mood. There had been talk earlier of the United States buying Cuba from Spain and some slave owners, looking towards the Confederate states in the South, had briefly flirted with the idea of its annexation by the United States because the Spanish government was tightening up its laws concerning slavery. In 1898, worried by the threat to North American assets of the continuing war in Cuba and determined to oust the old empire from the Caribbean, the United States declared war on Spain and after two months of hostilities forced it to give up its last colony. The new independent Cuba was thus born in the shadow of the eagle. Under the so-called Platt Amendment of 1901, the United States reserved to itself the right to intervene in the affairs of Cuba in order to prevent any other foreign power from exercising undue influence and to maintain ‘stable government’. Despite this seemingly well-meaning paternalism, the four interventions by the US government between 1898 and 1920 were intended to ensure above all that Cuba maintained policies which favoured the increasing American investments on the island.

Indeed, it was US capital that re-colonised Cuba. Long before independence, giant American companies had moved in to exploit Cuba’s natural resources. US investments on the island accelerated in the first quarter of the century and by 1926 were valued at $1,360 million, based in the sugar industry, and in railways, mining, tobacco, banking, commerce, real estate and other sectors. US capital controlled the telephone service and the gas and electricity industries among others.⁴ But it was sugar that set the tune in Cuba. Under a long-standing agreement, the United States committed itself to buying up to half of Cuba’s sugar crop each year, thereby guaranteeing profits for the Cuban planters, foreign currency and jobs. The Cuban sugar quota set by the US Congress, however, was a mixed blessing because it meant that the United States could punish Cuba by reducing the price and amount of the quota if it stepped out of line. Thus the remaining Cuban sugar crop could be sold on the world market but only to the extent that it did not affect US sugar growers; otherwise, the sugar lobby on Capitol Hill would force down the quota. A Louisiana senator is reported in the Cuban press in 1955 to have made the following warning to the Cubans: ‘I represent in the American Senate a vast sugar-producing area of the United States. And I have to demand here whatever benefits that area…. Cuba has exceeded its production [of sugar]. … It is we who permit your country to produce.’⁵

The United States also controlled Cuba’s internal market. The Platt Amendment was replaced in 1934 by a more modern instrument of neo-colonial domination, the Reciprocal Trade Agreement, whereby in exchange for the sugar quota, US exports to Cuba were given preferential tariffs. The effect was to dampen any efforts at creating import substitution industries in Cuba and to discourage cheaper imports from elsewhere. The Agreement therefore served to lock Cuba’s economy even more tightly into that of the United States. In 1957, another American senator called on Congress to lower the sugar quota because Cuba had just announced its intention to build two flour mills, thereby threatening the export of US flour to the island. A Cuban employers’ review reacted sharply, stating in the conditional tense what was already a reality: ‘Cuba would have to resign itself to having its economy “frozen” on the one hand by the limited US sugar quota and by world competition, and on the other by having to keep its internal market unchanged for the benefit of foreign exporters.’⁶

Any policy of modernising Cuba’s economy, any effort to regenerate Cuban society thus came to mean two related things in particular: to shake off its dependence on the United States, and to break out of the yoke of its sugar monoculture. Before the first marines landed in Cuba to supervise the new Republic, the writer and poet José Martí, icon of Cuban independence, had warned against US expansionism. In a famous passage from his last and incomplete letter, written the day before he died in a cavalry charge against Spanish troops in 1895, Martí referred to the US as the ‘monster’: ‘I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails: my sling is that of David.’⁷ Martí believed that the danger of US interference or aggression extended to the whole of the American continent south of the Rio Grande, to what he termed in his writings ‘America’. ‘The contempt of the formidable neighbour – who does not know it [America] – is the greatest danger facing our America, and it is vital, for visiting day is close by, that the neighbour gets to know it and gets to know it soon, so that it is not treated with contempt.’⁸ Martí feared above all that the United States would replace Spain as a colonial power in Latin America. More effectively than the old colonial power, however, the United States came to dominate the Cuban economy and that of many Latin American countries, shaping their societies and gearing their production to the demands of its own economy without permanently occupying their territories (except for Guantánamo Bay). As late as the early 1930s, the dollar was the only paper currency in circulation in Cuba. The struggle for independence was seen by successive generations of radical young Cubans as unfinished business.

The ‘Apostle’ Martí was an obligatory reference in the speeches of all political figures in the Cuban Republic, from generals to gangsters. But his official image was as a spiritual, millenarian patriot, free from any trace of anti-imperialism or rebelliousness. Such was the range of Martí’s thought, expressed in poems, prose, newspaper articles and letters, that it was possible to select different ideological messages to suit the circumstances. It was the student rebels of the 1920s who rediscovered the radical Martí, and this alternative picture of the national hero was channelled through successive generations of students and left-wing leaders to the new university class of the 1940s.⁹ Castro became one of the most dedicated disciples of Martí. The new aspiring liberator of Cuba saw him as a guide to action and a source of legitimacy. Castro never lost an opportunity to link himself publicly with the revolutionary traditions embodied by Martí, and in the darkest moments of his endeavour he was able to find some inspiration from the example of Martí’s political labours. Imprisoned after his abortive attempt to storm the barracks of Moncada in 1953 and contemplating the seemingly impossible task of creating a revolutionary movement in Cuba, Castro wrote to a friend:

the similarity of situations reminds me of Martí’s efforts to bring together all Cubans worthy of the fight for independence; each one had their history, their glories, their feats, each one believed they had more rights than or at least equal rights with the others; only the work of love, understanding and infinite patience of one man with less glory attached to him than others was able to achieve the miracle…. For this reason, perhaps, the pages of Cuban history I most admire are not to do with the heroic deeds on the battlefield but that gigantic, heroic and silent task of uniting Cubans for the struggle.¹⁰

In fact, striking parallels can be found between the lives of Martí and Castro. Both were sons of Spanish immigrants. Both were imprisoned for their political activities on the same island, the Isle of Pines off the west coast of Cuba. Like Castro before his landing on the island in 1956, Martí had raised money for his own expedition among Cuban exiles in Florida and on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Martí had disembarked on a remote beach in eastern Cuba in difficult circumstances, though not as hazardous as those encountered by Castro about 288 kilometres further west some 61 years later. Indeed, the dictator Batista was so sure that Castro would take the same route as Martí that he ordered air surveillance missions on the southern coast of Oriente; in the event, the new would-be liberator landed on its western coast.¹¹ Castro’s attempted seizure of the Moncada barracks in 1953 coincided with the much-publicised centenary of Martí’s birth, allowing Castro to claim that he and his men, the ‘generation of the centenary’, were the true heirs of the ‘Apostle’. Martí’s party, the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), like Castro’s movement later, embraced radicals of different and in some measure contradictory political tendencies. Among the members of the PRC were socialist and anarcho-syndicalist workers, many of them immigrant tobacco workers living in Florida. A final, less important parallel was the use both Martí and Castro made of US journalists to publicise their cause while engaged in guerrilla warfare, Martí’s champion being George Eugene Bryson of the New York Herald and Castro’s Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times.

Martí represented a brand of romantic, republican nationalism that belonged to a very different period from that in which the young generation of the 1940s began their political careers. Nevertheless, there was a continuity of ideas between the two periods. Martí’s words against the danger of US expansion struck a chord among radical nationalists like Castro who witnessed the contempt with which some Americans treated Cuba. In 1949, for example, Castro led a protest action against a group of drunken American sailors who had urinated on the statue of the national hero in Havana. Martí’s call for Spanish America to declare its ‘second independence’, this time against the colossus of the North, also invoked an old tradition of Pan-Americanism without the United States derived from the epoch of the ‘Liberator’ of South America of the early nineteenth century, Simón Bolívar, to whom Castro was also deeply drawn.¹² This same vision can be found in Castro’s restless efforts in the 1960s to create a continent-wide revolutionary movement or more recently to form a united front with other Latin American countries around the issues of debt and modernisation. Like Castro later, Martí believed that Cuba’s struggle for independence was pivotal to the new balance of power in the American continent and beyond. ‘We are holding a world in balance: it is not just two islands [Cuba and Puerto Rico] that we are going to free’, he wrote in 1894. ‘An error over Cuba’, he said, referring to the danger of US invasion, ‘is an error in America, an error among modern humanity.’ Echoing Martí’s words almost a century later, Castro remarked to foreign journalists in 1983 that ‘North Americans don’t understand … that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity’.¹³

Martí’s passionate belief in social justice, in the need for universal education, in the virtues of the countryside and land cultivation, found an echo in the young Castro. His conviction in the power of ideas and moral principles cannot fail to have influenced Castro, who gave special importance in his speeches and broadcasts in the 1950s to explaining his purpose and who rarely omitted in his speeches since the Revolution to make an appeal to rationality and ethics. Castro’s language may be more prosaic but his faith in the capacity of ideas to move people to action was as great as Martí’s when the latter wrote:

Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone. There is no prow that can cut through a cloud of ideas.¹⁴

Underlying this confidence in the power of will was a historicism or belief in the intrinsically progressive nature of history derived in Martí’s case from the philosopher Krause.

Both Martí and Castro also possessed an organicist, almost ahistorical picture of a true Cuba, free from the aberration of dictatorship, whose essence was waiting to be discovered. Despite his espousal of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, Castro shared with Martí a vision of nationhood rather than class as the driving force of progress. In a passage highly reminiscent of Castro’s words many years later, Martí wrote, with reference to the Latin American republics of the nineteenth century:

The republics have purged in tyrannies their incapacity to understand the real elements of the country, derive from these the form of the government and govern with them. To govern in a new country is to create…. To know is to resolve. To know the country and govern it in accordance with this knowledge is the only way of delivering it from tyranny.¹⁵

This notion of cubanidad, an essential Cuban way of being from which the country had been alienated, was transmitted from one generation of radicals to another and re-interpreted in the light of their own political ideas. It thus took the form of a radical nationalism or cubanía rebelde. Those who had gained power in the new Republic, whether as politicians or businessmen, were considered to have squandered the inheritance of the independence struggle. Without exception, the Cuban governments since 1902 had been characterised by graft and corruption on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Prologue
• 1 Pictures of the Past, Visions of the Future
• 2 The Rebel
• 3 Rise to Power
• 4 Defying the Colossus
• 5 The Grand Illusion
• 6 The Revolutionary Godfather
• 7 The World Statesman
• 8 Straightening the Rudder
• 9 A Special Period
• 10 Autumn of the Revolutionary Patriarch
• Epilogue: Castro’s Legacy
• Bibliographical Essay
• Maps
• Index