The Cuban economy’s problems had helped to create a widespread sense of popular dissatisfaction and frustration that made a large majority of the population potentially open to supporting radical solutions to Cuba’s problems. But what, if any, radical solutions would be presented to the Cuban people had not yet been determined.
Fidel Castro’s political ideology before he came to power remains unclear to this day despite the Cuban leader’s claim that he had been a supporter of or at least strongly influenced by “Marxism-Leninism” before the revolution. If this statement is true rather than an after-the-fact attempt to legitimize his membership in the Communist world, it would lend credence to the idea that he was involved in a conspiracy to bring Communism to Cuba, as his conservative detractors have long alleged. It would also mean that the contention that he was “pushed” into the arms of the Soviet Union and Communism, as many of his North American liberal and radical defenders have maintained, is unfounded. Absent a smoking gun of new documentation that may come to light after Fidel Castro and his close associates pass from the scene, we can rely only on the available evidence to attempt to understand the roots of Castro’s politics.
A good place to start is to examine a Cuban and Latin American political tradition that has been often downplayed if not ignored: populism. Observers frequently apply the model of West European and North American political experiences to Cuba and attempt to find in that country familiar political currents: conservatives, Communists, social democrats, or U.S.-style liberals. However, these political currents do not accurately portray Cuba’s political universe, which evolved in response to a variety of historically grounded issues and needs.
In his massive study of revolution and revolutionaries, James H. Billington has identified a political division that became established in Europe in 1830–48 and that distinguished what he called national and social revolutionaries. As Billington put it, the national revolutionaries were interested in establishing new nations with a cultural unity that would erase class divisions. The social revolutionaries were instead aiming at the abolition of classes, which would eliminate national borders. Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of Young Italy, was a typical national revolutionary, while Auguste Blanqui and Filippo Buonarroti represented the social revolutionary tradition in 1830s France. Important philosophical differences also existed between these two traditions, as Billington explained:
The conflict between national and social revolutionaries was, in essence, between Romanticism and rationalism: the nationalists’ emotional love of the unique and organic against the socialists’ intellectual focus on general laws and mechanistic analysis. The nationalists saw revolution as a “resurgence” (the Italian risorgimento or even “resurrection” (the Polish zmartwychwstanie) of an individual nation. Social revolutionaries saw it as an extension of the scientific universalism of the Enlightenment. If revolutionary nationalists were often poets like Petofi in Hungary and Mickiewicz in Poland celebrating the uniqueness of their vernacular idiom, social revolutionaries like Blanqui tended to view themselves as educational theorists teaching universal principles.1
These two political traditions help us to understand certain key figures and stages in the formation and development of Cuban political thought. If we look back to the high point of the Cuban struggle for independence, in the 1890s, we find the critical figure of José Martí, a poet, writer, journalist, and patriot known as Cuba’s founding father. Even though one or possibly two generations of Cuban patriots preceded and influenced Martí, he was and remains the source from which Cuban political factions of every kind—whether right-wing exiles in Miami or Fidel Castro and his political and cultural apparatus—claim their moral and political legitimacy.
Such widely divergent political currents have claimed Martí’s legacy because he was, to a significant extent, concerned with issues that have traditionally preoccupied social revolutionaries, even though his political roots lay mainly in the national revolutionary tradition. Martí’s campaigning and fund-raising among Cuban exile tobacco workers in Tampa and Key West in the 1890s brought him into close contact with the “social question,” because the milieu of Cuban exile tobacco workers was strongly influenced by the class struggle orientation of anarchist trade unionism. As historian Joan Casanovas has shown, this experience pushed Martí’s politics to the left.2
Martí was affected by blacks’ and poorer whites’ major role in the struggle for Cuban liberation that culminated in the third and final Cuban war of independence (1895–98), which was fought in a far more socially inclusive manner than were previous Cuban uprisings. Martí responded to this development, even if his color-blind political approach is open to criticism. He also spent many years in New York in the 1880s and 1890s as a political exile, becoming familiar with as well as sympathetic to the period’s social struggles. His life “within the entrails of the monster,” as he put it, also deepened his understanding of the perils that the United States posed for a future independent Cuba. However, it does not follow that Martí became a socialist, much less a Marxist. Although he sought a society without privilege and dominant classes, two Martí scholars, Manuel Pedro González and Iván E. Schulman, have demonstrated that “Martí did not go beyond the borders of democratic individualism, whether in the economic or political order. If he condemned excessive or ill-gotten riches or the exploitation of the helpless, he also defended [the] possession [of wealth] when it was the product of honest effort without detriment to the proletariat.”3 Finally, strong elements of stoicism and romanticism also featured prominently in Martí’s thinking and subsequently became fixtures in the Cuban populist tradition that sometimes regarded firm dedication, sacrifice, and heroism as self-sufficient virtues in the harsh sphere of political action, particularly revolutionary action.
The opposition to the Machado dictatorship in the early 1930s also shows a division that in some limited but revealing ways is reminiscent of Billington’s distinction between national and social revolutionaries. One tradition was most typically represented by the Cuban Communist Party, founded in 1925 and following the lead of the Communist International, which was undergoing its rapid Stalinization. Cuban Communists were strongly oriented to the working class and played a major role in organizing its members into unions. But the Communist International’s so-called Third Period line, an ultraleft policy imposed by Moscow from 1928 to 1934, required Communists to direct their main attacks at social democrats, who were denounced as “social-fascists.” Since Cuba had no social democrats, the party took a stance of sectarian opposition to student and populist nationalist groups, which represented the other tradition. Cuban populism, even in its most left-wing versions, usually addressed itself to an amorphous “people” and spoke of conflicts between the poor and the rich rather than workers and employers. The small, “just and fair” employer would also be included among the people. Policy and program were not characteristic or strong points of Cuban populism. More important was the personal commitment of the populist militants, who often saw themselves as engaging in exemplary acts that would set a standard and arouse the masses to militant action. As the key line in the Cuban national anthem states, “morir por la patria es vivir [to die for the fatherland is to live].” In this tradition, winning is not the only or even main aim of struggle; it is better to go down fighting than to stay alive and submit to oppression.4
In late 1933, as a result of the successful revolution against the Machado dictatorship, Cuban populists found themselves running a short-lived nationalist and militant reform government. This government constituted a highly unstable coalition. President Ramón Grau San Martín led the reform nationalists in the center. On the right was Colonel Fulgencio Batista (whom the new revolutionary government had recently promoted from sergeant). Antonio Guiteras, the nationalist and socialist minister of the interior, led the Left as the most radical member of the cabinet. The Communists refused to support this government even though it was engaged in a life-and-death struggle for survival in the face of the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to grant diplomatic recognition. A few months earlier, the Communists had already aroused hostility within the opposition when they favored calling off the August 1933 general strike against Machado in exchange for some trade union organizational gains.
This was the origin of the major split within the Cuban Left that would come to an ostensible end only with Fidel Castro’s founding of the united Cuban Communist Party in 1965. On one side of the split was again a Stalinist Cuban Communist Party, which never became a large mass party in the manner of the French, Italian, and Indonesian Communist parties but was nevertheless based on the organized working class. As we shall see in chapter 5, which discusses the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Cuban Communists, the Cuban Communists allied with Batista in the late 1930s in exchange for the government’s granting the party official control of the trade unions. At the height of their political influence, with an average support of 7 percent of the electorate, the Communists obtained representation in Batista’s cabinet in the early 1940s and maintained a small but visible presence in the Cuban Congress throughout most of that decade. The Cold War, however, brought a substantial decline in the party’s influence.5 Communist decline was not limited to the party’s electoral fortunes; it also involved the party’s trade union influence, particularly after the party was forced from the control of the central trade union federation in the late 1940s. In addition, the party’s subordination to the Soviet Union, which had been somewhat of an asset in the days of the wartime alliance against Nazism, became a definite liability.
As a result of their association with Batista and other conventional politicians, the Cuban Communist leaders, although by and large personally honest, associated themselves with politiquería (unprincipled and corrupt political wheeling and dealing). This politiquería was highly disdained by idealistic young Cubans who became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated by the corruption of the reformist and nationalist leaders of the 1933 revolution who were elected to office in 1944 and served until 1952. The left-wing nationalists failed to maintain a stable, organized political tendency. Batista’s army killed Guiteras in 1935, and many of those who had sided with him turned into political gangsters, engaging in armed conflict over political spoils, a development that was later encouraged by President Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–48). Grau cleverly eliminated potential left-wing populist nationalist pressure (the anti-imperialist element of Grau’s reform current had disappeared) by encouraging competition for political spoils, thereby stimulating violent struggles among the various groups of nationalist and populist origin. At this time, in the mid-1940s, Fidel Castro graduated from a distinguished Catholic high school and entered the University of Havana law school.
The political gangs of the 1940s—organized remnants of the populist and nationalist militants of the 1930s who had become demoralized—were, to be sure, an extremely decayed expression of the populist political culture. Unlike the Communists, the populist milieu was not strongly oriented toward the trade union movement. It also was not hostile to the union movement, but since the populist political culture saw the people and the nation as the central entities, it did not prioritize the unions in its political action. This populist tradition approached the social question from the perspective of a nationalism that, in the spirit of Martí, aspired to have broad popular appeal among those lacking advantages and privileges rather than to develop a class-based point of departure. Castro was following the populist tradition when he defined what he meant by “the people” in History Will Absolve Me: “When we speak of the people, we do not mean the comfortable and conservative sectors of the nation that welcome any regime of oppression, any dictatorship, and any despotism. . . . [W]e mean the unredeemed masses to whom everything is offered but nothing is given except deceit and betrayal.”6
If it is true, as some observers have claimed, that the theoretical level of the Cuban Communists was low by international Communist standards,7 it was high compared to the Cuban populist milieu and the country’s political world as a whole. This is evident in the biographies of forty-one Cuban generals published under the auspices of the Castro government in 1996. Only five of these generals have political roots that can be traced to the prerevolutionary Communist Party. Few had any significant political education when they joined the rebel army as rank-and-file soldiers in the late 1950s. One general stated that at the time “he had no solid convictions, but a little sense of adventure and of indignation against the assassinations and beatings that people suffered in Santiago de Cuba.” Another said that he had told Fidel Castro that he was joining “for an ideal” but that he did not know what those words meant: he had heard the expression and figured it was a good thing. A third general stated that before joining the rebel army, he had participated in high school student strikes but had had no revolutionary consciousness. Another general, a black Cuban, had a more developed sense of injustice, as indicated by his remark that when he joined the rebel army, he had “no economic possibilities and no political knowledge, but a clear concept of racial, religious and economic discrimination.” Another explained that Fidel and Raúl Castro later taught him whatever he knew about socialism. Along the same lines, one general stated that when he joined the rebel army, he had no political ideas but was attracted by the fact that the leaders identified with the aspirations of the peasants in their pronouncements. This perspective, in addition “to the dreams of adventure that all young people have in the face of the heroic,” caused him to join the rebels.8
At its best, the Cuban populist milieu encouraged the study of Martí’s works, but in a worshipful fashion designed to extract maxims and quotations bearing on appropriate moral and political behavior rather than in a respectful yet critical spirit. Martí’s ideas and actions provide an invaluable example of moral and political integrity. However, Cuban populism has treated him as the infallible source of knowledge for all conceivable political and human problems, notwithstanding the fact that Martí wrote for and about a late-nineteenth-century Cuba that differed substantially from the Cuba of the mid–twentieth century. In contrast, even the crude Stalinist Marxism9 of the Cuban Communists was superior in its analytical power and overall comprehension of society to the fragmented and sometimes intellectually incoherent views of Cuban populism. If nothing else, the Stalinist Marxism of the Communists was modern and had some discernible connection, even if rudimentary, to an informed and intellectually disciplined approach to social reality.
Cuban populism generally failed to understand the relationship between politics and society. Yet populists were generally better able than Communists to grasp the principal issues at stake in a particular political situation. In a sense, the light intellectual baggage of populist nationalism posed far less of an obstacle to an engagement with political reality than did the dogmatic schematism of the Cuban Communists and their subordination to the dictates of Soviet foreign policy. These often proved to be crippling handicaps for the Cuban Communists, who were likely to find themselves trapped in rigid Stalinist categories as well as in their organizational dependence and political commitment to the Soviet bloc.
Fidel Castro’s unquestionable tactical genius comes from this populist background. It can be appreciated in comparison with the Cuban Communists as well as in contrast to Argentinean nonparty Communist Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Guevara, unlike Castro, often failed to recognize the practical political necessities produced by specific historical conjunctures. He could not understand, for example, and opposed Castro’s very effective tactic during the guerrilla war of freeing prisoners after taking away their weapons.10 Castro understood, as Guevara did not, that this tactic made a great deal of sense when facing a mercenary and demoralized army with no social or political support from the population at large. Even more striking was Guevara’s colossal political error of proposing that the rebels rob banks to finance their operations. When this proposal was rejected by the urban leadership of the 26th of July Movement, Guevara took it as a sign of their social conservatism.11 He seemed unaware that from the mid- and late 1940s to the early 1950s, Cuba had gone through a period of political gangsterism. Many of the earlier revolutionaries had degenerated into gangsters, carrying out violent activities, including bank robberies such as the 1948 armed assault on the Havana branch of the Royal Bank of Canada. Any involvement in similar actions would have brought back memories of that dark period and been extremely damaging, particularly since Castro had been associated with those groups in his student days. Using such tactics would have made it easy for the Batista-controlled press to argue that the revolutionaries were just bringing back the bad old days.
Cuban populism was far more politically militant than Cuban Communism but tended to be more conservative on social issues. Populists, however, glorified action and denigrated theory as if the two were necessarily opposed. As indicated earlier, they were very influenced by Martí’s emphasis on sacrifice, dedication, and selflessness on behalf of the fatherland. Cuban populism stressed the heroic and glorified adventure in the sense of exciting and dangerous actions as well as unusual and romantically stirring experience. This approach was connected to the long-established tradition of armed struggle going back to Cubans’ various nineteenth-century wars against Spanish colonialism.
Populist political culture combined modern traits with others rooted in a Hispanic and precapitalist tradition, including a great emphasis on the concept of honor. Honor is a many-sided social and historical phenomenon that in egalitarian and humanist terms has positive and negative consequences. In recent years, however, honor has been viewed in mostly negative terms. Thus, for example, Cuba scholar K. Lynn Stoner perceptively notes that honor has been the “cornerstone of social consciousness” in prerevolutionary and revolutionary Cuba but then goes on to view it merely in terms of the male leaders’ dependence on public adulation and uncontested loyalty and ultimately as a cult of death. Following the analysis of Glen Dealy, Stoner continues to describe honor as depending on “individual male status within a group of potential competitors.”12 William Ian Miller, another author Stoner cites, draws primarily from the Icelandic sagas, viewing honor as the core values and behavior one would expect from the likes of members of the Mafia, southern slave owners, and medieval lords—men who take strong and often violent exception to even the most trivial offenses and are strongly motivated by envy and status, even in very small matters.13
There is, however, another side to honor, associated with the values of dignity,14 self- and mutual respect, courage, resistance to arbitrary power, integrity, and adherence to an internalized code of public, political morality. Most important, this “honorable” behavior, although obviously rooted in social mores, is inner-directed and is not viewed by the actor primarily as a means of obtaining outside approval or in terms of a market-type relationship where a one-for-one exchange of homage or services is expected in return. This type of honorable behavior is essential to the notion of solidarity, or “doing the right thing” in support of others without any expectation of immediate or equivalent returns. Of course, these notions of honor and solidarity reflect a social, long-term notion of the Golden Rule: others will do for you as you did for them.
Although usually thought of in terms of appropriate behavior for men, little intrinsic connection exists between the moral and political virtues associated with honor and masculinity as such, as is illustrated by the October 1958 response of rebel leader Camilo Cienfuegos to a Masonic lodge in central Cuba that had expressed concern about an army sergeant captured by the rebels:
Your petition is unnecessary, because under no condition would we put ourselves at the same moral level as those we are fighting. . . . We cannot torture and assassinate prisoners in the manner of our opponents; we cannot as men of honor and as dignified Cubans [Cubanos dignos use the low and undignified procedures that our opponents use against the people and against us. The spirit of nobility and chivalry inculcated in each one of our soldiers, with respect for prisoners and for the military, is the reason why more than seven hundred of them, after twenty-three months of struggle against the tyranny, find themselves today in the bosom of their families.15
Cienfuegos’s pride in the rebel army’s prisoner policy contrasted with the different position adopted on the same question by the more cosmopolitan, nonpopulist Guevara. The notion of honor was closely associated, as indicated earlier, with other highly appreciated values such as integrity, dignity, and loyalty to a cause,16 which were in turn part and parcel of a strong sense of membership in a highly politicized society. This politicization was national, not the localism of voluntary associations and neighborhood issues that sometimes is defined as political in the United States. Cuban politicization resulted from a variety of factors, including the relative compactness and cultural homogeneity of Cuban society and the overwhelming dependence on sugar, a product that had been, particularly since 1937, highly regulated by the state.
Mixed with the values of precapitalist origin were strongly held ideas of solidarity not with family, church, or other traditional sources of loyalty but with thoroughly modern public collectivities such as students, workers, the Cuban nation, and Latin America. The typical Cuban populist took all of these values, whether modern or Hispanic, quite personally. In this sense, the political was indeed personal, while the personal, in the sense of private morality and customs, was perceived as being outside the public, political realm.
In his analysis of the 1989 Chinese student movement, sociologist Craig Calhoun stresses the importance of honor as a motivator of the students’ willingness to take serious risks. Calhoun argues that the transformation of Western culture over the past several hundred years has made honor a less important category and that this phenomenon may be related to differences in radicalism and risk taking in social movements.
Calhoun also contrasts the logic of guilt and innocence with the logic of honor. The logic of guilt and innocence may, for example, excuse a political prisoner who, under the extreme pressures of torture, provides information about comrades. The prisoner’s sense of self as a person, however, may be deeply damaged by the revelation, even if the prisoner knows that the action was forced. According to Calhoun, the logic of honor is at work here.17 It is also clear that resistance under extreme negative conditions is tantamount to heroic conduct, a key feature of the Cuban populist tradition.
Of course, the revolutionary leaders could and did manipulate the positive aspects of honor for other ends. Thus, in the summer of 1959, Fidel Castro declared that it would be “hardly honorable” to attack the Communists to avoid being accused of being a Communist. Thus, Castro portrayed the issue as a matter of not picking on the weak to humor the strong (that is, the United States) or to satisfy the prejudices of many Cubans.18 This was, however, a clever maneuver by Castro to distract attention from the main issue at hand, which was not primarily a matter of attacking the Communists (although many undoubtedly wanted him to do so) but instead a matter of his failure to be clear and straightforward about his politics.
To be sure, in the Cuban context, honor was inevitably combined with sexism. As a result, women usually did not play central leadership roles in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship, perhaps partly because the Cuban women’s movement, a vital force in the 1920s and 1930s, had significantly declined by the 1950s.19 Nevertheless, machismo unquestionably was an important cause of the exclusion of women from certain revolutionary activities. While this exclusion was by no means absolute, women were generally confined to such traditional roles as nursing, providing shelter, fund-raising, and other auxiliary chores. Consistent with Latin American social patterns, many female leaders were relatives of the top revolutionary leaders, as in the cases of Vilma Espín and Haydée Santamaría.20 Celia Sánchez, Fidel Castro’s close associate, was the first woman to participate in armed combat, and in the summer of 1958, women were allowed to form their own Mariana Grajales platoon.21 In 1960, after the revolutionary victory, all independent women’s organizations were disbanded,22 but this was of course the fate of all independent organizational life in Cuba, as demonstrated by the abolition of the black Cubans’ important sociedades de color.23
Given the Cuban populist worldview’s emphasis on the values of heroism, selflessness, and sacrifice, the tendency to suicide among a significant number of leaders of Fidel Castro’s government is intriguing. Of course, the revolutionary leaders were products of the culture in which they were formed, including its higher propensity to suicide. (Cuba ranks among the top five countries in the world in suicides and has the highest suicide rate in Latin America.)24 Thus, many prominent Cubans in exile killed themselves, including former President Carlos Prío Socarrás, publisher Angel Quevedo, and Bay of Pigs commander José Pérez San Román, among others.25 Nevertheless, the characteristics of political leaders that lead them to kill themselves likely differ from those prevailing among the rest of the population. Although little is known about the specific circumstances, the suicides of these political leaders suggest the applicability of French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s analysis of “altruistic” suicide and its strong association with the spirit of renunciation and abnegation often found in institutions such as armies.26 The important revolutionary figures who committed suicide include former President Osvaldo Dorticós, Haydée Santamaría, Alberto Mora, and Felix Peña; Augusto Martínez Sánchez tried to kill himself but failed. Most of the founding members of the 26th of July Movement came out of the youth wing of the Ortodoxo Party, whose founder and leader, Eddy Chibás, committed suicide in August 1951. Chibás also fought ten duels between 1945 and 1950, a clear indication of the importance of honor in the Cuban political culture of the time.27
Populist political culture can be usefully contrasted with the far less important political culture of Cuban Communists, who were at times a persecuted minority and who endured the hardships of a clandestine life, particularly in the late 1950s, when the Communist Party decided to support Castro’s rebels. But while definite advantages accompanied the Communists’ “objective” view of politics as the outcome of certain impersonal processes and social causation, the disadvantage, in the Cuban context, was a certain loss of heroism and passion, whether in reality or appearance. Educated middle-class Communists also tended to be more sophisticated and less parochial than populists of similar class and educational backgrounds. In addition, the sectarian politics of the party and the long experience of its leadership in the unprincipled and often corrupt wheeling and dealing of electoral activity tended to widen the gap between the political cultures of militant populism and Communism.
Another distinguishing feature of Cuban populism was its strong generational consciousness, which developed as the frustrations and failures of political movements became strongly associated with specific age cohorts. The leading members of the generation of the early republic, officially inaugurated in 1902, failed to create a truly independent republic and greatly disillusioned those who eventually became the young revolutionaries of the 1933 generation. They in turn wallowed in corruption after obtaining power in the mid-1940s and thereby disillusioned the new young revolutionaries of the “Generation of the Centenary,” named after the one hundredth anniversary of José Martí’s 1853 birth.28 The revolutionaries’ tendency to see themselves as belonging to a distinctive generation was considerably reinforced by intellectual currents, influential in Cuba and Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century, that saw young people as the main carriers of nonconformity and innovation. This was an important component of the thought of turn-of-the-century Argentinean writer José Ingenieros as well as of his Uruguayan contemporary José Enrique Rodó. Besides praising the powers of youth, Rodó emphasized the role of spiritual idealism, which he contrasted with the utilitarianism and materialism he attributed to North American culture. His lengthy essay, Ariel, one of the most influential Latin American writings of the early twentieth century, was widely read in prerevolutionary Cuba.
The corruption of the revolutionary generation of the 1930s after achieving power from 1944 to 1952 constituted an important factor in bringing about a shift in Cuban populism. As open anti-imperialist politics became limited to the Cuban Communists29 and as the working-class political radicalism of the 1930s declined, the road was opened to a militant but somewhat classless democratic populism. In the late 1940s, Ortodoxo leader Chibás coined the slogan “Vergüenza contra Dinero [Honor or Integrity against Money]”30 and rejected politiquería. The Ortodoxo Party refused to make electoral pacts with the corrupt traditional political parties (even though it was much less strict in admitting certain traditional politicians and even big landowners into its own ranks). In social terms, the Ortodoxos endorsed a vague and moderate version of land reform, but this plank was not central to the party’s activity. Instead, it became involved in agitating against the U.S.-owned public utilities, such as the electricity and telephone companies, and in formulating proposals for nationalizing them. Chibás served a brief term in jail on charges of contempt of court when he accused some judges of having been bribed by the Cuban Electricity Company (a subsidiary of Bond and Share).31 Nevertheless, Chibás supported the United States in the Cold War but refused to join the McCarthyite attacks against the Cuban Communists. Although the Ortodoxos supported the idea of a welfare state and provided political support for many strikes, they were not a class-based party and did not advocate a radical restructuring of Cuban society. They attracted the professional middle classes as well as many young students and urban and rural workers sickened not only by the corruption of national politics but also by the corruption and bureaucratization of the majority of the unions. This young Ortodoxo milieu became the principal source of recruitment for Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fidel Castro was a second-rank leader of the party who attempted to form a more socially radical tendency within its ranks.
In recent years, a new political current has sought to develop a model of liberal democratic politics for Cuba. Some of its prominent leaders have criticized the intransigent rejection of politiquería that constituted the political starting point for many of Cuba’s revolutionaries of the 1950s. This liberal current is explicitly antirevolutionary, not just anti-Castro or anti-Communist. Many of the scholars and intellectuals who have taken this view used to support the Castro regime, and proponents have a home in the important high-quality Madrid-based journal Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana. The journal occupies the center to center-right of the political spectrum, although not all contributors fit this characterization. This attempt to develop a new form of Cuban political liberalism has included a wholesale revision of Cuban history, sometimes going all the way back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, more than a hundred years after their efforts failed, the Autonomistas (those Cubans who, in contrast to José Martí, argued for a program of political reforms short of independence from Spain) are beginning to be viewed more favorably.32 So has Tomás Estrada Palma, the first president of the republic, whose conservative pro-U.S. stance is retrospectively viewed in a positive light as a precursor of present-day aspirations for national reconciliation.33 High praise has even been bestowed on Carlos Márquez Sterling, a traditional Cuban politician who participated as a loyal opposition candidate in Batista’s fraudulent November 3, 1958, elections. Even after being defeated in what Márquez Sterling himself described as dishonest elections, he nevertheless recommended that the United States renew the sale of weapons and support the Batista regime.34 Broader intellectual currents that have emerged from the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s and that include such representative figures as Poland’s Adam Michnik and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel have influenced the new Cuban liberals.35
Some new Cuban liberals have criticized what they perceive as the intransigence and the moral/political absolutism of twentieth-century revolutionary and reform thought in Cuba, accusing it of having engendered a political climate of intolerance and illiberalism hostile to democracy. One of their targets is the militant impulse against politiquería. They equate democratic politics with a give-and-take process, with compromise, and with the presumably inevitable horse-trading of politics. Accordingly, in their view, the reformist and revolutionary rejection of politiquería points in the direction of an intolerant absolutism incompatible with democratic politics.
This liberal rejection of the opposition to politiquería confuses various phenomena that although often associated with each other are by no means identical. Political compromise or trade-offs are not the same as betrayal or unprincipled political behavior, of course, let alone venality or corruption. Politics may often involve compromise. But there are compromises and there are compromises. We need to ask whether the compromise in question involves fundamental principles. For example, militant and democratic unions with honest leaders often make principled compromises. Very often, this process involves an assessment of the relative strengths of workers and capitalists at any given point in time. Whenever a union is not strong enough in relation to the employers to win everything it wants (a common occurrence), its leaders compromise with employers and settle for less. If the leaders are honest and democratic, they will recommend that the members accept a compromise and explain why no choice exists. The point is to tell the truth to the workers so that they can take stock and learn the lessons available from the situation at hand. Then they will be fully aware of what is going on, organize to be stronger next time, and take control of their fate. As far as revolutionaries making compromises is concerned, what were the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and the New Economic Policy adopted in 1921 but major, king-size compromises made by V. I. Lenin and the Russian Communist Party?
In prerevolutionary Cuba, the opposition to politiquería did not involve hard cases of compromises that raised difficult questions of political and moral principles. Neither did those who rejected politiquería abstractly reject the transactions or give-and-take of politics, democratic or undemocratic, reform or revolutionary. Instead, they simply repudiated a long history of betrayal and corrupt political behavior in Cuba, particularly after the mid-1940s, and rejected the deeply entrenched view that public office was, more than anything else, a source of unlimited personal enrichment and social mobility. Under Batista’s government, those rejecting politiquería also insisted on an intransigent opposition to a dictatorial regime that had overthrown by force the country’s democratic constitution. As these oppositionists pointed out, the Batista regime’s actions had amply demonstrated that it was not interested in peacefully ceding power.
Political corruption was so pervasive in the Cuba of the 1940s and 1950s that it even corroded voluntary nongovernmental organizations, political and otherwise.36 Thus, the intransigent opposition to politiquería in the Cuba of the 1940s and 1950s did not involve making politics “a matter of saints and virgins,” as implied by a foremost proponent of the new Cuban liberalism.37 Opposition to politiquería was, rather, a fundamental component of democracy and progressive as well as revolutionary social change.
The populists came from among all Cuban social classes, although less from among the wealthy and the poorest. According to British historian Hugh Thomas, the participants in Fidel Castro’s armed July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada army barracks included accountants, agricultural workers, bus workers, businessmen, shop assistants, plumbers, and students. Nineteen of these men were among those who accompanied Castro when he landed in eastern Cuba on the yacht Granma in 1956: although the social composition of this group of eighty-two men varied, more of them had higher education than the Moncada fighters. According to Thomas, both of these groups comprised Castro’s loyal followers.38 Although many of them seem to have been workers by origin or occupation, very few had been active or even involved in trade union or working-class political organizations. The two groups of men were later enlarged in 1957 and 1958 by the recruitment of a couple of thousand peasants in the Sierra Maestra and elsewhere in Oriente Province. These fighters added a new element to the typical urban populist background of the Moncada and Granma veterans, although with a handful of important exceptions, the peasant recruits typically had little or no history of previous organized peasant struggles. This was very important in allowing Fidel Castro to mold these men into faithful followers of his caudillo leadership.39 In any case, an inner circle of “classless” men unattached to the organizational life of any of the existing Cuban social classes became Fidel Castro’s political core. Even though some prominent middle-class political personalities went to the Sierra Maestra to join Castro, they never became part of this inner circle, even when Castro’s movement achieved clear dominance over the broader anti-Batista opposition.
The populists included a significant number of first-generation Cubans, the children of Spanish immigrants. Their presence in the ranks of the Generation of the Centenary was linked to the huge migration of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, particularly of peasants from Galicia, Asturias, and the Canary Islands, that took place from 1900 to 1930, when Cuba’s population of the county remained below 4 million. Such first-generation Cubans included revolutionary leaders Camilo Cienfuegos, Frank País (both of whose parents were Spanish Protestants), Abel and Haydée Santamaría, Faustino Pérez, and Fidel and Raúl Castro. At least 22 percent of the forty-one Cuban generals whose biographies were published in the previously mentioned volume had at least one parent born abroad. Aside from one general whose parents were born in China, all the other foreign-born parents were Spaniards. (Several generals did not mention their parents’ nationalities.) This is particularly remarkable because the overwhelming majority of these generals came from the easternmost Oriente Province, where they had originally joined the rebel army. Spanish immigration had a greater impact in the western half of the island, where Havana is located.40
The case of Camilo Cienfuegos, the most important rebel leader after the Castro brothers at the time of the January 1, 1959, victory, is of particular interest in this context. Cienfuegos was born in 1932 into a humble—although not extremely poor—working-class family. He exemplified the quintessential native, male, urban Cuban with his sense of humor, great interest in dancing and baseball, good looks, love of women, and overall joie de vivre. Both of his parents were Spanish immigrants. His father, Ramón, who espoused left-wing politics, worked as a tailor in a men’s shop in central Havana, a member of a relatively poor but employed stratum of the Cuban working class. Ramón Cienfuegos had the craftsman’s typical sense of self-respect, an attitude that should be distinguished from upwardly mobile persons’ search for respectability in the United States and many other economically developed countries. As Ramón Cienfuegos recalled, “Only decent people entered my household. Neither runners for the illegal lottery [boliteros] nor lazy people, nothing like that. Camilo grew up in that kind of environment. I remember that at the time of the Spanish Civil War, he went out with us, even though he was a child, to raise money for the Spanish Republic.”41
Camilo Cienfuegos studied sculpture at art school but had to drop out to help with his family’s finances. He went to work in the store where his father was employed, starting as a janitor and messenger and eventually becoming a salesman. His older brother, Osmani, had graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Havana, where he joined the Communist Party. In the 1950s, Camilo migrated to the United States, working illegally for a couple of years before leaving for Mexico, where in 1956 he joined Castro’s expedition. Cienfuegos began as a rank-and-file member of the force but distinguished himself in the Sierra Maestra and eventually became one of the most popular leaders of the rebel army. However, Cienfuegos remained less politically sophisticated than the Castro brothers as well as Che Guevara. Cienfuegos died in October 1959, the presumed victim of a plane accident, according to the Cuban government’s version of the event. His body was never found, and the government’s account of what happened has never been conclusively proven or disproven.
The heavy presence of the children of Spanish immigrants was only one of the factors that determined the disproportionately white character of the populist movement. As stated earlier, although populism cut across social classes, it was much less representative of the poles of Cuban society, the rich and the very poor. Even after slavery was abolished in Cuba in the 1880s, the black Cuban population remained greatly over-represented among the very poor. In addition, in part because of Martí’s strong ideological influence, Cuban populist and nationalist thought was color-blind—that is, it failed to recognize the special oppression of black Cubans. Consequently, populists rarely went out of their way to recruit blacks as such. The traumatic impact of the “race war” of 1912—really a massacre of Cuban black people—also played a role in delegitimizing race as a topic worthy of open political discussion. This was reflected in the generally progressive Constitution of 1940, which raised to constitutional principle laws that had been on the books even before 1912 and that explicitly forbade political parties organized around racial criteria. Thus, Cuban nationalist populism did not for the most part explicitly address the specific needs of Cuban blacks or mulattoes, who in the 1940s and 1950s were officially estimated at about 30 percent of the Cuban population.
By contrast, the Cuban Communists attempted to recruit blacks and to address issues of direct concern to them. This, like every other aspect of Communist politics, was subject to changes in the Moscow party line (e.g., whether or not to advocate the recognition of a “black belt” nation in Oriente Province) and to the domestic politicking the party conducted with its political partners of the day. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the Communist leadership was black (including Blas Roca, Lázaro Peña, and Salvador García Agüero), and black Cubans formed a significant part of the party’s membership. While blacks were an important group within the party, however, Communists were not as important within the Cuban black population as a whole. There, the five hundred local branches of the sociedades de color (black self-help social clubs) constituted by far the principal form of black self-organization.42
The Roman Catholic Church played an important role in the overthrow of several Latin American dictators of the 1950s, including Colombia’s Gustavo Rojas Pinillas, Argentina’s Juan Perón, and Venezuela’s Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Such was not the case in Cuba. The Catholic hierarchy and the heavily Spanish regular clergy were politically conservative and went along with the dictatorship; Cardinal Manuel Arteaga of Havana even congratulated Batista after the general’s successful coup d’état and was photographed with him on many occasions.43 Nevertheless, when hostilities reached a boiling point in 1958, the church called on Batista to bring peace through the establishment of a commission on harmony and the formation of a government of national unity.44 These Catholic efforts failed, and the church hierarchy lost its opportunity to play an important role as a mediator.
Among Cuban Catholics, members of the secular clergy and of the laity were much more involved in the opposition to the Batista dictatorship. This was particularly true of the Catholic Worker Action and Catholic Worker Youth organizations and of well-known Catholic intellectuals such as Andrés Valdespino and Angel del Cerro.45 Nevertheless, none of these groups and individuals significantly influenced the course of the revolution.
This was not surprising. Cuban Catholicism was politically weak for reasons deeply rooted in Cuban history. The church had supported Spanish colonialism during the Cuban struggles for independence. The great majority of the Cuban independence leaders were Masons, and if they were not strongly anticlerical, they at the very least favored a strict separation of church and state, the policy adopted by the new Cuban republic in 1902. In addition, the weakness of the Cuban oligarchy significantly diminished the church’s influence. The church was also disadvantaged by the fact that most priests were Spanish46 and that the parishioners were mostly white, urban, and middle and upper class. Most peasants and rural workers had little contact with Catholic churches and priests. Although the great majority of the population was nominally Catholic, only a small proportion of Cubans actively practiced the Catholic religion.47
Cuban Protestants, who constituted only 4 to 6 percent of the Cuban population during the 1950s, faced a somewhat different situation.48 The Protestant clergy seem to have been more sympathetic to Fidel Castro than their Catholic counterparts.49 Moreover, a significant number of important revolutionary leaders had roots in Cuba’s various Protestant denominations, most notably Frank País, who came from a family that was active in the Baptist church in Santiago de Cuba. His father was a well-known pastor, and an older half-sister became one of the country’s most important Protestant leaders.50 Other prominent revolutionary leaders with Protestant affiliations included Faustino Pérez and leading urban underground fighters Marcelo Salado and Oscar Lucero, both of whom were killed by the Batista police. For a time, former Presbyterian seminarian Mario Llerena acted as a spokesperson for the 26th of July Movement in the United States.51 Several other revolutionary leaders taught at or attended Protestant high schools or elementary schools.52
The presence of Cuban Protestants among the revolutionary leaders and activists may be partly explained in terms of the social bases of Cuban Protestantism. According to Marcos A. Ramos, a historian of Protestantism in Cuba, “Protestantism . . . never reached the aristocracy. Its schools penetrated the middle class, even the upper middle class. But the average Protestant belongs to the poor class or the lower middle class.”53 Thus, the social bases of Protestantism significantly overlapped with the social bases of Cuban populism. In addition, until the 1930s, a sort of unofficial alliance existed between Masons and Protestants because most early Cuban pastors were active Masons.54 This historic connection may suggest a certain outsider status to Protestantism in relation to the traditional Catholicism of the ruling class. Nationalists seem not to have resented Cuban Protestantism’s historic connection to the parent churches in the United States;55 however, the most significant feature of Cuban Protestantism in the political context of the 1950s may well have been the puritan cast of Protestant values56 and their elective affinity with the Cuban revolutionary populism of the period, particularly the radical populist rejection of corruption and politiquería.
Fidel Castro does not seem to have had strong political interests before he matriculated as a law student at the University of Havana in 1945. He was then eighteen years old57 and had just graduated from the Jesuit Belén (Bethlehem) High School. This was an elite school where the great majority of the students were the children of affluent white Catholic families. While in high school, Castro seems to have been most interested in basketball and other sports, although on one occasion, he spoke at a “scientific-pedagogic debate” on the Belén campus, putting forward the school’s Catholic position on the relationship between private and public education.58 According to Castro, his Spanish Jesuit teachers instilled in him the virtues of personal dignity and honor and the willingness to sacrifice.59 Father Armando Llorente, one of these teachers who knew Castro well during his high school years, noted many years later that he had been “a good student. [He] was not deep, he was intuitive. He has a radar!” In addition, Llorente pointed out, Castro “had the cruelty of the Gallego [a native of the Spanish region of Galicia, birthplace of Angel Castro, Fidel’s father]. The Cuban is courtly. The Cuban would give up before he made people suffer. The Spaniard of the north is cruel, hard.”60 This is likely hostile testimony, but it supplements Gabriel García Márquez’s observations regarding his friend Castro: “One thing is known with certainty: wherever and with whomever he is, and regardless of how he is doing, Fidel Castro is there to win. I don’t believe there is anybody else in the world that is such a sore loser. His attitude toward defeat, even in the minimal acts of daily life, seems to obey a private logic. He doesn’t even admit defeat, and he will not have a minute of peace as long as he is unable to invert the terms of the situation and convert defeat into a victory.”61
The transition to what was then the only university in Cuba must have impressed the young Castro. Although this public university could not have been considered a working-class school, its students were socially more diverse, plebeian, and closer to the realities of Cuban society than anything that Castro could have experienced at the Belén school, and he soon became a student activist of some importance. University politics in Cuba were far removed from the parochial concerns of contemporary students on U.S. campuses and in many ways served as the training grounds for the national political arena. At the time, in the mid- and late 1940s, the university was plagued with political gangsterism, the legacy of the 1933 revolutionaries, some of whom had also fought on the side of the republic in the Spanish Civil War and/or on the Allied side in World War II. These armed gangsters had found a profitable refuge at the University of Havana, where as student leaders they often controlled the sale of books, trafficked in grades, and misappropriated student and university funds.62
Fidel Castro developed a relationship with one of the gangster groups, the Unión Insurreccional Revolucionaria (UIR, Insurrectional Revolutionary Union). Like its rivals, the UIR covered itself with a thin ideological veneer—in its case, anarchism. During this period, Castro was accused of the murders of student leader Manolo Castro (no relation) and of university police sergeant Oscar Fernández Caral, in February and June 1948, respectively. The first charge was dropped for lack of evidence and the second because a witness later declared that the police had forced him to accuse Castro of the murder.63 By the time Castro graduated with a law degree in 1950, he had honed the skills required of a student leader under Cuba’s prevailing circumstances. These political skills were of two kinds. One was the ability to develop contact with national politicians to organize protests against, for example, the raising of bus fares, occasions on which the protesting students would burn several buses. The other was the skill of negotiating with professors and administrators about the scheduling and nature of tests. Student politicians were also active in the distribution of study materials to students, sometimes including pirated translations of foreign textbooks. These leaders were also involved in lengthy negotiations with other student politicians regarding the formation of slates for student elections, distribution of student government posts, and the control of the agenda and possible outcomes of student assemblies.64 To sway students, a successful leader had to be a good orator, mastering the stylized nationalist and populist rhetoric. But he or she also needed the verbal negotiating skills necessary for the wheeling and dealing part of the job, which entailed a lot of informal talking and manipulative double-crossing abilities. At the time, student politicians had to know or pretend to know how to handle guns. In these requirements lie the origins of Castro’s reputation as an effective if long-winded orator, a charming although often extremely prolix conversationalist, and a man of armed action.
Castro enrolled in the ill-fated 1947 Cayo Confites expedition, which was supposed to overthrow Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. The expedition was organized by the Caribbean Legion, a mixed group of idealistic democrats, nationalists, and plain delinquents, and was supported by influential populist and liberal democratic politicians in Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica.65 When the Cuban army was about to seize the Cayo Confites expeditionaries, Castro claims to have put his athletic abilities to use and escaped by swimming ashore from the small key where the group’s boats were anchored. On another occasion, while attending a student congress in Bogotá, Colombia, he became involved in the “Bogotazo,” the Bogotá riots that followed the assassination of popular Colombian leader Eliecer Gaitán in April 1948.66
Castro was thus a product of the Cuban populist tradition, with its pronounced emphasis on the man of action, the adventurer, in the sense in which I defined it earlier. However, his populist adventurism should be distinguished from voluntarism, a useful term that is part of the Marxist intellectual tradition. Marxism defines voluntarism as the current of thought that affirms the ability of the human will to prevail regardless of material conditions and limitations. But this voluntarism presupposes at least an awareness of such conditions and limitations, even though a voluntarist may argue that they can be overcome with sufficient will and determination. Fidel Castro, was, by his own admission, an economic illiterate. Virtually all of the numerous books he kept in prison after the defeat of the 1953 Moncada attack dealt with literary, historical, political, and philosophical themes.67 Castro’s economic illiteracy was a factor in his later inclination toward gigantic showcase projects (e.g., the disastrous attempt to bring about a 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970 and the Ocho Vias, the eight-lane highway traversing much of the country). His ignorance also explains his stubborn resistance, particularly during the early years of the revolution, to the realities that material resources were limited and that an inescapable need existed for strict investment and spending priorities. Conversely, Che Guevara, a revolutionary versed in Marxism but with a strong affinity for the bohemian values that thrive among certain groups in Buenos Aires and other highly developed metropolises, was both a voluntarist and an adventurer in the sense described earlier. At the time, Fidel Castro was simply an adventurer.
Perhaps as a result of his populist political socialization, Castro reputedly is inclined to improvisation and disorganization in his work habits. His younger brother, Raúl, has always lacked Fidel’s political radar and rapport with people but is known to be highly disciplined and to have excellent organizational skills. The brothers’ political strengths and weaknesses may help us to understand why Raúl joined the youth wing of the Cuban Communist Party in the 1950s while Fidel did not.
The populist political milieu was by no means sealed off from other political and ideological currents. Fidel Castro, like other populists, was exposed to other ideologies. Thus, his statement that in his student days he went to the bookstore at the Communist Party’s headquarters in Havana does not by itself indicate that he was then more of a Communist than a populist. Similarly, his clear expressions of sympathy for Venezuela’s Acción Democrática government and his attempts to arrange a meeting with that country’s president while on his way to Bogotá do not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he was a social democrat.68 He also seems to have been somewhat more educated and cultured than the typical populist activist. Instead of the anti-intellectual man of action described by some observers,69 Castro appears to have been an intellectual, although something of a dilettante. To this day, he continues to read voraciously, and after reading several books and articles on a given subject, he is prone to proclaiming himself an expert. This is a common characteristic and would not be a serious flaw except that Castro possesses practically unlimited power. Military tactics and strategy, agricultural and cattle science, and sports are just some of the areas he claims to know well, and on that basis he makes personal, irrevocable decisions with enormous consequences for Cuba’s limited resources. In the late 1960s, huge investments were made in Castro’s stubborn attempt to develop the F-I hybrid, which would have crossbred the native zebu with imported Holstein cattle, despite the fact that the project was strongly opposed as thoroughly unviable by the two British specialists Castro had invited to Cuba to advise him.70 Left-wing French agronomist René Dumont had a similar experience with Castro in the field of agriculture and eventually came under vicious attack by the Cuban leader.71
Moreover, Fidel Castro has always held grandiose ambitions of a kind scarcely ever found among Cuban politicians of any stripe. As a young man, he reportedly sympathized with the thesis maintained by Gustavo Pitaluga, a Spanish exile residing in Cuba, in Dialogue over Destiny that Cuba had a great destiny, including becoming the leader of a federation of Caribbean states.72 But Fidel Castro had the misfortune of being born in a relatively small island country with very limited possibilities for playing a major role in world affairs. After achieving power, Castro for a time projected Cuba onto the world stage, but the end of the Cold War greatly diminished the country’s international role and forced Castro to severely limit his foreign involvements.
To fully understand Fidel Castro, however, it is necessary to see him not simply as a product of the populist political tradition but also transcending it. Castro’s reflections on his political upbringing help to elucidate his politics, even allowing for the inevitable distortions resulting from the effort to justify himself. The most striking features of these recollections are the recurring themes of control and order and Castro’s ideological obsession with organization, always understood in a top-down fashion. These in turn must be placed in the context of the failures of the revolution of 1933 and of subsequent Cuban populist politics. Castro said that as an adolescent he wanted to go to the Belén High School because “I felt more suited to the Jesuit discipline and their behavior in general.”73 Of his participation in the 1947 Cayo Confites expedition, Castro recalled, “There were around 1,200 men in the expedition. It was very badly organized; there were good people, many good Dominicans and Cubans who truly supported the Dominican cause, but also—as a result of too hasty recruiting—delinquents, some lumpen elements and all kinds of others.”74 Of the Bogotazo riots, he remembered that although he had been impressed by how an oppressed people could erupt and by their courage and heroism,
there was no organization, no political education to accompany that heroism. There was political awareness and a rebellious spirit, but no political education and no leadership. The [Bogotazo] uprising influenced me greatly in my later revolutionary life. . . . I wanted to avoid the revolution sinking into anarchy, looting, disorder and people taking the law into their own hands. . . . [T]he [Colombian] oligarchs—who supported the status quo and wanted to portray the people as an anarchic, disorderly mob—took advantage of that situation.75
Castro may have been correct in his diagnosis of what went wrong with the Cayo Confites and Colombian events, but the political lessons he drew from these events were one-sided and heavily weighted toward the need for political order and control from the top.
In his recollections, Fidel Castro indicated that his contribution to the Cuban Revolution consisted of having synthesized the ideas of José Martí with those of Marxism-Leninism. Castro also mentions that he had noticed that the Cuban Communists had been isolated in the late 1940s and 1950s as a result of the prevailing atmosphere of imperialism, McCarthyism, and reactionary politics. He thus concluded, he said, that the Communists had no chance under these circumstances.76 In the face of all this, Castro recalled,
I worked out a revolutionary strategy for carrying out a deep social revolution—but gradually, by stages. I basically decided to carry it out with the broad, rebellious, discontented masses, who did not have a mature political consciousness of the need for revolution but who constituted the immense majority of the people. . . . It was clear to me that the masses were the basic factor—the still confused masses in many cases, prejudiced against socialism and communism; the masses who had received no real political education, influenced as they were from all quarters by the mass media.77
According to Castro, he had no mentor and had figured out the political situation by himself, with no political groups or other individuals involved in this process. This statement is corroborated by the fact that neither the Soviet Union nor the Cuban Communists had a clear idea of where Castro was going or where he wanted to go when he took power on January 1, 1959. Even more remarkable was the fact that Guevara, a political sophisticate, spent almost two and a half years working closely with Castro both politically and physically yet did not really know Castro’s politics well. Thus, in late 1957, Guevara wondered whether Castro would denounce the Miami Pact, a far-from-radical agreement among all the opposition groups about how to overthrow and build the succession to the Batista dictatorship (see chap. 4). A representative of the 26th of July Movement had been maneuvered into signing the agreement without Castro’s authorization, and Castro quickly denounced it. In a farewell letter to Castro written before leaving for the Congo in 1965, Guevara reflected that “my only serious failing was not having had more confidence in you from the first moments in the Sierra Maestra, and not having understood quickly enough your qualities as a leader and as a revolutionary.”78 Nevertheless, even after the Miami Pact question had been resolved to Guevara’s satisfaction, he still described Castro as “an authentic leader of the left wing of the bourgeoisie,” although he did have “personal qualities of extraordinary brilliance that placed him well above his class.”79 This language clearly suggests that Guevara, who then saw himself as a supporter of the supposedly proletarian Communist camp, did not see Castro as belonging to that same camp.
On some occasions, even Raúl Castro expressed doubts about his brother’s political intentions. One such occasion was Fidel Castro’s April 1959 trip to the United States at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. While in the United States, the Cuban leader softened his tone and disassociated himself from Communism, alarming Raúl, who telephoned Fidel to tell him that there was talk at home that the Yankees were seducing him. Fidel reacted with indignation and repeatedly stated that he knew them too well for that to happen.80 According to declassified Soviet documents, Raúl Castro briefly considered splitting the rebel movement to convince his brother that he could not govern without the Communists, and Guevara threatened to emigrate if his spring 1959 proposals for a popular militia were not approved at the time.81 (The militias were created the following fall.)
In fact, Fidel Castro did not use his trip to the United States to sell out, as Raúl Castro had feared. Instead, Fidel carried out a complex political maneuver. He instructed his liberal companions, several of them government ministers, not to request U.S. assistance and to pretend a lack of interest when U.S. officials offered aid. At the same time, he soothed the liberals’ unhappiness regarding these instructions by conveying the impression that he was on their side and was waiting for the Communists to make the wrong move before acting against them. He also met privately in New York for more than three hours with famed Central Intelligence Agency agent Frank Bender and convinced him that those were indeed the Cuban leader’s intentions.82
It would be a mistake to view Castro’s shrewd manipulation of the various Cuban social and political forces merely in terms of his personal skills. His manipulative success also owed much to the prevailing situation in Cuba. The liberals and middle classes allowed themselves to be manipulated by Castro during the initial stages of the revolutionary process because they were so politically weak. They hoped that Fidel Castro would protect them from more radical and pro-Communist leaders, including Guevara and Raúl Castro. Fidel’s middle-class supporters acquiesced in the postponement of elections and other substantial modifications of constitutional procedures in early 1959, branding this behavior unconstitutional as well as a betrayal only after Castro turned decisively against their material interests. In addition, the nature of populist politics, with its ambiguous class commitments, allowed Fidel Castro, at least for a while, to be different things to different people.
Fidel Castro’s political behavior has led some to conclude that the eventual Communist outcome of the Cuban Revolution resulted from a conscious plan developed by Castro and his close associates in collaboration with the leadership of the old Communist Party prior to Batista’s overthrow on January 1, 1959. Because this alleged plan was developed in secrecy, it fits the criteria to be labeled a conspiracy whether or not the term is explicitly used. This view still constitutes the commonsense understanding among right-wingers, just as the view that the United States pushed Castro into the arms of Russia and Communism constitutes the commonsense view among liberals and part of the Left, at least in the United States. In 1986, well-known journalist Tad Szulc, who had covered Cuba for the New York Times in the late 1950s and early 1960s, published a biography of Fidel Castro that claimed that he had made a secret deal with the old Cuban Communists in mid-1958 (before the victory of the revolution). The deal was subsequently confirmed by the early 1959 establishment of a “secret government” parallel to the official revolutionary government. The purpose of such an agreement between Castro and the pro-Soviet Cuban Communists was to bring about the establishment of Cuban Communism at some future point in the development of the revolutionary process.83
Szulc claimed to have based his controversial contentions on interviews conducted with Cuban revolutionary leaders during the 1980s, but his analysis is marred by a number of problems that cast serious doubts on the validity of his thesis. In addition to questionable statements (e.g., referring to Camilo Cienfuegos as a “closet Communist” during the war against Batista),84 Szulc’s use of historical events as evidence for his thesis fails to distinguish between incidents that took place at different times during the revolutionary process. Thus, for example, to cite instances of collaboration between Fidel Castro and leaders and supporters of the Partido Socialista Popular in late 1959 and early 1960 (e.g., the creation of the revolutionary instruction schools for civilians in late 1959)85 does not constitute evidence in support of a conspiracy established in the pre-revolutionary period. By the time Szulc published his book, scholars had already firmly established that important changes had taken place in the relations between Fidelistas and Communists during the summer of 1959. Most significantly, Szulc made no effort to confront and analyze evidence that might have conflicted with his conspiracy theory. For example, he failed to analyze the frictions that arose among Raúl Castro, Guevara, and Fidel Castro or the frequent clashes that took place among leading elements of the 26th of July Movement and the Communists in at least two very important arenas, the unions and the press, including Fidel Castro’s own newspaper, Revolución. In addition, neither the pronouncements nor the behavior of the old Cuban Communists and the leaders of the Soviet Union during at least the first nine months of 1959 show, as we shall see in chapter 5, that they regarded Fidel Castro as having entered into a pact with them or being one of them.
Castro was no conspirator, if the term refers to someone who plans a future political strategy secretly with others. Although his behavior and pronouncements involved a great deal of secrecy and deception, he was merely determining in an ad hoc manner the general political direction in which he wanted to go, not pursuing a precise long-term strategy with a previously determined specific goal. This was true at least until the fall of 1959, when he decided to ally with the Soviet Union. Fidel Castro had political designs that he shared with no one. They were pragmatic in the sense that although Castro wanted to make a radical revolution, he left it to historical circumstances, the existing relations of forces and tactical possibilities, to determine specifically what kind of revolution it would be, all along making sure that he would remain in control. Although he did not necessarily foresee membership in the Soviet bloc, he also did not preclude it a priori. Castro’s considerable political talents were eminently tactical: that is, he knew how to advance his agenda in a certain general but unspecified leftist political direction by taking advantage of particular political conjunctures and relationships of social and political forces. Moreover, Castro has always resisted subordinating himself to any organizational apparatus. His own ruling Cuban Communist Party was itself fully established and formally founded only in 1965, when virtually all the major social and economic changes in Cuban society had already been carried out under his personal leadership and control. Castro’s leadership is strongly reminiscent of the Latin American phenomenon of caudillismo, except that Fidel Castro is a caudillo with political ideas.
Clear evidence indicates that Castro followed his plans for conducting the revolutionary process by stages, although these stages did not necessarily involve an ascending order of radicalism. His approach did not involve a long-term strategic plan but rather a series of tactical adjustments and innovations by an intelligent revolutionary politician. Castro’s stages had nothing to do with the way the term has been used in the classical Marxist tradition—that is, to refer to the appropriate revolutionary goals and actions in light of a certain development of the productive forces, class relations, and domestic and international political situations. The Marxist theoretical view is exemplified in the early-twentieth-century debates between the Russian Mensheviks and Bolsheviks regarding the prospects for revolution in Russia. The Mensheviks held that, given the degree of economic development and state of class relations in their country, the revolution would be carried out by the bourgeoisie and thus could not be expected to go beyond the bourgeois, democratic republic stage. Although Lenin and the Bolsheviks agreed that the establishment of a democratic republic was the only possible first stage of revolutionary development in their country, they maintained that the Russian bourgeoisie was not capable of revolutionary action. Consequently, Lenin argued, the Russian working class was the only class capable of leading the democratic revolution. Lenin changed his view in the 1917 April Theses, in which he implicitly adopted Leon Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. According to this theory, the working class would not only have to lead the revolution but, having done so, would have to move beyond the bourgeois democratic stage to the socialist stage. However, according to Trotsky, because Russia had achieved only a limited degree of industrialization, the prospects for socialism would depend on the revolution spreading beyond the country’s borders to economically developed countries such as Germany. A successful socialist revolution in one or more developed countries would in turn help the Russian revolutionaries in the economic development of their country.
In contrast, Castro’s notion of stages was exclusively concerned with the right tactics to follow in a given political conjuncture, with a particular focus on the audience to which he was appealing at any given moment. Castro’s stages also reflected his preoccupation with avoiding political isolation and with the need to delay any confrontation that he figured he had little chance of winning. His first stage began with a radical, nonsocialist program subsequently known as “History Will Absolve Me.” Castro initially put forward this program at his defense in the trial that took place after his unsuccessful attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953, long before he had achieved supremacy in the anti-Batista opposition. This speech, later rewritten in prison, along with the “Manifesto no. 1 to the People of Cuba,” dated August 8, 1955, and written in Mexican exile shortly after he and his supporters were released from prison under an amnesty granted by Batista’s government, constituted the bases for the first radical stage.86 Although these documents were addressed to the people in general, they were in fact more narrowly directed at the militant anti-Batista students and young workers who had not yet joined his group. Castro sensed that several thousand of these young people were ready to be brought into his nascent movement. Neither of these documents became widely known until after the revolutionary victory.87
By the summer of 1957, the situation had changed considerably. Castro had established a base in the Sierra Maestra and was beginning to gain dominance in the anti-Batista coalition, particularly after other efforts to topple the regime ended in failure. By this time, his audience had broadened well beyond the original ranks of young, anti-Batista militants. Castro now sought legitimacy and respectability so that he could earn the confidence of the Cuban middle classes and allay any concerns in Washington, D.C. He achieved a major success along these lines when two highly respected leaders of the opposition, Felipe Pazos, a top Cuban economist and former president of the National Bank of Cuba, and Raúl Chibás, brother of deceased Ortodoxo leader Eduardo Chibás, went to the Sierra Maestra and signed a joint “Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra” with Castro on July 12, 1957.88 This manifesto, unlike the previously mentioned documents, was published in Cuba’s principal magazine, Bohemia, during a brief lull between two periods of censorship and was read and widely commented on by hundreds of thousands of Cubans. The manifesto also became the guiding text of the next Castroite stage of the revolutionary process: the formation and consolidation of a politically militant but socially moderate coalition to overthrow Batista and avoid alarming the United States. Castro wrote privately to his confidant, Celia Sánchez, in June 1958 that when the current war ended, a bigger and much longer war would begin against the United States.89 In public, however, as an example of the social moderation that went hand in hand with Castro’s political intransigence, the rebels decreed a mild and noncontroversial agrarian reform law in October 1958. This second stage lasted from 1957 to 1959.
After coming to power, Fidel Castro gradually moved away from the second moderate stage. First, he divided the potentially enormous middle-class opposition at home by taking on different sections of it in turn. The radical rent reduction law of March 1959, reminiscent of the History Will Absolve Me program, negatively affected only a landlord segment of the relatively affluent urban middle and upper classes; the May 1959 agrarian reform law affected a different segment of these same classes; and so on. Even more important, while continually raising the anti-imperialist temperature of the country he tried to postpone the final confrontation with the much more powerful opposition of the U.S. government. In any case, by the spring of 1959 a third stage of the revolution was clearly in the making, again reminiscent of History Will Absolve Me. Before the end of 1960, this stage had ended, with the collectivization of Cuban society along the general, systemic lines of the Soviet bloc and China.
Fidel Castro’s notion of stages as tactics was guided in part by his determination to keep as much personal political control as possible. We have already seen how this approach was related to the lessons he drew from the Cayo Confites incident in 1947 and especially the Bogotazo experience in 1948. As early as 1954, Castro wrote to his close friend Luis Conte Agüero,
Conditions that are indispensable for the integration of a truly civic movement: ideology, discipline, and chieftainship. The three are essential, but chieftainship is basic. I don’t know whether it was Napoleon who said that a bad general in battle is worth more than twenty good generals. A movement cannot be organized where everyone believes he has the right to issue public statements without consulting anyone else; nor can one expect anything of a movement that will be integrated by anarchic men who at the first disagreement take the path they consider most convenient, tearing apart and destroying the vehicle. The apparatus of propaganda and organization must be such and so powerful that it will implacably destroy him who will create tendencies, cliques, or schisms or will rise against the movement.90
These strictures evidently were not supposed to apply to Castro, who had the habit of acting on his own and of disregarding agreements made by the 26th of July leadership, even those in which he had participated and to which he had given his concurrence. Such were the complaints made by Carlos Franqui, a leader of the 26th of July Movement, in an October 1958 document addressed to Fidel Castro and the members of the movement’s national executive. Franqui also noted that Castro tended not to accept criticism and to react to it by attacking the critic and concluded, “I have observed that many of our meetings are more like a consultation. Or a conversation, almost always the prodigious conversation of Fidel, in which a decision is taken for granted, while hardly ever an agreement is reached that has been amply discussed by all of us. We are all responsible for such situations for both reasons of commission and omission.”91
The movement guidelines also assumed that Fidel Castro would always be the chieftain. However, in July 1957, Frank País, the national coordinator of the 26th of July Movement with underground headquarters in Santiago de Cuba, wrote to inform Castro that the movement’s policies, strategies, and program were going to be under the control of the national directorate. This directorate, País wrote, would have thirteen members; he would designate one delegate, Celia Sánchez, to represent Castro’s guerrillas. País also complained that the 26th of July Movement lacked a systematic program and told Castro that there was work in progress to develop one, with several people specifically assigned to write on the racial issue and on economic problems and solutions. País asked Castro to send some suggestions. There is no available record of Castro’s response to País’s letter, but Castro chose that moment to prepare and sign the joint document with Pazos and Chibás, thereby preempting País’s and the task force’s programmatic efforts. The timing of Castro’s political and ideological coup was particularly significant, since País was known to favor a more socially radical line than that adopted in the Pazos-Chibás-Castro manifesto. País’s signature did not appear on this manifesto, and Batista’s police captured and killed him on the streets of Santiago shortly thereafter, on July 30, 1957, thereby eliminating the potential confrontation between the two leaders.92
Fidel Castro’s politics and methods succeeded in the sense that they enabled him to seize and maintain power in Cuba. Central to Castro’s functioning was manipulating people and hiding his political agenda, with the purpose of dividing and conquering his actual and potential opponents. However, that does not mean that he was from the beginning a “Communist.” Castro’s brand of populist caudillismo, detached from any significant institutional ties to Cuba’s principal social classes, had an elective affinity with Soviet-style Communism. But only the presence of certain historical circumstances (e.g., U.S. pressures, the widely shared belief in the international rise of Soviet power, and political pressures coming from the Partido Socialista Popular and the group around Raúl Castro and Che Guevara) converted that affinity into choice and commitment. Had Castro confronted a different set of opportunities, pressures, and constraints, he might have steered in a different direction.
Castro’s politics are inextricably bound with his caudillismo, by which I mean, among other things, the politics of blindly following the leader. This constitutes a major obstacle to raising the Cuban people’s political consciousness and increasing their organizational autonomy. Consciousness and autonomy cannot by definition depend on all-knowing leaders keeping their secret political aims to themselves, so when the time is ripe to defeat the opposition, the leader carries out the aims he has hitherto kept to himself. But these aims do not necessarily correspond to the political consciousness and explicit desires of those he is supposed to lead and represent.
Thus, Castro’s tactics have enabled him to manipulate and deceive his working-class and peasant supporters. As a result, the Cuban masses have remained the objects rather than the subjects of history, notwithstanding the political radicalization they may have experienced in the initial stages of the revolutionary process.