If Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.
—CIA DIRECTOR JOHN A. MCCONE TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY, AUGUST 23, 19621
After his repeated offers for the exploring of a modus vivendi with
the US—in 1961, 1963, and 1964—had been rebuffed, Castro had
concluded that the best defense was offense
—PIERO GLEIJESES, THE CUBAN DRUMBEAT, LONDON, SEAGULL BOOKS, 2009, P. 23
The mission of the present generation’s revolution is getting Cuba
out of this chaotic phase of the West in which we are annexed. Cuba
has to convert its smallness into a continent.
—OBITUARY FOR CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY FRANK PAÍS2
The Cuban Revolution polarized Central and South America between ruling oligarchs and rebellious social movements. At first, the frightened and defensive governing elites rallied to the US call to isolate the new Cuban government. In late January 1962, fourteen of twenty-one governments voted to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States; Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Mexico abstained. This was the same conference, in Punta del Este, Uruguay, where Che spoke on the sidelines with Richard Goodwin about a possible “modus vivendi” while Cuba’s then-president Osvaldo Dorticós3 called from the podium for peaceful coexistence. The Kennedy administration followed on February 3 by announcing a total trade embargo. Meanwhile, however, insurrectionary ambitions were awakened across the continent, and many insurgent leaders met in Havana on January 21 for a Peoples Assembly to plan an alternative to the OAS.4 There, on February 4, Fidel gave the Second Declaration of Havana, calling for a global movement against US imperialism, stating for the first time that “the duty of revolutionaries is to make the revolution.” His speech two years earlier—the First Declaration of Havana, on September 2, 1960, was a vision of a Latin America liberated from its role as “a zone of exploitation, a backyard in the financial and political empire of the United States, [and] a reserve supply of votes in international organizations. . . .”5 Now, in the Second Declaration, he gave the “green light . . . to Cuban-style guerrilla movements all over the continent, to subvert the existing regimes and to help Cuba escape from its isolation.”6
RICARDO: It is very difficult to go back to the past. We are talking about very young people, who were all in their thirties or younger. With the aura of the victory of Cuba, people were going to the mountains.
When I returned to New York almost thirty years later in 1990 and reread some of my old speeches, I felt how much I had matured—without abandoning my old ideals—and, of course, how much the world had changed. But in the sixties I didn’t have any doubts.
I met Salvador Allende, who was probably the most important personality on the Left in Chile and elsewhere, when I was a student leader attending a conference in Venezuela organized by a front organization of the State Department, the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, led by a lady named Frances Grant. I was the only Cuban revolutionary there, and when [former Venezuelan] president [Rómulo] Betancourt came to address the meeting the security came to take me out of my room and occupied the whole floor for security reasons. So I spent a night by the pool where I met Juan Mari Brás and the Puerto Ricans who were trying to participate. We spent the evening talking, looking at the stars in the summer humidity until Allende just came walking over. He was a senator then and was a presidential candidate just before the Cuban Revolution. He found us another accommodation and we would become very good friends.
I had gone to Chile the year before, for a preparatory meeting of a Latin American youth conference. One evening I had dinner with the leader of the Chilean Trotskyites. After he criticized everyone, as a good Trot should do, he referred to the last election when Allende almost won, and to my astonishment he promised, “In the next election we will win!”
Chile at the time was a showcase of constitutional democracy, a polar alternative to Cuba.7 I asked Ricardo if the Trotskyists believed that Chile was a unique exception to the rule that peaceful transitions were impossible.
RICARDO: Well, at least that Chilean Trotskyist believed that.
Nothing was foreseeable in those early moments, around 1960. The Bay of Pigs was one year away. The rapid rise and savage defeat of guerrilla wars lay ahead. The election of Allende was ten years in the future; his death in a US-backed military coup would come after three years in power. The long-term effects of these events would not be felt for thirty years when many former guerrillas led electoral coalitions to progressive victories across lands where dictatorships once had seemed secure.
RICARDO: I was at the Latin American desk in the Foreign Ministry. And I met with many of those people [the region’s revolutionaries] in Havana. I had nothing to do with the military training, only with political and organizational matters. Manuel Piñeiro was in charge of the [overall] solidarity efforts [with the continent’s guerrilla forces]. He was more or less like Fidel, the same routine, working all night, sleeping in the morning. He was called Barbarroja because of his unusual red beard.
During the early sixties, US reports estimated that some 1,500 to two thousand Latin American revolutionaries received military training or “political indoctrination” in Havana, under the leadership of the US-educated Piñeiro, while only about forty Cubans actually fought in other countries.8 More than a decade later, at least one thousand Cubans would be stationed in Nicaragua supporting the Sandinistas. Cuba was a center of resources, training, and networking for revolutionaries. Its foremost role was one of inspirational example, showing the world that successful revolution was possible. But it also provided training and modest material support. Fidel and Che assumed their places among the legendary liberators of the continent, especially Simón Bolívar, who provided the model for successful revolution throughout Latin America.9 After the CIA’s crushing 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz, the Cuban Revolution offered hope that the United States could still be held at bay by a small nation in arms. The 1954 Guatemalan CIA coup was largely the work of both President Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, on behalf of corporations like United Fruit. The leaders in government in the United States believed they could repeat that success five years later in Cuba. The CIA’s operations chief in Guatemala, Richard Bissell, was charged with organizing the invasion force at the Bay of Pigs.10
As Piero Gleijeses notes, Fidel’s vision was partly strategic—to forge an alliance of “defense” against the “pirates” of the north by stretching the Yankee resources too thinly to be concentrated against Cuba. By my count, the Cuban Revolution inspired at least twenty-four guerrilla-led organizations in a dozen countries: in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Venezuela and Uruguay. The oligarchs, threatened by the Cuban model, fortified themselves with vicious paramilitaries, death squads, torture chambers, and token reforms; virtually all were assisted by covert American military advisers and funding.
GUERRILLAS IN VENEZUELA
“Small-scale expeditions” departed Cuba for the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama, “freelance operations” perhaps without official blessing.11 Che dreamt of his Argentine homeland, contemplating the bordering state of Bolivia as a step. But especially significant at first was Venezuela, a base of considerable support for the revolution against Batista. After the Cuban Revolution threatened oligarchies across the continent, Venezuela became the key to the Kennedy administration’s new strategy of military intervention coupled with democratic reform. Venezuela was showcased as the American-favored alternative model to Cuba. By one estimate, 80 percent of US private and public foreign aid dollars were being invested in Venezuela.12 The American favorite was Rómulo Betancourt, a legendary leader of long standing who had been a Communist Party leader in Costa Rica during the thirties. After the overthrow of the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in 1958, Betancourt led the elected government of the new Venezuela, soon purging the Left and precipitating a crisis of legitimacy.
RICARDO: Fabricio Ojeda, a Venezuelan journalist, was very important in the underground movement against Pérez Jiménez, which succeeded in defeating him in 1958, one year before our victory in Cuba. He and the [Patriotic Junta that he led] had a strong influence on Cuba because of our relationships and past support. In 1958, for example, [Cuba’s underground ] Radio Rebelde was broadcast on Venezuelan stations. After our victory here in Cuba, Fabricio came here, and I also met him in Caracas. He moved to organize a guerrilla front in Venezuela and became one of the first followers of Cuba’s Sierra example. He was captured and killed under Betancourt.13
The Venezuelan movements had succeeded in defeating the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship by a general strike and by a broad coalition in which he was the most important figure. After that, partly because of the imperialists, the Frente was split.
Ojeda was a mainstream journalist, writing dispatches from an office in the presidential palace, Miraflores. He evolved into a revolutionary as a main leader of the “Patriotic Junta” that overthrew Pérez Jiménez in 1958. Afterwards, Fabricio was elected to Venezuela’s new Chamber of Deputies with the promise of a new power-sharing arrangement known as the Pact of Punto Fijo. Fabricio’s party, the Democratic Republican Union (UDR), had partnered with the communist movement to overthrow the dictatorship. The US-favored Acción Democrática, led by Betancourt and symbolizing the Kennedy administration’s “third way,” chose to exclude the Communist way altogether, even though the CP’s leaders finished second in the Caracas14 elections of 1958. Betancourt himself had been an exiled at age twenty and a Communist Party leader in the thirties. Fabricio’s UDR, which favored collaboration with the Communists, was squeezed out of the power-sharing accord by Betancourt; Fabricio ultimately resigned from his elected office and joined a new guerrilla movement supported by Fidel and Cuba, the Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN). Fabricio was captured in October 1962, the month of the Cuban missile crisis, and sent to a prison from which he soon escaped. Meanwhile Betancourt suspended political immunity for elected deputies from the Communist and Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), banned the parties, and had their representatives removed from the floor of Congress and taken straight to a prison. On the run, Fabricio tried unsuccessfully to consolidate his forces with the Venezuelan Communists, failed, was captured on June 21, 1966, and was found dead in a prison cell four days later. Despite the frustrations and defeats, Fabricio would be honored and revered as one of the revolution’s earliest heroes when Hugo Chávez took power four decades later.
GUERRILLAS IN EL SALVADOR
But who is the enemy?
You, or your enemies?
—ROQUE DALTON, TENSE CONVERSATION15
The dead are growing more restless each day.
They were easy to handle before:
We gave them a starched collar a flower
We showered them with praise on a long honor list;
We buried them in a National Plot
Among the noble shades
Under the monstrous slabs of marble.
The dead man signed up with the hope of being remembered:
He joined the ranks once more
And marched to the beat of our time-honored music.
But wait a second:
The dead
Have changed since then.
They’re sarcastic now
They ask questions.
I think they’ve caught on
That they outnumber us more every day.
—ROQUE DALTON, SOLDIER’S REST16
Ricardo was directly involved in supporting the Salvadoran guerrillas who took up arms after the Cuban example and, as in nearly every insurgent struggle, were sharply divided by factions, ideology and sectarian hatreds. The Salvador violence in the seventies and eighties had roots, like Cuba’s, in the thirties when a 1932 indigenous uprising, supported by the revolutionary Agustín Farabundo Martí and his fledgling Communist Party, was crushed by Gen. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. As many as thirty thousand Salvadorans were killed in the military’s massacre,17 known in Salvadoran history as the matanza, in the same era that Machado ruled Cuba. “We all were born half-dead in 1932,” the Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton wrote years afterward.18 El Salvador’s coffee elite, known as “the fourteen families,” ruled the small country like the sugar planters of Cuba.
Ricardo was impressed with Dalton, an intellectual and ironic poet who felt driven to take up the gun.
Did Cuba support and train Dalton’s organization, the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP)?
RICARDO: Yes, as well as the other groups.
I met Dalton quite by chance in Prague in late 1967 where he was in exile from the Salvadoran regime. He was a kindred spirit, a skilled poet with a Beat take on life, perfect for the club settings of Prague. He wrote of love and death as if they were twins. But he was a man of action:
Poetry
Forgive me for helping you understand
That you’re not made of words alone.19
A deadly split was created on the Salvadoran left when its Communist Party leader, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, known as “Marcial,” took his faction, known as the Popular Liberation Forces-Farabundo Martí (FPL) underground in 1970, while another group, the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) appeared in 1971–1972 from dissident Christian Democrats, students, and religious people. Both favored a guerrilla approach and were prone to internal divisions. The state response to the guerrilla threat was a rapid escalation of repression.
There was perhaps an outlaw in Roque’s DNA. He claimed his father was one of the Kansas Dalton brothers, a famed bank robber who took refuge in El Salvador where Roque was born in 1935. Educated in Jesuit schools and elite universities, Roque became a political outlaw at age twenty-four, inspired by the Cuban Revolution. He had already formed a University Literary Circle in the spirit of the fifties university reform currents; the military set fire to their building. Roque then joined the Communist Party, despite differences over nationalism and literary style. He was arrested for his associations and was to be executed by firing squad but the dictatorship was overthrown in a coup on the preceding day, October 26, 1960. Roque escaped to Mexico where he poured out poems while contemplating a return. He chose Cuba, where the revolutionary Casa de las Americas was a magnet for young Latin American writers.20 He published many works during a five-year stay, also received military training, and returned to El Salvador in a clandestine role in 1965. There he was arrested while sitting in a bar, was tortured again, and sentenced to the firing squad a second time. By chance an earthquake collapsed his jail cell, and he was able to scramble free and make his way back to Cuba. From there he traveled to Prague as a journalist, poet and polemicist; his wildest free verse, written in Prague and based on overheard bar conversations, was called “Tavern (Conversatorio)”:
“Good family men of the world, Unite!
“You have nothing to lose but your not wanting to!”
...
“The one sure thing I can tell you
“is that the guerrilla
“is becoming the only pure organization
“in the world of men.
“All the others show signs of going bad.
“The Catholic Church started to give off a stink
“when the catacombs were opened to the tourist trade
“and the shabbiest two-bit whores
“over ten centuries ago:
“If Christ went into the Vatican today
“a gas mask is the first thing he’d ask for.
“The French revolution was a Roquefort cheese from the start
“The international Communist movement has been weighing the value of
“Stalin’s big shit.”
...
“Okay. All that’s left is to talk Zen Buddhism,
“it’s in now.”
“Right. Zen Buddhism is a wonderful experience,
“if and when it gradually leads you to terrorism.”
...
“To choose between possible worlds: now that’s
“the divine punishment.”21
These poetic ramblings captured the unconventional and daring spirit of a whole generation of Latin American rebels who were aroused by the Cuban Revolution, crossed paths there, were published there, trained in guerrilla warfare there, and whose attitudes deeply overlapped with the New Left and the Beat Generation—not the Old Left.
RICARDO: Roque was killed by members of his own organization, the ERP. It was so unfair and sad, a case of sectarian insanity.
Roque’s fate revealed the-chaos within those same revolutionary movements. After spending five years on the Havana staff of Casa de Las Americas and helping a band of Guatemalan revolutionaries, Roque underwent plastic surgery and disappeared into El Salvador in late 1973–1974. Still writing “poemas clandestinos,” he tried to join FPL and, rejected for being a poet, he turned to ERP.22 Roque had finished eighteen volumes of poetry and prose before picking up the gun. In just over one year, days short of his fortieth birthday, Roque was killed on May 10, 1975 by his own paranoid “comrades” in a sectarian dispute. Apparently Dalton’s “heresy” lay in wanting to make alliances with Salvadoran mass organizations, not to rely only on the guerrilla struggle. The faction that tortured and killed him claimed he was “a Soviet-Cuban and CIA agent.”23 His supporters then split from the ERP to form a new faction known as the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN). The sectarian horrors didn’t end. On April 6, 1983, the second-in-command of the FPL, Melida Anaya Montes (Comandante Ana María) was murdered.
RICARDO: She was brutally assassinated in Managua on the orders of Marcial.24 Marcial had become incredibly sectarian, like Stalin. He had left the Communist Party secretary general position to create a more “pure" organization to conduct the armed struggle.
The first reaction of the FPL to Ana María’s assassination was to blame the CIA. But the Sandinista investigation showed it was done by FPL people close to Marcial. And then he killed himself when he suspected that he might be accused of the crime. The FPL went into such profound shock that it could have led to its self-destruction. It was then that “Leonel” was designated the new leader of the FPL and organized and led one of the most successful military campaigns I have ever seen, one that reversed the situation.
The comandante known as “Leonel González” was actually Salvador Sánchez Cerén, whose revived FPL was an organizational foundation of the Faramundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN), which eventually entered El Salvador’s peace negotiations, finalized in 1992. He was elected to the National Assembly in 2000 and became the country’s vice president under the FMLN’s presidential candidate Mauricio Funes in 2009, heading a left-of-center coalition that defeated the right-wing party, ARENA, which was associated with death squads in the civil war of the eighties. In 2014, Sánchez Cerén was elected president of El Salvador by a narrow margin.
It must not be forgotten that seventy thousand Salvadorans died in that conflict, mostly civilians, mostly at the hands of an army armed with US weapons and taught by advisers. Even today, US counterinsurgency experts consider it a triumph that so few advisers—US congressional rules limited their number to fifty—were able to prevent a “Communist takeover.” That might have been Cuba’s future if the Bay of Pigs invasion had been successful. To stop “another Cuba” from emerging in the hemisphere, the United States eventually intervened in civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands in small underdeveloped nations like El Salvador and Nicaragua.
RICARDO: Salvador Sánchez Cerén was a teacher like Ana María and had worked with her in the national teachers’ union. He joined the guerrilla and became one of the best commanders. To him, Marcial and Ana María were both revolutionary leaders. Then he learned the truth of what had happened to Ana María. Imagine having to suffer that double shock in a few days. And suddenly he was obliged to substitute himself for them and assume a larger role, not just as a guerrilla chief but also as the leader of a political organization in a critical situation, and then take care of that group as it was going through its most difficult moments. I went to Managua on a number of occasions, with and without Piñeiro, to meet with them. And now he is the vice president. [NB: Sánchez Cerén was elected president in 2014, after this interview took place.]
These movements were sometimes killing themselves. When you discover what happened in the Soviet Union or Cambodia, the extremes to which sectarianism can go, it is incredible. In Roque’s case, it was partly a matter of ignorance too, not only Stalinism.