The unusual circumstances that brought about the Cuban revolution of
January 1959, with bearded guerrillas descending from the hills to seize power,
and the dramatic arrival on the international stage of Fidel Castro, its
eloquent and charismatic leader, had an extraordinary international impact from
the first. Cuba's example was to spark off other revolutionary initiatives,
large and small, in countries all over the world, and to affect the lives of
millions of people. Perhaps for the first time since the end of the second
world war in 1945, an event occurred of transcendent pleasure and
excitement: the overthrow of a sanguinary military dictator and his replacement
by an undisciplined bunch of youthful radicals with a revolutionary project.
Castro and the revolution were soon indissoluble in the public
mind, perceived as one and the same thing.
In the United States, at the end of the Dwight Eisenhower era, Cuba's revolution brought hope
of the rejuvenation of politics at home and abroad. The same hope was raised in Europe, where
pre-war figures like Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, and Harold Macmillan
were still in charge. Even in the Soviet Union, where ancient revolutionaries
like Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan were sloughed down by post-Stalinist
bureaucracy, a cheer went up from the Kremlin when they saw the rebirth in the
Caribbean of their own youthful dreams.
As for the peoples of Latin America, they could not believe their
luck. They were suddenly presented with a revolution in the country most
conspicuously under the thumb of Uncle Sam, having been told over the previous
century that there was little hope for independence and freedom in the United
States's backyard. Thousands flocked to Havana to sign up for the cause;
hundreds were recruited into fresh armies of national liberation. Countries in
Asia and Africa, engaged in their own anti-imperial struggles, also took heart
from the Cuban example, providing the bedrock of the "third world" movement
that promoted an alternative scenario to the dismal nuclear stalemate of the cold war.
Cuba swam into my personal view at the start of my second term at an English university. As history students, we were fascinated by the story of the Spanish civil war, the nearest event to the present day that we were then allowed to study. The bearded guerrillas led by Castro and Che Guevara burst in upon us with a flash of illumination, as though that recent past, only two decades earlier, had been suddenly brought back to life.
Richard Gott is the author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press, 2005); Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso, 2005); and Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Seagull Books, new edition, 2007)
Many of us had already been radicalised for a hundred reasons: by the
British catastrophe at Suez in 1956, by the survival of so many dark-suited and
conservative politicians from the 1930s, by the end of military conscription,
by the imminent collapse of the British empire, by the emergence of the third-world
movement after the Bandung conference in 1955, by the political thaw in
communist Poland, by the guerrilla struggle waged by the Algerians, and by the
embryonic campaign against nuclear weapons and the new mood of anti-racism.
The rhetoric coming from Havana in 1959 - social justice, land reform, racial equality, anti-imperialism - seemed an answer to prayer, for it echoed what we thought and were trying to articulate. Even "armed struggle" had its heroic aspect, something almost unimaginable during today's "war on terror". Military dictators were not going to be toppled by non-violence, then the mantra of the peace movement. We purchased black berets to show our commitment, let our beards grow in conscious imitation of the Cuban barbudos, and investigated how we, too, could make the pilgrimage to Havana.
A revolutionary voice
I arrived in Cuba for the first time in 1963, with Castro's revolution now well established, and hardened - by the experience of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the missile crisis of October 1962. The country was on a war footing and the threat from the United States still remained. An American warship hovered permanently offshore, visible from the window of my room overlooking on the Malecón, in the Hotel Riviera, a gambling den finished just before the revolution (with no thirteenth floor). Assorted leftists from Europe and the Americas descended on the island in huge numbers in those years, to discover what was happening at firsthand. I mingled with the admiring throng, going out into the banana plantations at weekends for "voluntary work" with attractive young secretaries from the foreign ministry, and signing up to join a street committee at a stall in Old Havana.
Fidel spoke at an evening meeting in the Plaza de la Revolución, in front of the National Library with the immense white statue of José Martí, erected by Fulgencio Batista, towering to one side. He spoke for several hours, to an audience of half a million. They listened with close attention, captivated by his message, the cadence of his voice, and his marvellous use of the Spanish language.
Foreign critics, aware of the tedious speeches of their own politicians, often imagine that Fidel's long harangues must have been boring. This is not so. They were intensely political but often highly inspirational. Many of the twists and turns of the revolution have been spelt out in his speeches, as Castro engages in a one-man adult-education course, but there is always time for humour and poetry. Castro did for Latin America's tradition of political speechmaking what Gabriel García Márquez did for the novel: creating a memorable art form that transcends traditional boundaries. Winston Churchill was once awarded the Nobel prize for literature; Fidel deserves the same prize.
I have never read a proper study of Fidel's speechmaking, but he prepared them with great care, like a jazz musician. He blocks in the huge amount of factual material he needs to get across, he hits high spots of poetic language, he indulges in long riffs of reminiscence and shared endeavour, and then checks himself to return to his principal theme. He rounds off the entire structure with an optimistic message that sends his listeners home with the feeling that they have had a wonderful, theatrical evening.
People still remember the magnificent eulogy that he delivered on the
death of Guevara in 1967, and I was present one warm evening in 1970 when he
told his hushed audience of the death that day of Gamal Abdul Nasser, their far-away ally in Egypt. On one
occasion, as I walked back to my hotel, a (black) Cuban whispered to me:
"Batista used to do this very well too; he also could summon up a large crowd".
It was an unromantic reminder of the continuing traditions of Latin America's
political culture.
Also in
openDemocracy on Cuba:
Bella Thomas,
"Paradox regained: a
conversation with an old comandante in Cuba"
(19 August 2003)
Fred Halliday,
"Fidel Castro's
legacy: Cuban conversations"
(24 August 2006)
Bella Thomas,
"Living with Castro"
(19 February 2008)
My ignorance of all things Cuban was extreme, so much so that I was surprised to find Havana so full of black people. No one had explained to me that Cuba was a country with as many blacks as whites; the iconic pictures of bearded revolutionaries arriving in Havana in 1959 had only shown lorry-loads of white guerrillas. Gazing at the black faces in the streets of Havana, I understood for the first time the significance of Castro's visit to the United Nations in New York in September 1960, when he stayed at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. He was sending a message to the black population of the United States, then on the brink of creating a formidable civil-rights movement, but also to his own black population at home. When I met Nicolas Guillén, Cuba's great (and black) poet, I could see the local significance of Castro's close attention to the liberation struggle in Africa, and Cuba's participation in it. Guillén read me his wonderful poem evoking Cuba's structural relationship with Africa, which begins with a reference to his Yoruba heritage:
Cuba soy,
Soy Lucumí.
A political laboratory
I worked at the time as a researcher at London's Chatham House, the establishment think-tank then in a social-democratic, post-colonial, and pro-European frame of mind, and I had useful introductions to the principal figures of the revolution. The British establishment did not share the hysteria about Cuba that had overtaken the United States. Britain and the United States had competed fiercely for business in Cuba for more than a century, and businessmen knew that the Americans had only pulled ahead after the invasion and occupation of the island in 1898. The Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, as well as quite a few bankers and diplomats, were influenced by centuries of experience in the Caribbean. They had a sneaking admiration for Castro's ability openly to defy the Americans. Britain's Cuban railway company had been successfully sold to Batista ten years earlier. So why should the British care about the fate of US banks and sugar plantations?
Fascinated by what I found in Cuba, and intrigued by Castro's ambition to spread his revolutionary message to Latin America, I resolved to try to live and work in the continent, and I found a job at the University of Chile, in Santiago. Chile in the 1960s was a unique vantage-point from which to view the rest of the continent, a surprisingly free country in a region already beginning to be submerged by the incoming tide of military rule. The US helped stage a coup in Brazil in 1964, the first of many that would sweep the continent in the 1960s (in Argentina and Bolivia) and the 1970s (in Chile and Uruguay). The entire continent was talking about "revolution", with guerrillas in the mountains and jungles of half a dozen countries, all influenced by Castro's revolutionary project. From a base in Santiago I travelled around in search of the separate stories of these various guerrilla movements, culminating in the final campaign and death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.
Chile in those years was an experimental laboratory of political science, yet the Chileans were engaged in a different experiment from that of the Cubans. They were trying to create a revolutionary anti-body, helped and financed by the United States, which would prove capable of crushing the Cuban example. They called it a "revolution in freedom", and its chief protagonists were members of the Christian Democrat party. These Christian, conservative revolutionaries operated in Cuba's shadow, seeking to inoculate their society against revolutionary socialism by introducing radical reforms of their own. They discussed the need for land reform and for the strategic copper industry, run by US companies, to be brought under some kind of national control.
Their imaginative project ran into the sand, and in 1970 Chile launched itself on a new and more dangerous development: taking the road to Cuban-style socialism through the election of Salvador Allende, yet with only 43% (at best) of the popular vote. Castro was pleased to find an ally on the continent, for the United States had imposed a diplomatic as well as a trade boycott of the island in the early 1960s. Yet when he arrived for a month-long visit in 1971, he was unimpressed with what he found. Political disunity and economic disruption were the chief characteristics of Allende's revolution, overlaid with high-flown socialist rhetoric increasingly out of touch with reality. Castro saw nothing but chaos and the impending threat of fascism. General Augusto Pinochet seized power two years later.
Castro at that time had already taken the decision to join the communist bloc. Cuba became a formal member of Comecon, the trading organisation of the communist world, in 1972. Many people assume that Castro turned directly to communism almost immediately after the revolution. This is not so. During the first decade after 1959, Castro tried to maintain his revolution as an independent force in world politics, maintaining close relations with the Soviet Union, but keeping a critical distance. That was its charm, and the reason why it received such unswerving support from leftist intellectuals in the west, who dreamed of an alternative to the Soviet Union. Long before Alexander Dubcek, Castro stood for "communism with a human face".
A global commitment
Castro abandoned his independent stand in 1968, precisely over the
question of Czechoslovakia. When the Warsaw Pact countries took part in the overthrow
of Dubcek, Castro surprised and appalled his admirers by supporting the
invasion. He had his reasons, although they were opaquely explained. The death
of Che Guevara the previous year had meant an end to
the guerrilla struggle to liberate Latin America, a strategy disapproved of by
the Russians who were busy constructing a policy of détente with the United
States; the search for an alternative to Cuba's sugar economy meant the
resurrection of the sugar industry and the country's total economic dependence
on its principal purchaser, the Soviet Union; and the Cuban revolution itself,
never a significant source of intellectual debate, had run out of ideological
steam.
The Soviet Union and its satellite states provided a wonderful stream
of revenue and international support, but more importantly they supplied a
convenient model of how to reorganise a country's institutions according to a
socialist blueprint. Castro bought the entire Soviet package, and fitted Cuba
into its straitjacket. The Soviet
constitution, the Soviet economic plan, and the Soviet way of running schools,
universities, hospitals and state industries were all adopted, and imposed over a period of two decades,
from approximately 1970 to 1990.
The decision brought squeals of pain and disappointment within Cuba
itself, and much disenchantment abroad. The French intellectuals who had led
the international support campaigns were vociferous in their
opposition. Cuba lost its focus of interest as a special case. In my own case,
as Cuba turned to the Soviet Union and the rest of Latin America fell under
military rule, I looked for revolutionary possibilities elsewhere. I moved
continents, taking up a newspaper job in Dar es Salaam, where the guerrilla
movements of southern Africa had their headquarters. I did not return to Cuba
until years later, in the 1990s, after the Soviet yoke had been cast off.
Paradoxically, Africa became the scene of some of Castro's greatest
triumphs, often undertaken to the surprise and amazement of the Soviet Union.
Castro allowed the Russians free rein in reorganising the Cuban economy, but in
foreign affairs he ran the show himself. Unique among Cuban politicians, Castro
had a real sense of the country's African heritage. The revolution itself had
been born during the great Algerian struggle for liberation in the 1950s, and the
Cuban guerrillas were well aware of the parallel war being fought out in
Africa. Cuba's first "internationalist" support was sent to Algeria, to be
followed by Che Guevara's expeditionary force to the Congo in 1965. The African
guerrilla leaders I met in Dar were in constant communication with the Cubans,
sending their guerrillas to Cuba for training and their supporters to be
educated at schools specially created for them.
Cuba was first to provide help to the resistance forces against
Portugal's colonial rule, first in Guinea-Bissau, and later in Angola and
Mozambique. In 1975, and again in 1988, Cuban troops proved essential in
repelling the white South African regime's invasion of Angola. The Russians came in later, with
money and troops, but Castro's personal quick reaction had save the day. The
Cubans were also vital in helping the Ethiopians to defeat the Somalis in the
Ogaden in 1977. The Cuban victory in Angola of 1988 had a wider impact, as
Nelson Mandela explained later, for it gave inspiration to the people of South Africa by destroying "the invincibility of the white
oppressor."
Today there are people who complain that there are not enough black
faces at the top of the revolutionary leadership in Cuba. This is a reasonable
complaint. As befits a regime modelled for years on the Soviet system, racism
in Cuba is assumed to be a product of poverty. The blacks are poor and things
will get better when people are richer.
So runs the argument. Cuba has never taken the United States
road of supporting positive discrimination, and remains a country, typical of
Latin America, where racist attitudes persist. Yet blacks in general do better
in Cuba than in the US. They are represented at all levels of government except
the top. The revolution has recognised them as equal citizens, and they remain
the regime's most solid bulwark.
Castro's staunch support of liberation struggles in Africa, and his
subsequent project of sending doctors rather than soldiers to work there and in
other parts of the third world, gave him a unique position in the affections of
the entire world, recognised in the annual votes in the general assembly of the United Nations on the issue of the United
States economic boycott. In October 2007, only three countries in the world -
Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau (with
Micronesia alone in
abstaining) - supported the US position.
A special period
Castro's revolution recovered some of the spirit of the early years
after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Suddenly Castro was able to be
his own man again, forced to think for himself. He had to provide a new vision for his country without its Soviet
prop. Many outside critics imagined
optimistically that Cuba would go the way of the Soviet satellites states of
east-central Europe. Much of the Cuban exile population in Miami thought he
might receive the humiliating fate of Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. But the
Cuban revolution was woven from stronger material. Castro had not come to power
with the bayonets of foreign armies; his revolution was homegrown, the product of a long tradition of
nationalist struggle going back for more than a century. Whatever the
circumstances, the Cubans would fight to retain what they had achieved.
The period since 1991 in Cuba, described by Castro as "a special
period in time of peace", have shown what deep roots the revolution has
developed. Deprived very suddenly of Soviet and Comecon economic support, with
a collapse of economic activity on a scale rarely seen anywhere except in the
aftermath of war or recession, Cuba managed to struggle through, using bicycles instead of cars, and oxen instead of tractors. Only
at the dawn of the 21st century, with the timely arrival of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and the exchange of doctors for oil,
has Cuba managed to bounce back again. Having survived this extraordinarily difficult
economic period, Cuba should have little difficulty in navigating the political
waters that lie ahead without their maximo
líder.
In his final years, the people of Latin America have suddenly woken up
again to the huge historical significance of Fidel Castro, the great figure in the continent of
the 20th century. Wherever he has travelled, he has been mobbed by those who
want to see him, to hear him, to interview him. They have finally recognised
that he is now in the continental pantheon with Simón Bolívar and the liberators of the 19th
century, and that he will not be on show much longer.
A new history
A few years ago, I returned to Havana to write a history of Cuba, which was
published in 2005. On its final page, I wrote the following words about Castro:
"He remains a figure from all our yesterdays, grey-bearded but
eternally youthful like an ageing rock star. He does not run the country, but
he presides over a government that is his creation. He has changed his slogan
from ‘socialism or death', suitable for the violent 20th century, to ‘a better
world is possible', appropriate for the more pacifistic revolutionaries of a
new era. When he dies, there will be little change in Cuba. While few people
have been looking, the change has already taken place."
Hugo Chávez is the natural successor to Castro,
as a new and radical period opens up in Latin American history. Castro's revolution
brought the great mass of the Cuban people onto the political stage, and
successfully fought off the US ambition to recover its control over the island.
Today the challenges are different but also similar. Latin America faces
something new: the political awakening of the indigenous peoples, kept from
power over five centuries. They are the real power that lies behind what is
sometimes described as a move to the left in the great tranche of elections in
2006. They have the capacity to write an entirely new history.
At the same time there is a rich country, Venezuela, with unparalleled
resources at its command, intent and capable of using them to benefit
the people and to stir up others to do the same. No previous revolution has had
such economic strength at its command. Yet the threat remains the same today as it once was against Cuba: the
United States has still not learned to keep its meddling fingers out of Latin America's
future. Its long record of military as well as other forms of intervention has
not suddenly ground to a halt. The real battle over Latin America still lies
ahead.
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