Revolution's End
McColm, R. Bruce
"Revolution's End" - Carlos Franqui knows what the American Left has yet to learn: The Cuban Revolution is a fraud. But then, he ought to know--twenty years ago he...
...It calls for prison sentences against such things as absenteeism, voluntary unemployment, and working in an occupation deemed anti-social...
...Q: At what point would you say that Cuba came to be dominated by the Soviets to the point of losing any semblance of independence...
...Q: I'd like to ask you more about the physical prisons you mentioned earlier, the ones with the sardonic names...
...In 1971 Castro announced a "new revolutionary law," the Anti-Loafing Law...
...Castro admitted as much in his speech of December 27th to the National People's Government Assembly...
...CF: I left in 1968 after Castro supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Red in Cuba isn't the color of Communism but is a sign you are a member of an African cult...
...C a r l o s Franqui was born to peasant parents in 1921...
...The interview's translator, Ricardo Alonso, now a professor of Spanish at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, was the ambassador of Castro's Cuba to the Court of St...
...Q: We are now some 20 years past the Cuban Revolution and from all indications it appears that Cuba is in dire straits...
...There are, of course, many forced labor camps in Cuba...
...After an exile spent in Mexico, Latin America, and the United States, Franqui joined the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra and became the director of Radio Rebelde and the Movement's newspaper, Revol, cion...
...Moved by the plight of the guafiros, or peasants, and inspired by Cuba's long history of aborted attempts at reform, the Movement, led by Fidel Castro, became radicalized and embarked in a fit of machismo on a guerrilla war waged from the mountain strongholds of the Sierra Maestra...
...In Cuba, all those working on the sugar cane harvest look like they are doing the same thing...
...In 1968, after Castro supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Franqui broke with the regime and went into exile...
...Roughly, it means that there are little partnerships here and there, private alliances...
...When an animal dies or is eaten, a peasant must go to the police station and report that animal number so-and-so has died and of what causes...
...When Franqui broke with the Castro government in 1968, his face disappeared from all the official photographs...
...That was unforgivable...
...I certainly have no nostalgia for the Cuba of the past...
...It may be a personal vendetta or a spontaneous protest...
...Is there a similar law in Cuba...
...They're too long...
...Q: Jonas Savimbi, the President of UNITA [The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola], the group fighting the Cubans in Angola, was at that Algiers meeting...
...Moreover, the price paid by the Cuban people for the continuing African wars has been extremely high...
...CF: My pleasure...
...They are totally restricted in terms of movement...
...The man who introduced me to Castro's former confidante was Raul Chibas, the former head of the anti-Batista Ortodoxo Party before the Revolution and a friend of Castro's during his days as a law student at the University of Havana...
...After 20 years, they no longer have any hopes in Castro's system...
...Industrial sabotage and the use of arms against government targets have been reported on the rise...
...Many people trying to escape from Cuba have disappeared...
...Q: There are differing interpretations of the Cuban prison system...
...Q: V/hat about these camps...
...So a peasant will sometimes trade a chicken or another animal for something he needs...
...But what came later is nothing more than a disease...
...Even the basic foodstuffs like bananas, cassava, black beans, rice, and beverages are scarce...
...One of the plantados was Huber Matos, one of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, who has recently been released.] Apart from these prisons, there are 'punishment or disciplinary camps for prisoners who must undergo political reeducation courses...
...Q: V/hy should the pigs be exempt when you're going to list everything else...
...Although much criticized by America's Cuban community for his unrepentant leftist positions, Franqui, nevertheless, has been instrumental in breaking the taboo on the left against criticism of the Castro regime...
...Pork used to be a major food staple for the people...
...Besides, the distribution system has totally fallen apart...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...
...Then the animal is taken off the police lists...
...His articles and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, National Review, and the Christian Science Monitor...
...From 1955 until his imprisonment by Batista in 1957, he was the editor of Revolution Diario, the organ of the Castro movement...
...He quit the Party to become one of the first members of the Twenty-Sixth of July Movement in Havana...
...So we Cubans say that the "heel of the boot," that is, Tacon, has been resurrected in Castro...
...How can you feel excited about work when you can't even do your job...
...After the Revolution, the government embarked on a huge roadbuilding program...
...Q: After being an important participant in the Revolution and now a severe critic of the Castro government, what is your summary impression of Cuba today ? CF: You can see all of Cuba during the sugar harvest...
...But he is supposed to buy everything from the government...
...Things like that...
...But it was not revolutionary at all...
...But it also means that the system lacks any productive capability...
...The political structure is too strong: Over a half million people work for the secret police alone...
...For years, Cuba has enjoyed total immunity from criticism as a member in the pantheon of progressive states...
...Now, whenever his own problems at home get grave, he uses this apparatus to project a powerful international image...
...This animal identification was created to curtail this trade...
...CF: I wouldn't call these two events particularly important...
...CF: There are different types of prisons...
...Q: Recently, the former Havana Hilton and a number of train stations have been bombed...
...And even when the worker does get to work, he has to wait hours, sometimes until the early afternoon, for the bricks, wood, or whatever he is working with to show up at the site of his job...
...It is the same law used by the Spanish governor Miguel Tacon in the 1830s...
...Under these conditions, work becomes an absurd obligation...
...He was involved in Cuban politics from the time he was a teenager, first joining the youth movement of the Cuban Communist Party in 1939 and, later, being one of its most militant members during his days as a student at the University of Havana...
...Twenty-one years later, the results of the Cuban Revolution closely resemble the Movement's critique of the Barista regime, the differences being Cuba's total dependence on the Soviet Union and a caudillo R. Bruce McColm is a contributing editor to the National Catholic Register and its UN correspondent...
...After so many years, the Cuban people are fed-up with promises...
...These are forced labor camps for functionaries and so-called "misled revolutionaries...
...Others have capsized at sea...
...Actually, now that I think about it, everyone in this room, except me, would be subject to arrest...
...Now it appears that Cuba is taking this position, although not independent of the Soviet Union, as Guevara would have wanted...
...Yet, they certainly exist...
...sent will have to increase, of course, but this in turn will intensify the repression...
...There are large eight-lane highways in Cuba--but no one travels on them...
...He claims that Guevara told him not to send his men to Cuba for training because the Soviets would then control his movement...
...Whatever national dignity we regained with the Revolution has been lost with our total dependence on the Soviets...
...It is incredible to think that the 20 main national products of Cuba have been strictly rationed for the past 18 years...
...It's one of the most powerful in Latin America and extremely large for such a small country...
...from his early childhood he had to work alongside his parents in the sugar-cane fields...
...As early as 1965, at an international congress held in Algiers, Guevara denounced Soviet imperialism...
...Recently, even people who distribute pamph.lets with grievances against the government are said to be terminally ill and receive the death pcnahy...
...James before he defected to the United States in the early sixties...
...He charged the Soviets with opposing all independent revolutions...
...In it he called attention to the diseases devastating the sugar and tobacco crops and even stated there would be a wholesale lay-off of factory workers...
...Q: How do you relate the Cuban activities in Angola and Ethiopia to this abandonment of Guevara...
...CF: Yes, but I don't think it's a Soviet law...
...But even so, things in Cuba have gone way beyond anyone's wildest predictions, especially now that there are all those Cuban troops in Africa...
...Ostensibly here to promote the publication in English of his Diary of the Cuban Revolution and attend a conference of Latin American writers, he used the occasion to see some of his former colleagues from the early days of Castro's Revolution...
...The patients are the deviates from the revolutionary ideology...
...Q: From Castro's point of view, then, what is to be gained by Cuba's involvement in Alto'ca ? CF: Well, from his point of view, it is a matter of fleeing forward...
...They have been either killed by sharks or arrested by Cuban patrol boats...
...In that way, they are part of the first of the Revolution's "two pillars": national education and health...
...Is this the work of an organized underground or a spontaneous protest ? CF: It is very difficult to know...
...Dilapidated farm machinery rusts in the fields...
...Now, there are very few pigs left...
...The Cuban worker gets up before dawn and has to walk to get a bus to work...
...and Castro's and Guevara's fawning admiration for Stalin's book, The Fundamentals of Leninism--one gains an untampered look at the rise of Castro's brand of caudillo Communism and its aftereffects on Cuban society...
...Why should you work when you don't get anything for it, especially when you see government officials enjoying extraordinary privileges...
...Yes, they indicate severe problems...
...Sometimes the bus comes on time, sometimes the worker has to wait hours, and many times the bus doesn't even show up...
...Others say this represents a type of passive resistance...
...They are the plantados...
...Raul [Chibas] for his beard...
...The whole prison system in Cuba is a vast pharmacy...
...In a way, they are...
...After 20 more years of the Revolution, it's doubtful whether there will be enough food...
...The black market is the only way the Cuban people can survive...
...It amounts to a new form of Soviet imperialism...
...But, we also look upon them as part of the second pillar...
...The whole system was created to control the black market...
...It actually dates back to the times of Spanish colonialism...
...The question is whether the present dissatisfaction will lead to a stronger protest or just die away...
...All of them are there under different circumstances...
...So far, nobody knows exactly how many Cubans have died this way, but we're working on a census and trying to find out...
...Through Franqui's montage of the Cuban Revolution--a montage which reveals, among other things, Castro's early obsessions with Alexander the Great, Robespierre, and his favorite, Napoleon...
...They register this rebellion by wearing blue jeans, which are prohibited, by listening to jazz and rock and roll, which have been outlawed, and by wearing long hair, which is enough for one to lose one's job...
...There's sugar, meat, milk, coffee, tobacco, cigars, rum, oranges, mangoes . . . Everything has been totally rationed...
...Q: Since the Revolution, the Cuban economy has been plagued by every conceivable problem...
...I don't think it's well organized because I don't think you can be organized and escape detection by the secret police...
...Some cutting the cane are from the local jails, some are from the concentration camps, some are voluntary workers, some are military personnel, and some arc, peasants...
...But it is characteristic of Castro that when there is a military confrontation, the Cuban people will be made to suffer...
...The picture of Castro's first meeting with Nikita Khrushchev reveals Franqui as a grayish blur between the two leaders...
...Anyone found without this card is sent to jail...
...And now there are over 100,000 Cuban soldiers stationed all over the world...
...East as in East Bloc...
...He has suffered a similar fate in the official photograph of Castro's victorious entourage in Havana, a fate he shares with Huber Matos, the recently released former army commander, who also has been obliterated from the Cuban peso...
...The Tacon decree was against practitioners of black magic, homosexuals, poets, and blacks...
...But the change had begun a few years before, and really crystallized around 1967, when Ch~ Guevara died in Bolivia...
...This has already happened...
...He jailed over 100,000 people in his tropical gulags...
...After he met Castro in 1947, he joined the future Cuban leader in a futile expedition to unseat the Dominican Republic's dictator Trujillo...
...There are several reasons for this...
...The police are doctors tending to the sick...
...But there is more to the malaise than that...
...Even the final product gets lost, especially in agriculture...
...They say that in Cuba there isn't socialism, there is sociolesmo...
...Now, more than ever, the young people are in open rebellion against the system...
...I have nothing more to say...
...Sugar and tobacco just rot...
...people, let alone from one place to labor productivity Q: The productivity problem has been blamed by Cuban government officials on the workers' laziness and the material shortages in the factories...
...If you don't report the animal's death or his sale, you will be fined or jailed...
...Oddly enough, both the Miami exile community and Raul Castro [Cuba's former Minister of Defense] use the same word to describe the situation...
...What accounted for that split...
...This is a kind of imprisonment without the prison itself...
...More important still, is way, way down...
...CF (shrugging his shoulders): I doubt very much that Castro physically had Guevara killed...
...Now based in Italy, Franqui published his Diary of the Cuban Revolution in 1976 and is working on a follow-up volume dealing with the Castro regime until 1968...
...And recently the effort to jail anyone without this card has intensified...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 7 The importance of Franqui's Diary of the Cuban Revolution, soon to be published hy Viking Press, cannot be underestimated in light of the chronic Marxist disease of falsifying history...
...Are they different from one another...
...When Castro came to power on New Year's Day, 1959, he entrusted Franqui with the archives of the Revolution and appointed him the organizer for the Cultural Congress of Havana...
...Plantados is a Cuban prison sland expression for people who refuse to be re-educated...
...It prohibited loitering, laziness, social parasitism, and absenteeism...
...Such demonstrations of rebellion may seem inconsequential, but they are not...
...And Castro's firing of his cabinet last year seemed to be a fairly dramatic demonstration of Cuba's problems...
...Finally, you have the gulag...
...The youth rebellion will either escalate or be crushed by the government...
...Everyone in the room laughs.] Q: I can't let that pass by without comment...
...If you look at his diary, you realize that Guevara wanted to create a base in Latin America for a continental revolution...
...Through his talents as a publicist, Franqui brought all of Europe's major artists to Havana to participate in a variety of activities ranging from lectures to art shows...
...What follows is the first interview ever given by Franqui to an American journalist and is said to be the first time he has spoken openly about the conditions in Cuba today...
...But it is important to remember that nine million Cubans are t r e a t e d like prisoners...
...The only animal exempt from this law is the pig...
...That's how this man is remembered in Cuba...
...It shows the Cubans still maintain their Goya-esque sense of humor...
...From the early days of the Castro government, Franqui used his extensive contacts among Europe's illuminati to bring a number of intellectuals to idolize the Revolution...
...On top of all that, the system doesn't allow profits or the free discussion of labor problems, and it refuses to replace unfair administrators...
...Q: Thank you...
...But then, he ought to know--twenty years ago he sold the myth of the Revolution to the world...
...CF: Yes, that's very possible...
...How does it apply to animals...
...They aren't much different from the rest because you can't escape the island anyway...
...CF: It is totally insufficient to blame lazy workers for these problems...
...Some of the prisoners there refuse to wear their prison uniforms and have lived in their underwear for years...
...The failure of the economy certainly indicates a passive resistance against the government...
...CF: I told you their names are quite incredible...
...For Franqui, it was his first trip to the United States since his exile from Cuba in the sixties...
...It is extremely difficult for consumer goods, to get another...
...It lists where you work, where you live, where you come from...
...Look out on a field with sugar cane...
...After Castro's speech, he used this so-called revolutionary law indiscriminately...
...Truly, the Cubans fleeing the island are the precursors of the Vietnamese boat people...
...Ironically enough, he was instrumental a few years back in persuading people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to condemn the Cuban government for its repression of artists...
...That's a work compound...
...Cuba is a country of empty roads...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 9 Alonso would be arrested for his sideburns...
...Among Europe's Left and America's left-liberal elements, Havana has been the last stop of the leaking vessel transporting those in a perpetual search for the "successful social experiment...
...Early supporters of Castro's TwentySixth of July Movement, like Franqui, saw a Cuba dominated by a monoculture based on a sugar economy and badly run by an inept, colossally stupid caudillo, Batista, who was kept in power by the United States...
...Of course, a small country like Cuba can't pretend to do what a superpower like the United States and the Soviet Union can do without severely affecting the population...
...But he most certainly made sure he wouldn't succeed...
...The minimum rehabilitation period was three years...
...Could you explain for me the different types of prisons in Cuba and what role the prison system plays in that society ? CF: Well, first of all, you have to remember that Cuba is matushka...
...They are forced to work on different projects under the worst conditions...
...This is also why he plotted for so long to become the leader of the non-aligned movement...
...He's fired his cabinet many times...
...CF: Pigs are exempt now because they are diseased and dying by the scores...
...It is totally naive to think that Castro and his system will fall, at least in the near future...
...Then there are the prisons with open doors...
...When there is some crisis or another, he usually does something dramatic to exert further control over the government...
...By now, he has a highly developed military apparatus...
...Between this and his extensive involvement overseas, he is able to camouflage the tremendous economic, political, and social crises at home in Cuba...
...who now protects himself in a suit of Marxist-Leninist armor...
...Many, many Cubans would have followed Guevara in Latin America if Castro had allowed them to...
...This system is so pervasive it even applies to the animals...
...Q: You aren't suggesting that Castro's government will fall...
...Q: In light of all these things you've mentioned, bow much of the Cuban political bureaucracy is still behind Castro ? CF: The political apparatus is totally demoralized...
...Raw materials don't arrive on time, if they arrive at all...
...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980...
...It was supposed to be an impressive project and in many cases it actually was...
...Out of their miraculous success was created the myth of the Cuban Revolution...
...And the e x e c u t i o n e r ' s squad is for the terminally ill...
...He also held similar ideas for Africa...
...No one, not even Amnesty International and the International Red Cross, has been able to determine the number of political prisoners in Cuba...
...Among the pilgrims were Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote On Cuba after a Franqui sponsored trip, and Simone de Beauvoir...
...For one thing, Guevara wanted to create a revolutionary movement in Africa and Latin America totally independent from the Soviet Union...
...Today, when one gets down to it, Cuba is still an island of sugar and slavery...
...CF: Even animals need internal passports now...
...And you--well, for everything...
...His diary, a sort of The Sorrow and the Pity in print, is the rarest of historical documents - - a sure preventative against that peculiar amnesia which fogs the brains of those who use history for their own polemical purposes...
...When this situation occurred in the Soviet Union, they instituted a law against social parasitism...
...There is also the East Compound in Havana...
...He was one of the most repressive governors in Cuban history...
...But, by the late sixties, Carlos Franqui had become a "questionable person" in Cuba because of his public opposition to Castro's dictatorial methods and his strident advocacy of artistic freedom...
...C a r l o s Franqui and I met in February in the back room of a Spanish bookstore off New York's Union Square, an area now given over to drug-pushers, junkies, and bag ladies...
...Their seeds were planted in 1961--they are endemic to the system...
...Many people who have followed the Cuban Revolution over the years speculate that Castro had Guevara killed over a disagreement about the role the Soviets should play in Cuban affairs...
...Q: What is the government doing to combat this malaise...
...his admiration for Argentina's strongman, Juan Per6n...
...How have these economic problems affected the Cuban people ? And what has caused them ? CF: The Revolution has meant 20 years 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 of waiting in line for the Cuban people...
...He also promised to send "voluntary brigades" to Siberia to cut timber for the factories on the island...
...He [pointing to the photographer] is wearing red, which in Cuba is a serious offense...
...But they are ploys Castro uses to deflect people's attention away from the real problems in Cuba...
...If there is something good about these prisons, it's their formidable names: for instance, New Sunrise and The Future...
...13, NO...
...Q: Now, wait a minute...
...What is an animal passport ? CF: Every animal--farm animal--in Cuba has a tiny little metal plate identifying what it is, when it was purchased, and by whom...
...For the terminally ill, the prescription system has some 61 remedies or charges that can bring about a death sentence...
...The responsibility lies with the youth...
...What few buses there are break down and there aren't many cars...
...When Franqui left Havana, he managed to smuggle out of Cuba the letters, documents, and various reports which had been in the revolutionary archives...
...CF: No, of course not...
...In the past few years, a great number of people have been freed from Cuban prisons, but thousands more have been brought in to take their place...
...Tacon in Spanish means "the heel of the boot...
...While supporting himself by selling the original lithographs of two of his best friends, Pablo Picasso and Joan Mix, d, Franqui in exile re-established his contacts with the Spanish Left, the refugees from Prague's Spring, and other Eurocommunists to persuade them not to look to Castro's Cuba as the last progressive holy site...
...The Future, for instance, sounds Hke a bad joke...
...5 / MAY 1980 Carlos Franqui knows what the American Left has yet to learn: The Cuban Revolution is a fraud...
...Q: And what is the role of these pmsons within the system ? CF: Theoretically, the prisons are considered schools in the system...
...l want the readers of this interview to know one thing: Russian Communism and Castroism are a cancer of history...
...A Cuban citizen must carry an identification card or internal passport called an RD-3 card...
...This is something he didn't have in the early sixties...
...For any change to come about, protest and dis...
...But he didn't...
...Each rebellion has its different look...
...At that time, Guevara was becoming increasingly anti-Soviet...
...Actually, the problems you describe are very old...
...In fact, Cuba is only taking this position because the Soviet Union, not Cuba, wants to play on the United States' international weakness...
...It is the mother prison, totally surrounded by water...
...He died so alone and isolated after years of fighting for the Cuban Revolution...
Vol. 13 • May 1980 • No. 5
