Thus Spake Fidel Castro
Clark, Joseph
THERE'S A BEGUILING QUALITY to the style of Fidel Castro. Surely we have never known another Communist chieftain like him. Here is a leader in the Soviet Union's "family" of nations, hailed...
...Here we can draw some additional con JOSEPH CLARK clusions about the nature of "Castroism" based on Castro's analysis of Cuban-Chinese relations: • That Castro will maintain an independent posture even though he may temporarily ally himself with the Soviet or the Chinese Communist camp...
...While few would contend that freedom has fared well in Cuba under Castro, there have been social achievements...
...For socialism to accept the method, the system of absolute monarchies, is the worst absurdity because then the fight among the candidates to become the absolute monarch would begin...
...Yglesias is a warm supporter of the Castro regime but a clever reporter, so he asks two acquaintances: "Didn't it bother them...
...The Guevara-Castro theory of guerrilla warfare is based on a re 34 Draper, Castroism, p. 221...
...Boorstein has an interesting answer: "Cuba can, at considerable cost, grow more rice and reduce her trade dependence on China...
...cit., p. 81...
...Early in 1969 readers of the New York Times Magazine learned about another method for getting forced labor into the fields...
...Early in 1960 Cuba established close and large-scale economic ties with the Soviet Union and China...
...135-221...
...Now he recalls that in Oriente province new dams are being built...
...And in Cuba, if g° Draper, Castroism, p. 174...
...This, by way of introducing another favorite theme, his disappointment with all the comrades, from Moscow to Sofia, who persist in trading with Chile and other LatinAmerican countries that refuse to trade with Cuba...
...Castro and Boorstein were under no illusions, "the Revolution was engaged in a life or death struggle with the United States...
...Incredibly, small kiosks and service establishments in Cuba were taken over by the state in 1968, despite the lessons of every East European country that a "The Revolutionary Offensive," by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, in Trans-action, April 1969, P. 62...
...Castro now demands of the Soviet Communists that they grant him the same prerogatives in Latin America that the Soviet Union exercises in Eastern Europe: I ask, in the light of the facts and in the light of the bitter reality which led the Warsaw Pact countries to send their forces to crush a counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and to support a minority there .. . against a majority with rightist positions...
...They found that the youth in those lands were not being educated in the true ideals of Communism...
...4 Ibid., p. 27...
...Castro taunts the Russians "about a group The Peace Heresy of persons whose names do not even appear anywhere," those who in the Soviet version requested the invasion...
...From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc JOSEPH CLARK has the right to prevent it in one way or and "people are paid for performing volanother...
...Castro's Cuba is related to Lenin insofar as it uproots an old, decaying regime and estab 85 The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents, ed...
...The failures of economics in Castro's Cuba are almost as striking as the absence of liberty or the betrayal of the promises Castro made in his "History Will Absolve Me" address...
...that they buy manufactured goods at high prices...
...Having placed so much reliance on the sugar crop, a drought could have a most damaging effect on the economy...
...But once the Batista regime had been overthrown and Castro was firmly in the saddle, his revolution suffered the fate of the other Communist revolutions of the 20th century...
...The sad condition of civil liberties is summed up in the introduction of forced labor penalties and concentration camps...
...Then, on April 15, 1966, Major Fidel Castro is interviewed while cutting sugar cane, and he says that the crop in 1966 will come to only 5 million tons...
...For those two years there is data in the Boorstein book, and it shows that there was economic growth, mainly because of the reserves Castro inherited...
...But he also says that many workers "still live in barracks" and lack water systems, roads, and electricity...
...Castro would soon be reinstating an exaggerated form of monoculture based on sugar production...
...Carmelo Mesa-Logo, formerly an expert on social security in Castro's 1959 government, now acting director of the Center for LatinAmerican Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, has combed the Cuban literature...
...But general economic self-sufficiency is out of the question...
...The earlier failures of Cuban Communist economy (1961-1963) have been documented by the friends and fellow travelers of the regime, because the regime itself went into detail about these failures...
...The full impact of Castro's decision must be examined in the light of the long-standing Leninist indictment of imperialism for forcing colonial and underdeveloped countries to concentrate on a single crop...
...7 ONE ITEM in this picture of paradise is true: "A socialist market can be changed...
...support will come later...
...that U.S...
...Castro has an even more effective ploy whenever he finds Cuba's economic problems unpalatable for discussion...
...Because of the Chinese action, Castro said, "rice, the traditional and considerable product of Cuban consumption, would be cut back to almost half the amount of the previous year...
...But while all this is of no concern to Castro, nevertheless, "there is a series of matters worrying us," he says...
...Theodore Draper reviews all available Cuban Communist sources ' 23 and these point un 18 Ibid., p. 103...
...The imperialists in turn are confronted by "the people's desire and need to liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke...
...He explained "how we had relegated, underestimated the importance of the '69 sugar harvest, and concentrated attention above all on the '70 harvest goal...
...All that is needed are men with courage and will who refuse compromise...
...He's distinctive among Communist dictators by the frequency with which he says what's actually on his mind, and in a way, a marvelous antidote to his star-struck American admirers...
...He belabors the Soviet and East European Communists for adopting "the ideal of the society of capitalist bourgeois consumption...
...Arguments about numbers or the wishes of indigenous populations only inspire him to a still more creative use of the dialectic, that is, a Castro doctrine that beats hands down the Brezhnev doctrine: Our party did not hesitate to help the Venezuelan guerrillas when a rightist and traitorous leadership [of the Venezuelan CP], deviating from the revolutionary line, abandoned the guerrillas and entered into shameful connivance with the regime...
...Cuban workers had made these articles and made them well, before Castro...
...There has also been an extension of medical and hospital care...
...He doesn't bother to mention that GNP in Cuba declined that year, both absolutely and per capita...
...The Chinese government committed a criminal act of economic aggression," says Castro, "against our country, in a year of serious difficulties...
...Monoculture, in the Leninist view, is a policy dictated by the imperialist monopolies...
...25-26...
...That Castroism is a peculiar variant of Communism which permits itself a critical analysis of other Communist variants which comes close to a rejection of the entire Communist experience...
...He published some of his findings in the April 1969 Trans-action...
...The imperialists are waging this campaign not only in Czechoslovakia but in all East European nations including the Soviet Union...
...Yglesias doesn't conceal his satisfaction with the answers...
...It has been a long time," Castro boasts, "since we painted signs saying: Long Live Peace...
...No event since the U.S.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion gave Castro such a boost in morale as the invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Anarchists, pacifists, Trotskyists, and other varieties of socialists are being "remolded" by labor and brainwashing...
...Indeed, the critical radio, TV, and press in Czechoslovakia meant only one thing to Castro: "key communications media were taken over and fell into the hands of reactionary elements...
...They even gave an example of a girl friend who had been picked up in the raid, apparently because she likes to wear very short skirts...
...They didn't, and "absolutely none of the production goals have been met...
...Cuba's Maximum Leader detected an even more dangerous trend in Czechoslovakia—there were "a number of slogans and events" pertaining to "bourgeois freedom of the press...
...All he has to do, with very little exaggeration, is to describe—often and well—the fiasco of United States policies in Latin America...
...From the legal viewpoint, it cannot be justified...
...The European Communists, he charges, have been practicing an imperialist type of exploitation toward THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO Cuba, usually under the guise of comradely technical aid...
...Castro's condemnation of satellismo, is, for example, a condemnation of every Communist regime at one time or another, and in many cases, at all times...
...Draper summed it up in a prescient sentence: "Its most distinguishing characteristic has been an immanent violence which turns inward as readily as outward...
...He announces two years in advance that 1967 will see the greatest sugar crop in Cuban history, and when the goal isn't reached, not by a million tons or more, the 1967 crop is forgotten and he commands us to focus on the 1970 crop—which must, which will be 10 million tons...
...He told a 1961 conference how his regime would periodically become involved in "a great agricultural purpose...
...The trade unions have been smashed...
...and third, Chinese sugar stocks were so high that their people wouldn't even require coupons to buy sugar...
...the role of sugar was receding...
...19 Boorstein cites examples: shoes didn't come in pairs, seams weren't right and "the shoddiness seemed clearly due to the workmanship," not just a lack of raw materials20 Is there any evidence of improvement after the 1961 conference...
...And to what extremes we are going, when this element [Tito]—known to be revisionist, condemned historically by the revolutionary movement, which has taken the role of an agent of imperialism—was received by a nation practically as a hero...
...With the attempt to force diversification and industrialization in the first three years of the Castro regime, both agriculture and industry were set back...
...When Guevara was in Cuba, his influence was always on the side of decrying material rewards for work and emphasizing the moral equivalents...
...Castro had been accused of disregarding the wishes of the majorities of party members in various Latin-American countries when intervening in their affairs...
...Fortunately, Castro has again spoken long and vehemently about Cuba's relations with the land of "the great cultural revolution...
...A bit more difficult to understand is Castro's obvious disregard of the implications for Cuba, for example, when he asks: "And what is the good of a party where everything revolves around one man...
...35 Whether this prophet of violence, Guevara, met his death because that other prophet of violence, Castro, refused to send him aid, as the Maoists of Bolivia charge, is beyond the scope of this article.36 AMONG THE NUMEROUS MOVEMENTS and ideologies claiming descent from Marxism, Castroism seems the most maverick of all...
...26 Ibid., p. 173...
...Castro's comrade-in-arms, Che Guevara, has come to epitomize the spirit of violence even more than Castro...
...We shall never create a socialist awareness and a communist awareness out of a peso sign in the minds and hearts of men and women of the people," Castro declared on September 29, 1966...
...Cuban Communists have been astonished to find that in the East European countries "volunteer work does not exist" STILL ANOTHER HERESY of the European Communists affronts Castro: "the preaching which advocates peace...
...They try by every means to mount publicity campaigns in favor of the way of life of the developed industrial society and in favor of the tastes and the consumer goods of the developed bourgeois societies...
...This was more rapid "socialization" than Lenin ever attempted in Russia...
...Ruefully, Castro said that the Cuban 1965 sugar crop had declined, but "with less sugar, we offered more...
...Even where students and youth were recruited for labor in the fields by exhortation, the pressures were so intense that the word "voluntary" is a misuse of language...
...It is appropriate, Castro argues, for Communists to "preach peace in the enemy camp, but never in their own camp because this will only bring about the disappearance of combat spirit...
...An even more stringent tyranny replaced the old...
...The essential thing," he says, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which might lead to the breakdown of a socialist country...
...have always talked .. . about fanning the flames of liberalism, going so far as promoting and making available selected types of economic aid...
...Mining also fell, with decreasing output of nickel, copper, manganese, iron ore, and crude oil between 1957 and 1965.29 Since Castro's return to a sugar economy he has placed the greatest emphasis on achieving a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970...
...There is a breathtaking scope to this doctrine which says that Russia may invade any "socialist" country that, in the Soviet view, has departed from the party line, regardless of how the people of the invaded "socialist" country feel about this...
...8 When China's leaders refer to Cuban Communists as "revisionists," Castro says, they have reached "the height of absurdity...
...Their assignment was simple—to raise productivity, maintain labor discipline, and suppress discontent...
...20 Ibid., p. 108...
...Proof...
...On February 6, 1966, Prensa Latina issued a statement by Castro replying to a statement of the Chinese Peoples Republic, through an official in its Ministry of Foreign Trade...
...19 Ibid., p. 108...
...you, with more rice, offered less...
...When he turned from that promise in order to establish another tyranny, he earned the description—a revolution betrayed...
...But there was still another product, concerning which "there will be difficulties," Castro said, "because of reasons beyond our control, this year...
...There will be factory after factory, and Cuba will achieve a balanced, rational industrialization...
...We have seen the attitude of the workers . . . the willingness to do voluntary labor, the giving up of overtime...
...The Cuban dictator eschews the Soviet method which always speaks of 99.9 percent "majorities" and explains its interventions as responses to "invitations...
...or to send anyone a bill for technical assistance...
...because we believe that it is a duty...
...policy under which trade with Cuba has been embargoed, it's important to understand that Leninists like Castro and Boorstein consider the source of Cuba's economic troubles to be its ties with the United States...
...It's as though we had not gone through the history of voluntary Sabbath labor in Russia...
...The Maoists active among students in Latin America, Castro accuses of being payroll revolutionists, subsisting on Peking gold...
...a How then meet the demand for rice and other badly needed products...
...Castro even has the wit, in contrasting Communist regimes with absolute monarchies, to recognize the advantages of the latter: The absolute monarchies at least had the advantage of providing an heir to power...
...Since the "reforms" he condemns were taking place in the Soviet Union itself, we are left without an answer to some obvious questions: Who can set the Soviet Union right and by what means...
...These have included an expansion of educational opportunities and the elimination of much illiteracy...
...Mao Tse-tung's variant of Stalinism has enjoyed considerable influence on Castroism...
...In a speech a few days later, on April 20, Fidel casually makes the point that the biggest sugar crop in Cuban history was under the old regime, when 7.16 million tons were harvested...
...What a strange denouement, for a movement that insists on describing itself as Marxist, is contained in this diary entry by Guevara, dated April 30, 1967: On another plane: the isolation continues to be complete, sicknesses have undermined the health of some comrades, forcing us to divide forces, which has greatly diminished our effectiveness...
...The Chinese would cut back imports from Cuba to 1964 levels, and exports to Cuba to 7 Ibid., p. 200...
...It did...
...in many places all they talk about is incentives, about material incentives of all sorts, about profits and wages...
...On January 2, 1966, the seventh anniversary of Castro's assumption of power, he began to unfold the story of what was happening with one such "socialist market...
...But insofar as Castro's Cuba plays an independent and maverick role within the Communist world, it has elements of historical novelty...
...We are concerned that up to now, in the statements of the countries that sent their divisions to Czechoslovakia and in the explanation of the occurrences, no direct accusation of Yankee imperialism has been made...
...Ell Though he had used restraint on January 2, his February 6 statement accuses the Chinese government of "perfidy, hypocrisy, malevolent insinuations, and disdain for our small country...
...If anyone doubted how rosy the future would be, Castro said, "let him inform himself of the basic principles of dietetics...
...When charged with concealing the nature of the revolution he was planning, Castro asked in reply how he could possibly have said he was for socialism since the people whose support he was seeking were opposed to socialism...
...United States...
...And meeting the needs of another socialist country, establishing a sensible, mutually beneficial arrangement between two socialist countries, are good reasons...
...his expose of Communist agents is a devastating description of Comintern practice, as well as of the Comm form and of every other Communist regime, including Castro's...
...And there is no question that rice was important for Cuba...
...But the goal of 6.5 million tons of sugar for that year was not fulfilled, not by half a million tons or so...
...there was a 10 percent decline of productivity, Castro said in his May 28 speech...
...That put China in the same camp as the United States, according to Castro, and he warned "that our country had liberated itself from that imperialism 90 miles from our shores and it was not willing to permit another powerful state to come 20,000 kilometers to impose similar practices on us...
...In a 10 million ton sugar harvest," Castro said, "even to have the land surface to have such a harvest under normal conditions, a drought year could reduce the output to 6.5 or 7 million tons...
...To speak for a principle when one is in a minority is admirable in almost any system of ethics...
...Boorstein stresses the difference between Cuban economic relations with the Communist countries and those of the past with the United States...
...There's only one way to designate Yugoslavia, and surely to the Russians it has a familiar ring, "an instrument of imperialism," Castro says...
...Castro decries comparisons with Frei's Chile because Cuba, he points out, has been blockaded by imperialism and has to arm its youth...
...AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN CUBA: 1957-1966 (Index numbers: 1952-56=100) 1957-58 58-59 59-60 60-61 61-62 62-63 63-64 64-65 65-66 Total Production: 113 114 117 133 106 94 100 122 101 Per Capita Production: 106 104 105 117 92 80 83 99 80 51 JOSEPH CLARK production in 1965 would be about 600,000 quintals, less than half of the 1.25 million quintals of the year before...
...And we must learn...
...All this happened, Castro relates, on the eve of a "Solidarity Conference" of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to be held in Havana...
...A number of political slogans began to be aired in favor of the creation of opposition parties, in favor of ideas which were frankly anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist, such as the idea that the party should cease to exercise the function which a party 1 All quotes from Castro's speeches here are takenfrom texts monitored by the U.S...
...Czechoslovakia...
...It was Castro who so decided...
...But the methods that were used are not...
...Nor can one escape the parallel with a decision made in our own country, at the time of Tonkin Bay, to pursue a course of armed intervention in Vietnam...
...Judging by the reception Rockefeller received in Latin America, this prophecy may turn out to be closer to the mark than those about milk and honey in Cuba...
...his description is apt...
...His apotheosis of violent revolution, pronounced in an address to the Tricontinental Conference of January 16, 1966, has been picked up wherever middle-class revolutionaries despair of the great organizational and political efforts required to change the world...
...Castro makes clear his priorities...
...On January 2, 1966, the people still applauded mention of the Chinese Peoples Republic...
...So much is being gambled on the 1970 sugar harvest that it has already brought harm to the Cuban economy...
...Nobody will believe," Castro said, that in China a simple, unknown official in the Foreign Trade Ministry can make statements calling a liar the prime minister of a socialist state with which formal diplomatic relations are maintained, and by virtue of their political content and disrespectful form, involving the possibility of seriously affect JOSEPH CLARK ing relations between two countries like Cuba and China...
...Boorstein tells how viandas, or tubers, which are the poor man's sustenance, "began to vanish from the stores...
...I believe this is a secret to no one...
...second, the Soviet Union was making payment of a balance owed to China, "by using part of the sugar which was bought from Cuba...
...Revolutionaries whose only "crime" was loyalty to the ideals of the 26th of July Movement and to the promises of the "History Will Absolve Me" speech, have been jailed or executed...
...While it was not fully clear at the end of 1960," Boorstein writes, "the management of the Cuban economy during the first two years of the Revolution was made easier than usual by the existence of a large amount of reserves...
...And then when both were scarce, the consumer went in search of potatoes, and the stock of 10,000 quintals daily, calculated for normal situations, turned out to be insufficient...
...Confronted by military and political forces that flout the popular will and persist in waging an unconscionable war in Vietnam, youthful rebels are often drawn to an extreme, sometimes adventuristic course of action, one they hope will produce immediate results...
...Now the intrepid Castro recalls it was the Yugoslays that "applauded with both hands all those liberal reforms" in Czechoslovakia...
...der Marxist emblems...
...Castro agreed with Guevara in this respect...
...often as parody, by some of the student and other youthful rebels here and in Europe...
...Tito was received as a hero in Prague a few weeks ago...
...Do they advocate putting the accent more and more on mercantile relations and on the effects of spontaneity on these relations—on those criteria defending even the existence of the market and the beneficial effect of that market's prices...
...A socialist market need not be taken as given in the same way as a capitalist market...
...Within three or four years, Castro pledges, "we will be able to resolve this problem...
...In his speech of March 14, 1966, discussing Cuba's rice shortage, Castro completely forgets that six weeks earlier he was going to solve the rice problem by switching Cuba to higher quality products...
...There is no resemblance in fundamental qualities between Castro's Cuba as it actually exists and the ideal of Marx, "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all...
...Fellow-traveling supporters of Castro frequently refer to the "idealist" nature of the Cuban revolution...
...Meanwhile he sees a fine opportunity to settle old scores with Soviet and East European comrades...
...17 Ibid., p. 104...
...All this, mind you, under a "planned" economy...
...Indeed, the problem of Cuba's relations with China are worth pursuing from at least two viewpoints: first, as a way of examining relations among Communist governments and second, for illumination about economic conditions in Cuba and how they are affected by its relations with other Communist countries...
...The overwhelming support Castro received at first was understandable in the light of his promise of freedom...
...There has been no malanga anywhere and this naturally created immediate pressure on boniato...
...Economic Anarchy THE FAILURES OF CUBA'S ECONOMY under Castro are directly related to the planlessness of what passes for planned economy in a centrally directed, totalitarian economic system...
...They very subtly try to awaken in the masses admiration and an appetite for such tastes, for such consumer habits...
...The overthrow of Batista was an important event in the real revolution of modem times—the prolonged, interrupted, but fundamental sequence of historical action against oppression and for the achievement of democracy...
...It was George Orwell who immortalized the Stalinist use of "dialectics," whereby war becomes peace and a lie the truth...
...Foreign champions of Castroism have been particularly taken by what seemed to them the firm solidarity of the Cuban and Chinese regimes...
...Quite consciously Castro widens the scope of his indictment...
...After taking power Castro made a categoric pledge to his people: "We will not establish military service because it is not right to force a man to put on a uniform and a helmet, to give him a rifle and force him to march...
...all that the government agrees upon...
...14 1bid., p. 91...
...In his January 2, 1966 speech Castro recalls that 1965 had been designated the year of agriculture...
...Castro may never have gone past a hundred pages or so of Marx's Capital, as he once admitted, but the Stalinist "dialectic" he has mastered...
...He derides the 3 percent increase in gross national product projected for Latin-American economic development— while his own Cuban GNP declines...
...This may be a roundabout way of saying that 6.5 million tons are not 10 million...
...Still, one of Castro's boasts is well-founded —that he expresses his own opinions "in the midst of a history of humanity full of the satellite system, full of hegemonies, full of subjection...
...Most of the goals announced .. . were not met," Boorstein finds.21 How does a book devoted to unrestrained praise of Cuban economic progress cope with a complete inability to cite any progress...
...of those who direct a revolution to prevent deformations of such a nature that might make possible such circumstances...
...The one period of economic progress came in the first two years of the regime...
...29 Ibid., p. 25...
...Castro on Mao WHEN CASTRO RECENTLY ASKED the Soviet Communists how extensive was the protection of the Brezhnev doctrine, he could have been thinking about a possible Soviet strike against China...
...One aspect of Castroism, above all, has enjoyed a worldwide impact...
...Having so recently disparaged rice and promised to put in high quality crops, Castro now declares he will assign 100 youths from the Soil Institute and several engineers to develop the technology needed to produce two rice crops a year...
...Especially appealing to Cuba's leader was the Chinese emphasis on violent revolution and the deprecation of "consumerism" and material incentives as a reward for labor...
...Since they are based on official Cuban statistics Professor Mesa-Lago urges caution in reading these figures...
...Some ask, Castro says, whether enthusiasm will increase or decrease when Cuba becomes a "communist society": The spirit of sacrifice of the people increases —the discipline, the work capacity, the willingness— everything increases...
...Morosely, Castro admits that "at the outset" the Cuban Communists also committed such blunders...
...In that same speech he confessed that coffee 28 Ibid., p. 25...
...tariffs are restrictive and harmful...
...Not a single opposition newspaper or publication is permitted...
...The only policy for Cuba to follow is to develop her economy, trade freely with the socialist countries and any others that are willing...
...Such people, Castro says, think economic problems can be solved as "Mandrake the Magician would do...
...SHORTLY AFTER the SOVIET UNION led four junior partners in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Castro erupted in a torrent of comment...
...82 Quoted in The Labor Sector and Socialist Distribution in Cuba, by Carmelo Mesa-Lago (Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), p. 162...
...dozens of thousands of young people who go wherever they are sent—Isle of Pines, Pinar del Rio, Camaguey—anywhere—to live under difficult conditions, under difficult housing conditions...
...China was trying to conduct political propaganda in Cuba, Castro charged, "ignoring our government's exclusive prerogatives as head of a sovereign country...
...For example, on April 20, 1967, he lists the longstanding grievances of the Latin Americans, sunk in poverty, with population growing almost as fast as resources: —that Latin-American countries sell raw materials cheap to the U.S...
...fraction of what they used to be...
...A major accusation is that the Soviets and other East European Communists have maintained friendly relations with Yugoslavia, even calling the Yugoslav leaders, Communists...
...A recent issue of the theoretical journal of the American Maoists features an article by Jake Rosen which describes Castroite Cuba as a feudal society...
...His description of how revolutionary Communist regimes degenerate into fascism gives added point to the term totalitarianism...
...JOSEPH CLARK versal of Marxism—creating the conditions of revolution by organizing insurrections...
...And Castro is stung by some, "even leftist elements in Latin America," who say: "We have heard that Cuba has made great progress in education, in public health, but we are still in the dark about its progress in the field of economy...
...The imperialists, it seems, pursue this subtle scheme as part of an "East European policy," where their efforts are often successful, Castro notes, but "they have no chance of applying these measures, to come here to crack or soften up the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people...
...What should have been said by the invaders, if they took Castro's advice, is that Soviet tanks were shooting up American imperialism in Wenceslaus Square...
...He called upon revolutionaries to spend less time on theory and to act on the premise "that sooner or later all, or almost all the peoples, will have to take up arms to liberate themselves...
...Such statements can only come from the highest echelons of the Chinese government...
...The Chinese said they would not be able to buy the 800,000 tons of sugar as they had promised before, and they gave three reasons, according to Castro...
...But Cuba's socialist Coca Cola, Guevara found, "tastes like cough syrup...
...So, in the midst of friendly relations between two "socialist" countries, suddenly this: We never thought [Castro stated] that the Chinese government—as though hiding a dagger—reserved the right, absolutely unilaterally and without any kind of warning or previous discussion, to interpret the scope of its pledge precisely at a time when our country was not in a position nor had the means of acquiring the rice in other markets...
...The socialist market can be changed by conscious planning if there are good reasons for doing so...
...Indeed Castro has admitted that the 1968 rice crop was a mere 50,000 tons...
...First, he had some bad news: Cubans were not going to attain their goals for sugar cultivation because of lack of rainfall...
...He had begun to despair because there was so much detente and peace in the air...
...15 Ibid., P. 92...
...16 Ibid., p. 102...
...The violation was flagrant...
...At this point we can draw some conclusions about Castroism in the light of his analysis of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: • Castroism adopts the traditional Leninist precept that opponents of the regime must not be allowed "to talk and write freely...
...The awkward thing about placing dates on your promises is that they fall due...
...Others may have been enticed by the Czech springtime, but long before the Soviet invasion, Castro says, he "did not have any doubt—and this is a very important thing— I did not have any doubt that the Czechoslovak regime was developing dangerously toward a substantial change in the system...
...34 The elevation of violence and war as instruments of social change is hardly new in political philosophy...
...fundamental...
...The Czech economist Ota Sik pointed out some time ago that whenever a regime emphasizes "moral" incentives as against "material" incentives, it is probably imposing forced labor on its people...
...He was eloquent about coffee production in 1970 because he wanted to explain that "What we have is an enormous deficit of coffee...
...Before Castro there had been a gradual increase of rice, coffee, beans, fruit, and vegetable crops...
...China's actions, he says, raise a fundamental issue: whether in the world of tomorrow the powerful nations can assume the right to blackmail, extort, pressure, attack, and strangle small peoples...
...In his February 6, 1966 statement taking the Chinese Communists to task, Castro cited his militant bona fides to refute the Chinese accusations of revisionism: We speak in the name of a people who did not hesitate—for the sake of the strength of the revolutionary movement, for the sake of the socialist camp...
...The choice of the workers meant nothing when Castro decided to replace the July 26th Movement members, the men who fought for Castro's revolution, with the old-line Communists, who had opposed Castro's revolution...
...All this was part of an enormous propaganda effort and it must have had important impact among Cuban youth...
...Castro, however, upholds the right of military intervention by a minority so as to teach the benighted what's right...
...When the Cuban trade unions were reconstituted in 1959, David Salvador, a labor hero of the July 26th Movement, imprisoned under Batista, was the obvious choice of the Cuban workers for leadership...
...After having made clear to China that Cuba would allow no interference with its sovereign rights, Castro says, "the Chinese government has increased the shipment and mass distribution of propaganda material to our country...
...Draper has called it a "do-it-yourself" version of Marxism-Leninism...
...Castro began the explanation...
...Castro speaks directly about relations among "socialist" countries in the brave new world of tomorrow...
...During the past days we have seen with sorrow the things that men are capable of doing when they degenerate...
...They were going to reduce rice exports to Cuba by 150,000 tons, Castro said...
...But the Castro who in 1966 was so stoutly defending the "absolute equality" that must prevail among the peoples, large and small, is the same who later sanctioned the invasion of Czechoslovakia because national sovereignty must give way before "higher interests...
...In a speech broadcast on November 26, 1965, he projected 2 million quintals of coffee by 1970 (a quintal is 100 kilograms or about 220 pounds...
...The other slogan is to work, and with this law we shall work and produce more.33 THE SINGLE-MINDED AUDACITY that helped Castro lead a revolution to overthrow a brutal dictatorship earns him an important place in history...
...12 Ibid., p. 82...
...And there are intellectuals who, repelled by the authoritarianism of the Russians and Chinese, give their loyalty to Castroism because they think it is somehow more "democratic...
...Parallel to the Brezhnev doctrine there is JOSEPH CLARK the Castro doctrine, which upholds the right of Cuban Communists to intervene in other Latin-American countries without regard to the wishes of the people, or even the majority of CP members, in those countries...
...Not one enlistment has been obtained...
...One searches Boorstein's glowing pages for data to support his contention that there has been economic progress...
...Castro scorns to wait for 1984, he berates the Soviet Communists for failing to write a proper scenario of the Czech invasion...
...there, the masses must be kept in constant readiness for war, military intervention, and revolution...
...The lack of bal ance in the economy becomes accentuated...
...it is related to Stalin, insofar as that new dictatorship bears essential features of a totalitarian state...
...One of the most enthusiastic is Edward Boorstein, an American economist who worked three and a half years in Castro's Cuba and who dedicated a book on his experiences "to Commandante Guevara...
...But, alas, not in the way Boorstein meant it...
...or those who continued to uphold the banner of THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO rebellion...
...But again, a delightful aspect of Castro is that he disdains the nonsense his Western supporters attribute to him...
...And that's as long as it took Castro in Cuba...
...There were long-haired youths, outlandishly dressed by conventional standards, in Havana and other cities...
...He devotes not a moment to the way the Czechoslovak masses—workers, students, intellectuals, party members— entered the political arena for the first time in 20 years...
...SOON THEREAFTER, IN ANOTHER ADDRESS to the nation, on March 14, 1966, Cuba's leader describes China as a fascist society...
...But she proved to the police that "she works and shares none of the hippie ideology," so they released her...
...Castro and Guevara appeared on the historical scene with a successful revolution and a theory to go with it: revolution made to order, anywhere...
...Wherever these are clear and precise, the chances are he is talking about the future...
...It is a minimum responsibility, Castro says, of the more advanced "socialist" countries to help the technological development of the less developed "socialist" countries...
...Rubles or Yuan didn't turn out to be the same as dollars...
...10 The Castro Revolution: Myths and Realities, by Theodore Draper (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962...
...lishes a new dictatorship...
...The Chinese answer to Cuban remonstrances against Chinese propaganda in Cuba came "in the form of brutal economic reprisal for purely political reasons...
...Castro also taunts the U.S...
...He warns the Cuban people that he would never allow such a state of affairs to arise: No circumstances of that kind will ever occur in our country...
...Since all the Cuban kids now learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, even a child can now ask: what if the 1970 goal is attained...
...Nor was this the only source of forced labor in Cuba...
...The root of all "opportunist deviations" in the "socialist countries" must be sought in the dangers of "consumerism...
...and we have seen that this has increased in our country year by year, as awareness grows...
...Those who thought you could get people to work better "by appealing to individual selfishness" were reactionary...
...government...
...Castro taunts Pravda for accusing Czechoslovakia of adopting "spontaneous mercantile relations" (Market economy devices) while the U.S.S.R...
...Starting with the crisis year of 1962, when the Gross National Product was 3.079 billion pesos (at current prices), here are the GNP figures for subsequent years: 27 25 Draper, Castroism, pp...
...Above all, Boorstein wants us to know that a necessary condition for Cuba's economic emancipation was the sundering of ties with the United States...
...11 These included not only unutilized resources and dollar holdings, but, as Boorstein shows, 5 million head of cattle, factories with stocks of spare parts and raw materials, retail stores with large supplies of consumer goods...
...10 What is odd is how readily the myth is accepted that while Communist Cuba lacks liberty it has made much economic progress...
...Actually the 1967 harvest reached 6.128 million tons, respectable by the standards of Castro Cuba but far below the pre-Castro record...
...Who will invade Moscow as Moscow invaded Prague...
...Boorstein reiterates: "The rapid progress of the Cuban economy in the early years after the Revolution took power was made possible by the reserves...
...Of all agriculture 70 percent was "socialized," and the remaining private farming was hobbled by state controls...
...That Castro has not extended liberty to Cuba is generally acknowledged, even by such admirers as Paul Sweezy and Herbert Matthews...
...And with its dependence on the "socialist" market, the example of China surely shows what a gamble that is for Cuba...
...blockade against Cuba...
...Internally, however, it maintains the saddest single thread running through all Communist societies—suppression of liberty, regimentation of persons...
...32-34, 47...
...WHEN CUBA BEGAN its "socialist" planning and large-scale trade with the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and other Communist countries, its economy moved from failure to disaster...
...in deed, not in word...
...Collectivization may be an obsolete term because state farms have become the dominant agricultural unit...
...In the same way that Castro handles the problem— through an enthusiastic reliance on the future tense: there will be mammoth increases in the production of chickens, eggs, viandas, beans, fats and oils, pork and beef, and other foodstuffs...
...of which we shall never repent—we agreed to the installation of strategic thermonuclear missiles in our territory...
...Castro is especially pleased because the Soviet action has created additional obstacles to ratification of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty...
...Lack of diversification will be felt even more strongly with a successful crop in 1970...
...instead there is a severe labor shortage in the sugar fields...
...Castroism has exercised a notable influence on the militant student and middleclass rebels of Europe and America, partly because it sheds a romantic glow (best preserved by refraining from a careful examination of its domestic realities) and partly because it responds to their sense of impatience...
...Countries that needed modem technology, Castro charges, "were sold old and obsolete weapons" instead...
...Although faced with a Chinese rice embargo, Castro declared that in the future the Cuban diet would "be much richer in proteins, vitamins, minerals, and energy than when our diet was based on rice...
...Surely we have never known another Communist chieftain like him...
...Often when discussing Cuba's economic situation, Castro cites with true and telling effect the half million sugar workers who used to be unemployed for several months a year under the old regime...
...But then again he isn't so satisfied with that criterion, because the European party with just those powerful resources takes a rightist, conciliatory, and conniving position...
...The Czech crisis, Castro finds, is a good time for admitting "some bitter truths" including "concepts about financing, benefits, profits, and material incentives that were applied to foreign trade organizations" in order "to sell an underdeveloped country any old weapon...
...It's simple: "Here we have the facts...
...Then he makes the specific promise that in 1967 Cuba will have the greatest sugar crop in its history...
...Then the situation changed drastically...
...The young recruits were put to work cutting sugar cane, and the seven pesos a month they got was only a fraction of the wages workers received...
...What stand the Cubans would take in such an event may be discovered from examining Castro's views on China...
...What is not appropriate here," Castro states, "is to say that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak state was not violated...
...Guevara dwelt on something "which people were beginning to notice and wonder about: a deterioration in the quality of goods...
...Mesa-Lago indicates a correlation between declining production and state enterprises, central planning and the substitution of "moral incentives" for material incentives...
...The history of compulsory military service in Cuba is a story of an important "incentive" to make people work, an "incentive" neither "material" nor "moral...
...Those who could not prove that they were working, or that they belonged to Communist mass organizations, "were sent off to state farms where work and study, the Cuban cure for all ills, is expected to rehabilitate them...
...The Soviets offered to take up a high percentage of the Cuban sugar crop, at favorable prices...
...The table below traces falling agricultural production from 1957 to 1966...
...It's quite another thing, he notes, when "about 80 percent of Cuba's trade is with the socialist countries and its dollar earnings are only a 11 Boorstein, op...
...to risk the dangers of thermonuclear war...
...We believe that on this continent, in the case of all or almost all peoples, the battle will have to take on the most violent forms...
...Frankly, it has absolutely no legality...
...fit only for herds who move by conditioned reflexes...
...Cuba, for example, has been conducting the one kind of "technical aid" program it can perform, by sending arms to other Latin-American Communists, but only to those actually dedicated to armed rebellion...
...In this philosophy of revolutionary right, one wonders who decides what is right and revolutionary, especially when such decisions involve armed intervention...
...He cites figures showing that livestock production fell 6 percent between 1961 and 1966 and the per capita decline was 12 percent...
...And 20 years ago Cuba was diversifying agriculture, to boot...
...The implications of Castro's assault on Mao Tse-tung delivered on March 14, 1966, far transcend the phenomenon of Chinese Communism: If we are going to argue basically, we must tell some basic truths and we must unmask everything that is of fascist type hidden un 8 The fraternal compliment is returned...
...I ask if they will cease supporting also in Latin America those rightist, reformist, submissive and conciliatory leaderships, enemies of revolutionary armed struggle, who oppose the people's liberation struggle...
...when one interest must give way to another interest in order that romantic and idealist positions that do not accord with these realities may be avoided...
...It took Lenin about a year to smash the Russian trade unions...
...business takes out huge profits from investments in resource-rich LatinAmerican countries whose people are terribly poor...
...Another problem of the old regime persists—the sharp contrast between Havana and the interior...
...THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO has attempted this—service and distribution, from pretzel vending to dry cleaning, tend to disappear to the degree that they are nationalized...
...By 1968 retail trade and small service establishments were nationalized to make it 100 percent for industry, construction, transportation, banking, wholesale, retail, and foreign trade...
...As a result, he says, there is an "exodus to Havana" which intensifies the water and housing problem in the capital...
...There are no unemployed in the countryside...
...We did not take into account how many members of the Central Committee or Politbureau were involved, because right has nothing to do with numbers...
...Boorstein finds Cuban-Chinese trade, especially of sugar for rice, an excellent example of the true mutuality of economic relations between Communist countries...
...But Castro raised it to a very high level indeed...
...This achievement has to be measured in terms of the 70 percent literacy before Castro came to power...
...Considering the attitudes of the more extreme rebels in our colleges, it is a bit mysterious that they happily cite Castro and Guevara, along with Mao Tse-tung, as redeemers of our time...
...Nevertheless malanga was forgotten, despite the many times that we have said that if there is nothing else to eat we will eat malanga...
...Brezhnev to Castro THE INVASION of Czechoslovakia gives Castro an opportunity to defend his own intervention, with arms and men, in the affairs of other Latin-American countries and other Communist parties...
...unteer work...
...At times Castro seems content to leave such decisions in Europe to the party with the biggest battalions and the most missiles...
...86 "Bolivian CP (M-L) Rebuts Castro," by Oscar Zamora, in World Revolution, January—March 1969...
...when in our country and in our territory—with full and absolute right, which we have not renounced and...
...The most unlikely emotion to be associated with Castro is embarrassment...
...And indeed with such statements from friends, what remains to be said by anyone else...
...and the other republics of Latin America for projecting a low rate of growth-3 percent—of GNP, in 1966...
...Hence, Cubans desperately needed that Chinese rice...
...It does not enter our minds to send anyone a bill for arms...
...Castro promised that "by 1970 we will be among the best fed peoples, not only in quantity, but in quality, thanks to our present efforts, thanks to the development of our essentially agricultural economy during this first year...
...cit., p. 7. THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO rect to say that the Russians were responsible for Cuba's reversion to monoculture...
...Union Busting ABSOLUTELY essential for imposing a system of labor in a totalitarian regime is the destruction of trade unions...
...And that in turn was by way of informing folks that the 1969 crop was only 4,277,482 tons, a decline from the 1968 harvest of 4,735,000 tons...
...That product is rice...
...But the strangest development of all was the return to sugar monoculture, far and beyond the degree to which it existed in the two or three decades before Castro came to power...
...24 Well, the monopolies were gone, and by 1963 it wouldn't even be corDraper (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), pp...
...Castro, for instance, is a charter member of the `Brezhnev doctrine" club...
...Unfortunately, the Maximum Leader was vague about how Cuba was going to make available more nutritious, high protein food in place of the rice which was disappearing for two reasons —first, Cuba's reversion to sugar monoculture, second China's embargo...
...This East European policy has developed "the art and refinement of consumer tastes and luxury...
...There is not enough cement, Castro says in a July 26, 1966 speech, and even if they built 100,000 living units a year between 1970 and 1980 they would not have enough housing by that year...
...First, China itself had a big sugar harvest...
...Now Cuba would benefit from economic relations, in contrast to exploitation by the U.S...
...Although nobody within or outside Czechoslovakia has been able to uncover Czech capitalists straining to recover power in 1968, Castro warned that "the right to exercise political activities cannot be given to the old exploiters...
...dozens of thousands of workers that go off to effect the harvests, leaving their families behind...
...Then Castro describes how "the new socialist man" conducts business with his newer comrades...
...5 Ibid., p. 223...
...27 Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Trans-action, p. 24...
...They are the result of having introduced the style of absolute monarchies into the contemporary socialist revolutions...
...What have been the economic fruits of the regime...
...Clear enough...
...On May 27, 1969, Castro made a speech which might have been intended to prepare for a possible fiasco with respect to the goal of 10 million tons of sugar in 1970...
...With the awful example before him of the Czech working-class demand for bread and liberty, Castro thunders: The international reality imposes all sorts of sacrifices, not only the danger of sacrificing our blood but also sacrifices of a material nature...
...Today the great task of the CTC-R and of the trade unions comprising it, is to increase production, activate voluntary workers, augment discipline at work, increase yield, and improve the quality of what is produced.32 Activating "voluntary labor" is no small part of the role of the unions in Cuba...
...Rice production in 1960, shortly after Castro came to power, was 323,000 metric tons . 9 These were the fruits of abandoning diversification of Cuban argiculture and placing reliance on trade with the "socialist" world...
...When the people know that the realities of the world...
...The latter, it turns out, sought to do in Cuba what Cuba had been doing in Venezuela, Bolivia, Guatemala, and elsewhere...
...Moreover, not only did we agree to having them brought in, we disagreed with their removal...
...They would soon be told in more detail...
...Here is a leader in the Soviet Union's "family" of nations, hailed in Moscow each May Day, who yet lashes out with equal acerbity at the Soviet Union and China, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the United States and the Communist parties of Latin America...
...e Boorstein stresses the advantages of Cuba's 3 Ibid., p. 27...
...China was attempting to achieve political aims by economic warfare, "an obvious extortionist position" evidenced by the trade negotiations...
...Dis 18 Ibid., p. 89...
...National sovereignty is a goal to be proclaimed when seeking power, but once power has been won there are "higher" interests, defined of course by the Maximum Leader, which can violate national sovereignty...
...If the Russians are to learn the logical lessons of their intervention in Czechoslovakia, Castro tells them to dispense with "idyllic hopes of an improvement in relations with the...
...That doctrine is defended by Castro in the name of "realities," not idealism...
...Stressing his equal contempt for the liberal Czech leaders and the former Stalinist leaders, Castro recalls how "that leadership, with which we maintained relations from the beginning, sold us many arms that were war booty captured from the Nazis and we have been paying for weapons that belonged to the Hitlerite troops that occupied Czechoslovakia...
...THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO trade with "socialist" countries in contrast to the exploitation of commercial relations by the capitalists...
...Given such confrontation, Castro admonishes the peace propagandists in the Communist camp, that "these realities are not erased simply by preaching in our own homes, by an excessive desire for peace...
...22 Ibid., pp...
...Reviewing the liberalization in Czechoslovakia after the removal of Novotny, Castro found: A veritable liberal hysteria began to develop over there...
...Not only was there a shortage of the more nutritious food, but even the poorest food disappeared...
...Here he is not even discussing the actions of a minority within a country, but of an armed minority from one country, intervening in support of the minority of a minority party in another country...
...He told how planning failed because it was based on the assumption that goods which were expected would arrive...
...Should Cuba have continued to develop her own rice production—as she had been doing under the old regime...
...So we'd like to pursue two major questions here: What kind of outlook motivates Castro...
...They discovered soon enough that a factory, having to import its raw materials at prices higher than the prices at which the finished goods could have been purchased in the first place, was not much of an asset...
...He does so in his April 20, 1966 speech and again recounts the significant gains made in public education and public health...
...On the Soviet contention that it was not violating Czech sovereignty but was invited into Czechoslovakia, Castro pours out his contempt...
...Boorstein makes it clear that this happened before Cuba's nationalization of American firms...
...As yet we have been unable to establish contact with Joaquin...
...When Castro and Guevara set about industrializing Cuba in the early sixties, they did so with little regard for costs and sources of raw materials, or for incentives by which men work...
...But the argument is made that if Communism is delinquent in personal and political freedom, it provides prodigies of economic development, for which Cuba is cited by many foreign admirers...
...The R stands for revolution, but the fascinating thing about Lazaro Pena, named by Castro to head the organization, is that in 1939 Batista the butcher had appointed the very same Pena to head the CTC, without the R. Said Pena: Our trade union movement has two slogans...
...Indeed, he would argue that Brezhnev came to the doctrine late...
...Castro, 31 Draper, The Castro Revolution, pp...
...Jose Yglesias, writing in the New York Times Magazine of January 12, 1969, describes how "without warning, the police ringed the hippie area and indiscriminately led everyone in the streets into Leylard buses and drove them off to the police stations...
...One consequence of this policy was a drastic decline of rice production...
...The bias favors the regime...
...This is hardly more than population growth, Castro says...
...Again, Castro uses his discussion of the Czech events to air grievances against the Soviet leaders...
...but not for long...
...There was a special reason for offering this grand goal...
...In Moscow Khrushchev was stressing the importance of an international division of labor among the Communist countries...
...All such paradoxical aspects of the Castro revolution bespeak its distinctive, often mad character...
...THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO —that U.S...
...Breaking those ties, they said, was an essential condition for Cuba's progress...
...Ibid., p. 223...
...Castro had moved from cooperatives to Soviet style Kolkhozes, and then mainly to state farms...
...For any who may have a lingering doubt that Tito is an agent of American imperialism, Castro spells out the evidence...
...Again and again Castro referred to one of the reasons China was giving for cutting Cuban sugar imports, namely that the Soviet Union was reshipping Cuban sugar to China...
...In short, that power should cease to be a function of the Communist Party...
...Castro scorns "some European Communist parties" who "were starting to look favorably upon the liberalization movement...
...The threat of war exists, Castro says, because of imperialism...
...Soon that changed...
...26 From 1964 to the present the decline and stagnation in Cuba's economy has continued...
...Then, as though to make even the most backward Cubans understand policy-making in their own country, Castro explains: "It is very important because I think that this opinion of mine, which I honestly held and still hold, is very important in order to determine what our position is in connection with these events...
...Castro blows his top in front of the television cameras...
...We are against all those bourgeois liberal reforms within Czechoslovakia, but we are also against the liberal economic reforms that were taking place in Czechoslo JOSEPH CLARK vakia and that have also been taking place in other socialist countries...
...One, is to do always whatever the revolutionary power decides...
...No, they were not shocked...
...But one will also find evidence of present conditions: economic decline, crop failure, and retrogression...
...China had failed not only to warn about any impending curtailment of rice shipments, but had actually promised "to increase its rice exports to Cuba to 250,000 tons...
...Back to Monoculture TOWARD THE END OF 1963 Castro made it known that sugar would become the touchstone of Cuba's economy...
...Significant, too, was the decline in yield per acre this year...
...21 Ibid., p. 127...
...In midNovember 1965, they had sent a trade delegation to Peking to negotiate increasing commerce, especially in sugar and rice...
...And Castro reveals a little bit more about the split with China...
...Meanwhile Castro reverted to a standard device for coping with bad news: he talked about the future...
...So there would be no mistaking the kind of relations now existing between Cuba and China, Castro accused the Chinese government of having joined the U.S...
...By developing consumeroriented systems, Castro contends, they forget the need for waging war against the imperialists...
...Evidence of what really happened in Czechoslovakia was abundant...
...and we are still paying for them...
...Only the more sophisticated listeners that day could appreciate the gravity of the conflict that had arisen between Cuba and China...
...The peasant base has not yet been developed although it appears that through planned terror we can neutralize some of them...
...What happened in China, according to Castro, is "a result in part, of having confused Marxism-Leninism with fascism, with absolutism...
...It does not even enter our minds to mention it...
...1968 4 billion pesos For agriculture alone the figures are even more depressing...
...17 Matches, the Commandante says, are a disgrace, they never light...
...1963 3.788 billion pesos 1964 4.202 billion pesos 1965 4.136 billion pesos 1966 4.039 billion pesos 1967 n.a...
...The man who asked that question is Prime Minister of his government, First Secretary of the Party, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, President of the Central Planning Board and Director of the INRA (National Agrarian Reform Institute...
...he said there were many more Don Quixotes than Sancho Panzas among the people...
...being aware of the dangers caused by their unwillingness to make these sacrifices when their minds have been influenced and softened by an incessant, senseless, and unexplainable campaign for peace...
...But that sort of nonsense is over...
...Castro made that last forecast by way of introducing the remark: "You know that this year's sugar harvest was small...
...Bluntly he analyzes the schemes of the capitalists: The imperialists...
...Of no concern to Castro is what the working people of Czechoslovakia wanted...
...JOSEPH CLARK you dislike this arrangement, you can't organize a strike or even a demonstration...
...For will a people as revolutionary as the Cubans "not be capable of changing a habit of consumption of an article that is not essential to the health of the people...
...Salvador was soon back in the same jails where he had served under Batista.sl All this was necessary, of course, to transform the unions into state agencies for driving labor...
...30 When compulsory military service was introduced in 1963, the 1959 pledge went the way of all the "History Will Absolve Me" promises...
...LOOKING for a clue as to how the whole thing developed in Czechoslovakia, Castro distinguishes his views from those of his Soviet comrades...
...Draper has shown that there was far more diversification of agriculture in the decade before Castro came to power than in the years following the 1963 decision to concentrate on sugar...
...The agrarian failures were matched by industrial fiasco...
...Castro lectures Communists everywhere that troubles such as developed in Czechoslovakia can be expected whenever workers get notions about better living standards...
...As one wades through Castro's speeches one finds many statistics...
...16 At the same conference Che Guevara also described the people's miseries...
...and Introduc tion by Daniel James (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), p. 151...
...THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO should exercise within a socialist society and that it should play the role of guide, reviewer, and the like—above all, a sort of spiritual director...
...Boorstein wrote: "It was the monopolies that geared the Cuban economy to sugar...
...Raul Castro has an apt exposition of the role of the Cuban trade unions: Previously it was necessary for trade union leaders to constantly struggle for advantages, for obtaining more profits from the capitalist magnates...
...China's "bad faith," Castro charged, was revealed by the abrupt manner in which the action was taken...
...We will see...
...Needless to say, in 1967 Castro didn't refer to his promise of April 20, 1966...
...The slanders and lies spread by these supporters of China, Castro charges, are "shameful proof of the damage that satellitism (satellismo) does and can do in the world, the fact that some agents—because they are nothing more than agents of that nation— have committed the stupidity, the historic mistake of writing slanderous articles against the Cuban revolution on Chinese orders...
...In his "Marxism" the most dangerous illusion is the hope for a plentitude of consumer goods and services...
...they would "either mimic or imitate everything that came here...
...They were extending this effort "among the officers of the revolutionary armed forces of Cuba," Castro said, "up to the general staffs of the army...
...23 Castroism: Theory and Practice, by Theodore mistakably to collectivization as the source of the retrogression...
...1960 levels...
...Perhaps the most abject description of the functions of the unions was given by the man whom Castro appointed to head the CTC-R...
...21 The increase in agricultural production that took place from 1958 to 1961 occurred when most of the land was still privately owned...
...DISCUSSION of Castro's economics often return, quite properly, to the matter of incentives...
...Three years have passed and the problem has not been solved...
...Castro proudly boasts of intervention in Guatemala and Bolivia, as well as Venezuela, even though "the revolutionaries remained in the minority...
...Odd how sovereignty becomes a right under some circumstances...
...They trusted the authorities...
...Peace can be preached in capitalist countries, but preaching it in the "socialist" countries is impermissible...
...DEPLORING how many years of work are needed "to emerge from this poverty," Castro comes up with another forecast: "between 1970 and 1980 Yankee imperialism will not have one square inch of imperialist property left in Latin America...
...My main source has been Castro's speeches.' One person, if no more, enjoys freedom of speech in Cuba...
...Cuba's orientation, he said, had been toward increasing the volume of trade with China...
...12 But once its inheritance was used up, the Castro regime had to depend on its own policies and the help of the Communist world...
...In "a brief analysis of our position with regard to...
...Of course this story of revolutionaries, who in spite of having done good things in their lives have committed great barbarities later at the end of their lives, is not new...
...Therefore, when we have that dam water," he says, "we will be able to produce most of the rice we consume in our country on the basis of two crops a year and high yields...
...Castro went on for some 12,000 TV words on August 24, 1968...
...But it remains just possible that the free-wheeling and maverick style of the regime may lead to internal events facilitating a return to the course of 1959...
...whether in the world of tomorrow, which the revolutionaries are struggling to establish, there are to continue THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO to prevail the worst methods of piracy, oppression, and filibusterism which have been established in the world since a class society has existed by regimes of slavery, feudal regimes, absolute monarchies, the bourgeois states, and, in the contemporary world, the imperialist states...
...There's a Kafkaesque quality about the discussion by Boorstein and other fellow travelers about "moral" versus "material" incentives...
...THERE'S A BEGUILING QUALITY to the style of Fidel Castro...
...It's almost an understatement when Castro says "this naturally leads to discontent, disgust, misunderstandings, and a deterioration of relations with the underdeveloped world...
...Instead, "the youth there are highly influenced by all the ideas and by all tastes of the Western European countries...
...He instructs the CP chieftains of Italy and Spain to beware of Czech Communists ready to give enemies of socialism the right "to talk and write freely...
...Castro now directs his most charming invective against "satellite relationships" among Communists, whether countries, parties, or "agents," as he now describes foreign Communists who take the Maoist position...
...18 Remember that Cuba was not like many of the East European countries that were just beginning to produce such consumer goods...
...If you add the sugar harvest totals of 1969 and 1970 they won't come to more than those of two years back-to-back 20 years ago...
...But occasionally he also sets goals for other products...
...158-59...
...He became Secretary General of the Cuban unions...
...Other Communists may have waited to see, but not the Maximum Leader: "I reached that conclusion at the outset...
...We can only express our happiness over this," he exults...
...credits are often onerous, or insufficient, or must be spent in the U.S...
...Gleefully, he reads a dispatch from Washington quoting Secretary of State Rusk to the effect that Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia will hinder rapprochement between East and West...
...He used a clever metaphor to make his point...
...And more in line with Stalinism, the proletariat and even party members must be limited and controlled by the Maximum Leadership...
...14 Castro described how the poor man's food disappeared...
...Always in the forefront, Castro warns, are "the dangers of softening up" which come from trying "to move the masses only through incentives and only through aspirations of consumption...
...that these kids were summarily rounded up and sent off to farms without the opportunity to defend themselves in court...
...The standard of living will rise much more than the 60 percent per capita projected by Regino Boti.22 [Emphasis in original.] About the roots of Cuba's agrarian crisis the reader will find little in Boorstein...
...An improvement over dialectics...
...THUS SPAKE FIDEL CASTRO in one of his speeches, boasts of workers who stay on the job consecutively and without asking overtime pay, for 16, 32, even 48 hours at a stretch...
...JOSEPH CLARK cussing the shortage of tooth paste, Guevara cautions the hoarders: "I am advising people not to hoard toothpaste and then come around after four months with the protest they have a stone in the tube...
...In our judgment, the decision on Czechoslovakia can be explained only from the political viewpoint and not from a legal viewpoint...
...That should settle the matter...
...And judging by the statements of black nationalists, such as Stokely Carmichael and Robert Williams, who sought asylum in Cuba, there is even some discrimination based on color and race...
...Little effort was made to conceal a major purpose—to get cheap, forced labor...
...When Cuba's dollar earnings "were running over $700 million per year," they could buy raw materials for industry, machinery, food, clothing, paper supplies, jute sacks, Boorstein explains...
...But Castro was far too realistic to think he would take in the sugar crops, or run the country, on revolutionary fervor...
...3 The sale of 50,000 tons of Cuban sugar to China in January 1960 was "an even greater act of independence than the agreement with the Soviet Union...
...If so, Boorstein, who carries the story through 1966, doesn't provide any...
...Tragically, this aspect has been seized upon and imitated, S8 Quoted in ibid., p. 164...
...Background for any survey of economic developments in Cuba is the extremely rapid and practically total nationalization of industry and collectivization of agriculture...
...He is impatient with all the talk of "rightism" and "deviationism" in Czechoslovakia...
...He reminded the delegates that "the duty of every revolutionary is to effect the revolution...
...When Guevara put the theory to the test in Bolivia he faced a rather formidable obstacle, more important than the CIA or the Bolivian armed forces, namely, the refusal of the people to rally to his support...
...On many occasions," he declares, "they sold us industries whose technology was very backward...
...Castro says there were even provinces that forgot there was a sugar harvest in 1969...
...These "are not always pleasant circumstances," Castro says about the results of 1968 and 1969...
...is pursuing the very same economic reforms: Does this mean that they are also going to brake certain trends in the field of economy in the Soviet Union, too...
...24 Boorstein, op...
...At that time we analyzed who was right—the group committed to maneuvering and political chicanery, which betrayed the fighters...
...That such a revolution, in the rare instance where it succeeds, quickly becomes institutionalized as a one-party dictatorship is a lesson some learn too late...
...We have seen the results of many of the economic ideas about trade transactions carried out in desperation to sell old weapons...
...What other Communist leader could mock the Soviet assurances that they had in no way violated Czech sovereignty in August 1968, and who else could first call it a military invasion, without any legal basis whatsoever, and then defend it as wholly necessary...
...Then, when Castro ordered an overwhelming emphasis on sugar again, the ground that had been gained in diversification was lost 25 One can indeed wonder "whether a revolution was really necessary to restore sugar to the place it had in the Cuba of the 1920s...
...In that book, The Economic Transformation of Cuba, Boorstein is ecstatic about a Chinese economic discovery called "walking on two legs," a figure of speech which describes the importance of both centralization and arousing the enthusiasm of local authorities .2 2 The Economic Transformation of Cuba, by Edward Boorstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 258...
...13 Though I disagree with official U.S...
...Now he warms up his adjectives and the Chinese Communists are "venemous . . . insinuating . . . subtle cynical...
...that U.S...
...16 Coca Cola is practically a necessity in Cuba, "given the climate...
...That would be fiction and a lie...
...PREOCCUPIED by the problem of incentives that will make men work in a society where living standards are not improved, Castro poses a frank question...
...demand making investments and sacrifices to strengthen the country's defenses, the masses will be much better prepared to work enthusiastically in this direction...
...If we are going to give aid and if we are going to mention it every day, what we are going to do is constantly humiliate those to whom we are giving aid...
...One can't find them, at least for the years following 1961...
...Reading this description of Chinese-Cuban relations, one must bear in mind how difficult it has been for Communists traditionally to "equate" anything in the capitalist world and the "socialist" world...
...By the middle sixties Castro abandoned the concentration on industry and decided to emphasize agriculture...
...He recalls the frightful experiences of Cuban visitors to "more than one socialist country of Europe...
...127-28...
Vol. 17 • January 1970 • No. 1
