Reviews
Clark, Joseph & Pachter, Henry & Perlin, Terry M.
CUBA: THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM, by Hugh Thomas. New York: Harper & Row. 1696 pp. $20. GUERRILLAS IN POWER: THE COURSE OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION, by K. S. Kar61. Translated from the French by...
...Evidently, the Cuban Revolution could not be content with self-congratulations and public merriment...
...the popular leader may establish a dictatorship which he may bolster by coopting pseudorepresentative groups...
...Only Lazaro Pena, a black tobacco worker, and Jose Miguel Perez, a transport worker who had come from the anarchists, remained the Party's solid links to the trade union movement...
...the socialist states have demonstrated their corruptness...
...This period came to an abrupt end when Castro decided to succeed and achieve...
...It is fine to expose the shibboleths of statist propaganda— and this is the chief contribution of anarchists...
...A word may be necessary about U.S...
...then, his defiance of a great world power and the assertion of national sovereignty against great adversity...
...Its 1,500 pages of text, 14 appendixes, plus meticulous bibliography, glossary, maps, and plates, leave nothing unsaid and undiscussed: whether the first white man to set foot on Cuba might have been a Jew...
...But statistics do not distinguish between acclimatized Americans and absentee owners any more than history cares whether the frequent U.S...
...yet it meant little in terms of real social power— and therefore Castro not only was able to but had to discard it...
...He seems to me the political equivalent of what Herbert Read, the British art critic and anarchist, deemed the true artist: "what the Germans call ein Ruttier, an upsetter of the established order...
...When President Grau San Martin in turn ousted Pena from the trade union palace, very few workers followed their leader to Mount Aventinus...
...The Ricketts then wrote a book, Prisoners of Liberation, in which they heaped high praise on the Chinese political and legal system...
...HERE we come to the most tragic, and theoretically most difficult, turn of the Revolution...
...Castro himself told Karol, in anwer to a question on elections, that 50 percent of the people were "true revolutionaries...
...At that time the Party claimed its highest membership figure ever before 1959-23,300...
...the army takes over and imposes its own puritan discipline until its leaders succumb to the seduction of power...
...It is a strange commentary on the experts' political sophistication and on the revolutionary consciousness of the Left that the posture Castro strikes vis-a-vis the powers has been able to obscure the failure of the Cuban Revolution as revolution...
...360 pp...
...For Bookchin, who is neither democrat nor elitist, the answer is the grupo de afinidad (affinity group), "a new type of extended family...
...Thomas writes that "this is not Caribbean Bonapartism," though similar beliefs could be found in Mussolini's Italy and among the followers of Napoleon III...
...Ironically, it was Batistawho had given two cabinet seats to Communists in 1940...
...For instance, had a free press been able to warn him, Castro might not have wagered his prestige on the unattainable target of a 10-millionton harvest of sugar in 1970...
...And in his book Batista has charged that Grau opened the door to a"Communist conspiracy" during his second Administration, 1944-48...
...Thomas confirms this and Kar6l does not deny it...
...Since this, however, is utopian (and Kar61, who has absorbed his Trotsky, does not believe in socialism on one small island), the only logical course is to use Cuba as the power base of a protracted fight against U.S...
...During that remarkable spring of 1968 when most Czechoslovak Communists were striving toward a "socialism with a human face," the Party leadership set up a commission "to make a final inquiry into the notorious political trials of the 1950s...
...They "confessed" their guilt but, after doing so, could not describe the guilty acts to which they confessed...
...Thomas fails to see why Castro did not develop other methods than forced labor once he had adopted productivity as the central aspiration of the Revolution...
...what happens to the Revolution depends entirely on him...
...Fortunately there was a trial and a jury, and Hoover's "conviction" was rejected by the 12 men and women...
...Nor has it made Cuba independent: the country only has exchanged masters abroad...
...He called in BOOKS the army to organize the citizen's daily life— but he can dismiss it and replace it by any other organ he may create on the spur of the moment...
...Even the symbolic wait from February to October that Lenin deemed necessary can now be dispensed with and is replaced by a kind of "permanent" or "protracted" revolution...
...Thomas deplores the schoolchildren marching to meals in military formation...
...His book on Cuba is even more sprawling...
...New York: Harper & Row...
...Karol nostalgically remembers the heroic period when Castro assembled the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana and Guevara issued his call for "two, three, many Vietnams...
...If this may sound strange today, Thomas quotes Batista's favorable comments on the Communist party and, in turn, the Communist leader Blas Roca's support for Batista, "the focal point of democracy...
...it is quite misleading when Thomas speaks of a "Communist center" at Manzanillo...
...The revolution then is compelled to bend every effort, to strain all human and material reserves, to exploit and squeeze every ounce of labor in order to overcome deficiencies in material equipment and build up new industries...
...and finally, the attainment of certain economicdevelopment goals through heroic measures...
...This may not be all the people's idea of socialism, but the reassurance that the mighty Soviet Union backs up Castro's regime is the force that holds them in line...
...These characterize a colonial economy and a colonial society...
...Karol suggests that one can do that only if at the same time man's mind is reconstructed— as in China...
...Blas Roca, long-time Party secretary, was a shoemaker...
...boycott, human failures, mismanagement...
...He also quotes the unflattering observations made by "respectable representatives of Cuban public life and all the old middle-class and professional groups," whom Batista had "alienated...
...The percentage share of American-owned banks in total deposits decreased from 50 to 40 in the same interval...
...BOOKS Revolution was neither a "peasant revolution" nor a "proletarian revolution...
...He certainly had not been a Communist in the Sierra—his program then was "larger"—but when he saw that national liberation required expropriation of the counterrevolutionaries and mobilization of the workers, then from that realization to the conviction that his program had been socialist from the beginning was only a short step...
...it was not even of the Gironde-Jacobin type Marx saw in The Communist Manifesto...
...There is hardly a mention of the question of violence...
...Readers of Thomas's book on the Spanish Civil War know how much he likes to describe battles and battle plans...
...It does not seem to have deepened the self-awareness of the masses, who are conscious only of their increased work load...
...This surely is not Bookchin's intention...
...and that in a socialist country everyone must make sacrifices...
...The Cuban Revolution was not of the one-two, February-October, bourgeois-socialist type that still figures in Russian textbooks...
...Dynamism holds the regime together, even if the frantic commotion results only in "marking time...
...it has not strengthened the ties between people and government, except that the government has tied the people in knots...
...But as Thomas makes clear, despite the many revolutions in Cuban history, its democratic traditions and aspirations were really much weaker than they had been in Russia...
...Positing that "a basic sense of decency, sympathy and mutual aid lies at the core of human behavior" is no answer to the challenges of Freud and later aggression theorists who suggest that the masses depend on strong leadership...
...They had to strike the idealistic pose of tribunes of "the nation," embodying its general will...
...Who, for example, is to make the new revolution...
...By the will of its leader it had to pass from the Girondin to the Jacobin stage...
...imperialism...
...Countless numbers were imprisoned and tortured...
...It is not just one-man government...
...These revolutions were led by middle-class liberals or radicals who, it was hoped, might accelerate industrial development with the aid of foreign capital, would foster the growth of democratic movements and social institutions—and so would raise the lower classes to an economic, political, and cultural level approaching that of the Western proletariat...
...In the 1930s and 1940s, Peron and Vargas passed for semifascists...
...All sources agree that the Communists did not join the cause of Castro until its success had become clear—in August...
...3 But there was no middle class that could have sustained a web of republican institutions or formulated ideas that might have linked the technical and economic elites with the masses...
...These organs are the soviets, the authentic social form of self-management: popular, democratic, and decentralized...
...Both authors share a loving interest in the Cuban people...
...What caused the difference...
...Dayton Hedges, a small contractor from Louisiana, founded the Cuban rayon industry and sold it to Batista's government in 1958...
...second, the Revolution and Castro's hold on it had to be justified by, and indeed intimately tied to, the idea of development, thereby precluding the choice of any truly socialist priorities...
...arms embargo of March 12, 1958, which in effect gave the officers a signal to leave the sinking ship...
...Or, in the Bolshevik version of the conception, the liberal-bourgeois phase of the revolution would be followed by a second, radical-Jacobin or even proletarian revolution...
...Though Bookchin denies any desire to dominate the "revolutionary people," reliance on the unspecified direction of affinity groups is not very reassuring to the skeptical radical...
...his predecessor had been a decorator in—the presidential palace...
...Kar6l understands that THE PLAN called for either of two alternatives equally repugnant to him: either to revert to "capitalism" with material incentives, or to leap forward toward "Communism," after the model of Stalin and Mao...
...held together] by deeply empathetic human relationships" and devoted to the creation of the new society...
...Whenever the system and its ideology run into contradictions, the leader remains the only link between the origin of the Revolution and its future...
...Thomas himself compares Batista to Nasser...
...This image, however, also fits Peron, Nasser, Mussolini, Ataturk, and also Castro—and, as we have seen, almost several of Castro's predecessors...
...For we all realize that socialism, especially state socialism, has failed to make a new world...
...Cuba, of itself, did not bring forth a middle class that might have overcome the economy's colonial structure...
...technology is either burning out or blowing up...
...Castro chose Stalin...
...a new class of Lumpen fills the streets...
...Three New Deal pillars— A. A. Berle, Charles Taussig, and Rexford Tugwell—were involved with the American Molasses Company...
...nothing but a coalition of old-style politicians...
...its disregard of cost-accounting...
...But to read the record of the Slansky trial is to realize what a gulf separates the legal systems of Communist (or fascist) regimes and democracies...
...All of these things may happen together...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press...
...Batista had "given" Cuba a model Constitution in 1940, and therefore he could take it away when it no longer suited him...
...The same mass also had followed the greatest leaders of Cuban populism—the inspired Jose Marti, the brave mulatto Antonio Maceo, the half-crazy Eduardo Chibas who staged his suicide on the radio, the liberal Grau San Martin of the first (four-month) Administration...
...As in other underdeveloped countries, the workers who came to the Communist party were not typically industrial proletarians...
...facts about the Chinese trade with Cuba in the 19th century...
...free love, birth BOOKS control, and abortion are openly advocated...
...Marxists, Bookchin suggests, are now on the defensive, and the anarchists, once merely the idealistic consciences of revolution, are prepared to show their stuff...
...Castro chose a system that Karol likens to Stalinism...
...There they formed the coalition that intended to rule Cuba after Batista's fall...
...that Castro's father was a ladies' man (which probably did not distinguish him from 12 million other Cubans) . The Czech journalist K. S. Karol, by contrast, writes in crisp French about the Revolution and nothing but the Revolution, hurrying from a few facts to world-historical theories...
...its strident demand of gratuitous help from the richer countries of the Soviet bloc...
...Distrustful of power, and of its illicit effects, the anarchists seek "to dissolve all the organizational forms developed in the prerevolutionary period .. . into these genuine revolutionary organs...
...They were jailed for four years without trial...
...624 pp...
...There is no need to elaborate that in LatinAmerican politics it pays to confront the coloso del norte...
...Hugh Thomas is a deeply democratic historian at the University of Reading (England) who first became widely known, ten years ago, through his history of The Spanish Civil War— a sprawling account of the war that missed the significance of the revolution accompanying that war...
...And the tangled political skein that must be woven by this system suddenly becomes obvious when the authors of this report state: "The political system of our country is based, and will continue to be based, on the principle that the leading role is exercised by the Communist Party...
...6 But subjectively he could feel that the Revolution had gone straight from its democratic beginnings to its radical consequences...
...One wishes Thomas had provided a table showing the percentage of U.S...
...He has known all its leading men, and he has accompanied Castro on his famous trips through the island, which have replaced government procedures in that country...
...the censoring of writers and artists...
...K. S. Karol lucidly explains why: when Castro saw that his 536 allies wanted to continue cooperating with North America and were opposed to his own concept of an "integral democracy," he had to assert the general will the revolution was to give to the nation...
...The anarchists want nothing less than the successful accomplishment of the revolution...
...Its aim was said to be not the happiness of many but the happiness of the whole, not freedom for each but liberation of all...
...Thomas can only wring his hands and ask whether all this is really necessary to make Cuba economically and politically independent...
...They were not in the political market but "above parties...
...The vulgar Marxism of Progressive Labor or the Maoist Left are only recent examples of the Neanderthal view of the worker that is implicit in Marxism-Leninism: a view, puritanical and regimented, which sees the model man as hard-working, thrifty, efficient, sober, rational, and progressive...
...Bookchin despises the centralization of economic and political power, the bureaucratization of daily life, and the ruthlessness of the "proletarian dictatorship...
...perhaps the outstanding work in this genre is Medvedev's study of Stalinism...
...under what flags the slave ships sailed and that the Danish ships had the highest death rates...
...As Castro told Karol: they were revolutionaries with a party or without one...
...though there is no proof of wrong-doing, visibility is half of the proof that something is fishy...
...Nothing in Cuban society pointed to Communism—was there any chance for a radical Jacobin rule, perhaps with a sort of NEP...
...It makes a difference...
...Above all, it was the charismatic personality of Fidel himself that was well-established long before the victory of the Movement...
...It was sufficient to have been a veteran of the antifascist war in Spain or to have been a Jew to be selected for the horrors of framed trials, long imprisonment and, in thousands of cases, the gallows...
...In textiles it had been paramount, but under Batista it decreased rapidly...
...All these things—most of which have been seen before— have now combined at one point in time...
...but never had a revolution in Cuba provided organs that could express freely the aspirations of society...
...He needed a confrontation to justify the state's ever-tightening hold on the citizens, the militarization of labor, the emphasis on productivity and the sugar harvest...
...the majority stayed in the Autentico (governmentBOOKS sponsored) unions: the gangster system of Cuban politics made it possible for one group of adventurers to capture the trade union leadership as long as it had the government's backing...
...In 1939 Batista threw the anarchist leadership out and gave the Confederacien National Obrera Cubana a new name—Confederaci6n de Trabajadores de Cuba—as well as a palatial office and assembly building...
...YET a softer feeling remains after having read this book...
...Yet reservations about the theoretical and practical validity of this experimentalism abound...
...The central concepts of revolutionary Marxism— class and class conflict, the seizure of power by the proletariat, the creation of a socialist state—are anathema...
...Perhaps I have made Bookchin out to be a hopeless utopian and, worse, a backward-looking dreamer, attracted by the purity of ruralism that hastened the downfall of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy...
...The latter then justified the confidence of the liberals by allowing his mistress to take the bribes which he, the incorruptible President, forbade himself to accept...
...The alternative to the ruling "kleptocracy" was raised not by representatives of specific class interests but by the "liberators" who professed populist ideologies and voiced the grievances of the lowly without ever formulating negotiable programs...
...when touring the island he decides on the spot where to build a plant or establish a model farm, construct a bridge or found a school...
...It has served as a catalyst not only for mergers of various movements inside Cuba but for united fronts throuchout the hemisphere and beyond...
...Karol charges that Castro's power now rests on three myths: that the leader knows best...
...Thus, while instituting successive productivity drives, Castro has actually diminished productivity to the point where the native tradition of easygoingness has overtaken the puritan ethics of the Revolution, while at the same time the ideology forbids a return to material incentives...
...Cloth $6.95, paper $2.95...
...The most critical function of technology," he says, "must be to keep the doors of the revolution open forever...
...From the extermination of the enrages to the liquidation of the Kronstadt sailors to the betrayal of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, revolution has meant ideological and physical defeat for the anarchists...
...But these predecessors dared not cast themselves in the classical role of Bonaparte...
...Both are partisans of the Revolution...
...The speech of December 2, 1961, however, had significance in foreign rather thandomestic affairs: Castro wished to make sure that the Soviet Union would treat Cuba like a member of its bloc...
...Indeed it would be difficult to imagine two more different books or, for that matter, two more different authors...
...s Even in 1934, when there was no cold war but a rapproachement between Western nations andthe Soviet Union, FDR's Ambassador Sumner Welles discovered "Communists" among GrauSan Martin's followers...
...the public shaving of hippies...
...Thus far, Bookchin's attack on the Marxists is not unlike that of his anarchist predecessors...
...The inability to make or see such distinctions can have bizarre and tragic consequences...
...10.95...
...the Revolution has not created institutions to survive Castro...
...His system is not "Fidelismo," because it is Fidel himself—an extraordinary example of a man creating for himself a people in order to make a revolution...
...Unfortunately, as the response to Fidelismo abroad shows, this misuse of socialist labels for economic-development techniques also threatens to pervert the meaning of socialism...
...and that the 1957 landing of the Granma was unrelated to any genuine class movement...
...Technology—once a fearsome object for most anarchists—is the key...
...his sons married into a noble criollo family and were Cubans in everything but their passports...
...Che Guevara one day placed him before the alternative either to leave the country or to become—the manager of its socialized sugar industry...
...Kar6l, who has his eye less on military than on political shifts of power, records in greater detail the numerous actions of the Directorio and the political parties that allied themselves with the 26th of July Movement in "the plain," i.e., in the cities...
...Moreover, Cuban history provides numerous precedents of Bonapartism...
...The public utilities, mining, and oil refineries were almost totally North American...
...that the Soviet bloc must be defended as a whole...
...Having spent so much pain and printer's ink on the proof that a liberal regime either would not last or would lapse into the old Cuban routine, and having described the consequent usurpation of the Revolution by the imagination of one man, or perhaps two men, Thomas fails to recognize that this was the only possible way to prevent a repetition of 1933 or 1934—another Grau San Martinade...
...it also is one-man revolution...
...Karol reports in vivid detail how Castro shapes policy by inspiration, and Thomas points out that Castro is in complete control of the process of permanent revolution...
...Again, Cuban historians have charged that Theodore Roosevelt's proconsul, Charles Magoon, corrupted Cuban society, and Herbert Matthews has repeated the charge...
...but in this voluminous book, which abounds in guerrilla adventures over a 150-year period, the guerilla war of 1958 is summarized in a few brief pages, culminating in the almost regretful statement that on Castro's side only 46 partisans were killed and on Batista's side even fewer...
...It is the work, not of a demagogue but of an honest revolutionary, a man depressed by past failures but not yet despondent...
...it was closed in 1947 and has not been reopened...
...The Russian Revolution, which even anarchists once supported, has turned sour...
...Overnight the proletariat was turned into the hero of the revolution while the guerrilleros and the urban resistance fighters were relegated to a subsidiary role, turned into more or less passive pawns...
...How often it has been suggested that we have little moral right to condemn unjust trials in the Communist lands since we have our share of trials such as those that victimized the Berrigans...
...Anyway, two distinct stages were thought necessary to achieve socialism...
...Though unacknowledged, strains of Herbert Marcuse appear in Bookchin's work: we find the same expectation that sensibly directed economic organization can abolish scarcity and can usher in a life without repression, guilt, or domination...
...And then President Dorticos asked the stingy Russians just where Marx had said that socialist countries must exchange their goods at world-market prices instead of the "true labor value" embodied in them—an allusion to the "scissors" between the prices the Soviet Union pays and charges...
...Castro decided to create for himself a nation in his own image—puritan, visionary, and merry too...
...By assimilating artistic craftsmanship with machine labor, men could reach a degree of sophistication and prosperity unparalleled in history...
...Second, 40 years of pseudosocialist history may have convinced Castro that it was possible to devise a shortcut to development...
...What he has provided for them is, on the whole, better than what the mass of them have ever had before— materially and in terms of national pride, feeling of equality, and intellectual stimulation...
...fathers and sons have little in common...
...The new society, based on abundance and not on the struggle for scarce resources, is rapidly coming into existence...
...that the attack on the Moncada barracks was ill-considered...
...Liberty, Thomas concludes, is a convenience besides being a principle...
...The same conditions that made the economy colonial also left Cuban politics in the hands of adventurers and outsiders...
...They provided services Cubans failed to provide, but they also were envied and suspected of using monopolistic practices and political collusion to promote their private and collective interests...
...He even goes so far as to suggest that, perhaps, a little more freedom might have helped Castro avoid some costly blunders...
...Thomas makes no effort to evaluate whether on balance the Cuban economy was benefited or despoiled by U.S...
...Hounded by the state they reject, repelled by the revolutions they aid, the anarchists have been the marginal men of the Left...
...The fusion of intense nationalism with radical Jacobinism engenders a policy of confrontation, aimed against the former hegemonial power, and an anti-imperialism that precludes any cooperation with capitalistic corporations and governments that used to aid in the development of the country's resources...
...The impediment to a widespread understanding of this phenomenon is what Bookchin regards as a "mind-lag...
...First of all, of course, the mere fact that the Soviet Union was prepared to underwrite the reenslavement of Cuba...
...This "tribe," uncentralized and nonbureaucratic, becomes molecularly linked in times of crisis—say, in Paris in 1968—and leads the revolution, propelled by the revolutionary people...
...He was elected enthusiastically and overwhelmingly by the common people...
...Yet preserving the purity and spontaneity of the revolution is no mean task...
...He deplores the loss of freedom, but he is reluctant to acknowledge that this was the price paid for a social revolution that has only begun...
...The Communists were given power over the tradeunions by Castro for the same reason Machado and Batista had given it to them: to keep theworkers in line...
...On the subject of production, Bookchin outrhapsodizes Marx by forecasting a society in which the domination of nature is no longer necessary...
...4 If by a miracle, or because a government collapses under its own weight, such a coup succeeds, one of these consequences may follow: the idealism of the revolutionary government withers away and its personnel is ab sorbed into the corrupt routines of society...
...As Boris Goldenberg, Juan Bosch, and Theodore Draper have shown, the Cuban 4 Any objective analysis must conclude that Castro's participation in the 1947 expedition against Santo Domingo was quixotic...
...he is infatuated with the potential of technology...
...yet a large part of the mechanical failures must be laid to Castro's system and to the compulsiveness of the ideology...
...In the Castroite conception of national revolutions, the liberal-bourgeois stage no longer is necessary...
...But abolition and independence destroyed the cultural web, and then came the Snopeses—adventurers without tradition and morality, conquerors, speculators and politicians without roots in the community—Europeans, Americans, Jews, mulattoes...
...Had it remained the "beautiful revolution" a la La Fayette that it seemed to be in 1959, had it merely fulfilled the famous dream Castro expressed in his "History will absolve me" speech—restoration of civil rights and laws, of the Constitution, its Congress and President and Courts, of the right to speak freely, to assemble, to associate—then the Cuban Revolution would never have become the historic event it has been to this day...
...Karol finds this escalation necessary, Thomas probably would have liked a social democratic regime—but there were no social democrats...
...the proliferation of uniforms...
...Those were the days when the bureaucrats in Moscow were appalled at what might rightly be called the "Cuban heresy"—its communes...
...MOST OF THE COMMUNIST LEADERS came from the same background as the nationalist leaders and made their political debut in the student movement...
...It involves, first, the caudillo or leader, a charismatic figure chosen because of his populist roots and his victory in a courageous fight...
...New York: Hill & Wang...
...property in various industries...
...Both have warm admiration for Fidel Castro and deplore rather than condemn his abandonment of freedom...
...Then the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) proclaimed, "Let us be done with the concept of a national bourgeoisie...
...Batista started out with a program of national and social revolution that sent shudders down the spine of Wall Street...
...Its numbers were insignificant...
...Similar pictures have been drawn of Peron, and the parallels go even further: both Peron and the Cuban dictators Machado and Batista have bolstered their populist, national-revolutionary image by dallying with the Communists and by striking the pose of anti-Yankee national liberationists...
...the Stakhanovite methods of production...
...The 26th of July Movement was Castro...
...Why was this liberal-left coalition not able to govern after victory...
...Its significance is not covered by the term Thermidor, or only if we keep in mind that the French Revolution continued its revolutionary wars after the Thermidor and that the Terror did not stop either but continued to rage against the Left as well as the Right...
...Karol probably is right when he says that Castro did not have to change or to betray his program...
...The sugar-mill capacity owned by Americans declined from 55 percent in 1939 to 36 percent in 1958...
...q POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, by Murray Bookchin...
...Anarchists are frequently on the defensive...
...To those to whom the very thought of socialism without democracy is inconceivable, it will seem strange to read the tribute in this report to the "socialist" revolution carried out under Gottwald in Czechoslovakia...
...They work more and consume less because the state must invest 30 percent of the annual product or use it for payments to the Soviet bloc...
...Now a large body of literature is building up in which adherents of Communism reveal evils wrought by Communists...
...Nationalism can be joined to a rightist (conservative or fascist) ideology as well as to a leftist (populist, revolutionary, even Com 534 munist) ideology...
...Here BOOKS both the progressive and the reactionary character of anarchism is evident...
...Karol does not write as a distant observer but from the inside of the Cuban Revolution...
...and avoids] any formalization that might make us lose sight of the ultimate goal: to free man from alienation...
...But everywhere it has been betrayed...
...Yet no one knows whether they appreciate it or would rather live at a slower pace...
...The contact was made when Rodriguez came to the Sierra in August 1958...
...its provocative support of guerrilla activities in other Latin-American countries...
...The task of "primitive accumulation," the compulsion to catch up with other developing countries, the need to impose on a previously uncommitted and lethargic population a new "work ethic"—Paul Goodman has compared these revolutions with the Protestant Reformation— not merely supersede the original, democratic and egalitarian intentions of the revolution...
...influence in Cuba's economy...
...What is missing in Post-Scarcity Anarchism is a confrontation with the realities of revolution...
...Nationalism has been the natural ideology of student politics...
...Castro 6 Guevara had converted Raul Castro while theywere in Mexico: both incurred Fidel's wrath when he found out...
...The pattern of Bonapartism emerges when Thomas compares Batista to Trujillo, who also claimed the title "Benefactor": Batista "was a dictator who wished always to be loved, a democratically elected president...
...Since it is led by guerrillas, it does not degenerate into terror but begins with it—to settle down later into a regime modeled after the People's Republics...
...the state's credibility is nearly destroyed...
...But Thomas shows that it was, rather, a corrupt Cuban society that availed itself of Magoon to indulge its own national habits...
...No doubt, someone like J. Edgar Hoover would not have been loath to imitate some of the practices of the Communist legal systems...
...decentralization of power is becoming a popular notion...
...If despite all this Fidel still is worshiped as the greatest revolutionary leader in this hemisphere, the reason must clearly be sought in the views of his followers abroad who are hypnotized by their own definition of revolution...
...He enacts laws by announcing them at mass meetings...
...the 20,000 political prisoners and the 5,000 executions (from 1959 to 1970...
...They were a symbol, a flag, a myth—and a power only through the charisma of one man's name...
...The people, of course, are given to understand that Castro's commitment to the Soviet Union, to productivity, and to his own dictatorship are but temporary expedients—a belief that could not be justified by a party dictatorship but may well rest in the personal confidence Fidel Castro has earned through his courage, his generosity, his frankness in distress, his humanity, even his failings...
...Machado donned the mantle of tribunus plebis at the end of his bloody career...
...there was no one who could challenge his leadership, and he could dispose of the state as he pleased because there was no state, no public power whatsoever that did not emanate from Castro...
...he is the perfect Robin Hood and also projects the image of the modem leader of a national and social revolution...
...But what he offers is far less important than when he is offering it...
...the alliance probably was concluded in January 1959...
...288 pp...
...Simply supporting the notion of "direct action" or, on the other hand, criticizing earlier revolutionaries for their slaughter of innocents does not confront the question of how anarchists would simultaneously seize and destroy political power...
...This was true of the brothers Castro and the brothers Escalante as well as of Carlos Rodriguez and Juan Marinello, Batista's Communist ministers...
...as in every revolution, the civil service and utilities were working for the future masters long before the old tyrant had fled...
...Julio Antonio Mella is still worshiped as the great idealist who associated himself with the Communists and was martyred...
...There is no other driving force or decisionmaking organ...
...Perhaps I have been unfair...
...The key to Bookchin's thought is found in a single phrase: "Anarcho-communists seek to preserve and extend the anarchic phase that opens all the great social revolutions...
...the militarization of labor...
...TETS CONCEPTION, which by now is closely identified with Third World ideologies, is an image rather than a theory of revolution...
...It is a tale that has been told before...
...There the similarity ends: the two authors have each a BOOKS totally different conception of freedom and of the Cuban Revolution that occurred in the late 1950s...
...Castro was able to collect a levy on sugar production that was paid in 1958 even by the American mills...
...The authors start out from almost opposite assumptions...
...The middle class, which supported Castro in 1958, dreamed of restoring that Constitution...
...both write sensitively about its sufferings and aspirations...
...They might have built a nation, and then new democratic movements might have transformed the traditional society into a modern state...
...Castro has created a vicious circle that prevents the Cubans from escaping his hold...
...If the revolution aligns itself with the foreign policy of these Republics, the Kremlin's ideologists do not treat its leaders as "national bourgeoisie," as Stalin used to call them, but accredit their regime as a "national democracy...
...Heikal adds two observations Kar6l claims he had no knowledge of: that Guevara had indeedfallen out with Castro, and that he had told Nasser of his death wish...
...Castro fulfilled all the requirements of the populist myth...
...Why should anarchist soviets not suffer the same fate as workers' councils in most revolutions— namely destruction by a foreign enemy or takeover by an elitist party...
...The rise of Fidel Castro has reversed this order of expectations...
...it has not increased freedom of expression but has increased opprecsion...
...Then, after they served their sentence, they were tried and found guilty...
...There were mishaps— climatic, the U.S...
...IN PRESENT-DAY CUBA, as Nelson Valdes recently wrote in Aportes, Communism is mistaken for forcible investment...
...they stopped at the stage of benevolent despotism and were too timid in pursuing the goal of nationalism...
...But this was a limited success...
...And yet, these events form Cuba's revolutionary history— depending entirely on luck and on the enemy's stupidity...
...Because, says Bookchin, the anarchists will "try to prevent bureaucracy, hierarchy and elites from emerging in their midst...
...This volume, containing the full text of the suppressed report, will be valuable for students of that lovely and ill-fated little republic...
...BOOKS whipped nationalism into a frenzy of "antiYankeeimperialism...
...So far Castro has shown considerable political instinct and has retained his people's confidence despite the obvious hardships—which can be blamed on "imperialism...
...According to Kar6l, the Party was directed by the Italian Vittorio Vidali, who was known as "Carlos...
...In Cuba it has been alienated not only from its democratic roots but even from a strictly economic definition...
...This revolution is at once egalitarian, intensely national, and dictatorial...
...But, 538 as Karol makes abundantly and tragically clear, Castro also had to fulfill the two conditions that actually killed the Revolution: first, under prevailing conditions his Revolution had to be personal and despotic, precluding any development of popular revolutionary organs...
...Presidents had (or acquired) a criminal record...
...Castro, commenting on the coup d'etat of 1969 in Peru, welcomed generals who lead a popular revolution...
...He saw that the vicious circle of Cuban politics could be broken only by permanent revolution—the welling up of new social aspirations which simultaneously, while in the process of being formulated, had to form, define, and shape the society wherein they were to fulfill themselves...
...The pathetic attempts of Cespedes in 1933 to establish a "middle-class government" or of Grau San Martin in 1934 to conduct a "Girondin revolution" collapsed either because the native and foreign interests brought the reform government down or because radical forces tried to push the reformers into suicidal adventures...
...The kids are dropping out of school...
...As Ren6 Dumont has shown [see DISSENT, September– October 1970], the militarization of labor made a mockery of socialism...
...Cuba became a supplier of sugar to the Soviet bloc, and the free flowering of the Cuban people's producers' associations and self-governing bodies was declared counterrevolutionary...
...he obviously is less interested in events than in their significance...
...the liberation of women is more than a political slogan...
...At first sight, one would think that for the Bolshevik Revolution, which had triumphed over a bourgeois-democratic government, the "retreat" (Lenin's word) of the NEP was more difficult to accept than for the Cuban Revolution, which had grown out of a democratic revolution...
...to justify its past experiments, the regime must pursue new experiments, most of them amateurish or totally improvised for the purpose of the day...
...Worse still, the ideology and energy of the revolutionary 61an is used to direct it toward the goals of a totalitarian defense economy...
...But that is not the point...
...a new ruralism attracts men to the land...
...Their followers were those who are unrepresented and cannot be organized: in a symbolic way they embody the resentment of all those for whom government is "They...
...The picture emerging from Thomas's description, then, is that of a basically apathetic population whose most active part devotes itself to corrupt business and government practices and whose most articulate part—mainly students and others exasperated by the moral decay of the middle classes—is seething with constant revolution and engaging in desperate, often fantastic actions...
...Translated from the French by Arnold Pomerans...
...Uuntil a decade ago, national revolutions in underdeveloped countries supposedly would establish constitutional governments...
...Kar6l feels that transformation of capitalist instincts into socialist solidarity must precede the setting of goals for productivity...
...During those bright and heroic events BOOKS of 1968 it became clear that honest Communists were coming to the realization that the real question was not whether the government owned the means of production, but whether the people owned the government...
...He personally found Berrigan "guilty," before he was tried, of plotting to kidnap Kissinger...
...But, as the Cultural Revolution has shown, Mao would rather accept low performance than give up his revolutionary goals...
...interventions worked any good for Cuba...
...The age of cybernation and automation will make possible a realistic utopia, not in heaven but today on earth...
...Thomas is at a loss to understand why Castro gave up those liberties a British professor considers the heritage of man and a Western socialist deems an inextricable part of the definition of socialism...
...The report never saw the light of day in Czechoslovakia because a long winter arrived that August...
...Where this happens, the revolution cannot retain its democratic sources but, on the contrary, must lapse more and more into a dictatorship that cannot wither away...
...The Cuban Revolution too must be permanent in the minds of its defenders, of its admirers abroad, and even in the minds of its directors...
...2 In his memoirs of Nasser, Mohammad Heikal related Che's complaints about corruption among Cuban Communist officials, about the harsh terms of Soviet aid, and about his disappointed hopesin terms closely resembling those reported by In 1921, when Lenin had to choose between similar alternatives, he instituted the NEP...
...Bookchin is optimistic about the impact of revolutionary idealism...
...On December 2, 1961, Castro announced that he had "always been a Leninist," which was a plain lie...
...It still is the most virulent agent of political "fanatization" in underdeveloped countries...
...But creating a viable anti-politics is a more difficult task, one that Bookchin has not accomplished...
...but on the basis of what he saw, Karol doubted this estimate...
...As embodiment of the general will, his actions assert the sovereignty of the revolutionary ideology...
...People are weary of the constant pressure...
...They confessed to crimes they never committed, "believing that by their self-accusation they were serving their Party and the cause of socialism," as Jiri Pelikan, the editor of this volume, puts it...
...THOMAS ALMOST REGRETS the passing of the Karol...
...The most shrill revolutionary faction, they seem always to occupy the losing side of history...
...From self-regulating control mechanisms in manufacture to cybernetically produced automobiles to solar house-heating, he portrays a boundless technological cornucopia...
...They practically dominated civilian life in the population centers...
...The incredible story of the Czech trials is that these did not even involve political opposition...
...The masses behind them were not organized, while Castro's barbudos were a well-disciplined force endowed with the halo of heroes and martyrs...
...it was the bourgeoisie who opposed him with the candidacy of Grau San Martin...
...Berkeley: Ramparts Press...
...532 BOOKS old oligarchy, the Spanish colonizers, the criollo bourgeoisie, the old families that ruled on the basis of recognized customs...
...Thus Thomas reports that in the first weeks after the victory of the Revolution in 1959, people compared Castro to "Clavelito, a miraculous broadcaster who cured disease by his voice...
...but in the context of the Cold War, nationalism adopted a socialist mimicry and passed itself off as leftist...
...Their charisma often was based on nonpolitical myths...
...The radicals were usually "fanaticized" students, certainly not Communists...
...Unlike Thomas, Kar6l applauds Che Guevara's eloquent plea for the "new man" who achieves "complete identification of govern ment and community without the commonplaces of bourgeois democracy...
...Cho, who to the end remains Karol's hero, went into his exile, a deeply disappointed man who was seeking nothing but death...
...Though in reality it is already in its stagnating phase—socially, politically, and economically—an image of "movement" must be maintained for the sake of the ideology...
...investors...
...But he has no answer for those who accuse the anarchists of romanticism and nostalgia, of desiring to arrest the course of history, or of simple incompetence in dealing with the issues of power and authority...
...according to Thomas, later, perhaps, by a Polish Jew known as "Juan...
...He rules in the style of the Latin-American caudillo...
...The cause of equality becomes an instrument of a policy of autarky, and the idea of revolutionary sacrifice is confused with the phraseology of national defense...
...Just as Stalin asked for new sacrifices in order to justify the earlier ones, Castro must keep his people in constant agitation...
...If nothing else, the collapse of the "general strike" called for April 9, 1958, showed that the July 26 Movement did not have sufficient roots among the workers at a time when Batista already was in serious trouble and had been abandoned even by Eisenhower.s BATISTA'S FALL, both Thomas and Kar6l agree, was caused by the massive defections from his regime—defections by the Catholic Church, the civil service, the army officers, businessmen, the middle class (the intellectuals had never been in his camp)—but Castro's military actions as such contributed little to Batista's fall...
...It wanted to be "permanent," and for that reason it had to assume the most significant feature of permanent revolution: its expansion into neighboring countries by propaganda, terrorism, and possible conquest...
...Since it was he who had called in the Communists, he deposed some, disciplined others, and could dismiss them all any day...
...The main limiting factor is Marxism, a social theory applicable only to an age of scarcity...
...the point is that in Cuban political mythology the Yankees occupy the place of the Jews in countries of nascent or weak BOOKS capitalism...
...I am reminded of an American couple, the Ricketts, who were arrested in China and charged with espionage...
...GUERRILLAS IN POWER: THE COURSE OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION, by K. S. Kar61...
...This is representation by usurpation...
...Julio Lobo, of a Curacao Jewish family, owned half the sugar that was sold to the U.S., as well as hotels, banks, and radio stations...
...finally, it has not even succeeded in the self-assigned task of economic development, despite the Herculean efforts made by the people and its leaders...
...government opened a nickel mine that eventually produced 10 percent of the world's nickel...
...The Cuban Communist party had not grown out of the labor movement, which was largely anarchist, but imposed itself on it—or, rather, it was imposed by the dictators, who gave the Communists the job of keeping the trade unions in line...
...and the moral pressures to make sacrifices for the state—all the measures, in short, which Sartre and other well-disposed visitors have generously interpreted as benevolent attempts to overcome old-fashioned capitalist attitudes...
...It was also clear that there could be no rule by working people, or any other people, without freedom of choice, without a multiparty choice, and without full freedom of speech, of press, of assemblage...
...The goal of world revolution was subordinated to the gamble on a 10-million-ton harvest,' and diversification of Cuban farming and the development of Cuban industries were sacrificed to the necessity of exporting a big crop...
...Perhaps Urrutia could not have stopped the Revolution, but it was Castro alone who knew how to continue it...
...This revolution required the total mobilization of all citizens against foreign and domestic enemies of the new nation...
...Pressure alone maintains dictatorship...
...2 1 And I shall show that the nature of the gamblewas the cause of its failure...
...Recently, however, anarchists like Murray Bookchin are speaking with unusual confidence, a result of the conviction that history has validated the anarchist analysis and opened the door to the anarchist utopia...
...overtures toward relaxation of the tension...
...q THE CZECHOSLOVAK POLITICAL TRIALS, 1950 1954, edited by Jiri Pelikan...
...During World War II the U.S...
...Post-Scarcity Anarchism presents a serious argument: at this very moment the United States is on the threshold of a new epoch, one in which traditional forms of economic organization, social relations, and political authority will become obselete...
...He was less himself a torturer than a weak man [sic] surrounded by cruel ones whom he could not control...
...This also is the reason he has rejected, again and again, U.S...
...More vivid, if less official, is The Confession by Artur London, upon which the fine Costa-Gavras film of the same title was based...
...Cuban dictators were forerunners of many nationalist leaders who later were to ally themselves with Communists, with the Soviet Union or China...
...the revolution need not pass from the Gironde to the Jacobins...
...This conclusion has been reached simultaneously in these two books, both published last year, which for some time will be standard works on Cuba...
...The third difference is the character of the Cuban Revolution—a point on which, curiously, the theories of Thomas and Karol converge, which I shall explain in detail below...
...Cuba is a country where politics, magic, and religion are neighboring provinces...
...Thomas never thought it could, because the Cabinet of Urrutia was 5 By all accounts, the blow that hit Batista hardest was the U.S...
...All of these books, including the one under review, suffer from a paradox: they defend Communism in the face of the horrors it inflicted on millions of people and under which the authors themselves were victims...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
