Cuba's Revolt - an Historical Appraisal

...In spite of the danger many were eager to enlighten me: they were anxious that the world should know about a struggle in which they took pride as evidence of Cuba's maturity...

...The first reaction of the American press and radio was to raise an outcry against the trials of some of Batista's gunmen...

...But all of this is to ignore the fact that the men about Castro, though young, are deadly serious, convinced that they are living in a deadly serious world, where one mistake can mean the end...

...the Philadelphia Inquirer described Castro as a "bloodthirsty dictator...

...In Cuba there was this "French" element of high political idealism and moral rhetoric...

...secret police] and would dare ask the fatal question: "Why does the American government support Batista...

...There were opponents of Batista who thought Castro stubborn and unrealistic, because he refused any deal and announced that he would march into Havana—which seemed a manifest impossibility, since the success of such a march would depend on a general strike in the city and the workers did not have a sufficiently strong motivation for taking that risk...

...but since 1848 one has been aware that this noble idea cannot encompass all the complexities of social conflict...

...PORFIRIO DIAZ is reported to have said that the problem with Mexico is that it is too far from God and too near the United States...

...This does not mean that the trials should not be a matter of concern at a responsible level...

...I WENT TO Cuba because over the years I had become disappointed with revolutionary ideas and experience...

...When one remembers previous revolutions which at their inception were characterized by the kind of national elan that has swept over Cuba, and remembers too that after a time class interests began to reappear and come into conflict, there is ground for misgiving...

...When I drove to small towns in the interior, where a car with U.S...

...An indirect proof of this could be seen in the fact that many Mexican newspapers are unsympathetic to the new Cuban government...

...Selfishly I wanted to share the exhilaration that comes from living by hope and desire before the dawn of reality...

...They are concerned about the danger that Congress may cut the sugar quota —though even here they are not utterly at a loss, since it is conceivable that Khrushchev might then offer to buy Cuban sugar...

...Cuba, sick of the enormous and systematized corruption of the Batista regime, is, for the moment at least, in the grip of asceticism...

...NOT LONG AGO I was in Trinidad when the entire city was in the grip of terror, fearing indiscriminate reprisals, because fifteen boys had just taken to the mountains...

...rosters were still clipped on the walls and essays lay scattered on the floor...

...The Cuban government intends to press for the exclusion of dictatorships from the Organization of American States...

...plates was a rarity, a little crowd would quickly gather...

...As I have said, the revolution was motivated by a great faith in nineteenth century liberalism...

...In Cuba a part of the population became tired of seeing their country politically "underdeveloped...

...The Communists have impressed upon the world that in a few decades any country can cease to be economically "underdeveloped...

...About the position of the U.S...

...Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that history must always repeat itself, for in Cuba today there are possibilities which did not exist in previous national revolutions...

...Cuba, by contrast, is even closer to the United States but no longer quite a God-forsaken country...

...The spirit of political liberalism that accompanies the present demand for social reforms is so strong that the Catholic clergy, instead of engaging in the campaigns of intolerance well-known in South America, is even cooperating with the Protestants, who have a certain influence in Cuba...

...they will now need all possible help to make it also fully developed in its economic and social life...

...but there are also signs of prosperity...

...Not because they are worried about the marines, who in the post-Sputnik age can be told to go jump in the Caribbean...

...The explanation, I suspect, is that Mexico, where everybody is imbued with revolutionary language and where the middle class defends its privileges in the name of Marxist slogans, cannot understand the nineteenth century spirit of the Cuban revolution...

...there is now a growing number of subsidiaries of American companies that produce mainly for the local market...

...The great question is whether American policy, dominated by a fear of "chaos," will always aim at keeping such countries at a static point...

...Precisely because the revolution has such a definite middle class coloring does the personality of Castro become all important, for among his other roles, he is the mediator between the revolution as an active force and the working class as an interested observer...

...The recent Cuban revolution is the expression of the Cuban bourgeoisie as it has come into its own...

...But at first I thought I would miss even that, since what I heard expressed as political programs seemed to me not hopes but the sheerest dreams...

...At the present price of newsprint, the recently-begun production of paper as a by-product of sugar cane promises to be profitable...

...The outcry against the trials and executions of Batista's supporters raised by people who up to that day had shown total indifference about what was happening to Cubans, is a gesture of moral irresponsibility...

...A recent development of the cattle and dairy industries indicates that the diversification of agriculture can advance rapidly...

...The economy has thus started to take first steps toward modernization, one sign of which—it has both attractive and dangerous possibilities—is the recent influx of private capital from abroad...

...equipment...

...More recently, the revolution ists, because of their beards, have been portrayed as rather amusing hipsters...

...He is the man who can touch the heart of the masses and who can also touch the heart of those who will have to touch their pocket books...

...Not until later did the correspondents and TV characters begin to descend on Cuba...

...They were desperately in need of weapons and only later, and at great risk, did Castro supply them by sea...

...For Cubans this was a painful question, since nowhere else in the world is there so much sympathy, at all social levels, for American ways and institutions...

...Batista was only playing for time, hoping to force Castro into some sort of deal that would salvage something of his position and some of his men...

...Nobody casts a doubt on the virtue of the women who shared the adventurous life of the men in the rebel bands...

...One does not hear those snide remarks about American barbarism that are dropped by European conservatives who have, at the same time, sold themselves body and soul to American foreign policy...

...Indeed, the Cuban revolution can be regarded as an outcome of a fifty-year-old "Americanization...

...The issue is clear...

...The result must be that the expelled women will ply their trade in streets with less pertinent names...

...But I doubt that the revolutionists will be able to prove themselves simon-pure liberals...

...should not give support to an experiment to make democratic liberalism work in the twentieth century...

...Now it may be that Castro will yet have a similar destiny, but the general political outcome can hardly be the same, since everyone in Cuba is aware of a new historical factor: the Communist Party, at the moment a small group but in case the Castro movement were to collapse, a potentially powerful force...

...No doubt, this cannot have a lasting effect so long as there is unemployment and so long as waitresses are paid two dollars a day while the cost of living is higher than our own...

...It was this silence which helped persuade many Cubans that the "Americans" were against the Castro revolt...

...Many Cubans try to spend a year or two in the States as part of their training for business or a trade...

...they feel that with intelligence they can preserve them and at at the same time satisfy the social demands of a rising working class...

...The public began to expect the push to divide the island in two, which became a reality in December...

...Let me cite a few indices...

...Its leaders were men who learned American technical efficiency and tried to organize their movement in its spirit...

...The wealthiest supporter of the rebels I happened to meet, an owner of sugar mills, made no mystery of his social and racial prejudices...

...ONE OF THE revolutionists' very first gestures was to clean up such streets as the Street of Virtues in Havana...

...government, the Cubans had no doubt...

...after a few minutes of casual talk, some of the people, for mysterious reasons, would feel reassured that I was not a plant of the dreaded S.I.M...

...the Castro rebellion was a marvel of organization...

...but there was also something else, something more substantial...

...Little Cuba is in the process of liberating itself from a colonial status...

...Nevertheless, the Cuban economy remains essentially a nineteenth century economy, and together with it there has developed a bourgeoisie with nineteenth century ideals...

...The production of tires in Cuba is greater than in Brazil or Argentina...

...Batista was a man who came from the masses and, like many other modern demagogues, knew how to speak to and for them...

...The supporters of the revolution knew that they had also to overcome the skepticism of the workers...

...Only later, as I was leaving the city at a good rate of speed (since I had been advised not to be on the road after sunset), did I come to realize that I was here confronted with a faith in the power of constitutional processes and an optimism about progressive social improvement that has hardly been heard of since the Victorian age...

...When Garibaldi tried to act again he was arrested by the government and up to his death lived a life of exile on the craggy island of Caprera...

...but having expounded Ortega y Gasset's theory of the revolt of the masses, he concluded that the vocation of our time is nonetheless the recognition of the masses...

...I was constantly struck by the straight-laced conceptions expressed by middle-class Cubans, especially the younger ones...

...and once he failed it was the beginning of the end...

...Ninety percent of what is printed is either American or a translation from American...

...But July 1830 also forces one to reflect upon the distance between literary salon and social reality...

...So, for the time being, nothing is being said against the divorce laws, which the middle class has come to consider an established part of its mores...

...With the proper development and administration, Cuba could be the first Latin American country to reach a living standard that could approach the American one...

...However we may judge them, such people are self-confident in their bourgeois values...

...Trade with Germany and Japan is growing and could make the Cuban economy more flexible by reducing its dependence on the American market...

...This opinion is shared even by a section of the Catholic clergy, despite the fact that it is Spanish or Spanishtrained...

...ed his position as dictator of Southern Italy to which he had been brought by a popular revolt, when England arranged an agreement between the former supporter of the Bourbon King of Naples and the House of Savoy...

...Mexico at present is in a somnolent state...

...But the Cubans have learned not only about air conditioning and TV...

...This is the ethos of a bourgeoisie in formation, a bourgeoisie as it existed in the first half of the nineteenth century: austere, devoted to the family no less than to patriotic and philosophical ideals, increasingly productive in economy and on the verge of becoming a cultured class...

...In my search for the spirit of the young men I walked through the empty halls of the high school where the Revolutionary Committee of Students had its inception before the government had halted all classes...

...Part of the unemployment is the result of a mechanization of the farms...

...the American Embassy was also trying to arrange a compromise, perhaps with the sincere belief that it was thereby taking a neutral position...

...Castro likes to compare himself with Bolivar, but I think the more apt comparison is with Garibaldi, since it was Garibaldi who could establish contact between the masses and the bourgeois nationalists of the Risorgimento...

...But I was perplexed because of the lack of specific social demands...

...I found in Cuba a firm belief that the age in which social problems could be ignored had come to an end: a belief that if these problems were not soon solved in a substantial manner by the heirs of nineteenth century liberalism, they would be solved in the Soviet style...

...Their land reform program had originated as a pragmatic measure, since one cannot conduct a partisan war without the support of the peasantry...

...In their desire to be like Americans, the Cubans have made a great effort to become practical, efficient, businesslike...

...CLEARLY ONE OF THE greatest concerns of the Cubans today is the attitude of the United States...

...The bourgeois ideals of the revolutionists are reflected in some aspects that to an outsider may seem ludicrous, such as their extreme concern with gambling, night clubs and prostitution...

...Both the strength and weakness of the revolution is that its moving force is the "best people"— lawyers, doctors, capable landowners, local enterpreneurs...

...It reminded me of the July 1830 revolution in France, a revolution that was the expression of truly educated minds and which I, as an intellectual, have always been especially fond of...

...There is poverty in Cuba, but nothing like the mass misery of Mexico...

...Garibaldi, it will be recalled, resign...

...There was silence in the streets and the rare pedestrians walked close to the walls, as if that made it safer...

...The best that can be said is that the revolutionists are neither bloodthirsty nor thoughtless...

...Few of the new leaders have this gift...

...whereas it is no accident that the drifters, scum or wretches, who comprised Batista's army did not know what to do with their elaborate U.S...

...Establishing a program that would appeal to the workers, however, was a much more difficult task for the Castro revolution, since such a program did not come to them from immediate experience...

...The impact is reflected even in the language where not only is one word in ten or twenty English but even the grammar and idioms are often mod eled on American speech...

...What the Cubans are trying to understand is why the U.S...

...There are now capable agronomists in Cuba who know how to exploit the possibilities of a fertile soil...

...This sudden influx surprised the many Cubans who know English, since for months they had the peculiar feeling that they were living in limbo: most American papers simply ignored the revolution and the name of Cuba was never nieuuoned on the newscasts from American radio stations that are heard on the island...

...For the time being, that is, there reigns a spirit of good will toward everyone but profiteers of the Batista regime...

...they have come passlonaMly to believe in the democracy American preaches...

...wealthy Cubans send their children to American universities...

...Yet the gesture was not as hypocritical as it may seem: it means that one now believes that certain social evils cannot be tolerated and are a sign of a universal failure...

...Nor are the foreign capitalist interests entirely of the colonial type...

...Batista tried to dislodge these students from that small mountain area, but failed...

...Meanwhile, it is true, the number of employed comes to ten percent of the population...

...The strategic turning point of the Cuban revolution occurred in August 1958 when a group of students originally independent of Castro established themselves in the Mountains of Trinidad, in the center of the island...