A Journey To Cuba
Friedenberg, Daniel M.
Ever since Francis Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients revised the earliest myths of the race in order to make man over, it has been a habit of the modern mind to interpret actions in the form...
...THIS WRITER participated to a small extent in the making of the myth...
...Let us not forget imprisonment, exile, a landing of 82 men on a tropical shore from which a mere dozen escaped in flight to the mountains...
...It is true, regardless of how wide of the mark is Castro's phantasy fixation on sabotage, that planes from the United States have strafed the cane fields, which opens the possibility that American money or mercenaries might be involved in other incidents like the recent explosion on the ship La Coubre in Havana harbor...
...For example, when the thirteen original American colonies won their revolution almost two centuries ago, the victorious colonials confiscated the English and American-loyalist property...
...Furthermore, the recent history of Guatemala is scarcely designed to placate Cuban fears of a direct or indirect aggression from America...
...Es fortuna inconmensurable la de ser jGvenes en momentos que seran decisivos para la historia" Jorge ValdesMiranda, the chronicler of the 279 Cuban Revolution, stamps on the preface to his account...
...What glory to be young at a decisive moment of history...
...As the population explosion hit the Latin American countries, the static balance between labor supply and food became distorted...
...At the very beginning, it was clear that the business community in Havana feared and distrusted Castro, and their reactions made policy in Washington...
...America has always been the favored party in its trade relations with Cuba...
...At the same time, these people whose mere subsistence level was in actual decline, began to see through the movies and magazines that life could be other than brutish and resigned...
...It has been said that the masses in China welcomed the Communists because their standard of living was raised, while those of Eastern Europe went into active opposition when their living standard was reduced...
...We have created the conditions which led to the Cuban dictatorship, and are now appalled by the logical conclusion of our own actions...
...The bloody Mexican Revolution and the Peron era in Argentina were the only two events of great significance in the long decades since Teddy Roosevelt shook his big stick and growled at the lesser breed in the Americas...
...But the opposition is no longer limited to the rich...
...In the years 19491959, for example, the balance of payments were adverse to Cuba by more than a billion dollars—an enormous sum for a small country...
...THE SIMPLE FACT is that Fidel Castro is running out of money...
...It was the thugs around Batista who made Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara, and it is the hallucinatory world of revolution in which Castro and Guevara live that may unmake their revolution...
...And it is the revolutionists, not the antirevolutionists, who unmake a going revolution, or, rather, circle it back to defeat at the starting-point...
...The rich have already been bilked to the limit, so inflation or loans alone remain...
...The fact that Fidel Castro is widely regarded as a believer and avoids all attacks against the Church, has created an image for many Cubans in which Castro is the embodiment of Christ: a Christ-nationalist and a Christ-socialist...
...And, since the evidence points to Castro not being a Communist, the amount of money he can get from Russia is restricted by his strong feeling (in his own terms) not to become a lackey after escaping from slavery...
...In this, the most underprivileged peasant may be closer to the truth than the learned exegetes...
...Whether Prometheus, Hamlet, Falstaff, Oedipus or Captain Nemo endured their spasm of flesh is secondary to the larger reality through which they reflect the joys, anguish and inner struggle of human beings...
...And since these same Cubans regard the castigation of the sadists • In 1954, for example, Cuba spent over $27 million on lard, $36 million on rice and $10 million on flour...
...Industrial societies and enormous sprawling agrarian lands cannot produce heroes, in the sense of individual figures rising against the might and power of organized society...
...Lincoln Steffens made a brilliant observation when reporting the Mexican Revolution: "It is not revolutionists, it is the anti-revolutionists, who not only make but carry on a revolution...
...Let us not forget the rich lionesque young man who was a leader in the student revolts at the University of Havana, when politics was no mere shell game but a question of beatings, castration and violent death...
...Castro has enough force to repel attacks either from Trujillo or Cuban emigres...
...The United States government has manipulated all its enormous power to break the Castro regime when it found that certain American businessmen were losing their interests in Cuba...
...It is no accident that Premier Khrushchev, in the heat of his attack against the United States at the recent Summit Conference, singled out Fidel Castro for praise...
...In the long run, she can no more be an enemy of the United States than can Poland of Russia...
...And let us not forget how a golden dozen swelled to hundreds, defeated a government expedition of 5,000 seasoned soldiers, and then swept on to victory...
...The following consists of his general observations, based on a stay of only one week in Havana...
...The problem of Cuba lies more in Washington than Havana, more in the hearts of the American people than the frustrated mutterings of the Cubans...
...They represent races, nations, classes but they do not recapture the primeval yearning for a Hero as Man, an individual cloaked in all the spring-desire for purity which still rings in even the most skeptic heart...
...The Cuban government reacted in self-defense and hardened into a military dictatorship, with complete repression of primary freedoms, in order not to be bought or subverted...
...The rise in price of industrial equipment and decline in value of raw materials, which widened the gap still further, was the final factor in the collapse of the old order...
...A Churchill, a Roosevelt, a Stalin, a Hitler, even a Lenin, are the products of too many complex forces to seize the inchoate idealism among the poor and disinherited...
...In effect, the principal advantage of the preceding treaty—reciprocity on sugar and tobacco—was lost to the Cubans and the share of Cuban sugar sold to the United States was fixed in Washington...
...Under this agreement, which lasted to 1930, Cuba supplied 53 per cent of the sugar consumed in America and in exchange bought back 90 per cent of her total imports...
...The heart of the Revolution is land reform...
...The young men growing up in the Cuba of Batista, where the passage to wealth and authority was only venal, could easily see the fingers of the United States behind the mask...
...Fidel Castro is a product of this upheaval...
...A domestic tyranny was preferred to an unstable government, no matter how democratic the latter, because stability was the keyword for American capital investment...
...AND YET HISTORY may judge America, and not Fidel Castro, responsible for the failure of political democracy in Cuba today...
...Traveling through the island, he became involved in a guerrilla uprising at Manzanillo and served as a contact with Fidelista forces at Santiago de Cuba...
...Nothing is more humiliating than the need for Cubans to purchase foodstuffs in the United States that they can easily raise themselves, in order to cover the trade deficit created by the American quota system...
...The intense xenophobia, the hate campaigns, the retreat into phantasy fears, the dependence on Communist support (a man who hates your enemy is your friend), the swollen Army, the rigid control of radio and press: all these frightening symptoms of dictatorship are devices to hold the sympathy and loyalty of the Cuban people against the tremendous pressures exerted from Washington...
...And they swore that it would not be the same if ever they could free themselves from the intertwined domestic and foreign foe...
...It covers almost the entire middle class, and that enormous segment of the poor who in one way or another benefited from the tourist trade and American business...
...Unless agricultural wages can be stabilized on an annual basis, Cuban political and economic life will be in a perpetual turmoil...
...It is true that for each absurdity printed by the Cuban press, there is an equal absurdity printed in the United States...
...AS A STARTING POINT, Americans would be wise to think of Cuban sugar like Mexican oil, the symbol of a country's meaning and history, a symbol of national emancipation...
...And the American people, when prosperous, are morally dead, or drowned in the sea of cheap mass entertainment based on violence divorced from social ends...
...With the purest heart and the most resolute will, the chicken cannot eat the fox...
...It is true, despite real Communist inroads in Cuba, that every sadist and maniac who quotes anti-Communism is welcomed in front of the U.S...
...American public opinion has been completely alienated and the sugar subsidy is only maintained because it serves American interest: it was never created to aid Cubans in the first place...
...And it is true without doubt that the State Department finds more concern with Fidel Castro than it ever did the other blood-caked tyrants of Latin America...
...Fidel Castro springs from Plutarch more than the lexicon of Karl Marx and the blood always calls more closely than clever words...
...The policy of massed hate, which rings through the controlled press, radio and speeches, is bound to ricochet against Castro if he does not fulfill his many promises...
...Anthony Eden's memoirs, being printed in Cuba by the daily press while I was there, clearly indicate the part John Foster Dulles played in that episode...
...What fortune to share one's dreams with the paladin who swept to power by crushing every organized force in society, all the haughty men of pomp and money and class...
...The excitement aroused by Fidel Castro is largely due to his being the only heroic figure in the world today...
...The daily press was studied, mass rallies were attended, at one of which he was arrested and questioned as a possible assassin: the writer thus has the distinction of being jailed by the security forces of both Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro...
...Senate and has an assured visa to enter and depart from this country on all kinds of mischief...
...But the advent of modern lifesaving drugs and new techniques of communication doomed the old way...
...Ever since Francis Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients revised the earliest myths of the race in order to make man over, it has been a habit of the modern mind to interpret actions in the form of myth...
...285...
...The balance sheet drawn of the regime is thus wholly subjective, though based on a considerable sympathy for the plight of the gay and charming people of Cuba...
...The affirmative approach to the land question, on which the regime may ultimately be judged, has parallel aspects in other fields...
...The resulting chaos hurt both parties and a Trade Agreement was signed in 1934, which was made part of the new sugar import quota system...
...This is the ground for the emotional reactions of the present Cuban leadership to everything earmarked from America...
...In our time such a myth-symbol is Fidel Castro...
...Almost all the peasants still support him, as do the very poor and the Negroes in the city population...
...It is no accident that President Eisenhower made a special trip to South America in order to throw the charismatic weight of his personality over the lengthy shadow of Cuba's leader...
...A small elite of property owners and manipulators of tin, coffee, sugar, copper, beef, grain, bananas—the "single crop" varied but never the elite— played checkers with the Army, Church and State and the same pieces always won...
...At bottom, all the worst excesses of the Cuban regime flow from his knowledge of America's past in Cuba and the con283 viction that the United States is determined to break him...
...And the writer cannot help reflecting that, given the abuses of the past, it would be wise for the United States to take the first step...
...If Castro suffers from paranoiac delusions, American policy is not calculated to calm them...
...The proof of the system is seen in its results...
...Recently, disturbed by the tone of the news, the writer returned to Cuba...
...The insistence on an ever-larger Army has gone beyond what the outsider can see as legitimate...
...It is true, even given the indirect benefits to the Cuban people, that the reason for the United States sugar subsidy was pure self-interest: to aid the American owners of plantations and grinding mills...
...Avoiding the dilemma of Mexico, the Maximum Leader has attacked this question by dividing the large estates—the breeding ground of the old oligarchy—and forming cooperatives rather than small farms...
...The intellectuals are without doubt in his camp, though the Catholic intellectuals have already split Havana University...
...This is the real reason why anyone who does not agree with the views of Castro is labeled a traitor...
...What happened in Cuba (with its more direct Communist 280 presagement in Guatemala short years before) has been occurring in many other nations on all continents: Gamal Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia and Sekou Tour6 of Guinea are results of these same tensions...
...Contrary to the delusions of the Cuban leaders and Castro's puerile comparisons with Athenian democracy, the opposition is rising at what might be considered a tidal rate...
...THERE ARE MANY attractive features of Fidelism, mostly centered in economics...
...Whether this Nationalist Socialism, developing as a world-wide alternative to American parliamentary capitalism on one side and aggressive imperialist Communism on the other, is a force for good or evil may be judged to some extent from the Cuban experiment...
...These food imports are equivalent to about one-half the value of the entire sugar subsidy...
...The Cuban government spent $120 million last year on arms—the sugar subsidy amounts to $150 million—and the firepower of the Army is more than 2i times that of Batista's forces...
...It is true, despite the wild tirades against American imperialism, that Cuba was politically a colony up to Franklin D. Roosevelt and continued as an economic dependency until the Castro revolution...
...and to enable Cuba to buy back more from the United States than she sold...
...The writer happened to encounter two students visiting Cuba as representatives of the leftwing Socialist party of Argentina—the most violently anti-American group in that country—and was startled to discover that the students, who constantly compared Castro to Perlin, were far more disillusioned with events than he...
...For the muchmisunderstood sugar quota system is the heart of the problem...
...If Castro has enough time and money to create a higher standard of living among the peasants as a result of this truly revolutionary change, he will go down in Cuban history as a greater patriot than Jose Martf...
...From morning to night, the writer walked through the city, talking with Cubans of all classes and attitudes...
...It should hardly be necessary for intelligent readers to need briefing in a history of Cuba as a case study of Latin America...
...Shortages of even the most elementary items such as razor blades and medicine, sluggish business conditions, lack of tourists, a dearth of working capital: all these are beginning to be felt...
...It is this that creates the hostility to the Ugly American...
...The new quota system cut Cuba's share in the American market to the benefit of other areas while at the same time the American population and standard of living was rapidly rising...
...Since sugar and tobacco cultivation involve only three to four months, the administration is now trying to diversify with crops such as wheat, rice, potatoes and tomatoes,* the basic staples of Cuban diet...
...This writer was told over and over by ordinary people in Havana (the kind of persons the naive optimists who can only speak English do not meet) that Castro had over 90 per cent of all Cuba behind him in the first year, the great majority till the beginning of this year, and only a bare majority now...
...When the revolutionary forces tracked down the worst criminals of the Batista era and put them on public trial, as we did to the Nazis at Nuremberg, the press in America raised an uproar heard all over the world—though the abominations committed by the "friends" of the United States like Perez Jimenez of Venezuela, Rojas Pinilla of Colombia, as well as Batista and Trujillo, were never noticed...
...Since Castro cannot push the last course too far without a popular uprising, he must rely on another alternative...
...If the sugar quota means a continued and heavy trade deficit, the Cubans feel with a great deal of reason that there is something wrong with the system...
...To implement this measure, the government has already pushed a "Buy Cuban" and "Grow Cuban" program which is really the alternate face of the same problem...
...Something similar is happening in the large cities of Cuba...
...In an important sense, the Cuban problem thus is a reflection of our own problem...
...The lands south of our border have missed not only the winds from the 20th century, but many from the 19th century as well...
...After all, for every extravagance in Cuba one can couple another from the United States...
...The Reciprocal Treaty of 1934 deliberately forced this aspect of the quota system on the Cuban economy, and is the basis for charges of "economic slavery" that Raul Castro and Ch6 Guevara delight in hurling against the United States...
...He sojourned in Cuba three years ago while Batista was at the apogee of power, and became an avowed partisan of Fidel Castro...
...It has been estimated that there are 900,000 persons unemployed in a population of some 6 million, or 200,000 more than during the Batista era...
...The Church in Cuba, which stayed closer to the people than in most Latin countries, has hesitated to assail the Revolution (as distinct from specific Communists in the government) for this very reason...
...Reviewing the facts, one can understand Cuban resentment...
...No attempt was made to contact important leaders of the revolution...
...Not merely for propaganda purposes, like the Peronist doctrine of justicialismo, but because it is deeply and sincerely believed, the Cuban regime emphasizes that justice and dignity are for the poor and small and colored as well as the rich and big and white...
...The passive resignation of peoples has been shaken off and they are turning to dynamic leaders who fuse the new vision of socialism with the one old force, nationalism, that can break through the weight of tradition imposed by caste and religion...
...In an era where human rights— whether genuinely subscribed to or used for their propaganda value— are preeminent over property rights, America is the sole country in the world today which obviously supports property rights against human rights...
...Putting aside the disgraceful years preceding the abrogation of the Platt Amendment (1934), which gave America the right to intervene in Cuban affairs, it was quite apparent that the United States supported the Batista dictatorship...
...For only the Church remained as a stable traditional element when Fidel Castro rode on a tank into Havana one year and a half ago, and the Church, less strong in Cuba than most Latin countries, was mainly on his side...
...And on his return to the United States, by means of writing and lectures, the writer tried to impress Americans with the meaning of the Castro revolt...
...When all this is put in perspective, it tends to wash out the errors and stupidities on both sides...
...The two nations are involved in what the French call "a dialogue of mutes" which can only be resolved by cool thinking...
...This is the vision of fulfillment at its most glorious to the mass of men who live humble and frustrated lives...
...Ambitious revolutionaries need money and money can only come through confiscations of the rich, loans, inflationary printing or squeezing it out of the masses by taxation...
...When Castro set out to expropriate certain American properties in Cuba, with repayment at interest on better terms than General MacArthur provided in Japan, the United States immediately set out on a campaign to discredit the new regime...
...and he could never have enough to beat 282 off a direct American invasion...
...The diffuse social structure and high standard of living in the United States cushions us against dictatorship and obscures the fact that, to a large extent, we are oligarchic in structure: a "flexible" oligarchy where "the rank and file can move into the elite," but of oligarchic mode none the less...
...And specific voyages to Cuba planned by President Sukarno of Indonesia and leading figures of the new Arab and African nations, as well as literary lights like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, indicate that the Maximum Leader of the Cuban Revolution has caught the imagination of the world...
...This is the basic tragedy facing Cuba...
...The sugar workers have been forced to forego a wage increase despite higher living costs, and the enforced 4 per cent "contribution" recently demanded of the general laboring class for industrialization was met with less than enthusiasm...
...In the first or 1903 Reciprocity Treaty, Cuba granted the United States preferential duties ranging from 20 to 40 per cent below those charged to other countries, while America re284 served the right unilaterally to raise its import tariffs except on tobacco and sugar...
...281 and murderers of Batista as a type of almost miraculous justice, the violence exhibited by the revolutionary forces does not destroy the image...
...The conservative businessman undoubtedly feels more sympathetic to "order" than to the turbulence of social change and prefers to deal with his own kind in other countries...
...The Hawley-Smoot Tariff, passed in 1930 as part of Hoover's plan to raise tariff walls around America, raised the import duties on Cuban sugar...
...One cannot but deplore the movement of the Cuban Revolution, but neither can one separate it from the forces seeking to destroy it...
...The intoxicating days however have long since passed for the Habaneros and—though the writer was not there on this trip, he heard reports—the people of Santiago de Cuba...
...It did not take Fidel Castro long to know what to suspect...
...Partly through his aid, a young Canadian idealist imprisoned after fighting in the Sierra Maestra mountains, succeeded in escaping the firing squad...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
