Cuba: The Two Sides Of Castro's Cuba
Kraus, Richard & Friedman, Edward
The events in Cuba have naturally aroused the most intense interest among U.S. radicals. They have also aroused considerable disagreements of estimate. We are pleased to present an analysis...
...yet is was by no means true that Cuba was in the grip of a reign of terror as the U.S...
...Given the increasing U.S...
...elections were promised within two years, and former President Prio talked of organizing political parties...
...vendors hawk their wares...
...He turned to Japan and almost any Western country that would offer help, for technicians...
...But as things have developed, the Castro government did not transform the 26th of July Movement into a stable political organization, and the Communist party, however small, is the only group within the governing circles which can possibly be called a significant political organization...
...All these changes—and comparisons must always be made with the Batista years—have produced in Cuba an extraordinary warmth and friendship...
...aid and democracy in Cuba...
...The cumulative corruptive effect may be tremendous as men become entrenched in their positions...
...Fidel, by all indications a sincere Catholic, proclaimed that to be anti-Christian was to be counterrevolutionary...
...Instead they point with pride to the fact that soldiers now spend most of their time working alongside other laborers...
...Millions of Cubans (especially the landless, nameless guajiros for whom so few have ever expressed any real con tern, for whom so little has been done in the past) are now firmly convinced that Castro and his men care about them...
...The prospect of nationalization and the falling behind on debts led not only to bitter attacks from the U.S., but also to economic sanctions...
...This shortage of trained technicians and adrninistrators, some of whom were already abandoning the regime, was aggravated by the decision to carry out rapid land reform, so that the government apparently felt that it could no longer turn down the repeated offers of the Cuban Communists to help...
...IV In order to understand what is happening in Cuba it is necessary not only to focus on the problem of Communism and political freedom, but also to try to understand the nature of the overwhelming and enthusiastic support of the Cuban people for the Castro government...
...Once in power he permitted Batista papers to denounce him and argued that if the government prosecuted one man for his political beliefs, then none could feel safe...
...The events in Cuba have naturally aroused the most intense interest among U.S...
...Thus when Fidel called for a general strike in April 1958 to bring down the Batista regime, it was largely the opposition of the Communist-controlled unions which helped defeat that strike...
...Fidel should be educating the people in the values of democracy...
...The regime began to rely on people who, to say the least, were unsympathetic with the landowners and the landowners knew it...
...support and with Communist involvement, few landowners, especially U.S...
...Two years until elections" became "four" and then "not until the reforms are established...
...A great paradox of the revolution is that, despite the suppression of political opposition, Cuban society is more open, more relaxed than it has been in a long time...
...schools where there were none, and medicine, doctors, and shoes to replace a condition in which there was no medical care for the poor and in which parasitosis was endemic...
...aid, capital had to come from elsewhere, and eventually it did, from ever-widening nationalization of U.S...
...Still, you can find almost any kind of book in the bookstores—fascist, conservative, liberal, Communist—all shadings of the political spectrum (and the Communist literature is more expensive than in the U.S...
...The decision, as we now know, was no support...
...Castro was educated by men taught by Lombardi, and both the leader of the opposition against Trujillo and the leader of the Paraguayan insurrection against Stroessner are young, Lombarditrained Jesuits...
...Such a government—it had also defaulted on Cuba's debts to the U.S.—was, in the eyes of the U.S., profoundly suspect and sometimes said to be Communist...
...But this policy of watchful waiting was in reality no policy at all...
...it is that an atmosphere in which free elections can ever be held is not being created...
...In spite of U.S...
...With speed as the byword, the government has spread in an almost amorphous fashion...
...Thus today, the Communists who had no right to even hope for such a thing, are an integral part of the revolutionary government...
...was necessary if the revolution was to survive, and in February 1960 Mikoyan visited Cuba and signed the first trade agreement...
...Readers may be interested in comparing their views with those expressed by Daniel Friedenberg in DISSENT, Spring 1959.—Enrroxs The nineteenth-century Cuban struggle for independence was long and bloody...
...Today the government is offering these people the opportunity to build for themselves new cement homes to replace their grass, dirt-floored shacks...
...Cespedes government which followed was forced out almost immediately and then Dr...
...press started denouncing the regime...
...Porter's statement would seem to indicate, there was some Department support for aiding the Cubans...
...government to grant them belligerent status against Spain, but at no time, neither in the Ten Years' War (1868-1878), nor in the War for Independence (1895-1898), did the U.S...
...The Cubans believe that they are doing something new, important, human and essential...
...The mere parcelling-out of land from big holdings was regarded as of dubious economic value...
...While Machado was jailing and killing, President Coolidge claimed that the Cubans were "independent, free, prosperous, peace-loving and enjoying the advantages of self-government...
...Though the Cuban CP cried that it was all for the revolution and would sub ordinate itself to Castro, it was ap parently much too late...
...The Catholic Church came to terms more quickly with the social revolutionaries...
...control of the Cuban economy grew...
...When after seven years of official U.S...
...Ambassadors— Batista fell, his regime had been responsible for 20,000 Cuban deaths...
...supported the Spaniards...
...cutting of the sugar quota and the more recent embargo has only confirmed Cuban fears and increased Cuban dependence on the Sino-Soviet bloc...
...gov ernment, Britain cancelled an agree ment to sell Cuba some jet planes...
...Fidel is now denouncing democracy as "old fashioned electoral farces...
...In the past the U.S...
...Instead of cowering in total fear of the police as they did under Batista, Cubans can and do argue with the police, because they no longer see the police and military uniforms as representing terror and torture...
...Charles Porter gave assurances of large scale aid, but nothing materialized...
...Grau San Martin came to power with a program of social legislation and agrarian reform...
...Isis government opposed the influence of U.S...
...According to the land reform laws, the land reverts to the peasants when they are capable of running the cooperatives themselves...
...If so, we are among the principle culprits, and we are all the losers...
...CARE sent packages and some Catholic groups organized relief, but that was not enough...
...In fact, the Communists were bitter enemies of the social reformers...
...While U.S...
...Even Raoul Castro refused to attend some of these trials which he said, rightly enough, were like Roman gladiatorial contests...
...Castro, who had already ousted the corrupt Batista bureaucracy and seen the Batista henchmen earlier escape with a great deal of money, was now facing a social revolution virtually without capital, without technical assi , tance and with much less faith in the U.S...
...support— and praise from U.S...
...acknowledge the legitimacy of the rebellion...
...Girls, including the militia women with their sub-machine guns, come to the rallies in a fiesta mood, wearing lipstick and earrings, deliberately sexy...
...businesses and finally from the Sino-Soviet bloc...
...without them, the dangers are far greater...
...To have given aid to Castro—even on a much smaller scale than the U.S...
...Meanwhile the Moscow line changed again and Communist parties throughout Latin America tried to link up with Fidelista-type groups...
...You can find proU.S...
...Because of his unique status among the millions of Cubans who never had anything, not even hope, before he took power, Fidel's denunciations of political democracy as "phony" ma...
...There is singing and laughter...
...A later estrangement with the dictator was patched up by the mid-fifties, so that when Castro was leading guerrillas in the hills, the Communists condemned him as a "bourgeois romantic," and continued to seek alliances with Batista...
...books, such as Ike's "Crusade in Europe" and "The Bataan Death March," as well as many works on FDR and Lincoln...
...governments...
...army...
...Along with these new freedoms has come a new dignity and pride...
...And Fidel's proclaimed policy was to avoid or minimize conflict with opposing political tendencies in order to carry out the social and economic reforms as quickly as possible...
...and all it stands for—including democracy...
...Posters in Cuba which cry No encontraran aqui su Guate mala...
...11 In 1933, along with the State Depart...
...The experience of the revolution is part of him: the disappointment with the U.S., the help from the Sino-Soviet bloc, the moderates leaving the government, the Communists coming in...
...Although it firmly believes it has the support of the overwhelming majority of the people, the regime began from the very outset to organize this majority into a popular militia...
...They were following the same ultra-left line ("socialfascism") which helped Hitler gain power in Germany...
...The Cuban regime concluded that trade with the U.S.S.R...
...Perhaps they will fail...
...Nevertheless, in late 1959 and early 1960 there were still halting steps in the other direction...
...business, and was regarded as a friend by U.S...
...Iikely to proposition her...
...Before the military occupation ended, the Platt Amendment was im...
...business more secure...
...This may largely be due to the intelligent efforts of one man, an Italian Jesuit named Lombardi, who years ago obtained permission to hand-pick young Jesuits from the underdeveloped world, to bring them to his school in Rome and to train them in advanced social philosophy...
...took Guantanamo and claimed the right of intervention in domestic politics—a right exercised in 1906-09, in 1916 and again in the early 1920s...
...landowners, had faith in government bonds...
...Perhaps the Cuban Revolution has already failed...
...These events were strongly influenced by growing anti-Fidelista sentiment in the U.S...
...In the late twenties "order" came to Cuba...
...Now he insists there is no possibility for compromise, that, as he puts it, either Cuba advances one hundred years or it sinks back into the past...
...In the eyes of the Castro leadership, the social revolution has become everything and the means are largely beside the point...
...Five cabinet ministers resigned and a second emigration began among those groups which had provided much of Castro's strength and had supported the bid for U.S...
...posed on Cuba...
...Some say success is impossible...
...economic relationships in Cuba and the rest of Latin America...
...Even with uninhibited criticism and orderly change, the dangers of bureaucracy in a government-run economy are great...
...naval guns, the San Martin regime survived only four months...
...By the end of July 1959, however, new forces were at work in Cuba...
...The losers in that 1954 "liberation" claim that a prime reason for their defeat was their failure to arm the people, a failure that made them de pendent on the professional army, which the State Department and CIA were able successfully to influence...
...By the end of June 1959, the attacks on the Communists, in the press and unions, were brought to a halt and a number of sincere Fidelistas soon began to leave Cuba complaining of Communist infiltration...
...This was the period during which the South was forging the segregation system and the U.S...
...Once in power, the Fidelistas quickly ousted the Communists from their union positions and prevented them from taking over a second newspaper_ Anti-Communist fronts were formed in the unions and, in May 1959, after Revolution, the government newspaper, had charged the Communists with seeking to undermine the regime, a mob demonstrated outside the offices of Hoy, the official CP publication...
...Dictator Machado took power and ruled in violation of every prin• ciple of political democracy...
...support, the Ma chado regime fell in 1933...
...There is little of that discipline and forced enthuisasm that revolutions have produced in other countries...
...This conviction is of the utmost importance...
...Fidel tried to change this by integrating the great majority of the people into the body politic, by destroying illiteracy, by bringing political education to the people and by decentralizing the government...
...opposition to the Fidelistas, the Cubans have been preparing to defend themselves...
...troops were busily occupying and unoccupying Cuba, U.S...
...Once the government decided on rapid land reform and collaboration with the Communists in the middle of 1959, Castro began to lose support among middle and upper class Cubans...
...Not to have given support could only have meant continuation of the policy of buttressing almost any regime which continued the traditional U.S...
...Therefore cooperatives were set up with men from the National Institute of Agrarian Reform in charge and new seed, crops and programs were brought to the countryside...
...really cares about democracy it should be working with the revolutionary government, trying to encourage any democratic tendencies, trying to make democracy a possibility within the context of social revolution...
...Cubans proudly show that "Even the sergeants work...
...The many Negroes no longer face the in...
...Almost up to the moment of the SpanishAmerican War the U.S...
...The proU.S...
...In the cooperatives, for example, where the revolution has overwhelming support, democratic forms could be worked out in the near future...
...He was, however, on the best of terms with U.S...
...There was, and is, great hope in Cuba—hope on the part of Cuba's peasant millions for a chance to exchange existence for life...
...One of the reasons the leaders of the occupation could not deal with the rebel army was that it consisted in large measure of mulattoes and Negroes...
...The previous alliance with Batista and opposition to the Castro revolution seemed to have doomed the Communists to im potence...
...This is not simply a move against armed exiles or internal opposition, but is mainly a reaction to the U.S.-assisted overthow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954...
...The Rape of Hungary" is another prominent title...
...People are arrested on suspicion and held until cleared...
...With the help of the government, Communists returned to the unions and moved into powerful positions in the universities...
...well make future democracy impossible in Cuba...
...Without U.S...
...Once the mass military trials began, within a few days of Fidel's entering Havana, the U.S...
...The problem is not that elections will not be held tomorrow or within a fixed and short period of time...
...Right now, far too much depends on the maximum leader...
...A Cuban despatched to the U:S, to negotiate economic aid returned empty-handed...
...IN PART because U.S...
...sults of racial segregation...
...recognition and under the shadow of U.S...
...For a few weeks the government restored habeas corpus, only to drop it and reestablish the military courts...
...Even the "well-staged" mass rallies have a holiday mood of gaiety...
...sugar flourished and Cuban politicians grew fat on bribes...
...The vast bulk of it was homes and schools...
...In spite of over one hundred years of history which gave him no reason to expect help from the U.S., Fidel went to Washington looking for both encouragement and support...
...Purges in both institutions followed, ostensibly to remove Batista men, though the latter had actually been thrown out immediately after Fidel came to power...
...On January 1, 1959, U.S...
...Fidel still dreams, and the people continue to believe in the value and the power of that dream...
...the revolutionaries had committed themselves at least that far...
...In September 1960 Cuba was a mass of construction...
...The jails have filled with political prisoners, and the government insists that people be "clear," that is, one hundred per cent for everything it does...
...Thanks in large part to the inability of the U.S...
...The U.S...
...If the U.S...
...The succeeding Mendieta regime, drawn from the old oligarchy, was recognized by the State Department within five days...
...had already granted the authoritarian Rhee and Chiang regimes—would have advanced the possibility of social progress in a democratic context in Cuba, and perhaps all Latin America...
...press reported—thereby causing a swift drop in the tourist trade and immediate economic hardships in Cuba...
...Without U.S...
...By May 1960, to advocate elections was to be counterrevolutionary...
...His picture hangs in their homes next to Christ's...
...Matters will probably deteriorate...
...order was restored and crooked elections held...
...But the question of possibility aside, these beginnings and the faith they have aroused are stirring something in the Cuban people...
...farm machinery standing idle for lack of parts...
...For us to scoff, to analyze, to despair, or to show great patience is not enough...
...If the revolution has changed, it is in large part because Fidel has changed...
...THE HISTORY OF CUBA, as of most of Latin America, has consisted of a pattern of oligarchy, dictatorship, and then again oligarchy, while the conditions making for this pattern remained the same...
...This is a major undertaking...
...If the State Department succeeds in bringing down the Castro government, it will also probably have succeeded in losing all Latin America, and in insuring that the next American social revolution will be from the beginning openly anti-Yankee and proSoviet...
...The U.S...
...But what father will not wangle to get his son the scarce university opening, his wife the clothes she wants, himself the scarce repair part...
...The acclaim of the mob in mass meetings became more important than votes, and later the ballot box was replaced by voting "with machetes aloft...
...pressure, the erosion of middle class support, and the growing power of the Communist party, new men came to the fore in Castro's movement—men willing to move quickly, to take shortcuts, to suppress opposition...
...If one asks a Cuban why something is so, the answer often given is that "Fidel said it is a good thing...
...Opposition newspapers, though now denounced by Castro, remained largely free until February 1960...
...The military trials of Batista-men were concluded within the first six months...
...People leave when they are bored or when they have found someone of the opposite sex to leave with...
...secret denunciations are encouraged...
...Adam Clayton Powell visited Cuba in January 1959 and returned advocating 200 million dollars in economic aid...
...The 26th of July Movement was to be made into an effective political organ with roots throughout the nation...
...ment and the Catholic Church, the Cuban Communists helped defeat the social reformers...
...At the same time there is little point in mistakingly calling Cuba Communist, or in ignoring the great good being done, or wishfully conjuring up a significant anti-Castro group that will bring social reform and democracy...
...Aware of how far the U.S...
...Whether the dynamism and ideology of the revolution can be sustained without active political life, without independent political organization, is doubt ful...
...the possibility of year-round employment in the countryside to replace chronic unemployment and long lay offs...
...business...
...hostility has made anti-Castro forces bolder, the Fidelista regime considers the counterrevolution a serious threat...
...Two independent newspapers, one in English and one in Spanish, published in Havana until late in 1960...
...While attacking the Batista regime, he had always proclaimed his belief in political freedom, using the language of, in fact quoting, such western political thinkers as Aquinas, Milton and Locke...
...The results of the land reform thus turned out to be more drastic than the government had expected...
...He promised that if he could not carry out a "clean" revolution he would leave the government, for he was as much opposed to oppression and coercion as to the social evils of Cuba...
...We do not argue that what is, will be...
...Since reservations about various policies exist among a significant minority, silence and suspicion have spread...
...We are pleased to present an analysis and report by two young students who have visited Cuba recently and have kept in close touch with the events there...
...III Fidel came to power very much concerned with political means...
...The invasion was followed by a four-year military occupation, during which the revolutionaries were either ignored or insulted, and the government turned over to the "better classes...
...Learning from the experience of the Mexican Revolution, the Cubans believed that individual small holdings would not only prove less efficient than the already existing large estates, but that unless the peasants were given aid and taught-modern methods of agriculture they would end up deeply in debt and would lose their land...
...Then, at the request of the U.S...
...The U.S...
...This was the great opportunity for the United States...
...With Batista's coup in 1952, corruption became more systematic, political suppression more complete and U.S...
...NEVERTHELESS, with or without credits, the land reform, the center of Fidel's program, had to be pushed through...
...Late in February, Rep...
...They have also aroused considerable disagreements of estimate...
...To these people Fidel is the revolution...
...business held overwhelming controlling interests in the Cuban sugar industry, cattle and oil industries and public utilities...
...The State Department faced a crucial decision...
...business on the Cuban economy...
...In 1938 the Moscow-directed party, continuing its adherence to international orders now supported Batista, describing him not as "the center of reaction," but, in the name of Popular Frontism, as "the defender of democracy...
...They got none of these, but thanks to the "Yellow Press," "Manifest Destiny," and the "Maine," Cuba was invaded by the U.S...
...From the outset—in sharp contrast to Great Britain's sale of arms to the Kassim regime in Iraq—the State De partment refused to sell arms to Cuba and tried to keep its European allies from doing so...
...Symptomatically, Prio retired from politics and President Urrutia was ousted and humiliated...
...If the Fidelistas are able to maintain power long enough, there will be a strong tendency for those in office to harden into a privileged group, since no means of orderly political change has been developed...
...express a deep and sincere fear...
...Protestants, in this Catholic country, can for the first time preach and organize without hindrance...
...The Cuban government believed that to maintain its political independence while carrying out social reform, and to escape the fate of the 1954 Arbenz government in Guatemala and the Grau San Martin regimes, it would have to break the stranglehold of U.S...
...Although it seems more likely that the INRA men will become entrenched in their positions, the Cuban peasants who have been given deeds to the land by the government do seem to believe that the land is theirs and peasants, in general, want very much to get on cooperatives...
...During 1959, for ex ample, Cuba, in seeking to break its economic dependence on the U.S., doubled its trade with Great Britain...
...Repeatedly the Cuban rebels asked the U.S...
...In the final years of the struggle, the rebels pleaded for recognition, material aid and troops to be used as auxiliaries under the Cuban commander-in-chief...
...In contrast to this vigorous Jesuit action, the State Department went out of its way to remain "patient," to make no move to ease Cuba's course...
...business in Cuba, and, after a fight over utility rates, nationalized the U.S.-owned utility companies...
...The urban workers and the peasants undoubtedly enjoy a new sense of freedom—a freedom from day-to-day oppression and degradation...
...The Cuban government seems concerned about this possibility, and partly as a consequence of its hate for the privilege and corruption of Batista's regime, it has enforced a rigid equalitarianism: low salaries, plain clothes, all children in public schools, officials living in projects with everyone else...
...has shown a willing ness to help counterrevolutionaries with money, arms, military leaders and military training, bases from which to launch attacks and the aid of the CIA...
...Instead, a kind of benevolent, revolutionary paternalism seems to be developing...
...Cuba was again "safe" for U.S...
...was convincing itself of white supremacy...
...As Rep...
...withdrew its few technical advisers and imposed credit restrictions, as a result of which the Cuban countryside now contains U.S...
...Fidel came to the USA in April 1959, hoping, though refusing to beg, for a loan to finance part of his economic reforms...
...As they see it, they have for the first time been given the chance to exchange an animal existence for human life...
...At various times in their long association with and support for Batista, the Communists were rewarded with a newspaper, a radio station, control of a ministry and of the labor unions...
...It would be foolish to make predictions because Cuba is a little country and too much depends on international forces beyond her control...
...This changed commitment, with its increasing willingness to suppress all opposition, has distorted the revolution...
...Why the Eisenhower Administration refused to aid the revolution in early 1959 is not yet clear, but that there was some important support for such a move seems certain...
...That it has already achieved a significant amount of success in spite of all the economic hardship is amazing...
...government and people to understand that hope, it is now being corrupted by hate, but not by despair...
...V Political freedom is lost and repression is likely to increase...
...Nevertheless one thing is certain: the basis for the old pattern has been destroyed, and the basis for any of the modern political forms—desirable or undesirable— has been created...
...had gone to defeat social reform in the past, and aware of the U.S...
...investments grew and the one-crop (sugar) economy took on the form it would have until 1959...
...Without U.S...
...Since the cancellation, Anglo-Cuban trade has fallen off rapidly...
...But how long can a regime that is economically so hard pressed keep on building for those who can't pay and who must have and are being given 20-30 year low-interest loans...
...It is important to these people that a fellow can now safely take his girl to the beach, or go for a walk late in the evening, and that a girl no longer need fear that a man with money will be...
Vol. 8 • January 1961 • No. 1
