Fidelism as Faith
Friedenberg, Daniel M.
THE CUBAN STORY by Herbert L. Matthews. George Braziller, 1961. $4.50 Herbert L. Matthews, the New York Times correspondent whose 1957 interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra...
...Examples of the ability of Mr...
...Oddly, the final implications of Mr...
...The point of these quotations is not to agree or disagree with what Matthews states...
...So, on October 19 Huber Matos presented his resignation...
...For the very logic of his experiment, the actuality of the dream, will show the true face of the totalitarian police state...
...George Braziller, 1961...
...For, despite all sophisticated asides, the kind of reasoning employed by Mr...
...Juan Jose Arcvalo, author of The Shark and the Sardines, the most violent anti-American book ever published and a sacred text in Cuba, recently criticized Fidel Castro as "materialist" and "thoroughly impractical...
...The pages of this book must have been written in mid-1961 and, as Matthews himself states, the rhythm of the Cuban Revolution is so contorted, events are almost obsolete before they can be interpreted...
...Matthews to accept Fidel Castro's thinking abound throughout the book...
...This can be a straw in the wind...
...He tried to argue the matter out with Fidel, but Fidel would not listen or even see him...
...Even if the agrarian reform creates a Communist-type State system the peasant did not have freedom and democracy before, does not know what they mean and cannot be expected to care...
...Matthews does not lead to neutralist socialism but rather complete economic and political subservience to Russia or China...
...Put thus baldly, it was an utterly shocking business—but a revolution is not a tea party, and a great deal happens in revolutions that is shocking • . By the logic of the Revolution, Huber Matos was a traitor...
...As an editor of the New York Times he is careful to punctuate his remarks with disclaimers of historic inevitability, but underlying most of his attitudes is the feeling that the situation in Latin America has gone too far to be corrected by anything other than radical revolutions...
...4.50 Herbert L. Matthews, the New York Times correspondent whose 1957 interview with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra Mountains was a key step in the rise of the Cuban leader, has written a sympathetic study of the Cuban Revolution...
...If the Cuban story continues to unfold at the same momentum for the next year, Fidelists both inside and outside Cuba will start to ask themselves questions which cannot be resolved by the pat slogans Herbert L. Matthews has so lightly mouthed...
...Every great faith is based on this psychologic process and if enough people from the intellectual elite will it strongly enough, the great 20thcentury redemptive faith in revolution shall indeed create a worldwide religion of Communism...
...It is also an apologetics, which word in its old form is a branch of theology through which Christians logically defended their faith...
...The people of Puerto Rico may vote independence from the United States but Cuba, the Puerto Rico of Russia, no longer has that option...
...For Mr...
...The next day he was arrested, charged with 'treason,' and in December was tried, convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison, with Fidel Castro himself as the bitterest accuser...
...Elections are excreta to a revolution...
...The Cuban Story of Herbert Matthews and Listen, Yankee by C. Wright Mills clearly portray a dominant attitude among the Latin American student and professorial body...
...Matthews was struck with an extreme case of hero worship as a result of meeting Fidel Castro (by now confused with his ego satisfaction at making a great journalistic scoop) and has never been able to see the world the same...
...It is simply to indicate the trend...
...Nothing has been so salutary for Africa as the experience of Guinea...
...One believes and thereafter finds or recreates both facts and the logical relation among these facts to support conclusions which then seem inevitable...
...Those who condemned the outrageous way he was treated, had to condemn the Revolution...
...Matthews may be right...
...In brief, Matthews' thesis is that Fidel Castro was never a Communist but the United States forced him to choose the Russian system in order to continue the Cuban Revolution...
...he [Fidel], alone, holds the fabric of Cuban society together and without him it would break down into chaos, anarchy and a blood bath fearful to contemplate...
...Matthews favors, it must be emphasized, but one which he conceives as the movement of history so long as America stubbornly condemns what he calls totalitarian democracy...
...But the deliberate choice of Communism (or "MarxistLeninism," the preferred expression today) was already foreshadowed, and Mr...
...This is not a position Mr...
...Matthews' reasoning are closely similar to the reactionaries he despises...
...This left the field clear for the Communist party...
...the Leader alone holds together society...
...The case of Huber Matos was even more revealing, and is considered by some students of the Cuban Revolution as a watershed...
...radical social revolution must leave the field clear to Communists...
...In theory, Fidel could have developed the 26th of July Movement into a one-party system such as Mexico has with her Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) but, as I pointed out before, Fidel knew—or thought— that middle- and upper-class elements in the 26th of July Movement would not go for the radical social revolution he had in mind...
...Since in light of this same reasoning the United States will oppose such revolutions, the new Latin American leaders must look to Russia or China for guidance and assistance...
...The Cuban Story is more than a history of post-1957 Cuba...
...Matthews judged events presuming the strong possibility that the Fidelists might opt for a Communist state...
...Perhaps there is no middle way— peaceful, democratic, evolutionary— such as we want to see...
...Stridently anti-American for reasons excellent and less than excellent, the Wave of the Future is now riding hobby-horse with Moscow and Peking...
...since peasants neither know nor care for freedom and democracy, these aims become without substance...
...Matos, like many other officers and members of the former civic resistance, had watched the growing strength of communism in the Army with alarm...
...any man who disagrees with the Leader is a traitor by definition...
...And no Alliance for Progress can change this feeling since the world view of the Latin American intellectuals is so bound up with anti-Yankeeism, the emotional security of these individuals would be shattered if their redemptive faith were put to question...
...Perhaps we will be faced with the choice of one of the two evils—the Left-wing, socialistic, Fidelista way, or the Right wing, reactionary, military dictatorship way...
...Fidel Castro, who has gone much further than Sekou Tour6, is the only agent who can destroy the charisma of the Cuban saga...
...Only time may disprove the presuppositions of The Cuban Story...
...and no alternative is given between the "MarxistLeninist way" and reactionary military dictatorships...
...The faith is different but the reasoning the same...
...In my own opinion it was a logical, although reprehensible, development, and perhaps even inevitable...
...Some may be quoted: —"Fidel could not have held elections without putting a halt to his revolution...
...It follows that all revolutions must turn Communistic...
Vol. 9 • April 1962 • No. 2
