New Stage in Cuba:

...Revolution, the organ of the 26th of July Movement, or whatever remains of it, was recently awarded the annual prize of the International Organization of Journalists, a Communist group with headquarters in Prague...

...Two weeks ago, The New Leader published a special supplement by Draper, "Castro's Cuba," in which the author concluded that "the 'united front' of Communists and Sidelistas is heading" towards "a 'united party,' and if it materializes, Fidel Castro will certainly go down in history not as the Lider Maximo of a new movement but as the Pied Piper of an old one...

...The first fruits of this policy became visible among the youth...

...He used to insist that the Cuban revolution had its own superior ideology...

...Fidel must certainly be ranked with the greatest pseudo-messiahs of the century, but no one is likely to mistake him for a creative political thinker...

...This exchange of compliments, however, has been far from equal in value...

...At the end of last October, the official Communist youth branch and the youth division of Castro's 26th of July Movement merged to form the Jóvenes Rebeides (Youth Rebels...

...I have reason to believe, based on documentary evidence, that negotiations between Castro and the Communists began in June-July 1958 and were successfully concluded in OctoberNovember 1958, only about two months before Batista's flight...

...Anew stage has been reached in the Cuban revolution...

...This choice has become the crucial test of loyalty, and even those closest to Fidel must face it...

...Castro's tactical virtue is purely historical in character...

...A typical example of the new Castro may be found in the speech delivered on March 25...

...In any case, whatever the timing, it is the meaning of Castro's public admission that not he but the party has always been right ideologically...

...While they were still timidly advocating "clean, democratic elections" to get rid of Batista (declaration of the National Committee, signed by Mannello and Roca, June 28, 1958), he celebrated force and force alone...

...At one point, its correspondent in Havana, Arminio Savioli, asked Castro: "Major, what is your opinion of the Partido Socialista Popular, the party of the Cuban Communists...

...Thus the official Communists have gone very far since they accused him and his personal followers of petty-bourgeois putschism...

...The leaders of the revolution had great support among the people, the revolution itself had an extraordinary amount of sympathy, for what it had cleared away, not for what it had done...

...To which the Lider Maximo answered: "My boy, what would have happened to us if Khrushchev had not sent us oil, if he had not bought our sugar...

...They were capable of addressing Batista, as Hoy did in 1944, as the "idol of a people, the great man of our national policy, the man who incarnates the sacred ideals of a new Cuba"—the same language with which they address Castro today...

...Earlier this year, Antonio Nunez Jimenez of the Agrarian Reform Institute stated: "1961 will not only be the Year of Education...

...It was foreshadowed last August at the Eighth Congress of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), the official Cuban Communist Party...

...The first photograph is that of Lâzaro Pena, the best-known Communist trade union leader and head of the CTC until the split between the Communists and former President Grau San Martin's Auténticos in 1947...

...Ché once told Simone de Beauvoir that he would "spend hours explaining a complex economic problem to Fidel," who would then successfully boil it down to half an hour on television the next day...

...And the Cuban Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Faure Chomon, during a recent visit home, declared in a public address in Havana on March 13, in the presence of Premier Castro, that "we and the Communists will march together," that the students of tomorrow would see "how the whole [Cuban] people made itself Communist," and that ""we shall very soon see all the peoples of Latin America become Communist...

...Unlike Fidel Castro, Guevara is not in the habit of wasting words unnecessarily, and again unlike his nominal chieftain, past performance indicates that what he says should always be taken seriously...

...To celebrate the event, the official Cuban Communist organ, Hoy, sponsored a banquet for more than 2,000 people in honor of Revolution...

...Castro's ideological self-criticism was made somewhat easier by a dose of tactical self-criticism previously swallowed by Blas Roca...

...This was a new Castro speaking...

...And machines, spare parts, technicians...

...The old-time Communist leaders, formerly content to work in the background, have boldly stepped into the limelight...

...It was weak in its beginning, it was above all weak in the ideological sphere...

...Not a word would have to be changed if the same article appeared in an official Communist publication...

...He has already worn several different political coats in his relatively short career, and the latest is not necessarily the last...

...In the old days (a year or two ago...

...By the end of 1959, however, the die was certainly cast, and Castro has moved steadily toward the present perspective of fusion...

...it was, if anything, less radical than that put forward by Grau San Martin in 1933...

...On February 1 of this year the Italian Communist organ, l'Unità, published an important interview with Fidel Castro...

...Yet Castro's newborn humility before the Communists is not merely a pose...

...Castro was proud and even arrogant then...

...The ideas were not clear to us, though we wanted with all our strength to destroy tyranny and privileges...

...Thus Castro has begun to deprecate and inferentially to repudiate his past when he seemed farther from the Communists than he is now...

...His great advantage over them goes back to the struggle for power, not the uses to which he has put his power...

...And if the Czechoslovaks had not sent us the arms to defend ourselves...

...But the practical effect of the new stage of Fidelismo cannot be overestimated...

...it will also be the Year of the Paredon [execution wall...

...One reason the process has gone so far may have been revealed by Castro himself...

...Now we continue to work together, loyally and fraternally...

...the Communists' ideological advantage is very much more pertinent in the present...

...After all, the official Communists had contributed relatively little to the victory of his revolution...

...This is an unwonted role for him to play, a role secondary to that of the party...

...Now an apologetic and even a guilty note has crept into his interminable rhetoric...

...But this is precisely what he chose not to do...

...Another column and a half was spent on a lecture by Anibal Escalante on "The Cuban Revolution, Its Character and Its Development" for employes and officials of the Ministry of Finance...

...The same issue of Bohemia contains an article on the Cuban Labor Confederation (CTC), accompanied by photographs of six leaders...

...he never spoke of himself or his movement disparagingly...

...In this article, Draper goes a step farther and gives evidence for believing that the projected fusion between the Communist and Sidelista top leadership has now become ** virtual reality...

...It is also true that at first the Communists distrusted me and us rebels...

...It has been known for some time that Pena became the CTC's behind-thescenes advisor after the purge last summer of David Salvador, the previous Secretary General who had refused to submit to the Communists...

...It was a justified distrust, an absolutely correct position, ideologically and politically...

...By Theodore Draper NEW STAGE IN CUBA 'Castro now places the Communist party's interests over his own prestige' The fast-moving tempo of events in Cuba, reflected in last week^s State Department pamphlet calling upon Castro to sever his links with international Communism, is here underlined by Theodore Draper...

...The Government press devotes columns of space to their talks and lectures for Government employes...

...His apologies for his former "weakness" in the department of ideology are especially noteworthy, though the confession is far more surprising than the fact...

...There has always been only one party in Castro's Cuba, the Communist PSP, but it was not good form to show too much deference or attribute too much prominence to it publicly...

...In his interview with Arminio Savioli, he was asked: "What has the Socialist camp contributed to the Cuban revolution...

...The occasion was also typical of Cuba's newest phase...

...Castro replied: "It is the only Cuban party that has always clearly proclaimed the necessity for a radical change of structure, of social relationships...

...Indeed, the Cuban press reports such massive deliveries of everything from guns to buses that the entire Soviet bloc must be making a gigantic effort at no small cost to equip Castro's armed forces and support his economy...

...The Soviets are notoriously tight-fisted in these transactions, and it is most unlikely that they decided to invest so much in Cuba without adequate "guarantees...

...This is the inestimable gift of a popularizer and demagogue, not the genius of a pathbreaking social revolutionary...

...By placing its interests above his personal prestige or historical accuracy, he is demonstrating that he, too, can be a good, disciplined Communist...

...Its flavor may be gathered from one sentence in a passage comparing the different social backgrounds of Marinello and Bias Roca: "Nevertheless—one an intellectual, the other a worker—will come together afterward and both will be pupils of the greatest university of all: the marvelous university of Marxism-Leninism...

...But now Pena has visibly emerged as the strong man of the CTC's top leadership...

...The process has been complex and novel, surely one of the most fascinating and significant of our time...

...Communists like Blas Roca, Marinello, Rafael Rodriguez and Pena have gone through every twist and turn of Soviet policy for a quarter of a century, and more...

...The PSP itself is never mentioned by name—only "el Partido...

...But in that period, his political program betrayed little originality...

...The Communists were right to be distrustful because we of the Sierra, leaders of the guerrillas, were still full of pettybourgeois prejudices and defects, despite Marxist lectures...

...The open emergence of the official Communist party as the dominant force, the blatant build-up of its own top leadership, and Fidel's abject submission to its ideology have opened the way to the most acute crisis of the regime...

...The revolution was getting under way," he said...

...The human being, he proclaimed, was being sacrificed in both the capitalist and Communist states, and Cuba intended to make its own "autochthonous" revolution, as distinctive as its music, by being different from both...

...But in this new stage of fusion, the Communists have gained the upper hand, and Castro himself heads the procession of penitents...

...And yet I cannot suppress the feeling that the new, self-critical Fidel is totally out of character...

...In December, Major Ernesto Guevara, better known as "Che," the new Minister of Industries but then head of the Cuban National Bank, publicly announced in Moscow that the Castro regime "wholeheartedly supported" the statement issued by the 81 Communist parties, and he also held forth the prospect of a "united party" in Cuba...

...It will, in effect, represent the entrance of topranking Fidelistas into the PSP under a new name...

...For a long time, indeed, he has been increasingly dependent on the superior intellect of Ché Guevara...

...Then we met, we understood each other and began to collaborate...

...Its reflections on the earlier period were particularly revealing...

...The March 26 issue of the popular magazine Bohemia (not to be confused with Bohemia Libre, now published in exile by Bohemia's original owner and editors) presents a glorification of PSP President Juan Mannello of the type formerly reserved for heroes of the Rebel Army...

...Thus, for all his old boasts that the Cuban revolution was unlike any other and needed no ideology, army or party, Castro has turned to all three for survival...

...Since he took power without a real ideology, a real army or a real party, he could conceivably have survived without them only by making his power consistent with his promises...

...At the national plenary meeting of the PSP in July 1960, attended by such distinguished foreign emissaries as Jacques Duclos of France, the Communist Secretary General implied that the party had erroneously criticized Castro's attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 and that the latter's sound revolutionary instinct had led him to the correct tactical line...

...Prime Minister Castro's main speech filled five full pages of Revolution two days later...

...it had to go on step by step...

...For several months after Castro took power in January 1959, the "united front" was an uneasy one and various issues arose to disturb the partnership...

...There was a time when the most ardent and authentic non-Communist Fidelistas did not think of their leader as merely a Communist stalking-horse or a Soviet puppet...

...A column and a half was given over to a talk on economic planning by the editor of Hoy, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, before the officials and employes of the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation at which its Director General presided...

...For whatever the nascent "united party" may be called, it will merely be an enlarged version of the official Communist party...

...but, ideologically, the revolution was weak...

...As long as this attitude prevailed, the official Communists had to agree with the Fidelistas, not the other way round...

...It was a process that had to go on, for a long time...

...In his main report, the Secretary General, Blas Roca, called for the "fusion" of all the revolutionary forces "in a single movement...

...Most important of all, however, it looks as if it will be the Year of the Party...

...It may very well be, judging from Castro's obeisance to the Communist party, that this step has already been taken...

...In the Communist-style state which he has established in Cuba in less time than it took the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia—80 per cent of the Cuban workers, according to Anihal Escalante, are now employes of the state—a new ideology, a new army and a new party were urgently needed...

...Whatever may be the reasons for submitting to the ideology and discipline of the party, he can hardly transfer his mystique to it...

...Once upon a time—on May 21, 1959, to be exact—he distinguished his revolution from both capitalism and Communism, the one because it "killed people with hunger," the other because it suppressed their liberties, "the liberties which are so dear to man...

...The Communists have given much blood, much heroism, to the Cuban cause...

...They are products of the school of Stalinism who have survived in the era of Khrushchev...

...Many, if not most, cannot think so without disillusionment and perhaps revulsion...

...All that has changed...

...Revolution of March 24, for example, filled half of its second page with reports of two meetings addressed by two members of the PSP's Buró Ejecutivo, or Politburo...

...For many months afterward, many Fidelistas had made no effort to hide their contempt for the official Communists...

...Thus the old issues of agrarian reform, nationalization and antiAmericanism have been superseded by a new one—for or against el Partido...