The Strange Case of Professor Williams
DRAPER, THEODORE
THINKING ALOUD The Strange Case of Professor Williams By Theodore Draper A professor of American History at the University of Wisconsin, William Appleman Williams, has taken the trouble to...
...It is true that I have never quoted from "Castro's book...
...Indeed, Cuba was much closer in this respect to the United States, which had an infant death rate of 26.9 per thousand in 1958, than to any other Latin American country...
...Matthews also says that Castro "employed" the word "socialist" in talking to him in the Sierra Maestra, but he does not say in what context...
...In a letter to me, dated November 25, 1962 (long before I knew of Williams' book...
...And here is what the Times reported...
...Is this simply an argument "over translations," as Professor Williams puts it...
...The economic depression certainly did not help him, but it is quite as certain that his usurpation of power would have "generated a revolutionary crisis" with or without a depression...
...In 1927, two years before the financial crash in the United States, Machado arbitrarily "reformed" the Cuban Constitution to enable him to stay in power, thereby setting off the revolutionary struggle which was renewed with even greater force in 1930...
...The purpose of Mills' myth was to show that Castro had tried but the U.S...
...Not that he disagrees with me about its middle-class origins...
...He even quotes from the "book": "The Revolution is democratic, nationalist, and socialist...
...Sometimes carelessness seems too charitable an excuse for Professor Williams' irregularities...
...Very well: that is his privilege...
...This stage, which in Guevara's theory lasted at least from 1957 to 1960, poses an awkward problem for Williams...
...Let us say that there was a story in a newspaper at the time about some kind of Cuban "approach" to the Fund...
...Even his request for quite minor financial consideration was turned down flat...
...In a world of different Communist tendencies, does Castro perhaps represent still another and the latest one...
...I deliberately limited myself to a few observations that seemed to me clear and obvious and which seemed equally clear and obvious to almost all Cubans, including good Fidelistas, whom I met in Cuba in the spring of 1960—before Guevara's book came out with the new party line, now officially repudiated, of the "peasant revolution...
...Lopez Fresquet and Pazos expected negotiations with the United States and did what they could on their own to prepare for them...
...Thus, I decided to break one more good resolution and spend some time on this strange book...
...Strange" is really too feeble a word to characterize Professor Williams' methods of quotation...
...Draper is also wrong, and very misleading," he declaims, "when he dismisses American policy on the grounds that it did not gencrate the crisis" (p...
...Lichtheim merely remarked on Marx's cautious contemplation of the possibility of "a socialist development in Russia...
...Revolution was and is the name of a newspaper...
...So it is all a quarrel between two translations...
...The entire matter was handled most confidentially for a long time on both sides, and a current newspaper story can hardly be considered a reliable authority...
...In my book, I went to some trouble to point out that the official English translation of Castro's 1953 speech, "History Will Absolve Me," had distorted his reference to "cooperatives" by leaving out a key phrase (pp...
...None other than Fidel Castro...
...He meant that a bourgeois intellectual like himself could rise above his class origins and support the proletariat, but he never suggested that this made him into a proletarian...
...But if I had given any figure for the rate of Cuban infant mortality, I would not have reached back to 1940...
...The up-turn had started at least the year before, and it is this phenomenon of revolution in the midst of relative economic prosperity, rather than decline or stagnation, that gave a distinctive element to the entire struggle against Batista...
...Does it matter whether one translation was "officiar' as long as it was demonstrably wrong...
...A proCastro reviewer in the Hispanic American Report, for example, hailed it as "a work of great insight and value," which has "effectively demolished" the "main thesis of Theodore Draper (and the State Department...
...Williams wishes to show "the very serious weakness in Draper's thesis about the middle-class nature of the original July 26th Movement" (p...
...The Second Revolution in Cuba, published by the Monthly Review Press at almost the same time as Williams' book, Morray writes: "Castro, in the insurrectionary period, had based himself on a coalition of conservative constitutionalists, bourgeois reformers, petty-bourgeois Jacobin democrats, and Communists" (p...
...He helpfully suggests that "a more general familiarity with Marx might have helped Draper resolve his troubles with the middle-class origins of Castro and his intimate associates" (pp...
...This is how he treats a story in the New York Times of April 23, 1959: "One story revealed that Castro had first approached the International Monetary Fund 'several weeks ago'" (p...
...Hoy, April 11, 1959...
...As Lenin suggested in What is To Be Done?, the professional revolutionary "obliterates" class lines...
...Castro repudiated the nationalization of even the U.S.-owned public utilities in 1958, hardlv evidence that he "always" understood his revolution as "Socialist," let alone called it that...
...Felipe Pazos, later denies the story...
...If this was the state of affairs, there was very little the U.S...
...But in the Mexican brochure, which was dated November 1956, the words were "democratic, nationalist, and with social justice," whereas in the underground Revolution, which was dated the first half of 1957, "social justice" had been changed to "socialism...
...Toward the end of his book, he writes: "It is thus confusing and misleading to talk, as Draper does, about 'old' and 'new" Communists in connection with Castro's decision [to accept Communists in the Government...
...If Williams' "proletarianization" of Castro means anything, it means this...
...The figures show that 1957 was one of the best years economically in Cuban history, perhaps the best...
...in fact, he virtually whitewashes Batista in one of his worst periods...
...My own comment clearly indicated that I was challenging this particular story and its implications: "The United States has surely been guilty of many selfish and stupid actions in its relations with Cuba in this century, but the incident of April, 1959, does not happen to be one of them...
...Why should the whole burden of proof fall on one side...
...Felipe Pazos with respect to the international credit organizations...
...Even so, the national income in 1958 fell only to 2,152 million pesos, still above the 1956 level...
...If Williams knows any reference by Dr...
...The same logic would make the declasse revolutionary into a peasant as well as a proletarian...
...And if Castro is some kind of Communist, what kind is he...
...have seized on it to show that Castro was an avowed "Socialist" as far back as February 1957...
...And I added: "The theory that Castro wanted American aid but turned to Soviet Russia and Communism in frustration makes a very neat and simple propaganda package, but it is an unmitigated myth, unworthy of an academic moralist" (pp...
...Yes, the official youth organization has been renamed, with his express blessings, the "Union of Young Communists...
...In one of his most famous speeches, on March 26, 1962, against the Communist leader, Anibal Escalante...
...If he knew, or could have admitted to himself, that Castro was the true culprit who had invented the "new" Cuban Communists, he might have had to face some of the really difficult problems of Castro's present position in the Communist world...
...the quotation was cribbed from Herbert Matthews, without attribution, and hopelessly mangled in the process...
...As for the former President of the Cuban National Bank, Dr...
...But there is little or no evidence (Williams offers none) that Batista had any such highfalutin theory as "corporatism" in mind, and it is really most merciful of Williams to describe "the Batista of the years 1935-1940" as one "whose concern for a better Cuba was real and not sham...
...Williams' pages on this subject are simply incredible for a professional historian...
...So Williams changes his course and attempts to rebuild Mills' myth or to replace it with another similar myth...
...He seizes on my remark that "the revolution was made and always controlled by declassed sons and daughters of the middle class" and triumphantly equates "declassing" with "proletarianization" (p...
...Revolution...
...Brazil had as high as an estimated 170 in that decade (Statistical Abstract of Latin America I960, Center of Latin American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, p. 6...
...Williams never quite makes up his mind which side of the argument he is on...
...From this, any reader might gather that I invented the terms "old" and "new" Communists in Cuba...
...The chief trouble is not that Professor Williams has written a pro-Castro book...
...All the greater, then, was their surprise to learn from Castro himself at the last minute that they could not discuss economic matters in the United States...
...Williams attempts to make a mountain out of a newspaper molehill...
...I therefore quoted the entire passage, as literally as possible, to prevent charges that I was playing fast and loose with the original language— and I gave the reference to the Spanish original, so that anyone who knew Spanish could look it up for himself...
...Lopez Fresquct which would confirm Castro's "approach" to the International Monetary Fund for a loan, he should produce it...
...Indeed, I have never tried to give a complete economic and social analysis of Cuba...
...I was amused to notice that J. P. Morray, whose support of Castro's Communism can hardly be questioned, is guilty of taking the same reprehensible, "reactionary" position...
...To avoid possible misunderstanding, I went on: "I do not wish to make Julien's mistake in reverse and deny the significance of U.S...
...By the same token, I suppose, a proletarian would become a member of the bourgeoisie if he possesses a bourgeois "consciousness" and actively supports the bourgeoisie...
...Pro-Castro writers...
...Castro asked for nothing...
...I have rarely encountered, however, such a methodology on the part of a serious historian...
...33-34...
...1 was able to satisfy myself that he had quoted correctly from an unsigned article, about half a page in length, entitled "Necesidad de la Revolution...
...Instead of being turned down flat, Castro did the turning down...
...In his concluding sentence, Raul referred to the "fight for unity" in "our Marxist-Leninist ranks, in our Socialist ranks, in our Communist ranks...
...Instead of wasting so much time, energy and newsprint on obfuscation and flimflam, he would be better advised to find a reliable source and produce some real evidence...
...In the past, however, Guevara and others identified themselves with the peasantry, and this gave rise to the theory of the "peasant revolution...
...But, according to Williams, "the main point, however, is not that Draper missed Marx's thinking about the radical force inherent in Russian peasant culture...
...But it is also his obligation to produce some new and more convincing evidence from some other authoritative source...
...Similar instructions were communicated to Dr...
...I wrote about peasants being the "driving force of a socialist revolution...
...His entire purpose, apparently, is to make the translations cancel out each other and befog the issue...
...Felipe Pazos, he has told of visiting his old friends and colleagues at the International Monetary Fund and of how they tried to convey to him their interest in helping Cuba...
...During discussions at the International Monetary Fund, it became apparent to United States officials that the Cubans did not know what they wanted or what Cuba's real position was...
...To cite another example, I wrote: "For the 26th of July Movement was never homogeneous, and the larger it grew in 1957 and 1958, the less homogeneous it became" (Castro's Revolution: Myth and Reality, Praeger, New York, 1962, p. 75...
...Unlikely as it may seem, for reasons of his own, Williams even tries to clean up Batista in one of his worst periods...
...It may surprise Williams to learn that I consider this to be a tenable position, and I would respect those who hold it, even if the reality was not so black-and-white...
...If the point is so important, a few documents, which Fidel Castro could easily provide, if they exist, might not be amiss...
...and whatever else Williams may have intended, his prettying up of the Batista of 1935-40 serves as an apology for the Communist-Batista alliance of 1938-46...
...But anyone capable of committing such a distortion hardly qualifies as a reliable statistical guide...
...Not that the word "socialism" carries too much significance in Cuban politics...
...This is definite enough, and we are referred to Rufo Lopez Fresquct, Felipe Pazos and Nicolas Rivero as authorities who have referred to the incident "in general terms...
...And if Castro himself said, first, that he did "not want" a loan from the International Monetary Fund, and, second, that he "could not get it," Williams works this over until he makes it mean just the opposite of what Castro said...
...But if the Times is to be quoted and trusted about one part of the story, it must be quoted and trusted about the other parts, which would scarcely sustain the case Williams laboriously tries to make...
...The quotation cited by Professor Williams originated in Herbert L. Matthews' book, The Cuban Story (p...
...The problem of "class" is not an easy one in Marx's writings because he himself never worked it out fully and explicitly...
...Thus, by transforming Castro, Ché Guevara and the rest into "proletarians," the Cuban revolution can be made into a proletarian revolution, even though the Cuban proletariat as a whole sat on its hands...
...When...
...What did I dismiss...
...policy in Cuba since 1895 was so exploitative and reactionary no true Cuban social revolutionary could be anything but intransigently anti-U.S...
...could have done in 1959-60 to undo the previous 60 years...
...Why not ask Castro or someone in Cuba who could speak with authority...
...A recent work on Cuba by a French Communist, Jacques Arnault, can at least be taken seriously...
...One would expect Williams to tell us where Marx "pointed out" that a bourgeois could become a proletarian through "conscious identification and action...
...in this case, he suddenly switches to extreme philosophic idealism...
...To this extent, those who attack me should also attack the official Cuban Communists and other partisans of the present Cuban regime such as J. P. Morray...
...It is also, in my opinion, one of the strangest books ever written by one who calls himself a "historian...
...It happened that, when I read this quotation in Matthews' book, I was curious about the source...
...I think it would be obvious to most readers that I was referring to the U.S...
...Why, in four years, has Castro himself never made a claim that he asked for a loan in Washington and was turned down...
...Draper's old Communists are Communists: the pre-1959 leaders and members of the Cuban Communist Party...
...For a long time, pro-Castro apologists pretended that Castro's "cooperatives" represented a consistent policy on his part and stemmed all the way back to the 1953 speech...
...I recognized that almost the same words had appeared in the "Manifesto-Program," entitled Nuestra Razón, which was published in Mexico in the name of Castro's 26th of July Movement...
...When I queried him, he could only be sure of the reference in Revolution...
...After all, Castro had denied early in 1959 that he harbored any such deep-seated grudge, and there were many people in his movement who felt that a new beginning could be made in U.S.-Cuban relations or at least were willing to give it a try...
...Does Williams offer his own, more accurate translation...
...Since Castro based himself on the Communists only from about the middle of 1958 on...
...Williams, moreover, is not content to let it go at that...
...I must confess that my first impulse on reading the book was to tell myself not to waste more time on it, and I trust that the reasons for this impulse will become clear...
...If it did, the nonsense of viewing this problem in terms of "right" or "left," instead of right or wrong, would be exposed...
...Williams does not even see fit to mention Machado's usurpation...
...Consciousness," not property relations, is the factor determining one's class in Marxism à la Williams...
...That I did not go very far is only too apparent to me, but those who try to make my views seem bizarre and perverse strike me as slightly ludicrous...
...The most he ever said on this score was that a portion of the bourgeoisie could go over to the proletariat and raise itself to the level of understanding theoretically "the historical movement as a whole...
...he uses one class or another at different times for different purposes...
...Only the Communists came to his rescue, however, and he made a deal with them in 1938 which enabled him to call a constitutional assembly, write a new constitution, and get himself elected as President in 1940...
...Bias Roca, declared that power had passed "into the hands of the petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie"—the latter defined as those Cuban business interests not dependent on the U.S...
...A certain slyness and deviousness creeps into the polemic...
...How did former Finance Minister Lopez Fresquet refer to the so-called incident...
...But one cannot have it both ways...
...And the rest of the paragraph goes on to use largely outmoded statistics to reach untenable or unclear conclusions...
...Batista's electoral alliance of 1940-44, which included reactionaries and Communists, was called the "Democratic Socialist Coalition...
...It begins: "Draper does not tell us, for example, that infant mortality in Cuba was the fourth highest in Latin America in 1940...
...I have been studying it more intensively for the past two years, and I hope to extend and refine my own views soon...
...though, as Morray observes, "what he [Castrol meant by 'socialist.' however, was far from clear in January 1959" (p...
...And the reader is led to believe that, although I was right about the omission, my translation "does some violence to the feel of the original...
...On pace 77, Professor Williams tells his readers with much fanfare that "Castro wrote a book called Revolution...
...Actually, Professor Williams is eager to convert middle-class revolutionaries into proletarians for an ulterior motive...
...Marx and Engels clearly explained in 1882 that the "driving force" of a socialist development in Russia would have to be the "proletarian revolution in the West," and Engels went even farther in 1894 by declaring that the initiative for the possible transformation of the archaic Russian peasant communes into socialism could only originate "among the industrial proletariat of the West...
...For any firsthand knowledge of what happened, it would be necessary to go to the two men directly involved...
...In any case, Matthews went much too far by assuring his readers that "Fidel Castro always called his revolution Socialist" (p...
...If Batista did desire to establish a "corporate state," then the Communists aided and abetted him because they have always claimed that they played a major role in writing the 1940 Constitution...
...Since most workers in the United States accept bourgeois values and aspire to a bourgeois condition of life, there are virtually no members of the working class in the United States...
...Who did first use those terms...
...Yet this single reference to Castro's "socialism" in Matthews' book has created a peculiar problem...
...In his recent book...
...Matthews, however, attributed it to the "underground publication," Revolution, not to Fidel Castro...
...In October 1959, Blas Roca still held that "the most advanced elements of the radical sector of the petty bourgeoisie" still exercised "the hegemony of the revolution" (Hoy, October 7, 1959...
...This leaves me somewhat nonplussed...
...the motivation is exceedingly dubious...
...In effect, a man may have a million dollars and live accordingly, or own a chain of factories with any number of workers in them, but if he makes a "conscious" effort to identify himself with and actively support the proletariat, he becomes a member of the proletariat...
...Castro's 1953 speech has been reprinted in the original Spanish in numerous editions...
...if this were so, no one else had ever quoted Castro to this effect and why, in all his statements and speeches before April 1962, Castro never employed this word...
...Words like "revolutionary" and "socialism" have been so abused in Latin America that they may be almost devoid of meaning and need not always be taken too seriously...
...157-58...
...What is far more important is the fact that Castro never used the term publicly, or in print, or under his own name, or in connection with his movement, until 1962...
...To which Williams rejoins: "The appropriate comment on that proposition has recently been made by George Lichtheim in his fine essay, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study: 'Marx himself had cautiously admitted the possibility of a socialist development in Russia (the popular notion to the contrary is based on ignorance)'" (p...
...policy in Cuba that Julien considered culpable for Castro's choice of the Communists, namely, the events of 1960...
...Anything more recent...
...The Cuban revolution in its antecedents and various phases has become a large and complex subject...
...Lopez Fresquet, also denies it...
...If everyone who thinks that the Cuban revolution against Batista was essentially a middle-class phenomenon is a reactionary, then the official Cuban Communists were, as late as 1960, the worst reactionaries...
...And he did not say that Castro approached the International Monetary Fund...
...But, owing to Castro's instructions, he could only put them off...
...The relation of United States policy to the Cuban revolution is another one of Professor Williams' main counts against me...
...Here is Williams' interpretation of the struggle against the Machado dictatorship: "Combined with the inherent imbalance and inequities of its operation in Cuba, the American economic system's failure in 1929 generated a revolutionary crisis in Cuba" (p...
...THINKING ALOUD The Strange Case of Professor Williams By Theodore Draper A professor of American History at the University of Wisconsin, William Appleman Williams, has taken the trouble to write a book, The United States, Cuba and Castro (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1962...
...Castro, in his capacity as Prime Minister, gave me instructions not to ask for financial aid from officials of the U.S., and not to heed offers toward this end in case they should make them during the trip that we made together to this country in the month of April 1959...
...Another "Draper docs not tell us" passage tells us something about Williams' manipulation of statistics...
...Professor Williams has evidently rushed in to fill the breach left by C. Wright Mills...
...44-45...
...But the men and women he calls new Communists are in fact non-Communist Cuban radicals who have undertaken the extremely difficult, risky and demanding job of using the Communist Party to effect their own revolutionary purposes" (p...
...Professor Williams also undertakes to give me instruction in Marxism...
...he cuts across classes and maneuvers between them...
...I decided to start with the first one, which struck me as suspicious...
...And Castro is the one he insistently claims made the "approach," through them or through others, to the Fund...
...No, I did not...
...Much of the source material is not readily available, and even if it were, one would have to spend much time and effort studying it to get very far...
...I have already pointed to quite a few in the case of Williams, starting with Castro's non-existent book...
...99...
...137...
...This is how Williams handles the matter: "Draper wants to decide this issue, which is a significant one over and beyond his indictment of Castro, on the basis of his translation of the speech as against an official Cuban translation" (p...
...The second man most closely concerned with the matter...
...Any suggestion that the Cuban middle class played a leading role in the revolution is sure to evoke the most furious indignation, as if no idea could be more reprehensible and ipso facto reactionary...
...Even then, they speculated among themselves that the negotiations would come later...
...After all, Williams has chosen to impugn the honor and integrity of two men whose only crime is that they left Cuba and oppose Castro...
...What can we learn from Williams about what Marx thought of "middle-class origins...
...Indeed, Williams' theory makes it possible for one to change one's class as often as one changes one's coat, simply by changing one's "conscious identification and action...
...In truth, there is much less mystery to the entire episode than Professor Williams makes of it...
...the next lowest, Panama, was 57.2 in 1958...
...But it was not the causative, operative factor" (p...
...He was not always the bloody tyrant that Castro likes to make him...
...Still later, though, they consciously identified themselves with the proletariat, and thus changed their class again...
...There are some things which give away a writer's grasp of his subject or the work he has done on it...
...Another example of Williams' economic interpretation of Cuban history simply flies in the face of the facts...
...policy in Cuban developments...
...I went to some trouble to find out whether this is what happened in April 1959, and 1 produced evidence to show that it was an outright fabrication...
...In his book...
...If I thought 1 could get an answer, I would write to Fidel Castro as I have written to Dr...
...Williams omits the first six words of this sentence and quotes the rest of it as my "explicit and accurate" description of the "Civilian Revolutionary Front," a coalition of nine anti-Batista organizations, including the 26th of July Movement, formed in July 1958 (pp...
...Why did Castro on December 2, 1961, make a famous speech of four-anda-half hours in which he sought to explain why and how he had become a "Marxist-Leninist...
...And in the June 1960 issue of Démocratie Nouvelle, the official French Communist organ, another Cuban Communist spokesman, Juan Mannello, wrote: "It was clear that the triumphant revolution was directed by the 'radicalized' urban petty bourgeoisie—students, members of the liberal professions — with an important participation of the national bourgeoisie which was not compromised with imperialism and a strong intervention of the peasantry and proletariat...
...Since Mills claimed that he had miles of tapes of his interviews in Cuba, it would be interesting to learn who sold him this phony story...
...He has discovered that one of the three "primary factors" in the overthrow of Batista was "the on-going economic crisis that had started in the last year (or 18 months) of Batista's rule, and for the origins of which Castro bears absolutely no responsibility" (p...
...I changed my mind because I was forced to recognize that while the book may be unworthy of serious consideration as a work of scholarship, it cannot be ignored as a piece of propaganda...
...Is there any other evidence that Castro does not shy away from the term "Communist...
...One lives and learns...
...In 1935, Batista's terror reached its high point with the bloody suppression of the general strike and the murder of the former Minister of Interior Antonio Guiteras...
...It was not until 1937-38, when Batista came to realize that he faced the same fate as Machado if he depended on force alone, that he began to make overtures to the opposition to legitimize his rule...
...It is entirely conceivable to me that Castro mav have used the word "Socialist" privately on occasion...
...Williams gets into all this trouble because he equates "declassing" with "proletarianization...
...Of course not...
...Did he even try to get in touch with Dr...
...And on February 23, 1963, Fidel Castro himself scoffed at Secretary of Defense McNamara for having inferentially made a distinction between Castroism and Communism...
...Nicolas Rivero did write: "Although Castro had publicly denied any wish for a loan or a handout of any kind, Fresquet and Pazos approached high United States government officials, as well as officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...
...To be consistent, Williams would have to argue that Castro and the others originated in the middle class, became members of the peasantry in the Sierra Maestra, and members of the proletariat some time after they took power...
...But Rivero was an official of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, not directly involved in economic or financial matters...
...Instead of Mills' "request for quite minor financial consideration" in Washington, he tells us that Castro "chose to approach the International Monetary Fund for the kind of loan he wanted and needed to carry through his revolutionary program" (p...
...But Williams goes far beyond this safe generalization...
...The one man who would have made the request, or at least known about it...
...There is more to this question than fine-spun theoretical differences...
...In any event, the book that Fidel Castro allegedly wrote and from which I did not "choose" to quote was no book and was not written by him...
...Yes, on January 22, 1963, Raul Castro made an important speech which clearly showed that the men closest to Fidel consider themselves to be Communists and that they mean "Communist" when they say "Marxist-Leninist" or "Socialist...
...Williams has obviously muddled two quite distinct questions—the possibility of a socialist development in Russia and the role of the Russian peasantry in that development...
...Then he uses this misbegotten quotation to prove something "by his [Draper's] own words...
...The crowning irony is that Williams is waging this particular battle not against me but against Fidel Castro...
...he argues that it graduated out of the middle class into the proletariat as a result of its "consciousness...
...But first I should admit my guilt: I never told anyone about the rate of Cuban infant mortality...
...American policy in general from 1895 to the present...
...The former had two more years to do homework in the subject, and he chose to write in his own name...
...I do not know why the official English translation left out an important phrase at this point, but the truncated version tended to bear out the legend of Castro's consistency...
...I still consider a full "class analysis" of this revolution in all its stages to be a most difficult and complex task...
...In addition...
...There was every indication that 1958 would have been another relatively good year if transportation and the economy had not been disrupted by revolutionary sabotage and guerrilla warfare...
...With Julien's argument clearly in mind, I maintained that "the decision to turn Cuba into a Communist state was of such fundamental magnitude that it cannot be ascribed to a mere reactive response...
...such as Professor Williams and J. P. Morray...
...For some reason, nothing has wrought up Castro's apologists in the United States so much as my view that "the main drive in the struggle for power came from the middle class, especially its younger generation, with other classes providing additional mass support...
...Let Williams produce this book, or tell us where a copy of it exists, whether he consulted it himself or who consulted it for him, and how it happens that his very quotation from the "book" is identical with the quotation by Matthews from a newspaper...
...It would be a tedious and thankless task to subject all of Williams' figures to minute examination...
...It shows that Cuba had the lowest by far in all Latin America...
...The latter protected himself somewhat by hiding behind an anonymous "Cuban revolutionary" who told him some things that were true, some that were questionable, and much that was demonstrably false...
...Fortunately, Matthews had kept that copy of the underground Revolution, and he kindly consented to let me see it...
...Pazos for more exact information...
...Lopez Fresquet...
...Has Williams tried to get in touch with Dr...
...Just as I rejected Mills' myth of April 1959, so I rejected a somewhat different analysis by the French writer, Claude Julien, that the events of 1960 turned Castro to Russia...
...I dismissed the specific reason given by C. Wright Mills for Castro's resentment against the U.S.: "Our Prime Minister went to Washington, right away after the insurrection, but he was just given the cold shoulder, and certainly no help...
...Thus there were some confusing feints and false leads in this period, and only much later was the import of Castro's personal intervention made clear...
...They do not even ask why...
...It was almost frivolous of the myth-makers to invent an incident in April 1959 to account for Castro's umbrage...
...he said that Lopez Fresquet and Pazos made the approach, without actually specifying for what or to what extent...
...I had written: "For Marx, the notion that the peasants would have been the driving force of a socialist revolution would have been simply unthinkable...
...Morray would have to say that Castro based himself on the first three until the last six to nine months of the insurrectionary period...
...To be sure, Batista's role in 1938-44 was quite different from his role in 1952-58...
...His story is at best secondhand...
...How could any ordinary reader know who had "demolished" whom...
...The kindest thing that might be said of this repeated garbling of quotations is that Williams is all too often guilty of almost incomprehensible carelessness...
...officials to ask for something...
...There could be no excuse for a sociologist presenting a travesty of Cuban society in the guise of presenting the "voice of the Cuban revolutionary...
...The declasse revolutionary, however, is capable of establishing his rule over the proletariat and peasantry precisely because he functions above all classes...
...161...
...The reason is simple: There is not and has never been any such book...
...Equating the declasse with the proletarian is an elementary political and linguistic blunder...
...The Cuban figure was 37.6 per thousand in 1952...
...The dates are all wrong...
...If Castro, Guevara and those closest to them consciously identified themselves with the peasantry, they must have become members of the peasantry, according to the Williams exegesis of Marxism...
...The article was probably written by the editor, Carlos Franqui, who put out the paper in Havana, not in the Sierra Maestra...
...even the most superficial acquaintance with any Cuban history would make it impossible to believe that the depression, and not the usurpation of power, was the "generating" factor...
...But Castro always had the last word and never permitted them...
...His qualifications for writing a whole book on Cuba are difficult to discover in view of an almost total absence of references to any Cuban material and an almost total reliance on the most superficial sources in English...
...The chief trouble with Professor Williams' book is that it makes a mockery of his own calling...
...did or did not do in 1959-1960...
...Several weeks ago, a Cuban mission came to Washington to talk about possible aid...
...had adamantly refused...
...But the next one really had me wondering how a Professor of History in a great university could permit himself to make such monumental blunders...
...He writes that "Batista was willing, between 1935 and the presidential election of 1940, to work within the system of representative government in his efforts to create such a corporate state," and more of the same (p...
...Then he goes on for almost two pages chewing over the significance of this passage which "Draper does not choose to print...
...Pazos and others...
...I HAVE saved one point for last because it sums up what is wrong with Professor Williams' polemical style...
...Somehow, it does not work out that way...
...For the most part, he tends to follow the line that U.S...
...Lopez Fresquet for more exact information...
...I used some figures to show that Cuba was not what C. Wright Mills made it out to be, "a place of misery and filth, illiteracy and exploitation and sloth...
...but never breathed a word about having been pushed into the arms of the Russians and the Communists by anything the U.S...
...We happen to have the infant death rate for Latin America in the 1950s...
...that is, in large part, a polemic against me...
...Did I invent the terms "old" and "new" Communists in Cuba...
...When the two men, together with the Minister of Economics, Regino Boti, were asked to go to the United States in April 1959, they interpreted the very composition of the delegation as an indication that serious financial and economic negotiations impended...
...Here are the Professor's words: "Though his orthodox Communist followers have very seldom emulated his next step, Marx went on to point out that men and women who belonged in one class according to their position in the pattern of property relations could —and did—become members of another class through their conscious identification and action with that second class" (p...
...Professor Williams covers a great deal of ground from 1893 to the present, and it would be a hopeless task to take him up on all his misstatements, misinterpretations and oversimplifications...
...The absurdity of this kind of reasoning can hardly be exaggerated...
...The improvement in Cuba from 1940 to 1952 had been spectacular...
...the only argument can be between my translation and the original Spanish, not between my translation and the "official" one...
...in fact, he made a special point of forbidding his aides to ask for anything, even when they were invited by U.S...
...Williams then accuses them of "not telling the whole story...
...Since it closely paralleled a section of the Mexican Manifesto, there still remains the question of why the change was made...
...What is the difference between Castro's oft-avowed "MarxismLeninism" and the Communists' "Marxism-Leninism...
...But a fair sampling may serve as a warning to the unwary...
...Just after Batista fell, the Communist leader...
...If Castro is not any kind of Communist, why did he say that he was one...
...This is economic determinism gone mad...
...In some places, Williams appears to be an extreme economic determinist...
...I have read pro-Castro books with which I have disagreed in whole or in part but which I have respected...
...It seemed to me that Mills had taken the easy way out and that he had not done enough work of his own to know the difference even in the area of his own specialty...
...I think Professor Williams might have better luck...
...Does Williams really think these propositions are one and the same...
...87-88...
...Williams, however, has even less an excuse than Mills had...
...National income rose from 2,050 million pesos in 1956 to a high of 2,325 million pesos in 1957, and per capita income increased correspondingly...
...Lopez Fresquet wrote: "It is certain that Dr...
...Mexico had 80.8 in 1958...
...He makes some references to speeches by Castro, available in English, but inasmuch as he did not seem to know that Castro had spoken of the "new" and "old" Communists in as well-known and sensational a speech as that of March 26, 1962, one wonders whether or how carefully he has read many of them...
...For the rest, I explicitly stated that I was not trying to make any detailed "class" analysis of the Cuban revolution...
...This would have been the real message of the statistics if they had been used properly...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 9
