Discovering Castro's Cuba

...Discussing Draper's Castroism: Theory and Practice in the New York Times Book Review in 1965, Thomas criticized the author for not emphasizing that "despite the political and economic mistakes, the political prisoners (Castro himself speaks of 15,000 in contrast to the exiles' minimum estimate of 45,000), and the reeducation camps, the Cuban government is not corrupt and there are no gangsters...

...True, she admitted, "when there is a public attack on one of the younger apolitical writers, the poet Heberto LEO SAUVAGE, New York correspondent of the Paris daily Le Figaro and author of Autopsie du Castroisme, has recently completed the manuscript for a new book, tentatively entitled The Three Failures of Che Guevara...

...So why should Miss Sontag, two years after her Ramparts article, profess "shame and anger" about his confession...

...But the eight were no more troubled than the 60 by what they had said—and not said—during the years before...

...He discovers "the willingness of large sections of the population, including intelligent and humane people, to surrender their individuality to Castro as men did to Fascist leaders...

...The "Cuban Revolutionary Government," he pontificates, is "an experiment whose moral, not whose example, needs to be borne in mind by others...

...Some of 1971's discoveries of Cuba have certainly been reluctant, perhaps unintentional...

...Observing all of Castro's avoidable errors with growing dismay, he concludes that "no country can call itself Socialist when popular contestation is no longer possible there...

...Padilla also made enemies by supporting the efforts of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, former literary editor of Fidel Castro's newspaper, Revolution, to publish his now famous Ties Tristes Tigres in Cuba...

...This is obviously quite different from what he wrote in 1965...

...The people sent there, he continues, included homosexuals as well as "potential, rather than overt, opponents of the regime," and "the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution also sent unenthu-siastic revolutionaries there...

...Castro's role in the Czechoslovak drama was, they insisted, "his first serious error to our knowledge...

...still, I cannot help wondering whether Thomas feels differently...

...Everything is in the past tense...

...NOT WITHOUT some irritation, Thomas recalls my comparison in a footnote, and elsewhere rejects it as "tempting" only to others...

...By that time Huber Matos was approaching the end of the first half of a 20-year jail sentence imposed, after a pitiable parody of a trial, for having written a letter of complaint to Castro...

...BRITISH HISTORIAN Hugh Thomas remans free of the cia appellation, though he shouldn't have to wait long...

...Thomas is generally objective and professionally aloof...

...His "British understatements" seem always to favor the same side...

...A few days later, Castro labeled the 60 apostates a "group of miserable ones...

...up to that moment," his revolution was "exemplary...

...And he goes so far as to say that Castro's "presentation of himself as the thoughtful and benevolent father resembles Mussolini...

...He suggests a "political reorganization, based on a real control of the Party by the workers, of the Central Committee by the Party, and of Castro by the Central Committee...

...The insistent objectivity that marked his authoritative history of the Spanish Civil War seems to have become, in the later chapters of Cuba, the insincere and unconvincing balancing act of a political acrobat...

...These opening words of Chapter I, the date of Lord Albemarle's departure from Portsmouth on a secret expedition against the Spanish colony's capital, mark "the year of the first Anglo-Saxon capture of Havana...

...They have had to swallow quite a lot in the past decade and, though still willfully blind to much of the past, have lately started to grumble...

...Still, it is good that Castro's Cuba is beginning to be discovered...

...militarization of education and labor...

...No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published...

...government takeover of the press and trade unions...

...Such blasphemy, however, was to be dismissed from one's thoughts immediately: "But again there might not...

...Wait—the sentence continues: "conditional release" of prisoners means that ". . . the ominously named Department for the Prevention of Social Evils allocates them to a suitable center of work...

...Then another "but": "But dangerous enemies of the state are not offered these choices and many resilient prisoners have refused to take advantage of them...

...Even in his unexpected parallel between Castroism and Fascism—"it is possible to imagine Castro moving in time (or, more probably, at a certain time) from extreme Left to what passes for extreme Right"— Thomas finds ways to amend what must be a condemnation of Castro...

...elimination of civil liberties and of virtually every freedom—including, despite a much-touted tolerance for abstract art, the freedom of intellectual expression...

...A frequent visitor to Cuba, he often gave Castro good advice that was not heeded...

...I reminded him at the time in The New Leader ("Myths of the Revolution," November 8, 1965) that there was no gambling, dope or open prostitution in Stalin's Russia, either, and that under Mussolini the trains ran on time...

...In addition, there is a well-documented, well-written and very instructive description of Cuba's wars against Spain and of its difficult relationship with the U.S...

...Of the 60 intellectuals who could term all this "a model in the realm of Socialism," three—Marguerite Duras, Dionys Mascolo and Jean Schuster—had been among the eight signers of a September 30, 1968, protest (published in the Paris "New Left" weekly Le Nouvel Observateur) against Castro's lauding the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...For instance...

...But" and "however" and "nevertheless" abound in Cuba almost as much as in Herbert Matthews' two love-torn books on Castro, except Thomas confesses to no emotional bias...

...Some 600 pages—the initial 50 chapters—of the book deal largely with the events of the 19th and early 20th centuries, up to 1933...

...Nevertheless, there was "arguably" no other way to handle the situation...

...The Cuban poet's public confession, they charged, was full of "absurd accusations and delirious assertions" recalling "the most sordid moments of the era of Stalinism...

...What is happening now...

...In the April 1969 issue of Ramparts another one of the 60, Susan Sontag, offered "Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution...

...He thinks El Jeje should—and could— "contemplate the possibility of somewhat limiting his powers before it is too late...

...In language befitting a poet in the land of the "New Man," he ca'led Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Alberto Moravia, Jorge Semprun, and Juan Govtisolo "cynical enemies of Socialism" determined to "fuel the reactionary hate against all Socialist countries...

...Having ended this paragraph with a damning "but," Thomas opens the next with a mitigating "however": "For all except a few prisoners there is, however, a 'rehabilitation' program, by which those willing to be 'rehabilitated' move progressively from one stage of reeducation to another, until their conditional release . . ." So, the "different form" of the "most odious creation of the Revolution" is, after all, not without its redeeming qualities...

...But I do believe they offer a clear, absorbing, convincing view of the role of slavery and sugar in Cuba's past, and therefore in its present...

...Professor Dumont's book, published last year in Paris under the title Cuba est-il socialisle?, is far more censorious...

...No matter that Karol's Guerrillas in Power was, as Antonio de la Carrera has shown ("Ignoring the Facts," NL, April 19), basically an attempt "to justify Castro's imposing a Communist regime in Cuba...

...Those more concerned with Cuba after the 26th of July, 1953, when "Castro's changing moods" began shaping the lives of 8 million people, will also find it stimulating, if ultimately unsatisfying...

...A top Cuban agronomist, Olive had met Dumont and helped him with his research...

...The poet himself was excoriated in Raul Castro's Verde Olivo, the Armed Forces weekly, as one of those "whose spinelessness is matched only by their pornography and counterrevolutionism...

...Well, yes and no...

...Hugh Thomas' answer: "These camps were ultimately brought to an end but they seem to survive in a different form...

...Nevertheless, Miss Sontag proudly proclaimed that "the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression," that it had "not begun eating its children" and had "no intention of doing so...

...He states—herejia maxima!—that "the 'New Man,' held to be typified by Guevara . . . would have been admired by French Fascists such as Brasillach or Drieu, or by D'Annunzio of the wild demagogic epoch of the Republic of Fiume...

...Relating the history of modern Cuba, the author starts not in 1492, when Columbus mistook it for Japan, or 1511, when Diego Alvarez brought in the first settlers, but "On 5 March 1762...

...In his Epilogue, though, he appears ready to join those who would "compare the distinctive coloring which Castro has given to Cuban Communism with Fascism...

...Dumont was deemed so dangerous once his book came out that Castro's secret police —who could not wait, it seems, for Padilla's confession —produced from its jails, where he had been held for almost two years, an "accuser" named Raul Alonso Olive...

...This may sound rather like theoretical, Utopian, pre-1917 "Marxism-Leninism," but for the present Cuban government it is the plan of a cia agent...

...Since I am not a historian, it would be presumptuous of me to attempt a scholarly analysis of these chapters...

...In the light of some of his earlier attitudes, one must say that Hugh Thomas has surely come a long way...

...But why does he say "was," and not "is...

...There is an extraordinary page in the Epilogue where, again with a careful qualification of time, the author writes: "For several years perhaps the most odious creation of the Revolution was the rehabilitation camps known as Military Units for Aid to Production (umap...

...Faced with this challenge, Castro apparently decided that it was imperative to discredit his unruly supporters, and that Padilla would be useful in this endeavor...

...The outraged intellectuals urged "the Cuban revolution to return to what made us consider it as a model in the realm of Socialism...

...Indeed, anyone interested in Cuba's past will find this book indispensable...

...Nevertheless...

...While Heberto Padilla had of course not yet been jailed, the fact is that he could not get his work published in Cuba after his book of poems, The Rules of the Game, won a government prize and was subsequently attacked by the military in 1968...

...they will play a major role in the raising of the level of consciousness...

...Not that this clearly negative response to the question posed by his title means Rene Dumont is ready to give up on Castro...

...Apparently the intellectuals' ardor for the Castro regime has cooled...

...Thus it seems the apolitical poet had good reason to acknowledge his revolutionary shortcomings...

...Thinking Aloud DISCOVERING CASTRO'S CUBA BY LEO SAUVAGE ON MAY 21, 60 Leftist intellectuals sent a letter from Paris to Fidel Castro, expressing their "shame and anger" over the "pitiable parody of self-criticism" extracted from Heberto Padilla after subjecting him to five weeks in jail...

...He appears genuinely unaware of the fact that a person conducting an experiment whose example is distinct from its moral is usually called a hypocrite...

...My point, of course, was that whatever good Castro had done in eradicating the squalor of the Batista regime could not compensate for "reeducation camps"—which Thomas, by the way, felt he could mention without quotation marks...

...his monumental new work, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (Harper* Row, 1,696 pp., $20.00), will certainly be branded "counterrevolutionary propaganda" in Havana...

...Padilla, there might be reason to worry...

...Does he wish to imply that while this was true in the early '60s (when it did not upset him), it no longer applies...

...About the Gleichschallung of the University of Havana, he writes: "The manner in which this ancient university lost its liberties was deplorable...

...European Leftists who had written studies critical of Castroism—were "cia agents...

...Yet to which point in this paragon of revolution did they wish to return...

...Padilla's April confession, his earlier "pedagogical" contribution, included among its "absurd accusations" the charge that K. S. Karol and Rene Dumont—two pro-Fide...

...He incorporates recollections and documents from ex-Castro officials, and he has obtained access to the papers of Cuban exiles like Justo Carrillo, Mario Llerena, Raul Chibas, and Luis Simon, as well as to Theodore Draper's files...

...From the fall of 1959—when he imprisoned Huber Matos, his former "comrade in arms" of the Sierra Maestra—to the present day, Castro has pursued a consistently sordid neo-Stalinism: political purges and arrests among the old anti-Batista fighters...

...Following the letter protesting his obviously false confession, Padilla was placed on Havana radio to denounce his defenders...

...Karol's few reproachful remarks were simplv too much for the Cuban orthodoxy to bear...

...In any event, Susan Sontag agreed with the Zhdanovi-an apologists of Socialist Realism and "proletarian soul building," and with the Party cultural hacks from Vitebsk to Havana, that "the intellectuals in a revolutionary society must have a pedagogical function...

...Dumont teaches at the Institut Agronomique in Paris and is internationally recognized as an authority on agricultural development, particularly in the "Third World...

...Thomas now seems very outspoken about Cuban prisons: "The evidence suggests that the new regime was hardly an improvement on that of Batista in the matter of the treatment of enemies...

...And when Thomas discovers "the existence of a by now well-entrenched literary bureaucracy," he rushes to qualify his revelations: "For the present, admittedly, these things have perhaps scarcely got beyond .. . scandal and have not yet reached outrage...

...In recounting the "Cuban Revolution...

...Indeed, some of the sacrilegious things being said indicate that open heresy may be around the corner...

...The intervention of the military in intellectual affairs is to him only "disagreeable" ("Nevertheless, Padilla afterwards lived peaceably," reads a prematurely sanguine footnote...