Ignoring the Facts

...Italics added...

...The most famous evidence of this surrender was his August 23, 1968, speech endorsing the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...The enthusiasm of the masses for Castro waned, never to be restored, as it became obvious that his revolution was not the often promised and never implemented Cuban Revolution, but something else they knew all too well: a personal dictatorship, with the leaders of the old Communist party in control of the Workers' Federation...

...Castro contended that this monumental drive would free Cuba from economic dependence...

...Karol consistently relies here on second-hand information, gossip and myth to support his bias...

...Indeed, this is the revolution the Cuban people supported so enthusiastically in the months after Batista's abdication...

...Only in the last chapter, "The Reckoning," does Karol begin to perceive the widespread apathy or antipathy of the Cuban masses toward the Castro regime--attitudes prevalent since the very beginning of Communist rule...

...It was Castro, for example, who forced the three top Cuban economists traveling with him to break all appointments arranged with U.S...

...The Communists were also heading the formation of the Organizaciones Revo-lucionarias Integradas, touted as the future single party of Cuba...

...For instance...

...The questioning of Castro's courusc, moreover, is simply a gratuitous insult...

...intelligence and Latin American specialists...

...The "bourgeois elements" were clearly being silenced or driven out, but not a single foreign concern had yet been nationalized...

...Karol rejects this explanation, writing that "if Cuba continues to be afflicted by the worst symptoms of colonialism so many years after her great leap forward, the cause must surely be a decline in revolutionary fervor and not simply underdevelopment...

...Yet when Russia tightened the noose in 1968, what could Castro do but fall into line once more...

...Castro did not "want to have any dealings with [the U.S.] ever again," Karol observes approvingly...

...Not until he starts writing about Cuba after 1966, a period he knows firsthand, does he show some insight...

...Castro paid lip service to it from 1952 (as a member of the Orthodox Movement which tried to rescue it) through most of his first year in power...

...officials before the trip specifically for discussing aid...

...The initial one--authentic, nationalist, moderately Socialist--was betrayed by Ramon Grau San Martin and his Cuban Revolutionary party in 1944...

...This concluding chapter chronicles Castro's recantation of his heresy, both in word and deed, and what Karol calls Cuba's "second honeymoon" with the Soviets...

...In the chapter "Hay Problemas, Hay Contradicciones," Karol describes Castro's sugar plan of 1964, designed to increase production in six successive harvests to the fixed target of 10 million tons in 1970...

...covers areas Karol is personally more familiar with...

...Reviewed by Antonio de la Carrera Former member, 26th of July Movement...

...Cuba's anti-Communism was the product not of American propaganda but of the history of its own Communist party...

...Cuba reached the point of no return on its way to a totalitarian system on November 26, the day Ernesto "Che" Guevara, a medical-school graduate and avowed Marxist-Leninist, was appointed President of the National Bank (replacing Felipe Pazos, a trained economist who doesn't even rate a mention in Karol's book...

...in April 1959 was uninvited, implying that even then Washington was hostile to Cuba's new regime...

...For that he lacked the courage and perhaps even the means...

...Trade relations with the U.S...

...In truth the resignations of most of these technicians and professionals, who had supported the 26th of July Movement, followed directly from Castro's repudiation of the democratic process...

...There have actually been two revolutions in Cuba...

...plants and businesses...

...emasculated the Federation of University Students by installing his candidates in the executive...

...eliminated anti-Communist critics from the Rebel Army by imprisoning Huber Matos...

...served as secretary to President Manuel Urrutia The question that comes to mind after reading a few hundred pages of this book is what could possibly have moved Fidel Castro to publicly attack its author...

...Karol explains Cuba's communization as the victory of anti-American over pro-American forces, thus reducing to a simplistic formula what was actually a complex process...

...Although denying the similarity all along, he constructs an elaborate parallel between the relationship of the people to the state in present-day Cuba and in Stalin's Russia...

...It is the acme of cynicism--or idiocy--to recommend to a society suffering from the excessive control and whims of one man a Communism in which everyone is expected to share the thoughts and blindly follow the directions of a demigod...

...The press and radio were also in government hands by April 1960, and the authentic revolutionary members of the 26th of July Movement were in prison...

...The author relates the quotas, the slogans, the investments, and the mobilizations--culminating in the militarization of sugar production...

...You have to read on to find out, for K. S. Karol has divided Guerrillas in Power into two parts and the first--for all its ambition--is shoddy and badly researched...

...Why then, did Castro insist on a 10 million ton harvest...

...Here Karol asks himself a crucial question: "Will a successful 10 million ton zafra, in fact, ensure the great leap from austerity to relative abundance...

...In its practical aspect, the heresy manifested itself in the effective support of armed revolutionary struggle throughout Latin America...

...According to Karol, he had an alternative: "The Cuban leader could have followed the Chinese in denouncing the 'social imperialism' of the USSR," but concluded that "this would have meant challenging two superpowers at once, two giants who should show no mercy to an extremist Cuba allied to China...

...From this point on the USSR must have exerted increasing pressure on Castro, but how or to what extent Karol does not say...

...and, finally, obtained full control of the economy by placing Guevara at the head of the National Bank...

...To prescribe the Chinese example for Cuba's problems is absurd...

...This was to hasten the emergence of the "new man," who, by rapidly increasing the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, would cause Cuba to move without delay from the dictatorship of the proletariat to Communism...

...Castro's revolution, probably what he was fighting for all along, surfaced with his adoption of Communism--not in April 1961 but in the fall of 1959...

...destroyed the labor movement's independence by forcing a Communist-leaning executive committee on the Workers' Federation...

...The Soviet Union retaliated, sharply reducing the supply of oil to the island...

...In November 1967, Anibal Escalante and several members of the old Communist party of Cuba were arrested...

...The party ruthlessly removed anyone who dared oppose its tactics...

...were absolutely normal before the fall of 1959, although under Pazos Cuba was increasing its commerce with other countries...

...It could not, since Cuba, as a party to the International Sugar Agreement of 1969, had consented to export only 2.1 million tons to the world market...

...It attempts to justify Castro's imposing a Communist regime in Cuba, against the wishes of most of the people, and the overwhelming majority of both the revolutionary government and the Armed Forces...

...Between June 14 and November 26, 1959, Castro crushed the potential dissidents in his Cabinet by dismissing eight ministers...

...Two independent labor leaders, Sandalio Junco and Felix Palu, were assassinated by Communist goon squads...

...Karol narrates this history without once mentioning how the Communists rode roughshod over the Federation of Cuban Workers during the seven years they controlled it (thanks to a pact with Batista...

...In its theoretical aspect, the heresy (which Karol attributes to Guevara) consisted of discarding material incentives for moral ones...

...By erroneously placing Castro's conversion to Communism in April 1961, Karol distorts the "course of the Cuban revolution," as his book is subtitled...

...he fails to mention, however, the well-known fact that this was precisely the impression Castro wished to create...

...Castroites have long attributed the low productivity of the workers to "underdevelopment...

...When one adds to this the Hitler-Stalin Pact (wholly ignored in the book) and the Communists' consequent efforts to "keep Cuba out of the imperialist war," it is not hard to see why Communism was unpopular in Cuba...

...Karol remarks that Castro's visit to the U.S...

...On January 2, 1968, Castro announced the rationing of fuel and then staged a spectacular trial of Escalante and his friends, implicating a Soviet embassy member...

...reduction of the sugar quota in July 1960 is simply to ignore the facts...

...In any case, the pressure must have been enormous, for it finally brought Castro to his knees...

...For a time it was only alluded to in speeches and official comments (dutifully noted by Karol), but after the death of Guevara and conclusion of the Bolivian adventure, the battle entered an active stage...

...Knowing his monumental pride, there cannot be any doubt that Russia's pressure was so intense as to convince him his revolution was in jeopardy...

...The conflict became public in early 1967, following the refusal of the Communist party of Bolivia to help Che's guerrilla war there...

...The second part of Guerrillas in Power, beginning with the chapter entitled "A Cuban Heresy...

...And what is so revealing, so original, as to make it (according to Time) "required reading for U.S...

...Since the Soviet Union has always regarded the Party as the vanguard of the worldwide revolutionary struggle, implementation of the Cuban heresy, with its emphasis on the guerrillero, inevitably started rumblings in the Kremlin...

...Similarly, by insisting that Castro was not committed to Communism until nearly a year later, Karol can say the flight of "bourgeois elements" in the government was a consequence of Castro's nationalization of U.S...

...Karol does not really ask that question, but he does provide the answer: "The real reason why it is so essential to reach the fixed objective is that Fidel's personal honor and the integrity of his movement are at stake...

...by Christmas there was hardly any gasoline in Havana...

...Otherwise he would still be spouting beautiful phrases for the "superrevolutionary theoreticians" (to use Castro's recent description) in Europe and the U.S., who for years have been deluding themselves about the nature of what they mistakenly call the Cuban Revolution...

...To suggest, as the author does, that Castro's radicalization began with the U.S...