After the (Cuban) Revolution

...The policy cut production and often demoralized the peasants...

...All criticism is opposition, " wrote Castro in a letter to Franqui...

...Family Portrait with Fidel deals with the first, tumultuous years of Castro's regime...

...Land reform had been another goal of the revolution, in part to wean the island from its miserable historic reliance on sugar...

...During Castro's legendary 1960 visit to the United States, Franqui tells us, the Cubans discovered that Nikita Khrushchev well understood the irony of the Communists' role...

...Fidel had early on resolved to use the disciplined and dogmatic remnants of the island's pro-Soviet Communist Party, led by his brother Raul, to impose order on the exuberant new society produced by an admittedly chaotic "revolution of joy...

...Franqui doubts that such betrayals were natural or inevitable...

...An intense surge of creativity began to fuel a boom in fiction and poetry felt throughout Latin America...

...The general outline of Cuba's evolution into a one-party state has been examined much more systematically by Maurice Halperin and Jorge Domin-guez, among others...

...Castro's preference for a rigid hierarchy, and his close alliance with the Communists frustrated several early efforts to create genuinely democratic institutions...

...My enemies accused me of trying to divide the revolution from within and of being the evil genius behind every conspiracy that reared its head...

...The followingyear, while he was in Europe as a cultural envoy, he received a telegram relieving him of his duties as editor of Revolution, news that had already been published in Havana...

...Actually he knew how I thought, but neither I nor anyone else knew Fidel's real ideas...

...He looked me up and down and repeated the offer...

...So he offered me Finance, the job Raul Chibas had turned down...

...Autonomous cultural publications had, it seemed, no place in Fidel Castro's vision of socialism...

...The workers, too, did not always act in an ideologically correct manner...

...As Franqui recalls, this was a time of "chaos, rationing, party politicking, imprisonment, persecution, fear of the military, the sense that you were always being watched...

...the short moment of freedom ended...

...After years of frustration, he left the country in 1968 and broke openly with the Cuban dictator in 1971, when Heberto Padilla was forced to confess to "antirevolutionary activities...

...And Franqui's depiction of Raul Castro is such an unremitting portrait of evil incarnate that it borders on demonology...

...Those looking for a systematic history of Cuba from 1959-64 in Family Portrait with Fidel will not find it...

...In 1962, when Castro was publicly humiliated by the missile crisis, Revolution had a brief chance to attack the signs of growing Soviet influence in Cuba...

...He seemed to be trying to pull a fast one, but got mad when I told him I knew nothing about finance...

...he told me I should become Minister of Labor—because I understood how he thought...

...Like many of Castro's former comrades, Franqui was a democrat who resisted Cuba's transformation into a Communist dictatorship and Soviet satellite...

...Except for Carpentier, who died in Paris not long ago, all these writers are living in exile and banned in Cuba...

...on the contrary, he feels they were imposed on a revolutionary elite that included a broad range of participants from the non-Communist Left...

...In 1959 the new regime produced enormous editions of European, Latin American and U.S...

...Several of his wildly funny anecdotes give the book a quality of political burlesque...

...literary classics, and provided Cuban writers and poets with unparalleled publishing opportunities...

...If we can believe him—and I think we can—Cuba's revolutionary family had already started disintegrating before January 1,1959, when a victorious Fidel Castro immediately moved to consolidate his personal authority...

...One story that is not at all funny is the account of how Revolution and its weekly cultural section, Lunes, were muzzled...

...Around here it looks like nobody knows anything.' (He was right about that...

...Beards identified the veterans of that early campaign and in the mountains were therefore considered an important symbol...

...With more than a little regret, Franqui tells how an armed volunteer citizens' militia formed in early 1959 was dissolved soon afterward, replaced by a regular army and centralized national security force...

...He also set up the clandestine Radio Rebelde that is now the official network...

...Another story reports a meeting on cultural policy attended by a police official who brought a "homosexual detection machine" from Czechoslovakia—that fraternal country's generous contribution to Cuba's vigorous campaign to eliminate counterrevolutionary elements...

...He was the one who recognized Batista...

...The democratic revolutionists now faced the challenge of creating a governing structure that would counteract Castro's "power, his popularity, his militaristic tendencies...

...He himself was now a markedman...

...After 11 critical articles appeared, however, Fidel ordered Franqui to " lay off the Soviets...

...By 1961 Lunes and its contributors were regularly denounced as champions of "existentialism, surrealism, U.S...

...Carlos Franqui thinks that today's Cuban state has glaringly betrayed the revolution that brought it to power, and in this opinion he is not alone...

...I told him I had no labor-management credentials and couldn't take the job...

...Franqui himself had hoped to play an important role in the new government...

...But a year after the vote, the organization was absorbed into the Ministry of Labor and saddled with a bureaucracy in tune with the regime...

...The work is also refreshingly free of ideological cant and moralism...

...all opposition is counterrevolutionary...

...His classic Diary of the Revolution (1977) documented the struggle against dictator Fulgencio Batista...

...But his influence was minimal, except in cultural affairs, an area of little interest to Castro...

...Franqui now lives in exile near Florence, where he devotes himself to art criticism and to his avocation as the "archivist" of the Cuban uprising and its aftermath...

...Some of them violently resisted the new order— for instance, those of Escambray, whose suppression the author describes...

...literature, bourgeois decadence, elitism"—charges quickly followed by the weekly's demise...

...But Franqui's lengthy attempt to explore the psyche of Fidel Castro—a man who combines flamboyant machismo with the puritanical legacy of a Galician landholding family and a Jesuit education—adds little to the author's initial insight that the "maximum leader" is and always has been a megalomaniac...

...Franqui's dismissal seemed to prefigure Raul Castro's later warning: "nobody offends Stalin when I'm around...

...With an eye toward achieving the self-sufficiency that eludes Cuba to this day, Franqui wanted to promote local control of agriculture...

...But Franqui's insider's account sheds new light on the personalities involved...

...Soon thereafter, the regime set up a Writers Congress and Union of Writers on the Soviet model...

...In one case, free elections for the leadership of the national trade union returned an overwhelming majority of non-Communists...

...Instead, the large plantations were collectivized and administered centrally by Castro himself—with singular ineptitude, Franqui says...

...Outside the island, though, those voices survive, and they will be heard...

...Under the direction of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, now writing and living in London, Lunes brought together Cuba's chief literary lights, such as He-berto Padilla, Alejo Carpentier, Lydia Cabrera, and the young Reinaldo Arenas...

...Then the Bay of Pigs episode served as a pretext for suppressing whatever independent rank-and-file groups remained...

...Franqui's facial hair is not his own, Fidel declares angrily, it is the property of the revolution...

...Before Castro's triumph, Carlos Franqui was among his closest associates— the chief propagandist for the 26th of July Movement and founder of Revolution, its newspaper, which he continued to edit until 1963...

...In the course of a drunken gathering in New York, the Soviet leader pointed to his Foreign Minister and shouted: "Cubans, form your revolutionary tribunal and sentence Gromyko here...

...In a vignette worthy of the Marx Brothers, Castro scolds Franqui for shaving off the beard he grew in the Sierra Maestra...

...I could see he was serious...

...Reviewed by David D'Arcy As its title suggests, this spirited memoir depicts the breakup of a family: the tiny core of rebels who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the mountains of eastern Cuba during the late 1950s...

...Yet these were the very Communists who had supported Batista and opposed what they perceived as a ragtag group of bohemians until the last possible moment...

...Franqui' s valuable book is a personal memoir and an angry one—offset, fortunately, by an irrepressible sense of humor and an acute skill for evoking Havana's mood in a period of upheaval...

...Here is his description of Castro choosing leaders for his new government...

...Heberto Padilla, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Reinaldo Arenas all have their own books appearing in the United States this year, and these former contributors to Revolution echo Franqui's declaration that Castro's Leninist caudillismo has stifled the independent voices of Cuban culture...

...I answered him with a joke, saying that if being Minister of Labor meant bringing socialism to the factories and putting the workers in charge, he could count on me...

...The author is best at telling previously unreported stories of how the diverse elements that fought the Cuban Revolution were purged...

...Before long, though, his paper's open and critical spirit was seen as a threat by the ruling hardliners: "We were antimilitarist, proculture, proart, in favor of free labor unions, tolerant of homosexuals, and totally opposed to terrorism...

...As editor of Revolution, Franqui wanted to create an alternative to the sterile official periodicals already emerging...