Lesson in Cuba
Lens, Sidney
Lesson in Cuba THE CUBAN STORY, by Herbert L. Matthews. George Braziller. 331 pp. $ 4 . 5 0 . TRAGIC ISLAND, HOW COMMUNISM CAME TO CUBA, by Irving Peter Pnaum. Prentice-Hall. 168 p p ....
...Unlike Matthews, he lumps Fidelismo and Communismo in the same bracket...
...Matthews' story contradicted these claims and gave the July 26th movement one of its greatest psychological lifts...
...It was undoubtedly a turning point in Castro's fortunes...
...Castro emerges from these pages not as a fiery psychopath but a "remarkable young man" with vision and compassion...
...there is too much jumping from one anecdote to another...
...Despite its limitations and no matter how it ends, "it will not have been in vain...
...For Castro is not now, was not yesterday, and probably never can be a Communist...
...I would disagree with many of its points, but it stands at the top as a cry for objectivity, and a polemic against the McCarthyist critique of revolutions...
...To elevate these mistakes and injustices beyond their significance and to bury the great positive achievements of the Revolution constitutes a serious departure from objective analysis...
...The author's viewpoint—because he is so bent on proving "how Communism came to Cuba"—is lost somewhere in a graveyard of negativism...
...Reviewed by Sidney Lens EARLIER this year I appeared with Herbert Matthews at a Quaker institute on Latin America...
...It is against such nonsense that the Times reporter counterpunches...
...At the time, Batista's government insisted that Castro was dead and his invading force exterminated...
...He urges us to shed the illusion "that the Caribbean area is ours to control behind a barrier of military power and dominated by our economy...
...But like Matthews, he does expose the holierthanthou stance of the State Department, and that should be welcome fare for all liberals...
...But he, too, sees no alternative but to live with the Cuban Revolution...
...And the Cuban Revolution, whatever label you choose to attach to it, is the most significant event on this hemisphere in our century...
...To dismiss the Cuban Revolution or Fidel Castro as "Communist" is to miss the lesson of history...
...The Cuban Story is not so much the story of Cuba as a polemic against hysteria...
...Matthews was the first journalist to interview Castro after he reached the Sierra Maestre...
...Cuba, he says, cannot be a "cold war pawn...
...Mistakes, and even injustices, are endemic to social change as drastic as the Cuban Revolution, and particularly with the pressure Cuba has been under since its inception...
...Some of Matthew's book is repetitious...
...168 p p . $3.95...
...The chapters lack central themes...
...Pflaum, the former foreign editor of the Chicago Sun Times, has no sympathy for Castro...
...Irving Pflaum's Tragic Island attacks the subject from a different focal point...
...We were, in effect, asking Fidel Castro to give up his Revolution...
...Neither Ambassadors Gardner nor Smith understood the situation, and Ambassador Bonsai—after Castro came to power—was too stiff to do anything more than ask for "prompt, adequate, and effective compensation" for American propertyIn the quiet terms that characterize this book, Matthews makes light of President Kennedy's demand that Castro cut his Sino-Soviet ties...
...Whatever you may think of Matthews' estimate of Cuba or Castro, you are obliged to acknowledge that here is a man in the upper echelons of contemporary journalism...
...At each session leafleteers of the lunatic Right distributed circulars berating the New York Times editorial writer as the evil genius behind Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba, a stooge for the Communist conspiracy, and worse...
...But with or without Castro, he would save the Revolution...
...To confuse Fidelismo with Communism is a grievous error, for the Cuban doctrine is far more radical than Communism and has an attractiveness all its own in Latin America...
...The Cuban Story resolves my doubts...
...In dignified but unyielding prose, Matthews reaffirms his conviction that in all his four decades as a newspaperman he has never seen a story "so misunderstood, so misinterpreted, and so badly handled as the Cuban Revolution...
...My disagreement with Pflaum on the course of Cuba is too deep to discuss here...
...We must "revive the sugar quota and make it as permanent as possible . . . Include Cuba in a hemisphere banking plan for long-term and large-scale financing . . . Encourage U. S. tourism in Cuba and Cuban tourism in the United States . . . Unilaterally offer to remove our naval base in five years...
...But all this aside, the most serious defect of Pflaum's work is its poor writing...
...Years later, after Castro had come to power, conservative opinion in America—looking for a scapegoat— converted Matthews' journalistic interview into a plot to "bring Communism to Cuba...
...Yet with Matthews he ends on the note that we must "sustain" the Cuban Revolution...
...They are necessary reflexes against tyranny and despair...
...If it were in his power, Plfaum would cast Fidel Castro on the historical ash heap...
...I wondered then: "Can this man stand up under such a continuing barrage...
...His criticism is as sharp in many respects as that of Theodore Draper or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Thank the Lord for the United States and Cuba that the invasion of April 17, 1 9 6 1 , failed...
...Revolutions, he says, cannot be judged by the maxims of McCarthyism, nor extirpated by the witchery of labels...
...If he has drifted to the Communist bloc, Matthews notes that he had little choice in the light of our State Department's stoneheadedness...
...Matthews does not feel that the present rapprochement with Moscow is final, any more than was that of Nasser or Tito...
Vol. 25 • December 1961 • No. 12
