THE THREAT OF VIETNAMS' IN LATIN AMERICA
Geyer, Georgie Anne
THE THREAT OF VIETNAMS' IN LATIN AMERICA by GEORGIE ANNE GEYER TVThen I was in Havana a year ™ ago, one of the things that perplexed me most was the constant and fervent reference to...
...What confuses many Americans is the assumption that if you have seen one Communist party in Latin America you have pretty much seen them all...
...Chinese ideas about the heroism of the peasant revolution and about creating more Vietnams are identical to the Cubans', and there is reason to believe China might eventually stage a comeback...
...One day I was riding through the countryside with Jose Llanusa, the bright young minister of education...
...Anti-ideological and consumed with the idea that economic development will solve Latin America's problems— and most serious of all, obsessively preoccupied with Vietnam—Washington is tragically unprepared at a moment of pregnant new happenings to take advantage of the time or to offer even an ideology of democratic reform that might challenge the vigor of these new movements...
...Miss Geyer has lived and worked in Latin America since 1964...
...The Cubans still speak of China as of a woman they loved who did them wrong...
...Guevara's April letter, for instance, blames not only American imperialism for the shape the world is in but also the big Communist powers who keep fighting each other, and he proclaims the little countries as the vanguard of Communism...
...What he is doing is defining even international Communism in his own terms, and this type of statement, which is now coming regularly out of Havana, could quite correctly be construed as his reading the Soviets, who are clear about their non-violent strategy, out of international Communism...
...In March, the situation in Colombia was heating up, too...
...This winter the inherent differences in the interests of the Soviets and the Cubans bloomed for the whole world to see...
...Just in the last six months things have got worse," he was saying...
...The form of the changes that have now become dramatically clear was beginning to shadow things last summer, when I was in Havana for six weeks and had access to many of the leading Communists...
...At that time, the regular Communist Party printed paid newspaper advertisements in prominent papers denouncing the "insurrectional line" being followed by the guerrillas...
...they are, or so they say, seeking direct confrontations with it, seeking "more Vietnams" through the guerrilla movements Havana is spawning...
...They did it to take the leadership of the underdeveloped world away from the Chinese...
...but they still pine for her...
...One day I was having one of those clandestine private interviews you can still have in Havana, this time with a Cuban clergyman in his office, and he was speaking in low tones...
...But the notes were never read on Cuban radio or published, as he had intended...
...For various reasons, the Chinese are momentarily out, and the Russians and the Cubans are now forming their own lines and at times seem bent most upon destroying each other's influence...
...This is not the case...
...There is the difference," the lanky, dark-haired Llanusa said, as we rode along, "that the others do not support the armed fight...
...These attacks by Castro on the Soviets were never published either in Moscow or in the regular Communist papers in South America...
...This year is crucially important because it will go down in history as Castro's big year of consolidation...
...As to China—it seems to me she is not exiled from Latin America for good...
...For from that date, it is easy to trace the trail of the Soviets and their parties in Latin America, and it is consistently anti-guerrilla...
...It was the same month that Castro attacked the Chinese Communists for reneging on their rice deal with Cuba...
...However, Communists per se in Latin America are not persona non grata, and there are indications that the new respectability offensive of the Soviet-line parties may pay off...
...The Christian Democrats had opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union after their victory in 1964, and they were deeply irked by the congressional slight...
...Any that do not—well, we do not agree with them...
...He might have added that the party's central committee had sent out assassination squads to kill guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo...
...We control the propaganda here," Llanusa, who was once a pro-Chinese, said tersely...
...It's Vietnam," he said, as if everyone must understand...
...It was also last summer, in Castro's 26th of July speech, that Castro first attacked the Soviet Union for its new policy of giving aid to President Eduardo Frei's Christian Democrat government in Chile—a government that claims to be the only force that can destroy Marxism in Latin America...
...the Cuban, eight...
...When I. asked him about Vietnam, he said, "Even I get emotional about Vietnam and I don't support the government...
...At the meeting of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS), the standing body for Latin America of the Tricontinental, he will introduce his new, indigenous Latin American Marxism, if all the signals are correct...
...they have repeatedly warned against wars of national liberation that would bring the underdeveloped world into conflict with the United States, and they call the various nationalist guerrillas "adventurers...
...All of this places the Soviet Union in an extremely ticklish position...
...GEORGIE ANNE GEYER is Latin American correspondent for the Chicago Daily News...
...The same curious elements came into play in Colombia, when the Soviet trade mission was there...
...On this solemn day the entire Soviet people declare once more, 'We are always with you, dear Cuban brothers, we are with you both in times of difficulty and in times of rejoicing, in the common work and in the struggle for the victory of Socialism,' " he declared...
...Later, in Santiago, Millas was reprimanded by his party—not, tellingly, for disagreeing with Castro, but for saying he disagreed...
...They are not...
...Words pledging Cuba's "solidarity with Vietnam" were splashed across the country, and every time I spoke with Prime Minister Fidel Castro the one subject he grew almost uncontrollably angry about was Vietnam...
...The fascinating split over guerrilla warfare began to become visible in January, 1966, at the Tricontinental Conference of Latin-Asian-African revolutionaries held in Havana...
...Cuba, like the other countries, had an elderly Communist Party—a party formed early in this century and so Soviet a party that it went in and out of Stalinism and into Castroism without a wince...
...Then this spring,- on the six-year anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a statement supposedly by Ernesto "Che" Guevara was released in Havana...
...The Cubans, on the other hand, are in their revolutionary salad days...
...Then several experiences brought this obsession into focus...
...They're frightened to death that if you Americans win in Vietnam, you'll invade Cuba...
...All distrust the U.S.S.R...
...Today the Red Chinese live quietly and alone in their carefully-guarded compound in Havana...
...On March 13, Castro bitterly assailed the Venezuelan Communist Party as "rightist" and "reactionary" and said that it had "in an act of virtual treason" sold out the Castro-line guerrilla movement by abandoning violent revolution...
...The new guerrillas, the Soviet and Cuban specialists agree, will be less controllable, more nihilistic, more nationalistic, than they were with the Soviets around...
...Those who would not be combatant revolutionaries cannot be called Communists...
...Through a series of parties and party reorganizations, Castro has in the last six years built up his own Communist party, a party formed in the image of his own movement and his own experience...
...But most observers did not see it, because the Soviet representative, Sharaf P. Rashi-dov, went through the ritual motions of signing the obstreperous final document which called for a resurgence of guerrilla warfare in Latin America...
...They are not afraid of American imperialism...
...The Soviets, it seems clear, will not, apart from some dramatic development in Vietnam, be taking an active role in revolution in Latin America...
...It is offering aid, even to the military-run countries (the military, violently-anti-Communist government of Brazil was recently given a $100 million credit, putting it second to Cuba as a recipient of Soviet aid...
...the Cuban, a peasant and mountain revolution, whose whole elan is that of the noble peasant sweeping down on the city...
...The Soviet revolution is fifty years old...
...She covered the Dominican Revolution...
...One: of the amazing things that is happening in Latin America is that Latin Communism, which even a few years ago had a reasonable working cohesiveness, is now splitting apart like a cluster of unruly atoms...
...He made this clear last winter when he said, "For us the international Communist movement is the movement of fighting revolutionaries...
...The Russians, mature and greying and reasonable, are seeking respectability in the world, seeking to consolidate their gains...
...Not only will the first congress of his Communist Party (not to be confused with the old, Soviet-line, pre-revolu-tion party, which Castro destroyed) be held, but he will also host on July 28 a meeting of guerrilla movements from throughout the hemisphere...
...Last year her interviews with Castro and Guatemalan guerrillas won her the Overseas Press Club award for the best Latin American coverage...
...The Cubans interpreted this as an attempt to subvert the Cuban army, and they were also infuriated (Vietnam again) by the fact the Chinese were stopping Soviet supplies en route to Vietnam...
...It seemed to wipe out everything else in his consciousness, and his explanations—such as, "We have to support the movements of all peoples to free themselves"—did not seem to me to explain enough...
...This, again, is where Vietnam comes in...
...After the mass arrests of Communists, the Colombian foreign ministry made it public that they had told the Soviets that if they could not control the local Communists and keep them out of guerrilla warfare, there would be no trade agreement...
...They will have as the rationale of the new Latin American Marxism a remarkable and crystal clear document published in Havana this winter under the byline of Regis Debray, a twenty-six-year-old eclectic French Marxist who is close to Castro and was captured this spring with the Bolivian guerrillas...
...Today, scarcely any of the old Communists are in positions of importance (not one is in the ruling politburo, for instance...
...I discussed the Cuban concern about Vietnam with a number of other foreigners visiting Cuba...
...This is responsible for the general tightening up...
...In Chile, in February, the local Socialists and Communists joined up with the far Right in the Senate to block President Frei's projected trip to Washington...
...Whether their tentative banding together in the Tricontinental and in their fury over Vietnam will ever amount to anything like an alliance of the "New Communists" of...
...The technique the Cubans envision for the destruction of the enormous power of the United States is to draw Washington into more Vietnams, gradually to drain off American power and morale—"carrying the enemy to fight outside its borders, liquidating its bases of supplies, which are its dependent territories," as Guevara put it...
...At this time," the advertisements proclaimed, "the armed movement does not have the capacity to play a decisive role because of the stagnation of the guerrilla fronts," and proclaimed the correct tactic now is to form a "popular front" with other progressive forces...
...You could see the split coming— almost imperceptibly at first, then like a torrent—over the last two years, and it probably was inevitable, for the Soviet revolutionary experience and the Cuban experience—and their outlooks toward the world today—are about as different as any could be...
...We feel we're in the waiting room...
...How long the Soviets will stand the Cubans' carping at them and undermining their position on the South American continent is questionable, though at the mement both need each other enough to make an all-out break unlikely...
...Largely these differences were revealed in the form of Castro sniping at the Soviets indirectly by attacking the old Soviet-line Communist parties in Latin America, which were formed in the Twenties and Thirties and have nothing at all to do with Castro's nationalist-Marxist Cuban Communist Party...
...we were discussing why the Cuban Communists' relations with the old, Soviet-line parties were so bad...
...Instead, there were published articles in Izvestia praising Frei and his anti-Marxist "revolution in liberty...
...The Soviet strategy is long range, based on the belief that since the rest of the world will eventually become Communist anyway, why involve Russia in hopeless guerrilla forays with young hotheads who are ideologically unformed and strategically unpredictable...
...Whether the Soviet-line parties will even come to the meeting is open to question, but if they do, the Cuban charge d'affaires at the United Nations, Nicolas Rodriguez, predicted recently, "The first day everyone will come, the second day the meeting will blow up, and the third day the real revolutionaries will take over...
...THE THREAT OF VIETNAMS' IN LATIN AMERICA by GEORGIE ANNE GEYER TVThen I was in Havana a year ™ ago, one of the things that perplexed me most was the constant and fervent reference to Vietnam...
...Castro's new nationalistic line will probably allow him to recoup some of the luster he lost when he seemed to go too deeply into hock to the Soviets...
...The Venezuelan saga, one of the most telling in the recent split, went a little further in May, when Cuban army officers were captured landing with replacements for the Venezuelan guerrillas...
...The Soviets stoically pursued their interests without a complaint about the fate of their Colombian brothers, but Castro was enraged...
...This interpretation of history did not take into account the phenomenal personality of Fidel Castro...
...The next day Orlando Millas, a prominent Chilean Communist who had been invited for the occasion, left Havana in an angry huff and returned to Chile...
...What all of this offers the United States in terms of strategic possibilities is endless...
...What this means is that Castro's revolutionaries will probably make an attempt to take over, and his revolutionaries are such groups as the Guatemalan guerrillas (where the guerrilla types recently took over the party, a la Debray, putting all power in the guerrilla movement) and their Venezuelan, Colombian, and Bolivian counterparts...
...We are in power," he continued, with a smile...
...Disappointed with the lack of success in the last few years in spreading the Cuban revolution to the South American continent and blaming it on ideological incorrectness and physical timidity, the Cubans have now embarked on a new crusade...
...It happened to be there the same day that the Colombian government was rounding up local Communists and sending them to jail...
...All had noticed it and were equally at a loss to explain the peculiar obsessive-ness of it...
...The Russian revolution was largely urban...
...The real reason for the China-Cuba break was that the Chinese, enraged over the Soviets, were sending anti-Soviet propaganda over the heads of the Cubans to middle-level army officers...
...Basically, the Debray paper downgrades the old Soviet-line parties and states clearly that in the Marxism of the future in Latin America the political focus of power will be not in the party but in the revolutionary army...
...the world against the developed "Old Communists" may be a romantic question, yet recent events prove it is not a wholly quixotic idea...
...It was a hot summer day and we visitors sat listening in the stands in the Plaza de la Revolucion to Castro's revealing words, with their unmistakable intent: "It would be very interesting to know what the Left in Chile really thinks of those in their camp which are giving aid to the government of Frei...
...So Chile's Foreign Minister Gabriel Valdes spoke to the Soviets—if they could not put pressure on the local Communists, who follow a straight Soviet line, to rescind their action, the Chilean government would feel obliged to cancel their finance minister's projected visit to Moscow...
...When we talked about Jesus Fariah, the leader of the Venezuelan Communist Party, which was being so unrevolu-tionary, Llanusa added scornfully, "Do you think the imperialists are more afraid of him or of the guerrillas...
...He left two notes complaining about Castro's attacks on the Chileans and the Soviets and identified himself with the Soviet line...
...It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the Debray philosophy, because it is actually the Castro philosophy codified and creedified...
...Instead, Castro has created his own nationalist Communists who take as their first tenet activity—violent revolutionary activity...
...But, on the other hand, this strategy cuts off the Soviets from exactly those young hotheads who are revolutionary tinder in Latin America...
...Then the Guatemalans who hesitate to join us now will come with us against an openly mercenary army...
...This developing split over revolutionary tactics and the search for Soviet respectability has led to some fantastic diplomatic maneuvers in the hemisphere's foreign ministries between the Latin governments and the Soviet Union...
...The Soviets, pursuing their new strategy of seeking diplomatic and commercial ties with the incumbent Latin American governments, whatever they might be, had a trade mission in Bogota...
...But if the Soviets signed the Tri-continental document, Kremlinologists say, they did not mean it...
...On the one hand, it is trying intensely to enlarge its diplomatic and trade relations...
...For the United States, these changes open tremendous possibilities, but they are possibilities that the United States does not seem capable of exploiting...
...She is now writing a book, "The Latins," to be published by Putnam...
...Miss Geyer has contributed to The Atlantic, Look, Saturday Review, and National Observer...
...The original Cuban Communist Party—at the last moment —haltingly supported Castro in the mountains, considering him a bour-geoise romantic...
...In 1961, when Castro proclaimed "I am a Marxist-Leninist and I have always been one," people wagged their heads and said the Communist Party had taken him over...
...A few days later I was talking with a Cuban, this time an early revolutionary whose support of Castro had now waned...
...Why...
...It outlined the major offensive in guerrilla warfare now being planned by Havana and called for "two or three more Vietnams" in Latin America in the next few years— something Havana is consciously planning...
...to a degree—distrust its affluence, its power, its equanimity in the face of new revolutions—just as they instinctively distrust the United States, and learned the hard way to beware of China...
...The ramifications for the future of Latin America are boundless...
...One of the Guatemalan guerrilla leaders I was with in the Guatemalan mountains last November detailed to me precisely how they hope to draw American troops into the Guatemalan morass...
...All of these movements—Cuba is only, as the most successful, the interpreter—identify with Vietnam and the little, violent, put-upon countries of the world...
...Whoever helps those oligarchies which are fighting the guerrillas also is helping to suppress the revolution, because the revolution is not only fought with arms but also with economic credits...
...They are really trying to wipe out the churches...
...So Vietnam is central to the new and fascinating currents swirling around Havana and around Communism in Latin America..It is at once central to the fact the Soviets have abandoned guerrilla warfare in Latin America and to the creation, now underway, by the Cubans of a new, indigenous Latin American nationalist Marxism, on the style of North Vietnam's...
...What happens in Vietnam and whether a Soviet-American rapprochement develops will probably be the key elements...
...This, however, was only a cover...
...There are already Green Berets here," Miguel, a handsome young student educated in Europe, told me that day, as we sat on the side of the mountains, "and we want more to come...
...They are all underdeveloped, underprivileged, and overdue for revolution or reform...
...Not everything is rosy in the revolutionary world," he said then in a bombshell speech...
Vol. 31 • August 1967 • No. 8
