Hi all,
The below article (written last year) reviews two books with different
perspectives. I find the
first book of greater interest. But, taken together they present a lot of
food for thought for those of us who aren't willing to accept the given
narative of any government without some critical thinking.
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
Cuba: The New Opening
by Enrique Krauze.
Translated from the Spanish by Hank Heifetz
New York Review of Books, April 2, 2015 issue
Reviewed in this article:
Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959--1971
by Lillian Guerra
University of North Carolina Press, 467 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington
and Havana
by William M. Leo-Grande and Peter Kornbluh
University of North Carolina Press, 524 pp., $35.00
The history taught in Cuban schools exalts the redeeming function of the
Cuban Revolution but it also, for the most part, reduces that revolution to
a biography of Fidel Castro. Someday perhaps Cuban schoolchildren will have
access to other versions of their history. If that day comes, Visions of
Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 19591971 by Lillian
Guerra, an American historian of Cuban descent, should be a required (and
saddening) assignment. It tells the story of the construction of the longest
dictatorship in Latin American history (and now the longest-lasting
continuous regime on earth).
The book is not a conventional political history but rather a social history
of the Cuban people subjugated, by choice or by force, to the new system put
into place during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on almost twenty years of
research in Cuban and American archives like the Cuban Exile Collection and
the Cuban Revolution Collection at Yale University, Guerra reconstructs how
Fidel Castro went about narrowing the range of civil liberties, autonomous
institutions, and finally the society itself, until he completely dominated
them.
The revolutionaries came to power on an island where one in six Cubans owned
a radio, one in twenty-five a television set. There were 120 newspapers and
magazines, like the political journal Bohemia, which in the first three
weeks of 1959 sold a million copies celebrating the triumph of the
revolution. With this impressive island-wide coverage--most of it favoring
the revolution--Castro could multiply the effect of his very long speeches,
many of them to an audience of a million people acclaiming him with upraised
hands. He was the first revolutionary to use television with wide effect.
One of Guerra's revelations is the use Fidel made of religious symbols. As a
steady leitmotif he would say things like: "They speak ill of me because I
have spoken the truth. They crucified Christ for speaking the truth" or
"Whoever condemns a revolution like this one betrays Christ and declares
himself capable of crucifying that very Christ once again. Although he had
been educated by the Jesuits, Castro had no belief in religious dogmas.
Nevertheless he affirmed and imposed his beliefs as if they were in
themselves religious dogmas. A new faith, Fidelismo, began to form around
his person. Drawings were published with Fidel inserted into scenes from the
Bible; pilgrimages were conducted to sacralized sites in the former
guerrilla haven of the Sierra Maestra or to the Turquino mountain, which
Fidel had once climbed. In a conversation with a journalist from the
magazine Carteles, an old peasant succinctly expressed his reverence:
Question: What do you think of the Agrarian Reform?
Blanco: That is a blessing of God.
Question: You mean from Fidel, from the Revolution?
Blanco: I mean from God, through Fidel.
The new faith created its own ample vocabulary. Among its simplest epithets
were "traitors" and vendepatrias ("sell-outs of the nation"), first applied
to those accused of torture and murder in the service of the defeated
Batista regime. The executions of such people during Castro's first months
in power, under the banner of "Revolutionary justice," had vast popular
support. But then Fidel instituted, in his own words, "Revolutionary terror.
One of its early victims was the popular revolutionary comandante Huber
Matos, who was arrested in October 1959 for criticizing the clearly
increasing influence of the Cuban Communist Party within the regime. He was
sentenced to and served twenty years' imprisonment.
Fidel carried out his political moves with the same rapidity. He made
himself prime minister, dismissed the idea of elections or the democratic
division of powers, installed "true democracy" (voting by a show of hands in
the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana), and carried out the first purges
among those who had fought for the revolution. As early as March 1959, Raul
Castro contacted Moscow to arrange a Soviet-run training program for the
Cuban army and for an organized secret police force, later to be known as
G2.
Nonetheless, into the year 1960, Cuba seemed to be (at least in its publicly
cited objectives) a radical version of the Mexican Revolution: nationalist,
egalitarian, "humanist," and focused on social justice. In February 1960, a
visit to the island by Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan marked the
beginning of a close economic relationship with the Soviet Union, centering
around the exchange of sugar for oil, on terms very favorable to Cuba. The
economic connection rapidly impelled the spread of Soviet-style state
controls over the society and a severe erosion of the market.
All independent newspapers and journals disappeared. One of the saddest
episodes was the termination of the once staunchly pro-revolutionary Bohemia
and the self-imposed exile to Venezuela of its director, Miguel Angel
Quevedo. (Some years later he would kill himself, leaving behind a dramatic
description of how he had been forced out.) Only the newspaper Revolucion
remained, later to be merged in 1965 into a new publication called Granma.
The university was stripped of its traditional and politically important
autonomy and student organizations would expel members for having
anti-regime or anti-Soviet opinions. Television and radio stations were
confiscated. Unions were transformed from advocates of the rights of workers
to instruments of support for the maintenance of productivity in the
increasing number of state-owned enterprises. In the latter part of 1960,
around 550 businesses (Cuban or American-owned) were expropriated--amounting
to 80 percent of the broad and diversified industries of the country. The
Catholic Church opposed the turn toward communism but was neutralized.
Fidel was trying to create a kind of new militant church of regime
loyalists, intent on defending the "purity" of the regime by armed force.
Guerra gives a detailed description of how the responsibility for such
purification was assigned to the numerous militant organizations created,
early in the 1960s, by Fidel's fiat. The purpose was to integrate the
society vertically, from the masses leading up to the Comandante.
Organizations were formed for women, students, farmers, workers,
bureaucrats, writers, artists, down to children who marched with rifles.
Among those numerous groups, perhaps the most disturbing and intimidating
entities were the Comites de Defensa de la Revolucion ( CDR ). The CDRs
recruited volunteers, city block by block, to oversee the revolutionary
purity of their neighbors and denounce any deviations. Fidel defined them as
"the civil rear guard for the vanguard of the militias and Revolutionary
Armed Forces ( FAR ) in the struggle against the internal and external
enemy," and he added, "it is impossible that the worms and parasites can
make their moves if, on their own, the people...keep an eye on them.
In the early 1960s, Cuban cities witnessed an early surge of dissidence in
the confrontations between these Cederistas and groups or individuals the
regime stigmatized as gusanos ("worms"). Guerra, using newly discovered
material from various archives, vividly reconstructs much of this unrest.
The gusanos refused to integrate themselves into revolutionary institutions.
Yet most of them criticized the CIA -sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs
in April 1961, and considered the Miami-based exiles to be "servants of the
gringos. Nevertheless the CDR s could send them to jail and even (following
the Soviet model) to incarceration in psychiatric hospitals where they could
be subjected to such measures as electric shock treatments. For their
efficiency at forestalling criticism of the revolution, Castro called the
Cederistas "one million gags," emphasizing that their major effect by far
was the stifling of open dissent.
Another significant (and historically obscure) event was the violent
opposition of peasants to the collectivization of the land in the provinces
of Escambray and Matanzas. Lillian Guerra writes that in Escambray, the CIA
was actively involved in encouraging resistance. In the violence known as "
la limpia [the cleaning] of Escambray," six thousand people died (combining
the losses of the Cuban army and the peasant rebels). In the summer of 1963
the government permanently moved all the male population of Escambray to
Pinar del Rio and the women and children to the Miramar area of Havana, a
total of 35,000 people. Escambray was finally converted into a military zone
and a national park. In 2005, for the first time in forty years, Raul Castro
called the Escambray events "a civil war.
Almost simultaneously (and without any CIA intervention, according to
Guerra), the peasants of Matanzas also took up arms against the
collectivization policy. The guerrillas of Matanzas survived as a group
until the beginning of 1963. There were widespread arrests, summary
executions, and extensive campaigns of slogans and arguments in favor of the
revolution. The Second Agrarian Reform (1963) then put further limits on
rural private property and, says Guerra, "the historically exceptional
egalitarian model of capitalist agricultural production in Matanzas was
forcibly reduced to the Communist norm.
In the mid-1960s, the worldwide youth counterculture arrived, a little
belatedly, in Cuba. With their long hair and sandals, their rock music,
their fondness for an anarchic way of life and sexual permissiveness, many
young Cubans were culturally rebellious but not in active opposition to the
regime. Guerra describes how, in the ephemeral publications associated with
the counterculture (like El Sable or El Puente ), critical comments were
published on issues that are now--in the era of Raul--common currency in the
official media, including bureaucratic abuses and negligence and the wasting
of resources.
Fidel had no patience with what he saw as the lack of revolutionary zeal
among the young. The counterculture publications were closed down and many
of their contributors sent off to work camps for "re-education. And Fidel
went so far as to urge young people to report on their parents if they
expressed an explicit desire to leave Cuba.
In 1965 Fidel had created the Military Units to Aid Production ( UMAP ),
which were labor camps to which many of these "anti-social" young people and
various gusanos were sent. (An estimated 35,000 people passed through these
camps between 1965 and 1968.) Alongside other inmates were members of
Protestant and Afro-Cuban religious sects whom the regime considered
unreliable (especially Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists) and
who were submitted to systematic tortures.
Based on a conviction that to be revolutionary one must be "macho," gay
people were sent to the camps and cruelly persecuted. Reinaldo Arenas, the
brilliant homosexual writer who left Cuba in 1980, has written an account of
his treatment, Before Night Falls (1993); but Guerra supplements it with
firsthand personal reports. Gays were subjected not only to forced labor but
also to painful Pavlovian treatments meant to "cure their illness. This
government-inspired anti-gay persecution lasted until the beginning of the
1980s.
In 1968--proclaimed "the Year of the Heroic Guerrilla"--58,000 small
businesses were expropriated in a matter of days (including street vendors'
kiosks, shoemakers, dressmakers, laundries, beauty shops, nightclubs, etc.).
Many of the owners (labeled "petty bourgeois") were assigned to compulsory
labor in agriculture or construction. Now fully in charge of what some
critics have called "the island plantation of Fidel" (his father had been
the owner of a large hacienda), Castro made one of his many huge economic
mistakes. In 1970 he called for "the Sugar Harvest of the Ten Million. This
marked the absolute limit of Che Guevara's idealistic push for "voluntary
labor. Castro announced that "the honor of the Revolution" was at stake. A
student who had taken part remarked to Guerra that they had not harvested
sugarcane "for Fidel or his honor.
Still, the large-scale response revealed Fidel's still-charismatic capacity
to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people from all social and economic
levels, but the harvest failed to meet its objectives. Faced with rising
absenteeism in the fields (the only option left of the right to strike), he
issued a law against vagrancy and further tightened control of the shores of
Cuba. Fidel declared that no one any longer wanted to leave the country. And
emigration remained illegal until the Mariel Boatlift in 1980.
The definite sign of Cuba's incorporation into the Soviet bloc was the show
trial (an echo of the Soviet trials in the 1930s) of the poet Heberto
Padilla, who had dared to criticize "our miniature version of Stalinism.
Arrested in March 1971, after five weeks in prison and daily interrogations
he "confessed" his crimes against the revolution. Many voices of the
Latin-American and international literary community recognized a "show
trial" and criticized the persecution, including some, such as Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, up to this moment, had always backed
Fidel. Castro then gave precise orders banning the books of such authors in
Cuba. In the 1960s Padilla had won the national prize for poetry awarded by
an international jury. Now the message was definitive, as in Fidel's words
of 1961: "With the Revolution, everything. Against the Revolution, nothing.
The same slogan still prevails today, though certainly people have more
space. The regime now tolerates a limited amount of private economic
activity, though with many restrictions. There is some freedom of movement,
though Cubans cannot board tourist cruise ships or buy boats. And people are
not persecuted for their sexual or religious preferences. Still, limits on
political life and civil liberties are essentially the same as in 1971. The
government still controls the print media, radio and television, the
universities, student movements, and labor unions. In these matters nothing
has changed. There is no free access to the Internet and manifestations of
dissidence are persecuted. Dissidents are no longer sent to labor camps but
in 2014 there were 8,899 short-term politically motivated detentions. "We
have a different concept of human rights," said Josefina Vidal, a diplomat
now in charge of relations with the United States, to Roberta Jacobson, the
US undersecretary of state for Latin America, at their first meeting in
Havana on January 22, 2015.
This is the Cuba with which President Obama, bravely and intelligently,
though with considerable political risk, decided to reestablish diplomatic
relations in December 2014.
In light of the economic and political history of Cuba, it becomes easier to
understand its contentious relationship with the United States, the subject
of Back Channel to Cuba by William M. Leo-Grande and Peter Kornbluh, which
explores the mostly secret negotiations over decades between the Cuban and
US governments. It is an impressive investigation that appeared only months
before the agreements between Raul Castro and Barack Obama and reads like a
fascinating and thorough intellectual introduction to the accords.
The book makes it clear that, during the long period of the Cuban-Soviet
alliance, an agreement was practically impossible, though the history of
attempts reads like a James Bond novel, and the tireless efforts of some
figures to promote a rapprochement did have some positive results on
emigration and the freeing of political prisoners. After 1971, when the
alliance with Russia was solidified, Cuba adopted much of the ideology,
laws, and institutions of the USSR, especially that of a single all-powerful
party. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, apparently on his
own, put out some feelers to Cuba, which were suddenly withdrawn after the
announcement that Cuban troops had been dispatched to Angola in 1975.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter (with a cabinet divided between "doves" and "hawks")
made serious attempts to "normalize" relations with Cuba. He began by
opening "interest sections" in Washington and Havana, reducing travel
restrictions, and halting surveillance flights over the island. In exchange,
he secured the freedom of several political prisoners and a measure of Cuban
control over the tide of boat people crossing the ninety miles to Florida.
But disagreement over the Cuban presence in Angola and Mozambique and the
American embargo (first imposed in 1962) frustrated any positive result from
the dozens of secret meetings in New York, Havana, even in the Mexican city
of Cuernavaca. According to Leo-Grande and Kornbluh, "Carter aspired to be
the first post-Cold War president in an era when the Cold War was not quite
over.
It was quite the opposite with his successor, Ronald Reagan. In March 1981,
Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, expressed his inclination to
"turn that fucking island into a parking lot. During the eight years of his
presidency, Reagan was infuriated with Cuba for its support of independence
movements in Africa, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and the
guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was a period of renewed prestige
for the Cuban socialist revolution among a new generation of young Latin
Americans. Fidel resisted the increasingly active antagonism of the Reagan
government, which officially listed Cuba as a terrorist state, tightened the
trade embargo, and launched the propaganda station Radio Marti.
Yet even in this administration there were some open channels and some
advances on emigration issues, according to Leo-Grande and Kornbluh. But
after the war in Angola was no longer an issue (it ended by an accord that
sealed the victory of the Cuban troops and their allies) and elections were
held in Nicaragua and El Salvador (both reverses for Cuban foreign policy),
Cuba lost some of the chips it could use in negotiations. When George H.W.
Bush became president, he explicitly demanded a change of regime in Cuba.
In 1993, the crisis hit. With 50 percent inflation, a 35 percent decline in
the GDP, and a plunge of 80 percent in the resources available to meet the
needs of each Cuban citizen, the country seemed on the verge of collapse. In
1993 the Torricelli Amendment, passed after the fall of the Soviet Union,
seemed to herald (and exult over) the approaching end. It prohibited
foreign-based subsidiaries of US companies from trading with Cuba, forbade
travel to Cuba by US citizens, and no longer permitted remittances to be
sent by Cuban-American families to relatives in Cuba.
President Bill Clinton decided to lower the tone of fierce opposition; he
increased passenger flights between Havana and Miami. Fidel accepted the
repatriation of Cubans with criminal records he had sent to America in 1980
as part of the Mariel Boatlift. And unexpectedly, he asked for direct
discussions. In 1994, with the "Crisis of the Boat-People"--the attempt by
thousands to emigrate by small boats and rafts--Clinton requested the
intervention of President Carlos Salinas of Mexico.
The Crisis de los Balseros was resolved in a couple of intense weeks of
negotiation. Fidel's only bargaining chips were his political prisoners, to
whom freedom was granted in groups at his discretion, and the threat of
unleashed emigration. A Republican Congress voted to turn back the clock
with the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which further strengthened the embargo. Bush
the Younger returned to the intransigence of his father but Castro had by
then encountered a new ideological and political acolyte and a new Maecenas
in Hugo Chavez, elected president of Venezuela in 1999.
There had been one interesting possibility of rapprochement decades earlier
during the presidency of John Kennedy, as reported in Leo-Grande and
Kornbluh's fine book. After the Cubans had defeated the invading forces at
the Bay of Pigs and Cuba had formally adopted communism in May 1961, Che
Guevara sent Kennedy a box of cigars and a letter offering five surprising
concessions: payment for nationalized properties, a renunciation of the
Cuban alliance with Communist Eastern Europe, and free elections (but only
after the revolution had consolidated itself), as well as promises never to
attack Guantanamo and to reconsider Cuba's activities in other Latin
American countries.
Later, after the release of the 1,200 prisoners from the invasion force had
been negotiated, Fidel expressed (to Tad Szulc of The New York Times as well
as others) his desire to somehow reestablish connections. One year later,
despite the missile crisis in October 1962 and the CIA attempts to
assassinate Fidel, the possibility still seemed to exist. "If he kicks out
Sovs we can live [with] him," said a note from the National Security
Council. And so argued Lisa Howard, the very active ABC reporter who was
close to Fidel. It was a hope also supported by Jean Daniel, the editor of
Le Nouvel Observateur.
This was one of those moments that might have changed history. "Maybe things
are possible with this man," Castro said to Daniel on November 20, 1963.
Daniel had recently visited the White House, and he had been given to
understand that relations could improve. Fidel suggested that Kennedy might
possibly become "the leader who may at last understand that there can be
coexistence between capitalist and socialists, even in the Americas. Two
days later, when he was informed by telephone that Kennedy had been
assassinated, Castro turned to Daniel and said, "This is the end of your
mission of peace.
Today another possible turning point has arisen, for several reasons: the
economic crisis in Venezuela, the impoverishment of the Cuban economy, the
reduced influence (and changing views) of voters of Cuban origin. (Recent
polls show a majority of Florida Cubans favor lifting the embargo.) And the
major supporters of mutual enmity have receded from the foreground. There is
no doubt that the intransigence of Fidel Castro was a continual obstacle to
"normalization. His fixation on Cuba as David confronting Goliath can be
seen as justified in its time and for many years, but no longer. And his
definition of Cuban identity as deeply negative (permanent opposition to the
United States seen as a continual challenge) impoverishes the rich history
of Cuba.
But it can be argued--as LeGrande and Kornbluth observe in their concluding
chapter--that the US has been even more intransigent, often failing to act
on its promises even when Cuba made significant concessions. It is worth
remembering that during the Carter administration, which was perhaps the
most open to the possibility of "normalization," the government refused to
open a real crack in the embargo by selling Cuba needed medicines impossible
to obtain from any other country. Such an extreme (and cruel) outlook is
still alive in some quarters, especially within the Republican Party.
The most sensible voices of the Cuban opposition, on the island and abroad
(including some major US businessmen and a few right-wing political figures)
welcomed the agreement put forward by Obama in December. They understand and
have suffered from the repressive policies of the regime. They know how much
effort it will take to pry any fraction of power from forces that have
retained it for so long. But they have faith in what Obama has described as
a means to "more effectively empower the Cuban people.
This could result from greater contact with people from abroad whose mere
presence in Cuba (not to speak of information, ideas, remittances,
investments, and any newly possible business arrangements) will disrupt the
long isolation of the island from much of the world. They believe that this
new flow of contact will unleash and strengthen a general demand for civil
liberties with which the new generations of leadership will finally have to
make their compromises. A recent tweet from the blogger Yusnaby Perez
presents photographs of small American and Cuban flags appearing together in
the windows of Havana. Perhaps an omen of changes to come.
But the prospects are by no means certain. The road to new relations will be
rugged and the process could fail. A troubling signal was Raul Castro's
recent address at a leadership Conference of CELAC (the Community of Latin
American and Caribbean States), held at the end of January in Costa Rica. He
asserted that the possible accord had to meet four criteria: a US return of
the Guantanamo naval base, the cessation of American radio and television
broadcasts to Cuba (Radio and TV Marti), the end of the trade embargo, and
"compensation to the Cuban people for the human and economic damage suffered
as a result of American policies.
The return of Guantanamo may eventually happen but it will be no easy task
to achieve it. Cessation of propaganda transmissions would not be difficult
but, with the present makeup of Congress, could set off a political
confrontation. The end of the embargo--certainly desirable--cannot be done
immediately, and the payment of "reparations" is an impossible demand.
Clinging to such requirements (without any substantial concessions on
internal political liberty) would seem more appropriate to Fidel than to
Raul, if he truly wishes to move closer to the US and respect the present
enthusiasm and hopes of large numbers of Cubans. Dealing with those problems
is an issue for private diplomatic discussions. Using a confrontational
rhetoric in public (and backing the repeatedly repressive moves by the
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro) only provides ammunition for those who
want to continue the embargo. And Cuba could thus abort a golden opportunity
for normalizing relations with the US.
This would be a very unfortunate turn of events, because Obama has taken a
truly historic step not only in relation to Cuba but also to Latin American
anti-Americanism, one of the most profound and historically justified
political passions on the continent. Its contemporary form crystallized
during the Spanish-American War of 1898, reached its climax in Cuba in 1959,
and has begun to recede, perhaps substantially to disappear, as a result of
this possible resumption of American-Cuban diplomatic relations. The next
step should be the elimination of the embargo, though a Congress dominated
by Republicans will do its best to block such a move.
At the next meeting of the Organization of American States (scheduled for
April in Panama) Obama as a result of this opening--will arrive with a
greater moral legitimacy than any twentieth-century American president, even
more in this case than FDR. He should use this new prestige to achieve Latin
American consensus that Cuba should honor the agreements on human rights
that were signed by Raul at the 2008 summit meeting in Lima of Latin
American, Caribbean, and European nations. Cuba must legalize the basic
liberties that have been denied, including the freedom to connect to the
Internet.
Only then will Cuba be able to turn the page of history. When the virtual
shelf is filled with articles and books that have not been allowed to
circulate on the island, the Cubans themselves, we may hope, will be able to
freely decide whether to absolve or condemn the aged dictator who lives on,
mostly in silence, somewhere in Havana.
March 3, 2015;
Translated from the Spanish by Hank Heifetz
