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Originality and Relevance of the Cuban Revolution
by D. L. Raby
The
predominant tendency in European intellectual and political circles is to regard
the Cuban regime as a kind of fossil, a Stalinist hangover, and even in more
traditional leftist circles which see Cuba as an example of social justice and
resistance to globalisation, virtually no-one suggests that other countries
could learn from the Cuban experience in political terms. The Cuban experience
is identifi ed with armed struggle, and since the neutralisation of the Central
American guerrilla movements armed revolution has been discredited. Although
strong insurgent movements still exist in Colombia – the FARC, ELN and others –
their strategy is to combine armed struggle with other methods and to seek a
negotiated political solution; their great achievement (which should not be
overlooked despite government and media demonisation of them as ‘narco-terrorists’)
has been to maintain popular armed resistance to neo-liberalism. Within the last
decade other movements which defend the resort to arms have appeared, notably
the Zapatistas in Mexico, but given their limited military capacity and their
strategy of ‘dissolution’ rather than seizure of power, it would be more
accurate to describe them as representing ‘armed contestation’ as opposed to
revolutionary armed struggle in the classic sense. Small organisations which
advocate armed struggle in theory exist in many countries, and it would be rash
to suggest that the question of armed revolution will never again be on the
agenda in Latin America; but at present it is clear that political confl icts are
resolved through a combination of elections and mass mobilisations which are
predominantly peaceful.
For many on the Left, Cuba is to be admired for its achievements in health,
education and sport, and to be supported against the injustice and irrationality
of the US blockade; but at the same time there is a consensus that it should
become more ‘democratic’. There is a vague sense that Cuban Socialism is not
quite the same as the Soviet variety, that it is more popular and more
authentic, but little understanding as to how or why this is the case; and there
is widespread scepticism as to the prospects for its long-term survival. Yet if
Cuba did not
77
fall in
the early 1990s along with the rest of the Soviet bloc, if it survived the
extraordinary rigours of the ‘Special Period’ resulting from Soviet collapse and
the intensification of the US blockade, if moreover it has recovered economically
with less concessions to capitalism than China or Vietnam, then its prospects
for survival cannot be lightly dismissed. ‘Democratisation’ along liberal lines
would undoubtedly undermine Socialism and would open the door to domination by
the US and the Miami exile mafia; Cuba has its own system of Socialist democracy,
which may have limitations but merits serious examination. This chapter will
attempt to explain how and why the Cuban revolution has achieved so much and
why, despite its deficiencies, it is still very significant for Latin America and
for the entire world.
ORIGINS: THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION
The
triumph on 1 January 1959 of the guerrillas of the Rebel Army led by Fidel
Castro, and especially the dramatic process of radicalisation of the Cuban
political scene and the transition to Socialism during the following three to
four years, signalled the beginning of a new era in Latin America. Until then a
Socialist revolution in that region, and above all in Central America and the
Caribbean – the classic ‘backyard’ of the United States – was unthinkable. In
these ‘banana republics’ comic-opera tyrants alternated with weak and corrupt
civilian regimes, and the rare exceptions like the progressive nationalist
government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala from 1951 to1954 were swiftly crushed
by the Colossus of the North. In 1959–61 the memory of Guatemala was fresh in
everyone’s mind, and most observers anticipated a similar fate for the
revolutionary regime in Havana. The political establishment in Washington has
never forgiven Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionaries for their successful
defiance of US hegemony, and nearly five decades later Cuba continues to be a
thorn in the side of the imperial super-power. The Cuban–US confrontation became
a central component of the Cold War, and there is no doubt that from 1962 to
1989 Soviet support was a critical element in Cuban survival; but it is
necessary to recognise also that the Soviet Union only committed itself fully
after the Cubans had demonstrated their own capacity for political and military
resistance with the defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. This
independent Cuban will to resist has reappeared since the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, surprising the prophets of the New World Order who confidently predicted
‘the demise of Castro’ within months of the fall of the Berlin Wall; both Fidel
Castro and the Cuban revolution have confounded the sceptics and demonstrated an
unsuspected vitality. But those who really understand Cuban history should not
be so surprised.
To understand the success of the Cuban revolution and its continued vigour we
have to review the island’s history from the nineteenth century, when it was
Spain’s most important remaining colony (after most of Latin America achieved
its independence between 1810 and 1826). This delayed independence, together
with the crucial issue of slavery and its abolition, gave the Cuban nationalist
movement a more radical and democratic character when it finally emerged with
full force from 1868 onwards. Also, the expansionist and annexationist ambitions
of the USA, manifested from a very early date, contributed to the formation of a
precociously anti-imperialist consciousness in Cuba. Already in 1805 Thomas
Jefferson had proclaimed his country’s interest in the annexation of the largest
of the Antilles, and in 1823 Secretary of State John Quincy Adams declared that
with the passage of time Cuba would fall ‘like a ripe apple’ into the lap of the
United States; and in the course of the nineteenth century the US tried to
purchase the island from Spain on four occasions (Cantón Navarro 1998, 40). It
should not therefore come as a surprise that the literary prophet of the
independence movement and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, José Martí,
declared in his last letter, shortly before his death in combat in 1895:
‘Everything I have done unto now and all that I shall do hereafter has as its
objective to prevent, through the independence of Cuba, the United States of
America from falling with added weight on Our America’ –
Nuestra América,
in other words Latin America as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon world (Martí 1975,
3). It was also Martí who insisted, at a time when racial prejudice was solidly
entrenched in all Western countries, on racial equality within the independence
movement and on its democratic and popular character. Furthermore, another hero
of the independence struggle, General of the Liberating Army Antonio Maceo (a
free mulatto known as ‘the Titan of Bronze’), declared in reply to a young Cuban
who asked him what attitude he would take in the event of a US intervention
against Spain: ‘In that case, young man, I think I would be on the side of the
Spaniards’ (Thomas 1971, 300) – an extraordinary declaration, and a clear
indication that he agreed with Martí, even at the height of the struggle against
Spanish colonialism, in regarding nascent US imperialism as the greater danger.
The relevance of these warnings by the heroes of the independence struggle was
confirmed shortly after their deaths with the US intervention of May 1898 and
the Spanish–Cuban–American War. Taking advantage of the mysterious destruction
of the battleship
Maine
in
Havana harbour, the North Americans rapidly defeated the Spanish forces and
occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and the island of Guam in the Pacific,
and then negotiated peace terms with the Spanish in Paris without consulting the
Cuban liberation forces which had been fighting off and on for 30 years and were
close to victory at that time (Cantón Navarro 1998, 61–74; Collazo 1972; Foner
1972). The US military occupation lasted four years, until in 1902 the island
became formally independent. But it was no more than formal independence because
Washington imposed as a condition of its withdrawal acceptance by the Cubans of
the ‘Platt Amendment’, which gave the imperial power the right to intervene
whenever it saw fi t ‘for the protection of life, liberty and private property’,
and also the right to establish naval bases on the island (this was the origin
of the notorious Guantánamo base) and various commercial privileges. In the
following 30 years Washington intervened militarily in Cuba on four occasions;
the Platt Amendment was revoked by Cuba in 1933 and the United States in 1934,
but US domination remained the central fact of Cuban affairs until 1959 (Roig de
Leuchsenring 1973).
In the neo-colonial ‘Plattist’ republic it seemed for a while as if the values
of Martí and the
mambíses
(the Afro-Cuban nickname of the independence fighters) had been completely
forgotten, but from 1922 onwards a new radical consciousness began to emerge
with the formation of the FEU (Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, University
Students Federation) led by the brilliant and restless student activist Julio
Antonio Mella, who also founded the Liga Anticlerical and Liga Antimperialista
in 1924 and was one of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party in 1925 (Kapcia
2000, 68–9). The labour movement was also beginning to become a force under
anarcho-syndicalist leadership, but with a rapidly increasing Communist
presence. Then in the next few years the political situation became more
polarised as Cuba underwent its first experience of a classic Latin American
dictatorship, as President Gerardo Machado, elected in 1925, began to assume
arbitrary powers and held on to power by force until 1933, when a frankly
revolutionary situation developed.
Out of the FEU, suppressed by Machado, there emerged a more revolutionary
student body, the Directorio Estudiantil, which from 1930 onwards adopted a
strategy of armed resistance. In this it was soon imitated by other clandestine
organisations, the ABC and OCRR (Organización Celular Radical Revolucionaria),
both of petty-bourgeois composition and nationalist/corporatist ideology. The
world depression beginning in 1929 had a catastrophic impact on Cuba and
contributed strongly to popular discontent (the price of sugar, which accounted
for 80 per cent of exports, collapsed completely and long-term unemployment
reached over 50 per cent). The early months of 1933 saw a political strike by
sugar workers, and as political violence increased rumours of a possible US
intervention began to circulate. But the recently inaugurated President Franklin
D. Roosevelt had just proclaimed his ‘Good Neighbour’ policy in relation to
Latin America, abandoning military intervention and promising support to
democratic governments; so although the US Navy was on patrol in international
waters only a few kilometres from the Cuban coast, Washington limited itself to
sending a Special Envoy, career diplomat Sumner Welles, with the mission of
‘mediating’ between Machado and the opposition. But this only helped to
undermine Machado’s authority, and between May and August 1933 a series of
strikes, demonstrations, bombings and assassinations culminated in an ultimatum
from the military High Command to Machado, which finally convinced him to leave
for exile (Cantón Navarro 1998, 110–16; Kapcia 2000, 72–3).
With Sumner Welles’ support a liberal government was installed, but it had no
real power base and fell in a matter of weeks. On 4 September 1933 the sergeants
and NCOs of the army successfully revolted against the officer corps, putting
effective power in the hands of Sergeant Fulgencio Batista who thus appeared on
the political scene for the first time. But the rebellious sergeants did not
assume governmental office, leaving a power vacuum which was occupied by the
Directorio Estudiantil. The students nominated a ‘Pentarchy’ of distinguished
intellectuals, one of whom, the respected medical professor Dr Ramón Grau San
Martín, soon emerged as President of a Provisional Government in which the
students had signifi cant influence. The new government in effect represented the
popular, democratic and anti-imperialist movement, but it did not enjoy the
organised support of any political party or force and had to confront the
pressure of Batista (who soon revealed himself to be an opportunist) and of the
US Embassy.
The most interesting and influential member of Grau San Martín’s government was
the Minister of the Interior, Antonio Guiteras, a postgraduate student of
Socialist ideas but not affiliated to any party. It was above all Guiteras who
inspired many radical and popular measures decreed by Grau’s government: the
revocation of the Platt Amendment, the intervention (public administration) of
the Cuban Electric Co. (a US subsidiary), the minimum wage and eight-hour day,
female suffrage, the beginning of an agrarian reform, and so on. Many of these
measures were never implemented since the government had no real power and was
in any case overthrown after only four months, in January 1934, in a military
coup carried out by Batista and encouraged by the United States. The ‘Government
of the Hundred Days’ had failed, but the heady experience of these months
changed Cuban politics for ever (Aguilar 1972; Cabrera 1977; Tabares del Real
1973). There is a notable similarity between the measures decreed in 1933 and
those adopted by the revolutionary government in the fi rst six months of 1959;
in fact the 1933 revolution was the direct precedent of 1959, and revealed
clearly the weakness of the neo-colonial power structure and the growth among
large sectors of the Cuban people of an anti-imperialist and revolutionary
consciousness.
From 1934 to 1959 all the main political forces in Cuba had their roots in the
events of 1933: the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico), formed by Grau
and his associates and generally known as the Auténticos, the ‘Authentic’ Party;
the Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxo), or Orthodox Party, formed in 1947 as a
breakaway from the Auténticos and led by Eduardo Chibás, who as a student had
been prominent in the anti-Machado resistance; and Fulgencio Batista, whether as
de facto strongman behind a series of puppet presidents (1934–40),
democratically elected president (1940–44), or dictator (1952–58). Immediately
after the 1934 coup Guiteras began to organise clandestine resistance, creating
his own movement called Jóven Cuba (Young Cuba), but he was assassinated in
1935. In the next few years Batista revealed considerable political astuteness,
decreeing a series of popular reforms, legalising the Communist Party and
permitting the adoption of a remarkably progressive constitution in 1940. In
1944 Grau and the Auténticos won the elections, and this victory by the figurehead
of the 1933 revolutionary government aroused great popular enthusiasm; but it
soon became clear that the Auténticos had abandoned the ideals of the ‘Hundred
Days’, and the new government descended into a morass of corruption and
opportunism. Grau’s successor, Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948–52) was another
Auténtico and heir to 1933, but continued on the same corrupt path, thus
contributing to the failure of parliamentary liberalism in Cuba and paving the
way for Batista’s second coup d’état on 10 March 1952 (Ameringer 2000).
Batista’s coup provoked almost unanimous repudiation, but the established
political parties were unable to channel this sentiment into an effective
strategy. Repression hindered open expression of the popular movement against
Batista, but soon there was a series of attempts to launch armed struggle,
showing the extent and intensity of opposition. The first efforts came from
radical intellectuals and students: a philosophy professor at the University of
Havana, Dr Rafael García Bárcena, organised the Movimiento Nacional
Revolucionario (MNR, National Revolutionary Movement) which began to prepare a
civilian-military uprising for early 1953, but he was arrested and his movement
disintegrated over the next few months (Hart Dávalos 1997, 37–40). In Santiago,
the country’s second city and capital of the Province of Oriente, a group of
students and young intellectuals led by Frank País created another clandestine
armed movement, Acción Revolucionaria Oriental (Revolutionary Action of Oriente).
But the first effective armed action was carried out by another clandestine
group, as yet unnamed, organised in Havana by the young lawyer Fidel Castro Ruz:
it was this group which travelled secretly to Oriente to lead the assault on the
military barracks of Moncada (in Santiago) and Bayamo on 26 July 1953, which
although unsuccessful would mark the beginning of Castro’s emergence as
revolutionary leader and would give the movement a name (Movimiento
Revolucionario 26 de Julio, the 26 July Revolutionary Movement or M-26–7).
Castro’s famous ‘History Will Absolve Me’ speech – delivered at the in camera
trial organised by the regime, but clandestinely printed and distributed by his
supporters – became the manifesto of the new movement and helped to mobilise a
broad civic movement in favour of an amnesty for the imprisoned Moncada
survivors, an amnesty which was finally granted by Batista in May 1955 (Mencía
1993; Hart Dávalos 1997).
Fidel Castro had already become a household name in Cuba, and after his release
it soon became clear that he was not safe there; so he and his brother Raúl
chose exile in Mexico – but with the stated intention of returning to continue
the struggle. It was of course in Mexico that they met the young Argentine
doctor – already a revolutionary internationalist – Ernesto Guevara, nicknamed
‘Che’ by the Cubans because of his use of this interjection which means ‘mate’
in Argentine Spanish; Che Guevara would come to play a role second only to that
of Fidel in the Cuban revolution. There followed 17 months of training and
preparation for the expedition in the leaky yacht
Granma
across the Gulf of Mexico to land on the coast of Oriente with the aim of
linking up with an insurrection in Santiago organised by Frank País and the
urban underground of the M-26–7 on 30 November 1956. Once again the plan failed
disastrously due to a combination of errors of judgement and sheer bad luck,
with most of the expeditionary force dispersed or killed, and only a dozen or so
men, including Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, surviving to seek refuge
in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. But once again, as with the Moncada
assault, this disaster contributed to the heroic aura surrounding Fidel, and his
extraordinary knack for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat with the
subsequent success of the guerrilla campaign completed his transformation into
an iconic figure for the Cuban resistance against Batista. Che Guevara, Raúl and
others like Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan Almeida shared, and rightly so, in this
aura of revolutionary heroism, but there can be no doubt that the central figure,
standing head and shoulders above the rest, was Fidel
– popularly referred to from then on by his first name. No-one could dispute the
fact that the decisive blows in the triumph over Batista were struck by the
Rebel Army emerging from the Sierra Maestra, and that the strategic vision which
had made this possible was above all that of Fidel (Hart Dávalos 1997, Ch. 16).
This however should not obscure the fact that the Cuban revolution was a popular
mass movement in which tens of thousands of people participated in different
ways. Although the rural guerrillas were militarily decisive and the M-26–7
leadership in the Sierra under Fidel was politically decisive, the movement also
had many thousands of urban militants and sympathisers in Havana and throughout
the island, functioning clandestinely in the urban armed resistance, in the
trade unions and many other organisations such as the Resistencia Cívica, the
‘Civic Resistance’ which brought together thousands of members of the liberal
professions – lawyers, doctors, engineers, lecturers – in opposition to Batista
(Cuesta Braniella 1997). The scale and importance of urban armed resistance has
been reaffirmed in several recent studies, especially Gladys Marel García-Pérez’
Insurrection and Revolution
(García-Pérez 1998) and Julia Sweig’s
Inside the Cuban
Revolution
(Sweig 2002). When one takes into account also the thousands of militants of the
Directorio Revolucionario and further thousands of Partido Socialista Popular
activists who collaborated with the revolutionaries despite their party’s pacifi
st line, it becomes apparent that the entire country was in revolutionary
turmoil from 1955 to the fall of Batista in January 1959.
In this respect a complex historical and political polemic developed in the
1960s, and has recently been revived, regarding the relative contributions of
the
Sierra
and the
Llano
(the Mountains and the Plains) to the revolutionary victory. The
Sierra,
the guerrilla force under Fidel and Che, has traditionally been seen as
decisive, with the
Llano,
the urban underground, being regarded as secondary. This interpretation was
given semi-official status with the publication of Che Guevara’s
Pasajes de la
Guerra Revolucionaria
(later translated
as
Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War)
in 1963, followed in 1967 by Régis Debray’s
Revolution in the
Revolution.
Debray’s thesis, largely based on his interviews with Guevara in Havana and
later in Bolivia, was that in Cuba the
Llano
had been reformist and ineffective and that victory had only been possible when
the truly revolutionary position of the
Sierra
had
its way; and that this strategy could be extrapolated to Latin America as a
whole, where the traditional Left, based in the cities and dominated by the
conventional pro-Soviet Communist parties, was pacifist and reformist and based
its strategy on an illusory alliance with the national bourgeoisie. As against
this the Cuban experience had demonstrated that revolutionary conditions
existed, or were latent, in the countryside, where the peasantry was ready to
take up arms if only the revolutionaries, organised in a guerrilla nucleus (foco)
would show the way; the guerrilla
foco,
in an inversion of the normal Marxist interpretation, would
create
the
conditions for revolution.
This polemic, and the
foquista
strategy derived from Debray’s position, contributed significantly to the rash of
poorly organised and politically isolated guerrilla expeditions which failed
disastrously in many Latin American countries in the 1960s and ’70s. The
strategy was also based on a misreading of the Cuban experience. Although there
is no doubt that the military success of the Sierra Maestra guerrillas was
ultimately decisive in the revolutionary victory, this does not mean that urban
underground struggle was irrelevant. On the contrary, the urban resistance, both
armed and unarmed, had contributed enormously to undermining Batista’s regime,
and had also played a vital role at certain moments in channelling supplies,
arms and recruits to the
Sierra.
The
Sierra/Llano
polemic originally came to a head in relation to the strategy of
a revolutionary general strike, which the urban leadership saw as the road to
victory and which was reluctantly accepted by Fidel and the
Sierra
in
late 1957. The result was the general strike of 9 April 1958, a heroic but
disastrous failure in which many militants lost their lives and the urban
underground was severely disrupted by repression. In response a crucial meeting
was held on 3 May at Altos de Mompié in the Sierra Maestra, attended by all
members of the M-26–7 national leadership plus Che Guevara (García-Pérez 1998,
100); after what was by all accounts a difficult discussion, it was decided to
unify the guerrilla and
Llano
command structures with Fidel as General Secretary of the Movement and
Commander-in-Chief of the Rebel Army. The National Executive was now based in
the Sierra and the urban underground, headed by Marcelo Fernández in Santiago,
was subordinate to the Executive in the mountains. Those responsible for the
general strike were censured for sectarianism in its preparation (marginalising
the Partido Socialista Popular which controlled the bulk of the organised
working class) and for underestimating the difficulties of armed confrontation
with the police and military in an urban environment (Sweig 2002, 148–51).
The Altos de Mompié meeting did therefore conclude that the
Llano
leadership had committed serious errors and that the Cuban struggle had reached
a point where rural guerrilla struggle against the regular military was the
decisive element; and this proved to be correct. However, this is not the same
as saying that the
Llano
leaders were irredeemable reformists or that a rural guerrilla
foco
could
bring revolutionary victory in isolation from the urban movement and in any
Latin American country, regardless of specifi c conditions. Whether Che Guevara
really believed this or whether it was an unwarranted extrapolation of his views
by Régis Debray is debatable, although it is undeniable that Che made tragic
errors of judgement, apparently inspired by the
foco
theory, in the Bolivian campaign which would lead to his death.
Another element of the Cuban revolutionary struggle which cannot be overlooked
is the contribution of the FEU (the Student Federation) and the Directorio
Revolucionario Estudiantil (Student Revolutionary Directorate) which emerged
from it. The Directorio leader José Antonio Echevarría had signed a crucial
alliance with Fidel and the M-26–7 in Mexico in August 1956, and on 13 March
1957 the Directorio would lead a heroic but unsuccessful armed assault on the
presidential palace in Havana with the aim of assassinating Batista. Despite the
Mexico agreement, this reflected the Directorio’s independent strategy of trying
to defeat the dictatorship by ‘decapitation’; they were not far from succeeding
but were driven off with over 40 dead, including Echevarría (Sweig 2002, 18–19).
The Directorio would subsequently rebuild and would develop its own rural
guerrilla force in the Escambray mountains in central Cuba, but would never
again really be in a position to dispute revolutionary leadership with Fidel and
the M-26–7.
After the failure of the April strike, the key development in the revolutionary
struggle was the summer offensive by Batista’s army, with some 10,000 troops
with tanks and aviation launching an all-out offensive on a few hundred
guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. By August the offensive was defeated, and as
the guerrilla columns began to fan out into the plains and take the initiative
it became clear that the dictator’s days were numbered. As Raúl Castro
consolidated control of the northern part of Oriente province, Fidel moved on
Santiago and two columns under Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos undertook a
heroic march through the swamps of Camaguey towards the west of the island,
repeating the great feat of Antonio Maceo, the ‘Titan of Bronze’ in the 1895–98
war of independence. Batista’s forces disintegrated and it became clear that the
M-26–7 and above all the Rebel Army were victorious.
1959: VICTORY AND EUPHORIA
With
Batista’s hurried departure in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1959 and the
triumphant entry of the
barbudos
(the bearded guerrilla fighters) into Havana and Santiago, the country was swept
by scenes of extraordinary euphoria. In the following weeks and months, with the
consolidation of the new regime and the avalanche of decrees by the
revolutionary government imposing change in all aspects of public life, it began
to become clear that this was a situation without precedent in the history of
Cuba or Latin America, and that the new authorities in Havana enjoyed
unparallelled freedom of action. At local level a multiplicity of popular
initiatives sprang up, the people began to seize control in neighbourhoods and
workplaces, and provisional revolutionary town councils replaced the
representatives of the dictatorship. With the collapse of Batista’s army and
police and the purging of
batistianos
from the civil service, the state apparatus was already being transformed.
Within three weeks the most notorious of the dictator’s agents, responsible for
thousands of deaths and other abuses, were being put on trial and in many cases
condemned to death; when US Congressmen protested about the trial procedures, it
was pointed out that at least the Rebel Army had maintained order and saved them
from lynching:
The 12th
of August 1933 had been marked in historical memory as the start of
disorder, looting and social upheaval. To the amazement of our contemporaries
the much-feared spectre of the excesses of 1933 was not repeated, giving the new
revolutionary order a different character. (Díaz Castañón 2001, 105–6)
There was of course disorder in other respects, as the new government issued a
raft of decrees which often could not be implemented, or in other cases ratified
de facto situations which had been created by spontaneous actions.
It quickly became apparent that the only organisation with popular legitimacy
and credibility was the M-26–7: for the vast majority of Cubans the Auténticos,
the Ortodoxos, and even more so the Liberals and other traditional parties only
represented the past – and one of the most remarkable aspects of the
revolutionary situation was how these parties virtually disappeared from the
political scene. They were not suppressed, they simply faded away over the next
18 months. The only party with a signifi cant presence was the old Communist
Party, known since 1944 as the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), which had won
the support of some sectors of the working class since the 1930s but had been
somewhat compromised through its collaboration with Batista in his reformist
phase (1938–44), and had become further discredited by its opposition to armed
struggle against the dictatorship until the last moment: at the time of the
Moncada attack it condemned Fidel and the insurgents as ‘petty-bourgeois
adventurers’, and only officially changed its line in mid-1958. In 1959 therefore
the PSP could support the revolutionary process and accept the leadership of
Fidel and the M-26–7 – and this it did almost immediately – but it could not
claim to be the vanguard of the revolution. In Cuban domestic politics the
central issue of the next four years would be the relationship between the PSP
and the M-26–7, which was at times friendly and collaborative and at times tense
and conflictive. Other than these two organisations, the only other movement of
any importance was the Directorio Revolucionario, which had emerged from the
student movement and had played an important role in the clandestine struggle in
Havana, as well as having its own rural guerrilla force in the Sierra del
Escambray in central Cuba; its ideology was similar to that of the M-26–7, and
after a few moments of tension in the early months of 1959 it also accepted the
leadership of Fidel and the larger movement. In mid-1961 these three
organisations (M-26–7, PSP and Directorio) united to form the Organizaciones
Revolucionarias Integradas (Integrated Revolutionary Organisations, ORI); in
1962 this was transformed into the Partido Único de la Revolución Socialista (PURS,
Single Party of the Socialist Revolution), and finally in 1965 into the new Cuban
Communist Party. The leading role, however, was that of the M-26–7, and it was
fundamentally this movement with Fidel at its head which directed the agrarian
reform, the nationalisations, the breach with the US and the transition to
Socialism.
It is important to bear in mind these original characteristics of the situation
in order to understand the headlong rush of events in the first three to four
years. In the first nine months of 1959 some 1,500 decrees and laws were issued.
The government decreed the purging of
batistianos,
the compulsory reduction of urban rents, the reduction of telephone rates and –
when the US-owned company refused this – the legal intervention of the company,
the reduction of electricity rates, wage increases for low-paid workers, and the
first agrarian reform law (May 1959) (Pérez 1988, 319–20). The State Department
condemned the measures, but the Cuban response was to reject any interference in
the country’s internal affairs and to press ahead with more reforms. From August
1959 onwards, armed attacks on Cuba began to be mounted by Florida-based exiles
with the connivance of US offi cials; on 5 September the US Ambassador was
recalled for a fortnight as an expression of Washington’s displeasure with the
agrarian reform and the measures affecting the telephone and electricity
companies; on 21 October a Cuban Air Force deserter, Major Díaz Lanz, fl ew over
Havana dropping leaflets and incendiary bombs, and in Havana itself
counter-revolutionary terrorists planted bombs and machine-gunned people in bus
queues; and Fidel announced in response the formation of a popular armed militia
(Scheer and Zeitlin 1964, 104–7). This tit-for-tat pattern culminated with the
Cuban expropriation of the Standard Oil, Texaco and Shell oil refineries in
June–July 1960, the US decision to cut the Cuban sugar quota, and the Cuban
expropriation of a series of industrial subsidiaries in August, until in October
all remaining US properties were nationalised and Washington imposed its trade
embargo, soon to become a virtually complete blockade, which has continued ever
since.
What was remarkable in all this was the unfl inching determination of the Cubans;
where previously in Latin America, and especially in the Caribbean area, any
nationalist or reformist government which faced the hostility of the United
States had backed down or else had been overthrown, this government in Havana
reacted by taking more radical decisions in defiance of Washington. Then in April
1961 when the inevitable armed intervention came at the Bay of Pigs – an
invasion by 1,600 counter-revolutionaries sponsored by the CIA, with the US Navy
just off the coast waiting to land – the Cubans resisted and crushed the
invaders, in an act of revolutionary affirmation which won the admiration of all
Latin America and which Washington has never forgiven. It was also at this
moment that Fidel proclaimed the Socialist character of the revolution, for the
fi rst time and after two years and three months in power; and the alliance with
the Soviet Union, hitherto partial and limited principally to a trade agreement,
developed fast over the next few months and was extended to the political and
military fields as well. The fi nal act of this geo-political drama came 18 months
later with the Missile Crisis of October 1962, when Cuba stood at the centre of
what was probably the most dangerous confrontation ever between the two
super-powers. With the peaceful resolution of this crisis Cuban Socialism became
a fait accompli, although subject to a systematic US blockade and integrated
into the Soviet bloc in ways that were not necessarily always desired by the
Cubans.
These are the bare bones of the Cuban revolutionary transition, of an
exceptionally radical and rapid transformation occurring in an island of six
million inhabitants (eleven million today) only 180 kilometres from Florida. The
Cuban revolution has been studied to death, but there are still aspects of it
which are misunderstood. First, it is necessary to look more closely at the
political and ideological characteristics of the revolutionary movement itself.
It is generally recognised that the PSP had little to do with the revolution,
which was the work of Fidel Castro and the M-26–7: a broad, nationalist,
democratic and anti-imperialist movement. Most observers also recognise that the
movement as such was not Socialist or Marxist until some time after victory, at
least in terms of programme and systematic doctrine (although a significant
number of its militants were familiar with and sympathised with one or another
version of Socialist ideology). Before and for some time after 1 January 1959 it
included many individuals of liberal, Social Democratic or Christian Democratic
ideology. With the exception of some right-wing US writers or Miami Cubans who
regard the revolution as a cleverly disguised Communist plot, most scholars
consider that the Cuban leaders became radicalised in the course of the struggle
against Batista and especially in the confrontation with the US from 1959 to
1962. It is important to realise that US hostility did not begin when the
revolution was declared to be Socialist (which was not until April 1961) but
from the very beginning. Even on 1 January 1959 when Batista had just fled and
the revolutionaries were in control of Santiago and marching on Havana, the US
Embassy supported an attempted coup by General Cantillo to prevent Fidel Castro
and the M-26–7 from taking power (Ibarra Guitart 2000, 352–3); it failed because
Fidel immediately called for a general strike and confi rmed his orders to Che
Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos to march on the capital. In the months that
followed, despite conciliatory overtures to Washington by the revolutionary
leaders, the US remained fundamentally hostile, and it was later revealed that
plans for a counter-revolutionary invasion of Cuba (which would eventually
materialise in the Bay of Pigs or Playa Girón expedition of 16–20 April 1961)
actually began in May 1959:
… the
Agrarian Reform Law was signed on May 17, 1959, and just two days later
President Eisenhower signed the Pluto Plan, which aimed to destabilize Cuba.
Pluto was the CIA’s code name for the comprehensive program of subversion that
culminated in the Bay of Pigs invasion. (Blanco 1994, 14)
This was almost two years before Fidel declared the revolution to be Socialist
(which, not accidentally, he did on the first day of the invasion), and when Cuba
had not yet even re-established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
Although Communism would later become an additional factor in US hostility, the
fundamental reason was Washington’s traditional view of Cuba as a US
protectorate where its imperial fiat must be obeyed.
The view of North American liberals is that US hostility and political blunders
drove the revolutionary leaders into the arms of the Communists: Robert Scheer
and Maurice Zeitlin, writing in 1963, declared that:
An
examination of the history of the years since the establishment of the
Revolutionary Government demonstrates, we believe, that the tragic course of
Cuba–United States relations has been encouraged and accelerated, rather than
hindered, by the United States Government’s foreign policy towards Cuba. That
policy acted both to change political attitudes among the Cuban leaders and to
increase the probability that men already holding Communist or pro-Soviet
beliefs or both, would move into positions of influence and power within the
revolutionary movement. Moreover, United States actions often confronted the
Revolutionary Government with alternatives which led them to take steps they
apparently had neither anticipated nor desired … . (Scheer and Zeitlin 1964,
64–5)
The
authors are undoubtedly correct in arguing that US hostility was
counter-productive, but they probably underestimate the determination of the
revolutionary leaders to take radical measures which would inevitably affect US
interests – not because of a preexisting Communist or pro-Soviet disposition
but because of their own national-revolutionary ideology. This interpretation
also overlooks the original characteristics of the revolutionary movement and
the unprecedented character of the political situation obtaining in 1959.
As previously mentioned, one of the most remarkable features of the Cuban
political scene in 1959 was the almost total lack of political initiative of the
political parties and organisations of the bourgeoisie. It could be objected
that the Provisional Government established in January included several figures
of clearly bourgeois origin and orientation, beginning with President Manuel
Urrutia and Prime Minister José Miró Cardona. But what is striking here is their
complete inability to control the course of events, and the almost universal
attitude that real authority was in the hands of Fidel Castro and the other
comandantes
of the M-26–7. It only took six weeks to bring about the inglorious resignation
of Miró Cardona and Fidel’s appointment as Prime Minister, a change widely
regarded as natural and inevitable (Buch Rodríguez 1999, 69–75). Five months
later (in July) came the crisis provoked by the differences between Castro and
Urrutia, which produced first Fidel’s resignation as Prime Minister and then
Urrutia’s resignation from the presidency (to be replaced by Osvaldo Dorticós)
and, after several days of overwhelming and almost unanimous demonstrations of
support for Fidel, his return to the premiership. In this conflict there can be
little doubt that Urrutia’s position represented bourgeois interests, but what
is remarkable is the weakness of the support he received from traditional
political forces.
Apart from questions of personal ethics – for example, the fact that unlike
other ministers, Urrutia had not agreed to a 50 per cent reduction of his salary
– the fundamental political issue was that in the preceding weeks the President
had repeatedly denounced the threat of Communism, just at the time when one of
the fi rst revolutionary renegades, former Air Force Major Pedro Díaz Lanz, was
doing the same in hearings at the US Senate (Buch Rodríguez 1999, 129–31).
Moreover, this was at a time when the revolutionary government was far from
being Communist-dominated; in fact there was public friction between the PSP and
the M-26–7, and on 22 July the Communists demonstrated in protest outside the
offi ces of the pro-26 July newspaper
Revolución
(Scheer
and Zeitlin 1964, 100).
By doing this Urrutia was in practice encouraging US interventionism, which was
aimed more at the agrarian reform and its possible impact on US interests than
at the as yet very marginal Communist influence on the revolutionary government.
It would later emerge that Urrutia was a close personal and political associate
of another anti-Communist dissident, Major Hubert Matos, whose desertion
occurred in October 1959 (Scheer and Zeitlin 1964, 107–11; Buch Rodríguez 1999:
126–7).
The crucial weakness of Urrutia (and also of Hubert Matos and others like them)
was the political impossibility of attacking Fidel. Their allegations of
Communist influence in the government were known to be directed principally at
Raúl Castro, who had previously been a member of the Youth Wing of the PSP, and
Che Guevara, who made no secret of his Marxist (but not PSP) views. When Urrutia
first learned of Fidel’s decision to resign (which he did by reading the report
in the morning edition of
Revolución
on 17
July
– a circumstance which in itself shows how bad the relationship between the two
men had become), his first reaction was to see it as a Communist coup against the
Comandante-en-Jefe!
(Buch Rodríguez 1999, 133). As it quickly became clear that this was not the
case and that Fidel had indeed resigned because of disagreements with him,
Urrutia had no alternative, given Fidel’s overwhelming popularity, but to
present his own resignation which would swiftly be followed by Fidel’s return as
premier. What he had failed to appreciate was that Fidel was determined to carry
through the profound and radical revolution that the Cuban people were
demanding, and to do so regardless of US hostility and with the support of
whatever allies were necessary. Since no politician or party had the prestige to
confront the
Comandante-en-Jefe
Urrutia saw that there was, from his point of view, nothing to be done.
With regard to the political parties, it is necessary to examine with some care
the circumstances of the collapse of the Auténticos and Ortodoxos, particularly
the latter. Supposed heirs of the revolutionary values of 1933 (and therefore of
Martí and the mambíses), these parties should theoretically have been the
backbone of the resistance against Batista’s dictatorship. The Auténticos were
profoundly discredited by the corruption and ineptitude of the Grau and Prío
administrations (1944–52), although it might have been anticipated that they
would be capable of reorganising and recovering to defend their rights as
representing the legitimately elected government overthrown by the upstart
military tyrant. But it would have been even more logical to expect the Partido
Ortodoxo, founded in 1947 as a split from the Auténticos and in opposition to
their corruption, to channel resistance against the dictatorship. Indeed it was
from the Ortodoxos, and especially from the party’s Youth Wing, that many
militants of the M-26–7 emerged, among them Fidel Castro himself. But the
Ortodoxo Party as such proved to be incapable of offering effective leadership
in the anti-Batista struggle; not long after the coup it split into a
revolutionary sector and a
pactista
sector, named after the Pact of Montreal which they signed in June 1953 with the
Auténticos and other traditional parties. This sector came to accept the classic
ineffective strategy of a legal or tolerated opposition to a dictatorship, of
searching in vain for a peaceful and constitutional means of forcing the
dictator to abandon power (Mencía 1993, 55 [Note 29], 205) – the same dilemma
faced for many years by the Portuguese opposition to Salazar. Nevertheless,
until the early months of 1957 Fidel insisted on the close links between his
movement and
ortodoxia,
and it was in fact this party which contributed more than any other to the
formation of the M-26–7. In March 1956 in Mexico Fidel made a categorical
statement to this effect:
The 26th
of July Revolutionary Movement does not constitute a tendency
within the [Ortodoxo] Party: it is the revolutionary instrument of
chibasismo,
fi rmly rooted in its rank-and-file whence it sprang to struggle against the
dictatorship when
ortodoxia
lay impotent, divided in a thousand pieces. (quoted in Harnecker 1986, 24–5)
–
in other words, the rank-and-file of the Ortodoxo Party had revolutionary
sympathies and remained faithful to Chibás’ ideals even when the leadership had
betrayed them. This being so, the new movement had to emerge from
ortodoxia
and had to base its legitimacy on the memory of
chibasismo:
For the
chibasista
masses the 26 July Movement is not something different from
ortodoxia;
it is
ortodoxia
without the
leadership of landlords like Fico Fernández Casas, without sugar barons like
Gerardo Vázquez, without stock-market speculators, without industrial and
commercial magnates, without lawyers working for powerful interests, without
provincial
caciques,
without political fixers of any kind. It is the organisation of the common
people, by the common people and for the common people. (quoted in Harnecker
1986, 26–7)
This obviously implied the exclusion from the Ortodoxo Party of all bourgeois or
oligarchic groups, and it could be objected that any party subjected to a
decapitation of this kind would be transformed into a proletarian organisation.
But it is noteworthy that Fidel did not make any similar declaration in relation
to the Auténtico masses or those of any other party, which tends to suggest that
he regarded
ortodoxia
– or perhaps it would be better to say
chibasismo
in the
broadest sense – as the principal source of recruitment for the revolutionary
movement.
In order to understand this affinity of Fidel Castro for
chibasismo
it is
necessary to say a few words about Eduardo Chibás. The founder of
ortodoxia
has more than a few critics among Cuban historians and
revolutionaries: they describe him as being excessively emotional, demagogic, as
making unfounded accusations against his opponents, and as lacking a clear
revolutionary vision or ideology. There is no doubt that in 1951 his accusation
against Aureliano Sánchez Arango (Minister of Education in the Auténtico
Government), of having stolen public funds for his private investments in
Guatemala, lacked documentary proof, and it was the scandal created by this
which led Chibás to his final crisis (when he shot himself while on the air in
his weekly radio broadcast, dying ten days later) (Alavéz 1994, 64–5). It is
also undeniable that Chibás’ ideology was contradictory and lacking in
coherence. But his emotional speeches conveyed to the people his passion and his
conviction of the need for a new politics free from Auténtico corruption; his
slogan of ‘Honour before Money’ (Vergüenza
contra Dinero)
was a reassertion of the profoundly ethical roots of Cuban radicalism since the
time of Martí, and his criticism of the telephone and electricity companies and
of the US loan reflected a nationalist and anti-imperialist position which was
fundamental to the Cuban revolutionary tradition. Moreover, even if he was
inconsistent, Chibás did at times take a clearly revolutionary stand: on the eve
of the foundation of the Ortodoxo Party in May 1947 he proposed this succinct
ideological formula: ‘New ideas and procedures, nationalism, anti-imperialism
and socialism, economic independence, political freedom and social justice … ’ (Alavéz
1994, 53). Even if his conception of Socialism was not Marxist, what we have
here is a more explicitly advanced position than that of ‘History Will Absolve
Me’ six years later (which did not mention Socialism).
It is also instructive to read the
Bases
(Principles) of the Ortodoxo Party, approved on 15 May 1947 with a decisive
contribution from Chibás: they imply a frankly revolutionary orientation, which
however would not be practised by the new party because of the influence of more
conservative and/or opportunist leaders. Thus the second article declared that
the party should be ‘thoroughly revolutionary in its functional structure, which
will incorporate the social groups interested in national liberation: productive
sectors, workers, peasants, middle classes, youth and women’; the fourth article
insisted on the need to avoid a purely electoral structure, because ‘it is
necessary to adopt forms of organisation and leadership which ensure the
discipline and militancy which are indispensable in a modern Revolutionary
Party’; and the fifth proposed a method of popular participation which would be
‘the result of popular assemblies, and not an empty formula existing on paper
only’ (Alavéz 1994, 53–4) – in other words, a party of militants and direct
popular participation, which would have a revolutionary character.
In the light of these statements by Chibás it is easier to understand why Fidel
Castro rendered such explicit homage to the
Adalid de Cuba
(Champion of Cuba) at a public rally on 16 January 1959:
If it
had not been for those young people, if it had not been for those teachings, if
that seed had not been sown, the 26 July would not have been possible, for it
was the continuation of Chibás’s work, the flowering of the seed which he sowed
among our people. Without Chibás the Cuban revolution would not have been
possible. (Revolución
17
January 1959)
This does not mean that Fidel was simply a disciple of Chibás or that the M-26–7
was a direct linear successor of the Ortodoxo Party. If Chibás had lived he
would not have had Fidel’s capacity to develop the political and military
strategy to overthrow Batista, or to direct the revolutionary transition after 1
January 1959. The success of the M-26–7 lay in its capacity – which was
essentially Fidel’s capacity – to bring together all the strands of what Tony
Kapcia calls
cubanía revolucionaria,
with its roots in Martí and the
mambíses,
in Mella, in the 1933 revolution and in Guiteras (Kapcia 2000, 46–7, 85–97,
263–8).
An important tendency in the new movement drew its inspiration not from Chibás
but from Guiteras, the most coherent protagonist of 1933 who had a clearly
Socialist ideology and who subsequently organised a clandestine armed movement,
Jóven Cuba (Young Cuba). The memory of Julio Antonio Mella was another source of
inspiration, and not only for the Communists: the work of that young student
leader of the 1920s went beyond the limits of the Communist Party of which he
was a founder, and inspired many who never accepted the Party’s line. Figures
like Mella and Guiteras formed part of what could be called the Latin American
independent Marxist tradition, a school of thought derived from Marx and Lenin
but adapted to the realities of the colonised Afro-Indian-Latin-American world
and formulated by such thinkers as the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui. In view
of this the participation in the M-26–7 of the young Che Guevara was not such a
chance event, even if it did result from a fortuitous meeting in Mexico; the
greatest influence on Guevara’s political and intellectual development was
precisely this independent Latin American Marxism, and no doubt he identified
with the Cuban revolutionaries because he recognised in some of them the same
philosophical outlook (Mariátegui 1969; Kohan 1997).
The presence of the Communist Party/PSP cannot be ignored; although it did not
participate directly in the revolution until mid-1958, it had organised a large
sector of the proletariat along class lines and had disseminated Marxist and
Leninist ideas among Cuban intellectuals since the 1920s. As in other Latin
American and European countries, many progressive intellectuals and activists
had been members of the Communist Party at one time or another and had left or
been expelled for differences with the official line. In the 1950s many of those
who joined the M-26–7 were also in touch with the PSP but were alienated by its
condemnation of Fidel and the
moncadistas
for ‘putschism’ and ‘petty-bourgeois adventurism’. Thus Enrique
Oltuski, later head of the M-26–7 in Las Villas Province and holder of various
ministerial posts after the revolutionary victory, relates how in 1955 he had a
talk with a PSP lawyer who defended the party’s ‘mass line’ of agitation in the
unions and among intellectuals to pressure Batista into granting free elections,
a notion which Oltuski found completely illusory (Oltuski 2000, 64–8).
In practice, many rank-and-file Communists identifi ed instinctively with the
armed struggle and collaborated actively with the M-26–7, disobeying the party
line. As the guerrilla struggle advanced, the party leadership came under
greater and greater pressure to change its position and began to make contact
with the M-26–7, until fi nally in July 1958 one of the top PSP leaders, Carlos
Rafael Rodríguez, went to the Sierra Maestra to hold formal discussions with
Fidel and the rebel leadership, and the party officially decided to support the
insurrection (Scheer and Zeitlin 1964, 127–9). On 6 January 1959 the
Secretary-General, Blas Roca, publicly declared the PSP’s support for Fidel
Castro and the victorious revolution, implicitly accepting Fidel’s leadership
(Matthews 1975, 99–100); but they had little alternative if they wanted to avoid
the complete marginalisation of the party. It was only to be expected therefore
that the victorious revolutionaries, while accepting the PSP’s collaboration,
expected it to remain in a subordinate position.
THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM
Does this
mean that the subsequent Socialist option was due only to a defensive reaction
in the face of US hostility, and to an alliance with the Soviet Union based on
geo-political considerations? Not necessarily: it was possible to make a
political and military alliance with the USSR without adopting Soviet-style
Socialism, as for example in the case of Egypt under Nasser. Moreover this
interpretation fails to give sufficient importance to the internal dynamics of
the revolution, in which the Cuban bourgeoisie was excluded from the political
process (or excluded itself) in little more than a year without any intervention
on the part of the Soviets or even of the PSP, whose influence remained minimal
until well into 1960. During the transition, leadership was always in the hands
of Fidel Castro and the M-26–7 (with the collaboration of some figures from the
Directorio Revolucionario), and the social base of support of the revolutionary
government consisted from the start overwhelmingly of the popular classes,
workers, peasants, blacks, women, middle class; although some representatives of
the bourgeoisie and the landlords were involved in the early stages, they had
little influence and were quickly marginalised. In a sense the M-26–7 was exactly
what Fidel had suggested in 1956,
ortodoxia
without landlords, without industrial magnates, without opportunistic
politicians, without lawyers in the service of vested interests, etc. It was
therefore tendentially inclined towards Socialism, and the
cubanía
revolucionaria
of its leaders, their unflinching commitment to achieving economic independence,
political freedom and social justice, evolved necessarily in that direction. In
another international context this would not have led to the specifically Soviet
model of Socialism, and in this sense the geopolitical factor was decisive; but
the endogenous revolutionary impulse was leading the country towards some kind
of Socialism anyway, a Socialism of original characteristics – and even with the
imposition of the Soviet model, elements of Cuban originality remained in what
some observers in the 1960s called the ‘Cuban heresy’.
From the very beginning the Cuban leaders had to respond to accusations of
Communism from right-wing circles in the US and at home; in a press conference
on 22 January 1959 Fidel declared, no doubt sincerely, ‘I want to make it clear
now that I am not Communist.’ But at the same time he indicated that the
revolutionaries would not allow themselves to be blackmailed by the ‘red scare’
into abandoning their goals: ‘We will act according to circumstances and if they
try to exterminate us, we will have to defend ourselves’ (Revolución
23 January 1959). The leadership had to perform a balancing act
in order to preserve unity while maintaining their revolutionary commitment and
yet avoiding provocations. Internally there were problems with PSP sectarianism
but also with blind anti-Communism from some members of the M-26–7 and
Directorio. In May 1959 there was a vigorous polemic because some Communists
tried to promote unity ‘from below’ between local branches of the different
organisations in some districts, but on their terms, in a way which would
guarantee PSP domination; they were condemned by Fidel in person in a press
conference in which he insisted that the philosophy of the revolution was
‘humanism and
cubanismo’
(Tamargo 1959, 65;
Revolución
22 May
1959). Again in November 1959, at the X Congress of the CTC (Confederación de
Trabajadores de Cuba, Cuban Confederation of Labour), there were lively
arguments between Communist and M-26–7 delegates; in the elections victory went
to the M-26–7 list headed by David Salvador, and the PSP delegates withdrew in
protest (Revolución
20 November 1959;
Hoy
25
November 1959). But the revolutionary leadership rejected the notion of
anti-Communism as a general line: only a few weeks before Fidel had declared in
response to right-wing critics that ‘the accusations they make that we are
Communist show only that they haven’t got the courage to say that they are
against the revolutionary laws’ (Revolución
27 October 1959). It is interesting to note also that a year
later, David Salvador was arrested as he tried to leave the country in a small
yacht (Scheer and Zeitlin 1964, 293); he could not accept the Socialist option
which was becoming a reality by then.
A fundamental element in the dramatic transformation of Cuba in this period was
mass mobilisation and pressure. Some Trotskyists and other leftist writers,
while expressing admiration for the Cuban revolution, lament what they describe
as a lack of working-class or popular involvement or initiative, implying that
everything was done by fi at of Fidel and a few other
comandantes.
Nothing could be further from the truth: despite the crucial leadership role of
Fidel and the M26–7 commanders, there was enormous mass mobilisation throughout
the country. The hundreds of thousands, even millions, who came to listen to
Fidel’s speeches did so spontaneously, and they came not only to listen but to
shout and to answer back and to give their opinions. Workers, peasants, students
and people of all backgrounds were active from day one onwards in taking over
local governments, reorganising trade unions, demanding the purging of
batistianos
and making demands for wage increases and better conditions. Much
of this activity was spontaneous and organised, although in other cases it was
led by M-26–7, PSP or Directorio militants emerging from clandestinity. Tens of
thousands of people were now joining these organisations, above all the M-26–7,
as new recruits. At fi rst the people lacked effective mass social organisations
– with the exception of the unions in the CTC – but this soon changed as the
process accelerated. The first new organisation was the militia – the Milicias
Nacionales Revolucionarias (MNR, National Revolutionary Militia), organised in
December 1959 in response to the wave of counterrevolutionary bombings that
began in October, and becoming really operational in March 1960:
By
bringing together in defence of the homeland everyone from the offi ce worker to
the housewife and the combatants of the guerrilla struggle, [the Militia] were
the first associative space in which everyone could recognise each other as
revolutionaries on the basis of the activity in which they were participating,
and not just because of the guerrilla legend. (Díaz Castañón 2001, 119, 126)
The
wave of nationalisations and the completion of the rupture with the US between
July and October 1960 witnessed intense activity by the militia in their
implementation, and they were accompanied by the formation of two major new mass
organisations: the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (Comités de
Defensa de la Revolución, CDR) and the Cuban Women’s Federation (Federación de
Mujeres Cubanas, FMC). The CDRs, committees of militants at street level – one
for each city block – were officially founded on 28 September 1960 in response to
an appeal by Fidel, with the primary task of rooting out
counter-revolutionaries; for this reason they have been condemned by dissidents
as instruments for spying on the population, but the fact is that initially they
sprang up spontaneously as neighbours rushed to show their enthusiasm to defend
the revolution. Within a year they had recruited some 800,000 members, and
eventually incorporated 80 per cent of the adult population; they became crucial
in mobilising people for all kinds of activities from health to education and
recreation. As for the FMC, founded on 23 August 1960, it brought together
several previous women’s groups to form a national federation which would play a
key role in educational and health campaigns and in promoting women’s rights (Kapcia
2000, 110–11; Díaz Castañón 2001, 311).
The question of Socialism was resolved in practice between June 1960 and April
1961, with the refusal of the oil companies to refi ne Soviet oil, the Cuban
expropriation of the oil refi neries, Eisenhower’s decision to cut the Cuban
sugar quota on the North American market, Cuba’s expropriation of US sugar
mills, the imposition of the embargo by Washington and more Cuban
expropriations, until the Bay of Pigs/Playa Girón invasion and Fidel’s
declaration of the Socialist character of the revolution (16 April 1961). Even
before this, a key ideological statement was the First Havana Declaration,
adopted by a mass assembly of more than a million people in the vast Plaza de la
Revolución on 2 September 1960; although not yet explicitly Socialist, it was a
militant anti-imperialist proclamation denouncing US interventionism throughout
Latin America and defending the revolution in the name of the Cuban people. This
declaration, often overlooked in English-language accounts of the revolution, is
still relevant to global anti-capitalist politics today:
Close
to the monument and the memory of José Martí, in Cuba, free territory of
America, the people, in the full exercise of the inalienable powers that proceed
from the true exercise of the sovereignty expressed in the direct, universal and
public suffrage, has constituted itself in a National General Assembly.
The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba expresses its conviction
that democracy cannot consist only in an electoral vote, which is almost always
fi ctitious and handled by big landholders and professional politicians, but in
the rights of citizens to decide, as this Assembly of the People is now doing,
their own destiny. Moreover, democracy will only exist in Latin America when its
people are really free to choose, when the humble people are not reduced
– by hunger, social inequality, illiteracy and the judicial systems – to the
most degrading impotence. In short, the National General Assembly of the People
of Cuba proclaims before America:
The right of peasants to the land; the right of workers to the fruit of their
work; the right of children to education; the right of sick people to medical
and hospital attention; the right of youth to work; the right of students to
free, experimental and scientific education; the right of Negroes and Indians to
‘the full dignity of man’; the right of women to civil, social and political
equality; the right of the aged to a secure old age; the right of intellectuals,
artists and scientists to fight, with their works, for a better world; the right
of states to nationalize imperialist monopolies, thus rescuing their wealth and
national resources; the right of nations to trade freely with all peoples of the
world; the right of nations to their full sovereignty; the right of nations to
turn fortresses into schools, and to arm their workers, their peasants, their
students, their intellectuals, the Negro, the Indian, the women, the young and
the old, the oppressed and exploited people, so that they may defend, by
themselves, their rights and their destinies. (quoted in August 1999, 196–7)
This would be followed 17 months later (on 4 February 1962) by a Second Havana
Declaration, asserting the right of peoples to self-determination and
proclaiming that revolutions cannot be exported (contrary to the view of the US
and the Organisation of American States which accused Cuba of doing this), but
the Cuban example showed the peoples of Latin America that revolution was
possible. In both declarations Cuba was described with the ringing phrase
Primer
Territorio Libre de América,
the First Free Territory of the Americas, in itself an enormously symbolic
statement which among other things, reclaimed the name ‘America’ from the
imperialist power which had arrogated unto itself exclusive use of what was
after all the designation of the entire hemisphere. In the words of the Cuban
historian María del Pilar Díaz Castañón, ‘the people as a whole is the
protagonist of the subversive process’, subversive, that is, of the established
order (Díaz Castañón 2001, 126); the dramatic cry of ‘¡Patria
o Muerte!’,
‘Fatherland or Death!’, first proclaimed after the tragic explosion of the French
munitions ship
La Coubre
in Havana harbour in March 1960, marked the identity of the concepts
Homeland-Nation-Revolution, a unity which was given formal expression in the two
Havana Declarations (Díaz Castañón 2001, 124–6).
The First Havana Declaration was followed after little more than six months by
the long-awaited invasion, which would be defeated by the revolutionary armed
forces, the militia and the entire people: ‘The triumph of Girón consolidated
the Homeland-Nation-Revolution identity which lent prestige to the epithet
“socialist” in the name of which people fought and won’, and gave the collective
protagonist, the people as revolutionary subject, a heroic dimension (Díaz
Castañón 2001, 133). The people of Cuba – the militia, the CDRs, the FMC, the
CTC, workers, peasants, housewives, students – the vast majority contributed to
this epic first defeat of US imperialism in Latin America, which gave the Cuban
revolution its unique place in history. The adoption of Marxism-Leninism would
then become official with Fidel’s speech of 2 December 1961 in which he declared
‘I am a Marxist-Leninist and will remain so until the end of my days’; this was
in part a response to the geo-political situation following the complete break
with Washington, but it also reflected the real Socialist option which had
developed among the revolutionary leadership and the majority of the Cuban
people in the course of the dramatic struggles of the previous three years. Even
so, contrary to appearances, it did not indicate total victory for the PSP or
for Soviet orthodoxy.
The true orientation of the new regime in Havana began to become clear in March
1962 with the scandal of the ‘micro-fraction’ or ‘Escalante affair’. As
explained earlier, in June 1961 agreement had been reached to merge the M-26–7,
PSP and Directorio Revolucionario into a single political force, the ORI. The
post of Secretary-General of the ORI went to a prominent PSP leader, Aníbal
Escalante. After a few months it became clear that Escalante was using his
position in classic Stalinist fashion to appoint PSP loyalists to all the key
positions in the new structure, often to the exclusion of outstanding guerrilla
fi ghters from the rebel army or the urban underground. In a dramatic speech on
16 March 1962 Fidel publicly denounced this abuse of power; the ORI were
completely reorganised, Escalante was sent into ‘diplomatic exile’ in Eastern
Europe and his ‘micro-fraction’ was dissolved (Kapcia 2000, 130–2). It was made
clear that real power in Socialist Cuba was in the hands of veterans of the
M-26–7, and that the political, economic and military alliance with the Soviet
Union did not imply acceptance of unconditional satellite status (when Escalante
returned to Cuba in 1966, he once again tried to organise an ultra-orthodox
fraction within the party, but in 1968 he was arrested and sentenced to 30 years
in gaol) (Kapcia 2000, 138–9).
The final chapter of the rupture with the United States, the Missile Crisis of
October 1962, also marked the limits of Cuban submission to Soviet power. The
solution of the crisis by the US and the Soviet Union without consulting the
Cubans provoked an indignant reaction in Havana, which refused on-site United
Nations inspection to verify removal of the missiles. The end result was a US
undertaking not to invade the island (a promise of somewhat dubious
reliability), and the consolidation of the Cuban–Soviet alliance on a more
realistic basis. Cuba needed, and could rely on, Soviet support, and became a
solid bastion of the Soviet bloc right under the nose of Washington, but subject
to a systematic blockade by its super-power neighbour. For the next three
decades Cuba always defended Soviet interests, but nevertheless insisted on
retaining the right to take initiatives of its own, especially with regard to
support for revolutionary movements in Latin America and Africa.
Internally the transition to Socialism was confirmed with the Second Agrarian
Reform of 1963 (more radical than the first) and the ‘Great Revolutionary
Offensive’ of 1968, which nationalised all small businesses. It was also during
these years that the originality of Cuban Socialism was reaffirmed with the
primacy of ‘moral incentives’ and voluntary labour, and the ‘Great Debate’
between Che Guevara and the defenders of Soviet orthodoxy in economic policy
(see Silverman 1973). Similarly in international affairs, Havana’s support for
guerrilla movements elsewhere aroused Moscow’s distrust; but to the Cubans this
was an integral part of their revolutionary vision with its pan-Latin-American
roots in Martí and Bolívar, naturally extended to Africa because of the history
of slavery. Cuban idealism in the 1960s (and later) was the logical expression
of the revolutionary populist bond forged between Fidel and the people through
the years of armed struggle, the victorious confrontation with imperialism and
the Socialist transition: the Cuban people had emerged as a collective subject
with an indomitable will and self-confidence, and would not be content with
bureaucratic half-measures.
This forging of the identity of the Cuban people as collective revolutionary
protagonist through its intimate bond with Fidel as both architect and
expression of their unity in the epic struggle of these years was reinforced by
the special role of Che Guevara as advocate of Socialist purity and role model
of the ‘New Man’. The Cuban nation was not only the vanguard of revolution in
Latin America and the Third World, it was venturing where no revolution had gone
before, to realise the ideal of true Communist equality without waiting for the
long transition of ‘really existing Socialism’ to run its tedious course. Che
was also a model of internationalism, and as an Argentinian his acceptance in
Cuba – not only at offi cial level but in the popular mind – as second only to
Fidel, was truly remarkable. Such acceptance could only occur in a revolutionary
process, and is yet further evidence of the depth and authenticity of the Cuban
revolution. Che’s secret mission to the Congo in 1965, and then a year later his
departure for Bolivia in fulfilment of the vision of ‘turning the Cordillera of
the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of Latin America’ were the maximum expression
of his, and Cuba’s, revolutionary internationalism. Although the circumstances
of Che’s departure and of his tragic death in Bolivia on 10 October 1967 have
given rise to an enormous polemical literature with many critics claiming that
Fidel, and Cuba, were in some way responsible, most Cubans and many others who
were close to the two leaders regard this as inconceivable:
I knew
from the time of Che’s disappearance in 1965, that there could have been no
ill-feeling or quarrel between the two men … The cruel libel that Che Guevara
and Fidel Castro quarreled and the Cuban leader punished his friend, both in
Cuba and by sending him off unaided to his death in Bolivia, will, like so many
malicious or ignorant lies, live in books and uninformed minds, either as belief
or as doubt. (Matthews 1975, 266)
There are strong grounds for arguing that the Bolivian guerrilla strategy was
ill-conceived, and indeed the entire Cuban strategy of supporting armed
insurgency throughout Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s was based on a
revolutionary optimism which did not correspond to actual conditions in most
countries. But it was entirely consistent with the ideological roots of the
revolution, with Martí and Bolívar, which moreover undoubtedly found echoes
throughout the continent even in countries where conditions were not ripe for
insurrection; and its relevance in some countries was later vindicated by the
Central American insurgencies, and arguably by the ongoing struggle in Colombia.
In the 1960s Cuba played a central role in the Non-Aligned Movement along with
Algeria and Vietnam, despite its close alliance with the USSR; in practice this
reflected an autonomous Socialist tendency in the world context, a tacit refusal
to accept the Moscow line of ‘peaceful coexistence’ while remaining faithful to
the Soviet bloc in the Cold War confrontation. For many years afterwards the
Departamento América (best translated as ‘Department of the Americas’) of the
Cuban Communist Party under Comandante Manuel Piñeiro was the fundamental point
of reference for Latin American revolutionaries, indeed down to the present it
continues to express Cuban internationalism in a radically different context.
CHANGING DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES
In terms
of political economy Cuban policy also retained original features, although with
very strong Soviet influence. The initial project of accelerated Socialist
industrialisation had to be revised in 1963–64 due to the inadequacy of capital
accumulation and the bottlenecks caused by the rapidity of the transition; it
was at this point that the decision was taken to maximise sugar production as a
source of capital, while pursuing a long-term strategy of economic diversification.
At the same time Che Guevara as Minister of Industry championed a centralised
planning structure known as the Budgetary Finance System, which in contrast to
the Soviet system relied on collective moral incentives to achieve labour
discipline and growth. But this idealism was not confined to Che: after his
departure in 1965 an anti-bureaucratic campaign inspired by Fidel and other
ex-guerrilla
comandantes
led to the
weakening of the planning and accounting systems in the name of direct Socialist
initiative. In 1968 in the ‘Great Revolutionary Offensive’ all small businesses
were nationalised: ‘ … private enterprise was banned by fiat, and not as a result
of education or a developing socialist “consciousness” … The result was
socialist evangelism, exhorting people to act in the “social” interest’ (Cole
1998, 30–1).
This strategy reached its limit with the famous ‘10 million ton zafra’ (sugar
harvest) of 1970, an objective which proved impossible and which led to a
political and economic crisis only resolved by Fidel’s personal assumption of
responsibility and the adoption of a more realistic and orthodox economic
project. In 1972 Cuba joined COMECON, the Soviet bloc’s integrated economic
structure, and in 1973 it adopted a Soviet-style planning system known as the
Sistema de Dirección y Planificación de la Economía (SDPE, Economic Management
and Planning System). This certainly produced results, with a GDP growth rate
estimated at 7.8 per cent per annum from 1972 to 1981 and continued growth
through most of the 1980s when the rest of Latin America was suffering actual
per capita decline during the ‘lost decade’. But it was based on the exchange of
Cuban sugar and nickel and a few other primary products for Soviet oil and
COMECON manufactured goods, essentially perpetuating Cuban underdevelopment
although on more favourable terms than under capitalism. Moreover, in line with
post-1965 Soviet policy, the SDPE combined centralised bureaucratic planning
with enterprise profitability and individual material incentives, undermining
collective Socialist consciousness. Although trade unions expanded in the 1970s
and were in theory given much greater opportunities to participate in enterprise
management, in practice their scope for decision-making was severely limited by
the requirements of the central plan and the international division of labour
imposed by COMECON (Cole 1998, 32–6).
These deficiencies of the SDPE led to more and more outspoken criticisms until
the system was abandoned in the mid-1980s. One of the most interesting critical
Cuban writers, Juan Antonio Blanco, declares that in economics it led to a
‘primitive and incompetent’ style of authoritarian planning, and politically to
the bureaucratisation of organisations that had been full of creativity and
initiative:
In
fact, I would say that the worst error we committed, the one with the most
dramatic and lasting effects, was the decision to follow the Soviet model of
socialism. Those 15 years of ‘Russification’ of our socialism left us with
problems in almost every realm of society. (Blanco 1994, 24)
The
defects of the SDPE were not limited to lack of popular participation. In the
long run, just as in the Soviet Union, it also proved to be seriously inefficient.
Enterprise autonomy was a fi ction as ministries imposed central decisions, profitability
was artifi cially maintained through arbitrary price increases, goods were
hoarded to conceal overproduction, and workers slacked so as not to surpass
norms. ‘The bureaucratic centralism of the SDPE was refl ected in the
bureaucratic habits and elitist pretensions of planners, with ministries keeping
close control of their respective areas of concern, competing with other
ministries for resources, which went as far as ministries ordering enterprises
not to declare their excess and unused resources as “superfluous”’ (Cole 1998,
35). The result was a lack of real coordination, unfinished projects, inefficiency
and cynicism. Also, Cuba had never ceased to trade with the capitalist world,
and when world market conditions were favourable in the 1970s with high prices
for sugar and re-exported Soviet oil, it made the mistake of contracting
hard-currency debt. In the 1980s, just like other Latin American countries, it
was unable to meet the debt payments; the difference was that it was sheltered
by COMECON and thus was able to avoid IMF restrictions and continue to expand
its economy, but the long-term result was to cut it off from Western sources of
credit when the Soviet bloc collapsed.
As the negative effects, both political and economic, of this Soviet-style
planning system became apparent, pressure grew from the more politically
conscious revolutionaries for a radical reassessment. Once again the
Comandante-en-Jefe
took the lead in
1985 in denouncing the negative tendencies which threatened to undermine the
revolution, promoting instead the policy of ‘rectification’ which was adopted at
the Third Party Congress in 1986. Centralised bureaucratic planning was replaced
in 1988 by what was called ‘continuous planning’, allowing greater flexibility
and autonomy in drawing up plans and greater worker participation. Work norms
were made more realistic, there were general wage increases for the lowest paid
(fi rst in agriculture, later for nurses and teachers), and voluntary labour
schemes were reintroduced. Private farmers’ markets, authorised in 1980, were
closed down because they had led to greater inequality (although this measure
would have to be reversed a few years later in the ‘Special Period’) (Cole 1998,
45–50).
It was also in these years that the international situation began to take a much
less favourable turn, with the intensified hostility of the United States under
Reagan and the reformism of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. Fidel surprised many
observers by taking a strong stand against
glasnost
and
perestroika,
a stand which was widely criticised as ‘Stalinist’ or ‘conservative’ but which
was in reality a reaffi rmation of Cuban originality, of the more popular and
participatory character of Cuban Socialism which did not therefore need a
liberal ‘opening’
– an option which in any case, and in this Fidel once again showed remarkable
foresight, would lead almost inevitably to capitalist restoration in the Soviet
Union.
In fact ‘rectification’ began a process of debate and of return to the
autochthonous roots of the revolution which contributed significantly to Cuban
survival in the unprecedented crisis provoked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. In that period almost all
observers were predicting the imminent collapse of the Cuban revolution, and the
Miami mafi a was eagerly preparing to celebrate the fall of Castro. The impact on
Cuba of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc was indeed catastrophic: in three
years the country lost 85 per cent of its foreign trade and its GNP fell by 35
per cent. The lack of Soviet oil was particularly serious: many factories closed
for lack of fuel, there was scarcely any public transport, mechanised
agriculture could not function because there was no fuel for tractors,
harvesters or pumps, crops rotted in the fields because they could not be
transported to market, there were blackouts 16 hours a day and for the first time
since the revolution there was real hunger and malnutrition. The government
announced the inauguration of the ‘Special Period’, defined as a war economy in
peacetime, in order to administer a situation of extreme scarcity. It has been
said, quite rightly, that in any other country such a critical situation would
have provoked the overthrow of the government in a matter of months, and the
regime’s survival in these circumstances is the most convincing demonstration of
the continued vitality of the revolution. Furthermore the crisis was aggravated
by the intensification of the US blockade: the Torricelli and Helms-Burton Laws
(of 1992 and 1996 respectively) tried to tighten the noose around Cuba by
forcing third countries to apply the same restrictions.
To understand Cuban survival in these circumstances it is necessary to take into
account several factors: first, that even faced with such a grave economic crisis
Cuba, unlike any other Latin American country (even Sandinista Nicaragua) did
not adopt IMF-type defl ationary measures; secondly, that it maintained universal
free health care and education, the distribution of cheap rations (when the
products were available), the control of rents which could not exceed 20 per
cent of wages, and highly subsidised prices of gas, electricity and other basic
services; and thirdly, that the reforms which were introduced in 1993–94 – free
circulation of the dollar, individual self-employment for those that wanted it,
joint ventures with foreign capital and a new tax system – were only adopted
after an extensive process of consultation with the population. Another
indication of the popular character of Cuban Socialism is the country’s defence
doctrine, which was revised in the mid-1980s following the US invasion of
revolutionary Grenada: rather than just relying on the regular army, it was at
this time that the Cubans devised the strategy of ‘War of the Whole People’,
reviving the popular militia which had been neglected since the 1960s:
… some
three million people were organized and trained in martial arts or tasks related
to defense … We distributed weapons in factories, farms, universities, different
neighborhoods in cities and small towns throughout the island to make sure that
the population would have access to them in case of a U.S. invasion … . (Blanco
1994, 25–6)
As
Blanco points out, to arm the population in this manner was to show great confidence
in popular support for the revolution. Finally, and without any doubt, the
leadership of Fidel was once again crucial in the survival of the revolution,
with his insistence that Cuba would not capitulate to US blackmail and neither
would it follow the self-destructive path of
perestroika;
that it would remain Socialist and forge its own model in the new and hostile
world which was emerging. What also became apparent as the country struggled
through the hardships of the Special Period was that in some ways it was also
returning to its original Cuban and Latin roots, as a distinctive variety of
Socialism with strong participatory characteristics.
From 1995 onwards there was a steady recovery of the economy, with a cumulative
growth of about 25 per cent by 2002, and signifi cant diversification of
production also (the most promising sector being pharmaceuticals and
biotechnology). Many state farms, particularly in the sugar sector, have been
converted into cooperatives known as UBPCs (Unidades Básicas de Producción
Cooperativa, Basic Units of Cooperative Production) in which the state still
owns the land but planning and management is in the hands of the workers; the
UBPCs have also diversified to produce other crops. Industrial management has
been reformed to reflect market conditions within planning priorities set by the
state, under the SPE (Sistema de Perfeccionamiento Empresarial, Management
Optimisation System) which has been criticised as creating a new
capitalist-minded management class (Carmona Báez 2004, 166–80). But Carlos Lage,
Executive Secretary of the Cuban Cabinet (Council of Ministers), who is highly
respected in Cuba for his Socialist commitment, argues that the SPE combines
entrepreneurial efficiency with worker participation in planning and union and
party involvement to ensure social justice; and even Carmona Báez recognises
that ‘what is experienced in the application of the SPE is the maximisation of
state influence over the market’ (ibid., 182–3). In Cuba there is extensive
debate about alternative economic strategies, possibly involving greater
enterprise autonomy (Carranza Valdés et al. 1996) or more small and medium-size
individually or collectively owned businesses, and greater worker participation
in management of state enterprises (Blanco 1994, 48–50).
Politically the most significant development has been the leading role assumed by
Cuba in the international opposition to neo-liberal globalisation, and the
internal debate on the quest for a new post-Soviet model of Socialism,
appropriate to the circumstances of the twenty-first century but also faithful to
the revolution’s Cuban and Latin American roots. Constant US harassment has
probably limited the scope of this debate, since any sign of division or
weakness is immediately exploited by Washington to undermine the revolutionary
regime as such. But the opening to religious organisations ranging from the
Catholic Church to the evangelicals, the promotion of organic agriculture, the
increasing acceptance of gay rights, and Fidel’s active participation in
international gatherings such as the Ibero-American Heads of States meetings and
the UN ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, are all indications of a Cuban desire
to innovate and to engage in discussion on the major issues of the day. Cuban
leaders insist on the continued relevance of Socialism and the need to find a
non-capitalist solution to the world’s problems, but they do not pretend to
export the Cuban model and have demonstrated a very open approach to supporting
a variety of progressive regimes such as those of Chávez in Venezuela and Lula
in Brazil. Cuba is the best example in today’s world of a revolutionary regime
which still remains a centre of interest and debate decades after coming to
power, and this is why it is important to re-examine its origins, development
and original characteristics.
THE TRUE ORIGINALITY OF CUBA
The
originality of the Cuban experience, then, lies not so much in the recourse to
arms as in its unorthodox origins and course of development. A careful analysis
based on a detailed knowledge of Cuban history reveals at least four aspects of
the Cuban revolution which were quite original. The first of these was the
achievement of a remarkably broad consensus, an overwhelming degree of unity
around a popular democratic ideology with deep roots in the national culture; in
1959 and later the political expression of the ‘opposition’, whether openly
reactionary or liberal, was minimal. The second remarkable originality of the
Cuban process was the achievement of a surprisingly rapid and complete
transition to Socialism without any major rupture in the initial popular
consensus: the popular democratic ideology evolved in a Socialist direction
without trauma and without losing its original characteristics. The third
original feature was the central role in the entire process of one man, Fidel
Castro, whose signifi cance cannot be overestimated; although – as has been well
analysed by María del Pilar Díaz Castañón – the revolution was the work of the
Cuban people as collective subject, Fidel was the personifi cation of this
collective subject, its intuitive mouthpiece. This has naturally led to
accusations of ‘populism’ in the negative sense, of
caudillismo
and even dictatorship; accusations which are fundamentally misguided and
incorrect, but which cannot be refuted without a clear analysis of the origins
and characteristics of Fidel’s protagonism. However, such accusations are also
discredited by an understanding of the fourth and final original feature of the
process, namely its essentially democratic character: despite limitations which
will be discussed below, the revolution has striven constantly to forge a
genuine participatory socialist democracy, and its achievements in this respect
should not be dismissed. The first two of these original characteristics – the
broad revolutionary consensus and the swift transition to Socialism – have been
analysed above, but the personal protagonism of Fidel and the issue of democracy
need to be discussed further.
FIDEL: POPULIST
CAUDILLO
OR MARXIST REVOLUTIONARY?
On the
basis of these original features of the revolution it should immediately be
clear that those who describe the regime in Havana as ‘Stalinist’ have no
understanding of Cuban history; despite strong Soviet influence from 1961 to 1989
the revolution had different roots and characteristics which never disappeared,
and the theory and practice of Fidel, Che and the M-26–7 were anything but
Stalinist. Almost all observers recognise its deep roots in Cuban popular
traditions; in Fidel’s words, ‘The Revolution is as Cuban as the palm trees’ (Bohemia
22 March 1959, 75). There is also general recognition of its
continuity with earlier popular struggles, beginning with Martí, Maceo and the
mambíses
of the independence wars and continuing with Mella, Guiteras, the
1933 revolution and Chibás, a continuity which was constantly referred to by
Fidel and the other leaders. Fidel’s personal leadership of the popular
resistance against Batista was affirmed at the Moncada and confirmed with his
active organisational role from exile in Mexico, the
Granma
expedition and the success of the guerrilla struggle in the Sierra Maestra.
Although the M-26–7 was a national organisation with a collective leadership,
there was never any doubt that the supreme leader was Fidel and that the
strategic vision was Fidel’s, and as time went on it became clear that the
greatest inspiration for thousands of militants throughout the country was the
charisma and political genius of Fidel (only rivalled, for a time, by that of
Che Guevara).
This makes it easier to understand why in January 1959, after the revolutionary
victory, the explosion of popular enthusiasm did not find expression in any
political party, not even – or perhaps especially not – in the PSP. The 26 July
Movement had become the national liberation movement of the Cuban people, and it
was identifi ed in the popular mind less with a political programme than with the
fi gure of Fidel and with the rest of the
barbudos
like Raúl, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. This does not mean that policy
decisions could be completely arbitrary (Herbert Matthews, who in general had a
remarkably perceptive understanding of Cuba, at one point made the absurd
suggestion that Fidel would have embraced any ideology from liberal to Fascist
if it seemed to produce results!) (Matthews 1975, 228). The movement did have an
ideology (although not a dogmatic formula), summed up in what Kapcia calls
cubanía revolucionaria;
and there were essential popular demands like the agrarian reform, popular
education and the purging of
batistianos
from the state apparatus which the leadership had to satisfy to retain the trust
of the people. But within these broad parameters the leadership had great
freedom of action: the people felt that their deepest desires were interpreted
by Fidel and the M-26–7, they wanted and expected decisive action from the
leaders, and they regarded party politics and elections as irrelevant or even as
a betrayal of the revolution. Democracy – the power of the people – meant the
absolute power of the movement which had overthrown Batista’s tyranny and which
expressed popular hopes and dreams after decades of frustration. These hopes and
dreams, the popular will forged in struggle against the tyranny, were now
expressed openly in Fidel’s speeches which became the voice of the collective
subject of the revolution, the Cuban people as protagonist of its own destiny.
The Cuban revolution, then, had the classic features of a left-populist
movement: charismatic leadership, massive popular mobilisation, relative
ideological fluidity (which does not imply lack of ideology), organisational and
tactical flexibility, a radical but non-dogmatic discourse, and a remarkable
capacity to bypass political parties and established institutions. Fidel
Castro’s exceptional ability as popular leader, and the particular
characteristics of the M-26–7, facilitated during the armed struggle and even
more during the radical transformation of 1959–62 the marginalisation of almost
all political parties and institutions and the creation of a direct democracy –
a structure of popular power – which gravitated automatically towards Socialism.
The PSP was dragged along by the process against its initial wishes and in the
end came to play an important but secondary role in the revolution. Everyone –
Batista, the old Cuban politicians, the USA, the Catholic Church and the
international Left – was surprised by the strength and radicalism of the
process. Therefore the description of the revolution as populist does not imply
that it was in any way reformist, opportunist or demagogic; quite the contrary,
it confi rms the words of Ernesto Laclau, that a Socialist populism is not the
most backward form of working-class consciousness but the most advanced (Laclau
1977, 174; see the discussion below in Chapter 6).
One of the most important, and most misunderstood, features of the revolutionary
situation was Fidel Castro’s oratory, his interminable speeches to which
foreigners could not relate but which held most Cubans spellbound. Often
passionate, sometimes calm and methodical, at times didactic, Fidel’s speeches
ranged in tone from solemn political pronouncements to intimate dialogue in
which each listener might feel as if in a private conversation with the
Comandante-en-Jefe.
Moreover, in his constant travels around the country the leader did in fact
converse with thousands of workers and peasants and listened to their concerns –
and those who know him well say that one of his greatest virtues is his ability
to listen. A fundamental aspect of Fidel’s leadership of the struggle against
Batista, little understood outside Cuba, was his insistence on the unity of the
revolutionary movement and on a policy of alliances with all political forces
prepared to agree on a minimum revolutionary platform; and in power as well,
contrary to the impression of many outsiders who think that every important
decision is taken by Fidel, his role has typically been to mediate and build
consensus. Although on certain crucial occasions his analytical vigour and
rhetorical brilliance have carried the day, at other times he has been in a
minority among the leadership and has accepted the majority opinion (Blanco
1994, 30).
To appreciate the significance of Fidel’s speeches (and to a lesser extent those
of the other revolutionary leaders) it is necessary to bear in mind that there
already existed in Cuba, as in other Latin countries, a tradition of
grandiloquent and long-winded oratory. What was new and compelling about Fidel’s
discourse was, first, his direct and down-to-earth language, and second, his
passionate sincerity. Where the self-serving politicians of the old regime had
been renowned for their pretentious and bombastic rhetoric and hypocritical
promises, here was a leader who spoke directly and frankly to the people in
their own language and whose actions corresponded to his words. Although he
spoke at enormous length his rhetoric was acceptable to the people because it
was so frequently the expression of their own deeply held convictions, and they
would listen to him for hours in the heat of the day because he was both giving
voice to their desires and didactically explaining the reasons for and the
implications of revolutionary policies. A distinguished and perceptive observer
of this process was Jean-Paul Sartre, who visited Cuba for a fortnight in March
1960 and declared at the end of his visit:
Fidel
Castro is very fond of the phrase ‘The Revolution of the majority’, and it seems
to me that that phrase is absolutely correct. It’s clear that at the moment he
has a relationship with the majority of the people and it is also clear that in
that relationship he expresses and fulfils the will of the people … At this
moment there exists between the rulers and the people – and particularly between
Fidel Castro and the people – a relationship which we could describe as one of
direct democracy, which consists in explaining to the people the implications in
terms of work, effort and sacrifice of the desires expressed by the people …
This is therefore a Revolution which is creating its own ideology and its own
instruments through direct contact with the masses. For all these reasons it is
the most original Revolution I have seen … . (Revolución
11
March 1960)
When Fidel spoke there was often a sense of dialogue, of mutual interaction,
between him and the people, sometimes expressed in shouts, applause or
interjections, and sometimes more instinctive ways; ‘The dialogue and the
incorporation into [public] discourse of anonymous proposals from the people
brought about such a level of interaction as to convert the audience from
spectators into participants’ (Díaz Castañón 2001, 111). Fidel was in effect the
mouthpiece of the Cuban nation.
That this was not merely a matter of ideological agreement is apparent from the
accounts of various eye-witnesses who testify to the intensity of the
experience. Enrique Oltuski, a leader of the M26–7 in Las Villas who later held
various ministerial positions in the revolutionary government, was in Santa
Clara on 6 January 1959 when Fidel passed through on his triumphal march to
Havana, and he describes the scene as follows:
… Fidel
approached the microphone and a sensation of collective hysteria took hold of
the crowd. After several attempts Fidel managed to say a few words. It was then
that I saw for the first time the emergence of that strange communion between
Fidel and the people. The people applauded him because he expressed their
feelings, because he said what they were all thinking … . (Oltuski 2000, 249)
Oltuski saw the same phenomenon the next day in Cienfuegos: ‘Despite having
passed many hours without rest, Fidel was transformed when he faced the crowd.
Then he seemed to forget his tiredness, and the strange communion I had observed
in Santa Clara occurred again …’ (Oltuski 2000, 253–4).
This is the essence of the populist phenomenon, and although it has mystical
overtones it is not irrational, not just ‘collective hysteria’. As we have seen
it is based on the deeds, on the actual achievements of the revolutionary
caudillo,
and on his uncanny ability to synthesise and express popular feelings with
remarkable force and accuracy. The over-used term ‘vox populi’ can truly be
applied to Castro at his best.
The legitimacy of the system derives precisely from its profoundly popular and
revolutionary character. From the very beginning, without recourse to
stereotyped formulae, Fidel insisted on the revolutionary character of the new
government: ‘The revolution cannot be made in a day, but rest assured that we
will carry out the revolution. Rest assured that for the first time the Republic
will be completely free and the people will have what they deserve … ’ (Revolución
4 January 1959). Less than two months later, and once again in
Santiago, he proclaimed: ‘Many people have not yet realised the scope of the
change which has occurred in our country … ’ (Revolución
25 February 1959). The same message was delivered by Raúl Castro
in a speech on 13 March in Havana: ‘On the First of January 1959 we had done no
more than conclude the war of independence; the Revolution of Martí begins now’
– and he went on: ‘This Revolution has a series of characteristics which
differentiate it from all other revolutions. The world beholds in astonishment
the transformation which is taking place in our country in economic, political,
social, moral, cultural and all other aspects … ’ (Revolución
14 March 1959). There was no talk of Socialism, much less of
Marxism-Leninism, indeed not even of class struggle; but there was repeated
insistence on the radical character of the revolution, on the decisive break
with the past and the need for a real transformation of the country. Fidel came
back to this theme in a speech on 25 March:
If it
had been a question of a mere change of individuals, of a mere change of command
and if we had left everything just as it was before and had not got involved in
the task of reform, in an effort to overcome all the injustices of our republic
… [then it would not be a revolution]. There was a Revolution because there were
injustices to overcome and because, in Maceo’s words: ‘The Revolution will
continue as long as there remains an injustice which has not been remedied’ …. (La
Calle
1 August 1959)
Another constant feature of the revolutionary discourse was continuity with the
historic struggles of the Cuban people, with the traditions of Céspedes, Martí,
Maceo, Mella, Guiteras, Chibás and others. The revolution was a rupture with the
structures of the past, with vested interests, with corruption and dictatorship,
but a continuation and fulfilment of national and popular traditions. This
reclaiming of historical memory was a fundamental component of the movement’s
ideology and a central factor in its acceptance by the people as the legitimate
expression of their interests. As already mentioned, Fidel said, ‘the Revolution
is as Cuban as the palm trees’, and therefore it needed no lessons from abroad;
and ‘The
mambíses
began the war for
independence which we concluded on 1 January 1959 … ’ (Revolución
25 February 1959). The same process of emancipation was now
continuing, and this in itself implied the need for radical change. In February
Marcelo Fernández, National Secretary of Organisation of the M-26–7, wrote an
article with the title ‘Permanent Revolution’ insisting that the revolutionary
transformation was only just beginning: ‘The War of ’68 ended with the Pact of
Zanjón, that of ’98 ended with the Platt Amendment, and the 1933 Revolution led
to Welles’ Mediation. But this Revolution cannot be shipwrecked with Pacts,
Amendments or Mediations … ’ (Revolución
16 February 1959). In the same way, when faced with criticisms by
vested interests and reactionary attacks, the revolutionary government defended
itself by appealing to the legitimacy of its continuity with Martí and the
mambíses;
in June 1959, when the attacks on the agrarian reform intensified, Fidel declared
that ‘ … what we are doing, you gentlemen who defend powerful interests, what we
are doing is to fulfil the declarations and the doctrine of our Apostle, who said
that the fatherland belonged to all and was for the good of all … ’ (Revolución
8 June 1959).
This insistence on Cuban national and popular traditions was logically connected
with a defence of the Latin American character of the revolution, its
identification with the struggles of the entire continent and with Bolívar’s
dream of unity. The victorious insurgents felt instinctively that their triumph
was part of a larger movement, that they had a duty to support the struggles of
fellow Latin Americans: ‘Above all we feel the interests of our Fatherland and
of our America, which is also a greater Fatherland’, declared Fidel at a press
conference in the Hotel Riviera on 22 January 1959, just before leaving for
Venezuela on his first trip abroad after the victory (Revolución
23 January 1959). In the same press conference he suggested that
the Cuban example would be imitated, and spoke out explicitly in favour of the
Bolivarian vision: ‘ … a dream I have in my heart and which I believe is shared
by everyone in Latin America, is one day to see Latin America completely united,
that it should be a single force, because we are of the same race, the same
language, the same feelings’. This is the concept of race as
criollo
ethnicity, as the common heritage of indigenous, black and European citizens of
Nuestra América,
and it was a constant reference for all representatives of the movement. In a
television interview on 5 March 1959 Armando Hart declared that
at this
moment this Revolution is making a contribution to the thought of Latin America;
Nuestra América,
to the South of the Río Grande, is in need of a system of thought for a
continent which needs to unite and achieve integration as the Cuban people have
done, overcoming any sectarianism. (Revolución
6
March 1959)
Similarly – and for obvious reasons – this was a frequent topic of Che Guevara’s
speeches: ‘... we are carrying the Revolution forward in the midst of forces
that want to destroy it even more because of what it represents for all the
Americas, as a special beacon for [our] America at this time … ’ (Revolución
2 May 1959). Finally in July 1959, in relation to the aggressive
plots being hatched against Cuba in the Dominican Republic, Camilo Cienfuegos
declared that
Trujillo’s provocative plans won’t be successful because the peoples of the
Americas are watching the development of the Cuban Revolution, because they know
that the historic destiny of all the nations of the Hemisphere depends on the
process which Cuba is going through at present. (Revolución
10
July 1959)
Indeed, not content with preventing plots against the revolution by neighbouring
dictators, many young Cubans wanted to go the other way and planned assaults on
the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua or Panama (Díaz Castañón 2001, 119).
But it was not only the Cubans who proclaimed the revolution’s continental significance.
Right from the start this view was shared by representatives of other Latin
countries, and the impact of the revolution on Cuba’s sister republics was
enormous. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand: it was due,
first, to the remarkable guerrilla victory over Batista’s regular army, and
second, to the example of national independence and anti-imperialism
– and this from the very beginning, at least implicitly, well before the
radicalisation of the breach with the United States. At the end of February 1959
the then Chilean Senator Salvador Allende visited Cuba and declared that ‘The
Cuban Revolution does not belong only to you … we are dealing with the most
significant movement ever to have occurred in the Americas … ’ (Revolución
28 February 1959). In the same vein Gloria Gaitán, daughter of the great
Colombian popular (and populist) leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, declared in an
interview in April 1959 that ‘The Cuban revolutionary movements correspond to
the entire wave of insurrections which in Latin America are challenging the
past’, and that the work of the M-26–7 was ‘the beginning of the great
liberation of
Nuestra América
… ’ (Revolución
24 April 1959).
These sentiments of Latin American solidarity were one of the prevailing themes
in the huge mass rally of 26 July 1959 in Havana, the first celebration of the
founding event of the movement after the revolutionary victory. Among those
present on the podium were Salvador Allende, Gloria Gaitán and Lázaro Cárdenas,
the former Mexican President who had been responsible for that country’s oil
nationalisation and agrarian reform in the 1930s. Raúl Castro saluted the great
Mexican statesman thus:
Brothers of the Latin American Continent, General Lázaro Cárdenas, this
revolution is not the exclusive property of our people, neither is it limited to
our frontiers. We believe that the hour of the second independence for the whole
continent, foretold by our apostle [José Martí], is arriving … . (La
Calle
28 July 1959)
Cárdenas replied that ‘ … the Cuban Revolution has aroused a profound sentiment
of solidarity in the whole Continent, because the cause of Revolution is
indivisible … ’ (Revolución
27 July 1959). It was clear to all, long before the Socialist definition
of the revolution, that Cuba represented the most vigorous expression of the
Latin American anti-imperialist and unitary movement with its roots in Bolívar
and Martí, and that it was entering a new phase which pointed towards a popular
and participatory democracy with a profound social content. This orientation
became clearer still in the final months of 1959, after the desertions of Díaz
Lanz and Hubert Matos and the fi rst bomb attacks from Florida; in the words of
Che Guevara speaking in front of the presidential palace on 26 October, ‘We are
not Guatemala. We are Cuba, which rises up today at the head of the Americas,
responding to each blow with a new step forward … ’ (Revolución
27 October 1959).
What becomes clear from this analysis of the revolutionary discourse is that it
is not necessary to postulate any supposed concealed Communist intent to explain
the radicalisation of the Cuban revolution; this radicalisation sprang naturally
from the popular character of the movement, from the structural contradiction
with imperialism and from the leadership’s ideology of nationalism and social
justice, an ideology which had such profound roots in Cuban and Latin American
history that it found spontaneous expression in the course of the struggle. The
great virtue of Fidel was his unrivalled capacity to synthesise and personify
that ideology and the corresponding revolutionary will in a populist dynamic of
dialogue with the Cuban people. This does not mean that Marxism was irrelevant
to the Cuban revolution, but simply that the revolution would arrive at its
Socialist goal by other means and with a different ideological inspiration.
This failure to conform to Marxist-Leninist stereotypes was also evident in
relation to issues of class and class confl ict. The revolutionary discourse made
frequent reference to the movement’s popular and anti-oligarchic character, but
the protagonist referred to was not the proletariat or working class as such,
rather it was the people, the popular classes, the humble: in other words, the
great majority of the Cuban nation. The enemies of the revolution were the
oligarchy and imperialism, the rich and the privileged; but the door was left
open even for them, since if they abandoned their privileges they were welcome
in the new country that was being built. This was very well formulated by Fidel
in the phrase: ‘The privileged [classes] will not be executed, but privileges
will be … ’ (Revolución
15 June 1959). But, he insisted, if the rich thought they could
prevent revolutionary measures by bribery and corruption, they were badly
mistaken:
They
helped the Revolution in order to buy us out. So, as I could see that in that
phase [of the armed struggle] everyone helped the Revolution, I ask them to make
a sacrifi ce, to continue making a sacrifi ce for the Country, not just during the
insurrection but in this creative effort, because the Revolution doesn’t preach
hatred, the Revolution preaches justice … I know everyone helped, yes, but the
Revolution was not made in order to maintain privilege, the Revolution was made
to establish justice, the Revolution wasn’t made to enrich those who were
already rich, but to give to those in need, to give to those who had nothing, to
give food to those that work … . (Revolución
12
March 1959)
Similarly, on several occasions Fidel insisted that those who wanted to provoke
class confrontation were the counter-revolutionaries; speaking on Lawyers’ Day
(8 June) to the members of the Havana Bar Association, he declared: ‘What do
they want? To provoke class war? To incite class hatred when it is our purpose
that the revolution should be seen as the work of the whole nation?’ – because,
he pointed out, here there were more than a thousand lawyers, who were far from
being poor or underprivileged, but who supported the revolution as they showed
by their applause (Revolución
9 June 1959). In the same sense Raúl Castro also insisted that
they were not closing the door on anyone, ‘And that to those who in minuscule
numbers are against the Revolution, we tell them in good faith – because in
principle we don’t wish evil for anyone – we make a patriotic appeal to them to
adapt to the new situation, to adapt to the brilliant process which began on the
First of January … ’ (Revolución
14 March 1959).
The discourse of the revolution, especially in the fi rst euphoric 18 months in
power, was profoundly anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist, but also generous
and open-minded, with a powerful ethical commitment and an emphasis on social
justice. It was therefore not a class discourse but a populist one: the
protagonist of the revolution was the Cuban people, all of those who worked with
the sweat of their brow, but also the intellectuals and even businessmen and
industrialists if they were honest and supported the process. As the revolution
radicalised and became more egalitarian, the discourse became explicitly
Socialist and fi nally Marxist-Leninist, but the stereotyped formulae of the
international Communist movement never became totally dominant in Cuba, and in
the post-Soviet world Cuban representatives – Fidel, of course, but not only
Fidel – have been able to engage in constructive dialogue with the new anti-globalisation
and anti-capitalist movements and the new political and social movements in
Latin America. It remains to be seen how Cuba will adapt in the long run to the
new world situation, but perhaps the most striking development in Cuban policy
is the intimate relationship with, and total support for, Hugo Chávez and the
Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. Despite obvious differences, the two
revolutions share the same left-populist roots and the same popular-democratic
and anti-imperialist characteristics, and Fidel has clearly recognised that
Venezuela is showing the way ahead for the Latin American revolution in the
twenty-fi rst century.
THE ISSUE OF DEMOCRACY
Fidel’s
extraordinary dialectical relationship with the people is what Sartre described
as direct democracy, and it was fundamental to the Cuban process. Liberals have
always praised the social achievements of the Cuban revolution but labelled it
as undemocratic because of the lack of Western-style elections, but it is
necessary to understand that from the beginning the Cubans rejected the
liberal-pluralist model as irrelevant, and this attitude was shared by a
majority of the population. Early in 1959, as in any country just emerging from
dictatorship, the question of elections was raised, and the typical response of
the revolutionary leaders was that they would be held in 18 months to two years,
when the revolutionary process was consolidated. Pressed repeatedly on the
question by Cuban and North American journalists, Fidel responded in a
television interview on 25 March:
Which
of us here has said anything against elections? No-one … However, such is the
weariness that people feel, such is their repugnance at the memory of that
verbiage, at the memory of those rallies with hypocrites parading from one
platform to the next … We are favourable to elections, but elections that will
really respect the people’s will, by means of procedures which put an end to
political machinations … . (Revolución
26
March 1959)
Similarly in another interview in June – with a large audience – when a
journalist quoted the opinion that anyone who spoke against elections was
‘Communist, Fascist or Nazi’, Fidel replied in a more polemical tone:
Do you
want to have elections right away, tomorrow? Shall we call on the people to vote
tomorrow? [The audience shouted ‘No!’] Supposedly elections mean consulting the
people’s will, so you people must be Fascists or Communists because you’ve
shouted against elections. What a poor sense of judgement! Instead of blaming
those who are responsible for the people’s distrust of elections, those who
converted politics into a quest for spoils … What is really odd is that those
who have no popular support talk about elections … . (Revolución 15 June 1959)
Rather than elections, he explained, what was needed was genuine democracy:
‘There is democracy in the Government. The Government is at the service of the
people, not of political cliques or oligarchies … We have democracy today, for
the first time in our history … ’
– because real democracy, government of the people, he explained, only existed
once before in Cuba, and that was with Guiteras in 1933; and that was destroyed
by reaction (Revolución
15 June 1959).
Indeed, everything suggested that the people did not want elections, at least
not at that time and not in the conventional form. An opinion poll conducted by
Bohemia
magazine in June showed that almost 60 per cent were against elections, at least
for the next three to four years, whereas 90 per cent were in favour of the
revolutionary government and the agrarian reform (Bohemia
28 June 1959, 70–3, 96). This poll also revealed the interesting
fact that opposition to elections was stronger among workers and peasants, while
those who did want elections were proprietors, executives and professionals. The
reasons given by those opposed to elections were that they would interrupt the
work of the revolution, that they would encourage petty politicking and that
they would mislead the people. On the other hand, the same social classes that
opposed conventional elections also declared themselves in favour of a different
type of elections, of a system (yet to be developed) of revolutionary democracy.
This is why they responded so favourably to Fidel’s repeated statements in
favour of such a system, as when he referred to the agrarian reform:
And by
redeeming the peasant, the Revolution is taking the fi rst step towards building
a true democracy; a democracy without slaves, a democracy without helots; which
is also the strange phenomenon of a non-representative democracy, but one which
is yet more pure: a democracy which lives through the direct participation of
the people in political problems … . (Revolución
28
July 1959)
This was one of the most sensitive and crucial issues of the revolution, and
indeed of any revolution. As Raúl Castro also pointed out, if those who wanted
to redirect the process towards ‘those false democracies, those democracies of
privilege’, then true peace would never exist and in another 15 or 20 years at
the most, ‘as well as still facing all the problems we are fighting against
today, another Machado or Batista would arise’ (Revolución
7 September 1959). In other words, liberal democracy would not
resolve the country’s major social and economic problems, and this would lead to
further political turmoil and eventually another dictatorship.
For some 15 years the revolutionary notion of direct popular democracy
functioned in Cuba on an informal basis, and mass organisations like the CDRs,
the CTC, the FMC and the UJC (Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas, Union of Young
Communists) were the only institutional channels for popular participation. The
spontaneous interaction with Fidel and other leaders was genuine and important,
but it could not substitute for organised structures where popular concerns
could be expressed. It was to overcome this defi ciency that the system of
‘People’s Power’ was created in the mid-1970s and given permanent status in the
1976 Constitution. The ‘Organs of People’s Power’ (Órganos de Poder Popular, OPP)
are elected governing bodies at municipal, provincial and national level, with
delegates elected by universal suffrage and secret ballot. Municipal delegates
represent small wards of 1,000 to 1,500 voters and candidates are nominated in
public mass meetings; by law at this level there must be between two and eight
candidates for every seat. Both the Communist Party and the mass organisations
like the CTC and FMC are forbidden by law from intervening in the nomination
process, so that people nominate whomever they consider to be best for the job
based on local personal reputation. Peter Roman, author of a detailed study of
Poder Popular, points to three crucial differences between the Cuban system and
that obtaining in the former Soviet Union: that in Cuba municipal delegates must
reside in their electoral district; that the municipal elections are competitive
by law; and that the Communist Party does not choose the candidates (Roman 2003,
103).
Attendance at nomination meetings averages from 70 to 90 per cent of eligible
voters, and most delegates say that when they were first nominated they had no
idea they were going to be proposed (Roman 2003, 107). The only campaigning
allowed is the distribution of candidates’ photographs and biographies. Once
elected, municipal delegates are responsible for all local affairs including
supervision of schools, hospitals, factories and other productive facilities
within the municipality, obviously within the parameters laid down at national
level. They serve for two and a half years and may be reelected, but they also
have to report back to their electors in public meetings every six months and
may be recalled if there is widespread dissatisfaction with their performance.
This is not an idle threat: in 1989, for example, 114 delegates were recalled,
and only 45 per cent of delegates were re-elected overall (Cole 1998, 38). I
have attended some report-back meetings (rendición
de cuentas),
and some of them at least are vigorous public cross-examinations in which the
community asserts its authority in no uncertain terms. Moreover, the six-monthly
reporting back is not limited to one public meeting per delegate: the size of
each meeting is limited by law to 120 people, so most delegates have to hold
between four and ten such meetings depending on the size of their ward.
One of the reasons for the non-re-election of delegates (as distinct from
recall) is that the task is extremely demanding. Roman points out that ‘The
public conceives that their delegates are on call at all hours and for any
reason. Many citizens with emergencies or personal problems contact their
delegate first’ (Roman 2003, 77). Delegates at all levels are non-salaried
volunteers and continue to work in their regular jobs in addition to their
representative duties, and with the pressure of popular demands and reporting
back they are often under considerable stress; in many cases therefore they
themselves refuse to serve more than one term. The reason for the insistence on
non-payment of delegates is to prevent the emergence of a professional political
class, to ensure that as in Rousseau’s ideal or in the Paris Commune, delegates
should be just like the working people they are mandated to serve.
It seems clear that there is a close, even intimate relationship between
municipal delegates and the electors they serve. In 1990 a survey conducted by
Bohemia
magazine found that 75.2 per cent knew the name of their
municipal delegate, and asked whether they trusted their delegate, 59.1 per cent
said Yes, 23.3 per cent said Somewhat, and only 17.6 per cent said No (Roman
2003, 78): a level of confidence which compares very favourably with that found
in most liberal systems. One aspect of Poder Popular which cannot be emphasised
too much is the small size of municipal wards and the sense of direct
responsibility of delegates to their constituents, who are after all their
immediate neighbours: with only 1,500 or so voters in most cases, the typical
ward consists of half a dozen city blocks or a small village in the countryside
(August 1999, 256–7). This creates a sense of direct involvement in the
political process lacking in most countries, where even local councillors
typically represent 10,000 people or more. If Cuban municipal delegates are tied
up with what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘parish pump’ politics,
this is where involvement in the political process should logically begin; and
if in most countries including Britain turnout in local elections is appallingly
low (30 per cent or less), one reason for this is undoubtedly the remoteness of
local councillors.
The other reason commonly cited for lack of participation in local elections in
‘advanced’ Western countries is the sense that local councils lack real power (a
situation which in Britain has been accentuated as a matter of deliberate
central government policy since Thatcher). In Cuba a similar problem emerged
during the worst years of the ‘Special Period’ when very frequently delegates
simply could not resolve concrete problems raised by their constituents because
of the extreme scarcity of many goods: if a delegate were asked to improve the
street lighting or paving, for example, they could not do it even with the best
will in the world because light bulbs, asphalt and cement were not available.
According to some reports this did lead to frustration and some loss of confidence
in the system, but with improved conditions in recent years this is not such an
important problem.
It should also be emphasised that Cuban local delegates do hold significant
authority over social and economic affairs going well beyond the ‘parish pump’;
through the municipal assembly they are responsible for all aspects of local
administration. They do not legislate, but they do supervise the running of
everything from schools and hospitals to recreational and productive facilities
in their municipality: in Cole’s words, ‘Poder Popular decentralized the
management of productive and service enterprises and institutions to the areas
or constituencies which they serve’ (Cole 1998, 36). Even large factories,
although ultimately controlled by the central government, are supervised on a
day-to-day basis by commissions of the municipal assemblies, which may report
managers to higher authorities for poor performance, sometimes leading to their
dismissal.
In addition to the municipal assemblies there is a further instrument of local
democracy which was introduced in 1988, the people’s councils. These operate on
a smaller scale than the municipalities; each municipality is divided into
several units, each with its own people’s council consisting of the municipal
delegates from that district plus representatives of the mass organisations and
state enterprises in the district. The president and vice-president of the
people’s council are elected by its members and must be popular delegates, not
appointees of the mass organisations or enterprises. Unlike the municipal
assemblies, these councils do not have administrative responsibilities, but they
do have extensive powers to investigate and make complaints about corruption,
ineffi ciency and other problems, and have become an increasingly signifi cant
instrument for citizens to gain access to higher authorities and resolve
important issues:
On the
one hand, people’s councils became part of the convergence of civil and
political societies, by amplifying constituents’ frequent and personal contacts
with their elected municipal representatives; and strengthening the application
of the
mandat impératif,
that is, the responses and responsibilities of municipal delegates regarding
citizens’
planteamientos
[complaints]. On the
other hand, people’s councils have also supported the development of a more
autonomous civil society … (Roman 2003, 234)
The
development and popularity of the people’s councils has sometimes led to conflicts
of authority with the municipal assemblies, but this can probably be taken as a
healthy sign of local democratic vigour.
At higher level Popular Power as an expression of the direct will or interests
of the people suffers from greater limitations. Under the 1976 Constitution
provincial delegates were chosen by the municipal assembly, and national
delegates were likewise chosen by provincial assemblies from among their
members. This pyramidal structure obviously severely limited popular influence on
the process, and in 1992 it was replaced by direct election at all levels. But
it is still the case that there is only one candidate for each position at
provincial or national level, and the nomination process is less open than at
municipal level, so that the election is more like a popular ratifi cation of a
preselected list of candidates. The one signifi cant qualifi cation of this is a
requirement introduced in 1992 for delegates to receive the votes of at least 50
per cent of the registered electorate in their districts; if turnout is too low,
the process has to be repeated, and this can be a mechanism for voters to reject
unpopular candidates. National delegates, like local ones, are unpaid, except
for those selected as officers of the Assembly or its commissions.
The Council of State, the country’s supreme authority, is elected by the
National Assembly whose deputies vote in secret ballot on a list drawn up by a
candidacy commission which takes into account deputies’ proposals but modifies
the list to achieve ‘balance’. It clearly does make an effort to include figures
representative of different areas of national life and to achieve consensus in
the Assembly on this, but the process is more one of negotiation within the
governing elite than of democratic election. Decisions of the Council of State
have to be ratified by the National Assembly, which has supreme legislative
authority. However, the National Assembly meets in plenary session only twice a
year for a few days, and its votes are always unanimous because of a convention
that favours consensus; controversial proposals are usually withdrawn and
redrafted. Most of the work is done by specialised commissions of the Assembly,
on which about half the delegates serve and which have much longer sessions
including public hearings, often meeting in the provinces (Roman 2003, 85–9).
The commissions clearly do allow for a significant degree of debate and public
input, but this does not alter the fact that debate in the Assembly as such is
limited and many delegates feel pressure to conform. This is in part due to the
need for national unity in the face of US hostility, but may also refl ect the
heritage of Soviet infl uence.
However, popular input into policy is not limited to the formal structures of
Poder Popular; the Constitution provides for processes of popular consultation
on major issues, and even if formal national consultation processes are not very
frequent, they are remarkably extensive and thorough when they occur. The 1976
Constitution was circulated in draft form to the mass organisations and debated
extensively in thousands of local branches, and revised in accordance with these
discussions before being put to popular referendum. In the summer of 1990 there
were some 89,000 workplace meetings in preparation for the Fourth Party Congress
of 1991, plus many meetings in neighbourhoods, schools and universities,
generating a multitude of comments which served as input for the delegates in
considering the constitutional amendments which would be adopted in 1992 (Cole
1998, 37). Also for the first time many delegates to the Party Congress were
nominated directly by the rank-and-fi le, rather than members just being given a
prearranged list to vote on; and in the Congress itself, in contrast to the
Soviet-style tradition which had prevailed for the previous 20 years, the
General Secretary (Fidel) did not pre-empt discussion by giving guidelines for
discussion, but limited his opening remarks to a presentation of the country’s
problems and then opened the floor for debate (Blanco 1994, 30). In 1993–94 a
similar process took place, again with over 80,000 ‘workers’ parliaments’ in
workplaces discussing the proposed economic reforms (legalisation of the dollar
and of foreign investment, self-employment, introduction of income tax and so
on). Opinions expressed were synthesised and reported to the National Assembly,
and the proposed legislation was modified accordingly. As a result of this
consultation process the proposed income tax was limited to incomes from
self-employment or private property, and was not applied to wages as originally
proposed.
Direct popular involvement in economic policy and management is in fact a
crucial element of popular democracy and Socialism: Cuban development policy
cannot be understood in purely economic terms, divorced from the politics of
Socialist participation. Thus the Rectification Campaign was conceived explicitly
in these terms, as explained by Fidel himself:
The
most serious error of economic policy put in practice between 1975 and 1985 was
undoubtedly its reliance upon economic mechanisms to resolve all the problems
faced by a new society, ignoring the role assigned to
political
factors in the construction of socialism. (quoted in Cole 1998, 44)
Ken
Cole points out that the Soviet-style SDPE planning system was ended for
political
reasons: ‘Economic regulation and control was to be a conscious
political process of choosing priorities, and not considered to be the
“inevitable” economic result of technical specialization … or the necessary
effect of the anarchy of market forces … ’ (Cole 1998, 45). The directly
political implications of the Rectification Campaign, relating to popular
socialist consciousness and participation, were constantly emphasised both by
the Cuban leadership and by the most critical and creative intellectuals. Thus
Haroldo Dilla and others at the Centro de Estudios sobre América (Centre for the
Study of the Americas) wrote in 1993: ‘It would be wrong to see these changes …
as basically issues of economic administration … the basic challenge of rectification
was the problem of participation, the problems of which have been
less signifi
cant than the advances in socialist democracy’
(quoted in Cole 1998, 121; Cole’s emphasis). This was further borne out by the
measures adopted in the ‘Special Period’; although the economic crisis obliged
the leadership to reverse some of the policy changes of rectification (for
instance, allowing private farmers’ markets and self-employment, both of which
had existed in the early 1980s and had been banned under rectification), in
political terms the emphasis of the 1992 reforms was very much on improving
participation and democracy.
The question of Communist Party intervention or infl uence in Cuban elections is
a complex one. The legal prohibition of party intervention was designed to
ensure separation of party and state, unlike the situation in the Soviet Union.
At local level there is much evidence to suggest that delegate nomination is
indeed free and independent, but at national level this is much less clear.
Approximately 15 per cent of the Cuban adult population belong to the party, and
70 per cent of both municipal and national delegates are party members. The fact
that 30 per cent are not does suggest a degree of independence in delegate
selection; national delegates have included members of Catholic and Protestant
churches, for example, an indication that the process is partially open to
non-party interests. Since recruitment to the party is by popular nomination, in
which workers in each enterprise propose for party membership those individuals
they consider to be most outstanding, it seems only natural that there should be
considerable overlap with the choice of OPP delegates; it should also be borne
in mind that outstanding non-party delegates are often invited to join the
party, another factor boosting the percentage who belong to the party without
implying that it controls the electoral process (Roman 2003, 93). At local level
it seems clear that there is a large degree of popular autonomy in both
elections and municipal assembly discussions, but at national level there is
little doubt that basic policy is decided by the Communist Party leadership and
ratified by a National Assembly which it in fact controls. It is possible to
justify this as necessary to preserve the basic components of popular power and
Socialism in the face of US sabotage, but it cannot convincingly be described as
fully democratic.
The role of the Communist Party cannot be separated from the issue of
multi-party liberalism versus direct, participatory democracy. The concept of a
single party expressing national unity and consensus did not begin in Cuba after
1959, and neither was it borrowed from or imposed by the Soviet Union. Rather,
it originated in the late nineteenth century with José Martí and the Partido
Revolucionario Cubano, the Cuban Revolutionary Party which united many different
political clubs in Cuba and among Cuban émigrés in the US and the Caribbean.
Party politics – multi-party politics, that is – was seen as factional and
divisive. The single-party system, therefore, is not only a defensive reaction
to the US blockade, and once again a very interesting perspective is provided by
Juan Antonio Blanco:
…
rather than advocating an evolution toward a multi-party system, which is a
system that emerged in the world some 200 years ago as a response to a specifi c
historical reality, I would prefer to see us create a new kind of democracy
using different tools. I think it is entirely possible to achieve a pluralist
one-party system if in that system there were strong sectoral organizations –
women’s organizations, farmers’ groups, neighborhood committees, etc. These
sectoral organizations exist in Cuba today, but would have to be stronger at the
grassroots level to play the role, when necessary, of challenging government
policies. (Blanco 1994, 68–9)
One
of the key issues here, as argued in my discussion of democracy, is the role and
ideology of the single party. If it is to be truly democratic and an instrument
of genuine unity and consensus (unity achieved from the grass roots and not
imposed), it cannot be a vehicle of a very specific ideology such as
Marxism-Leninism; in other words, it cannot be a Communist party as
conventionally understood. Undoubtedly it should express a general commitment to
popular power, participatory democracy and socialism, but within those broad
parameters it should be open to all currents of thought and ideologies. The
Cuban Communist Party has become more open in recent years; this can be seen in
its practice of recruiting the best workers as recommended by their colleagues,
and by the decision to accept religious believers as members. But it is still
the case that members are then indoctrinated with Marxism-Leninism, by all
accounts on the basis of very traditional, even dogmatic manuals; and this
cannot be the basis for a free and open Socialist democracy. Of course the ideas
of Marx, Engels, Lenin and all the revolutionary classics should be studied, but
on a critical basis and along with creative and progressive thought of all kinds
– as already occurs in Cuba, but not with the blessing of the party.
The Cuban system of popular participation has been the subject of two
interesting recent studies, one by the Canadian author Arnold August and the
second by Peter Roman of the City University of New York (August 1999; Roman
2003). August’s work suffers from a poor writing style and a number of
historical errors, but it does have the virtue of being the first attempt to
study the Cuban system seriously on the basis of direct observation; while
Roman’s study is a thorough and closely argued piece of academic research which
sets the Cuban system in the context of the philosophy and practice of direct
and/or Socialist democracy from Rousseau and Marx onwards, and constitutes an
excellent antidote to the superficiality of most liberal accounts of Cuban
‘dictatorship’. These two studies demonstrate that grass-roots participatory
democracy is a reality in Cuba, and although the system has limitations in terms
of freedom of expression and participation in decision-making at national level
(to which US policy has powerfully contributed), it can in no way be dismissed
as merely authoritarian. The crucial error of liberals has always been to judge
Cuba in terms of formal political institutions, without understanding that
Socialist democracy is about popular participation and decision-making in all
spheres of the economy and society: municipal delegates of Popular Power
appointing the managers and supervising the operations of local facilities from
schools to factories or health clinics, trade unionists intervening in the
management and planning of their enterprises, mini-brigades building houses for
themselves and their communities, or people in local neighbourhoods organising
their own
organopónico
allotments. It is this, coupled with the reality of social justice, which gives
the Cuban system legitimacy with or without Fidel, and which makes it relevant
today in the quest for an alternative to capitalist globalisation. The Cuban
revolution is not over and it too will continue to change, but contrary to the
prevailing opinion, that change does not have to be in the direction of liberal
pluralism and a ‘market economy’; rather it may well be towards a deepening of
participatory democracy and socialism.