Cuba: Communist Caudillismo

By ALFRED SHERMAN

UT the Cuban peasants and workers must have been economically discontented, otherwise why should there have been a revolu- tion at all?'—insisted a 'politically conscious' acquaintance here. Sancta simplicitas.

One can trace the mechanics of how Com- munism was imposed in Cuba, and how the native tradition of caudillismo assimilated to Communist ideas and practices without diffi- culty. One can trace how Communism, in its more traditional form, has failed to make much of an impact elsewhere in Latin America, so far. But to ask why Comnpnism should succeed in establishing itself in tbe most affInent.of Latin- American States where anti-American traditions were at their weakest, and inequalities least marked, and not in States where poverty, in- equality and traditional anti-gringoism are strongest, is really to inquire into the nature and potentialities of Communism, rather than to study Cuba. One thing is certain: the Cuban revolution cannot be attributed primarily to economic causes in general, and to discontent among peasants and workers in particular. Cuba was as different from the stock picture of an underdeveloped country familiar from BBC television broadcasts as could be imagined.

Thanks to its proximity and close economic ties with the US it was relatively affluent. The urban-rural ratio was about fifty-fifty: its literacy rate of over 75 per cent. was the envy of the continent. Social and economic differences were far less sharp than in most of the continent; a large proportion of the popula- tion were embourgeoise in taste and outlook, though not in income; rich and poor tended to speak alike, think alike and share common tastes: There was no Indian problem; everyone spoke Spanish. There was no land-hunger; any- one with initiative and a little money could rent land; Cuba lacked an agricultural tradition, and its landless labourers did not wish to become farmers, they wanted steady employment and no worries.

But for all that Cuba had staggered from one political crisis to another during its sixty years of independence, and political crises stemmed from an underlying crisis of values. Cubans had never learned to govern themselves, nor to achieve the transition from a Spanish colonial- type society to a modern society. They had been unprepared for independence when it came, having been accustomed to paternalist rule. They never subsequently acquired the civic virtues without which democracy is unworkable —and dictatorship intolerable—yet, unlike several of their neighbours, they could never reconcile themselves to the absence of democ- racy and the civic virtues.

With independence Cuba had become pro- gressively isolated from the Spanish roots of its culture—in the widest sense of the term, includ- ing ways of thinking and acting--but had largely failed to assimilate the modern way of life in the American form in which it had reached the island. The result was a crisis of values and considerable ambivalence towards the US. The breakdown of old values and behaviour patterns without their replacement by anything new and better was often misleading and disparagingly called 'American isal ion ,' but Leva n tin ism would have been a better term. Real Ameri- canisation—acquisition of the habits of hard work, punctuality and reliability, and a touch of the puritan ethos-- was beginning to show in Cuba, but it never went far enough to change the character of the country. The crisis of values was evident in many fields: sex and family life; language and culture—particularly the deplor- ably low standard in the universities, and the

superficiality and verbalism in social thought; and in the all-pervading corruption and self- deprecation. It was hard to be a Cuban, under the shadow of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant colossus in the North, comparing and compared.

Though the Cuban economy had had a good rate of growth by any standards, it was neither as large as it could have been, given levels of Production and availability of capital, nor was it large enough to absorb the growing younger generation, which was much larger in propor- tion to the adult population than is the case in demographically mature populations. The Cuban eennomy was certainly unable to absorb the flood of semi-intellectuals—university and secondary-school graduates who knew almost 11,nthing—on. their own terms. The reasons for the shortcomings in Cuba's economic perfor- mance were largely bound up with corruption, Politicisation. low propensity to save and invest, and feather-bedding of employed workers (including a good deal of 'make work') which raised labour costs above what they should have been in an island with a considerable labour surplus. But though many Cubans shared in the blame for this situation, they preferred to blame each other, or the US. There has been a good deal of argument as to Whether Castro was a Communist all along, determined to impose Communism on Cuba, or Whether he drifted into Communism under Pressure of events, including mishandling of the situation by the US. There is a good deal of e°11flicting evidence, particularly contradictory statements by Castro himself, but a number of general conclusions are possible. In the first Place, the universities, particularly the over- ctowded, underworked law, history and arts faculties were always over-politicised and left w - "'lig in sentiment. Every student was exposed to stocial revolutionary ideas which gave high marks 0 Lenin and low marks to the US. Graduates' subsequent political attitudes depended a good deal on their post-university career; Castro and tuiis associates, who remained student-politicians ll they reached striking distance of power, retained the general fellow-travelling attitudes they had acquired at university. See°ndlY, all Castro's strategy and tactics early 1958 at the latest turned out 'on, retrospect to be perfectly adapted to the task ll imposing Communism on the country, against a b e will not only of a majority of its population, el the vast majority of those he used to carry 1:-'t this process. He showed a mastery of oeninist tactics, always isolating and destroying nene enemy at a time, calming the fears of his poxrt victims and even implicating them in the ttical destruction of other victims, in order to caev,ent the crystallisation of an opposition. eolsli`ro himself, in private conversation with a de- scribed who has since left the country, de- bi,ed the process as a train in which everyone cohl u get off at whichever point he wanted, while ott train went on. The number of those who got e„:"--nr were thrown off—on the way far b;ce t eded those who made the whole journey, theY that th were so distributed along the route nnt.t_nse just about to descend were always a c"rttY, and a confused one at that. aloo4tro has since claimed that he knew all g Where he was going, but was forced to dissimulate because otherwise he would never have had sufficient support from the middle classes—and, one could add, from trade union- ists, farmers and many other groups. This `doing good by stealth' merely carries to its logical conclusion a process in which all Com- munist parties have dabbled. Though the Bolsheviks fought under their own colours, those peasants and intellectuals who supported them would hardly have done so had they known what lay in wait for them. Tito's uprising in 1941 deliberately dissimulated the Communist ele- ment, in the knowledge that if the party could take over the levers of power, Communisation could be achieved at leisure. A similar process can be observed in the establishment of 'peoples' democracies' in Eastern Europe after the war; indeed the very same people and publications who denied that the satellites were being Com- munised at the time subsequently denied that Cuba was undergoing a similar process. The novelty in the case of Castro is that he waited until after the fait accompli to declare himself a Communist, and that he frankly admitted to having lied.

Yet it is equally true that had the Castros and Guevara been Communists in the sense that Bias Roca and Carlos Rafael were Communists, they could never have achieved what they did. In the first place the Party was strongly opposed to 'adventurism,' and only a leader with the resources of a Mao Tse-tung could have followed an independent line. Secondly, had they shown Communist traits in their actions and policies up to mid-1959 they would have prematurely antagonised many powerful groups. The paradox of it is that a free-lance communoid Caudillo was so much more effective in imposing Com- munism than a 'real Communist' could have been.

Thirdly, even granting that Castro deceived the Cubans, he could not have succeeded had they not helped him to do so, by the compulsive gullibility that only a nation of sceptics can experience. Middle-class ubans were ready to believe in a Caudillo whi would solve all the country's tangled contradictions at a stroke, because they lacked any vision of how they should really be dealt with. Castro had been

built into an almost legendary figure by Batista —a mistake later to be repeated by the Ameri- cans—who lost control of himself when stung by a guerrilla force of a few hundred, which never constituted a serious military threat to the regime. By arresting and torturing tens of thou- sands of young people and intellectuals in the towns, Batista created the mass support which Castro had formerly lacked. Cubans suddenly found that they had a new folk hero, a latter-day Marti, and projected on to him their beliefs and hopes.

Given the position in which Castro found him- self in 1959, and his intellectual background, it is not surprising that he steered Cuba towards Communism. For one thing he needed an ideology and system which would justify the retention of power, and the removal of rival power centres. Secondly, he needed organisa- tional help, which the local Communist Party was best fitted to supply—they had reached agreement of sorts in March, 1958, after Carlos Rafael had visited guerrilla headquarters. Thirdly, he needed to offer miracles quickly, and yet be in an invulnerable position by the time his miracles failed to materialise; neither capitalism nor the mixed economy offered much in this direction. Lastly, he needed an enemy against whom to rally Cubans, and the natural temptation was to exploit existing anti-Yankee feelings, which, though they had diminished con- siderably during the two previous decades were still strong and traditionally respectable. Com- munist theory added sophistication and 'scientific' basis to anti-Americanism.

True, not all sections of the population have swallowed the crude anti-American line. (Indeed, a joke going the rounds of Cuba is: 'If a blind man and a cripple collide in the street, who is to blame?—Yanqui imperial ism.') Anti-Ameri- canism is still less pervading in Cuba than, say, anti-Semitism was in Germany. But it is invalu- able in maintaining the self-righteousness and esprit de corps of his supporters, and reaching out to other Latin-American circles, for whom straight Communism has less emotional appeal. By now, having burned so many bridges, Castro has little alternative but to carry on with this line.

'Just because Man has been making progress doesn't mean the rest of us still, y'knowr

The question of the relevance of Cuban experience to the rest of Latin America needs treating cautiously, since it has proved a twa- edged weapon. On the one hand it has demon- strated one possible chain of events and encouraged would-be Castros elsewhere; on the other hand it has opened a good many eyes, and made it more difficult for Latin American States to turn Communist 'in a fit of absentmindedness.' In the short run it gave a fillip to the anti- Western extreme left by mobilisjng many circles which find orthodox Communism unattractive and preparing them to work in harness With local Communist parties. However, Castro's increasingly close identification with the Com- munist bloc, his intolerance of opposition or dis- agreement at home or elsewhere in Latin America, and his economic failures, have since reduced much of his impetus, though clumsy policies by the United States could easilY antagonise public opinion on the continent and give Castro a new lease of life.

The fact that Castro succeeded in one of the most affluent, literate and socially advanced States of the continent indicates the need to re- examine the quasi-Marxist theories implicit M the Alianza para el Progreso, which assumes that higher per capita GNP, schools, roads and other reforms, however excellent in themselves, will automatically militate against repetition of the Cuban pattern elsewhere. A good deal of argument over Cuba has shifted its ground from whether or not Castro is a Communist, to how far United States policies were responsible for 'pushing him towards Communism: many who ferventlY denied that Castro was a Communist until be himself proclaimed it, are now the most deter- mined to blame the US. Leaving aside questions of how far Eisenhower and Dulles were to blame for tying the US so closely to Batista, it seems unlikely that the US Government could have done much after 1959 to slow or accelerate Cuba's progress towards Communism, though their ineptitude certainly helped to put their unnecessarily in the wrong with important sections of Cuban, Latin-American and world opinion. For one thing, opinion in Washington and in the country was divided over Castro for some time, and there was no single US policYf towards him. Secondly, there is no waY ° proving that had the US Government overridden its own public opinion and treated Castro as Nasser, Nkrumah and Kassem have been treated: the logic of the situation I discussed earlier elm" not have operated in much the same way. After all, neither nations nor governments chooser ntheeigirhbsotr octisa. m

1 systems in order to punish the It is not surprising that neither Washing.teill

nor Moscow should have grasped the imPhea-e tions of what was happening in Cuba until th die had been cast: both shared many of the same premises, and thought in terms of Pole,.. tarian and peasant uprisings led by Mose"_ trained Communists. Cuban experience showtob that these ideological dogmas are an obstacle.

"leen understanding regions like Latin America,

are unique phenomena with their own terms of reference. It should be easier for the West .get free itself from Soviet clichds than for M.., remains to be done. has shown, this still