Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution

Age, Position, Character, Destiny, Personality, and Ambition

Carlos Alberto Montaner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351519939
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Perhaps the foremost social analyst and journalist on Cuban affairs, Carlos Alberto Montaner has written a definitive study of the Cuban regime from the vantage point of the Cuban dictator. This is not simply a history of Cuban communism but rather a personal history of its leader, Fidel Castro. Montaner's extraordinary knowledge of the country and its politics prevents the work from becoming a psychiatric examination from afar. Indeed, what personal irrationalities exist are seen as built into the fabric of the regime itself, and not simply as a personality aberration.Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution is not an apologia for past United States involvement in Cuban affairs. The author is severe in his judgments of such participation. Nor is he sparing in his sense of the betrayal of the original purposes of the Revolution of 1959 manifested in the character and policies of Fidel Castro. As the work progresses from a study of the victims to a study of the beneficiaries of the Cuban Revolution, it leaves the reader with a deep sense of the tragedy of a revolution betrayed, but not one that could have easily been avoided.Montaner is an ""exile"" like the great Alexander Herzen before him. His decision to live in Europe was made by choice, not of necessity. He sees his role as critical analyst, not as restoring the status quo ante. A most valuable aspect of this book is its intimate reevaluation of Fulgencio Batista. Whatever the reader's judgment of Montaner's work, no one can read it and be dismissive of the effort. It is a work of intimacy even through written in exile--and hence must be viewed as an important effort to understand the character of the man and regime who have changed the course of Cuban history in our times.

1

The True Story of the Cuban Revolution

For that tenuous thing called “posterity,” a story will remain that in a few lines will tell of the deeds that took place during the insurrectional period of the Cuban Revolution. It will go more or less like this: “After several years of intense struggle, Fidel Castro and his guerrilla followers in Sierra Maestra defeated dictator Fulgencio Batista.” And perhaps then the story of “the twelve” will be mentioned—the mythical twelve men who survived the first combats and later led various guerrilla groups. This sketch will suffice for history. But it is a trifle.

A Portrait of Batista

A book about the Cuban revolution should start with Batista. What was he like? What were the predominant traits of the ex–Cuban dictator? The first thing that comes to light is the tremendous incongruence between his personal limitations and the positions in which he served. He was a vulgar and ignorant man—a malicious biographer has solemnly stated that “he had mastered the secrets of shorthand.” Nevertheless, he managed to acquire the repertoire of gestures of the learned bourgeoisie. He was a military leader with no talent for fighting. Castro’s war—which would have been terminated in short order by other Latin American strongmen—was all that was needed to put him on the run. As a politician he had little popular support. Yet this mediocre man was able to rule over politicians and the military, the middle class and capitalists, conservatives and Communists. Until Castro’s arrival, no other Cuban had held such power in the country’s republican history. This can only be understood if one realizes that Batista’s weaknesses were his main assets to those forces that insured his political longevity. Batista was useful to the interests of the Cuban oligarchy, to American investors, to the Stalinist Communist party in Cuba, to the bourgeois political parties, to the Department of State in Washington, to the army he built and later destroyed, to organized labor—to all the pressure groups that operated in Cuba during the tiresome quarter of a century that elapsed between 1933 and 1958. His “ability” rested in choosing the most appropriate ally at the most opportune moment. He sold and collected favors from all parties involved. To all he conveyed the certainty that his bulky deficiencies made him pliable and usable and thus made him the suitable man to carry out the designs of the group with which he happened to be allied. He manipulated and was manipulated. He served and was served. Such was the secret of his “success.”

He managed to be a progressive politician (in name) in the thirties and a reactionary (also in name) in the fifties, because in the first period he was living in an atmosphere of revolution and in the second period, in the institutional order of capitalist middle-class structures where there was a certain prosperity. During the forties he was able to become an ally of the Popular Socialist party—blindly subservient to Moscow—and later in the fifties, he outlawed it, because in the first period he needed some popular support that his barracks’ power base could not offer, and in the second period, he needed only the use of force to rule a country in which the relative economic boom and disgust over the corrupt use of power by traditional political parties had sown a cynical spirit of resignation. Batista sensed—he was more intuitive than logical—the rules of the Cold War, and in the fifties endorsed the mythology of that period with the same enthusiasm he had shown during the Spanish Civil War and World War II when he was pro-Popular Front and pro-Soviet. He was like a chameleon: fluid, protean, malleable to the interests with which he would temporarily strike deals (from which he would benefit). I suspect he had a realistic image of himself and his weaknesses. This would have to be considered one of his assets. He was discreet in a country of raving braggarts. He was not a hopeless egomaniac like Castro, but an astute fellow: sly, distrustful, with a cautious sense of timing, always ready to “sell” his limitations to the best buyer.

What did this man look for in government? In the first place, money. He stole, permitted stealing, and benefited from others’ stealing with a neurotic frenzy. Ten percent of the budget from the Department of Public Works ended up in his pockets. Let no one be surprised, therefore, by the impressive buildings and highways with which he endowed the country. With his close relatives he shared the gambling profits (legal and illegal). He would sell sinecures, decrees, favors, customhouse directorships, government positions, and any other “merchandise” within the reach of an uncontrollable and dishonest ruler. It must be acknowledged that he did not invent such practices, and that his predecessors did the same things, but Batista carried corruption to unheard-of limits. His estimated fortune was $300 million. He was said to be one of the richest men in the world. In all likelihood, this is not an exaggeration.

Aside from wealth, the sergeant-stenographer frantically sought social prestige. I doubt that power enticed him as it does other political chieftains. He was not interested in the presidency in order to change the world—as André Breton writes in a poem—but to obtain the social ascendancy that the Cuban upper classes otherwise denied him. He merely wanted to be accepted, not to become an outstanding leader. Batista was a man of very humble origins with no prestigious ancestry to be traced back to the recent Cuban wars of independence. (There existed in Cuba a peculiar aristocracy, different from the landed one, which originated with the heroes of the wars against Spain. The descendants of these military leaders were active in politics until Castro came to power.) Batista was a half-breed, and in Cuba there were profound, though hidden, racial prejudices. When he was an ex-president, for example, he was denied entrance to an exclusive social club because he was a mulatto. In that social sphere, it was worse to be Black than to be a thief.

Batista was boorish, and to avoid appearing so, he would end up being pretentiously uncouth. Thousands of ridiculing jokes about him were told throughout the island. Behind his thirst for power there was no psychological motivation other than his deep-seated social resentment. He made pathetic efforts to be accepted by the Cuban aristocracy (an entity out of opera buffa) which were later expanded by befriending the European aristocracy. There is no more naive and awkward chapter in his biography than the one that chronicles his pilgrimage to the town of Zaldívar, Spain, in search of his mythical lineage.

He did not leave any political heritage when he died. There was no political loyalty, no coherent doctrine. Not even a trace of ideological precepts can be found in the life of the dead strongman—only a system. of temporary compromises based on mutual benefits. Batista’s wake does not exist as a political entity, but as a nostalgic bond among certain people of little intellect or dubious past, proclaiming themselves Batista followers. Time, in the same way it extinguished Batista in Marbella, will erase all traces of his following. In a few years, it will all be a pitiful anecdote.

The Collapse of Batista’s Régime

On December 31, 1958, Havana was calm but tense as it awaited the New Year. There were few parties or celebrations. The opposition slogan “moderation, silence, no lights,” devised by Emilio Guede, one of the July 26 Movements’s propaganda chiefs, was being taken seriously. Everyone knew it would be unwise to provoke the police, but some way had to be found to show Batista that virtually the entire population was against his dictatorship.

The news from places where the struggle was in progress was encouraging. In Oriente, Huber Matos’s guerrilla column was advancing on Santiago de Cuba as Fidel Castro had ordered. In Las Villas province, Che Guevara and Rolando Cubelas’s men had taken Santa Clara, one of the country’s main cities, while guerrillas attached to the Escambray Second National Front were raiding or besieging half a dozen sizable towns. A few days earlier, this organization’s leader, the twenty-four-year-old Spaniard Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, had pulled off a remarkable coup: he had infiltrated an army barracks in disguise and, after disarming the senior officer present, persuaded it to surrender.

There could be little doubt that from a military viewpoint things had been going badly for Batista’s army. The two offensives launched by his General Staff had failed. One of these had been mounted to deal with the situation in the Sierra Maestra, at the far eastern end of the island; the other had as its target the guerrilla forces operating in the central region about 190 miles from Havana.

But despite such setbacks, for all practical purposes the armed forces were still intact. Nine-tenths of the army had not left barracks, and Batista had total control of the air. There was also his navy, which, though small and obsolete, could at least be used to bombard guerrilla strongholds on the coast. Batista’s position, then, could hardly be described as desperate. In the entire country there were fewer than three thousand guerrillas; he had thirty thousand men under his command. In strictly military terms Batista should have been able to recover all the ground he had lost—it amounted to less than 2 percent of Cuba’s territory—and defeat the opposition. Nonetheless, on January 1, 1959, after saying good-bye to the old year with shouts of “viva” and champagne, Batista, along with his family and his closest associates, boarded two air force planes and told the pilots to take them to the Dominican Republic. This development was so unexpected it astonished the entire country, including Fidel Castro who, in his Sierra Maestra redoubt, had been getting ready for a long guerrilla campaign whose outcome was far from certain. It had simply never occurred to him that his still immensely powerful foe would suddenly flee the country.

But the motives behind Batista’s astounding decision had little to do with anything happening on the battlefield. The most important factor was his realization that the Cuban people no longer wanted him. This had been made plain in the rigged elections of November 1958, just seven weeks before his flight. Hardly anyone voted and it was obvious that the vast majority had turned their backs on him and on any electoral solution that would imply some degree of continuity. Batista had been rejected by everyone and he knew it. The psychological significance of this for him was considerable. Thirty years earlier, Batista had erupted into public life on a wave of popular approval, and he had had an aura of revolutionary prestige conferred on him by his then ally, a Cuban Communist party known as the Popular Socialist party. Unlikely as it later came to seem. Batista did not see himself as a right-wing dictator but as a populist caudillo, the friend and protector of the Spanish Republican government in exile and enemy of the tyrant Trujillo, the man who would give him asylum. In his own mind, he remained close to the very poorest classes from which he had been lifted up by the revolutionary movement that in 1933 transformed him from sergeant typist into Colonel and Chief of the Armed Forces.

His gloomy awareness that he had been rejected might not have been enough to make him relinquish power had his secret services not placed on his desk two very well documented reports. One informed him that some supposedly loyal army officers had been in contact with Fidel Castro in an effort to arrange a peace formula, something that would have been bound to entail his removal and also, perhaps, his arrest and trial. The other report was even more serious. It told him high-ranking United States Embassy officials had been meeting opposition representatives in Havana in an attempt to work out a political deal that might prevent the complete collapse of the country’s institutions. Washington knew Batista’s dictatorship was not viable in the medium term and thought it would be unable to survive even if power were handed to Dr. Andrés Rivero Agüero, the wily pro-Batista lawyer and politician who had been designated president after November’s election farce.

Confronted with this situation, Batista panicked. Suddenly, he saw himself spurned by the people and “betrayed” by two of the main pillars of his régime, the Americans and the armed forces. He could not help but remember the events of 1933 when another dictator, Gerardo Machado, had been undone by the same factors: public opinion, the army, and the United States embassy. Like Machado in 1933, he knew he would not be able to keep his grip on the levers of power. He was also afraid of what might happen to him at the hands of the mob should revolutionary anarchy spawn riots like the ones that had shaken the country twenty-five years before. Haunted by these nightmares, without a thought of the glory or greatness that so frequently figured in official speeches, the general fled at dawn, leaving behind, utterly exposed to their enemies, thousands of people committed to the defense of his ignoble cause.

Fidel Makes His Move

As soon as news of this unexpected turn of events reached his headquarters, Fidel Castro, the thirty-three-year-old lawyer commanding the 26 July Movement, ordered a slow advance on Havana by highway, with a halt in Santiago de Cuba so the columns led by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, which were already halfway to the capital, would have time to consolidate their hold on power. This was essential not just to avert a counteroffensive by the armed forces, but also to prevent guerrilla groupings attached to other opposition factions from taking over important military or political organizations. Castro never shouted “all power to the Soviets,” but he did have the ability to maneuver astutely enough to make sure all power would go first to his July 26 Movement and then, a few months later, to himself.

But who was this Hollywood-style individual who did so much to create the shaggy-haired and romantic Latin American revolutionary archetype? Fidel Castro was one of the five children of the second union of a Galician immigrant named Angel Castro who had arrived in Cuba about 1898 as a Spanish soldier to fight the mambises rebels. After the Republic was established, Angel Castro stayed and became a farmer. He first married a woman whose surname was Argote and had several children by her. Later he set up a household with Lina Ruz, a woman who had been his servant. She bore him three boys and two girls: Fidel, Raúl, and Ramón; Emma and Juana.

A landowner, Angel Castro was comfortably off and his common-law wife, Lina Ruz, made it her business to see that her children received some education. Fidel studied with the Jesuits and distinguished himself as an athlete and member of the school debating team. Oddly enough, the final debate of his school years was over education in the Soviet Union: young Fidel harshly attacked Soviet education while José Ignacio Rasco, now an exiled Christian Democrat leader, defended it. Fidel proved fiery and eloquent. Even then it was clear he was leadership material.

As an adolescent, Castro was viscerally anti-Communist, so much so that he was the only border in Belén school who supported the Axis. Using a map that he kept in his dormitory, young Fidel followed the feats of the German army with fascination. But the object of his enthusiasm seems to have changed even before the war ended.

Castro’s political ideas really began to take shape in the mid-1940s, soon after he started studying law, thanks to his relationship with Alfredo Guevara, a young communist studying philosophy and literature. Unlike Guevara, Castro did not join the Party, but he did accept its radical diagnosis of the ills of Cuban society: ever since then he has taken it for granted that his country’s relative poverty is due to corrupt politicians, American imperialist greed, and the bad distribution of land; he also assumed that the eradication of these evils would lead to an immediate expansion of the economy and the strengthening of the country’s institutions.

But although his political baggage on entering university was limited to these few simple ideas, Castro never for a moment doubted that destiny had chosen him to play the role of a leader. This conviction soon brought him into violent confrontation with the young people who dominated the University Student Foundation. Even though at the time the country was ruled by a law-abiding and freely elected government, Havana University was a political cockpit. Gunfights and murders were common. Castro soon got involved in the violence, trying to kill a rival leader, Leonel Gómez, by shooting him in the stomach. During that period he was accused of two murders: one victim was Federation president Manolo Castro—no relation to Fidel—and the other a university guard sergeant, Fernández Caral. However, nothing could be proven in court.

In 1947 Fidel played a part—a humble one as a simple soldier—in a plan to invade the Dominican Republic and unseat Trujillo. Nothing came of it because international pressure obliged the Cuban government to disarm the would-be expeditionary forces and dismantle their organizations. The following year, Castro, along with other student leaders, was invited to an anti-imperialist get-together in Bogotá. His visit there coincided with the murder of Gaitán and the riots that led up to the savage confrontation between liberals and conservatives known as the bogotazo. While the bloodletting was going on Castro was arrested for trying to stir up a mutiny in a police barracks, but he was released from jail thanks to the good offices of the Cuban ambassador, Guillermo Belt, who managed to get him home aboard a cargo plane.

In 1948 Castro took his law degree and joined the Orthodox party, a populist organization whose ideology was vaguely social-democrat but that had a distinct penchant for striking radical postures. It was then that he married Mirtha Díaz Balart, the daughter of a prominent pro-Batista politician. The couple had a son, Fidelito, and went to the United States for a year. Castro toyed with the idea of studying political science at Columbia University in New York and forgetting Cuba for a while: he had too many enemies there and might easily lose his life in one of the vendettas among rival political gangs.

But Castro’s political vocation finally proved strong enough to overcome these promptings. He went back to the island with the aim of becoming a legislator. In 1951 he stood as a candidate for the House of Representatives for a Havana ward. His friends at the time thought him an indefatigable idealist; his enemies saw him as a dangerous gangster; both agreed he was a remarkable personality who would be sure to win fame if suitable circumstances arose but who also might easily come to an abrupt end with a bullet halting his turbulent progress.

On March 10, 1952, the kind of situation Castro could thrive in was created by General Fulgencio Batista who, together with a group of old military cronies, staged a coup d’éta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the English-Language Edition
• Prologue
• 1. The True Story of the Cuban Revolution
• 2. Anatomy of Power in Castro’s Cuba
• 3. A Revolution in Search of an Ideology
• 4. Cuban Military Imperialism
• 5. Beneficiaries of the Revolution
• 6. Economic Failure
• 7. Hidden Evils of Castroism
• 8. Freedom and Repression
• 9. The Revolution and the Intellectuals
• 10. Voting with Their Feet: Those Who Choose Exile
• 11. Anti-Castroism
• 12. Cuba and the United States
• 13. Destiny of the Cuban Revolution
• 14. Castro’s Cuba in Gorbachev’s Era: Factors That Weaken/Consolidate Castroism—Possible Outcomes
• Appendix: State of the Cuban Economy before Castro
• Selected Bibliography
• Index