Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
How does one reconcile individual effort with the needs of society? We again have to recall what each of our lives was like, what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any other public health function, prior to the revolution. We have to do so with profound critical enthusiasm. And we will then conclude that almost everything we thought and felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and that a new type of human being should be created. And if each one of us is his own architect of that new human type, then creating that new type of human being—who will be the representative of the new Cuba—will be much easier.
A few days later, Che met with René Dumont, a French Marxist economist who was trying to help Cuba in its difficult conversion to socialism. After extensive travels around the country, Dumont had concluded that one of the biggest problems of the newly established agricultural cooperatives was that their workers did not feel they were owners of anything. He urged Che to consider a scheme whereby the workers who did additional labor during the off-season to maintain the cooperatives would be paid, giving them a sense of co-ownership.
According to Dumont, Che reacted violently to the idea. It was not a sense of ownership that Cuban workers needed, he said, but a sense of
responsibility, and he spelled out what this meant. Che had, Dumont wrote, “a sort of ideal vision of Socialist Man, who would become a stranger to the mercantile side of things, working for society and not for profit. He was very critical of the industrial success of the Soviet Union, where, he said, everybody works and strives and tries to go beyond his quota, but only to earn more money. He did not think the Soviet Man was a new sort of man. He did not find him any different, really, than a Yankee. He refused to consciously participate in the creation in Cuba ‘of a second American society.’” As far as Dumont could see, Che seemed to be advocating skipping stages in Cuba’s socialist transformation of society by going directly from capitalism to Communism, much as Mao had tried to do in China in 1956 with his radical Great Leap Forward forced collectivization. “In short, Che was far ahead of his time—in thought, he had already entered a Communist stage.”
Che now openly acknowledged the Communist influences in Cuba’s revolution while engaging in some heavy revisionism to prove that they had come about of their own accord. It was only after he and his comrades had fought against the encirclement and annihilation tactics of Batista’s army in the Sierra Maestra, he claimed, that “a pamphlet of Mao’s fell into our hands” and the rebels discovered they had been fighting with much the same tactics Mao had used against a kindred foe. Similarly, it was seeing the needs of the peasants of the Sierra Maestra that brought the rebel leaders to the threshold of political enlightenment. Was the revolution Communist? he asked rhetorically. “In the event that it were Marxist—and hear carefully that I say Marxist—it would be so because [the revolution] discovered the paths signaled by Marx through its own methods.” Che was going much farther than Fidel; it would still be nine months before
el jefe máximo
publicly acknowledged that his revolution had a “socialist nature.”
If there was growing disenchantment among some of Fidel’s old allies—that summer several more of his former comrades in arms resigned their posts—the disenchantment was also spreading to the PSP. For all the gains it had made since January 1959, it was clear that the Communist Party was becoming increasingly subordinated to Fidel. His preeminence had been blessed by Khrushchev, who reportedly sent him a private note in May to the effect that the Kremlin “does not consider any party to be an intermediary” between Fidel and itself. Communist or not, what was being erected in Cuba was an old-fashioned personality cult.
Bohemia
’s owner and editor, Miguel Ángel Quevedo, who had experienced a loss of faith since comparing Fidel to Christ the year before, shut down his magazine and fled the country. Before he left, he accused Fidel of delivering Cuba into a shameful state of “Russian vassalage.” Miró Cardona,
the former prime minister, also left for the United States, where he soon joined the anti-Castro forces. A mass anticommunist rally was held in Santiago by the Juventud Católica; a priest and some of the group’s members were captured after a gun battle in which two policemen were killed. Cardinal Arteaga published a pastoral letter that was harshly critical of the government. This time, Fidel responded, complaining of the Church’s “systematic provocations.”
As the U.S. presidential election entered its final stretch, the fencing between Washington and Havana accelerated. Cuba had become a central issue in the campaign, with each of the candidates—Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy—promising to be tougher against Cuba than his opponent would be. Kennedy ridiculed the Eisenhower administration’s “do-nothing” policies that had brought about the present crisis;
his
administration, he said, would take firm action to restore “democracy” in Cuba.
Kennedy’s charges hit a nerve. The White House pushed through bills to impose sanctions against countries that bought Cuban sugar with American loans and to cut off security assistance to nations that gave
any
aid to Cuba. A debate over “Who lost Cuba?” ensued at the State Department. Then, the United States took its case to the Organization of American States, and, dangling the promise of a new foreign aid handout at a conference of OAS foreign ministers in Costa Rica, pushed through a unanimous declaration condemning any intervention in the hemisphere by “an extra-continental power,” a clear reference to Cuba’s growing partnership with the Soviet Union.
Fidel reacted to the “San José Declaration” with passionate indignation. On September 2, he made what became known as his Havana Declaration, outlining Cuba’s position in the hemisphere as a revolutionary example, and, without using the word “socialist,” proclaimed Cuba’s determination to defend the rights of the oppressed by fighting against exploitation, capitalism, and imperialism. He added that if the United States dared attack his country, he would welcome Khrushchev’s proffered missiles. Finally, he announced, his government would officially recognize Communist China.
Fidel followed up the Havana Declaration with a rowdy trip to New York for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. This time, he took pains to be as irritating as possible. He camped out in a hotel in Harlem, the Theresa, on 125th Street, claiming to show solidarity with oppressed black Americans. He played host to Khrushchev, who gave him a bear hug, and met with such “anti-imperialists” as Kwame Nkrumah, Nasser, and Nehru. The Soviet-bloc presidents of Poland and Bulgaria also paid calls on him. In the General Assembly, Fidel and Khrushchev formed
a mutual-admiration society. They echoed each other’s speeches, lauding the Cuban revolution, accusing the United States of aggression, calling for global nuclear disarmament, and arguing for a revamped, more nonaligned United Nations.
The biggest crisis facing the UN at that moment was in the Congo. Belgium had granted its former colony independence at the end of June, but in the ensuing violent turmoil, Belgian troops had occupied much of the country. The Soviets, the Americans, and the UN itself had intervened in support of various factions. Joseph Mobutu, the Congolese army’s chief of staff, who was supported by the CIA, had taken power in a coup on September 14 and ordered the Soviets to leave the country. Khrushchev protested against the UN’s involvement in the situation. Essentially, he accused the secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, of being a Western stooge. The Cuban delegation cheered him on. Fidel received attention for giving the longest recorded speech in United Nations history, clocked at well over four hours. He and his bombastic entourage were dubbed “the Greatest Show on Earth” by the press.
Fidel flew back to Havana on a borrowed Soviet Ilyushin after his own aircraft were impounded in consequence of a suit from an ad agency in Miami regarding unpaid bills. He soon began dismantling the last vestiges of American influence while simultaneously tightening the revolution’s controls. On September 28, he created the Committees to Defend the Revolution (CDRs)—a nationwide network of civic organizations. The inhabitants of each block in every town and city in Cuba formed a committee to ensure the implemention of revolutionary decrees and to provide grassroots vigilantes for the state security apparatus.
The U.S. embassy in Havana began advising American citizens to leave the island. Recruitment and arms training for the national militia—according to Fidel, already more than 200,000 strong—had become the new national priority.
Ironically, the sheer number of Cuban exiles who now wanted to take up arms
against
Fidel was causing some headaches for the CIA. In Miami, Justo Carrillo resigned from the Americans’ anti-Castro alliance, upset at the growing influx of ex-
batistíanos
. There were now some 600 men training in the Guatemalan camps, with smaller groups receiving specialized guerrilla training in Panama and Louisiana. In Havana, Manuel Ray’s group carried out a daring assault on La Cabaña and freed some of the officers imprisoned with Huber Matos; afterward, Ray managed to escape to the United States. What was lacking in all these disparate efforts was any degree of cohesiveness or a leader strong enough to unite and bend the others to his will; in short, the anti-Fidelistas didn’t have a Fidel.
In early October, a group of armed Cubans and an American were captured in Oriente after a gun battle with government troops, and a few days later Cuban soldiers captured a cache of weapons and ammunition dropped by a CIA plane in the Escambray mountains. There were now as many as a thousand rebels in the Escambray, sustained by CIA airdrops of arms and supplies. They were being helped on the ground by the American expatriate mercenary William Morgan and one of his old comrades, the ex– Second Front warlord Jesús Carreras. Having learned well the lesson of his own ordeal in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel ordered the army and the militias to carry out a mass evacuation of the area’s peasantry to isolate the rebels from sources of food and intelligence. Before long, most of the rebels, among them Morgan and Carreras, had been either wiped out or captured and shot by firing squads, although the Escambray would remain a focus of counter-revolutionary activity for several more years.
Che, Raúl, and Fidel attended the eleventh-anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People’s Republic of China with the head of China’s new trade legation to Cuba. Trade deals were signed with Hungary and Bulgaria. Fidel invited Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to visit Cuba again, and they did, but this time they weren’t so entranced. “Havana had changed; no more nightclubs, no more gambling, and no more American tourists; in the half-empty Nacional Hotel, some very young members of the militia, boys and girls, were holding a conference. On every side, in the streets, the militia was drilling,” de Beauvoir wrote. The atmosphere was tense with rumors of invasion, and a notable air of repressive uniformity was seeping into Cuban life. When Sartre and de Beauvoir asked workers at a clothing mill how their lives had benefited from the revolution, a union leader quickly stepped forward to speak on their behalf, parroting the government’s dogma. In the cultural arena, Soviet-style “socialist realism” had arrived; writers told the French couple that they had begun to engage in self-censorship, and the poet Nicolás Guillén said that he considered “all research into technique and form counterrevolutionary.” They left after a few days, with de Beauvoir concluding, “[In Cuba there was] less gaiety, less freedom, but much progress on certain fronts.” As an example of the latter, she cited a visit to an agricultural cooperative that had impressed her; still, “the ‘honeymoon of the revolution’ was over.”
On October 11, Che summoned Cuba’s richest man, the sugar magnate Julio Lobo, to his office. The owner of vast tracts of productive land—now expropriated—and thirteen sugar mills, Lobo was a force to be reckoned with.
He was a cultured man, famous for his collection of art treasures and Napoleonica, and was something of an enigma, having refused to leave Cuba or lend his voice to the flood of anti-Castro protests. Fidel was going to seize the sugar mills in a few days, and Che wanted to persuade Lobo to stay in the country. Alfredo Menéndez, who administered the state’s sugar mills for INRA, was advised in advance of the offer Che was going to make Lobo: a monthly salary of $2,000 and the right to keep any one of his palatial homes. “We really didn’t want him to leave,” Menéndez said. “All that talent was what Che wanted.”
The very notion of offering such a wage to a man whose fortune was estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars might appear absurd, but perhaps more than anything else, it reflected Che’s singular devotion to his ideal, and his belief that others—even Julio Lobo—might share it. Troubled by the brain drain of experienced technicians and administrators from Cuba, he had often tried to persuade skilled personnel—men such as Napoleón Padilla—to stay, promising to honor their capitalist-era salaries. In terms of the “new Cuba,” the salary he was offering Lobo was high; he himself had refused the $1,000 monthly salary due him as president of the National Bank, as a matter of principle, accepting only the $250 paid him in his capacity as a
comandante
.
Che informed Lobo that the time had come for him to make a decision. The revolution was Communist, and Lobo, as a capitalist, could not remain as he was; either he could stay and be a part of it, or he had to go. Lobo gamely pointed out that Khrushchev believed in “peaceful coexistence” between the world’s competing political and economic systems, to which Che replied that such a proposition “was possible between nations, but not
within
one.”
Che then laid out his offer. Lobo was invited to become the administrator of Cuba’s sugar industry. He would lose his properties but be allowed to keep the income from one of his mills. Lobo said he needed time to think about it, but he had already made up his mind. He went home, and two days later flew to Miami. The following day, the government nationalized all of Cuba’s banks and large commercial, industrial, and transportation businesses. All of Lobo’s sugar mills and homes and their contents were seized, and his Napoleonica collection eventually becoming a state museum.