Makers of the Twentieth Century: Castro
Alfred Stepan continues our series on Makers of The Twentieth Century, arguing that the
romantic acclaim of Fidel Castro as a revolutionary guerrilla leader disregards the
practical achievements and structural changes he has brought to Cuba and distorts his
world-view of revolution.
Whether he is depicted as a romantic guerrilla in the Cuban Sierra, a mercenary pawn in Angola,
or an exporter of arms to Nicaragua, the stress is usually put on his military role in discussions of
Fidel Castro. Compared with Lenin or Mao, Castro had no early concern with creating a party
organisation; to this day, despite his reputation as a rhetorician, there is virtually no Castroite
corpus of social and political doctrine. Thus Castro appears to many observers to be the most
‘caudillo-like’, the most militarily 'voluntaristic' of the great modern revolutionaries. While certainly
not without some validity, this perception of Castro distorts the structural and political context of
his pre-revolutionary strategy and post-revolutionary policies within Cuba. Internationally, it
prevents an appreciation of his involvement in the promotion of revolutions in countries as diverse
as Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua where, despite his military contribution, his independent
ideological and political concerns may well weigh more heavily in the historian's balance.
My stress on political and structural factors may strike many as particularly perverse if we are
concerned with Castro's role in the making of the Cuban revolution. Perverse because it runs
counter to the famous interpretation of that revolution by Régis Débray in his Revolution in the
Revolution , a work that was energetically distributed by the Cuban government throughout the
hemisphere as the authorised account of the revolution. The book was based on extensive
conversations with Castro and privileged access to the archives of the revolution. It was a paean
to the military aspects of the Cuban revolutionary struggle. Some quotations will capture the
flavour of the argument:
A significant detail: during the two years of warfare, Castro did not hold a single political rally in
his zone of operations.
Under present conditions the most important propaganda is successful military action.
One must go from the military foco to the political movement.
The guerrilla movement could and has to provide a military solution to the political problem.
Unlike the guerrilla ‘base areas’ characteristic of the Chinese and the Vietnamese revolutionaries.
Debray stressed that the Cuban contribution to revolutionary theory was the foco - a constantly
moving rural military centre. He quoted Castro as saying that until the later stages of the
revolution the guerrilla base was simply the ‘territory within which the guerrilla happens to be
moving; it goes where he goes'. There was also an insistence on the intrinsic military and moral
superiority of the rural over the urban revolutionary way. Indeed, not only was there a dichotomy
between the two but an inherent conflict. The city was ‘a cemetery of revolutionaries and
resources'. On the contribution of the middle class and traditional political groups to the making of
the revolution, the book was virtually silent, except to note approvingly Castro's brusque rejection
in December, 1957, of an overture to make a broad, multi-class political alliance called the Pact of
Miami.
The picture of Castro that emerges both from the scholarly monographs and from the
revolutionary diaries, published in 1979 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Cuban
revolution, provides some obvious contradictions to the authorised version by Debray. They give
plenty of evidence of the political tactics and overarching revolutionary strategy used by Castro in
his march to power. Far from not holding a single political meeting, we now know that in the last
nine months of the guerrilla struggle a small scale literacy campaign was conducted, a Peasant
Congress attended by four hundred peasants organised, and the Tumbasiete Political School
instituted to train people to distribute leaflets and revolutionary propaganda. These activities were
only possible because in March, 1958, a political front, known as the Frank Pais Second Front
and similar in conception to the Chinese fixed guerrilla bases, had in fact been created. In its nine
months of existence, its guerrillas constructed four hundred small schools run by a revolutionary
department of education, built twenty field hospitals, administered by a revolutionary department
of health, and constructed fourteen airstrips. A close reading of the sources shows that while
indeed the Havana-led general strike of April, 1958, was a failure, the urban guerrillas,
headquartered in Cuba's second largest city, Santiago de Cuba, did play a critical role in
supplying manpower, guns and intelligence at vital moments throughout the guerrilla struggle.
And finally, despite Debray's emphasis on the centrality of the military in the revolution, Castro
was, of course, a master of the political.
Early in the revolution, Castro's Radio Rebelde bad succeeded in reaching much of the Cuban
population. Instead of rejecting contacts or alliances with the middle class, Castro was in fact
adept at caching out to them. The interview with Castro by Herbert Matthews of the New York
Times in the mountains in February, 1957, is the best known example of this tactic. A less well
known, but domestically more important, example of Castro's bid to build broad, multi-class
alliances is his participation in the construction of the Pact of Caracas, which was signed by
almost all the anti-Batista groups in Cuba, from the former President, Carlos Prio of the Autentico
Pirty, to trade union leaders from the United Labour Front. In broad terms, this Pact laid the
groundwork for a more unified anti-Batista military struggle, the establishment of a provisional
government after his fall, and a minimum programme of social reform. The specific details of the
Pact included a consensus agreement that the well known lawyer, Miro Cardona, would serve as
Coordinator of the 'Junta of Unity', Judge Urrutia as the 'President of Cuba in Arms', and Fide1
Castro, the most important insurgent signatory fighting within Cuba, as Commander-in-Chief of
the Forces of the Revolution. In short, Castro's strategy in making the Cuban revolution was to
incorporate the bourgeoisie and to present himself as their only military hope. In fact, Urrutia did
serve as the Provisional President of revolutionary Cuba, Cardona as Prime Minister, and
Castro's initial position was Commander-in-Chief of the Rebel Army.
Once the Pact was sealed, Castro, as the recognised military leader of the anti-Batista forces on
the island, began to receive aid from a variety of middle-class groups, especially from the former
President, Carlos Prio, who directed supplies from Miami via the Caribbean to Castro's mountain
headquarters in the Sierra. Most of it went in fact to the airstrips built by the Frank Pais Second
Front. Batista, defeated politically and psychologically but by no means militarily, fled Cuba on
New Year's Eve, 1958, less than six months after the Pact of Caracas was signed.
Thus Castro began his career as a maker of the modern world not by following a military, rural
strategy based on the foco , which rejected alliances with other groups, but by developing an
integrated, rural-urban political-military network. Castro established his own broad base and
eventually achieved recognition by the most important middle-class, labour and political party
groups as the island-wide, revolutionary co-ordinator against their common enemy, Batista. In
almost all its emphases, in fact, the account authorised by Castro of how the revolution in Cuba
was made is misleading. The question is - was it self-deception or a revolutionary tactic?
To be frank, I am not completely sure. However, subject to further testimony which could clarify
the matter, the most plausible explanation is that the 'official' account of the revolution was drawn
up in the context of tensions within the Soviet-Cuban alliance and Cuba's decision to embark on a
new phase in her export of revolution to Latin America.
Revolution in the Revolution? was released in Havana in January, 1967. Castro's relations with
the Soviet Union had been souring since 1965, when the Soviets failed to react strongly to the
American military intervention in the Dominican Republic, to protest adequately at the American
bombing of North Vietnam, or to support the export of revolution to Latin America. In January,
1966, Castro sponsored a Tri-Continental Congress in Havana where Cuba's divergencies with
the Soviet Union and the traditional Communist parties of Latin America began to surface. Just as
Yugoslavia's break with the Soviet Union had stimulated her search for an ideologically distinctive
position, so the conflict between Cuba and Russia in the period 1966 to 1968 coincided with, and
probably stimulated, a Cuban search for doctrinal originality, an originality built into the Debray
version of the revolution. Finally, Che Guevara had secretly begun his campaign in Bolivia a
month before the release of Revolution in the Revolution? Thus the account of Cuba's revolution
authorised by Castro should be read not as an interpretation of how the Cuban revolution was
made, but as a primer by Castro, Guevara and Debray on how to make revolution under
conditions in which opposition from traditional Communist parties was to be expected. One must
also remember that Guevara, furious at the North American attack on Vietnam and eager to divert
American energies, saw the revolution in Bolivia as a way of sparking 'one, two, three, many
Vietnams'.
The voluntaristic, military dimension of the Cuban revolution is not found primarily in Castro, but
in Castro as interpreted by Debray and in Che Guevara himself. The Che Guevara who was killed
in Bolivia was a Guevara attempting voluntaristic military acts with almost no overt political
connections with national Bolivian social groups, a Che Guevara who was attempting to create a
Cuban-led military movement among non-Spanish speaking Bolivian peasants, a Che Guevara
who was not a revolutionary 'fish in the water' (as Mao advised he should be) but are isolated,
almost lumbering animal out of his element, an easy prey for the Green Beret-trained counterinsurgents. The book by Debray was not a cynical deception, but a deadly misperception of the
relationships between the possibilities of revolutionary voluntarism, social structures and politics.
Successful revolutionaries change structures by their acts of courage and will. But these
successful acts take place within existing structures. For Fidel Castro, this has been true of his
politics just as much after as before the revolution. A practical revolutionary as opposed to a
theoretician, his genius has been to build upon, exploit and finally transform elements of the prerevolutionary social structure for his own revolutionary ends. The simplest example of this has
been his use of television. Castro was the first revolutionary to come to power in a technologically
advanced society. Despite the existence of great social and political inequalities, Cuba had by
1958 the third highest per capita income in Latin America and more television sets per capita than
France. Unlike many African countries, where no more than 35 per cent of the population speaks
the same language, all Cubans spoke Spanish. In addition, the island was small, with good air
and road links. The potential for communication of revolutionary messages was there, and Castro
exploited it to the full. The perception abroad that he harangues his audiences misses the political
significance of his speeches. At his best he talks softly, intimately, conveying a sense of sharing
his thoughts about a current crisis with those citizens present in the plaza or watching throughout
the island on television. Some of the major initiatives of Castro's government, as well as some of
its more important institutions, such as the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, grew
out of such dialogue.
The relationship between social structures and Castro's revolutionary politics is even clearer in
the case of agriculture. In the Soviet Union collectivisation generated great resistance and the
government responded with massive repression. Revolutionary Cuba, on the other hand,
collectivised without encountering rural resistance; indeed, collectivisation generated increased
levels of support from rural workers, and today Cuba has one of the most collectivised agricultural
systems in the world. How did Castro manage this, especially since, while in the Sierra Maestra,
he had promised to distribute individual plots of land to the landless? In this case, the fact that
most rural workers had worked on sugar plantations had a special significance. The rural workers
were as much members of a rural proletariat as they were peasants, but many were unemployed
for six or even eight months of the year during the dead season that follows the end of the sugar
harvest. Such a work force could have demanded individual plots. But Castro urged them to
organise collective farms by arming that he could transform the expropriated plantations into
diversified, rural productive communities that would create full-time employment and provide their
members with the collective services of schools, public health stations, and stores, services which
would be almost impossible to deliver to scattered, individual farmers.
To a large extent Castro fulfilled his promise. With farmers of lands beneath the size established
for compulsory collectivisation, Castro used face-to-face persuasion rather than force to induce
them to join collectives or more decentralised co-operatives. He recognised that since for these
farmers the pre-revolutionary structures had not made them into a semi-proletariat, compulsory
collectivisation was beyond the realm of the politically possible. Rather than use force he
accepted the objective limits to the creation of new revolutionary institutions imposed by prerevolutionary structures.
How was Castro able to win wide support for what became a Communist revolution in a Catholic
country, while in Poland the Catholic Church remains a major obstacle to the legitimacy of
Communism? The main difference between Cuba and Poland is that Castro was able to link his
revolution to the major themes of Cuban nationalism. In his speeches he refers constantly to the
Cuban patriots of the nineteenth century, such as Jos éMarti, and attempts to show how the
revolution of 1958 is the logical fulfilment of the revolutions of 1895 and 1932, both of which many
Cubans view as true revolutions that were thwarted by the United States. In Poland, the
Communist government is less nationally authentic in origin. It came to power largely by
imposition not only by a foreign power but a power that was an historic enemy of Poland. The
Church in Poland had often been, and is now, a repository of Polish nationalism, and remains a
powerful ideological competitor to the Communist government. In Cuba, by contrast, the long
nineteenth-century struggle for independence was waged by Cuban nationals against Spain and
the Spanish slave holders with whom the Church was closely identified. The Church emerged
from these wars particularly weak in the countryside, especially among the rural working class.
The result was that, even before Castro came to power, the base of the Catholic Church in Cuba
was one of the narrowest of any country in Latin America. By the 1950s this base was largely
urban and upper middle class, precisely the social strata from which came the bulk of the 800,000
or so people – 10 per cent of the total population – who left the island after the revolution. Thus,
despite the absence of any sustained institutional or ideological attack against the Church of the
sort that emerged in Mexico during its revolution, the Church in Cuba was left with its physical
infrastructure intact after the revolution but with its constituency enfeebled. The interaction
between Communism and nationalism, which gave strength to the Catholic Church in Poland and
made it critical to the political process, worked in the opposite direction in Cuba. As a result the
Church was weakened and made marginal. By 1968 Poland had fifty-two priests per 100,000
people, giving the country one of the highest number of priests per capita in the world, while
Cuba, with three priests per 100,000 had the lowest ratio in Latin America. The Church's antinationalist legacy and weak social base meant that Catholicism was no serious obstacle to
Castro's attempt to create new revolutionary values and institutions. To a great extent, and
especially since the mid-1960s, Castro has avoided any governmental attack on what remains of
the Catholicism in Cuba.
Turning now to the realm of international politics, what are we to make of the fact that Castro has
committed his revolutionary support, and at times troops, to revolutionary causes around the
world? What weight should we attach to political, ideological, diplomatic or purely military factors?
Many policy analysts subscribe to the view that in Africa Cuba is acting simply as a Soviet proxy
or 'hired gun'. They emphasise once again the military dimension of Cuba's international role,
though even in this role Cuba is taken to be dependent on Soviet support. But such an
interpretation does an injustice to the complexity of Cuba's ideological and political history, and to
the strength and variety of Castro's commitments to international solidarity. While a case can
certainly be made that Castro followed the Soviet line in Ethiopia, one must not forget Cuba's
leng history of initiatives abroad. In 1960, for example, only a year and a half after the success of
the Cuban revolution, Castro sent arms to the Algerian Liberation Front. In 1961, he established a
military mission in Ghana, and in the mid-to-late 1960s, against strong Soviet resistance, he
supported armed revolution in Latin America. Castro was also perhaps the first head of state to
establish an embassy to the Vietcong in South Vietnam, right at the height of the US armed
commitment. In 1973, when Soviet aid was described as inadequate by a Southern Yemen rebel
leader, the Cubans responded by providing more extensive aid than the Soviets.
In one of the most famous instances of Cuba's supposed mercenary activity – Angola in 1975 – a
plausible case can be made for an original Cuban foreign policy. Since 1966 Cuba had
maintained close personal and political ties with the top MPLA revolutionary leadership, a
relationship which includecl an independent arms and training programme within Cuba and in the
Congo-Brazzaville. Moreover, Soviet aid to the MPLA began to diminish in 1972 and for a while in
1974 stopped altogether. The Soviets ultimately supported Castro's decision to increase Cuba's
presence by sending combat troops to reinforce the MPLA, which was retreating under the attack
in October, 1975, of a South African armed column that had already penetrated several hundred
kilometres into Angolan territory. Available accounts indicate, nonetheless, that the first major
contingent of Cuban combat troops was transported to Angola in a Batistavintage Dutch ship, two
Cuban merchant marine ships and a number of Cuba's old Bristol Britannia turbo-prop planes.
The point worth stressing is that Castro's foreign policy objectives and ideological preferences in
Angola played a significant part in determining Cuba's actions. In fact the speed and vigour of
Castro's commitment to the MPLA may well have drawn the Soviets more deeply into the conflict
than would otherwise have been the case. Cuba, rather than being the military surrogate of the
Soviet Union, may well have seized the political initiative.
Despite continuing economic difficulties, Castro continues to play a controversial international
role, witness the Nicaraguan revolution. But the weight of Castro's purely military influence is
often overestimated and misunderstood. The Sandinista Guerrillas in Nicaragua began their
offensive against the Somoza régime in 1960 under the strong ideological influence of Castro. By
the late 1960s the guerrillas, following a predominantly rural-military strategy similar to that
advocated in Revolution in the Revolution? found themselves isolated and far from victory. Their
success grew in the 1970s, as other social groups within Nicaragua, starting with the Church and
then the Chamber of Commerce, and eventually other countries, such as Panama, Costa Rica
and the members of the Andean Pact, joined in the anti-Somoza struggle. Castro, by his
example, his internal reforms, his convictions, as well as his arms, did stimulate the Nicaraguan
revolution, but US policy makers were so preoccupied with Cuban and Sandinista military factors
that they neglected to see the internal weaknesses of the régime and the national alliances that
were shaping the balance of forces. As in Cuba, victory came to the guerrillas only after they
were able to co-ordinate urban and rural insurgents, and win support from the middle classes. To
say that Cuban military support was decisive to the 'Nicaraguan revolution misses the social and
political factors at work in Nicaragua, just as Debray's interpretation of the Cuban revolution is to
miss the political dimension of Castro's strategy in Cuba.
Will Fidel Castro continue to play an energetic role in the world? One area where there is
significant potential for Cuban influence is the Caribbean. When Fidel Castro came to power the
only independent island countries in the Caribbean were Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Rapid decolonisation by England, and to a lesser extent by the Netherlands and France, ushered
in a period of proliferation of new 'mini-states' – Grenada (1974), Surinam (1975), Dominica
(1978), St. Vincent and the Grenadines (1979), and St. Lucia (1979). By the end of the 1980s the
number of independent countries in the region could reach twenty. Cuba is by far the largest and
the most powerful of these states. To the extent that many of the mini-states have substantial
black populations and major problems of unemployment and national integration, the Cuban
model could well prove extremely important to the region. There is no doubt that in general Cuba
will be a serious contestant for regional influence,along with Venezuela and the United States.
But Castro faces problems as well as possibilities. Cuba's withdrawal of its bid in 1980 for a seat
on the Security Council of the United Nations (following the loss of a dozen or so vital votes from
Third World countries who wanted to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) complicates
Castro's leadership of the Conference of Non-aligned Nations. It goes without saying that
Castro's continued overseas military connection with Russia impedes normalisation of relations
with the United States.
Finally, Castro's great initial victories within Cuba involved the redistribution of existing wealth and
the mobilisation of the people from above. If the Cuban model is to retain its appeal in the 1980s,
Castro must address successfully the issue not of mobilisation but of participation, and not of
redistribution but of growth. Failure in these two areas will decrease not only the external but also
the internal attractiveness of Castro's revolution.
Further Reading
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Ramon Bonachia and Marta San Martin, The Cuban Insurrection 1952-59 , Transaction
Books (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1974)
Richard R. Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba , Stanford University
Press (Stanford, California, 1969)
Jorge I. Dominguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution , The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press (Cambridge, Massachussets, 1978)
Régis Débray, Revolution in the Revolution? , trans. Grove Press (New York, 1967)
About the Author
Alfred Stepan is Professor of Political Science and has the Chair in Latin America Studies at Yale.