Logo: Fidel Castro

Lesson 21: The Cuban Revolution

I. The Revolution

The Cuban Revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power in early 1959 has been one of the historic landmarks of 20th Century Latin America. It brought more profound and enduring changes than even the Mexican Revolution, involved the two superpowers (at one point bringing them to the verge of nuclear war), and because it set itself up as an exportable example, had considerable impact on a number of other Latin American nations.

Although there were surface similarities with the Mexican case, such as heavy foreign investments and a long dictatorship which established the conditions for revolt, the Cuban situation was quite different. For one, Cuba historically has been under the strong influence of an outside nation against which it has struggled to gain its full independence. First it was Spain, which maintained control of Cuba until the Spanish-American War of 1898. After the War the U.S. ran Cuba under a military administration for some time before giving Cuba a limited independence in which the U.S. retained the right to intervene and to control certain foreign policies under the Platt Amendment.

Beyond that, U.S. economic ties to Cuba were so strong that it was a classic case of a dependent neocolonial economy. U.S. companies controlled Cuba's principal crop, sugar, as well as the major hotels and gambling casinos that attracted large numbers of U.S. tourists across the ninety miles to Florida.

For many years before Castro's rise to power Cuba's politics had been under the direct or indirect control of Fulgencio Batista, a one-time Army sergeant who staged a successful coup in 1933, promoted himself to General, and ruled the country with a tight grip from then on.

Fidel Castro was an energetic, articulate and charismatic student leader, offended at the corruption of the Batista regime, and, typical of many revolutionaries, was an alienated and educated member of the middle class. He had been very active in student politics, and had been present in Colombia during the 1948 riots and revolutionary violence known as the "Bogotazo". In 1953 he led a gang of some 160 student revels in a quixotic and suicidal frontal attack on an army barracks in Santiago, Cuba (the date, 26 July 1953, still serves as the official title for Castro's movement). Most of the group were captured or killed. Castro was fortunate to have been spared and put on a show trial, where his defense ("History will absolve me") became one of the basic documents of his revolution. Batista felt secure enough to release Castro (and his brother Raul) and send them into exile in Mexico on the promise that they would not engage in any future political activities.

Once in Mexico, Castro proceeded to do just that, attracting a number of Cuban exiles as well as revolutionaries who had just left Guatemala with the fall of the Arbenz government. An Argentine medical student by the name of Ernesto "Che" Guevara was among them.

Castro had promised his followers that the end of the year 1956 would find him either dead or back in Cuba fighting against Batista. True to his word, in the last days of December of that year he and 81 followers made the passage from Mexico to southern Cuba on the small (normal capacity 16) and aging yacht "Granma". The landing was disastrous; they were quickly spotted by Batista's troops and almost wiped out before the twelve survivors could make it to the sanctuary of the Sierra Maestra mountains.

From there he waged a two-year hit-and-run guerrilla war against Batista, enlisting the support of peasants and finally city-dwellers who had been abused by Batista's repressive security forces. In the end the outcome was as much due to Batista's errors as it was to Castro's successes. Batista's troops had little luck pinning down the elusive guerrillas, and they took out their frustrations on opposition leaders, student groups, labor organizers, and anyone else they thought might be collaborating with Castro. The end result was to create more recruits for the guerrillas and to reduce international support for Batista until toward the end of 1958 even the U.S. cut off military assistance. On the last day of December 1958 Batista and a small group of family and friends flew off into exile, leaving the way clear for Fidel Castro and his increasingly large group of guerrillas and supporters to take over.

In January 1959 there was almost universal adulation for Castro in Cuba, and much admiration for him in Latin America and the United States. Predictably, however, when he moved to put a land reform and social welfare program into place he ran into increasing opposition from the Cuban upper class and from American firms with investments in Cuba. The U.S. government position under the Eisenhower administration quickly turned to opposition and then hostility as Castro's reforms led to increasing amounts of confiscated and nationalized U.S. investment, and as Castro turned to the Soviet Union and its allies for support. The final break came when Castro nationalized U.S. oil firms after they refused to refine Soviet oil. The Soviet Union was all too happy to quickly step up its level of support to include weapons and the implicit guarantee that it would help defend Cuba against attacks from the U.S..

By the time of the 1960 break with the United States the general outlines of Castro's program had become clear. The Revolution would involve nationalization of almost all sectors of the economy under a centralized collective arrangement. Leadership would be in the hands of a small number of Party officials, with Fidel at the head. The political system would be authoritarian and intolerant of internal opposition. There would be a leveling and redistribution of wealth, with a broad medical and welfare program that would cover all for free. Internationally there would be hostility to the United States and a corresponding swing towards the Soviet Union and its allies.

The Cuban Revolution, like the Mexican before it, also involved a cultural element. Instead of murals, the emphasis was on film, art, literature and sports. An apt symbol of the Revolution's interest in culture is the painter Wifredo Lam, of mixed Chinese, African and European descent. His political views made him unwelcome in pre-Castro Cuba, and he spent time in France and Spain (until the collapse of the Republic); he was closely associated with Picasso and the Surrealists. Castro's Revolution welcomed him back to Cuba, where he became one of its warmest supporters.

Castro's charisma and disdain for professional politicians led to what he called "direct democracy", in which the principal decisions were made by a small group at the top and then ratified by public acclaim in his dramatic and emotional speeches to the gathered thousands. By 1960 the reforms were beginning to threaten the interests of the middle class, many of whom went into exile in Florida.

In its last months the Eisenhower administration had begun to plan covert operations to eliminate Castro. Some of these involved bizarre assassination plots, but the most significant was a greatly amplified version of what had "worked" against the Guatemalan government of Arbenz in 1954. This would involve training, arming and using Cuban exiles to launch an invasion of Cuba in the expectation that there would be an internal uprising that would finally bring Castro down. Incoming President John F. Kennedy, who had talked a tough anti-Castro line in the 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, reluctantly allowed the plan to go forward, although he cut back the commitment of U.S. combat aircraft, a decision that was to prove fatal. The invasion force, operating from bases in Florida and Nicaragua, sailed into the Cuban Bay of Pigs in April 1961 and encountered a strong and well-trained Castro-led force that quickly defeated it. The uprising within Cuba never materialized, Castro's forces were prepared for the invasion, and without a heavy commitment of U.S. power (denied by Kennedy) there was no chance of success.

The U.S. turned next to commercial and political sanctions, including an economic blockade that continues to the present. This did not bring Castro down either, and in the long run only increased his links and dependence on the Soviet Union and its allies. In October 1962 Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev placed nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba, an act that brought a naval blockade and almost led to all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Castro's links to the Soviet Union led him to act as the Russian's surrogate in conflicts in Angola, Ethiopia and other parts of Africa, sending large numbers of Cuban troops to support Marxist regimes against opposition guerrillas and the Government of South Africa.

In 1980 Castro surprised the United States (and his own people) by briefly allowing Cubans to freely leave for the U.S.. The resulting flow, known as the "Mariel boatlift" for its port of exit, reached 125,000 before it was cut off. The Mariel exiles were different from the first wave of upper and middle class Cubans who had left in 1959-61; they were poorer, less educated, and included in their number were a small but troublesome, and potentially dangerous, group of criminals and mental institution inmates.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and disappearance of the Warsaw Pact Castro lost his chief patron. Trade with his former supporters in Eastern Europe and Russia was still possible, but only in terms of hard currencies which were in extremely short supply in Cuba.

The balance sheet on the Cuban Revolution is a mixed one, with the final results still not in. Assessments of the Revolution by Cubans themselves tend to be partisan and sometimes extreme, depending on whether one has gained or lost from the process.

On the positive side Castro can point with pride to the fact that the Revolution removed the class and social barriers that had been maintained since colonial days. Education, health and welfare benefits were for the first time available to all Cubans and were basically free. The corruption symbolized by the casinos, bars and houses of prostitution had disappeared. Cuba was a military power to be respected in the Caribbean, and for a considerable period of time its alliance with the Warsaw Pact checkmated U.S. military attempts to bring his regime down. Finally, Latin Americans of all political stripes acknowledged, and many admired, the way he had stood up to U.S. pressures ranging from plots to invasions to blockades.

On the negative side there have restrictions on freedoms and human rights under a regime whose control is far more totalitarian than the dictatorship that preceded it. Shortages and long waits for basic necessities abound. The average Cuban may not see extremes of rich and poor, but the overall feeling is one of hardship and sacrifice for an ideology which has been abandoned by most of the formerly Marxist states in the world. The respect that many Latin Americans have for Fidel is tinged by bitterness over the attempts that the Cuban government made to export its revolution to other nations via subversion and guerrilla warfare. There is also the reality that many of Cuba's most intelligent, educated and promising citizens have been forced to live outside their own country in a long and seemingly permanent exile.

II. Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Argentina, 1928-1967)

Guevara was an Argentine, born to a upper-middle-class family with leftist political views. He was educated as a doctor, but rather than starting a practice in Argentina he traveled to the revolutionary Guatemala of Arbenz and then to Mexico, where he joined up with Fidel Castro's movement. He was one of the twelve survivors of the original 1956 return to Cuba, and fought alongside Fidel

for the full period of guerrilla warfare in a dual capacity as doctor and guerrilla commander. After the triumph of the Revolution he was given important posts, such as head of the Agrarian Reform Institute and the National Bank. He was identified with the more radical group in Fidel's government, and favored the Maoist Peking line of Marxism over the more traditional Moscow line. In 1965 he mysteriously disappeared, and it later turned out that he had been fighting with rebels in the Congo. A year later he disappeared again to start a revolutionary "foco" in Bolivia. But his group of Cubans and other outsiders were never able to obtain a meaningful following among the Bolivian peasants, and he was finally captured by a Bolivian Army Ranger unit and executed in October 1967.

The selection which follows was taken from his 1960 book, Guerrilla Warfare, which was intended as a guide for other revolutionaries based on the triumphant Castro experience in Cuba.

Essence of Guerrilla Warfare.

The armed victory of the Cuban people over the Batista dictatorship has been, besides an epic triumph noted by the press the world over, a modifier of the old dogmas regarding the conduct of mass movements in Latin America. It demonstrated clearly the capacity of the people to liberate themselves, through guerrilla warfare, from a government that oppresses them.

We believe that the Cuban Revolution made three fundamental contributions to the conduct of revolutionary movements in Latin America. These are:

1st. Popular forces can win a war against the army.

2nd. It is not always necessary to wait for all the conditions for revolution to be present; the insurrectional "foco" can create them.

3rd. In underdeveloped South America, the armed struggle should basically be carried out in the countryside.

Of these three contributions, the first two go against the defeatist attitudes of revolutionaries or pseudo-revolutionaries who hide behind, and hide their inactivity behind, the pretext that nothing can be done against a professional army, as well as those who sit and wait mechanically for all the necessary objective and subjective conditions to be present, without doing anything to make them move faster. Even though these two ideas undoubtedly are today very clear for all the world to see, they were previously questioned and discussed in Cuba and probably will be in Latin America as well.

III. Horacio Quiroga: Psychological Stories

Horacio Quiroga was an Argentine writer (1878-1937) who is considered by many to be one of the best writers of short stories the country has produced. His technique, originality, and ability to create drama and tension in just a few lines, and then present us with an unexpected outcome as the story ends has earned him an envied reputation.

The geographic environment of most of Quiroga's stories is the northeastern Argentine province of Misiones, named after the Jesuit missions of colonial times. It is a hot, primitive jungle area, in which humans have to fight constantly against an environment that can crush them at any moment. Quiroga's themes are tragic: death, suicide, terror, insanity, and fatal accidents (especially with firearms).

Many of his stories have an autobiographical element to them, for his life was also tragic. Just a few months after Quiroga was born his father, a diplomat who was descended from the caudillo Facundo Quiroga, died in a shotgun accident in front of the baby Horacio. His stepfather also killed himself in front of Quiroga, who a few years later killed one of his best friends when a pistol he was examining went off accidentally. And his first wife, who had gone with him to live in Misiones, could not stand the solitude and living conditions there, and eventually poisoned herself. Finally, Quiroga too poisoned himself when he was told he was dying of cancer.

Two important influences on Quiroga were Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling, the former for his morbid fascination with death and tales of horror, and the latter because he placed his stories in the jungles of India, which seemed to Quiroga to be quite similar to those of Misiones.

Certain elements of Quiroga's tales are surrealistic, or at least involve a mixture of the real and the unreal, the impossible, or the psycho-pathological. We see an example of this in the story that follows. But in contrast with many of his contemporary Surrealist colleagues, Quiroga clearly lets the reader know the dividing line between the real world and the imaginary one.

"The Son" by Horacio Quiroga

It is a powerful summer day in Misiones, with all the sun, heat and stifling calm that the season can produce. Nature, fully open, feels satisfied with itself.

Like the sun, the heat, and the calm environment, the father also opens his heart up to nature.

"Be careful, son", he says, summarizing in that phrase all the advice that is necessary, and which his son understands fully.

"Yes, father", replies the boy, as he takes the shotgun, and loads shells into the pockets of his shirt, which he carefully buttons.

"Come back by lunch time" the father says.

"Yes, father" repeats the boy.

He balances the shotgun in his hand, smiles at his father, and kisses him on the head.

His father follows him with his eyes for a minute and then returns to his daily chores, happy in his son's joy.

He knows that his son, taught from his earliest days in the habits and precautions regarding danger, can handle a firearm and hunt whatever comes along. Although he is tall for his age, he is only thirteen. And he seems younger, judging from the blue eyes, still fresh with juvenile innocence.

The father didn't need to look up from his work to be able to follow his son's progress: he has crossed the red trail and he moves straight to the woods through the opening in the underbrush.

To hunt in the woods (at least to hunt fur-bearing quarry), you need more patience than his young pup can muster. After crossing the patch of woods, his son will walk around the line of cactus to the swamp, looking for doves, toucans, or perhaps herons, like the ones his friend Juan had found a few days before.

Alone now, the father smiles when he recalls the passion for hunting the two boys have. By themselves they sometimes bag a yacútoro, or at least a surucuá, and triumphantly return, Juan with his nine millimeter rifle he has given him, and his son to the house on the flat hilltop with his 16 gauge Saint-Etienne shotgun with quadruple lock and white powder.

He had been the same way. At thirteen he would have given his life to possess a shotgun. His son, now the same age, has one. And the father smiles.

Nevertheless, it is not easy for a widowed father, without any hope or faith in his life beside his son, to educate him as he has done, free in his short range of action, sure of his small feet and hands since he was four years old, conscious of the immensity of certain dangers and the shortcoming of his own powers.

That father had had to struggle mightily against what he considered his selfishness. It would be so easy for such a child to miscalculate, step into the void, and the son is lost!

The danger continues always for men at any age; but the threat diminishes if from an early age one is accustomed to rely only on one's own powers.

Thus the father has educated his son. And to achieve this he has had to resist not only his heart, but also his moral torments; because this father, of weak stomach and eyesight, has suffered hallucinations for some time.

His hallucinations have taken the form of both painful illusions as well as happy memories that should not have emerged from the nothingness in which they were secluded. The image of his own son has not escaped this torment. Once he saw him tumbling, covered with blood, after hammering on a bullet on the workbench, when in reality he had just been filing the buckle of his hunting belt.

Horrible things... But today, in the burning and vital day of summer, whose love the son seems to have inherited, the father is happy, calm and sure of the future.

At that moment, not far away, a shot rings out.

"The Saint-Etienne..." the father thinks as he recognizes the sound. "Two fewer doves in the woods..."

Without paying any more attention to the routine event, the man loses himself again in his work.

The sun, already high in the sky, continues to climb. Wherever one looks, everything vibrates with heat: rocks, earth, trees, the oven-heated thin air. A deep buzz fills everything and impregnates the environment as far as one can see, concentrating the attention of all life in that tropical area.

The father glances at his wrist: twelve noon. And he looks out at the woods.

His son should have returned by now. In the mutual confidence they have in each other, the father with the silver temples and the boy of thirteen, they do not lie to each other. When his son answers, "Yes, father, I'll do what you say", he knew he would return by noon, and the father smiled when he saw him leave.

But he has not returned.

The man returns to his work, forcing himself to concentrate on the task at hand. It is easy, so easy to lose track of time in the woods and sit down for a while on the ground in quiet rest...

Time has passed; it is now twelve thirty. The father comes out of his workshop, and as he rests his hand on the mechanic's workbench there rises from the depth of his memory the blast of the bullet in the vise, and in a snap, for the first time in the three hours that have passed, he realizes that since the single blast from the Saint-Etienne he has heard nothing more.. He has not heard the crunch of gravel under the familiar footstep. His son has not returned, and nature is there, halted at the edge of the woods, waiting for him...

Oh! A tempered character and a blind confidence in his son's education are not enough to push away the fatal specter which a father with sick vision sees rising from the edge of the woods. Distraction, forgetfulness, chance delay: none of those simple things which could explain his son's tardy return can now fit in the father's heart.

A shot, a single shot has been heard, and some time ago. After that the father has heard no sound, has seen no birds, has seen no one cross the clearing to tell him that in climbing a fence a great misfortune...

Hatless and without machete, the father goes out. He cuts through the underbrush, enters the woods, and follows along the line of cactus without finding the slightest trace of his son.

But nature remains still. And when the father has covered all the known hunting trails and has explored the swamp in vain, he is convinced that every step he takes brings him closer, inexorably, to the body of his son.

Not a single reproach does the father make, or lament. Only the cold, terrible and consuming reality: his son has died crossing a...

But where, where! There are so many fences there and the woods are so dirty!... Oh, so dirty!... And all it takes is a little carelessness in crossing a wire fence with the shotgun in your hand...

The father muffles a cry. He has seen something rise in the air. No, it is not his son, no!.. And he turns, this way, and that...

Nothing would be gained by seeing the color of his skin or the anguish of his eyes. The man has yet to call out to his son. Although his heart screams out for him, his throat is mute. He knows full well that the simple act of pronouncing his name, of calling him out loud, would be the confession of his death...

"Sonny!" the cry suddenly escapes from his lips. And if the voice of a man of character is capable of crying, we should in pity cover our ears in the face of the anguish that rings in that voice. No one and nothing answers. Under the burning red rays of the sun, the man, who has now aged ten years, searches for the son who has just died.

"Sonny! My little boy!..." he cries out in diminutives which pour out from the depths of his soul.

Before, in a time of joy and peace, the father has suffered the hallucination of seeing his son tumbling with his forehead split by a nickel-jacketed bullet. And now, in every dark corner of the forest he see flashes of wire; and at the foot of a fence post, with the empty shotgun at his side, he sees his...

"Sonny!... My boy!..."

The forces which allow a poor hallucinating father to surrender to the most horrible nightmare also have their limits. And he feels that his limits are being broached, when he suddenly sees his son burst out from a side path.

A thirteen year old boy can see from fifty meters the expression of his father, machete-less, in the woods, and he speeds up the pace with damp eyes.

"Sonny!..." murmurs the man. And, exhausted, he falls to the ground, sitting on the white sand, wrapping his arms around the legs of his son.

The boy, his legs immobile, remains standing; and as if understanding his father's pain, slowly caresses his head:

"Poor dad..."

Time passes. It is almost three o'clock. Together, now, father and son head home.

"How come you didn't see the time from the sun?" the father continues to murmur.

"I did look, dad... But when I was about to return I saw John's herons and I followed them...

"What you have put me through, sonny!"

"Daddy...", the son also murmurs.

And after a long silence:

"And the herons, did you kill them?" the father asks.

"No"...

A small detail, after all. Under the burning air and sky, in the open through the clearing, the man returns home with his son, around whose shoulders, almost at the height of his own, is wrapped the happy arm of his father. He returns bathed in sweat, and even though broken in body and soul, he smiles with happiness.

He smiles with hallucinating happiness... Because the father walks alone. He has found no one, and his arm is poised in the air. Because behind him, at the foot of a fence post and with his legs in the air, tangled in the barbed wire, his beloved son lies on his back, face to the sun, dead since ten o'clock that morning.