Steve Wasserman on Fidel Castro

Posted on Apr 10, 2008

By Steve Wasserman

(Page 2)

    Castro’s zeal to remake Cuba was seen by sympathizers as a patriotic project, less to do with Karl Marx than with Jose Marti, the founding father of the country. It was a posture that won him many adherents, especially among the men and women of Cuba’s middle and upper-middle class whose political aspirations had been thwarted by Batista’s March 10, 1952, coup. As for Castro’s anti-Yankee sentiments, he came by them honestly. Years later, the U.S.-made bombs that Batista used against Castro and his men would harden his attitude. In a letter from his redoubt in the Sierra Maestra to Celia Sanchez, the daughter of a dentist and his chief courier between the rebel army and the city underground, Castro wrote of his anger toward the United States: “When I saw the rockets that they fired on Mario’s house, I swore that the Americans are going to pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war is over, I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of my own: the war I’m going to fight against them.”

    The long, near-Talmudic debate over when and how Castro became a Communist is largely beside the point. What was clear from the start was the man’s radical disposition and his refusal to be cowed into a complacent reformism. His defining ideological characteristic was his implacable anti-imperialism. His sympathies were plain. These sympathies and much else—from reminiscences of his childhood to his thoughts on the crackup of the Soviet Union and the current imbroglio in Iraq—are on offer in his lengthy reflections given in 2005 to Ignacio Ramonet, the editor of Le Monde diplomatique, over the course of 100 hours of interviews, and now three years later published in a meticulous English translation by Andrew Hurley in a book of more than 700 pages called “My Life: A Spoken Autobiography.” (Interestingly, Hurley is also the translator of Armando Valladares’ indelible 1986 memoir of his time in Castro’s jails, “Against All Hope.”) Castro recalls that it was in the party’s Havana bookstore on Calle Carlos III that, as a college student, he bought “most of the classics of Marxist literature.” (Twenty years ago, Castro said as much to Frei Betto, the Dominican priest from Brazil, to whom he granted 23 hours of interviews, which were edited and published in the United States as “Fidel and Religion,” saying,  “Almost all of the books I read were bought on credit at the Communist Party bookstore on Carlos III Street.”) While he found himself in accord with many of the party’s goals, he despaired of its rampant sectarianism and what he condemned as its “ghetto mentality.” In addition, the party was compromised in the eyes of many Cubans by its willingness to collaborate with Batista and to serve in his government.

    He was also keenly aware of the deep-seated anti-communism that marked Cuba’s political culture. Looking back, Castro concedes his “ideas were Socialist, and pretty radical.” And he confesses that he was determined to steer the population toward ever more radical positions. But he didn’t want to panic his opponents. He was careful not to prematurely proclaim the socialist character of his ultimate goal. His admission isn’t new. In 1965, in a lengthy series of conversations—some 25 hours—with Lee Lockwood, the American photojournalist, an edited version of which was published two years later as “Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel,” Castro said “that all radical revolutionaries, in certain moments or circumstances, do not announce programs that might unite all of their enemies on a single front.” He was aware of the need to be cunning: “To have said that our program was Marxist-Leninist or Communist would have awakened many prejudices.” Still, he told Lockwood, “it is possible that there was some moment when I appeared less radical than I really was. It is possible too that I was more radical than even I myself knew.” More: “If you ask me whether I considered myself a revolutionary at the time I was in the mountains, I would answer yes. I considered myself a revolutionary. If you asked me, did I consider myself a Marxist-Leninist, I would say no, I did not consider myself a Marxist-Leninist.”

      Moreover, Castro had not only to be certain of the support of a majority of the island’s 6 million people but also of a majority of his comrades, telling Ramonet that he “had to do some heavy arguing, even among the militants of the 26th of July Movement.” It couldn’t have been easy: “There was also competition, rivalry, among the leadership, and you had to keep your eye on all that.”

      It is a rare admission of the difficulty of keeping together the many, often conflicting strands of the various factions that made up the opposition to Batista while constantly demanding obeisance to his personal leadership. For in addition to the clash of personalities and the differences in temperament of the various men who vied to head the movement to oust Batista, it was also riven by ideological differences—differences that had their origin in the diverging strategies and priorities of those who fought in the mountains and in the cities. The seeds of future conflicts (and defections), after Castro’s triumph, are in the contradictions of class which to a very considerable extent would mark both the struggle against Batista and the years following his overthrow during which Castro consolidated his power. Many who helped to make the revolution would later break with Castro. The list of ex-Fidelistas is long. It would include Huber Matos, Anibal Escalante, David Salvador, Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, Pedro Diaz Lanz, Carlos Franqui, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mario Llerena, Herberto Padilla, Ernesto Betancourt. Some would flee; others would be expelled; still others would be imprisoned.

    The anti-Batista resistance was made up of men as diverse as Che Guevara, who, in a private letter, insisted that “the solution of the world’s problems lies behind the so-called iron curtain,” and René Ramos Latour, a leader of the movement’s urban underground who castigated Guevara for thinking it possible “to free ourselves from the noxious ‘Yankee’ domination by means of a no less noxious ‘Soviet’ domination.” The urban wing was composed mostly of middle-class moderates, many of whom would feel betrayed by Castro when he embraced socialism in 1961, following the victory over the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. The guerrilla army, on the other hand, drew upon the peasantry, the revolution’s chief beneficiaries and most vigorous defenders. (Two informed and detailed histories of the inner workings of the anti-Batista resistance, based on primary documents and extensive interviews with the participants, stand out: Ramon L. Bonachea and Marta San Martin’s “The Cuban Insurrection, 1952-1959” and Julia E. Sweig’s “Inside the Cuban Revolution.”)

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