Defining Castroism: Man, Myth, and Ideology

Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution are popularly known in this country as archaic remnants of the Cold War and Communism. However simplistic and inaccurate this description may be, it is a popularly held myth that Castro is a leftover Soviet stooge holding on to power only by the force of his authoritarian government and charisma. Once Castro is gone, some politicians predict that Cuba will immediately renounce its current form of government and come running for US trade packages and aid. On the other side of the spectrum there are many who consider Castro to be a hero of Cuban history. Though few revere him with the cult of personality which existed during the climatic years of the Cuban Revolution, he (along with Che Guevara) is frequently credited with the true liberation of the Cuban people.

Who is the true Castro, and for what did he really stand? Was he simply yet another pawn in the Cold War, or was he truly an independent hero who represented the Cuban people? Neither myth is completely false, yet both fail to consider the complexities of the situation which allow Castro and his ideology to be simultaneously a catastrophic Soviet-style importation and a triumphant indigenous revolution. To better understand Castro, his ideology and the Cuban Revolution, one must look at the circumstances which shaped the three. In the following sections of this paper I will confront and analyze the opposing myths surrounding Castro and his role in Cuban politics from the revolution to the current day. I also hope to define what makes the Cuban brand of Communism different from others which were both developed and imported in the rest of the world. Included with the myths will be essays, speeches and propaganda artwork which helped to bolster the various Castro myths.

Fidel: a Brief Timeline

- 1898: Spanish-American war

- 1898-1902: American military occupation in Cuba

- 1902: American occupation ends, however the US still controls the main economic and

political activities of Cuba and reserve the right to send in military troops at any time. US military bases also remain in the country

- 1928: Castro born on August 13 th in Las Manacas to a wealthy sugar cane grower.

- 1945-1950: Studies law at the University of Havana, is introduced to Cuban nationalist

philosophy and the writings of Marti

- 1952: Runs for parliament for the Orthodox Party, however a coup led by General

Fulgenico Batista on March 10th overthrew the government of Cuba, canceling the elections.

- 1953: On July 26th Castro organizes an attack on the Moncada Barracks in Oriente province

with 129 men and 2 women. It is a massive failure, and Castro is sentenced to fifteen years in prison. During his trial he delivers the speech “History Will Absolve Me” evoking the class-based nature of his Revolution. While at the Isle of Pines prison he begins to study Marxist philosophy.

- 1955: Castro goes into exile in Mexico. There he meets Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara

and begins to plan a revolution in Cuba based in the mountainous eastern region of Cuba, the Sierra Maestra.

- 1956: December 2nd Castro, Che and a small group of rebels arrive in Cuba at Playa Las

Coloradas on the yacht Granma. Batista’s military discovered the group, and only 12-14 of the original 82 men survived. They retreat into the Sierra Maestra mountains from where they launched attacks and built up support among the local populace.

- 1958: May 24th Batista’s forced launched an attack on Castro in Operacion Verano. Castro is

miraculously victorious.

- 1958: December 31st, Batista and president-elect Carlos Rivero Aguero flee to the Dominican

Republic, then to Franco’s Spain.

- 1959: January 8th Castro and his forces take Havana, the Revolution is declared a success.

- 1961: April 16th, Castro declares the Revolution to be officially Socialist

 

 

The Myths of Castro

• The Dictator

Since January 1 st, 1959 when the triumph of the Cuban revolution was declared, mainstream western politics have seen Fidel Castro as the authoritarian force guilty of suppressing the Cuban populace in the name of his brand of “revolutionary society”. Human rights watch organizations such as Amnesty International have consistently criticized Castro and his government for imprisoning dissidents and cracking down on freedom of expression. The frequent exoduses of Cuban citizens to the United States (most notably in 1980 to the port of Mariel along with another in 1994) only help to bolster the case against Castro’s reign. Year after year the human rights reports published by Amnesty include lists of prisoners of conscience and reports on the current undemocratic activities of the Cuban government. Most recently, Amnesty spoke out against a new Cuban law put into effect on January 10, 2004 which limits internet access to those with special telephone accounts payable in US dollars. Amnesty claims that this law was enacted to limit the flow of information out of Cuba and restrict the ability of human rights organizations to monitor Cuba . Whether or not this is true is of little concern to Castro and his government, for Article 62 of the Cuban Constitution puts the issue of human rights second to that of the state’s political goals. It states:

"None of the freedoms which are recognized for citizens can be exercised contrary to what is established in the Constitution and by law, or contrary to the existence and objectives of the socialist state, or contrary to the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism and communism. Violations of this principle can be punished by law. "

Mario Llerena, a former member of the July 26 th Movement (M-26-7) who now lives in exile, damns Castro in his essay “the Case of Castroism”. He accuses the Cuban revolution to be a “perverse revolution, i.e. one which, in the first place, had no reason for being and whose aftermath has been immensely worse than the presumed existing wrongs it raised as a pretext” (Llerena 179). Llerena claims that despite the dictatorship of Batista, Cuba was the third richest country in Latin America with a longer life expectancy than Spain, Greece and Japan. The literacy rate, as well as the number of doctors per capita were both unusually high for Latin America (Llerena 180). Though Batista was an irrefutably brutal dictator, Llerena argues that in fact Castro’s rise to power was worse for the Cuban people for several reasons inherent in Cuban political culture. Llerena describes the Cuban people as being extremely manipulatable to the whims of the caudillo; “In fifty years of (if frequently disturbed) democratic experience, the Cuban people turned out to have learned little beyond attaching themselves to one frustrating public figure after another” (Llerena 181). Castro, Llerena argues, usurped leadership in a military coup and transformed Cuba into a Stalinist-like dictatorship in a time when Cuba could have been moving further towards a capitalist democratic-republic. Cuba did in fact have nine presidents from 1902 until 1958 chosen in multi-party elections (though four of the presidents forced their re-election and provoked four revolutions). A successful revolution in Cuba is an impossible feat according to Llerena because of the unwillingness (or ignorance) of the Cuban people to separate the revolution from the person leading it. To have a truly successful revolution, the Cuban people must learn to look to leaders as conductors or teachers, not “the living embodiment of the people’s aspirations” (Llerena 183). To Llerena, Castro is just another in a long line of Cuban leaders who promised reform for the benefit of Cuba and did nothing but betray their country.

The United States has also denounced Castro as a Communist dictator since his rise to power and done much to perpetuate the myth of Castro’s iron fisted rule. The role of the United States in shaping Castro’s image will be examined later on in this essay under the heading “Castro as the Socialist revolutionary.”

• The Savior

Fidel Castro presents a magnificent archetype of the romantic revolutionary. He and his band of attractively rugged and bearded rebels in the Sierra Maestra were perfect for both the physical and ideological icons for the Cuban revolution. Castro proved from the beginning of his revolutionary career that he had both the ability and the dedication to lead men and women into what appeared to be (and often were) suicidal missions solely for the sake of “the people”. Although Castro came from a relatively wealthy family and was educated in the bourgeois tradition, both Castro’s legendary military success in the face of incredibly odds as well as his promises of reform in the aftermath of Batista’s reign of terror made him an instant working-class hero. Although not yet an avowed Marxist, Castro made his revolutionary intentions clear in his speech History Will Absolve Me. In a fiery passage just before the closing of the speech he implores the Cuban people to honor the heroes of their past and be willing to martyr themselves for the cause of liberty, lest they commit treason against the founding ideals of an independent Cuba. It was not until after the revolution had been won that its more Marxist intentions became clear. On May 17th, 1959 Castro began to implement reforms which would dramatically improve the living standards of most Cubans. To the great dismay of the United States, Castro banned ownership of land by foreigners and seized over 1,000 acres of privately owned farmland, then distributed titles for this land to hundreds of thousands of peasants. Castro continued his plan to nationalize all industry in Cuba which included some $850 million worth of US property and business. On June 7th, 1959 Castro nationalized Texaco, Esso and Shell refineries after the US refused to refine Soviet oil (which was being traded to Cuba) and on September 17th of 1960 Castro struck an even greater blow to US imperialism in his country by nationalizing all the banks. The Cuban populace benefited as well under Castro’s policies concerning education and health care. Castro began a country-wide literacy campaign in 1960 which reduced the illiteracy rate in Cuba to 4% within a year. UNESCO confirmed that Cuba’s illiteracy rate was unusually low for the region, and all citizens were entitled to high quality health care and free milk until the age of 6. On April 12, 1988 Castro became the only head of government to ever receive the Health for All medal from the World Health Organization.

Despite whatever concerns they may have with Castro’s human rights record, many on the progressive left see Castro as a hero and perhaps savior for Cuba because of his ability to maintain what is at least in name a socialist, yet inarguably independent state in the shadow of the American capitalist empire. The day after Castro declared his revolution to be officially Socialist, the US government backed an infamously unsuccessful attack on Cuban soil at the Bay of Pigs. The massive failure of the United States is hailed in leftist circles as an incredible defeat for US Imperialism in Latin America. The fact that Castro’s government was able to withstand a US invasion that had been in the works for two presidencies and attacks by bombers from a vastly superior military only added to the myth of his power and near immortality. Even more incredible than Castro’s ability to survive a botched US invasion and the later missile crisis of 1962 is his government’s continued existence despite the fall of their most important ally (who in many cases guaranteed Cuba’s existence) only 90 miles from the United States.

• The Socialist Revolutionary

One of the most enduring yet also most mistaken myths about Castro is that he began his political career as a Marxist and intended the Cuban Revolution to be entirely socialist in nature. As of 1959 Castro described himself as believing in a cooperation between capital and labor with no intentions of nationalizing any industries. Castro only came to embrace an official “doctrine” when he was forced to find an ally in the tumultuous world of Cold War international relations. The governmental system of Cuba is distinct from Socialism and, though praised in principle by the global left, has come under much criticism from its founding until the modern day. The American Trotskyists criticized both Castro and Che’s penchants for using guerilla warfare in order to achieve revolutionary means. They insist that guerrilla movements do not spark the masses to rise against dictatorships. A guerrilla movement can only be successful once the people have already begun to rise up, for if a guerrilla movement were to attempt to spark a revolution that were not already building, they would surely be crushed by the existing dictatorship due to their lack of popular backing (Hansen 10). This is likely what accounted for the horrendous failure of Che’s military endeavors in Bolivia. Castro’s goals both at home and abroad were focused more on the anti-imperialist struggle than building socialism itself. This brought Castro under criticism from other (non-Russian) socialists who stated that “it is dangerous to believe that an anti-imperialist struggle automatically reinforces the struggle for socialism. Such a view can lead to defeats for socialism, as was shown in Chile” (Hansen 11).

Castro is also often accused by modern day analysts of adopting the one-size-fits-all Stalinist-flavored Communism of the USSR. This is deceptively easy to believe, seeing as Cuba almost immediately allied with the USSR after its revolution. However, one must remember that Cuba was forced into this alliance due to extreme measures taken by the United States against Cuba. In 1959 President Eisenhower banned the importation of Cuban sugar into the US thereby threatening the Cuban economy with imminent bankruptcy. On February 6th of that year Castro turned to the USSR for assistance. The Soviet Union agreed to buy five million tons of sugar from Cuba over the next five years and give Cuba additional support through oil and grain. From the years 1959 until 1961 (when the US formally ended diplomatic relations with Cuba), the USSR and the United States used the Cuban economy as yet another chessboard in Cold War one-upmanship until Cuba was left with no choice other than to submit to complete economic domination by the Soviets.

I believe that had Cuba not been economically strangled by the United States and forced by the political climate at the time to seek out a powerful ally, they would have remained an extremely independent state. Although the USSR was, at the time, the most logical ally for a more left-leaning state such as post-revolution Cuba , the two states had little in common. The Russian revolution was primarily urban based and distinctly Socialist from the outset, while the Cuban revolution was almost completely rural and nature and became Socialist with little conscious intention of its leaders. While the USSR fiercely (yet falsely) maintained that it was a Communist state, Castro continued to insist, most notably in a 1961 interview with the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unita, that the Cuban revolution was not in any way dogmatic;

At any rate, you wish to write that this is a socialist revolution, right? And write it, then... Yes, not only did we destroy a tyrannical system. We also destroyed the philoimperialistic bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucracy, the police, and a mercenary army. We abolished privileges, annihilated the great landowners, threw out foreign monopolies for good, nationalized almost every industry, and collectivized the land. We are fighting now to liquidate once and for all the exploitation of man over man, and to build a completely new society, with a new class contents. The Americans (Cubans say just that, los americanos, to mean the United States) the Americans and the priests say that this is communism. We know very well that it is not. At any rates, the word does not frighten us. They can say whatever they wish.