Lamberz, the East German SED functionary, wrote in his report of June 1961 on Fidel Castro:
To the question how one should understand Fidel’s declarations in the first half of 1959 – when he expressed such views as: “The revolution must give bread and freedom, but without terror,” or “We don’t want a red or a green revolution, a revolution of the left or the right” – Comrade Roca explained that Fidel Castro has always been a friend of the Party.
Although such declarations “should also be ascribed to Castro’s ideological views at that time,” they were “essentially” made with “tactical considerations” in mind.81
Blas Roca claimed to Lamberz that the PSP had been in contact with Fidel Castro since 1947, “when he was still a student” and the Party organized “joint actions with him at the university.” Raúl, who also studied at Havana University, became a member of the Socialist/Communist Youth in 1952. “Both also began at that time to study Marxism-Leninism, but had mainly liberal-democratic views.” Another interesting claim, however, is that before Fidel went into Mexican exile in 1955 there were “common agreements between him and the [Cuban] Party leadership,” and that “throughout the period of the armed struggle he kept in close contact with the Party.”82 It is well known that the Party had close contact of this kind with Raúl, but not with Fidel (if we leave aside the visit by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez to the Sierra Maestra).
Nevertheless, in 1961 when Fidel publicly announced his conversion to Marxism-Leninism, the Cuban people was by no means so far advanced. How could it have been? The ideology had no place of note in Cuba’s history; it was more in the way of a marginal phenomenon – even if, in Castro’s view, “Martí’s thinking contains such great and beautiful things that you can become a Marxist by having his ideology as a starting-point.”83 Besides, Castro concedes that “Martí did not explain why society was divided into classes.” And since people were used to living in a class society, many of them had difficulty completing the radical turn and giving up individual freedoms.
Even the friends in Moscow whom Castro assumed to be overjoyed with his rapprochement were surprised and not exactly delighted by his latest step. But this mainly had to do with foreign-policy factors. “We had trouble understanding the timing of his statement,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. “Castro’s declaration had the immediate effect of widening the gap between himself and the people who were against Socialism.”84 Vladimir Semichastny, then head of the KGB, expressed in a report to the Central Committee of the CPSU open criticism of the Cuban revolutionary leader:
Castro’s speech on the socialist character of the Cuban revolution, and the subsequent creation of a Marxist-Leninist party, proceeded without sufficient preparation of the laboring classes, thus intensifying the class struggle in Cuba and alienating from the revolution a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, the backward portions of the working class, and the peasantry, and also a series of Castro’s revolutionary fighters, who were not ideologically ready for these changes.85
It is true that Castro was himself not prepared for these changes and was by no means the experienced Marxist-Leninist that he liked to present himself as. “Fidel Castro and his supporters,” we read in a GDR diplomatic report of April 1962, “are, as it were, joining Marxism-Leninism relatively unburdened.” Of course, such things were not openly said in official reports, nor, above all, in public statements. But Eastern-bloc diplomats trained in political dialectics, who usually exchanged impressions among themselves and especially discussed and agreed them with the Soviet embassy, had for a long time considered that Castro was not yet what he promised to be. In 1962 there was no more than a favorable mention: “Fidel Castro made considerable advances in appropriating and creatively applying Marxism-Leninism. But this knowledge was not yet sufficiently grounded, and often enough there were plainly visible deviations.”86
The ideologization of public life during those months of mounting external threat went together with dramatic developments in the supply situation inside the country. On March 12, 1962, Castro had to introduce rationing of staple foods. Cubans learned to live with a little book of coupons, the libreta, which was supposed to guarantee everyone a fair share of food and other provisions. This accompanied the Cuban Revolution like a ghost. From now on lard, vegetable fats, rice, and beans in the whole country, soap, detergent, and toothpaste in Havana and a few other towns, and beef, chicken, fish, eggs, milk, and certain vegetables only in Havana, were subject to strict rationing.
While Castro blamed this on the United States and its “brutal blockade,” Che Guevara made no bones about identifying causes nearer to home. On television he complained: “We made an absurd plan, disconnected from reality, with absurd goals, and with supplies that were totally a dream.”87 Since the revolution the country had been living beyond its means. The hectic attempt to industrialize agricultural land in accordance with the Soviet model was failing at the first fence, owing both to incompetence and to lack of infrastructure. Waste and sloppiness, encouraged by the increased money supply in circulation, were making things worse; the national economic check was not covered. According to an internal report by the East German ADN news agency: “All the measures announced and propagated were, it is now clear, based not upon consideration of objective possibilities but upon the subjective views of individuals. It was thus often wishful thinking which was served up in public as the reality.”88 Theodore Draper wrote in his work on the theory and practice of “Castroism” that, after 1960, the Cubans behaved as if “the Soviets had given them not a 100-million five-year credit but an unlimited account.”89
Soon Castro had a convenient person to blame for the malaise – namely, ORI general secretary Aníbal Escalante – and he was probably not even wide of the mark. When Castro removed Antonio Núñez Jiménez (who was obviously not up to the job) as director of the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) in charge of economic policy, and replaced him with the reliable PSP leader and economics expert Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the latter’s Party comrade Escalante criticized the decision on the grounds that he had not been consulted beforehand. At this point, Castro thought the time had come to make a clean break with what he saw as the Stalinist machinations of Escalante and his associates. A suspicion had long been forming that Escalante wanted to outmaneuver Castro through a creeping coup d’état – a suspicion that was fueled in February 1962 when Castro, his brother, and Che Guevara suddenly seemed to disappear from the scene for a considerable while. Some rumors went so far as to suggest that they had been deposed by the Communists, or were even being held prisoner by them.
On March 12, however, Castro returned to the public eye and announced his rationing program. In a series of appearances beginning the next day, he then set about undermining Escalante’s position – initially through vague allusions that did not mention him by name. From March 20 the political execution followed in installments: first at a public session of the ORI leadership body, then in a television interview on March 26 that accused Escalante of serious errors. “He allowed himself to be swept away by personal ambition, and the result was that he created a series of problems – in fact, he made a chaos of the country.” Escalante allegedly exploited the situation and built up a system of privileges and rewards totally dependent upon his own person.
He appointed [PSP] members to the National Directory with a Nazi “Gauleiter” mentality instead of a Marxist mentality.… Didn’t he know anyone else? No, because while the people here were fighting, he was hiding under his bed.… Some people began to wonder: but is this communism, Marxism, or socialism? This high-handedness, these abuses, these privileges, is it really communism?90
The next blow immediately fell upon Escalante’s followers in the ORI, where a Party secretariat was formed with Fidel Castro as leader and Raúl as deputy. Escalante himself was allowed to pack his bags and go off into “exile” in Moscow. The second prominent victim of the “purge” was the Soviet ambassador i
n Havana, Sergei Kudryatsev, considered one of the men behind Escalante who had been pulling the strings. Castro categorically demanded that Moscow replace the diplomat, whom he violently abused as a “shithead” and “son of a bitch.”
In a secret report in November 1963, the recently appointed GDR ambassador informed East Berlin, on the basis of a conversation with Escalante’s longstanding comrade, PSP general secretary Blas Roca, that Escalante had provoked Castro’s reaction with his “sectarian methods” as ORI general secretary.
In his fever for power he began to issue orders to military leaders, asked ministers to report to him, and issued them with instructions.… Aníbal tried to make political commissars in the FAR [the Revolutionary Armed Forces] subject to himself. He gave them instructions and demanded reports from them. Such behavior aroused mistrust of the Party in Fidel.91
For the PSP, this meant a considerable reversal within the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations, the ORI. The East German comrades still angrily maintained in 1964:
Among the effects of Aníbal Escalante’s sectarian politics, was the reemergence of all Fidel Castro’s previously known weaknesses resulting from deep petty-bourgeois roots. His petty-bourgeois origin, his still-defective knowledge in the field of Marxism-Leninism, his insufficient experience of taking into account the interests and problems of the international workers’ movement in building a new social order on a national scale, as well as strongly marked emotional tendencies and a certain pragmatism were especially in evidence during his appearances before the people.
These features, combined with “the generally lagging construction of a [Communist] Party and the lack of political/ideological unity in the leadership of the Party [the PURS],” meant that [it] was still quite impossible to speak “of a collective leadership and responsibility for action, … of collectively made decisions.”92 Nevertheless, the reaction of the Soviet government to the fall of its protégé, Escalante, was astonishingly calm and pragmatic. On April 11, when Castro had only just emerged victorious from the power struggle, the Soviet Party daily, Pravda, paid tribute to him as his country’s leader and sharply condemned Escalante’s “sectarian” conduct. At the First of May celebrations in Moscow, Cuba even rose above Yugoslavia to take twelfth place in the list of countries bringing fraternal greetings. According to “Kremlinological” criteria, this meant that the Caribbean island had been accepted into the community of socialist states.
Although the liaison was not for either side a “love match,” and indeed remained for the USSR until the end a political “forced marriage,” Khrushchev now began to shower Castro with favors. One calculation was to avoid slighting Castro, so that he did not seek the embrace of China. After his arrival in Moscow, Escalante had already warned the Kremlin that under Che Guevara’s influence Castro might go off and flirt with China. Indeed, the Cubans had been quietly forging closer links with Beijing, since Havana did not feel that it had enough support from Moscow for its attempts to export the Cuban Revolution to other Latin American countries. But Moscow, in stepping up its relations with Havana, now seized the chance of shifting the East–West balance to its advantage through the positioning of a new satellite in the middle of the other superpower’s sphere of influence.
“Mongoose” and “Anadyr”
On November 30, 1961, the day before Castro publicly signed up to Marxism-Leninism, President Kennedy gave the go-ahead for a new covert operation against Cuba, the most extensive ever undertaken by the CIA against another state. “Operation Mongoose” – so called after the greyish-brown Asian viverrine famous for its ability to attack and kill even the largest and most venomous snakes – would be allocated 400 CIA officers, several hundred motor-boats, and an annual budget reputedly in excess of 50 million dollars.
Cuba, as the president’s brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, put it to CIA director John McCone, had “top priority;” “all else is secondary – no time, no money, effort or manpower is to be spared.”93 In government circles in Washington the story was that the president had decided “to utilize all resources to unseat Castro.”94 On his brother’s advice, the president appointed to head Operation Mongoose a South-East Asia expert in “special operations” under the Eisenhower administration, Brigadier-General Edward Lansdale, who was to be the inspiration for Haudegen, the main character in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. Lansdale was set up in the Pentagon and placed under Robert Kennedy’s direct supervision. To his colleagues in the CIA he was known as a braggart. Or, more bluntly, “Lansdale was a nut” – the words of Samuel Halpern from Task Force W, the Cuba department in the CIA control room.95
When the new planning began to overthrow Cuba’s revolutionary government, the CIA still had only 28 agents on the island. “After the Bay of Pigs, they [the Cubans] cleaned house. And they did a fine job,” Halpern asked his superiors to bear in mind.96 As before, he saw Castro’s elimination as the prerequisite for success, and toward the end of 1961 he wheeled in Mafia drugs-trafficker Rolando Cubela, the killer of Batista’s secret police chief. For CIA agent Desmond FitzGerald, the architect of several attempts on Castro’s life, Cubela was something like “Robert Kennedy’s special representative” in this matter.97 Ronald Steel, in his biography of Robert Kennedy, makes it sound highly plausible that the Kennedy brothers were fully in the picture and backed the assassination plans, although no one has ever been able to prove that they actually gave the orders.98
Castro’s embrace of Marxism-Leninism had the effect that, within just a few weeks, 13 Latin American governments – mostly under pressure from Washington – broke off diplomatic relations with Havana. At the summit of the Organization of American States (OAS) held in January 1962 at Punta del Este in Uruguay, Che Guevara’s forceful interventions were unable to prevent his country’s exclusion from the organization by a two-thirds majority of 14 out of 21 votes. The official justification spelled it out that “ties to Marxism-Leninism” were “incompatible with the Inter-American system.” Still, to win the fourteenth vote necessary to carry the decision, the US ambassador to the OAS had to dig deep at a dinner with little Haiti’s foreign minister; the Uruguayan daily El Día reported that he promised to come up with 5 million dollars, ostensibly for a new airport in Port-au-Prince.99 On February 7, 1962, the United States government imposed a total economic blockade of Cuba, causing the loss of 600 million in foreign currency earnings.
At the same time, there was a growing number of reports that Washington had decided to press ahead with another landing on the island. At a three-hour White House dinner with Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law and editor of the Soviet government daily Izvestiya, President Kennedy drew a striking parallel between Cuba and Hungary. He further aroused suspicions by alluding to the American presidential elections in 1964: “If I run for reelection … ,” he told Adzhubei, “Cuba will be the main problem of the campaign, [and] we will have to do something.”100 Against this background, a day after the imposition of the US economic blockade, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet gave the go-ahead on February 8, 1962, for a program of military aid to Cuba. On February 21, three weeks after Adzhubei’s get-together with Kennedy, KGB Chief Semichastny informed Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky of what he had learned about a new invasion plan.101
On February 20 General Lansdale had presented to the “Special Group (Augmented),” or SGA, a top secret 26-page schedule setting out six stages for a coup in Cuba. The document submitted to the committee supervising Operation Mongoose, under US chief of staff Maxwell Taylor, also contained an option for “decisive intervention by US forces.”102 Already on February 7, the day when the blockade came into force, Admiral Robert Dennison, commander of US Atlantic forces (CINCLANT), had called a meeting of the joint chiefs of staff in Norfolk, Virginia, to make all necessary preparations for a landing on “Day X.” President Kennedy and his advisers demanded that a military strike should be successfully carried out against the C
astro regime within two to four weeks. On February 22, five days before the session of the UN Security Council, the invasion plan was ready in the safes of the supreme commander and the US general staff. Many years later, at a conference held in 1992 in Havana to review the missile crisis, the US defense secretary in 1962, Robert McNamara, admitted: “If I had been a Cuban leader at that time, I might well have concluded that there was a great risk of a US invasion. And I should say, as well, if I had been a Soviet leader at that time, I might have come to the same conclusion.”103
In the spring of 1962, Soviet–Cuban relations were already so close that, as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, loss of the newly gained partner “would have been a terrible blow to Marxism-Leninism [ … ] and gravely diminish[ed] our stature throughout the world, but especially in Latin America.”104 In April, Khrushchev first floated to his defense minister, Malinovsky, the idea of stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba.105 Khrushchev later wrote:
In addition to protecting Cuba, our missiles would have equalized what the West likes to call “the balance of power.” The Americans had surrounded our country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons, … and it was high time America learned what it feels like to have her own land and her own people threatened.106
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