Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  That future has been lasting dozens of years. No end was in sight more than a quarter of a century later, when Castro recognized: “We shall work hard and must work hard – for we are a third world country, we wasted centuries under colonialism and nearly sixty years under neocolonialism, and we have also wasted a few years under the revolution. We must make up for lost time.”16 Early on, in 1960, Guevara was still excited about the prospects:

  In ten years, we intend to raise the per capita income somewhat more than nine hundred pesos … [to] twice today’s per capita… . At this moment the duties of the working class are to produce, … to produce without unemployment, produce more, create more wealth, more wealth that will be transferred into more sources of wealth; to economize as much as possible, not only on the level of the state, but on whatever level a real national saving is possible; … to organize, organize in order to bring the greatest force to the collective task of industrialization.17

  Initially Castro and Guevara were convinced that, with the ideological and material backing of the Soviet Union, Cuba could progress faster than if it had to rely on itself alone. Guevara’s idealistic goal was one day to do away altogether with material incentives and exchange-value, even if, as he noted in his 1963 speech on the tasks of the party, that was not possible at once:

  There are two things that are constantly conflicting and dialectically becoming part of the process of creating a socialist society.… On the one hand, material incentives are made necessary by our having emerged from a society that thought only of material incentives.… On the other hand, we still do not have enough to give each individual what he needs. For these reasons, interest in material things will be with us for a time during the process of creating a socialist society.… Material incentives will not play a part in the new society.… We must establish the conditions under which this type of motivation that is operative today will increasingly lose its importance and be replaced by nonmaterial incentives such as the sense of duty and the new revolutionary way of thinking.18

  This brought Guevara into conflict with Soviet economic thinking. In his view, the material incentives, “economic calculation,” enterprise viability and profitability that were central features of the Soviet economy did not advance the cause of socialism: “Pursuing the chimera of achieving socialism with the aid of the blunted weapons left to us by capitalism … , it is possible to come to a blind alley.”19 An article published in 1964, “On the Budgetary System of Financing,” again expressed this heretical approach: “It is necessary to make it clear now that what we seek is a more efficient way of achieving communism.”20

  At the end of this “more efficient way” would be the “new man,” whose incentive to work and goal in life would no longer be the egoistic accumulation of material goods, but rather a selfless moral duty towards society – a society which, in return, would care for him and his family. Castro and Guevara geared their new economic and social policy to this goal, launching an ambitious literacy drive, an extensive healthcare program, and a guaranteed basic provision for every citizen. The overcoming of Cuba’s underdevelopment as a Third World country was thus a prerequisite for the creation of the “new man.”

  But Cuba’s great leap forward was a failure. In the first phase of industrialization, Cubans still had a fairly good life: low rents, higher wages, and free healthcare gave a considerable boost to income; consumption and living standards rose. It was not long, however, before output was unable to keep up with demand. Supplies ran out after two years, and at one point even breeding bulls were slaughtered and eaten. In 1962, when food rationing was first introduced, annual economic growth was a mere 0.4 percent. From mid-1963 the Cuban economy slid into its worst-ever crisis, as gross national product fell by 1.5 percent. The new agricultural policy of “diversification against sugar monoculture,” which the revolutionaries themselves later came to see as amateurish, had chaotic and sometimes catastrophic results in many areas. Between 1961 and 1963 agricultural output fell by 23 percent; the sugar harvest, at 3.9 million tons in 1963,21 was the worst since the end of World War II, down more than 40 percent from the post-revolutionary high of 6.9 million tons in 1961. As Castro’s industry minister, Che Guevara was responsible for this disaster. The result was a foreign trade deficit that became a permanent feature of the economy.

  A hard look at the realities eventually forced the leadership to move away from its idealistic positions. After a half-year experiment at 247 pilot enterprises employing 40,000 workers, it was decided in December 1963 that from the following January pay linked to productivity would be introduced in 4,000 industrial enterprises for a total of 400,000 employees. Whereas pay had been based on a proliferation of 25,000 skills and more than 90,000 wage-rates, the new system established just eight rates based on skill grades. For each percentage point by which workers exceeded their norm, they would receive a bonus – although this could not be higher than half their basic wage, and anything above that would fall to the state. Those failing to meet their targets would incur deductions up to half their basic wage. Even sugarcane cutters would now be paid by results, not in accordance with fixed rates or a simple hope that moral motivation and revolutionary enthusiasm would raise output above its previous levels. The new measures were introduced at the urging of Communists loyal to Moscow, and against the resistance of the Guevara faction.

  This was the situation when the influential Soviet Politburo member Nikolai Podgorny arrived in Havana in December 1963. On January 12, 1964, Fidel Castro accompanied him back to Moscow, and ten days later, after detailed discussions with Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, he and his hosts signed an agreement whereby the Soviet Union undertook over the next five years to purchase the bulk of the Cuban sugar crop at a price above the world-market rate.

  In 1964, in a self-critical article for the journal International Affairs, Che Guevara finally admitted some elementary mistakes:

  Our first error was the way in which we carried out diversification.… The sugar cane areas were reduced and the land thus made available was used for the cultivation of new crops. But this meant a general decline in agricultural production. The entire economic history of Cuba has demonstrated that no other agricultural activity would give such returns as those yielded by the cultivation of sugar cane. At the outset of the Revolution many of us were not aware of this basic economic fact, because a fetishistic idea connected sugar with our dependence on imperialism and with the misery in rural areas, without analysing the real causes: the relation to the uneven trade balance.… Only a very solid productive organization could have resisted such rapid change.

  Furthermore, it was discovered that “in many [industrial] plants the technical efficiency was insufficient when measured by international standards.”22 The quality standards of Eastern-bloc technology did not match those of the machines and equipment goods previously imported from the United States; nor were their technical specifications compatible.

  Castro later told Tad Szulc:

  At the outset of the revolution, when we had to assume all the functions of the state and all the functions of the economy … we began this task without experts, just ignorant people who did not know what had to be done.… We suffered the consequences of different errors. Let us say that one error we committed was to want to jump stages, wanting to arrive at communist forms of [wealth] distribution, jumping over socialist forms of distribution – and it is impossible to jump stages. The communist formula is: each must give according to his capacity and receive according to his needs. The socialist one is: each must give according to his capacity and receive according to his work.23

  In other words, the satisfaction of needs was running ahead of performance; Cubans were living beyond their means.

  As the focus now shifted to sugar production, Che Guevara’s policy underwent a change that would be crucial for future development. The agreements meant a big step backwards, and the industrialization drive – which had anyway been making only slow progress –
ran into the sand. After the disastrous sugar harvest of 1963, Castro announced that it would reach 5.5 million tons the following year, 7 million tons in 1965, and the magic figure of 10 million tons in 1970; all economic efforts would be concentrated on this goal. Guevara therefore had to write off his ambitious plan, so that “by 1970 we will have laid the foundations for our economy’s development, based primarily upon our own technology and our own raw materials, mostly processed with our own machinery.”24

  If he had come only a little closer to his goal, this was not just because the massive task of conversion had placed far too many demands on a workforce lacking both the necessary skills and (never previously required) logistical capacities. In addition, the agreed supplies of machinery and plant from the Eastern bloc had arrived either too late or not at all. Often they had been of such poor quality that it would have cost more time and money to get them working than to let them rot and simply import the required goods.

  Delays in the supply of such vital products as oil, as well as in the signing of annual aid agreements, were actually quite deliberate. They served as a means of disciplining Havana, so that it could not afford to stir up conflicts elsewhere in the Third World without taking into account the political and strategic interests of the Warsaw Pact – a course that would have forced Moscow to keep explaining itself in the international arena. Guevara especially irritated the Kremlin when he used the Trotskyist term “permanent revolution” in his speeches. In order to end this playing with fire, Moscow tied future economic aid to the condition that Cuba would refrain from supporting or instigating revolutions in the Third World.

  To the outside world, the fraternal socialist countries displayed a perfect family life together with their questionable Cuban match, but behind closed doors they were extremely worried that things would not work out. Kennedy was right in sensing that Castro’s political ambitions would not be limited to his own island. In one of the East German embassy’s many “assessments” of political trends in Cuba, which were based upon a lively exchange of views with other Eastern-bloc diplomats, we read that in the summer of 1964 “ideological/political and theoretical confusion on basic political issues in the Party leadership,” as well as pettybourgeois “radicalism and nationalism” represented by “Fidel Castro himself,” were leading to an “underestimation of the international relationship of forces with regard to Cuba and of the effectiveness of the policy of peaceful coexistence,” and “an inclination toward ‘violent solutions’ in policy toward the USA, its Latin American lackeys and the Latin American liberation movement.” Worldwide support for revolutionary Cuba, “and the pressure to use Cuba’s well-founded example as the basis for the Latin American liberation struggle, in the sense of a kind of command post for the Latin American liberation struggle,” were throwing up certain “tendencies” toward “nationalist arrogance.” In the eyes of East European friends, Castro and his comrades were losing touch with political realities and falling into delusions of grandeur. The resulting “dangers for future development should not be underestimated,” the report concluded.25

  The demise of Che

  Economic realities, the collapse of his utopian hopes, and ideological differences with Moscow gradually worked behind the scenes to deprive Guevara of power. Disappointed, he again took refuge in the role of foreign policy spokesman for the revolution, making long trips abroad that further aroused Moscow’s suspicion. Already in July 1963 he had visited Algeria, whose president, Ben Bella, was an ally of Castro’s, and it was at an economics seminar there that he surprised everyone with the admission that his concept of industrialization and diversification was not working. But his stay also served other purposes, for a few months later, in October 1963, a battalion of 800 Cuban soldiers and officers together with 70 tanks arrived to support the government in its military conflict with Morocco over the Eastern Sahara. Earlier, in 1961, Cuba had supplied the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) with weapons for its war of independence against France. Now Castro was taking the first steps in exporting the Cuban Revolution, not only with words and guns but with Cuban troops. In return, Ben Bella allowed the Cubans to escape international attention by secretly shipping through Algeria three tons of weapons for the Venezuelan guerrilla campaign to overthrow the government in Caracas.

  In March 1964 Guevara traveled on an official mission to Geneva, where he represented Cuba at an UNCTAD conference on world trade and again drew attention to his country as champion of the Third World. “It must be clearly understood,” he said, “and we say it in all frankness, that the only way to solve the problems besetting humanity is to eliminate completely the exploitation of dependent countries by developed capitalist countries, with all the consequences that implies.”26 Eastern-bloc delegations loyal to Moscow made him feel that he really did not belong among them, that he was a kind of strange and exotic creature. And the representatives of Latin American countries also kept their distance. He stayed away from Cuba for a good month, making side-trips to Prague and Paris, then meeting in Algiers a number of Congolese politicians who had gone into exile after the murder of nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba.

  On July 3, 1964, came Guevara’s first open loss of powers as industry minister, when a special autonomous ministry was created for the sugar industry. This did not seem to be a sudden jolt for Guevara; he anyway gave the impression of being increasingly bored and unenthusiastic. It was denied that he had quarreled with Castro. Then in October, while President Dorticós was away in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev was replaced at the head of the Soviet leadership. The new rulers in the Kremlin, who gave “Operation Anadyr” as one of the reasons for the change, were Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the CPSU, Aleksei Kosygin as prime minister, and Nikolai Podgorny as head of state. Castro declined to fly to Moscow for the November march-past in honor of the socialist nomenklatura, thus taking the opportunity to mark his independence in the eyes of world opinion. In his place he sent none other than … Che Guevara. Fidel himself took his time before his next trip to Moscow: eight months.

  On December 11, 1964, Che Guevara made a further major appearance on the international stage, when he spoke on behalf of Cuba at the United Nations in New York. With a deeper meaning behind his words – and certainly without consulting Castro in advance – he quoted at length from the revolutionary appeal of the “Second Declaration of Havana,” which the Cubans had issued on February 4, 1962, in response to their exclusion from the Organization of American States: “Two hundred million Latin Americans,” he read, are “sounding a warning note … that the hour of vindication … is now striking from one end to the other of the continent. That anonymous mass … is beginning definitely to enter into its own history, it is beginning to write it with its blood, to suffer and die for it.”27 With this speech he was unconsciously foretelling his own destiny. Even friends sensed that his time in Cuba was running out.

  Rather than return immediately to Havana from New York, Che spent the next three months traveling in the Third World – not in Latin America, but in Africa and (for a stopover) China. He met leaders of the liberation struggles in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, flew on to Mali, the Congo, Guinea, and Senegal, then to Ghana, Tanzania, and Egypt. Driven restlessly onward, he roamed the dark continent and tried to put together a front against neocolonialism in Black Africa. The alliances he formed during this time would lead later – as in the case of Angola – to a long Cuban involvement in Africa. The first and last stop on his tour was Algiers.

  On February 24, 1965, a week after a new long-term agreement between Cuba and the Soviet Union had raised the sugar quota and the general level of trade between the two countries, Guevara made a speech at the “Second Economic Seminar of Afro-American Solidarity” in Algiers which marked his definitive break with the Soviet Union:

  Each time a country liberates itself, as we have said, it is a defeat for the world imperialist system … and it is our international duty … to cont
ribute our efforts.… From all this a conclusion must be drawn: The development of the countries which now begin the road of liberation must be underwritten by the socialist countries.… How can … mutually beneficial trade … mean selling at world market prices raw materials which cost unlimited sweat and suffering to the backward countries and buying [from the socialist countries] at world market prices the machines produced in today’s large automated factories? If we establish that type of relationship … , we must agree that the socialist countries are, to a certain extent, accomplices in imperialist exploitation.… The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.28

  This appearance in distant Algeria was Guevara’s last as Comandante of the Cuban Revolution. When he returned to Havana on March 15, 1965, Fidel Castro, Raúl and President Dorticós picked him up from the airport. Behind closed doors, a dramatic exchange that was supposed to have lasted 40 hours then took place between Che (the “brains”), Fidel (the “heart”) and Raúl (the “fist”) of the revolution, as Time magazine had described them in August 1960. None of the three men subsequently said a word in public about what transpired, and Fidel Castro has imposed a news blackout on the matter. No records or notes have since emerged; all we have are rumors and stories at second or third hand. Franqui, referring to statements by Castro’s loyal colleague Celia Sánchez, claims: “What is certain is that Guevara was … energetically reprimanded, accused of indiscipline and irresponsibility, of compromising Cuba’s relations with the USSR; Fidel was furious over his irresponsibility in Algiers.”29