Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  In December 1972 Castro was again in Moscow, to take part in the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the USSR. The agreement on further economic cooperation that he signed with Brezhnev involved, in his own words, “extraordinary concessions” to the Cubans: the purchase price for Cuban sugar nearly doubled; Moscow granted not only a moratorium until 1986 on nearly 4 billion dollars of debt but a suspension of interest payments for 25 years; it also accorded Cuba a further loan of 300 million dollars, payable in three tranches at a favorable rate of interest. The “golden seventies” of relative prosperity were beginning for the Cubans; very soon, by the middle of the decade, nearly half of all Soviet development aid was going to the island state. Its hard-currency income from exports of sugar, as well as from other goods such as nickel, tobacco, citrus fruit, and fish, gave the Cuban government some leeway and enabled it to make some purchases in the West: for example, cars, machinery, locomotives, hotel equipment, furniture. In 1975 Cuba received even more loans from West European banking consortia, as well as 200 million dollars from Argentina, where 60,000 US automobiles were produced under license for Cuba. At first, the United States certainly tried to intervene behind the scenes at every level, but it was an era of detente and the cold warriors were on the defensive.

  Towards the end of 1974, on the initiative of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, secret contacts were established with the Cubans. On July 29, 1975, the United States even voted in the OAS to end the diplomatic and economic sanctions imposed against Cuba 11 years before. Many Latin American countries restored relations with Havana. And the new US administration under Gerald Ford declared certain trade restrictions “temporarily” suspended, especially the ban on US corporations maintaining business contacts with Cuba through their overseas subsidiaries.29

  On January 28, 1974, 15 years after the victory of the revolution, not quite 14 years after Deputy Prime Minister Mikoyan had made the first official Soviet trip to the country, Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the CPSU, touched down in Havana for a week-long visit. It was the first time that a Soviet Party chief had ever been to Latin America, and the signal was not lost, either on Washington or on the socialist bloc and the Third World. Brezhnev’s journey to meet Castro was tantamount to a benediction: not only were all the sins of the past forgiven, but Cuba became the model for revolutionary struggle. The exalted guest went with Castro in the tracks of the revolution, beginning with a visit to the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. It was estimated that a million people gathered for the central rally to greet the two men, at the foot of the José Martí memorial in Havana.

  The joint Soviet-Cuban statement reported their “complete agreement of views about the present world situation and the foreign-policy tasks of the socialist states.” Cuba paid tribute to the “peace program” of the Soviet Union, and unity also prevailed with regard to “general and complete disarmament, the prohibition of the use of force in international relations, and the ban for all times on the use of nuclear weapons.”30 In reality, Castro had been skeptical or even dismissive regarding the first signs of East– West detente in the early 1970s. He feared that a rapprochement between the superpowers would bring the opposite of security for small countries such as Cuba, since they would feel able to use the umbrella of detente to strike at them with greater impunity.

  Less than three weeks later, the GDR state and Party leader, Erich Honecker, followed Brezhnev to Havana, where he received an equally magnificent welcome. He too stayed a week, and went out to meet the people all over the island; his entourage was so enthusiastic that plans were announced to produce a film and a picture book about the visit. Behind closed doors, however, there was a lot of hard talking: Castro had already prepared the East German leader – as he had Brezhnev – for the possibility “that we will have to review our whole sugar policy, since all we have is sugar.”31 In other words, the comrades would have to pay more for their sugar. Castro gave his visitors from East Berlin a dramatic lesson in Caribbean economics, which climaxed in the observation that Cuba’s income from sugar and its few other products would in the current year be equivalent to only “40 percent of world market prices,” while its spending on necessary imports would be “10, 15 or 20 percent above world market prices.”

  Castro angrily reproached the Eastern-bloc states with reselling reasonably priced Cuban sugar at higher prices on the world market: “To take one example, 100 percent of the sugar that we export to Poland is re-exported.” This reselling of Cuban sugar by fraternal socialist countries had the effect of pushing down the price which Cuba (as one of the two or three largest sugarexporting countries) was able to obtain for what it had to sell directly on the world market for foreign currency. In this way, Castro argued, “we lost millions and millions in convertible currency” over the past years.

  Only the Soviet Union, Castro said in praise of it, had improved the situation in the last year by increasing the price it paid for Cuban sugar; “the other countries have done nothing.” Cuba therefore demanded a solid agreement on “rational trade, fair trade and balanced trade,” on the basis of equal rights. “We can no longer play the role of beggar and keep modestly knocking every day on the doors of foreign trade departments,” Castro declared. He also seems to have referred in passing to other typical problems in trade relations. “Twenty-three percent of the goods that we were supposed to receive from the GDR in 1973 have not arrived in our country. We do not know when we shall get them. In some of these cases there were shipping difficulties, in others there were supply difficulties.”

  Honecker too had many grounds for complaint – after all, the other Comecon countries generally saw Cuba’s slow economic growth in a critical light, not least because it was constantly exposed to the moods and sudden ideas of the Máximo Líder. Honecker let himself indulge in criticism wrapped up in gentle irony: “There is a lot of spontaneity, but naturally the hand of the Party is felt.” But on one thing he made himself unmistakably clear:

  I would like to state categorically that until now we have not acted out of stinginess in our economic relations with Cuba, but have always based ourselves on Cuba’s significance as the first socialist country in the Americas.… And if there is a greater advantage on one side, it must lie not on our side but on Cuba’s. That is our position.

  Just a few weeks later, Castro was able to take Honecker and his Eastern-bloc counterparts at their word. To the joy of the Cubans, the CPSU Politburo decided in the spring following Brezhnev’s visit that the 200 rubles a ton agreed in December for Cuban sugar would be raised to 325 rubles a ton for the years 1974 and 1975. Castro immediately passed news of this to the other Comecon states, and let it be understood that he expected them to match the Soviet Union. Such a decision on their part, he wrote in May 1974 to Honecker, would correspond “not only to the spirit” of their mutual relations but also “to conditions on world markets,” where the price of sugar was more than 400 rubles a ton.

  Into the Third World

  The Kremlin had also wanted Brezhnev’s visit to underline the importance it attached to the Third World. Cuba’s outstanding role as spokesman for the Third World, and its growing agreement with Moscow on questions of development policy, were demonstrated by the fact that Brezhnev did not include any other country in his trip. Above all, the Soviets hoped that Castro’s influence and reputation in the Third World would win credibility and influence for themselves in neutral developing countries that were shy of drawing too close to either of the superpowers.

  In the early seventies, Castro not only corrected and redefined Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union, but also developed a new line in foreign policy. Che Guevara’s failure and death, as well as the weak resonance of his call to create “two, three, many Vietnams,” had caused Castro to draw away from any simple exporting of revolution. The strengthening of social-revolutionary forces, which were winning influence and power in several Latin American countries not through armed struggle but b
y peaceful means, also forced Castro to do some rethinking. For he now had to recognize that there were other paths than violence to national emancipation and social transformation.

  The very special Cuban experiences of guerrilla warfare could not easily be transferred to other countries, even if here and there attempts were made to precipitate a revolutionary situation (for example, by the Tupamaros urban guerrillas in Uruguay). At most, Guevara’s book on guerrilla warfare32 met with passionate approval only among European drawing-room revolutionaries or political loose cannons such as Germany’s Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. In Peru in October 1968, a progressive military government had come to power not through a popular revolution but through a putsch from above, and yet the generals there had nationalized a large part of industry, decreed an extensive land reform and expropriated North American oil corporations. In 1970, the bourgeois socialist Salvador Allende had won the presidency not through arms but through a tight electoral victory, even though the CIA had tried to prevent this with years of covert operations. And in other parts of Latin America, especially in Brazil, the “liberation theology” emanating from within the Catholic Church and favoring social justice throughout the continent had won ever greater support and influence in oppositional circles.

  Castro, albeit somewhat reluctantly, instrumentalized these currents for his own ends. He formulated his new line in November 1971, during a state visit to Chile that was his first trip abroad for seven years, and his first in Latin America for 12 years. Like someone on a visit to relatives, who suddenly does not want to leave, he remained not the planned ten days but a full twice as much, traveling the 3,000-mile length of the country from the Atacama Desert to Patagonia. The wearing journey became a triumphal procession for him but caused considerable discomfort to his hosts, under siege as they were from a strong political right. It soon became clear that a Havana–Santiago political axis would be ideal for Castro’s internationalist concept of revolution; and he was already friends with Allende, from the time before the election when the Chilean had paid several visits to the Cuban. When Castro was asked along the way whether he supported the Chilean road to socialism, even though it did not correspond to the course taken in Cuba, he gave a statesman-like answer: “Not only did we find no contradiction, … we will always look with satisfaction on every new variation that may appear. And let every variation in the world make its appearance! If all roads lead to Rome, we can only wish for thousands of roads to lead to revolutionary Rome!”33 By “revolutionary Rome” he meant his dream of (left-wing) Pan-American unity.

  Castro’s goal – to build the broadest possible anti-imperialist front, not only in America but throughout the Third World – forced him into rhetorical restraint and dialectical flexibility. The professional revolutionary was more and more assuming the role of a statesman, which increased both his international reputation and his popularity at home; it flattered national pride and freed the country from the oppressive diplomatic isolation of the sixties, giving Cuba a certain weight again in the world. At a time when, in those latitudes, the upper classes and oligarchies were jealously watching over their national interests, so jealously that (until the early nineties at least) they undermined any attempt to create a Mercosur along the lines of the European Economic Community, Castro developed for the nitrate miners of northern Chile the vision of a common Latin American market, “a union of sister nations that may become a large and powerful community in the world of tomorrow.”34 Such reasonable and constructive ideas on the part of their arch-enemy disturbed the strategists in Washington more than his usual polemics had done. For if they fell on fertile ground, they would certainly endanger for a long time to come the powerful economic interests of the United States in Latin America.

  Castro was able to report, years later, that the CIA had been planning to have him killed – first in Chile, then on his journey back through Peru or Ecuador; and that assassins disguised as Venezuelan journalists had been equipped via the US embassy in La Paz with the most up-to-date precision weapons and submachine guns. One device was a television camera specially adapted to function as a firearm: “It was straight in front of me,” he said, “but they didn’t shoot.”35

  The shooting took place a couple of years later, when a military putsch prepared with the help of the CIA put a bloody end to Chilean president Salvador Allende and his government and plunged the country into nearly 17 years of dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. According to our present knowledge, Allende avoided falling into the hands of the military by shooting himself in the Moneda Palace in central Santiago – apparently with a submachine gun given to him as a present by Castro in 1971.

  During his visit, Castro seems to have had a suspicion of what was in store for Chile: his moderate account of a trip to “revolutionary Rome” strays from time to time into the militant rhetoric of the revolutionary from the Sierra Maestra. “For America to become united and become Our America, the America Martí spoke of, it will be necessary to eliminate the very last vestige of those reactionaries who want the peoples to be weak so they can hold them in oppression and in subjection to foreign monopolies.”36

  A few months after his Chile visit, inspired by his growing reputation and his new image as an (outwardly) moderate revolutionary, Castro boarded his Ilyushin-62 on May 3, 1972, and set off for a two-month trip that would include his first stay in the Soviet Union for eight years and reach a climax with Cuba’s admission to Comecon. Altogether, he visited ten countries. First, as if in the tracks of Che Guevara, he traveled to Africa, where Cuba had for years been overtly or covertly supporting liberation movements and left-leaning regimes. He visited Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Algeria (in the company of a conspicuously large military delegation), refined old relationships or cultivated new ones such as with Hoari Boumedienne in Algeria, who in the mid-sixties had overthrown Castro’s and Guevara’s friend Ben Bella. Then he flew on to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and finally the Soviet Union.

  In December 1972 Allende made a return visit to Cuba, the last time he would ever meet Castro. On September 11, 1973, the Cuban leader, coming straight from the fourth Non-Aligned Conference in Algiers, learned in Hanoi of Allende’s overthrow and death.

  On February 21, 1974, five months after the putsch in Chile, Castro told GDR leader Honecker (who was then in Havana) of his impressions and conclusions from his visit to Chile. “Since my visit to Chile, I had seen the strength of reaction, the fascism, the government’s weaknesses and its powerlessness. I had … the impression that the government’s only chance of saving itself was to go on the offensive, a mass popular offensive.” Given “the sabotage in international loans, a large foreign debt, a government without any foreign currency, and the high food prices,” Allende could only “with great audacity … have had any chance of survival.” Castro continued: “I think that in that situation the only option was to try to arm the popular forces. Naturally it would have been dangerous, but it was more dangerous to do nothing.… For the enemy was mobilized, the fascists were mobilized, and the masses were nowhere to be seen because the government had not mobilized them.”37

  Castro did not want to lose Chile as a base for revolutionary missionary work on the Latin American mainland. And, having seen early on the latent danger facing Allende, he was prepared to help him out with limited military support: he sent an elite contingent of Cuban soldiers to act as his bodyguard and military advisers, headed by his then-trusted friend Antonio de la Guardia (whom Castro had executed 18 years later for alleged drug-trafficking).38 “When the coup took place,” he confided to Honecker, “there were in our embassy enough weapons for a battalion, automatic weapons, armour-piercing weapons, and there was also a force of special troops.” But Allende did not want them to get involved in fighting, any more than he had allowed his Communist allies in Popular Unity to undergo paramilitary training.

  The putschists around Pinochet always sought to justify their brutal coup, and their
subsequent persecution of opponents of the dictatorship, by arguing that a real “war” was on against the Cuban-backed leftists of the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario), who subscribed to Che Guevara’s path of armed guerrilla struggle. In his conversation with Honecker, Castro admitted that there actually were links with the MIR, which was then operating underground. But, although there was some readiness to give them support, the scale of it was in the end only quite small.

  Castro also told Honecker that Cuba had insisted that the situation in Chile “required arming and that Unidad Popular must prepare for it.” According to the (uncorrected) stenographic record of the conversation, Castro claimed that a few months before the coup Allende had given his consent “for weapons to be given to Unidad Popular forces.” The components of Unidad Popular – Socialists and Communists, as well as the United People’s Action Movement (MAPU) of the Christian left – had preferred Allende’s peaceful road to the MIR’s armed struggle. But Castro now dressed this up to sound as if those parties had not been “prepared” for arming: “They had got some weapons, but much fewer than we wanted to give and could have sent.”39

  “The largest part” of the weapons stored in the Cuban embassy had been intended “for the Communist Party.” “A few weeks before the coup we asked them to collect the weapons. They did not collect them.” So, if it is true – as Castro claimed – that a few months before the putsch Allende agreed (contradicting his own stated policy) to the distribution of weapons to Unidad Popular members, he appears to have withdrawn his approval shortly before the actual coup. This can be the only explanation – assuming the stenographic record is correct – for Castro’s statement: “We had handed out some weapons and said, we won’t disregard Allende’s instruction, but if the coup takes place we will give you the weapons.” When the military finally struck, “we couldn’t give them any, because the fascist groups quickly surrounded the embassy.” The Cubans thus had “to take two-thirds of the weapons out of the country.” “But,” Castro let it be known, “a third of the weapons have remained there, and with the support of our Soviet friends we gave them to the MIR. We wouldn’t hand them out on the day of the coup, but only later. Now there are no longer any weapons in the embassy. They have a fair number of automatic weapons.”