Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  It was against this background that Castro eventually announced: “We’re rectifying all those things – and there are many that strayed from the revolutionary spirit, from revolutionary work, revolutionary virtue, revolutionary effort, revolutionary responsibility.” “Rectification” for him meant “revolution within the Revolution,” a move against those who were negating “Che’s ideas, revolutionary thought, style, spirit and example.”41 On the twentieth anniversary of Guevara’s death, the Cuban propaganda machine presented the ideological course correction associated with rectificación as a revival of the revolutionary idealism of the sixties.

  Previously, any return to dogmatic positions had occurred when decisive economic measures or political changes were about to happen, and when it seemed essential to close ranks to keep the revolution on course. The state and Party leadership handed down from above the ideological framework within which the rectificación was to be interpreted over the following years. It was thought necessary to keep a tight rein on society, since the population was being asked to swallow things which, in Western societies too, would hardly be accepted without grumbling or revolt. Abolition of the popular farmers’ markets was just one measure in an austerity program which stretched into every sphere of the economy, and which, on closer inspection, by no means always corresponded to a strictly Marxist definition of purity.

  Boston sociologist Susan Eckstein writes:

  In sum, “rectification” in practice diverged from and at times contradicted the rhetoric of the campaign. While assigning new life to Marxist-Leninist and Guevarist moral principles, the government and Party implemented certain reforms and tolerated practices of the preceding period that involved market features, that undermined revolutionary and prerevolutionary won gains, and that led living standards to drop.42

  The urgent need to balance the state budget left Castro with little choice. Thus, the problems of socialist Cuba – and many of the ways of tackling them – resembled those to be found in capitalist Third World countries. As Eckstein points out, “many other Third World governments implemented neoliberal economic reforms in response to similar fiscal crises at the time.”43

  One outcome of the restructuring of Cuba’s state economy was a change in social standards as rapid and extensive as the kind familiar from neoliberal performance-oriented societies. In order to boost the efficiency of the system, decisions were taken to increase work targets, to link bonuses more closely to output, and to punish abuses. Castro himself called into question a number of social gains, eventually enlisting the support of the trade unions, with the result that there were no longer unconditional guarantees of job security or wage levels. Promotion no longer came automatically with length of service, but also depended on workers’ skills and qualifications. Pay was related to output, and average incomes even declined slightly during this period. To cut down on the extravagant and overpowerful bureaucracy, nearly 23,000 posts in state and enterprise administration were eliminated in the course of 1988. Although officially there was no unemployment, it was actually running at 6 percent. In future, when manpower was short, it would be permissible and indeed necessary for workers to perform tasks outside the narrow sphere for which they were qualified. Multioficio – more or less, “multiservice” – became the magic formula through which bottlenecks were supposed to be overcome.

  The housing shortage was still a major problem in the eighties. Although in 1982 the government again allowed the construction of private housing, the unsatisfied demand rose sharply throughout the country between 1971 and 1985 – from 755,000 to 888,000 units. In the capital the situation was described as “explosive.” “The collapse of more houses in the old town is to be expected in the event of heavy rainfall; 56,000 people are currently living in hostel accommodation,” the GDR embassy reported to East Berlin in 1987.44 Because of the continuing drought, the “supply of drinking water is also a growing problem. In some localities, all of it has to be delivered by tankers. There are plans for expensive drilling – down at least 100 meters – to open new wells.” At the same time in the eighties, the number of nursery school places was 20,000 short of requirements.

  To bring some immediate relief, Castro revived the so-called “microbrigades” and “construction brigades” from the 1970s, which worked on a piece-rate plus bonus system from 12 to 15 hours a day. The “microbrigades” were made up of students, school-leavers, pensioners, and housewives, while the “construction brigades” recruited fairly well-paid and ideologically unobjectionable “model workers” from other enterprises as a kind of “rapid deployment force” on the socialist building-site front. In 1990 up to as many as 40,000 people belonged to this prestigious vanguard of the working class, roughly 1 percent of the country’s 4-million labor force; some brigades had more than 1,000 members. The conditions they enjoyed were special in every sense: they lived in superior housing, received better food, could buy luxury goods on favorable terms – and, above all, earned higher pay, up to 60 percent more than the average monthly wage of 185 pesos.

  Workers who did not belong to one of the brigades were called upon to do voluntary overtime. In 1987, for example, some 400,000 men and women responded to the Party’s appeal for “forty hours of voluntary work on community projects,” eventually putting in a total of 20 million extra hours. Two years later, more than 2 million workers obeyed the call to work a “Red Sunday” without extra pay, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Russian October Revolution and the Sixteenth Congress of the Cuban Trade Union Federation, the CTC.

  While Castro hit out at capitalist attitudes inside the country, the need for foreign currency led him to seek alliances with the ideological devil in the form of joint ventures between Cuban state enterprises and foreign corporations. Companies were set up at home and abroad with Western participation: Cubatabaco, Caribsugar, Cubanacán, Gaviota, Cubapak, Cimex, Banco Financiero and others, concentrating on biotechnology (where Cuba played a major world role), tobacco, and, above all, tourism (especially the magnificent beaches of the Varadero Peninsula). The Panama-registered Cimex, involved in the tourist industry in 17 different countries, was the largest of the joint companies: it was associated with 12 corporate partners, and had more than 48 subsidiaries. Gaviota, founded in 1988, specialized in high-level tourism and came under Raúl Castro’s defense ministry. The development of tourism as a source of foreign currency increased the number of people visiting the island by 150 percent in the course of the eighties, until it reached more than 320,000 in the year 1990. (The figure was scheduled to reach 2 million by the end of the millennium, bringing in more revenue from abroad than any other sector of the economy.) But all the new efforts to earn foreign currency were unable to offset the losses resulting from lower prices on world commodity markets. Cuba therefore had to keep cutting back its imports from Western countries, and against his will Castro found that he was more dependent than ever on the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. In 1986, the launch year for both rectificación and perestroika, more than 86 percent of Cuba’s foreign trade was with other Comecon countries.

  The encrusted bureaucracy also got a taste of the new dynamic born of necessity. In order to create the right conditions for the rectification campaign, Castro broke up old structures, fired incompetent officials, made personnel changes everywhere from the Central Committee to the heads of ministries, and embarked on a major rejuvenation of the apparatus. In elections to the Party’s leading bodies, at the congress held in February 1986, sweeping changes were introduced under the slogan “Renewal or Death.” A total of 40 percent of those elected to the Central Committee, and 50 percent of the new Politbureau, had never served on those bodies before.45 Castro wanted to take account of the fact that a half of Cuba’s population of 10 million had been born since the revolution, and another way he showed this was by taking 20 well-trained members of the Communist Youth (UJC) to work as advisers by his side. This constantly replenished reservoir would also provide him with his futur
e ministers – one being the young paediatrician Carlos Lage Dávila, who was later made responsible for planning economic policy and helped lead the country into the new millennium as Castro’s deputy in the Council of State. The up-and-coming revolutionaries chosen by Castro traveled the country in his company or on his behalf, to track down and rectify serious irregularities.

  Although Cuba rolled back the private sector just as Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was giving it a boost, market instruments were deployed in both countries to overcome the crisis. The difference was that in the one case the state itself kept charge of those instruments, while in the other it handed them over to the free market. Cubans were not spared neoliberal shock therapy – but it was ordered not by their own government but by erstwhile friends and allies. The Cuban media spelled out more and more clearly for its viewers the negative consequences that Gorbachev’s reforms and the worsening economic and political crisis in the Soviet Union were having for the social security of the population there, as well as the knock-on effects for Cuba itself. Cubans learned that they could expect from Soviet-style liberalization not a higher standard of living but chaos and unemployment. They could picture to themselves that the kind of economic and political transformation which would follow the mass return of exiles from Miami would in all probability be far less peaceful than the changes in the Eastern bloc. This helps to explain why the magic words “perestroika” and “democracy” lost a lot of their force among the Cuban population.

  In fact, perestroika was only part of a dual political concept; the other part was glasnost, or “openness.” Once again Castro’s understanding of the term was different from that of the Soviet general secretary. In Cuba too “we have glasnost,” he said in 1988 in an interview for the US television channel NBC. “We have always had it. No party in the world has been more selfcritical than the Communist Party of Cuba. None. Examine our history and you will see glasnost on a large scale.”46 But in Cuba the word “glasnost” was equated with an “opening” not in the sense of the Spanish word apertura, but at most with sinceridad, or frankness. It was openness behind closed doors, and in the limited space of ideological principles that had already been laid down.

  This was also true for intellectuals, although they were encouraged to take part in the rectification and to advance criticisms of the political stagnation and bureaucratic inefficiency. “Whereas Soviet glasnost had opened up a Pandora’s box of demands that threatened to undermine the fragile stability of the USSR, the Cuban version, if it could be called by the same name, was a decidedly controlled and limited affair,” wrote Sebastian Balfour.47 The controlled character of the rectificación, and the fact that it never led, as in Eastern Europe, to street power and the fall of the Communist regime, was not only due to the ubiquitous presence of Cuba’s state security. It was also the result of a basic ideological unanimity in Cuba about the hard times ahead.

  In a speech in Havana on the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, at the beginning of January 1989, Castro still officially dismissed speculation about growing political differences between Cuba and the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, he made it quite clear that he intended to stick to his course.

  What I can assure you … is that the revolution is not going to change. I think the secret of this revolution is having been loyal to principles from start to finish, having been loyal for thirty years and being willing to continue that way for another thirty or hundred years. . . . There is only one honorable way to survive under conditions as different as those Cuba has had to face over the last thirty years; loyalty to principles and never letting yourself be intimidated by anything, not letting anyone or anything change the pure and straight line of the revolution.

  The message was crystal-clear, as were those to whom it was addressed. Castro did not forget to thank the Soviet Union and its deceased leaders for the help Cuba had received in previous decades. “We will never forget the support received at key moments, when we did not lack the weapons needed for our defense. We will never forget the economic cooperation, the just trade relations.”48 All the more did he complain behind the scenes about the revisionist policy of the new Soviet leader, who was trying to cure the ills of socialism “with capitalist medicine.”

  In his book Castro’s Final Hour, the US journalist Andres Oppenheimer quotes from a revealing dialogue in January 1989 between Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez, a supporter of Gorbachev’s reform policy. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the principles of Perestroika,” Castro said. “But it’s an extremely risky policy. It’s leading the Socialist world back to capitalism.” García Márquez suggested that, on the contrary, “perhaps it’s the beginning of true socialism, of socialism with a human face.” To which he replied: “No. Believe me, Gabo, it’s going to be a disaster.”49 Yuri Pavlov, former Soviet ambassador and director of the Latin American department of the foreign ministry under Gorbachev, later recalled: “Castro was one of the few foreign leaders who saw that Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika could get out of control and wreck the very system it was intended to improve.”50

  The Soviet imperium collapses

  On April 2, 1989, 15 years after Brezhnev’s trip to Cuba, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze arrived for a three-day visit. In the five previous years Castro had already met Gorbachev at least three times, more often than any of the latter’s predecessors in a similar period of time. The first occasion was in February 1984, at the funeral of Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, who had died at the age of 70 after just 15 months in office. At the time Gorbachev was responsible within the Politburo for the struggle against corruption in the country’s ruling apparatus. And a year later, in March 1985, when Konstantin Chernenko died in his turn, a generation change was completed with the surprising appointment of Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Castro simply conveyed his congratulations by telephone. But the Twenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU in 1986 offered Castro the chance to pay a courtesy call on the new Soviet leader. The 59-year-old veteran revolutionary had a three-hour conversation with Gorbachev in the Kremlin on the afternoon of March 2, the Russian’s birthday. Already perestroika was beginning to make itself felt.

  In November 1986 Castro was again in Moscow, for the annual celebration of the October Revolution. More important, however, was the meeting of general secretaries and Central Committee first secretaries of Communist parties from Comecon countries, at which Gorbachev tried to drive home the urgency of economic reforms. “It is no secret,” he had written on September 2 in his letter of invitation, “that the structure and forms of economic relations among our countries, both bilateral and multilateral, have come into conflict with the need for rapid and comprehensive strengthening of the economy as well as an acceleration of scientific and technological progress.”51 In his opening words to the closed meeting in November, Gorbachev then reminded everyone present that “in the present period of historical development” the Comecon countries faced “an inexorable choice:” either socialism greatly quickened its pace, adopted the most modern positions in science and technology, and convincingly demonstrated the superiority of its way of life, or else it remained mired in problems and difficulties, lost its dynamism and was driven “into a corner.”52 Castro, attending his first meeting of Comecon leaders in 14 years, seemed in his contribution eager to mark a distance from the new course, by emphasizing that Cuba belonged “partly to a different world, the Third World.” He dressed up as self-criticism his old critique, taken over from Che Guevara, of the way in which Soviet economic policy watered down the Communist ideal. We wanted to complete a historical leap in short order, he said; we copied a number of good experiences from the socialist countries, but also copied well many bad experiences. Nor did he forget to mention that Cuba was still “dependent upon help from the fraternal countries, especially the Soviet Union.” If the Comecon countries ceased paying more than the world-market pric
e for sugar, “the people of Cuba would be condemned to go hungry.”53

  Despite their divergences expressed in the terms rectificación and perestroika, the two leaders seemed to have found a direct rapport with each other, in a relationship of mutual respect. There was thus great excitement as the time approached for Gorbachev’s trip to Cuba. Western politicians and commentators, brimming with impatience and political naivety, expected that the Soviet Party leader would force Castro’s rectificación onto the tracks of perestroika. But Gorbachev seemed determined to dash the hopes of all those who could scarcely wait for Castro’s rule to end. For a start, it looked as if he did not want to damage the decadeslong relationship with Cuba by openly compromising his host.

  Factors associated with both internal and external policy played a role in this. Perestroika did not mean for Gorbachev naively and needlessly giving up the strategically not insignificant position on the Caribbean island, or vexing friendly Third World countries in which Castro still enjoyed a high reputation. And so, he evidently preferred for the time being to maintain an obliging attitude toward the Soviet Union’s difficult ally. Besides, at that time he could scarcely apply any coercive measures against Cuba, both because Castro’s friends among orthodox Communists in the Soviet apparatus were still too powerful, and because a shortage of foreign currency meant that the two countries were still all too dependent upon each other economically. Havana needed Moscow’s oil, and Moscow needed Havana’s sugar and nickel. Nevertheless, Castro seemed unsure and concerned about what was in store.

  One of the most important people accompanying Gorbachev was Yuri Pavlov, who had been involved in preparing the trip. Part of the reform wing of the ruling apparatus in Moscow, he saw Castro as a Stalinist and felt a deep antipathy toward him. Later he wrote: