As well as being increasingly alarmed by Cuban ‘adventurism’, Moscow was also dismayed by the failure of the Sandinistas to live up to its early expectations. The first FSLN guerrilla force, inadequately dressed in olive-green uniforms (which, though unsuitable for the climate, were chosen to preserve its self-image as freedom fighters), endured a miserable existence at its mountainous base on the Honduras-Nicaragua border. As Borge later recalled, ‘There was nothing to eat, not even animals to hunt . . . It wasn’t just hunger that was terrible, but constant cold twenty-four hours a day . . . We were always wet through with the clinging rain of that part of the country . . .’ In order to survive, the guerrillas were reduced to appealing to local peasants for food. In 1963 the demoralized guerrilla force was routed with heavy loss of life by the Nicaraguan National Guard. For the next few years, in the words of one of its supporters, the FSLN had ‘neither the arms, the numbers nor the organization to confront the National Guard again’.46 In 1964, with the assistance of Torres,47 the Mexico City residency reconstituted a sabotage and intelligence group (DRG) from the remnants of Andara y Ubeda’s (PRIM’s) guerrillas. The group was given one of the great historic codenames of Soviet history, chosen by Lenin as the title of the newspaper he had founded in 1900: ISKRA - ‘Spark’.48 By 1964, however, the extravagant optimism in the Centre at the prospects for Latin American revolution which had inspired Shelepin’s 1961 master-plan had faded. The KGB plainly expected that it would be some years before the Sandinista ‘spark’ succeeded in igniting a Nicaraguan revolution.
During his summer leave in 1964, Alekseyev was told by Shelepin to discuss Cuban affairs with Leonid Brezhnev. This was the first hint he received of preparations for the KGB-assisted coup which led to Khrushchev’s overthrow in October and Brezhnev’s emergence as Soviet leader.49 Soon after the coup, Mikhail Suslov, the chief Party ideologist, told the Central Committee that Khrushchev had been profligate in the promises he had made to other nations. Though he did not identify the states concerned, Suslov probably had Cuba chiefly in mind.50 The Kremlin watched aghast as its Cuban allies squandered its economic aid on such frivolities as the giant Coppelia ice-cream emporium. Resentment at the cost of supporting Cuba’s mismanaged economy combined with growing annoyance at Castro’s revolutionary indiscipline. In the mid-1960s, despite opposition from Latin American Communist parties as well as from Moscow, Cuba made unsuccessful attempts to set up guerrilla bases in Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Guatemala and Colombia.51
The main emissaries of the Cuban Revolution were illegals belonging to, or controlled by, the DGI. Cuban illegals were trained far more rapidly than their KGB counterparts: partly because the DGI was less thorough and paid less attention to devising secure ‘legends’, partly because it was far easier for a Cuban to assume another Latin American nationality than for a Russian to pose as a west European. Instead of going directly to their Latin American destinations, most Cuban illegals were deployed via Czechoslovakia. According to statistics kept by the Czechoslovak StB (and handed over by it to the KGB), from 1962 to 1966 a total of 650 Cuban illegals passed through Czechoslovakia. The great majority carried Venezuelan, Dominican, Argentinian or Colombian passports and identity documents. In most cases the documents were genuine save for the substitution of a photograph of the illegal for that of the original owner.52 One probable sign that the KGB had begun to distance itself from the Cuban attempt to export revolution, however, was the return to Moscow in 1964 of Grinchenko, who for the past three years had been advising the DGI on illegal operations.53 He does not appear to have been replaced. In 1965, however, in an attempt to reinforce collaboration with the DGI, Semichastny (travelling under the pseudonym ‘Yelenin’) led a KGB delegation to Cuba. When they met in the country house of the Soviet ambassador, the easy rapport between Alekseyev and Castro quickly created an atmosphere conducive to convivial discussion over a shashlik dinner. Semichastny was struck by Castro’s personal fascination with intelligence tradecraft. Later, as they watched a KGB film on the tracking down and interrogation of Oleg Penkovsky, the senior GRU officer who had given SIS and the CIA crucial intelligence on Soviet missile site construction before the Cuban missile crisis, Castro turned to Valdés, his Interior Minister, and the DGI officers who accompanied him, and exhorted them to learn as much as possible from the KGB delegation during their stay.54 Despite his enthusiasm for KGB tradecraft, however, Castro continued to alarm the Centre by what it regarded as his excess of revolutionary zeal. In January 1966, undeterred by Moscow’s reservations, Havana hosted a Trilateral Conference to support the onward march of revolution in Africa, Asia and Latin America. ‘For Cuban revolutionaries’, Castro declared, ‘the battleground against imperialism encompasses the whole world . . . And so we say and proclaim that the revolutionary movement in every corner of the world can count on Cuban combat fighters. ’55
Castro’s confident rhetoric, however, was belied by the lack of success of the revolutionary movement in Latin America. In the summer of 1967 the Sandinistas launched a new offensive which the Centre condemned as premature.56 Their guerrilla base in the mountainous jungle on the Honduran border was far better organized than at the time of the débâcle in 1963, thanks largely to much greater support from local peasants. According to one of the guerrillas, ‘They took on the job of wiping out tracks where the [FSLN] column had passed; the compañeros hung out coloured cloths to warn us of any danger; they invented signals for us with different sounds . . . We had a whole team of campesino brothers and sisters who knew the area like the back of their hand. ’57 At the mountain of Pancasan in August 1967, however, the Sandinistas suffered another disastrous defeat at the hands of the Nicaraguan National Guard. Among those killed was the ISKRA leader, Rigoberto Cruz Arguello (codenamed GABRIEL). The Centre blamed this disaster on ‘disloyalty’ in the FSLN leadership (all of which had gathered at the guerrilla base), inadequate resources with which to take on the National Guard and the ‘unprepared state’ of the local population.58 The jubilant Nicaraguan dictator, Tachito Somoza, boasted that the Sandinistas were finished. The late 1960s and early 1970s were ‘a period of silence’ for the FSLN during which it continued to rob banks to finance its underground existence but avoided open clashes with the National Guard.59
The rout of the Sandinistas was quickly followed by a major setback in the Cuban attempt to ‘export the revolution’. In 1966 Che Guevara devised a hopelessly unrealistic plan to set up a base in Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America, to train guerrillas from all parts of the continent and spread revolution across the Western hemisphere. Che convinced himself that he would turn Bolivia into another Vietnam. Argentina and Brazil would intervene and provoke mass protest movements which would bring down their military regimes. According to Che’s fantasy master-plan for continental revolution, the United States would then also be drawn in. The strains of fighting guerrillas in both Vietnam and Latin America would force Washington to set up a dictatorship whose inevitable disintegration would destroy the bourgeois state and open the way to revolution in the United States. 60
To conceal his journey to, and presence in, Bolivia for as long as possible, Che employed some of the techniques used by the DGI Illegals Directorate. He shaved off his beard and moustache, had his long hair cut short, put on a suit, disguised himself as a Uruguayan bureaucrat and had his photograph inserted in two false Uruguayan passports, each made out in a different name. In October 1966 Che flew to Moscow, then - like most Cuban illegals - returned to Latin America via Prague on one of his passports. In November he arrived in Bolivia, where his grandiose scheme for setting the continent ablaze rapidly reduced itself to guerrilla operations in a small area of the Rio Grande basin.61 Only a few years earlier, before his revolutionary rhetoric lost all touch with Latin American reality, Che had insisted, ‘A guerrilla war is a people’s war . . . To attempt to conduct this kind of war without the support of the populace is a prelude to inevitable disaster.’62 Che’s Bolivian adventure ended in ‘in
evitable disaster’ for precisely that reason. Not a single peasant in the Rio Grande basin joined his guerrillas. Even the Bolivian Communist Party (accused of treachery by Che) failed to support him. He wrote gloomily in his diary, ‘The peasant masses are no help to us whatever, and they are turning into informers.’
During a visit to Havana in July 1967 the Soviet Prime Minister, Aleksei Kosygin, complained that Cuban attempts to export revolution were ‘playing into the hands of the imperialists and weakening and diverting the efforts of the socialist world to liberate Latin America’. Castro’s refusal to heed Soviet advice caused a significant setback to the hitherto high-flying career of his friend, Aleksandr Alekseyev, the former KGB resident turned Soviet ambassador in Havana, who was accused in the Centre of going native and failing to restrain Castro’s adventurism. Alekseyev was recalled to Moscow, allegedly for medical treatment, in the summer of 1967. His successor as ambassador was a tough career diplomat, Aleksandr Soldatov, who did not arrive in Havana until the following year. The chief KGB adviser in the DGI, Rudolf Petrovich Shlyapnikov, was also recalled in the summer of 1967 after being accused by the DGI of conspiring with a pro-Moscow ‘microfaction’ in the Cuban Communist Party.63
Che’s guerrilla operations ended in October 1967 with his capture and execution by US-trained Bolivian forces. Death enormously enhanced his reputation, replacing the reality of the brave but incompetent guerrilla with the heroic image of the revolutionary martyr. Castro declared in an emotional address to the Cuban people that 8 October, the day of Che’s capture, would henceforth be for ever celebrated as the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla Fighter:
As all of us pay him homage, as all our thoughts are turned to the Che, as we look forward confidently to the future, to the final victory of the people, we all say to him and to all the heroes who have fought and fallen at his side: ‘Ever onward to victory!’
Moscow initially failed to see the symbolic value of the martyred Che as a weapon in the propaganda war against US imperialism. Pravda published instead an article by an Argentinian Communist denouncing the futility of the Cuban policy of exporting revolution. Leonid Brezhnev clearly had Guevara in mind when publicly condemning the idea that ‘a conspiracy of heroes’ could make a socialist revolution.64
The KGB was later to recognize the world-wide popularity of the Che Guevara myth as a useful element in active-measures campaigns against American imperialism. In October 1967, however, the only commemoration in Moscow of Che’s death was by a small, forlorn congregation of Latin American students who gathered outside the US embassy. In Washington, by contrast, over 50,000 Americans, most from various factions of the New Left which spread across American campuses in the late 1960s, assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial and bowed their heads in silent homage to the great opponent of US imperialism. A poll of US university students in 1968 discovered that more identified with Che than with any other figure, alive or dead.
In the immediate aftermath of Che’s martyrdom and the thinly veiled Soviet criticism of Cuban adventurism, Castro showed little inclination to mend his fences with Moscow. When in January 1968 he scornfully dismissed some of the ideas ‘put forward in the name of Marxism’ as ‘real fossils’, it was obvious that he had Soviet ideas in mind: ‘Marxism needs to develop, overcome a certain sclerosis, interpret the realities of the present in an objective and scientific way, behave like a revolutionary force and not like a pseudo-revolutionary church.’
It was clear to Castro’s listeners that Cuba was the ‘revolutionary force’ and the Soviet Union the ‘pseudo-revolutionary church’ which had succumbed to ideological sclerosis. Soon afterwards the Maximum Leader staged a show trial of a ‘microfaction’ of pro-Soviet loyalists within the Cuban Communist Party, who were found guilty of ‘ideological diversionism’ prejudicial to the ‘unity and firmness of the revolutionary forces’. During the trial, the head of the DGI, Manuel Piñeiro, gave evidence that members of the microfaction had been in contact with the KGB.65
With the threatened collapse of the Soviet ‘bridgehead’ in Cuba, the KGB’s grand strategy conceived in 1961 to orchestrate ‘armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments’ in Latin America seemed in tatters. The Centre’s early optimism about the prospects for a Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua had faded away. During the later 1960s the Centre was more interested in using FSLN guerrillas in operations to reconnoitre sabotage targets in the southern United States than in helping them prepare for revolution in Nicaragua. In 1966 a KGB sabotage and intelligence group (DRG) based on the ISKRA guerrilla group was formed on the Mexican-US border with support bases in the area of Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana and Ensenada. Its leader, Andara y Ubeda (PRIM), travelled to Moscow for training in Line F operations. Among the chief sabotage targets were American military bases, missile sites, radar installations, and the oil pipeline (codenamed START) which ran from El Paso in Texas to Costa Mesa, California. Three sites on the American coast were selected for DRG landings, together with large-capacity dead-drops in which to store mines, explosive, detonators and other sabotage materials. A support group codenamed SATURN was tasked with using the movements of migrant workers (braceros) to conceal the transfer of agents and munitions across the border.66
The year 1968 was a difficult one for the KGB in both Europe and Latin America. The show trial of the pro-Soviet microfaction in Havana was quickly followed by what Moscow considered an outrageous display of ideological subversion in Czechoslovakia. The attempt by the reformers of the Prague Spring to create ‘Socialism with a human face’ was interpreted by the KGB as counter-revolution. The near-collapse of official censorship culminated in a Prague May Day parade with banners proclaiming such irreverent messages for Moscow as ‘Long live the USSR - but at its own expense!’ The KGB played a major role both in assisting the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 and in the subsequent ‘normalization’ which ensured the country’s return to pro-Soviet orthodoxy. 67
Castro was widely expected to side with Prague reformers and to condemn the August invasion of Czechoslovakia. He began his first broadcast speech after the invasion, however, by saying that some of what he had to say would ‘run counter to the feelings of many people’. Castro acknowledged that the invasion had no legal basis but insisted that, in the greater interests of ‘the people’s struggle against imperialism’, it was fully justified:
In short, the Czechoslovak regime was moving toward capitalism and it was inexorably marching toward imperialism. About this we did not have the slightest doubt . . . The essential thing, whether we accept it or not, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which led to the breakdown of a socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism. From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another.68
All this was music to Moscow’s ears. The Maximum Leader’s emergence over the next few months as a dependable Moscow loyalist made it possible for the Soviet Union to shore up its crumbling Cuban bridgehead.
Probably the main reason for Castro’s ideological somersault only months after the show trial and imprisonment of Moscow loyalists within the Cuban Communist Party was a severe economic crisis which served to emphasize Cuba’s dependence on Soviet economic aid. Cuban industry and power stations ran on Soviet oil shipped from the Black Sea. When Moscow began to cut back its oil exports as a sign of its displeasure early in 1968, there were power cuts in Havana, and Cuban sugar mills and factories began to grind to a halt. Castro himself worsened the crisis by an economically disastrous ‘revolutionary offensive’ in March designed to destroy the remnants of free enterprise by nationalizing 55,000 small businesses which accounted for a third of Cuba’s retail sales. As a reward for the Maximum Leader’s newfound loyalty, the Soviet Union effectively bailed out the Cuban economy. By the end of 1969, Cuba owed the Soviet Union $4 billion.69
Castro’s decision to side with Mosc
ow against the Czechoslovak reformers also reflected his own authoritarian leadership style and distaste for the political freedoms of the Prague Spring. By the mid-1960s the real achievements of the Cuban Revolution - the reforms in health and education and the end of gangsterismo chief among them - were increasingly overshadowed by an empty revolutionary rhetoric which bore little relation either to the regime’s shambolic economic mismanagement or to its intolerance of dissent. In 1965 Castro himself admitted that Cuban jails contained 20,000 political prisoners.70 A huge network of surveillance kept close watch for any sign of ideological dissidence. The DGI was assisted by the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), a nationwide network of neighbourhood associations which reported all suspicious activities. Founded in 1960, the CDRs expanded over the next decade to include almost a third of the adult population. Immediately after Castro’s endorsement of the crushing of the Prague Spring, the CDRs, acting on instructions from the DGI, arranged for a series of ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations to support his speech. Cuba thus developed a vast system of social control similar to, but more conspicuous than, those operated by the KGB and its east European allies. By the late 1960s, Castro was using the CDRs to dictate even the length of men’s hair and women’s dresses. In November 1968 the parents of long-haired youths and miniskirted girls were summoned to appear before the local authorities.71 Castro had a particular dislike of homosexuals and instructed that they ‘should not be allowed in positions where they are able to exert an influence on young people’. Gays were routinely refused tenancies in new housing projects and frequently singled out for service in forced-labour units.72
The World Was Going Our Way Page 9