by I. F. Stone
The Chinese were anxious to answer Khrushchev’s charge that theirs was a policy of adventurism which might well plunge the whole world into thermonuclear war. The Chinese replied that while they were opposed to “the imperialist policy of nuclear blackmail,” they also saw no need whatsoever for Socialist countries to use “nuclear weapons as chips in gambling or as a means of intimidation.” This implied that the missiles were emplaced by the Russians as “chips” in a strategic game. “To do this,” the Chinese said, “would really be committing the error of adventurism.” They went on to say that “if one has blind faith in nuclear weapons” and “becomes scared out of one’s wits by imperialist nuclear blackmail, one may possibly jump from one extreme to the other and commit the error of capitulationism.” The Chinese said the Cubans had committed neither but implied the Russians were guilty of both. They quoted with approval Castro’s statement that the way to peace “is not the way of sacrificing or infringing upon people’s rights,” a sideswipe at Khrushchev, and praised the Cubans because “far from being frightened by United States nuclear blackmail, they insisted on their five just demands.”
This must have been music to Fidelista ears. The Chinese went on to make a puzzling remark. “The whole world knows,” the Chinese said, “that we neither requested the introduction of nuclear weapons into Cuba nor obstructed the withdrawal of ‘offensive’ weapons from the country.”
The Chinese have an influential Embassy in Havana. To say that they did not obstruct the removal of the missiles is to say that they did not advise the Cubans to resist the removal. That much seems clear. But why should they feel it necessary to say that they had never “requested” the placing of nuclear missiles in Cuba? No one assumed that they did. Castro’s speech of January 2 throws some light on this. He suggested that the emplacing of the missiles in Cuba had been requested by the Russians. “We agreed with the Soviet Union on the weapons which were set up here,” Fidel said, “because we understood that we were fulfilling two obligations: one toward the country, fortifying its defenses in view of imperialist threats, and one obligation toward the peoples of the Socialist camp.” This contradicted Khrushchev’s account. It implied that Castro allowed the missiles to be set up in Cuba not only to deter United States attack but also because he was persuaded that in doing so he would be fulfilling an obligation to the Soviet bloc. Was it to help right the Soviet missile gap by placing IRBM’s in Cuba? Castro did not say. But this reference in his speech would help to explain what the Chinese meant when they said they had not requested the placing of missiles in Cuba, and then went on to call the emplacement “adventurism” and the swift removal “capitulationism.”
Castro in his speech of January 2 had no word of praise for Khrushchev. Castro did not say, as Khrushchev did, that with the United States no-invasion pledge, there was no further need of missiles to deter a United States attack. On the contrary Castro said that while “the Soviet government, in search of peace, arrived at certain agreements with the North American government” this did not mean that Cuba had renounced “the right to possess the weapons we deem proper and to take the international steps we deem pertinent as a sovereign country.” He said over and over again that he did not believe United States pledges and he would not allow inspection. The Kremlin is not accustomed to such coolly independent language.
As for the Sino-Soviet struggle, Castro alone of all the Soviet leaders declared his neutrality between Moscow and Peking. This, too, is unheard of in the bloc. There personal rivalries have always taken on doctrinal forms, and questions of doctrine in turn have been debated in the intransigent tones of medieval theological dispute, in which the loser was doomed to be outcast as a heretic. Castro stood aside from this furor theologicus. In his January 2 speech the Cuban spoke of the split with sorrow. He said Cuba was forced to carry on its struggle for economic development in “a bitter situation” amid “discrepancies in the bosom of the Socialist family.” The very word chosen must raise eyebrows in Moscow and Peking. Castro could hardly have picked a weaker word than “discrepancies” for what they regard as a mortal quarrel. He said, “We see with clarity here, from this trench ninety miles from the Yankee empire, how much cause for concern these discrepancies can be, how much unity is needed, how much all the strength of the entire Socialist camp is needed to face up to these enemies.” He announced that “the line of our people” was to be “to struggle for unity” in the Socialist camp so that it could present “a united front to the imperialists.” Unity “inside and outside” was his watchword. This neutralism in the Soviet cold war will be as unpalatable to Moscow and Peking as India’s neutralism in our cold war has been to us.
There is no better place than Havana to listen in on the controversies shaking the bloc. I did not speak with Chinese but I did speak with Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs. They cannot dismiss the Sino-Soviet struggle as easily as Castro. For Castro the problem is to save unity so he can get help from both sides in his struggle against American strangulation. For these others the problem is more complex. “The Cubans wanted to join the bloc,” one Yugoslav said bitterly, “to have its advantages but then did not wish to accept its obligations.” He thought it sheer madness for the Cubans to expect the Russians to risk a thermonuclear conflict on their behalf. From the Yugoslav and Polish points of view, Castro fails to see that a Chinese victory would be the end of “different roads to socialism,” and that Castro would be the first to find this unbearable. For Poles and Russians, the Cubans seem not to understand that while Khrushchev may be too cautious for their taste, his downfall would threaten the greater freedom within the Soviet bloc which followed the death of Stalin and the defeat of the Old Guard. In their opinion the very same Fidelistas who cheer China’s “paper tiger” line would be the first to rebel if Chinese-style thought control were to be imposed on Cuba. As for the Russians, their friendliness for Cuba in no way interferes with their obvious desire for friendlier relations with the United States.
These talks in Havana showed me that wherever American policy was to some degree flexible and pragmatic, rather than rigidly ideological, this paid off. The Yugoslavs, the Poles, the Russians—none took as dark a view of the possibilities of peaceful coexistence as the Cubans or the Chinese. This difference does not have its origin in theory but in experience. We treat communism as negotiable—everywhere but in Cuba and China. We have diplomatic relations with most of the bloc. We do some business with them. We have cultural exchanges. We even extend aid to two Communist countries, Yugoslavia and Poland. But China and Cuba are outside the pale. Is it any wonder that they, knowing only our rigid hostility, are rigidly hostile in return?
One way to look at the recent crisis is that we were brought to the brink of thermonuclear war because we had driven an island neighbor so far into fear and enmity that it was willing to emplace nuclear missiles against us. We can be back on the brink again very easily by misjudging our relations with Cuba. From all I could learn, the events of that awful weekend when the world came so close to destruction brought Castro new support from among his own people, as the Russian threat once evoked support for Tito. People who had never volunteered before came out for militia service. Those foreign observers who were in the front-line trenches when a United States attack was expected at any moment said they had never seen anything like it in their experience of war. “The sense of the people’s courage,” said one East European observer, “was a physical, tangible thing. You felt it in your skin and in your spine.” Of course, he added, the Cubans have no conception of what a modern war, even a “conventional” one, would be like. “Everybody was running around with pistols, as in the Wild West,” he said. “They did not realize that in a real war they might never see the enemy at all, much less engage in hand-to-hand combat with him.” The Cubans are a brave people with a great tradition, fighting after a half century to complete a revolution we twice thwarted before, once after they defeated the Spaniards at the beginning of the century and again in 1933 after t
hey overthrew Machado.
A visit to Havana for any foreigner today is both frustrating and inspiring. Red tape and inefficiency are suffocating, and in the middle echelons of the bureaucracy—the worst echelons everywhere—one meets officials who seem to arrive late and leave early and devote themselves in between to keeping up the morale of the cigar industry by smoking their way gloriously through the Revolution. Appointments are made and broken in the most maddening fashion. Petty officials drag out the simplest tasks to magnify their own sense of importance. One finds in oneself a sudden sympathy with the “imperialists” who have to do business in these Latin lands of a mañana that rarely comes. But then one encounters a very different type of official, some young guerrilla soldier turned administrator, whose sobriety and devotion are at once apparent. I was often reminded at such moments of the best chaverim (comrades) whom I had known in Israel in the greatest days of its struggle. Indeed Castro’s Cuba often recalled Israel, in the courage of its people in the face of such great odds, and in the spirit of the Fidelistas. There is no way of knowing what portion of the Cuban people are with Fidel but everyone with whom I spoke felt that his support was substantial. The spirit of the Fidelistas is difficult to explain to persons like ourselves who live in a stable society, indeed a society which often seems stalemated at dead center. For the Fidelistas—and they are particularly strong among the youth and the Negroes—the Revolution is still in its first uncorrupted phase. For them the experience is like love. They live in a springtime of mankind when words which have grown overblown and empty elsewhere become meaningful—love of country, devotion, selflessness, readiness to sacrifice one’s life for others, the joy of struggling to end misery and to build a better society. How speak of these things to the jaded intellectuals of Washington?
Elsewhere youth has turned beatnik in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. In Cuba the same youth still believes. A whole new generation of technicians, scientists, doctors and engineers are being developed from them to replace those who have fled. The best and most promising youth are being brought in as becados—50,000 of them—given scholarships (becas) and stipends to make it possible for them to study. It was the holiday season and I was unable to talk with them. But a girl who is teaching some of the premedical students English spoke glowingly of their enthusiasm and devotion.
Without hope, faith and charity, Castro’s Cuba cannot be understood. We underestimate its grass roots strength and we overestimate its difficulties. A Britisher who had gone through the London blitz, a Pole who had seen his country forced to make a revolution in a land leveled by war and depopulated by Nazism, a Yugoslav who knew at first hand what the Partisans went through, a Russian who had seen war in all its appalling fury—such observers told me they regarded the Cuban Revolution as a de luxe affair, the standard of living as extraordinarily high, the food supply as phenomenal for a country undergoing so fundamental a revolution against the will of so powerful a neighbor. It is, thanks to the kind of buildings we Yankee imperialists left behind, the world’s first air-conditioned revolution. They keep the air conditioning on even in December when it is hardly needed. It is also, thanks to the existence of a huge Soviet bloc, getting a level of aid from abroad such as no other revolution has ever enjoyed. An American engineer who spent a lifetime in the automotive industry in Detroit and is now running a Cuban government laboratory for products research and automation told me the machine tools being supplied by the bloc are of very good quality. He said even a country like North Korea, so recently leveled by war, is sending Cuba first-class milling machinery. “They may be short of consumer goods,” he told me, “but the task of supplying capital equipment and technicians for a country as small as this one is ‘chicken feed’ for the Soviet bloc.” He is very optimistic about the future. He thinks Cuba will be growing its own food needs in three or four years and he says a geological survey has found not only many valuable metals like cobalt but petroleum. If Cuba can supply its own oil and food, it will really be independent.
The true Fidelistas are a pleasure to talk with. One of them was the young soldier in charge of the new fishing port. When I told him the United States fears this will be a Soviet naval base, he said, “We are building this port in Havana. We are building a refrigerating plant, a canning plant, a fileting plant. You will be able to see for yourself that our purpose is fishing.” Traditionally Cubans have paid little attention to the food potential of the seas around them. In other quarters I was told that Cuba hopes also to fish the little-touched South Atlantic, that the Russians can fish the North Atlantic from their own bases but that for South Atlantic fisheries it will be advantageous to them to have fish-processing and ship-repair facilities in Cuba. Others spoke of the plans going forward for automation in the sugar fields. Part of the Revolution’s problems arises from its success rather than its failure. Labor is growing short. The hard work of cane cutting is not popular and peasants are no longer forced by hunger and misery to take on such backbreaking tasks. They are also eating more, and supplying the cities with less. My own impression in the shops was that price control and rationing were working fairly well, and there was more available than I had been led to believe. In everything the children come first. Milk was impossible to get in Havana’s best hotels but a Mexican reporter told me of visiting a fishing village in Oriente where every morning a truck came over bad roads to deliver twenty-eight liters of milk for the twenty-eight babies. Those people in Havana with babies all told me they got their milk ration regularly. If Havana is poorer, the countryside is richer. And in the hotels at night one sees a whole new class of Negroes and mulattoes, the men in dinner jackets, the girls in new-style half-bustle dresses, enjoying themselves where hitherto only the rich and the foreigner played. The sense of full racial equality and ease is one of the most pleasant experiences for the guilt-burdened white American in Castro’s Cuba.
It was my sixth visit to Cuba—three times before and three times since the Revolution. I did not encounter enemies of the regime. I did not visit the prisons, or study the workings of the bloc system which is supposed to give the Castroites eyes and ears everywhere against the threat of sabotage and our CIA, but must work some injustice too. The Cuba I picture is a Cuba as it appears through friendly eyes. This, of course, is not the whole truth. A revolution is a complex phenomena, a tragic struggle to be fully grasped only when seen from many points of view with compassion for the exiles as well as the victors. But I believe it is dangerously misleading to make policy and form opinion, as we do back home, almost exclusively on the basis of hostile views. To look at Castro’s Cuba only through the eyes of those who have fled, to concentrate on the negative aspects as our press does, to exaggerate these and even to falsify, is to make it almost impossible to fashion flexible and wise policy. For years we read in our press that the Russian Revolution and then the Chinese was on the verge of collapse. Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda. Those who try to be objective or friendly are dismissed as dupes, and sometimes—as the Stalin years demonstrate—they were. But events have also shown that in the long run the dupes prove less misleading than the doped.
The Rapid Deterioration in Our National Leadership
In this remarkable essay, Stone warns his readers about the apparent failure of the still-young Kennedy administration to take seriously the lesson of the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco—namely, the danger when nations “take the law into their own hands.” And to illustrate the seriousness of the danger this failure poses, Stone points to the administration’s threat to embroil the United States in another anti-Communist crusade in a distant nation few Americans had then heard of—Vietnam.
. . .
April 26, 1961
NEITHER MEN NOR NATIONS can take the law into their own hands without paying a price. The price we are paying for our undercover war against Cuba is a rapid deterioration in our leadership, and in our moral standards. According to Chalmers Roberts in the Wa
shington Post of April 23 the President made a significant remark at the National Security Council meeting called the day before to discuss the Cuban debacle and the world situation. He said of South Vietnam that the Vietminh does not have a New York Times reporting how many people it is sending south to assassinate officials of South Vietnam. “He had in mind,” Mr. Roberts wrote, “the pre-invasion stories in the American press about the Cuban fiasco,” and “what has come out of the Cuban affair has been a determination to meet the Communist para-military tactics of guerrilla warfare, infiltration, sabotage and so on.” General Maxwell Taylor’s assignment “now is going to try to figure out how to do it.”
These remarks of the President, more cryptically reported in the New York Times of April 24, are alarming in their implications. In the first place they misconceive the situation in South Vietnam as seriously as our government does that in Cuba. The real causes of the disintegration in South Vietnam lie in the failure of the Diem regime to build a viable government in the seven years since the Geneva settlement; its corruption, its false elections, its concentration camps, its suppression of democratic liberties, its mistreatment of minorities, are the causes of the growing rebellion. In the second place, the President’s animus seems to be directed not at the follies exposed in the Cuban fiasco but at the free press for exposing them. The New York Times, and particularly staff members Tad Szulc and James Reston, has acquitted itself in recent weeks in the best traditions of a free press. It has brought to light conditions of which the President himself seems to have been but dimly aware. In the third place, the President’s remarks are disturbing because they indicate he is out, not to rid our foreign policy of the CIA’s incubus, but merely to improve our cloak-and-dagger methods, and to go further along the path of adopting the worst practices attributed to the Soviet bloc, even to the point of wistfully eyeing the advantages he thinks it derives from the absence of a free press.