The Cubans were also losing their appeal on the continent, especially as economic failures and anxieties about Nixon’s election forced them back into Moscow’s embrace. Castro refused to condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and soon he too caved in to Soviet pressure and abandoned the ambitious mobilizing economic policies the Soviets so disapproved of. The ‘voluntary labour’ and mass mobilizations pursued since the mid-1960s had produced exhaustion and cynicism, and in 1970 Castro was forced to accept a more Modernist, Soviet-style economic regime of labour discipline and wage incentives.48 In 1972, the notion of a separate Cuban model of socialism was dealt a severe blow when Cuba became a member of Comecon. This did not, however, mark the end of Cuba’s activist, independent foreign policy. As the Cubans lost their revolutionary lustre in Latin America, they – together with their new Soviet allies – found new disciples in Africa.
III
In January 1966, the leader of the Guinean guerrilla movement, Amílcar Cabral, gave an optimistic assessment of the state of the world revolution, whilst also condemning Khrushchev’s old notion that the Third World was a ‘zone of peace’:
the present situation of national liberation struggles in the world (especially in Vietnam, the Congo and Zimbabwe) as well as the situation of permanent violence… in certain countries which have gained their independence in the so-called peaceful way, show us… that compromises with imperialism do not work… that the normal way of national liberation… is armed struggle.49
The charismatic Cabral was speaking in Havana, at Castro’s ‘First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America’ – the so-called ‘Tricontinental Conference’. It was designed to be a Marxist replacement for Bandung, a declaration that the old socialist Third World was dead and had been reborn in more militant form. After the many setbacks of the mid-1960s, and as Communists were being massacred in Indonesia at that exact same time, not all were convinced that the time was ripe for such assertiveness. But Castro agreed with Cabral: the Americans were losing ground in Vietnam, and the time was right for an intensified armed struggle throughout the world.50
However, it was not just the new international balance of power that radicalized Third World leaders in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Marxist ideas from the West played a role, whether communicated through links with the Portuguese, French or Italian Communist parties, or through students studying abroad, as was the case in Ethiopia.51 Generational change was also important. Many believed that the Bandung generation had not delivered on its promise that a moderate form of socialism would deliver economic development and international prestige. By refusing to challenge local chiefs and ‘tribes’, critics argued, the indigenous socialists had left in place a powerful class of neo-colonial collaborators who merely served the interests of the old imperial powers. As Cabral explained in his long and densely theoretical speech to fellow revolutionaries, ‘the submission of the local “ruling” class to the ruling class of the dominating country limits or prevents the development of the productive forces’.52
Cabral was never a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist, but his fluency in its syntax shows how pervasive the Marxist style of thinking had become amongst much of the African left by the late 1960s.53 And the variety of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ that was to become so powerful there was in many ways reminiscent of 1930s Radical Stalinism, combining, as it did, anti-imperialist nationalism, a model of development that stressed ‘modernity’ and the city over ‘tradition’ and the countryside, and a hard-line willingness to use violence.54 Of course, African Marxist-Leninists accepted that their ‘proletariats’ were tiny, but they still clung to the belief that, given the right policies, they could swiftly build a ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. A coalition of various progressive classes would take power and build heavy industry, and with it a revolutionary proletariat. These Marxist-Leninists claimed to have the solutions to under-development that the indigenous socialists so conspicuously lacked. Only a vanguard party, they argued, would have the will and focus to remove the local elites who were so selfishly holding their countries back; their commitment to ‘class struggle’ allowed them to use the violence so necessary to resist imperialists and dislodge their internal bourgeois allies; and their Marxist internationalism would attract funding from the USSR at a time when the Soviets themselves were moving in a more ‘Stalinist’ direction.
In the last respect at least, the Afro-Communists were right. From the late 1960s, the ideologists in the party Central Committee’s International Department (including Karen Brutents and the future Gorbachev advisers Georgii Shakhnazarov and Vadim Zagladin) began to develop an analysis of the reasons for Communism’s defeats in the middle part of the decade. They concluded that Khrushchev’s ‘united front’-style policy and belief in peaceful transitions from indigenous socialism to Communism had been far too optimistic. The frequent American interventions had convinced them that only vanguard parties of orthodox Marxist-Leninists could protect the left in the Third World. But far from being pessimistic, they argued that the prospects for Communism were bright. American difficulties in Vietnam would weaken the West’s prestige, whilst continued Western intervention would also strengthen socialism. ‘Bourgeois’ nationalists, they argued, denied true independence by the neo-colonial West, would have to forge alliances with the still small, but growing working-class and peasant movements. Guided by a party vanguard, pro-Communist nationalists would fight ‘reactionary’ nationalists, and then engineer transitions to socialism, even in these ‘backward’ peasant societies.55 In some ways, then, the Soviet response to the setbacks of 1964–6 in the Third World was a milder version of Stalin’s reaction to the failures of the united front in 1927–8: Communists would have to be more sectarian and cohesive; outside the global North, the era was one of ‘struggle’ between the capitalist and Communist worlds, not peaceful coexistence; and domestically the time could be ripe for a rapid advance to socialist states and economies – in the agrarian Third World, as in the peasant Soviet Union forty years earlier.
One of the first regions to experience the full force of Marxist-Leninist rebellion against the Bandung generation was the Middle East. Israel’s defeat of Syria and Egypt in the six-day war of 1967 was a humiliation for Arab socialism throughout the region, whether Syria’s ‘Ba’athism’ or Nasser’s socialism. After the war, the Arab states lost influence over the Palestinian nationalist movement, which they had tried to control by supporting the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. Yasser Arafat’s more radically nationalist Fatah (‘Victory’) group began to displace its rivals, championing a guerrilla struggle inspired by Franz Fanon and the Vietnamese example.56 In 1967 Fatah was joined as a member of the PLO by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which declared itself a fully Marxist-Leninist party in 1969 and received Soviet backing from 1970.57 For these Palestinians, the conflict with American-backed Israel was more than just an Arab affair: it was part of the global struggle against imperialism.
Nasser’s defeat also contributed to the foundation of the first Marxist-Leninist regime in the region, in South Yemen. One of the main guerrilla nationalist organizations fighting the British, the Nasser-backed National Liberation Front (NLF), had already become disillusioned with its patron from 1965 when Egypt began to withdraw its support. The NLF regarded itself as a radical party, fighting for the rights of small peasants against landowners, and when the British handed over power to the NLF in November 1967, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen declared itself a Marxist-Leninist state.58
The Vietnamese example inevitably encouraged other peasant-based guerrilla movements in many other regions throughout the world. In West Bengal, rural rebellion against landlords in Naxalbari village were joined by Marxist students from Calcutta, encouraged by Beijing’s Cultural Revolution radicalism. The formally pro-Beijing Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had just achieved power in West Bengal, repressed the rebellions, and in 1969 the
radical former student Charu Mazumdar formed the militantly Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) – commonly called the ‘Naxalites’.59
In Portuguese Africa, too, the guerrilla movements moved further towards Marxism, and from 1970, under the leadership of Samora Machel, the Mozambican anti-colonial front – FRELIMO – finally declared itself a socialist movement. Machel, a former nurse from a family with a long anti-colonial tradition, was not a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist of the Agostinho Neto type, but he used Marxist language to express a fundamentally moral critique of the Portuguese.60 And, like the other anti-colonial movements in Portuguese Africa, FRELIMO was conducting a self-consciously Maoist-style ‘people’s war’.61 The ‘people’s war’ strategy involved efforts to win over peasants by establishing rural schools and hospitals, whilst also involving peasants in ‘mass line’-style ‘democracy’. More radical still were the attempts made in guerrilla-liberated areas to dismantle old hierarchies of gender and generation by challenging the power of chiefs and promoting women and younger men in their political organizations and guerrilla bands.62
How far these movements really did mobilize peasants is a matter of debate. Communists could find it very difficult to secure peasant support because the political culture they were imposing seemed very alien. As had been the case in ‘liberated areas’ in 1930s and 1940s China, some peasants benefited from and supported the new order, whilst many more merely put up with Communist rule because they had to.63 The guerrillas used some violence to control their areas, and the terror seems to have become particularly extensive in parts of Eastern Angola, where the MPLA tried and executed alleged traitors (and even persecuted witches, despite its supposed Marxist hostility to superstition).64 The Angolan movement was the least successful militarily, and in Mozambique, too, the Portuguese were not seriously threatened by an all-out FRELIMO military victory.65 Only in the much smaller and less divided Guinea-Bissau did the PAIGC become a government-in-waiting, securing some three quarters of Guinea-Bissau’s territory by 1972. Even so, all of the rebels could draw from a deep well of dissatisfaction with Portuguese rule. Economic growth caused divisions between those who had benefited from Portuguese rule and those who had not, whilst Portuguese repression alienated many.66 Naturally Portugal – a small, relatively poor country – found it increasingly difficult to sustain these debilitating wars, which by 1968 consumed 40 per cent of the state budget.
The anti-apartheid guerrilla movement in South Africa was in far worse shape than its Mozambique counterparts at the end of the 1960s. It also had special reasons to welcome the Soviets’ renewed interest in the continent, as Moscow had already been giving substantially more assistance to Oliver Tambo’s African National Congress (ANC) than it had to the South African Communist Party proper, which it regarded as too independent (and too white).
A weakened United States did not find it easy to respond to this leftward surge in southern Africa, or to the Soviets’ and Cubans’ willingness to take advantage of it. Nixon and his influential adviser, Henry Kissinger, strongly objected to Kennedy-style efforts to spread democracy, convinced they would not work. Both the US President and Kissinger dismissed the global South as a backward, benighted and incorrigibly authoritarian place which had been by-passed by history. Kissinger informed a dumb-struck Chilean foreign minister that ‘Nothing important can come from the South… The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes on to Tokyo.’67 The Americans’ main concern, therefore, was simply to block Soviet and Cuban influence as effectively as possible, whilst not repeating Johnson’s mistakes by intervening directly. Their solution was to franchise out the struggle against Communism in the Third World to a series of loyal ‘gendarmes’ of various political colourings – from the authoritarian Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Suharto of Indonesia and Médici of Brazil, to apartheid South Africa, and democratic Israel and Turkey – all of whom would be generously rewarded by Washington for their trouble. Efforts were also made to ‘Vietnamize’ the South-East Asian conflict, withdrawing US troops and creating a pro-American regime that could survive by itself. Finally Nixon hoped that the détente process itself would relieve pressure on American power by dissuading Moscow from intervening in the global South.
Though undoubtedly energetic, Nixon and Kissinger were playing a weak hand; their machinations not only failed to stop the Soviets but left many intellectuals in the Third World enraged and more willing than ever to contemplate Marxist solutions. Moscow, for its part, did not see why détente with the United States should stop it from promoting Communism outside Europe, especially when the United States was continuing to intervene to strangle it (as in Chile in 1973). Moreover, challenged by North Vietnam, Cuba, the European parties and (a much weakened) China, the Soviet authorities became even more determined to retain their international socialist pre-eminence. Party intellectuals in the Central Committee saw opportunities to re-ignite the flame of socialist internationalism at a time when the regime at home was so lacking in ideological sparkle. And the more realpolitik-obsessed military regarded the new scramble for Africa as a way of keeping its hand in with the United States in the superpower game.68
America’s gendarme strategy had serious weaknesses. The alliance it fostered with apartheid South Africa was especially damaging, as it seriously undermined Washington’s efforts to maintain the moral high ground in Africa and made it very difficult for African nationalists to feel sympathy with the United States. In Vietnam, meanwhile, Washington’s efforts to establish a powerful American-backed figure in Nguyen Van Thieu failed because his base of support was too narrow. His regime collapsed in 1975, two years after American troops had left, and Vietnam united under Communist rule.
Meanwhile, gendarmes could not always be relied on to hold the line in those regions where the United States believed Communism was spreading. In Allende’s Chile, Kissinger saw a dangerously attractive Communism, and he was determined to change the regime. But he could not rely on local allies; rather he used economic sanctions and covert support for the opposition. Allende gave his opponents an excuse to intervene when his radical economic policies of land redistribution and nationalization alienated the middle classes and provoked strikes, and in 1973 General Pinochet led a right-wing military coup against the President, claiming that he was rescuing Chile from an economic crisis.69 He proceeded to ban leftist parties and some 3,200 were killed and 30,000 tortured. The United States’ precise role is unclear, but whatever the level of its involvement, the experience of a democratically elected Popular Front-style government being ousted by military force, with the support of foreign backers, had distinct echoes of 1930s Spain. Washington had suffered yet another blow to its standing in the Third World.70
There was, however, one area where the gendarme policy at first sight seems to have worked: the Middle East. When, in October 1973, Arab armies attacked Israel, they were repulsed with American help and the Soviets backed down from their threats to send aid to Egypt. The United States, with its Israeli ally, had shown itself to be the master of the region. But this was to be a temporary victory that was soon to lead to a second defeat for the West, arguably as important as Vietnam, if not more so. The Arab oil producers retaliated by raising prices by 70 per cent, and then by imposing an embargo on Israel’s supporters, including the United States. The oil price shock demonstrated the drawbacks of supporting regionally unpopular gendarmes. A significant redistribution of the world’s resources took place, from oil consumers to producers; indeed it was this that helped finance the Soviets’ African adventures.71 Meanwhile, the West’s economies were hit, and the inflation of the late 1960s worsened, increasing labour militancy as workers fought to preserve their wage gains. It seemed as if capitalism itself was in crisis. In the oil-importing parts of the Third World, the shock was even greater, and bolstered the Marxist view that the time was ripe for radical economic change.
One of the first victims of the oil shock was Ma
rcelo Caetano’s authoritarian regime in Portugal, and with it the Portuguese Empire in Africa. Caetano had been trying to liberalize the old regime, in the face of resistance from conservatives, but in 1974, weakened by the economic crisis, he was toppled by a politically eclectic group of junior army officers, bitter at the conduct of the African wars. The coup was bloodless, and was dubbed the ‘Carnation Revolution’ after the red carnations handed out by the rebels to show their peaceful intent. Far from signalling the start of the revolution with banners or bugles, the leaders of the rebellion told their supporters to wait for the broadcast of the Portuguese entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.
A new broad coalition took power, representing conservative officers and more radical junior officers in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), as well as liberals and Communists.72 Yet Eurovision ballads were to give way to more martial tunes. Shanty-town dwellers took to the streets, occupying buildings and demanding full state housing provision, whilst landless peasants called for the break-up of large estates.73 The MFA, the far left and the Communists – who were much more radical than their Spanish and Italian comrades – began a more fundamental redistribution of property, and legalized massive land seizures. In the north the result was violence, as right-wing paramilitaries, with the support of small-holders, attacked the left. Portugal in 1975 had distinct echoes of Spain in 1936, and Kissinger estimated that there was a 50 per cent chance that Portugal would join the Soviet bloc.74
However, the radicals were weakened by their poor performance in the elections of April, and by the victory of the moderate socialists. It was clear that most of the poor had achieved what they wanted – basic property rights which they believed were rightly theirs – and did not desire a revolutionary transformation of society. The Communists attempted to mobilize the poor against the socialists, but moderates in the army regrouped and the threat of revolution was headed off. The last Communist-inspired revolution in Europe had failed.
The Red Flag: A History of Communism Page 63