Castro’s presentation was a carefully worded lawyer’s brief, which argued that the Prague Spring reforms were leading in the direction of splintering the socialist bloc and undermining international socialism. “And our point of view,” he stated, “is that the socialist camp has the right to prevent this one way or another. . . . We acknowledge the bitter necessity that called for the sending of those forces into Czechoslovakia; we do not condemn the socialist countries that made that decision.”38
This was the statement on which many analyses of Cuban-Soviet relations have dwelled, suggesting that August 1968 was the point when Cuba caved in and accepted Soviet domination. But Castro was far from done, and what he declared later in the address informs us about the terms under which he was willing to accept Soviet leadership. He argued, now with passion, that the Soviet intervention “unquestionably entailed a violation of legal principles and international norms. . . . Because what cannot be denied here is that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak State was violated.” He could justify the invasion only in political terms, to maintain the unity of the “socialist camp” so that it could advance international socialism. “In our opinion,” he said, “the decision made concerning Czechoslovakia can only be explained from a political point of view, not from a legal point of view. Not the slightest trace of legality exists.”
Now, if the only justification is political, he reasoned, then the socialist camp must be consistent. It would be obliged also to engage itself to a greater degree in “Vietnam if the Yankee imperialists step up their aggression against that country . . . the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea if the Yankee imperialists attack that country . . . Cuba if the Yankee imperialists attack our country.”39
Less an endorsement than a noncondemnation of the Soviet invasion, Castro thus threw a gauntlet in front of the Soviets, conditioning Cuban acquiescence in the illegal invasion on the Soviets’ willingness to support revolutionary struggles. As with his pointed admonitions earlier in 1968—that the Soviets should not interfere in Cuban domestic politics or try to dictate the character of Cuba’s economy—Castro now asserted that Cuba’s relations with the Soviet Union had to be based on mutual respect and a shared commitment to a worldwide socialist revolution.40
In practice, the lofty rhetoric gave way to the reality of Cuba’s vulnerabilities. The Soviets acknowledged their appreciation of Cuba’s noncondemnation with symbolic initiatives such as exchanging visits by the Soviet and Cuban defense ministers. But a meaningful change in the relationship did not occur immediately. Only after Cuba failed to achieve the ambitious goal of harvesting ten million tons of sugar in 1970 did it readily welcome Soviet economic and military assistance.
Notes
1. “Kosygin’s Report on Trip to Cuba to Meeting of Communist Party First Secretaries, Budapest, Hungary, 12 July 1967,” Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), Washington, DC. KC PZPRXIA/13, AAN, Warsaw. Obtained by James Hershberg. Translated by Jan Chowaniec. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115803.
2. FRUS 1961–1963, vol. XI, Document no. 349, June 20, 1963.
3. FRUS 1961–1963, vol. XI, Document no. 275, January 26, 1963.
4. As quoted in LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 63.
5. LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 64.
6. Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm, 197–208; LeoGrande and Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba, 67–78.
7. Don Bohning, The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), chapters 7 and 9; FRUS 1961–1963, vol. XI, Document nos. 346, 348, 388, June 8, 1963, June 19, 1963, December 19, 1963.
8. Bohning, The Castro Obsession, 217–18.
9. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party,” January 25–26, 61–63. The full text of the letter is available at: “Letter from Khrushchev to Fidel Castro,” January 31, 1963, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of Foreign Policy, Russian Federation (AVPRF), http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114507.
10. Jacques Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution: Soviet Ideological and Strategical Perspectives, 1959–77, trans. Deanna Drendel Leboeuf (New York: Praeger, 1978), 91–96; Fursenko and Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble, 329–34.
11. “Text of Joint Statement, Tass in Russian to Europe 2255 GMT 24 May 1963,” in “Material on Castro Visit in Soviet Union,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), USSR International Affairs, May 27, 1963, BB13; Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make the World Safe for Democracy: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 64–66.
12. US Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Report, “The Sino-Soviet Struggle in the World Communist Movement Since Khrushchev’s Fall,” Part 1, September 1967, http://www.foia.cia.gov/document/intelligence-report-sino-soviet-struggle-world-communist-movement-kruschevs-fall-part-1, 113.
13. H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s International Relations: The Anatomy of a Nationalistic Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 27–28.
14. “The Second Declaration of Havana,” 264.
15. Blight et al., Cuba on the Brink, 298, 300.
16. “Playboy Interview: Fidel Castro,” Playboy, January 1967, 70; Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 86–88.
17. Ernesto (Che) Guevara, “Vietnam and the World Struggle for Freedom,” in Che Guevara Speaks, ed. George Lavan (New York: Pathfinder, 1967), 159.
18. Ernesto (Che) Guevara, “Speech in Algiers to the Second Seminar of the Organization of Afro-Asian Solidarity, February 25, 1965,” in Che Guevara Speaks, ed. George Lavan (New York: Pathfinder, 1967), 107–8.
19. US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, “The Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian and Latin American Peoples, A Staff Study,” 89th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 7, 1966.
20. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 102–4.
21. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso en el Acto Clausura en la Primera Conferencia de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, Africa y America Latina,” el 15 de enero de 1966,” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1966/esp/f150166e.html.
22. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 270–71; W. Raymond Duncan, The Soviet Union and Cuba: Interests and Influence (New York: Praeger, 1985), 66–72.
23. “Kosygin’s Report on Trip to Cuba to Meeting of Communist Party First Secretaries, Budapest, Hungary, 12 July 1967,” History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115803. Also see: CIA Intelligence Information Cable, IN-73140, October 17, 1967; Subjects: “Background of Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin’s Visit to Havana; Content of Discussions Between Kosygin and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro,” 2–3; available through Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), Gale Cengage Learning.
24. Saul Landau, “Filming Fidel: A Cuban Diary, 1968,” Monthly Review 59, no. 3 (July–August 2007).
25. Lévesque, The USSR and the Cuban Revolution, 130–31.
26. Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 96–97.
27. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso Pronunciado al Conmemorarse el IX Aniversario del Triunfo de la Revolucion,” January 2, 1968, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f020168e.html.
28. Granma, International Edition (English), February 4 and 11, 1968; Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 133–37. Castro used the Escalante case as evidence of the Soviet character in 1977 when he reportedly warned Angolan president Antonio Aghostino Neto about the possibility of a Soviet-sponsored coup. See Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 73–77.
29. SED CC Department of International Relations, “Information on the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of th
e Cuban Communist Party and on the Attacks of the Cuban Communist Party against the Socialist Unity Party of Germany,” January 31, 1968, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115812.
30. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 35–71.
31. Castro, “Speech to the Central Committee,” 36.
32. Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution, 75; Yuri Pavlov, Soviet–Cuban Alliance: 1959–1961 (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994), 89.
33. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Commemorating the 11th Anniversary of the March 13, 1957, Action Held at the Steps of the University of Havana,” March 13, 1968. The Spanish is “¡Señores, no se hizo una revolución aquí para establecer el derecho al comercio!” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f130368e.html.
34. Mark Kramer, “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part 1): New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, issue 10 (March 1998); Mark Kramer, “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: New Interpretations (second of two parts),” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, issue 3 (Fall 1993).
35. Nelson P. Valdés, “What Was Forbidden Then Is Promoted Now: Cuba, the Beatles and Historical Context,” Counterpunch, March 29/30, 2008.
36. Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech Analyzing Events in Czechoslovakia,” August 23, 1968, in Blight and Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days, 215.
37. Telephone interview with the authors, May 30, 2011.
38. Castro, “Speech Analyzing Events in Czechoslovakia,” 221.
39. Castro, “Speech Analyzing Events in Czechoslovakia,” 221.
40. Pavlov, Soviet–Cuban Alliance, 91–92.
Chapter 14
Internal Adjustments and Advancing Equality, 1963–1975
In the House of the Americas I met Ramón, who is the “expert” on my poetry, as they told me. To find an expert on my poetry was another of my surprises in Cuba. Ramón was a young boy with an honest look and a constant smile who worked for gangsters before the Revolution. He told me, smiling, that he worked in the Sans Souci, one of the most corrupt casinos. His job was to play cards with the customers: to play “for the house.” He also worked in the Kennel Club, the dog-racing club, for other gangsters. His job was to inject morphine into the dog that was not supposed to win, or else to keep him thirsty and, just before the race, give him lots of water to drink. . . . When he was sixteen the Revolution triumphed. Ramón stopped working for the gangsters, left the casinos, and began to study literature. He said: “Because that was what really interested me.”
Once when we were going to the Varadero beach resort . . . we went by the former Biltmore, which had been the district of the most elegant mansions in Cuba and which is now called Siboney and is the district of the scholarship students—where some fifty thousand farm boys live in the mansions of the rich. Ramón, smiling, pointed out a huge building in the distance and said: “That is the Kennel Club, where I used to inject the dogs.” The Kennel Club, I was told, is now the stadium of the country scholarship students. It was very moving to see the children of farmers and laborers in the houses of millionaires. . . .
Farther along, where the Havana slums had been: beautiful pine groves and ten-story apartment buildings behind those pine groves. Ramón told me: “These are the families that used to live in the slums. Those ghettos that used to exist around the cities no longer exist. The dirty water drains used to go right through the middle of the houses. The houses were made of cardboard and tin cans. People lived in the midst of filth. One of the first tasks of the Revolution was to get rid of all that. It was done very soon; the first houses built were for those people.”
—Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba
By 1963, the average rural worker’s diet had improved significantly in comparison to pre-Revolution days. All Cuban families with children younger than seven could purchase one liter of milk per day for each child at a subsidized price. Higher wages for most workers, decreased rents, and free public transportation gave many people more disposable income, enabling them to buy products previously available only to the middle and upper classes. But increased demand quickly reduced the reserve stocks of these products, and soon even ordinary items like toothpaste and soap were missing from store shelves.
The economy was suffering from two shocks. As the Cuban revolutionaries implemented their plans, disaffected Cubans voted with their feet and left Cuba. The first wave of émigrés, from 1959 to 1962, consisted largely of landowners, wealthy businesspeople, officials in the Batista government and army, employees of US corporations, small proprietors, and professionals—doctors and nurses, skilled managers, architects, pharmacists, and engineers.1
Meanwhile, Cuba lost its principal market and supplier, the United States. Once President Kennedy formally invoked the US embargo in 1962, its draconian impact was felt by every Cuban. In contrast to trade sanctions the United States had imposed on other countries until then, and unlike any sanctions since, the embargo against Cuba even included all food and medicines. Unable to buy machinery, chemicals, or spare parts from the United States, Cuba was forced to let buses lie idle, electrical generators break down, and many plans for development gather dust. Even the small chores of daily life—washing clothes, repairing a tire, or preparing meals—became exhausting, time-consuming tasks. Trade with the Soviet Union provided some relief, but it was far from sufficient to enable Cuba to remake its whole economy.
Economist Claes Brundenius explains that this “was the atmosphere when the so-called great debate started in Cuba.”2 It lasted from 1963 to 1965, as positions on material versus moral incentives, centralization versus decentralization, and the use of market mechanisms to determine the price of basic necessities were hashed out in newspapers, magazines, and meetings of mass organizations. By the end, a tentative consensus emerged that Cuba could not move to industrialization as quickly as leaders had envisioned initially, and that for the time being the country’s development had to rest on agricultural production. In part, this outcome was spurred on by a brief rise in the world price of sugar in 1964, which held out the promise that increased sugar output could provide for the economic diversification the leaders wanted.
A Preferential Treatment for Rural Areas
Despite economic problems, the government proceeded with several major reforms, many of which were rooted in a preferential treatment for rural areas. In practice, this meant nonpreferential treatment for Havana, the country’s dominant urban center. Castro summarized the policy in 1966 by saying that “we must promote a minimum of urbanization and a maximum of ruralism.”3 This commitment, which the July 26th Movement consistently had articulated, served both idealistic and practical objectives. The highest levels of poverty and inequality in Cuba occurred in rural areas. Both could be attacked by improving the lives of rural workers. Rural areas along with what was then the eastern province of Oriente also had a larger percentage of black Cubans than Havana. As the government improved basic human services and infrastructure, and created opportunities for meaningful work in rural areas, it gave life to the promise of ending racism in law and practice. At the same time, the government was able to reduce internal migration because rural towns were becoming as attractive as the major cities had been.
The preferential policy resulted in the Cuban population being dispersed in a way that departed significantly from the pattern common in Latin America, where urban migration had begun to create megacities such as São Paulo, which today are ringed by shantytowns with millions of people.4 Metropolitan Mexico City today has a population of more than twenty-one million, five times that of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. In contrast, from 1960 to 1980 Havana’s population increased only slightly, from about 1.6 million to 1.9 million, though the country overall grew from 7 m
illion to almost 10 million people. The city’s population today is about 2.1 million people.5
Cuba Doubles the Number of Provinces
In 1976, Cuba reorganized its administrative jurisdictions, dividing its six provinces into fourteen provinces and 169 municipalities. The fabled Oriente Province became five new provinces: Las Tunas, Holguín, Granma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo. The Island of Youth (Isla de la Juventud) became a “special” municipality. In 2010, the government made further adjustments, reducing the number of municipalities to 167 and creating an additional province. Starting in the west, the fifteen provinces are: Pinar del Río, Artemisa, La Habana, Mayabeque, Matanzas, Villa Clara, Cienfuegos, Sancti Spíritus, Ciego de Ávila, Camagüey, Las Tunas, Granma, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo.
Map 14.1. Cuba’s Administrative Divisions
An elected provincial assembly governs each province and elects a provincial committee, the president of which is the provincial governor. An elected municipal assembly governs each municipality and chooses the mayor.
Holguín’s growth provides an example of the deliberate nature of the government’s policy. Holguín had been a minor city in Oriente, thirty-five miles from Cuba’s northeastern coast. As a result of the preferential policy, it doubled in size to 187,000 people between 1960 and 1980, and today has a population of nearly 300,000. The city became a provincial capital and a manufacturing hub in accord with the plan to locate new factories closer to natural resources and in parts of the country that had been previously underdeveloped (see a Holguín factory in figure 14.1).6 Similarly, the government developed provincial ports in order to reduce the country’s reliance on Havana for international trade. Holguín became one of the first cities in Cuba to build a new university—the University of Holguín—which was founded in 1973 and today has 4,400 students.7
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence Page 23