by Tad Szulc
Late in 1969, prize-winning novelist José Lorenzo Fuentes was expelled from UNEAC because of his connections with a Mexican diplomat allegedly employed by the CIA. It seemed as if the party's cultural ideologues were determined to absorb Marxism-Leninism to the point of turning Cuba into a tropical version of an Arthur Koestler novel about Communist police states. In 1970 the most prestigious Cuban novelists and poets suddenly discovered that no publishing house or magazine would publish their work—no explanation given. This mysterious ban would last into the mid-1970s.
The new official line was proclaimed in a "Declaration" issued by the First National Congress of Education and Culture held in Havana in April 1971, and what an ideological monstrosity it was in terms of Cuban cultural life can be gleaned from the published text. "Cultural development" in Cuba, it said, must be aimed at the masses, "contrary to the tendencies of the elites. . . . Socialism creates objective and subjective conditions that render feasible a true creative freedom while rejecting as inadmissible those tendencies that are based on a criterion of libertinage and aimed at concealing the counterrevolutionary poison of works that conspire against revolutionary ideology. . ."
Rambling on page after page, this cultural edict provided that in hiring personnel for universities, mass communications media, and literary and artistic institutions, the candidates' "political and ideological conditions be taken into account." Selectivity in invitations to foreign writers and intellectuals was recommended to avoid the "presence of persons whose work and ideology are at odds with the interests of the Revolution." Moreover, the congress declared that "cultural channels may not serve for the proliferation of false intellectuals who plan to convert snobbism, extravagance, homosexuality, and other social aberrations into expressions of revolutionary art, alienated from the masses and from the spirit of our Revolution." It seemed incomprehensible that Fidel Castro could tolerate such insults against his beloved revolution by his own ideologues.
Yet, Castro evidently approved of the crackdown on Cuban intellectuals because the arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla in March 1971 must have been authorized by him. This arrest led an impressive group of European and Latin American intellectuals, including Sartre and García Márquez, to write Castro demanding Padilla's release. He was freed thirty-seven days later, after reading a statement of self-criticism and urging other writers to do likewise. Even though his friends regarded him as a traitor, Padilla remained in Cuba for a decade, working as a translator of foreign literature. He finally left Cuba in 1981, after García Márquez made another personal appeal to his friend Fidel. Even the obedient UNEAC wrote a letter to Castro protesting the lengthy detention of homosexuals in military forced-labor units, and they were finally sprung. Yet it left an ugly scar on Cuban society. Overall, Castro's shocking cultural policies have dealt a lethal blow to creativity in his country; even in 1986 the island was a wasteland of ideas and a reign of strict self-censorship. It may take generations before Cuba returns to the free cultural age of José Martí.
In any event, Castro was extremely busy during 1971 with Cuba's foreign relations and probably lacked time to supervise the cultural life personally. Ties with the Soviets were being strengthened daily, but Fidel was still not ready to visit Moscow. Instead, he dispatched President Dorticós to attend the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Soviet Communist party in March, preferring himself to meet in Havana with top Soviet officials. Nikolai Baibakov, the chief Soviet economic planner, came in April, and Soviet Premier Kosygin spent five days in Cuba in October, his second visit to Fidel.
On November 10, Castro flew nonstop to Santiago, Chile, for a ten-day visit that became a three-week stay. It was his first trip abroad in seven years since his last journey to Moscow, and he enjoyed it hugely. It was also the first time he was returning to Latin America in twelve years, and that too pleased him greatly, as he said to his aides aboard the Soviet IL-18 jet airliner equipped with a bed and an office. From the airport, Fidel drove into the city, standing up in a convertible next to Allende and waving to the huge crowds that cheered him in the streets. After several days in Santiago, Fidel embarked on a voyage to the north and south of the long, narrow country, visiting schools and plants, delivering speeches, granting interviews, meeting young and old Chileans, and visibly having a fine time. In the northern city of Antofagasta, he joined a group of folklore musicians for a picture, holding a guitar in one hand and patting the head of the musician next to him with the other.
Nathaniel Davis, then the United States ambassador in Santiago, described Castro's visit as "an extraordinary display of high-level tourism, thinly disguised meddling, and shrewd commentary on the Chilean scene; it was a circus." Fidel stayed longer in Chile than his hosts had expected, almost running out of things to do, but he evidently wanted to have a solid look at Allende's socialist experiment. He went to nine provinces, from the seaport of Valparaiso and the copper mines in central Chile to Río Blanco high up in the Andes and Tierra del Fuego across the Magellan Straits. He talked to workers everywhere, conducted endless dialogues with university students in sports stadiums, discussed theology with "revolutionary priests" in Santiago, donned straw hats and hard hats, kept warm in colorful wool ruana blankets, and played a rousing game of basketball in Iquique, wearing a Number Twelve sweatshirt and showing that at the age of forty-five, he was still in great physical shape.
En route home, Castro stopped in Lima to meet Peru's military rulers, with whom Cuba was developing cordial relations, then in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to converse with the aging president, José María Velasco Ibarra, who once upon a time had been a dictator. In all three Pacific Coast countries, Castro offered Cuba's support for their controversial claims to a two-hundred-mile territorial-water limit to protect fisheries and won warm applause in exchange. In Havana Fidel received a hero's welcome after his long absence, but he was already thinking of more foreign travel the following year.
Recalling that South American trip many years later, Castro said he knew the CIA had tried to assassinate him first in Chile, then in Peru and Ecuador. He told an interviewer that weapons for the assassins, who posed as Venezuelan journalists with Venezuelan credentials, had come from the American embassy in La Paz, Bolivia. These arms, he added, ranged from rifles with telescopic sights to machine guns and a television camera with a hidden gun: "It was even in front of me, but they didn't shoot. "
On May 3, 1972, Fidel Castro left Cuba aboard his IL-62 jet airliner for a two-month voyage to ten countries on two continents, climaxing the trip with his first visit to the Soviet Union in eight years. In Moscow Castro came face to face with the nascent Soviet-American detente, arriving exactly one month after the departure of his archenemy, Richard Nixon. While Nixon's presence at the Kremlin had resulted in the signing of SALT I, the nuclear arms limitation agreement, Castro's sojourn resulted in Cuba joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the Communist common market, better known as Comecon. By joining CMEA, Cuba became fully integrated into the worldwide Communist economic system, which included the Soviet Union, the six European Communist countries, Outer Mongolia, and Vietnam. The Russians were most skilled at dealing simultaneously with adversaries and friends, even when, like the United States and Cuba, they were each other's mortal enemies. Fidel also received a Soviet marshal's saber as a special accolade, and of course he volunteered no public comments about the Brezhnev-Nixon embrace the previous month. He had become a very sophisticated revolutionary and a fine practitioner of personal diplomacy.
Castro's realignment with Soviet foreign policy included his acceptance of the view (at least publicly) that the time for guerrilla warfare on the Sierra Maestra model had run its course, and that social change in Latin America had to be accomplished by less violent means, which had been argued by the Russians all along. They still thought that Fidel's 1958 victory had been basically an aberration due to his personality and special Cuban conditions, and could not be repeated elsewhere. Chances are that Castro had not given up his
personal revolutionary dogmas, yet he, too, had to recognize new realities in the hemisphere. After Che Guevara's death, the aura of romantic revolutions had paled (Camilo Torres, the revolutionary Colombian priest Castro had met in 1948, had been killed in his own guerrilla war, and the Peruvian rebel poet Hugo Blanco had been captured), forcing Fidel to rethink his strategies. Allende's election in Chile and the emergence of the left-wing reformist generals in Peru confirmed the emergence of the new trend. Castro was too intelligent to ignore it, deciding on the route of Cuban statesmanship and the confining of aid to insurgents only in situations where revolutionary conditions already existed.
Consequently, the Seventies saw Castro concentrating on ending the diplomatic and political isolation imposed on him by the United States, and he was doing fine. The visits to Chile, Peru, and Ecuador produced new friendships for Cuba on the west coast of South America. Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela resumed diplomatic relations with Cuba, leading the Venezuelan guerrilla chief, Douglas Bravo, to accuse Fidel publicly of betrayal (just as Fidel had earlier accused Venezuelan Communists of betraying Bravo). He developed relations with Panama, Jamaica, Barbados, Bahamas, and Trinidad and Tobago in the vital arc of Central America and the Caribbean when he realized that his thirteen-year-old revolution no longer required a cordon of other revolutionary states around Cuba for protection. Soviet protection was more weighty, anyway. Gradually, Castro began reentering Latin American organizations, such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), and the Organization of American States (OAS) prepared to lift diplomatic and trade sanctions against Cuba established in the early 1960s. Finally, the Cubans played an important part in organizing SELA, a new regional economic entity. They were no longer pariahs.
Now Castro set out to expand his friendships in Africa, with visits to Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Algeria. It was his first trip there. Cuba has had considerable involvement in Africa since the first days of the revolution; Che Guevara was the principal emissary to the continent until he vanished from the political scene in 1965. The Cubans had championed the cause of Algerian independence since 1959, sending military and medical supplies to the National Liberation Front (FLN) who fought the French in 1960, then sending a Rebel Army combat battalion to help freshly independent Algeria in its border war with Morocco in 1963. In the Sixties, there were Cuban military missions in Algeria, Ghana, Congo (Brazzaville), and Guinea, and later in Equatorial Guinea, Somalia, and Tanzania. Castro's visit to Sierra Leone was followed by the arrival of a Rebel Army mission to train the national militia.
Along with Che Guevara, he believed that Africa was the future scene of great revolutionary changes with Cuba as guide and mentor. Since much of Africa had either been recently decolonized or was peacefully preparing for independence (or fighting for it as liberation movements were doing in the Portuguese colonies), Castro saw an extraordinary potential for Cuban revolutionary influence. And African nationalists, mainly of leftist persuasion, welcomed the Cubans: Cuba's cultural origins were partly African, and the Afro-Cuban tradition was powerful. The Cubans offered the perfect alternative to either American or Soviet "imperialism," and finally, Cuba was a sister Third World nation with a triumphant revolution.
By the time Castro set foot in Africa, there was no African left-of-center government or liberation movement that did not have Cuban ties of some sort. Africans were being trained by Cubans in everything from medicine to military organization in their own countries or in schools and camps in Cuba and the Isle of Youth. Fidel was planning for the future, knowing intuitively that Cuba had a perhaps decisive role to play in parts of Africa; this, in turn, gave him and Cuba international importance beyond Latin America. In addition to his Bolívarian dream in his own hemisphere, Castro now aspired for Third World leadership.
In Conakry, Guinea, he found a fellow revolutionary in President Ahmed Sekou Touré, who told a crowd greeting Castro at a sports stadium that "Cuba is the light in Latin America." Their conversations served to coordinate Cuban support for guerrilla movements against Portuguese colonial rule and South Africa, Guinea being a natural transit point from Cuba to the African continent. Active backing for African guerrillas fit Castro's (and the Russians') thinking because anticolonial "national liberation" movements were involved; Khrushchev had been a foremost advocate of such movements. Fidel started his Guinean tour clad in his usual olive-green fatigues, but on the second day he changed into the national dress of white trousers and a white short-sleeved tunic buttoned below his beard at the neck; he kept on his black combat boots, green cap, and military webbing belt for an arresting overall effect. He always delighted in trying on the attire of countries he visited, which, in turn, delighted the local audiences. Sekou Touré awarded Fidel the Order of Fidelity to the People. The compañeros whom Castro took along to Africa suggested what his interests in the region were: Juan Almeida, the black vice-president and former Rebel Army Chief of Staff; Manuel Piñeiro Losada, his closest adviser on intelligence and contact with revolutionary movements; Arnaldo T. Ochoa Sánchez, a new-generation officer who would soon command Cuban combat troops in Angola; and Raúl E. Menéndez Tomassevich, once Raúl Castro's deputy in the guerrilla war and now the principal insurgency and militia expert.
In Sierra Leone Castro spent one day with President Siaka Probyn Stevens, a relatively moderate politician, then returned to Conakry for more talks with Sekou Touré. In Algeria Fidel was back in a warm revolutionary environment, visiting for ten days the country Cuba had helped in its independence war. His old friend Ahmed Ben Bella had been overthrown by Houari Boumedienne, but Castro established a good relationship with the new president. As a socialist and revolutionary state, Algeria was Cuba's oldest and best ally as well as a key link both to Africa and the Arab world. Similarly, the Algerians had a military rapport with the Soviet Union, which equipped their armed forces, and Castro and Boumedienne could also share their Third World views on the Russians—not always flatteringly. Algiers was a revolutionary planning and plotting center for Africa, and Fidel devoted much time to this topic, refining his ideas on "anticolonialist struggles" in speech after speech. Finally, Boumedienne was immensely important to Castro as a key leader in the Nonaligned Movement that Fidel hoped to dominate.
From Algiers Castro's Soviet jet took him over the Mediterranean, across Italy, the Adriatic, and Yugoslavia, directly to Sofia, Bulgaria. This was his introduction to non-Soviet European Communist states, called "satellites" by their detractors, and was presumably an instructive experience for Fidel, representing the Cuban variety of Soviet-supported communism. He instantly fell into the mandatory "fraternal" practice of warm embraces with local leaders, but in Bulgaria and throughout the rest of Eastern Europe, Castro evoked genuine interest and excitement among the eager crowds that greeted him in the streets and squares of the old cities. He was different, he was a legend, and he was informal—he appeared to be all the things the traditional Communist leaders were not. For his part Fidel was fascinated to discover old cultures in new but distinctly designed Marxist mantles.
In Sofia his host was Todor Zhivkov, the Bulgarian leader. He had been in power longer than any other Communist in Europe (except for the self-isolated Enver Hoxha of Albania), and never questioned Soviet wisdom. Castro was in gala uniform for official functions and a concert, but seemed even happier dressed in a gray sweatsuit playing basketball with an army team against a civilian team. He dutifully observed military maneuvers and was presented with a Bulgarian-made AK-47 submachine gun and an antique pistol of Bulgarian partisans; his private weapon collection grew as he traveled the world.
From Sofia the Cuban leader flew to Bucharest to meet Rumanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu, also a Communist master of the art of survival but a maverick in foreign policy. It must have intrigued Fidel how Ceauşescu, a next-door neighbor of the Soviet Union, had succeeded for so long in defying the Russians on just about everything: He refused to break relations with Israel after the 1967 Middle E
ast war (unlike the rest of the Soviet bloc), he remained pointedly friendly with the Chinese and Yugoslav Communist heretics, and he roundly condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which came five days after his visit to Prague (he also declined to let Rumanian troops participate in the "fraternal" action). Defying Moscow had not been a signal success for Castro, but in common with Ceauşescu he had a dedication to total internal regimentation and an inability to make workers produce well. Fidel may not have learned Ceauşescu's foreign policy secrets; he did learn, however, that Rumania produced excellent wine (a matter of interest to him) when he drank some from a wineskin.
In Hungary there was still another subtle Communist experience for Castro. He came to Budapest a quarter-century after Soviet tanks had destroyed the anti-Communist "freedom fighters" (this expression was born in Budapest in 1956) to find the country with a considerable degree of autonomy from the Russians in internal affairs and a remarkable prosperity stemming from market-economy reforms. These were the reforms Czechoslovakia had sought to imitate and expand before the 1968 invasion, and that Castro so violently denounced in his speech. Whatever impression the Hungarian achievements had left on Castro, he remained just as opposed to market economy ideas in 1986, when he banned the experiment in farmers' markets. Under Janos Kadar, who had ruled Hungary since the rebellion, the country lived in remarkable political and cultural relaxation within the Communist system. Evidently, Castro did not wish to imitate these practices either. From Budapest he took home a saber used in the 1848 independence war and an AK-47 automatic rifle.