by Tad Szulc
In October Fidel Castro returned to New York for the first time in nineteen years to address the United Nations General Assembly as chairman of the Nonaligned Movement. It was a moment of vindication he savored: In 1960 he had sought refuge in a hotel in Harlem, and now he was spending three days in New York at the twelve-story midtown building belonging to the Cuban mission to the United Nations (complete with living quarters and a school) that Cuba had just purchased for $2. 1 million. The Cuban mission employed the third largest number of officials after the United States and the Soviet Union. Reminiscing about this latest visit to New York and the reception he had held at the Cuban mission, Fidel told me with immense satisfaction, "that first time in 1960, we lived on chicken . . . this time I brought my own lobsters, my own rum. . ." In his two-hour speech at the General Assembly on October 12, Castro—acting as spokesman for the destitute Third World—urged the United States and other "wealthy imperialists" to grant the underdeveloped nations $300 billion over ten years. "If there are no resources for development, there will be no peace," he said, "and the future will be apocalyptic." The fate of the Third World, including its gigantic debt to the industrial nations, became the centerpiece of Castro's foreign policy in the Eighties: He fervently championed it at the 1982 Nonaligned Movement's summit meeting in New Delhi, and in an extraordinary antidebt offensive he mounted in Havana in 1985.
Economic issues were one aspect of Castro's ever-growing "internationalism." Another was military participation in revolutionary confrontations across the globe. From the initial involvement in Angola in 1975, Castro moved on to Ethiopia in 1978, dispatching nearly twenty thousand combat troops to assist the new Marxist regime of Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam repulse an attack by Somalia on the contested Ogaden region. As it had done in Angola, the Soviet Union provided arms and advisers; this was the second Soviet-Cuban joint military venture. In Third World policies, Castro and the Russians were totally on the same wavelength. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 to save "socialism" in an Asian rerun of applying the Brezhnev Doctrine to Czechoslovakia, Castro stood foursquare behind this action. He rationalized it even though the fierce Afghan resistance to the Russians created great embarrassment for Castro as the Nonaligned Movement's chairman, especially with Moslem nations. But he could also rationalize switching Cuba's early support for the Eritrean secession movement from Ethiopia to the other side once President Mengistu became his ally. Again Castro's activities threatened to create a Soviet-American confrontation. The presence of Soviet-supported Cuban forces in the crucial Horn of Africa nearly led the Carter administration to break off Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union. Fidel was always in the limelight.
Castro has never made a secret of his support for the Sandinista movement before or after its triumph. He has given Nicaragua, his revolutionary junior partner, maximal support in military advisers and civilian technicians. The Cubans had trained the Sandinistas in military camps in Pinar del Río and on the Isle of Youth, and it was Fidel who took it upon himself in 1978 to bring together rival factions among Nicaraguan rebels. Unless they were united, he told them at a secret meeting in Havana, Cuba would not supply arms to them in their "final offensive" year. Since the Sandinista victory in 1979, Castro continues to stage-manage the Nicaraguan revolution from Havana; Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra is a very frequent guest in Cuba, sometimes publicly, sometimes secretly.
Castro fully supports the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador (he also supports the M-19 guerrillas in Colombia), but he knows that Cuba cannot protect the two Central American countries from a direct United States attack (and he realizes that the Soviet Union would not commit itself to a military defense of Nicaragua as it is committed to do in Cuba). He believes that political settlements are possible both in Nicaragua and El Salvador because endless stalemate is the alternative. But he is also aware that in a total crisis, the United States might try to annihilate him. His concern is heightened by early Reagan administration threats to go "to the source" of Central American upheavals, which it believes is Cuba—and by the invasion of Grenada in 1983.
Early in 1984, in a conversation about possible American military action in Central America and beyond, Castro told me: "We have no means to be able to decide militarily the events there. All our means are defensive. We have no fleet and no air force capable of neutralizing or breaking a blockade by the United States. It's not a question of options, it's a practical question. . . . Besides, from a political viewpoint it would be improper for us to attempt a military participation under such circumstances because it would be justification before American public opinion for a United States agression." Replying to my question whether he was concerned about an American invasion, Castro said: "We have made great efforts to strengthen our defenses. After Grenada, we have made even greater efforts. We are increasing considerably our defense and resistance capability, including the preparation of the people for a prolonged, indefinite war. If the United States deterrent, as the Reagan government has said, is the nuclear force, our deterrent is to make it impossible for this country to be occupied, for an occupation army to be able to maintain itself in our country. First, it would be necessary to fight very hard to occupy our country. But the occupation of our country would not be the end, but the beginning of a much harder and much more difficult war, in which we would be victorious sooner or later at an enormous cost. "
Castro still believes that the Salvador civil war can be settled politically by negotiation, and he does not hide the Cuban support for the leftist guerrillas there. Just as he knew most of the Nicaraguan leaders prior to the 1979 victory, he is acquainted with the Salvadoran guerrilla leaders, having tried hard to impose unity on their factions. During a conversation with me early in 1984, he indicated that these leaders had been visiting him in Havana, saying that "I haven't spoken in many months with the principal leaders of the revolutionary movement in El Salvador because all of them are now inside their country, and it's not possible to have any direct contact with them. "
In Castro's Third World vision and policies, doctors and teachers are as important as combat troops, and he takes immense pride in explaining that Cuba is the only developing nation willing and ready to help others. He says that the new Cuban generation has an internationalist spirit not found elsewhere. In a conversation about this internationalism, he told me: "Look—when after the triumph of the revolution in Nicaragua we were asked for teachers, there were twenty-nine thousand volunteers. . . . In the beginning, we had no doctors to send to the interior of our country. Today, we have doctors in more than twenty-five countries of the Third World—more than fifteen hundred doctors working in the Third World. And there will be more because we are graduating two thousand doctors annually. It is a new culture, a new morality. . . . It is amazing: You go to our universities, and one hundred percent volunteer for any task. When we needed volunteers to go to Angola, three hundred thousand of them responded. When we needed volunteers for Ethiopia, more than three hundred thousand responded. They were civilian reservists. Now, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have fulfilled internationalist missions. People ask why there are two thousand Cuban teachers in Nicaragua, but who else will do the work that Cubans perform there? How many [people] in Latin America are prepared to go where our teachers go to live with the poorest families, to eat what the poorest families eat themselves, to teach there? You won't find such people. . . . We have more people disposed to go to any place in the world as doctors, as teachers, as technicians, and as workers than the Peace Corps of the United States and all the churches together—and we are a country of only ten million inhabitants. "
Since 1985, Castro has devoted an astounding amount of time to the problem of the Third World's debt to the banks and governments of industrialized countries, arguing that the destitute debtors cannot pay what they owe without destroying their economies, and predicting dire consequences if efforts are made to collect the money. In 1986 Latin
America alone owed more than $350 billion (much of this to United States banks), and the Third World total debt stood near $750 billion. In speeches, interviews, and at conferences he had sponsored in Havana, Castro turned the debt issue into a powerful political instrument in battling "imperialism," but his efforts have had the positive impact of calling international attention to the gravity of the crisis. Staying excellently informed about all Latin American developments, he was, in effect repeating in 1985 and later exactly what he had done in 1959: warn the industrialized countries of the north that an explosion was in the offing if they did not decisively attack the roots of hemispheric problems. In 1961, President Kennedy took up Castro's challenge by launching the Alliance for Progress; in the late 1980s the "rich" governments would do well to listen again to this Cuban Cassandra.
At home, however, Castro is much less bold and imaginative. He stubbornly refuses to relax the harsh standards of totally centralized planning (even when most of the Communist world has discovered the merits of relative decentralization). Because of his orthodox ideological inflexibility, Castro sees heresy in any attempt to experiment with market forces. Even though the Soviet Union has begun to establish joint industrial production ventures with Western capital, and in 1979 China embarked on a market-economy policy—including allowing private retail stores—Castro will not be budged. The chronic and alarmingly deficient performance of the Cuban economy seems to strengthen his resolve to be faithful to orthodoxy. In June 1986—sounding as he did during the "revolutionary offensive" in 1968—Castro denounced "certain concepts [proposed] by persons, supposedly very Marxist and very versed in Marxism, but really with a capitalist or petit-bourgeois soul." Ideological and political controls over what must be the world's most indoctrinated society tend to tighten rather than relax after the twenty-seven years of revolution.
Even some of Castro's close associates are at a loss to understand the reasons for his new hard-line attitude during the mid-1980s. After the Mariel exodus of 120,000 Cubans in 1980, Castro appeared to have concluded that the nation required a certain relaxation of tensions—the Mariel experience was a trauma because the regime was taken aback by this manifestation of internal resentments—and must be allowed a degree of consumer freedom. Accordingly, many food items were released from rationing and made available at "free stores" for extremely high prices, and uncontrolled farmers' markets were authorized to sell produce in the cities. It was far from a bonanza because foodstuffs remained in short supply as a result of inadequate production, but it seemed a small step toward a liberalization of the economy within Marxism.
As preparations were made during 1985 for the Third Congress of the Communist party, many senior economic planners hoped for still more liberalization and a new policy of decentralization. There was talk about allowing private owners operating through cooperatives to take the government out of the business of running taxis all over Cuba, and about ending clothes and footwear rationing, which had created a state monopoly over shoddy products at an immense cost to the treasury (Cuban women increasingly preferred to have private seamstresses make their dresses). Ideas also circulated about abandoning the ideologically designed youth work brigades whose weekend activities cost more in blankets, boots, mosquito netting, food, and transportation than they brought in farm production. But Castro evidently would have none of it, reemerging as the fierce apostle of the pure revolution while the economy kept deterioriating.
Presumably because Fidel was unable to formulate an economic plan for the next quinquennial party Congress—in part because he was busy presiding over international conferences on Third World debt—the Congress was postponed to February 1986. But even then Castro was still not ready to deal with the key issues, so the most important work of the Congress was postponed till the end of 1986. According to Castro, the most significant achievement of the first part of the Congress was to rejuvenate the leadership. Even this, however, was an illusion. The Politburo contained the same old faces, although several cosmetic changes were made. The new Central Committee was an assemblage of middle-aged men and women drawn from the bureaucracy, party organizations, the armed forces, and Security Services. In a nation where more than half the population was born after the revolution, only 9 percent of the Central Committee membership were under thirty-five; more than 50 percent were over the age of forty-six. Only 18. 2 percent were women. And 78. 1 percent had a university education, all of which suggests that the party created a new ruling elite, heavy on bureaucrats and administrators (27. 5 percent) and full-time party officials (27. 1 percent). Twenty percent of the seats went to the armed forces and Interior Ministry Security Services.
In 1986, Fidel Castro imposed an ossification of the regime and society under the guise of keeping the revolutionary fires burning. Almost immediately after the first session of the party Congress ended, Castro ordered the closing of the farmers' markets on the grounds of illicit enrichment and corruption. It was strangely reminiscent of his discovery in 1968 that privately owned hot dog stands were hotbeds of counterrevolution. At the same time, Castro moved even further ahead with the militarization of the Cuban society through the expansion of the Territorial Troop Militias, a highly trained reserve organization exceeding one million people—10 percent of the population. The Militias' 340-page illustrated Basic Manual is must reading in Cuba (though it sells for one peso in bookstores), and exercises and maneuvers are conducted continuously in "defense zones" into which the island has been divided. The ever-present threat of invasion by the United States has always justified a high degree of preparedness in Cuba, especially after the Grenada incident, but militarization in the mid-1980s is as much as anything, a political move to strengthen the cohesion of the revolutionary society under Castro's extremely strict leadership.
Castro's revolution was again in trouble with the Soviets in the mid-1980s, chiefly because of Cuba's economic waste and inability to meet its sugar delivery commitments. Soviet emissaries had warned him frankly that this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely, and when the 1985 trade agreement was finally signed in the middle of the year, the communiqué published in the Cuban press said the accord had been reached after "long and difficult negotiations," a most unusual phrase. In fact, Castro had to take the unprecedented step in 1985 and 1986 to purchase for cash sugar from the Dominican Republic to keep going the shipments to the Soviet Union. However, he was able to pay the very low world price in dollars to the Dominicans while being credited by the Soviets for this sugar at a very high, subsidized price.
Politically, Castro shows total deference to the Russians. He dutifully attended the Soviet Communist Party Congress in 1986, holding his first meeting with Gorbachev since the latter became the top Kremlin leader. Then, he found it necessary to visit North Korea to meet Kim il-Sung, the senior Communist dictator in the world who presides over the most repressive Communist society anywhere. His Moscow and Pyongyang speeches sounded like carbon copies of every communist speech delivered that year in the Soviet sphere of influence. Fidel seemed to join the ranks of the great conformists.
Who is Fidel Castro at the age of sixty? In the immediate sense, he is the undisputed and still enormously popular (and even loved) leader of an extremely volatile nation, which he has led for more than a quarter-century to a place in the sun in world affairs and toward what he has called "a life of decency." A grandfather himself, he sees to it that in Cuba all children are healthy and clean and well educated. In 1985 the national goal was a ninth-grade education for every Cuban. None of this was true a generation or so ago. It is a great accomplishment in any society, underdeveloped or industrial. No Third World country approaches Cuban standards in the area of that decent life. None have a higher doctor-population ratio than Cuba or a greater longevity expectation at birth.
But there are other aspects to Castro, and disturbing ones when one takes his intelligence and experience into account. Since around 1980 his behavior suggests that he has few fresh ideas for his aging revol
ution. Curiously, this man of astonishing daring and imagination and romanticism is allowing—or forcing—his beloved social and human experiment to be locked into obsolete ideological orthodoxy and deadening bureaucratization. His sallies against "bourgeois" tendencies sound quaintly antiquated, if not slightly caricatural, in a world that has changed so much since such expressions were still in vogue. Considering the extent to which national creativeness has been blunted (one hopes not buried) in the name of conformism, Castro faces the danger that his revolution may be decaying.
In the physical sense, much of the early revolutionary construction is already decaying: the paint is peeling off and windows are broken at the great and admirable Camilo Cienfuegos school complex at the foot of the Sierra Maestra, and masses of costly imported equipment are destroyed by the Caribbean weather because the regime remains unable to solve the problem of unloading ships and loading trucks. These are obvious examples: There are others. Mismanagement discourages work and production, and resulting shortages aggravate the problem of low productivity and high absenteeism. It becomes a vicious circle. Bureaucratic corruption and black marketering in the streets are reemerging like a cancer on the body of the revolution that was born so pure, and Fidel Castro inveighs in rage against "vile money." Young people drink too much because there is little else to do in their spare time, and they are not touched by the mystical magic of the revolution as their fathers and mothers were when Fidel Castro was an obsessed young rebel.
He is furious over the immense rate of absenteeism among Cuban workers, low productivity, shoddy quality of industrial goods (in the province of Havana in 1985, one half of the soft drink and beer bottles produced in the first six months were unusable and had to be destroyed), and the shocking waste of materials and resources in industrial plants, farms, and government offices. At the Third Congress of the Communist party in 1986, Fidel lectured and chastised his fellow citizens in a speech lasting five hours and forty minutes. However, he rejects any suggestion that it is the over-centralized system of government and management that is at fault, allows no basic structural changes, and resents outside criticism as "counterrevolutionary." Again, such absolutism in a man who does understand the workings of Cuban society is perplexing, and raises the question of whether he has lost contact with his people on this small island.