CHAPTER 12
CASTRO AND LUMUMBA
KHRUSHCHEV SAW NO inherent contradiction in actively cultivating new allies in the third world as he worked to relax military tensions with the West. In February 1960, just days after single-handedly reshaping Soviet disarmament proposals and three months before the Paris summit, Khrushchev had approved plans for a new Friendship University in Moscow to bring young adults from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to study Marxism-Leninism and the practical arts of agriculture and engineering.1 Scheduled to open in October 1960, the school was designed to accommodate five hundred foreign students in the expectation they would come from ninety different countries.2 This was a substantial undertaking. “The university cost us a hefty sum,” Khrushchev later recalled, “but it was worth it.”3
It had been a long time since Moscow had sponsored a special school for foreign Communists. In 1921 the Bolsheviks in Tashkent had established a Communist University of Toilers of the East to promote revolution in India and Central Asia. A few years later the Soviets added the Sun Yat-sen University to train cadres for the revolution in China.4 Stalin had closed these schools as he turned the energies of the regime inward and moved the USSR away from supporting the international Communist movement. Khrushchev, however, was eager to restore that focus of Soviet foreign activity.
Recent developments had encouraged Khrushchev to pay even more attention to developing ideological allies in the third world. Since 1955 he had championed signing arms deals, providing grants, and sending industrial and agricultural delegations to cultivate the first generation of third world leaders without regard to their political affiliation. Although the peoples of such newly independent countries after World War II as India and Indonesia spoke dozens of different languages, prayed to different gods, and were shaped by different histories, Khrushchev saw them as a cohesive group that could be converted to Marxism-Leninism. Five years into this campaign the results were not as Moscow had hoped. The leaders were turning out to be more nationalistic than progressive and far less pro-Soviet than they should have been in light of the money that the Kremlin was spending on them.
Egyptian President Nasser no longer acted like a dependable Soviet ally. When Iraq refused Egypt’s offer to join the United Arab Republic after the Iraqi Revolution in 1958, Khrushchev found himself in the midst of a feud between the Iraqi leader, Brigadier General Qasim, and Nasser that appeared to have wrecked his relationship with the Egyptian leader. Nasser blamed Iraqi Communists, who formed part of the governing coalition, for Qasim’s lukewarm embrace of Arab nationalism and assumed Moscow was directing the local Communists. By 1959 Nasser was putting more of his own Communists in jail and both publicly and privately attacking Khrushchev for not having done enough for Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis.5 Complaining about these attacks on Communists, Khrushchev told Egyptian Ambassador Mohammed Awad el-Kouni, “we consider the struggle against imperialism under the banner of Arab nationalism to be a progressive phenomenon in so far as it consolidates the power of colonial and dependent people.” El-Kouni replied: “But President Nasser is not an anticommunist, he is only against Arab communists.”6
Meanwhile Moscow’s alliance with Iraq had also gone sour. In August 1958 Qasim had told the Soviets that he did not fear the position of the Communist Party in Iraqi society. Indeed, some prominent members of Qasim’s inner circle were party members. His first cousin Mahdavi, the chief justice of the country’s revolutionary tribunal, was a Communist.7 So too were Qasim’s personal aide, Colonel Basfi, and the chief of the Iraqi Air Force, General Avkati.8 By early 1960, however, relations between Qasim and the Communist Party had become sharply antagonistic. He held the party responsible for a series of bloody clashes between Kurdish Communists and government soldiers in northern Iraq in the spring of 1959 that jeopardized his control of the country. Qasim had subsequently outlawed all political parties. In February 1960, just as Khrushchev was announcing in Moscow the formation of Friendship University, the Communists closest to Qasim approached the Soviet ambassador at a housewarming party for General Avkati to share their concerns about the direction in which the country was going.9 Mahdavi told of a recent meeting with Qasim in which he had warned his cousin that his autocratic ways were strengthening the reactionary forces in the country at the expense of his progressive allies. Qasim’s response to Mahdavi had been flippant: “Does this mean you are tired of your job at the tribunal?”
In the winter of 1960 Moscow took this gloomy report from its chief allies in Baghdad so seriously that it turned to its traditional fixer, Anastas Mikoyan, and asked the Iraqis to permit special high-level talks. The Presidium instructed Mikoyan to report back on “Qasim’s attitude toward the Communist Party and the willingness of the communists to cooperate with him.”10 Expecting that this conversation would be disappointing, the Kremlin also instructed Mikoyan to tell Qasim that the Soviet Union, his principal supplier of weapons, was “unhappy” with his treatment of the Iraqi Communist Party. As a reminder of the value of keeping in Moscow’s good graces, Mikoyan was to bring with him some KGB information on Western plots to overthrow the Iraqi leader. The Qasim regime, however, was so cool to a visit from Mikoyan that it was delayed until April.11
DESPITE THESE REVERSES in the Middle East, Khrushchev remained optimistic. His commitment to the Friendship University in early 1960 did not stem from pessimism about Soviet opportunities in the third world. Balancing out the bad news from Cairo and Baghdad were hopeful new developments in parts of the world where the Soviet Union had never before had interests. In late 1958 and 1959, while Khrushchev’s foreign policy concerns were primarily Berlin and disarmament, a second wave of national liberation reshaped the map of Africa and brought postcolonial regimes to power in the Caribbean and Asia. The first move to sovereignty occurred in West Africa, where Ghana, the former British colony of the Gold Coast, declared its independence in 1956. The former French West African colony of Guinea followed in 1958. Sékou Touré, the new president of Guinea, turned to the Soviet Union soon after independence. “When I look into the face of the Soviet Union,” he had told a visiting Soviet diplomat, “I see a reliable friend.”12
This new generation of leaders brought Moscow its two brightest hopes for expanding Soviet influence in the developing world. Over the course of 1960 the world came to pay enormous attention to Khrushchev’s relationships with Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. The charismatic young Cuban revolutionary and the dynamic Congolese nationalist personified the kind of leader that Khrushchev hoped to see in the third world. Although neither Castro nor Lumumba was a formal member of a Communist Party, both seemed reassuringly comfortable with Marxism-Leninism and, most important, looked to Moscow for guidance.
In the months to come, Khrushchev took risks to help Castro and Lumumba as local events transformed the two nations into hotly contested squares on the Cold War chessboard. The strong ideological affinity between Moscow and these two young leaders added a new dimension of fear for Washington, making these entanglements seem more threatening than any the Soviet leader had made in the Middle East. With dark passions provoked, the administration would soon be actively trying to kill Castro and Lumumba. But before recounting how the Cold War struggle turned so deadly in the third world in 1960, we should examine the origins of Moscow’s relationship with these young leaders. In neither case did Khrushchev make the first move.
THE CUBAN REVOLUTION began in 1956, when Fidel Castro led a band of guerrillas calling themselves the July 26 Movement into the mountains of Cuba, where they mounted sporadic attacks against the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Following the lead of the Cuban Communist Party, the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), Moscow at first took little notice of this struggle. The local Communists, who believed that revolution should come through a political uprising of the urban working class, seriously underestimated Castro and doubted the revolutionary potential of Cuba’s vast population of agricultural workers. When it became clear, however, that Castro’s
movement was capturing the Cuban public’s imagination and wearing down the Batista regime, the Cuban Communists rallied to his side, and Moscow followed. In December 1958 the Kremlin organized a small covert operation to ship surplus World War II–era German rifles to the revolutionaries, using a company in Costa Rica.13
Soviet assistance, however, played no role in the outcome of the Cuban Revolution. Castro’s forces reached Havana before the weapons did. On New Year’s Eve 1958 Batista fled the country, and the next morning a new Cuban government led by the July 26 Movement was declared.
Over the course of 1959 Fidel Castro gradually introduced himself to the Soviets. Moscow already knew something about his younger brother, Raúl. In his early twenties Raúl had attended a youth congress in Bucharest, Romania, and joined the youth wing of the PSP upon his return.14 According to Raúl’s wife, Vilma Espín, Raúl discussed this decision with his older brother, who was attending the law school at the University of Havana at the time. Fidel advised Raúl to “go ahead” and join the party in 1953. Fidel was already a Marxist, but he told Raúl that he could not follow him into the PSP. According to Espín, Fidel believed his fledgling political career would be doomed if he were a party member.15 The Soviets, on the other hand, were never sure how much Fidel knew of his brother’s work with the PSP and doubted that Fidel was a Marxist-Leninist.16 Instead, Fidel appeared to be a revolutionary who intended to put his own stamp on a social revolution in his own country. In a word, Latin America’s first Fidelista. He needed neither party nor ideological guidance from abroad. In part, the Soviets got this view from the Cuban Communists. The PSP’s leaders told Moscow that Raúl was much closer to the PSP than Fidel. Indeed, the Cuban Communist leaders reported that Raúl and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine-born Communist in the inner circle of the revolution, had kept their Communist membership a secret from Fidel, despite their intense loyalty to the man.17
Moscow’s first inkling that a special relationship with Fidel Castro and his regime was possible came in April 1959, when Raúl Castro sent a representative on a mission to Moscow to request Soviet assistance in creating a Marxist-Leninist cadre within the Cuban Army.18 The Kremlin obliged the Cubans by sending seventeen Spanish republican military officers who had taken refuge in Moscow at the end of the Spanish civil war in 1938.19 The next step came a few months later, when the Cubans approached the Poles for military hardware. The Kremlin reviewed all weapons sales by its satellites to nonbloc countries, and in late September 1959 it approved the Polish request to send some Soviet bloc tanks to Havana.20 The first Soviet representative to visit Cuba after the revolution, the KGB’s Aleksandr Alekseyev, reached the island a few weeks later.21 When the Cubans approached the Czechs in January 1960 to request weapons from them, the Kremlin agreed.22 The next month Presidium member Mikoyan visited Cuba in a major public display of friendship to open a Soviet exhibition in Havana. Mikoyan was passionate about what he found there. “I felt as though I had returned to my childhood!” he reported to the Kremlin. “[Fidel] is a genuine revolutionary—completely like us.”23
Fidel Castro initially imposed limits on Cuba’s relationship with Moscow. At his first meeting with the KGB’s Alekseyev in October 1959, he had explained how his fear of U.S. retaliation shaped his approach to the Kremlin. “For Nasser it made sense,” Castro told Alekseyev in explaining why Cuba would not be requesting weapons directly from Moscow. “First of all, American imperialism was far from him, and you are next door to Egypt. But us? We are so far…. No weapons. We do not ask for any.”24 Castro also believed that the real threat to his regime was economic, not military. “All U.S. attempts to intervene are condemned to failure,” he said confidently to Alekseyev at a later meeting, in February 1960. “The only danger for Cuban Revolution is Cuba’s economic weakness and its economic dependence on the U.S. which could use sanctions against Cuba. In one or two years, [the] U.S. could destroy the Cuban economy. But never, even under mortal danger, will we make a deal with American imperialism. And under these circumstances, the USSR could play a decisive role in the strengthening of our revolution by helping us economically.”25 Castro also wanted to limit what the Cuban people knew of his dealings with Moscow. Anticommunism was deeply ingrained in Cuban society, where the Roman Catholic Church remained a strong institution, and Castro did not want to restore open relations with the Soviet Union until he was more confident of the domestic reaction.
Despite Castro’s caveats, Khrushchev had reason to be optimistic about the potential for sturdy ties between the Kremlin and Cuba. The thirty-two-year-old Castro seemed to be a true revolutionary and reliably anti-American.
ON APRIL 18, 1959, three months after Castro’s triumphant arrival in Havana, a tall Congolese activist named Patrice Lumumba entered the Soviet Embassy in the Guinean capital of Conakry. At the time the Congo was still a Belgian colony, and Moscow knew nothing about Lumumba and very little about his homeland.26 The night before, a Guinean official had introduced the Soviet ambassador to Lumumba, and the two set an appointment for the next day. “The struggle for the independence of the Congo,” Lumumba explained to Ambassador P. I. Gerasimov, “is progressing.”27 He was the founding leader of the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), a grassroots organization that demanded Congo’s independence from Belgium. Born in 1925, Lumumba had only a primary school education because the Belgian colonial administration did not offer public secondary education to blacks. In his early twenties Lumumba had gone to work in the post office in Stanleyville, and eventually he started writing pamphlets for the local branch of the Liberal Party of Belgium. While in prison in 1956 for allegedly embezzling funds on the job, he wrote a political tract, Le Congo, terre d’Avenir: est-il menacé? [The Congo, Land of the Future, Is It Threatened?]. After he was released later that year, Lumumba’s political activism became more intense and more radical. In October 1958 he played a major role in establishing the MNC, which advocated independence.
Lumumba hinted strongly to Moscow’s representative in April 1959 that he was pro-Soviet, if not a Communist. He asked for permission to make a secret visit to the Soviet Union, explaining that once he returned from Moscow he would be in a better position to “expose the anti-Soviet propaganda that the colonial powers are now increasingly disseminating in Africa.”28 To keep the trip a secret from the Belgians, the Guineans had already promised to allow Lumumba to leave from Conakry if the Soviets agreed.
Lumumba also asked for Soviet financial assistance. He lacked the funds to distribute his own propaganda throughout the vast territory of the Belgian Congo. If his message could get out, he assured the Soviet ambassador, it would undermine the “anti-Soviet fabrications” of the Belgians.29
The meeting with the Soviet ambassador was not Lumumba’s only effort to seek Communist assistance in 1959. Two weeks later he left for Brussels to meet with the leaders of the Belgian Communist Party, whom he saw as natural allies. His conversations with Albert de Coninck, the secretary of the Central Committee of the Belgian party, created great optimism among the Belgian Communists, which they communicated to Moscow. “The Congo,” de Coninck explained to the Soviet officials at the embassy after his meeting with Lumumba, “presents the most favorable conditions for the spread of Marxism of any country in Africa.”30 As evidence, he pointed to the colony’s large—by African standards—urban population. Compared with 10 percent in French West Africa, 26 percent of the Congolese population lived in towns or cities. De Coninck also celebrated the fact that the party Lumumba led was the strongest in the Congo and “practically stands at the forefront of the national-liberation movement.” Although not formally a Communist, Lumumba “supports progressive positions.” This was a codeword among Communists for someone who was politically reliable.
The Belgian Congo was a potentially rich prize. A vast empire in Central Africa that stretched from the mouth of the Congo River on the western coast of the continent for twelve hundred miles into the interior, it had more mineral wealth than any ot
her country in Africa. The colony produced 9 percent of the world’s copper, 49 percent of the world’s cobalt, 69 percent of the world’s industrial diamonds, and 6.5 percent of its tin.31 During the Second World War the Congo had been the source of almost all of the financing of the Belgian government-in-exile, and since 1945 its mining output had almost doubled.32 Moscow had no particular interest in acquiring these resources, but this mineral wealth meant that once it was independent, the Congo had a good chance of prospering and might thereby become a useful Soviet ally.
In January 1960 Congolese negotiators reached an agreement with the Belgian government that independence would be declared on June 30. This would be preceded by the country’s first parliamentary election in May.
Lumumba was unquestionably the Soviet favorite in the political struggle for the Congo. In late December 1959 the Kremlin had turned down a blanket request for assistance from representatives of another coalition comprising distinguished Congolese nationalists who were not allied with Lumumba.33 Moscow suspected the ideological commitment of these nationalists, and Khrushchev preferred to take his chances with Lumumba.34
WELL INTO THE WINTER of 1960 the U.S. government knew surprisingly little about the extent of the Kremlin’s relationship with Castro and cared little about Lumumba. Neither the CIA nor the National Security Agency, which intercepted and decrypted foreign communications, had detected the covert supply of Soviet bloc weapons to Havana that the Presidium had approved in September 1959 and January 1960. Lumumba’s contacts with Soviet representatives had been noticed but were largely ignored.
Washington was working hard to understand Fidel Castro. With Cuba only ninety miles off the coast of Florida, the Eisenhower administration had followed the Cuban Revolution very closely. For a time after the July 26 Movement took control of the island, the administration was unsure how to handle Castro. The State Department initially recommended engagement. An undercover CIA officer was assigned to spend time with Castro during a tour of the United States that the young leader took in April 1959. Castro made some very reassuring statements to this officer. In fact the visit, which was partially choreographed by an American public relations firm, created widespread support for the rebels without revealing Castro’s future revolutionary aims. Castro repeated the mantra “We are not communists,” throughout his stay.35 He was so convincing that even Vice President Nixon, who had a private meeting with Castro in Washington, D.C., described him as an anti-Communist who cavorted with the PSP out of sheer naiveté.36
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