These are appeals by a prophet or a mystic, reminiscent of D'Annunzio or Codreanu rather than Lenin or Trotsky. They lead us a little closer to the metapolitics of Cuban guerrilla doctrine. It is not of course that Fidel was a paradigm of asceticism or that the guerrillas all wanted to commit suicide. But there certainly is a revolutionary romanticism, with its pessimistic, even tragic undertones, to which Raoul Castro and others have referred.16 Purity is the ideal, revolution is a mystical adventure, a struggle to the death for something enigmatical. Although these observations refer more to Guevara (and to Camilo Torres, about whom more below) than to Fidel Castro, almost all Latin American revolutionaries have certain features in common: their character and mental makeup present a curious mixture of contradictory qualities, admirable and not so admirable. In many ways they were the most attractive revolutionary heroes to have emerged in Latin America; enthusiastic, courageous, idealistic, willing to make sacrifices, genuinely concerned about the fate of the poor, impatient with bureaucracy. They had a sense of mission and were free of the corruption and the egotism of the society surrounding them. They became the heroes of many of the best young people in Latin America and beyond. But there was another side to it. Their heroism was by no means free of machismo or showing off, their concern for the poor was paternalistic, they were anything but democrats and the idea that the masses could or should be trusted in free elections was quite alien to them. The dividing line between selfless heroic action, caudillismo, terrorism, and gangsterism has never been quite distinct in Latin America and the same lack of delineation was true of the Cuban revolutionaries. Castro, who began his career as a university gun fighter, wrote about the companions of his youth:
. . . the young men who, moved by natural yearning and the legend of a heroic era, longed for a revolution that had not taken place and at the time could not be started. Many of those victims of deceit who died as gangsters could very well be heroes today.17
Conversely, it would appear that many, perhaps most, of the apostles of Communism, Latin American style, in the late 1950s and 1960s could with equal ease have become fighters for Fascism, Latin American style, twenty years earlier. This applies to elements in their ideology and traits in their character alike. They were children of their time; in the last resort action was more important than ideologies which had always been imported to Latin America anyway. One element remained constant — nationalism, populist and elitist at the same time; the rest was given to continual change, according to the prevailing intellectual fashion. It is quite true, as Theodore Draper has noted, that ideologically Castroism never lived a life of its own:
historically, it is a leader in search of a movement, a movement in search of power, and power in search of an ideology. From its origins to today, it has had the same leader and the same "road to power" but it has changed its ideology.18 ... A caudillist movement of a new type, it uses power not for power's sake and needs an ideology to justify power ideologically, a mixture of the Latin American revolutionary tradition and European communist elements.19
The apparent break in the ideological continuity of Castroism can be understood only against this background. The same goes for the constant changes in doctrine, the debates whether objective conditions were of any importance for a revolutionary, whether armed struggle was the inevitable road to power everywhere, whether Cuba was an example for the whole of Latin America. There is, as already noted, a great and growing discrepancy between the doctrine of Castroism as it developed after 1960 and the realities of the Cuban revolution. It is true that similar discrepancies exist between the doctrines of all revolutions and the real course of events, but it is particularly striking in the case of Cuba. The Castroist doctrine is a myth, which is not to say that it is irrelevant. Taking the Castroist doctrine of revolution at face value, one would never glean the facts that Castro and his comrades had not originally intended to launch guerrilla warfare, that the "masses" played an insignificant role in the fighting, that, generally speaking, there was little fighting at all, that the Batista regime collapsed, in the final resort, because it was rotten to the core and not because the insurgents were so strong. There is no recognition of the fact that there was relative prosperity in Cuba at the time and even relative freedom; Castro's Sierra Maestra appeal for a rising was reported in the Havana press.20 It is never acknowledged that Castro's intelligent manipulation of the mass media (including the foreign press and television) was of the greatest importance, that he received decisive financial help from bourgeois political leaders inside and outside Cuba, that America turned against Batista and imposed an arms embargo. The importance of the revolutionary struggle in the towns, which involved more fighting and cost more lives than in the countryside, is systematically played down in Castroist literature. A Marxist critic later wrote that Fidel's victory over Batista's army was not achieved by force of arms; corruption, the great Cuban vested interests, the Church, and in the final analysis, Yanqui imperialism, all assisted in Batista's defeat.21 In moments of candor, Cuban official sources have provided explanations that come close to this analysis: that the revolution was won largely because of Castro; that U.S. imperialism was disorientated; that support was given by a large segment of the bourgeoisie and some big landowners; and lastly, that most sections of Cuba's peasants were proletarianized. Only the last part of this official formula is quasi-Marxist in character and it is also the one which is incorrect. In short, the revolution prevailed in Cuba because of a unique set of circumstances, and thus attempts to reproduce it elsewhere in Latin America were bound to fail — not for lack of "objective revolutionary situations" or courageous guerrilla leaders, but because it was unlikely that the United States or the non-Communist circles would support a movement of this kind in the post-Cuban situation. By 1965 one observer noted that the counterinsurrectionists knew more about guerrilla warfare than the guerrillas themselves.
Debray
The orthodox Communists rejected Castro's "adventurism," partly because they opposed his policy for tactical reasons, but mainly because they could not accept the subordination of the party apparatus to the military leaders. The polemics usually proceeded by proxy: Castro did not want to attack Moscow openly so instead accused the Latin American Communists of cowardice — for not supporting Douglas Bravo's guerrilla operations in Venezuela, for instance. The Latin American Communists on the other hand were reluctant to engage in a dispute with the Cubans because of their tremendous prestige in radical circles all over the continent. In the circumstances, Debray became the main butt for their attacks; he was merely an unofficial spokesman of the regime and could be criticized with greater impunity. Inter alia Debray was charged with not presenting a detailed Marxist class analysis in his writings, with trying to prescribe for the whole continent, with not taking into account decisive local peculiarities, with "liquidating" theory, with having a wrong model of revolution. It was pointed out to Debray that the armed struggle was no panacea; it did not necessarily unite the revolutionaries as events in Venezuela and elsewhere had shown. It was explained to him that urban revolutionaries did not enjoy a dolce vita, that he was an "ultra-voluntarist,' an elitist, distrustful of the masses.22
Some of this criticism was quite to the point. Castro, Guevara and Debray had admitted the existence of "national peculiarities" in principle but had paid them scant attention in practice, assuming, apparently, that the Cuban model was equally applicable to Honduras and Brazil. Some criticism was correct but irrelevant: all revolutionaries are elitists and voluntarists even though some admit this more openly than others. Other charges were quite unfounded: a Marxist class analysis of Latin American society, however interesting per se, was not, as experience proved, the answer to the feasibility of a revolution. The Cuban experience demonstrated that the "subjective" factor was of decisive importance, that revolutionary war was a contest of will: if Batista lost his nerve while Fidel maintained supreme self-confidence, this had little to do with the social tensions in Cuban socie
ty. Tensions exist in every society and it would be impossible to prove that there were more tensions in Cuba than elsewhere in Latin America. Orthodox Marxists could argue that the Cuban experience was unique, an exception, but the exception had been successful, whereas guerrilla movements operating in objectively favorable conditions had failed.
The Castroist-Guevaraist doctrine was most fashionable throughout Latin America until about 1968, the year after Guevara's failure in Bolivia. In the years that followed, Cuba began to toe the Soviet line more closely (a fact for which Soviet economic pressure might accoun t in part). The Cuban leaders also lost some of their illusions about an imminent victory of the revolution in Latin America in view of the guerrillas' minimal progress on the continent; the revolutionary spirit of 1960-1968 gave way to internal splits, interminable polemics, and mutual recriminations. Ironically, Castro, who had bitterly attacked the Communist parties because most of them had not opted for the armed struggle, found himself by 1970 at the receiving end of similar charges. Douglas Bravo contended that Cuba had retreated, declared a truce, choosing to sacrifice the revolutionary cause in favor of economic development. Cuba, he argued, had refused to unleash a war on the grand scale. True, Cuba would be lost in such a war but the Cuban revolutionaries would be able to carry the revolutionary struggle to other Latin American countries.23 The Cuban leaders were in no mood to accept such advice; they preferred the establishment of closer relations with nationalist regimes, such as in Peru, which had carried out "progressive changes." Finally, the vacilations of Cuba's overall political strategy quite apart, Cuba's prestige declined among those who had enthusiastically welcomed the revolution a decade earlier. As they saw it, the great promise of 1960 had not been quite fulfilled, the regime had become bureaucratized despite all the good intentions, the revolutionary spirit was slowly petering out. It was still regarded as a progressive regime, but the image of Cuba no longer quickened the heart.
Debray's approach also changed markedly over the years. After his release from a Bolivian prison, he went to Chile, eventually returning to France where he joined the socialists. In La Critique des Armes, published in 1974, he stated that the hypothesis he had previously advanced had been belied by experience. The theory of foci had been wrong insofar as it had dissociated the military from the political, the clandestine from the legal, struggle. Debray now considered the political training of cadres and contact with the masses as of paramount importance. One had to return to the ABC of the great revolutionary teachers, beginning with Marx. For the zealous revolutionaries who continued to believe in theories he had advocated only a few years earlier, he felt nothing but contempt: "Schizophrenia as a norm of organization is the last stage of individual megalomania." He saw nothing but irresponsibility and revolutionary delirium in their pronouncements and noted sarcastically that the revolutionary phrase begins its flight, like the owl of Minerva, when night falls and when revolution has reached the stage of agony.24
Thus ended a chapter in the history of Latin American revolutionary doctrine. The same Debray, who had rejected the very idea of the urban guerrilla in 1965, now came to regard the Tupamaros as the most intelligent and politically sophisticated of all Latin American guerrillas — but even they were defeated. Venezuela, as he saw it, had acquired a hypertrophied and omnipresent repressive apparatus, but despite this, it still functioned as a liberal republic with elections and a normal political life; in these conditions, too, revolutionary violence failed.25 He had come back full circle in 1974, to the position adopted all along by Communist leaders like Prestes or by Guevara in 1960 before he announced the inevitability of the armed struggle.
Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America
Although the Cuban leaders were at the very center of the debate on revolutionary strategy, they had no monopoly in this field. The political splits of the Latin American radicals into dozens of factions and hundreds of groupuscules were reflected in a bewildering multitude of theses and platforms; even an encyclopedia would not do them justice. They ranged from those who advocated cooperation with "progressive" bourgeois-nationalist groups within a parliamentary framework, to the Posadistas, a Trotskyite faction, who took the Soviet Union to task for not waging nuclear war. Of the guerrilla ideologists only the advocates of urban terrorism deserve more than cursory mention; the views of the others can be summarized briefly, since they coincide, broadly speaking, with the concepts developed by Fidel, Guevara and Debray.
Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan guerrilla commander, was in the forefront of the armed struggle on the continent for several years. A former leading Communist, who broke with the party, he established his first rural foco in 1962. The conditions facing him and his men differed in some important respects from those in Cuba: there was a greater degree of urbanization in Venezuela, where more than sixty percent of the population lived in cities; the enemy confronting the insurgents was not a Batista but a democratically elected mass party, the Acción Democratica. Guerrilla strategy manifested itself 011 the one hand in collaboration with criminal elements and the indiscriminate use of terror (such as attacks against trains carrying urban holiday-makers). The slogan was to kill at least one policeman a day. Since the policemen were usually of lower class background than the guerrillas, this topsy-turvy class struggle did not always endear them to the very groups they wanted to win over. Bravo's manifestos on the other hand were quite moderate; one would look in vain for any radical program of social change. He demanded agrarian reform and criticized the government for not conducting a friendlier policy vis-à-vis Cuba and North Vietnam. He referred at length to the glorious struggle for national liberation of 1810 and the fight against Yanqui imperialism, but these same motifs could be found in the programs of most Latin American parties.26
In later years the guerrilla movement split and some of Bravo's erstwhile lieutenants sought explanations for the mistakes committed: the guerrillas could have won in 1962, said Teodora Pet koff, if they had combined the armed struggle in the towns with an insurrection in the army. The decisive battles were fought in the cities, not in the countryside, where the rural guerrillas could not survive without help from the towns. Hence the conclusion drawn by another Venezuelan guerrilla leader: in future it would be necessary to concentrate on the urban centers, building a powerful civilian and military base on the strength of clearly formulated, concrete political goals. Foreign models were only of limited assistance and a specific Venezuelan road to socialism would have to be developed.27
Despite the fact that Peru was far more rural in character than Venezuela the Peruvian guerrilla leaders, Hector Bejar and Hugo Blanco, reached very similar conclusions when they too looked back on the reasons for their failure. Bejar wrote that the guerrillas had fought in the forests, while the peasant population was concentrated in valleys and high zones; unless they mastered the tactics of operating on high open plateaus, they would have to stay in the forests, militarily secure but politically ineffective. More importantly, "our attitude was based on an underestimation of the cities," therewith blocking the road to successful revolutionary agitation among the urban masses. He also critically reappraised the apolitical attitude of the guerrillas: "Our groups were oriented towards action and found in it their only reason for existence,"28 Bejar mentioned in passing yet another important handicap: the cultural gap between the city-born, educated guerrillas and the campesinos was enormous. Quite literally, they did not speak the same language; the former, with a very few exceptions, did not understand Quechua (the Indian language) and the latter hardly spoke any Spanish.
Hugo Blanco attained fame as a successful organizer of peasant associations. The struggle for land control was carried out under his leadership, with the slogan Tierra ο Muerte (Land or Death). These associations were to be the nucleus of a new society, they would run their own schools, courts of justice, health services. To all intents and purposes they would constitute a "dual power" on the lines of the Soviets in Petrograd in 1917. But again, in retrospec
t, Blanco admitted that the basic weakness of the guerrilla struggle had been its lack of support by a mass party: "We did not attach sufficient importance to the fundamental role of the party." The peasantry in Peru, Blanco said, was the major revolutionary force, but in the long run, once they were given land, they would become bourgeois. In the final analysis, therefore, the working class was the only guarantor of a socialist revolution.29
Camilo Torres, the revolutionary priest, who joined the Colombian guerrillas, made no major theoretical contribution to the actual conduct of guerrilla warfare; he was killed in the very first engagement in which he took part. His writings were devoted to the necessity of implementing social change and land reform, and to attacks against the establishment of the Catholic Church, which identified itself with the propertied classes. He tried to prove that the revolution was not just compatible with Christian ethics but was a Christian imperative.30 He realized that the precondition for the success of the revolutionary cause lay in a united front of the various opposition forces who were engaged in intense internal feuds. But his great prestige as the most eloquent spokesman of the left was quite insufficient to achieve this aim; the Colombian insurgents, more than any other Latin American guerrilla movement, remained deeply split and frequently engaged in bloody purges of their own ranks. They probably lost more of their cadres in killing each other than by enemy action.31
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