NOTES ON THE CUBAN DILEMMA

by Stuart Hall & Norm Fruchter

1. KENNEDY AND THE NEW RHETORIC

who did not follow Mr. Kennedys
pronouncements on Cuba in the days before his
election were surprised by the American intervention. For Mr. Kennedy has never wavered on
Cuba. When his Administration undertook yet
another agonising reappraisal of foreign policy,
Cuba remained the one territory which could not
be contained within the new frontier. There
were weeks in which the Administration refused
to take any policy decisions over a very wide
field: yet there was no pause between the promises
which Mr. Kennedy held out to the Cuban
emigres in the last weeks of the election, and the
execution of those promises by the military and
the CIA, with the full knowledge and support
of the President, within his first hundred days.
Why?
A satisfactory answer to this question would
entail an examination of the new philosophy
which underpins the Kennedy Administration.
The new frontier in foreign policy is quite
different from the brink which Mr. Dulles
once defended. For Mr. Dulles, the Free
World was maintained by the deterrent and the
threat of massive retaliation. Communism would
be rolled back by external propaganda and
internal subversion. The only legitimate revolutions were those directed against the Soviet
autarchy. Neutralism was a sin.
Mr. Kennedys philosophy is quite different.
He has accepted the redifinition of world reality
which the Russians and the Chinese have recently
made. The points of engagement between East
and West lie now along the outer perimeter of the
Free World, in the under-developed and nonaligned nations. Mr. Kennedy appears to have
taken a rather unsophisticated view of this shift
in strategy. He thought that the first phase could
be brought to a neat close (with arms control and
perhaps a measure of disarmament in Europe)
ONLY THOSE

before the second phase (the struggle for the

uncommitted nations) began. Here, he misread
the movement of history: the two phases could
not be so neatly separated and the battle for the
second was already well un der way before the
first had been brought to any safe conclusion.
The shift in strategy has forced both Mr.
Kennedy and Mr. Khrushchev to alter the terms
of the argument between East and West. For
social revolution in Asia, Africa and Latin
America is not in essence concerned with the Cold
War. It is a revolution of the hungry countries
against the industrially advanced: more especially,
a revolution against the old structure of imperialism and therefore, profoundly hostile to capitalism
as an economic system. It is essential to see that
these social and economic revolutions would have
taken place in this decade, whatever shape world
politics had assumed after 1945. Of course,
a conflict with imperialism provides Mr.
Khrushchev with a point of entry. But both he
and Mr. Kennedy are now engaged in an attempt
to exploit the colonial revolution, and adapt it
to the world power struggle. Thus, at the recent
meeting of Soviet and Chinese leaders, classic
communist doctrine was drastically revised to
take account of national revolution; a parallel
revision has been taking place in American policy
as well.
A strictly conservative world view such as
Mr. Dulles maintained was of little use to Mr.
Kennedy in the new phase. Mr. Kennedy has
had to define, within the limits of a new liberal
rhetoric, the precise degree of revolution
compatible with American interests. Those which
guaranteed the characteric American freedoms
could be endorsed and incorporated within a
network of massive technical and financial
assistance. Neutralism became respectable. The
most distinguished of Mr. Kennedys team were

appointed to the capitals of the under-developed

world: Mr. Stevenson began to court the nonaligned representatives at the UN. And when
Mr. Kennedy turned to his own hemisphere,
Latin America, he came armed with the new
rhetoric. Massive aid would be given, he said, but
only to those governments which were prepared
to put it to use within the framework of a new
deal for their peoplesocial and educational
reform, parliamentary government, and free
institutions. The transformation which this
represents can only be appreciated if the proposals
for Latin America are compared with the foreignaid policies pursued in previous years in Vietnam,
Korea and Turkey.
It is this new frontier which informs the
US Statement on Events in Cuba under the Castro
Regime (April 3, 1961). This document is a
dramatic attempt to put America on the side of
history. It admits that the Batista regime deserved
to be overthrown: The character of the Batista
regime in Cuba made a violent popular reaction
almost inevitable. The rapacity of the leadership,
the corruption of the government, the brutality of
the police, the regimes indifference to the needs
of the people for education, medical care, housing,

for social justice and economic opportunityall

these, in Cuba as elsewhere, constituted an open
invitation to revolution. The Paper makes no
mention of the United States relationship with
that regime; it ignores the millions of dollars
America poured into Batistas army, the yearly
American exploitation of the Cuban agriculture,
industry and resources. The indictment is rather
that the revolutionary regime betrayed their
own revolution, that it was transformed into an
instrument employed with calculated effect to
suppress the rekindled hopes of the Cuban people
for democracy.
The Castro regime, it argues, has reneged on
the liberal promise of the revolution with regard to
individual and politics rights, freedom of
information and general elections; the 26
July Movement has been suppressed as the
main political instrumentality of the regime by
the Communist Party; it has been a history of
disillusion, persecution, imprisonment and exile;
professional groups and civic institutions have
lost their autonomy; the Castro regime has
seized control of the nations educational
system and the agencies of public communication.

2. MR. DRAPER ENCOUNTERS THE NEW FRONTIER

THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED. This is also the
theme of the most formidable ideological attack
yet to be launched against Cuba by Mr. Theodore
Draper (Castros Cuba, Encounter March
1961). Mr. Drapers attack echoes, in more
sophisticated terms the language and ideology
of the White Paper. He judges Castros betrayal
by the same yardstickthe speech History Will
Absolve Me, which Castro made to the Batista
court, trying him for treason after the unsuccessful
assault on Moncada, in 1953.
Here, Draper argues, was the revolution Fidel
Castro promised. The essence of the speech was
the restoration of the 1940 Constitution after a
brief provisional government. Castro supported
grants of land to small farmers and peasants, a
land reform which would set a ceiling upon
agricultural holdings, distribution of the remaining land to farming families, the establishment of
co-operatives. But he declared against the
expropriation and nationalisation of foreign
investments. None of these promises and
reforms have been honoured.
Mr. Draper is an expert historian of the

American Communist Party. He is aware that

every revolution must be discussed in terms of
the social classes which made it possible. He
therefore extends his indictment, by arguing
that the revolutionary movement itself was not
composed of the urban proletariat or the
peasantry, but of the middle class. There is, for
him, a close conjunction between the middle
class which made the Cuban revolution and the
liberal reforms which Castro promised. His
conclusion is that the Cuban revolution is a
double betrayal. It has betrayed its promises
and destroyed its own revolutionary class.
The Cuban revolution was essentially a middle
class revolution which has been used to destroy
the middle class.
. . .Was the Cuban revolution betrayed? The
answer depends upon what revolution one has in
mindthe revolution that Castro promised before
taking power, or the one he has made since taking
power.

Both these charges fail to recognise that the

Cuban revolution has been a permanent
revolution, continuously in transition. History
Will Absolve Me was not, as Draper makes out, a

revolutionary programmeit was an impassioned denunciation of tyranny, by a young

idealist facing what he thought was almost
certain death. Castro could not have foreseen in
1953 the problems which he would encounter
once the whole fabric of Cuban society began to
crumble.
Suppose that Castro had attempted in 1959 to
apply the policies he had sketched in 1953.
Land would have been granted to the peasants
and farmers; but how could the Cuban economy
have been diversified without technical advice
and help, new markets and equipment? If
maximum holdings for agricultural enterprises
was enforced, the consequence would have been
the break-up of the large estates, the destruction
of the Cuban proprietor class and the dismantling
of vested sugar interests. If the share croppers
were converted into proprietors of the lands they
work on, that would have spelled the end of the
ownership of estates by landed Cuban or foreign
Companies; but then, how would sugar, which is a
collective crop, be grown, cut and processed?
History Will Absolve Me did not deal with these
contingencies.
Many times during his rise to power, Castro
promised a radical land reform, diversification
of agricultural production, rapid industrialisation,
an end to the scourge of unemployment, health
services for all people, and a new and vastly
expanded educational system (Monthly Review,
May 1961). Were these plans to be negotiated
with American capital, whose whole raison detre
had been monoculture and the dependence of
Cuba on the American sugar quota? Castro had
declared that agricultural co-operatives were
to be encouraged. How far could encouragement go before the co-operative became the
basic economic institution? Mr. Draper deals
only sketchily with the links between the Cuban
and American economies: yet it was precisely
this relation which altered the course of the
Cuban revolution. It would be truer to say that
many of Castros 1953 promises were not relevant
to the Cuba he inherited from Batista: and that,
had he restricted himself to the letter of the 1953
speech, even those modest reforms would have
brought him into sharp conflict with the structure
of American interests.
When Mr. Draper deals with the social
composition of the Cuban revolution, his model
becomes static and schematic. He does not
account for the revolution as a process
particularly the transitional period of the guerilla
war and the extension of the revolutionary
movement from its original leaders to the
disaffected middle class and the rural proletariat.
He continually reminds us of the middle class

origins of the leadership, but he fails to ask who

constituted the rebel army, and who kept them
alive in the Sierra Maestra. Castro and his twelve
survivors from the yacht Granma could not, by
themselves, have liberated Cuba. It is true that
the urban workers did not provide the social
base for the revolution: they were not Cubas
largest class, they were confined to the cities,
which were still Batistas stronghold. It is also
true that the final collapse of Batista was due,
most of all, to the withdrawal of middle class
support in the cities. The backbone of the
revolution was, indeed, a handful of inexperienced
radical students and intellectuals. But they made
their revolution in the midst of the rural poor,
and the poor staked their claim in it. The war, as
it progressed, drew into active support, not only
middle class students who escaped to the mountains and defectors from Batistas army, but also
the vast majority of the Cuban people: the
peasants and subsistence farmers and, more
especially, the plantation workers on the sugar
estates and factories. By the middle of the
war, the rebel army had become a political
cadre in the countryside. When the rebels constructed a field hospital to care for the wounded,
the campecino families were able, for the first
time, to have hospital treatment. When Guevara
set up a school in the mountains, it was the
campesino adults and children who attended
regularly. Within two years, there were thirty
rebel army schools. Never before had the
campesinos seen a school in the Sierra. (Anatomy
of a Revolution, Huberman and Sweezy). The
first co-operatives were brought into existence as
an expedient for keeping economic life going in
those parts of liberated territory, whilst the
Batista regime remained in control of the cities
and the markets.
As the support for Castro grew, so for the first
time the revolution encountered the practical
needs of the Cuban people. The task was no
longer, as Castro had seen it in 1953, simply the
overthrow of a repressive tyranny: it was a
question of what social system to put in its place.
Not only were the aims of the revolution continually revised, as the needs of the Cuban poor
disclosed themselves to the Revolutionary Army,
but the tentative measures, taken in the Sierra
Maestra, became the embryo organisation of the
new State.
And here, the Cuban Revolution touched and
surpassed the outer extremes of Mr. Kennedys
and Mr. Drapers model. The White Paper makes
no reference to the influence of American
capitalism over the structure of Cuban society.
It gives a picture of a society without an economic
history. Yet it must be clear that, as the revolution

engaged wider and wider strata among the

Cuban people, so, too, it encountered the organic
shape of the whole society. As the Batista regime
fell away, as the middle class and urban workers
began to rally to Castro, so the whole structure
was probed and revealed. First the rottenness of
the regime itself, the fraudulence of its electoral
basis, the terror and executions, the corruption,
the carapace of military terror by which it was
maintained. What was to replace the existing
order? Corruption and terror had, clearly,
battened on something. It was not enough that
the revolutionary leadership, learning its marxism
as it went, should point to urban vice, the brothels
and gambling, the high-priced hotels, the seamy
subversion of human morale in a tourist economy.
Who used the hotels? Who patronised the
brothels? The tourists, the owners, of the
latifundia, the proprietors? But what was their
basis of power? Was the dictatorship to be over-

thrown, simply so that the peasant could return

to his hovel, the children and the young barbudos
lapse into illiteracy, the campesinos retire again
into the permanent semi-unemployment and
feudal conditions of the sugar plantation?
Castro had before him the lessons of Mexico
where a revolution had been short-circuited by
the failure to carry a far reaching agrarian
reform. This was therefore the first, and irrevocable, act of the revolutionary leadership after
the collapse of Batista. For the Agrarian Law
was a challenge, not only to the Cuban rich, but,
by an indivisible chain of connections, to the
dominance of American capital and the hegemony
of foreign investments. The one alienable right
which neither Mr. Draper nor the White Paper,
in their enthusiasm for legitimate revolutions,
defend, is the right of a people to reconstruct
their economic system.

3. DIALECTIC OF THE COLD WAR

COMMUNISM IS not negotiable in this hemisphere.
But arms and markets were.
Soviet domination of economic relations has
proceeded with a speed and comprehensiveness.
A series of trade and financial agreements has
integrated the Cuban economy with that of the
Communist world.

Had Cuba been placed, geographically, seven

or eight thousand miles from the American
mainland, in a hemisphere already the playground of the Cold War; had she confronted a
second-rank imperial power in the Western
alliance, she might have been able to play the
Egyptian game taking aid without favour from
both sides. But once the economic embargo by the
US had begun, there was only one way in which
the Cubans could maintain the economy and
carry through the revolution: by turning to the
Sino-Soviet bloc.
And so the dialectic was engaged. The Agrarian
reform initiated the tension. Following a Trade
Fair, Cuba signed an agreement with Mr.
Mikoyan. Russia was to supply crude oil at
lower prices than America. And when the American oil companies refused to refine the Russian
oil: Castro intervened Texaco, Shell and Esso.
The decree empowering the government to
nationalise US property was followed by the
slashing of the American sugar quota. The
Russians, and then the Chinese offered to buy the

crop. On July 9, Castro accepted the Soviet

shield against US aggressionand Nunez Jimenez
returned from Eastern Europe with credits for
56 new factories. The effect of the American
response was to create the abstraction she claimed
to fear: a Soviet economic bridgehead in the
hemisphere.
From this point forward American hostility
became the defining principle of Cuban reality.
The Cuban people did not emerge from the
revolution with any developed world view. Like
much of the revolution, it was improvised into
existence during the months of American pressure.
The people approached the question of international allegiances in a practical manner. The
Soviet Union saved the revolution in mid-course.
They were prepared to help Cuba defend itself if
necessary. They had made no attempts to dictate
the course or character of the Cuban revolution
from outside. In the prolonged revolutionary
period through which the Cubans are living, the
revolution is treated like the extension of the
guerilla war: the definition of a friend is a man
who will help you out of a tight spot. In practice
the Soviet Union is the friend of the Cuban
revolution. That is the root of Cuban
communism.
By the same definition, the American government is an enemy; and the highest expres-

sion of that Governments philosophy

anti-communismhas become an alien ideology
to the Cuban people. Once again, in the practice
of revolution, the categories of Cold War politics
interpenetrate and reverse. There is a documentary
film in existence which shows a Cuban guajiro,
explaining in broken English to an American
visitor that the Cubans are not against him,
but against his government. The Cuban is
speaking against a background of the sustained
chants of the crowd: Cuba Si, Yanquis No.
Such is the naturethe contradictionsof
Cuban anti-Americanism.
The Cubans are also quick to point out that the
only foreign base on their soil is the American
base at Guantanamo Bay, whose lavish structures
and ample facilities contrast strikingly with the
squalor of the Cuban town next door, which,
until recently, depended for its existence upon
the base trade.
The dependence of the Cuban economy upon
the Soviet bloc is a Cuban reflex to American
hostility, harrassment and economic subversion.
But that does not dispose of the charge that the
revolutionary leadership has delivered Cubas
internal affairs into the hands of the Cuban
Communist Party. This Party, the White Paper
argues, is the only political instrumentality. It
dominates the government, the commissions of
economic planning, the labour front, the press,
the educational system and all the agencies of
national power. The Communist Party could
promise Castro not only a clear-cut programme
but a tough organisation to put that programme
into operation.
There is no doubt that the rapid increase of
Soviet economic aid provided a shield for the
extension of activities on the part of the Cuban
Communist Party. Indeed, without this contingency, the Party would not have won its way
back into Cuban life so quickly. Until the very
end, the Cuban Communists refused to acknowledge that the revolution was anything but a
middle class putsch, and Fidel an adventurer.
They did not join the fidelistas in the hills. They
are not the new men of the revolution. And since
the continuity in popular allegiance has been
maintained, it is the new men, the leadership
of the Sierra Maestra, who command the pace of
the revolution.
Moreover, Soviet aid is not being transmitted
via the Communist Party: it is going direct to
the leadership. In this respect, Mr. Khrushchev
has been faithful to the new map of world
revolution which he drew, together with the
Chinese, last year: he has bypassed the local
Communists in order to get directly in touch
with the national leadership. When Khrushchev

returned from the UN, he was asked whether

Fidel was a Communist or not. He replied,
I dont know whether he is a Communist, but
I am a Fidelista.
If indeed the Cuban Communist Party is in
command of all the agencies of national power,
then they are exercising that power in a
remarkably free and revisionist fashion. For at
almost every stage, the revolutionary leadership
has affronted orthodox Communist theory.
Indeed, the best way to characterise the distinctiveness of the revolution is to look at the ways in
which it has departed from classic practice.
While the Communists were still adopting the
tactic of clean elections under Batista the
fidelistas were organising in the mountains. The
vanguard party method has never been employed
at any stage. The revolutionary leadership has
time and again rejected the theory that the
present generation should be sacrificed for the
benefits which later ones might reap. They have
refused to postpone the advantages of revolution,
which have been, almost at once, enjoyed by the
people: wages have gone up; rents have been
halved; consumer goods have been priced
down drastically to place them within reach of the
poorest guajiro; the housing and education
programme has first priority; already there are a
medley of holiday and recreational facilities
which, in orthodox Communist practice, should
have been postponed for a later stage. The
Communists considered the Agrarian reform,
and the ceiling on land ownership, too radical.
The leadership has resolutely rejected the classic
conformities of Communist practice: a heavy
industrial base, plus enforced primary accumulation, plus the assimilation of the peasantry via
collectivisation to the urban proletariat. They
have gone rather for a diversified agricultural base,
a spread of light consumer industries, and the
co-operatives. In any orthodox Bolshevik revolution, 1961 should have been The Year of
Industrialisation: instead, the Cubans have
made it The Year of Education. There is no
promotion via the Party bureaucracy. The
Communists who have been given places in the
administration are there because of their abilities.
Perhaps most important of all, the civil population remains armeda practice unknown in
Communist countries since the collapse of the
Soviets. What is more difficult to define, the spirit
of the revolution in practice, is clearly distinct
from the Communist pattern. The leadership
retains an openness and flexibility, an improvisational flair, which is quite distinct from
doctrinally bound Party appartchiks.
Of course, in an atmosphere where anticommunism is a swear-word, the Communist

Party is free to organise and to overtake, to

influence and promote. But it still maintains an
existenceand indeed an internal critique of
the revolutionseparate from the revolution
itself. (Cf: The Cuban Revolution, report by the
General Secretary to the Cuban Communist
Party, August 1960).
But the leadership of the Sierra Maestra still
provides the revolutionary dynamic. These men
are the direct trustees of the spiritual capital
which the revolution accummulated in the days
of the revolutionary war. They set the paceand
its emphasis. It would be truer to say that the
Communist Party can only maintain and extend
its influence by continually reaffirming its
allegiance to the revolution and to Fideland
this, of course, it is only too willing to do.
Communists have certainly advanced in the

outer departments of the administration, where

Fidel is desperately short of trained cadres: in the
labour unions, where they have always been
strong, in communications, in the training and
organisation of the Young Rebels. They have the
considerable advantage of not being likely to
defect to Miamiwhich must be a crucial test of
loyalty in these threatening days. What criticisms
they have of Fidel they keep muffled. So far, the
Communists and the fidelistas coexistbut the
basis of that coexistence is still contained by the
definitions of the revolutionary leadership in
action: on Fidels terms. Certainly they constitute a dangerbut it is a danger, not to the
American Government but to the revolution
itself. They are certainly not yet in control of the
agencies of national power.

4. CUBA BEYOND THE MODELS

now easier to see why Mr. Drapers categories
do not fit the Cuban revolution. He deals with two
abstractly created revolutions, which also
happen to fit in with the two available and
competing world ideologies. In 1953so his
mythology runsCastro promised a revolution which would have satisfied every element in
an impeccable list of liberal imperatives: a
Danish prototype for Latin America. Finding
that this social form has been transcended, Mr.
Draper can only go on to acceptthough, of
course, on moral and political grounds, he
repudiatesthe second available model: Stalinism. He must assimilate the Cuban revolution to
it. The betrayal having been proven, Stalinist
degeneration is inevitable. The terror, totalitarianism, single Party domination, dogmatism,
the irresponsible dictatorship and Soviet penetrationthe full panoply of Bolshevism in decay
follow for him as night the day.
But the truth is that neither of these abstract
models sufficiently account for the Cuban
revolutiona revolution in transition, a prolonged revolutionary moment without fixed
forms. Further, Mr. Draper cannot see that his
own dilemma is also the dilemma of the Cuban
revolutionary leadership: the two ideological
models offered them by Western democracy and
Stalinism are both grossly inadequate to their
needs. They do not help the leaders to identify
and confront their problems in the spirit of the

IT IS

Cuban revolution. Thus the leadership have been

thrown back upon an existensial attitude towards
Cuba and its problems; they encounter their
dilemmas as a series of unfolding practical
contingencies: they assimilate into the practice
of administration and leadership the methods and
style of the guerilla war; the revolution makes
itself precisely because neither of the proffered
ideologies offer a constructive alternative. Castro
is thus the inheritor of the fag-end of two world
ideologies, two world systems. And either the
Cuban revolutionary reality will been folded into
one or other campeither alternative with its
accompanying violence and distortionsor
Castro has succeeded, by a series of brilliant and
ex-tempore practical improvisations, to create in
Cuba a paradigm or prototype of what is possible,
beyond the ideologies.
Of course, in struggling to free a society from
the grip of an imperialist power and in attempting
to reconstruct Cuban society on socialist lines,
the leaders have naturally drawn more upon
Marx than upon Locke. As Guevara has said,
the laws of Marxism are present in the events of
the Cuban revolution, independently of what its
leaders profess or fully know of those laws from
a theoretical point of view (Notes for the
Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution,
Verde Olivo, October 1960, reprinted in Studies
On The Left). But given this orientation, the

ideological specgrum is still, from the point of

view of classical Bolshevism, hopelessly confusedincorporating Sartre and Marx, Lenin
and Marti and Democritus, looking through
the Chinese revolution to the Athenian City State!
And the leaders still handle these ideological
fragments in a remarkably free, flexible and
probing manner. Without benefit of theory, they
confront with quite diverse ideas the contradictory premise of the revolution itself: liberty
and bread. The Cuban dilemma, then, might
be posed in another way: can the leadership
mobilise the totality of Cuban resources without
restoring another tyranny in Batistas place? Can
the revolutionary tradition, available to them
through Marxism, be tempered by the present
humanism which is the revolutions distinctive
feature? Are bread and liberty irreconcilable?
To understand these dilemmas more fully, we
must consider the pattern of the revolution over
against the available ideological models. Something like direct democracy undoubtedly exists.
The mobilisation of public opinion is extremely
suspect in our timeand rightly so. But the
distortions and mystifications of the methods of
the Peoples Democraciesrejected by Poles and
Hungarians alike, when they called their uprisings against Stalinism revolutions of the
worddo not yet exist. In Hungary, the
rhetoric of the leadership was an attempt to cover
over and erase the severe gap between the
declared will of the Party, and its practices. It was
a process of organised falsification, justified by

the sacred texts. In contrast, when Fidel speaks

he may be long-winded, but his intention is
precisely the reverse: to explain, to make clear,
to reveal.
Not only did the classes interpenetrate in the
war against Batista, but class relationships have
been continuously radicalised by reforms and
reconstructions which touch every life. A transparency of relations between classes throughout
Cuban society has been the measure of the
revolutions momentum. The scale of the society
has been an enormous advantage. When a
million people travel to Havana to hear Fidel
speak, they represent one-seventh of the total
population. So is the developed system of
communications which the leadership inherited
(as Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn have
pointed out, New University 4). The revolutionary leadership is still personally accessible to
the people, and the country is accessible to the
leadership. It is constantly sounding public
opinion, and it has developed an informal style,
an on-site strategy. This accessibility cannot be
paralleled in a developed mass society, with its
structured and ritualised class relations.
Accessibility is itself a compound of different
Cuban elements. The openness of classes is
on the basis of a declared egalitarianism.
The battle-dress, the beards, the despatch of
urban teachers to the rural schools, the teach
yourself campaigns, the week-end cutting of
cane, the assimilation of Carnival to the
revolutionthese are the emblems of a revolutionary informality which point backwards to
the guerilla war and forwards to a classless society.
The continuity with guerilla practice is confirmed
by the use of the rebel army as a mobilising force.
And this informality finds expression in the
relative autonomy of the co-operatives, in their
relation to a central administration which
remains obstinately fragmentary. The central
plan is a series of economic trajectories, rather
than a plan to be fulfilled by precise norms,
and the assigned experts are themselves learning agronomy or the economics of leather-work
or frog-farming in the evenings. So far, the
revolution has bypassed an elaborate bureaucratic structure. The legislative initiative is,
necessarily, in the hands of the leadership: the
instrument of its execution is the rebel army:
the work is done by the people themselves, and
substantially revised and modified in practice.
The revolution is still experienced as a selfactivity.
The whole basis of the leaderships actions is
a rough extension of popular consent. The
individual guajiro or the particular co-operative
might object to the details of a project, but there is

probably so close a correlation between need

and reform, that they are willing to agree in
general. Such consent is not, traditionally,
democratic: but it is not totalitarian either. It
belongs rather to the euphoria of a revolutionary
transition: it was characteristic of the vortex
points of both the Russian and the Hungarian
revolutions. By some extraordinary chance, the
Cuban revolution has managed to maintain this
level of social momentum and human involvement
long after the expected life-span of any similar
moment.
It is within this framework that the questionable decision to postpone elections and the
formation of a Revolutionary Party was taken.
Elections and Party government is seen now as a
rupturing of the transition period, slowing down
its pace and altering its style. It would formalise
the system and fracture the fraternity between
people and leaders forged in the revolutionary
war. With the memory of Batistas electoral hoax
fresh in their minds, the Cuban poor regard
elections as a bureaucratic postponement of the
revolution. They retain, after all, a sanction
stronger than Batistas ballot box: they are armed.
If the slogan of liberal democracy is one man
one vote, and the Stalinist alternative is one
voteone candidate, then the Cuban reply is
one manone gun. It was the effectiveness of
this principle which Cardona and the rebel
army forgot, when they argued to the CIA that
the Cuban people would revolt against their
government if only they had a chance.
The Cuban revolution is clearly wide open to
totalitarian abuse. And there can be no doubt
that it has already been abused. But the Cubans
insist upon asking the question which other
ideologies have altogether abandoned: can the
practical advantages of the revolution be given
permanent expression without suffering bureaucratic degeneration, of either the capitalist of the

communist variety?
The Communist answer, if strictly observed, is
clear: a central plan, rigidly observed and carried
through, a heavy based industrial economy and
the execution of the plan by the enforced hardships of primitive socialist accumulation,
through the apparatus of a single Party. This is
one definition of Cuban possibilities: and it is a
view which has clearly made some headway
for example, in the loss of autonomy of the Trade
Unions, and the proposal to establish a broad
Party on the model of the Peoples Democracies,
rather than a loose federal Party based on the
26 July Group. In the absence of an alternative
ideology, this pattern will gain ground, particularly if the harrassment of the American
Government continues to drive the administration into harsh alternatives. Indeed, the danger
of the Cuban Communist Party lies not in their
power over the organs of government, but rather
in their ability to fill the ideological vacuum, and
to define in a dogmatic and enclosed manner the
multiple variety of Cuban revolutionary
experience.
The liberal alternative is equally clear. Elections, two-Party Government, the right of free
expression, dissent and criticism, the separation
of powers and institutions within the State, even if
the pace and nature of economic change is
sacrificed in the process. The manipulation of
popular consent is seen as evil, when contrasted with freely-formed public opinion,
such as in mass elections in a mass society with
mass communications, which is wholly good.
The liberal critique has no terms in which to refer
to its own bureaucratic forms, its own class
society. Is it any wonder that, faced with the
alternative, bread without liberty on the one
hand, liberty without bread on the other,
Castro has continued, in his improvised programmes, to attempt to reconcile the two?

5. CUBAN ALTERNATIVES
mean that the Cuban revolution cannot
be criticised? Not at all. If we had learned
anything from the history of post-war socialism,
it is certainly that the only guarantees against
abuses of all kinds are genuine democratic
control from below, the right to establish social
priorities and to affect their execution, the final
right to overthrow a tyrannical regime, in whatever name its tyrannies are perpetrated, the

DOES THIS

freedom to dissent and criticise without fear of

reprisal. Where Draper is wrong is that he does
not believe these to be questions relevant to a
society which has transcended the forms of a
liberal democracy, whereas we see them as
central to the very definition of the term socialism,
whatever its forms. By imprisoning his human
imperatives within one set of social institutions,
Draper assumes his answers before he has come

to them. Yet democracy and liberty were

themselves the values of the Cuban revolution,
and they continue to find expression in many
rudimentary forms which the revolution has
thrown up. Their abuse is due rather to the
American response, and to the perfectly justified
fear of invasion, than to any dynamic native to
the revolution itself. It follows that the preconditions of a revolutionary democracy is the
release of Cuba from external threat: only in such
circumstances can the leadership achieve the
manoeuvrability to experiment. Mr. Draper must
know enough about the dialectic of revolution to
understand that encirclement can provide both
an inducement to, and then positive justification
for, the fracture of democratic practices and
human liberties. Yet the American government
has acted in such a way as to reproduce in the
Caribbean the damaging contexts of Russia after
1917 with terrifying exactness.
Suppose that Castro gained a period of
manoeuvrability: what should he do with it?
He would have to retrace his ground, building
back into the incipiently totalitarian structure he
has perforce created the democracy for which
the revolution was made. For the present moment,
the leadership must retain its authority and drive:
but at some point he will have to face up to a
more human means of ensuring popular control
over power than the mass rally and the general
distribution of arms. But almost as compelling is
the need to give clear ideological expression to
the distinctiveness and humanism of the revolution, which exists, where it does, in wholly
extemporised forms. He cannot do this without a
Revolutionary Party: and his decision to postpone the formation of one has been a principal
political miscalculation. Such a Party, however,
cannot be a tightly organised political apparatus:
indeed, no existing models provide him with a
prototype. He will have to begin at precisely that
point where revolutionary parties before have disintegrated: by finding a flexible and decentralised
structure, such as would include the leadership
and the agents of INRA at one extreme, the
elected leaders of the co-operatives, the rebel
army and the peasant proprietors at the other.
And such a party will have to experiment in the
very field where typical Bolshevik parties have
failed, by maintaining genuine inner-party democracy.
But the system of inner party democracy must
be based upon a parallel system of democracy
throughout the society. Rapid mobilisation, as
the Soviets discovered, has almost undefeatable
centripetal forces built into it. If the momentum
is to be maintained without the Party becoming
an installed apparatus, then the fragmentary

10

autonomy of co-operatives and farms, and the

local democracy which exists at the moment in
practice, must be given a harder and more effective form. If the plan is not to be enforced from
above, then the purpose of the leadership should
be to create a genuine two-way traffic of discussion around the formation of overall targets
coupled with a generous system of local and
regional autonomies, guaranteed to the Cuban
people as a revolutionary right. Since the
resources of technical and trained manpower are
so flimsy, the carry-through of reconstruction will
fall inevitably to the Cuban people themselves.
This is itself a positive value. It allows for the
formation of a genuine popular opinion about
local and national issues at the base, and the
establishment of priorities from below. Naturally,
the priorities will be different from the streamlined desires of economic planners: the campecinos
will think of housing, education and medical care
before capital accumulation and the building up
of an industrial base. With all the economic
hazards and postponements this entails, such a
system of priorities would be fully in line with
the instincts and the anterior premises of the
leadership itself. The real disaster would follow
if the leadership developed either a full-scale
technical drive or a fetishistic attitude to the
iron path of enforced industrialisation out of a
supine imitation of previous models. It is only
on the basis of such widely dispersed and decentralised power that the humanist character
of the revolution can survive for long without the
formal rituals of parliamentary elections.
But decentralised power must rest upon
free criticism and disent. Yet it is impossible for
an encircled and besieged government to relax its
strictures. And this is less a questionabsurd as
soon as it is posedthat Castro should himself
set up and maintain alternative organs of
criticism, than that he should define, more exactly
within the rule of law, the freedom of criticism.
It is not a question of institutions, but of a general
cultural climate. But here too, somewhere along
the path the Cuban revolution has taken, lie
practical advantages. The means by which
Cubans have declared their identification with
the revolution is extremely wide. It spreads from
middle class doctors who have found themselves
at work in rural hospitals, to young intellectuals
who seized the opportunity which the revolution
provided to reprint, in Spanish, literature from a
wide international spectrum. This cultural
diversity is the breeding ground for a freewheeling expression of human variety, and its
basis is the principle of multiple personal
identifications with the revolution. If either Castro
(through the demands of the practical tasks

before him) or, in a wholly different sphere,

the Cuban Communists (through social realism
in art, for example), define this multiplicity of
identifications out of existence, then the society
will achieve an embattled form, harsh, severe and
strict upon deviants, critics and eccentricities. The
revolution might turn upon the success or failure
of the leadership to create precisely such a climate
of cultural and critical diversity. The absence of a
distinct ideology, at one stage the revolutions
greatest asset, is now its present weakness.
Mr. Draper understands that some such
question is posed by the contradictions of the
Cuban revolution, but he exhausts its subtleties by
assimilating the revolution to what he calls
the Communist family of revolutions. But it is
possible to see Cuba as offering potential, though
by no means certain possibilitiesthe beginning
of answers to old problems and the prefiguring of
problems altogether new. It was the collapse of
socialist democracy, the failure of inner-party

freedom, the ideological mystification, the

centralised authority of the State and the Party
against the people, the repressions of secret police
and the belief that every criticism could be translated as internal subversion, which provide
the common mechanisms of Stalinism. It was
against these that the Hungarians and the Poles
rebelled. In the Cuban revolution, the world
has been brought back to those intractable
frontiers which the Cold War so ruthlessly
defended. On the other hand, in its methods and
manner of economic reconstruction, Cuba
forecasts problems which beset the revolutions
of all the backward territories. It is because the
Cuban revolution resumes so fully the whole
galaxy of questions involved in socialism in our
time, that we must both identify with and
criticise what they are trying to do. We worry
with the Cubans because their revolution could
be either the axis or the graveyard of socialism in
the next decade.

6. AND US
CUBA IS one thing: it would be quite wrong to
assume that the Cuban revolution has achieved
its final form, or that it is possible to predict, at
this stage, what such a form will be. But the other
question is our attitude. The ideological
armoury which has been trained against Castro
derives, as we pointed out, not from classic
conservative premises, but rather from a kind of
persistent social democratic defeatism. The revolution is seen from Washington and elsewhere
with eyes blurred by The Grand Disillusion with
human progress. This is the ideological stance
of Mr. Kennedys new men, who were either
spurred to action by the intellectuals fascination
with the mechanisms of secret intelligence, or
acquiesced in a massive piece of self-deception.
Such, too, is the ideological stance of Mr. Draper,
and the post-Draper retorts wrung from the
Editors of Encounter and others in recent correspondence.

The trouble with this view is that it is ideologically dispossessed. They argue like Stalinists
in reverse. Though they cannot for a moment
accept the Stalinist forms, they conceive of
history as committed to a determinist shuttle
between liberal democracy and Stalinism. Nothing
else exists or could exist except these two models.
It is in this spirit that Mr. Daniel Bell recently
declared the end of ideology: for if history is
now totally encapsulated within these limits,

what need is there for further ideological exploration? There is only a desperate battle to the death.
In quite another context, but betraying the same
complex of attitudes, Dwight Macdonald, reviewing Raymond Williams book, The Long Revolution (Encounter for June, 1961), declares himself
softheartedly sympathetic to Williams belief
in democratic socialism, a vision of a communal
style of life in which groups of producers . . .
freely co-operate without any coercive central
authority, but remains tough-mindedly convinced that Marxian Statism is the programme
which best meets the needs of mass industry.
This is a kind of fellow-travelling backwards, an
intellectual and historical cramp which afflicts
late liberalism. Yet the fact that history cannot
be forever enclosed within either of these two
human models is confirmed, not only by the
Hungarian, Polish and Yugoslav revisions,
but throughout the underdeveloped territories.
Some of these alternatives we may approve, others
disapprove: some will lean towards welfare
capitalism, others towards Soviet statism. But
there will be many new configurations in human
affairs before the map of history is rolled up and
the kissing has to stop. And the chance remains
that Cuba might offer a notation of such a
configuration, provided the Grand Social Democratic Disillusion can be prevented from overwhelming it with the aid of that vanguard of
American policy, the US Marines.

11

CUBA: THE PRESENT REALITY

To analyse the Cuban revolution is one thing: to understand its present reality and its possibilities,
another. This interview helps to fill out the actual conditions of the revolution, and highlights the
problems which it faces. The speaker is Saul Landau, one of the editors of the American new left
journal, Studies On The Left, who has recently come to England after five months in Cuba. The
questioners were Ralph Samuel, Denis Butt, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn and Stuart Hall.

One of the most important aspects of the Cuban

revolution has been its development from one stage
to the next. Would you say something about this?

Let me make a somewhat artificial division. To

begin with there was the Insurrection: this began
in 1953 with Fidels attack on Moncaca, although,
of course, Cubans had fought for an independent
island for many years before that. After Moncada
came jail; then exile in Mexico; then the return to
Cuba in 1956 to wage a war against the tyranny.
Fidel had not clearly articulated a programme that
covered everything. He was going to bring down
the Batista dictatorship by waging civil war
because that was the only way to do it. His army
would growfrom the 12 survivorsand would
engage the Batista army on rugged terrain,
always by surprise, so long as the guerrillas were
at a disadvantage. The city dwellers could help
by not co-operating with Batista, by sabotage,
by strikes, by using every opportunity to discredit the regime and its claim of stability.
To fight this kind of a war Fidel had to count
on the guajiros, that section of the Cuban
population that was most exploited, that had
least faith, in anything, that previously had been
dismissed as rural idiots. To bring these people
into a civil war, to bring them to the point of
being willing to die for a cause, for an ideal,
Fidel had to stand for something specialhe had
to be a special man. He accomplished both: his
ideal was honesty, not democracy or socialism,
or do-goodismit was simply to do the things
that had to be done. The problem of Cuba was
first and foremost an oppressive tyrannyit had
to be done away with; all traces of it had to be
wiped out once and for all. Then there was
poverty, disease, and squalor, most pronounced
in the countryside. This had to be eliminated
the vice and corruption that had infused all Cuban
life, the gangsterism, the anything-for-a-buck
attitude, all the material and psychological aspects
of life that had demoralised and devitalised Cuba
it had to be done away with.

12

But Fidel could not programise these things

away. They were, after all, effects, not causes. He
had an insight into the root of the problem by
the time he made his History Will Absolve Me
speech in 1953. His years in the Sierra Maestra,
his intimacy with the guajiros, his dependence on
them not only for the defeat of Batista, but for
his day-to-day lifeall this greatly sharpened that
first insight. The real problem was Cubas dependence on sugar, but more than that, it was the
dependence, in every way, at every level, on the
United States.
This realisation had not fully come in the days
of the Insurrection. The problem, first and foremost, was to get rid of Batista. To do this meant
becoming a different type of man: a guerrilla.
Being guerrillas had a profound effect on the
Fidelistas. One could not be a guerrilla and
maintain illusions about oneself and ones world.
One could not be abstract or metaphysical. To
live meant to fight; life and combat became
interchangeable words.
The second phase was the finding of the means
to do away with the immediate injustice, with
corruption and misery. Batista fled and with him
went many of the old institutions and the men
who administered them. New ones with new men
had to be organised to deal with each problem.
This was done quickly. The obvious corruption
and vice, the gangsters, the pimps, the perverted
sex shows, the drug peddlers, were obliterated.
But each necessary reform brought opposition.
Almost all Cubans had hated Batista and were
glad when Fidel and his men won. But each group
had different objections to Batista. And Fidel,
who saw the problem of the salvation of his
country first and foremost, was resigned to
maintain unity at all costs. But this could not be.
To do away with effects meant to hurt some
Cubans. Some disunity was inevitable.
Exhorbitant rents were an acute problem in
Havana. When Fidel cut all rents in half, he hurt
the landlords. When the law confiscating ill-