Raymond Carr: Castro's wonderland
Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution K. S. Karol (Cape £4.95) Ancient Greece apart, the output of words as a ratio of inhabitants written about must be greater in Cuba than anywhere else in the world. This growth industry has kept the European left employed for a decade. Unfortunately its creator has put the business into liquidation. Dr Castro no longer finds it comfortable to be under Western eyes when they detect flaws in a regime which extracts confessions from poets who are on friendly terms with Sartre. "The brazen pseudo leftists . . . will never be able to use Cuba, not even pretending to defend her . . . Now you know it, bourgeois intellectuals, agents of the CIA: You will not be allowed to come to Cuba." Mr Karol has committed the sin of criticism; no more for him those hypnotic sessions with Fidel which enliven his book. His implacable criticism of US policy cannot save him; he too is denounced as an agent of the CIA.
Mr Karol's fall from grace is instructive. He is a naive revolutionary optimist typical of those who warmed to Dr Castro's apparent rejection, between 1963 and 1968, of the old Communist hands and with them the Soviet model. He therefore is appalled at the turnabout of 1968; the Cuban endorsement of Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia; the creation of a Stalinist, militarized mini-state in Cuba with Soviet sailors as honoured harvest volunteers. For his real hatred is reserved for the unimaginative dogmatism of the USSR; indeed, at times — and at great length — his book appears to be less a study of Cuba than a denunciation of the sins of Stalin and Khrushchev and a mild panegyric of the Chinese way to socialism.
How was it, he asks, that a revolution in Cuba could be made without the leadership of the Communist party, thus escaping the penalties of conformity to irrelevant and outdated beliefs? The answer to this question — and it is typical of Mr Karol's obsessions that he poses it — constitutes the best part of this curate's egg of a book. It provides the best analysis by far of the tactical opportunism and dogmatic inflexibility •of the old Cuban Communits hands; of their failure to appreciate the significance of the revolution of 1933 and their subsequent alliance with Batista which cut them off from Cuban reality. Impotent and isolated, they watched Dr Castro's revolution from the,. outside and then tried to take it over from the inside. What Mr Karol does not explain is that these tired middle-aged dogmatists nearly brought it off. The leadership of the party is never as stupid as its critics imagine.
The blittezeit of the Cuban revolution is, for Mr Karol, the mid-'sixties. Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, Cuba lapsed into heresy — though her heresy was unpunished by her Russian masters. Spurned by the super-powers during the missile crisis of 1962, Dr Castro spurned peaceful co-existence and any belief in a legal victory of the revolutionary forces in Latin America. A continental revolution 'detonated' by guerrilla action would be Cuba's shield against imperialism rendered militarily impotent and exposed as politically immoral by a score of Latin American Vietnams. These were the days of the new socialist man, of Che Guevara's criticism of Soviet aid policies; when the Havana Libre was stuffed with ' dissident ' intellectuals and when the representatives of orthodox Latin American Communist parties sat sullen and silent while the theoreticians of the revolutionary way to from steel to sugar, from fish to vegetables. His greatest illusion is that he can keep the economy working by personal intervention, that agricultural production can be significantly increased by his dissertations on the milk yields of Fls. An economy cannot be run by an energetic Boy Scout with a penchant for roughing it. Picking up bemused hitchhikers is no way for the head of a state to find what is going on. The demonstration effects of the leader's cane cutting and tree planting are lost, as Mr Karol argues, on workers who have no effective means of control, no sense of being inside the machine controlled by the guerrilla gods.
Mr Karol is obsessed with this failure to create a truly revolutionary conscience in the masses, to replace paternalism by participation. Like so many leaders of underdeveloped countries Dr Castro has bet on a startling economic breakthrough. This not only puts material benefits above the creation of a socialist conscience but sets a small society prestige tasks it cannot fulfil — the ten million ton harvest. Since voluntarism can only work if the volunteers know what the purpose of their efforts is and if, in some sense, they have shaped the ends for which their efforts are demanded, such targets entail the militarization of the whole economy. Worse still, that economy has become increasingly dependent on the USSR; thus the Cubans labour in their 'trenches' — note the new military jargon — in order to earn roubles for imports which they would be better advised to buy elsewhere with convertible currencies.
Dr Castro rides hard at impossibly stifffences; but that willing horse, the Cuban people, is a bit out of condition. The miracle is that the rider is still so firmly in the saddle. Appalled by his hero's choice of lines yet fascinated by his daring, the ever-optimistic Mr Karol has written one of the best and most penetrating studies of the Cuban revolution.
Raymond Carr is Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford
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