The Cuban Conundrum

After more than 40 years of confrontation with the United States, Fidel Castro remains in power, defiant and determined to outlast one more hostile administration in Washington. Ten years after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, at a time when the United States projects power across the globe virtually uncontested, the Cuban government, a mere 90 miles away, amends its constitution to proclaim the inalterable character of socialism on the island. The resolve and resilience of Cuba’s leaders in the face of decades of unrelenting pressure from Washington remains a source of perplexity and pain to U.S. policymakers.

Debate and dispute, of course, have long characterized the U.S. response to Castro’s Cuba. In the Cuban revolution, one comes face to face, at one time and in one place, with issues of enduring vitality and moment: power and powerlessness, dictatorship and democracy, nationalism and imperialism, the quest for social justice and the economic imperative. These issues prompt, on every side, vigorous partisanship. Detachment and disinterest are almost impossible.

Cuban history is similarly implicated, of course, and especially those facets of the Cuban past that bear most directly on the present. One such debate involves Castro’s 26th of July movement (named for the date in 1953 that saw his ill-fated attack against a military barrack) and the armed insurrection against the government of president-turned dictator Fulgencio Batista.

The debate is over which of the two components of the 26th of July movement--the civilians who fought in the urban underground, or llano, or the soldiers who made up the guerrilla columns in the mountains, or sierra--played the more decisive role in toppling Batista.

It is a debate that is at the heart of the complicated social and class composition of the broad-based opposition to Batista. Understanding this debate helps to illuminate the purpose to which power was put after the 1959 ouster of Batista. As Julia E. Sweig makes clear in “Inside the Cuban Revolution,” the llano was made up principally of middle-class professionals seeking to restore civil liberties and free elections guaranteed by Cuba’s 1940 constitution. The sierra, on the other hand, represented by Castro, was composed of peasants and workers and sought a thorough-going egalitarianism based on social justice. The sierra prevailed, and many of the llano fled into exile, claiming that the revolution had been betrayed and that a liberal democratic program, rooted in a return to law, had been subverted by a radical socialist whose principal objective was his own power.

In a thoughtfully argued and carefully researched book, Sweig, a senior fellow and deputy director of the Latin America Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, provides what will almost certainly be the standard account of the Cuban insurrection for years to come. Using a wide range of archival records and manuscript sources, including important Cuban materials, Sweig successfully explores the complex and often contradictory relations between the llano and the sierra. She pays attention more to similarities than to differences and, by emphasizing collaboration and coordination, provides a coherent and cogent explanation of the astonishing success of Castro’s movement. Keenly aware of the larger historical context which gives her tale meaning, Sweig shows how Castro held together the disparate elements of his often-fractious movement while providing considerable insight into his personality and the politics that often divided his followers.

Mark Falcoff, a longtime commentator on Latin American affairs, is interested in Castro’s ideological disposition and its origins. “The Cuban Revolution and the United States” addresses the debate over why, when and how Cuba became aligned with the Soviet Union. Some observers insist that Castro was driven into the Soviet camp by hostile U.S. policy. Others, like Falcoff, argue that he rose to power disposed, if not determined, to align Cuba with the Soviet Union, that he was probably from the outset a communist--or at least a fellow traveler--and that his decision to seek ties with Moscow was unrelated to U.S. policy.

To this end, Falcoff has assembled a “history in documents” of U.S.-Cuban relations between 1958 and 1960. His book is made up of State Department documents (all of them previously available in an officially published government volume). It is designed to tell “the real story,” namely, as Falcoff asserts, that “Castro’s decision to take his country into the Soviet bloc was not a reaction to specific American policies but part of a grand design which proceeded according to its own imperative.”

But “the real story” about Castro’s “larger designs” cannot be divined from State Department records alone. These documents reveal less about Cuban motives than they do about Washington’s perceptions of Cuban behavior. Insight into Castro’s motives and objectives is not to be found in American documents but rather in Cuban materials, such as the texts of Castro’s speeches, interviews and correspondence. These are precisely the kinds of sources that Sweig uses to such good effect in her book but that are ignored by Falcoff.

If Falcoff’s use of documents is one-sided, so too is his chronology. His selection of March 1958--the occasion of the U.S. arms embargo against Batista--as the starting point of his history is disingenuous. The author implicitly suggests that the United States played a generally salutary and principled role in the Cuban drama of the 1950s. But relations between Washington and Havana have a far larger history. Ignoring this history makes it virtually impossible to understand much of anything that followed the revolution’s triumph. Any serious examination of U.S.-Cuba relations during the crucial years of 1959 and 1960--and thereafter as well--must be set against the larger historical setting.

It is true that Castro rose to power with an “attitude” toward the United States. But even the most cursory review of the previous 60 years of relations between the United States and Cuba provides some understanding of the sources of this attitude. But it is enough to begin with March 10, 1952--the date of Batista’s illegal seizure of power--to appreciate Cuban attitudes. It was the unabashed warmth that the United States showered upon the Batista government that irked so many Cubans, a warmth made all the more egregious in the face of U.S. exaltation of democratic principles.

The United States trained and equipped the Cuban army units deployed against Castro and his men in the Sierra Maestra. Falcoff acknowledges the U.S. role in supplying the Batista government with arms but pleads that “since Cuba was a sovereign state, there was no way for the United States to control effectively the deployment and use of its weaponry once transferred to it.” It is difficult to reconcile this disclaimer with the pronouncement made by Earl Smith, the former U.S. ambassador to Cuba, who boasted to Congress in 1960 that “[T]he United States, until the advent of Castro, was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that ... the American Ambassador was the second most important man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than the President.”

What Falcoff fails to grasp (and what the selective documents he’s at pains to promote do not reveal) is that momentum for change in Cuba was related less to political issues than to social and economic problems. Falcoff’s allusion to “Cuba’s large and dynamic private sector” obscures the structural sources of the Cuban predicament. By the middle of the 1950s, sugar production could no longer sustain the country’s economic development. Twenty-five percent of Cuba’s workers were chronically unemployed: It was much like what the United States had experienced during the worst years of the Depression, except that in Cuba it happened every year because of the dependence on the annual sugar harvest. All through the 1950s, Cuba’s economy was contracting, unemployment was spreading, the cost of living was increasing and the standard of living was declining.

This was the situation confronting Castro when he came to power. The new government was subject immediately to powerful popular mobilizations to do something about the deepening crisis. Reforms could not have been undertaken without challenging the historically privileged place the United States occupied in Cuba. Castro’s determination to advance the primacy of national interests led inevitably to confrontation with the United States. It is, of course, no surprise that Washington would have responded with all the means at its disposal to defend what it regarded as its legitimate interests. It is, however, at this point that Cuban actions, U.S. reactions and Cuban counteractions become complex, climaxing in the rupture of U.S.-Cuba relations and the establishment of Cuba-Soviet ties.

To suggest that Cuban actions were unrelated to U.S. policy, as Falcoff does, is simply not tenable. U.S. policy has consequences. That these consequences are often not the ones intended--or perhaps even the ones desired--should not obscure the fact that they are nevertheless consequences of U.S. policy. To recognize this relationship is to acknowledge that the United States is often implicated in misfortunes of its own making. The question then becomes how to undo the effects of misjudgments and miscalculations.

One place to start is to recognize that responsibility for outcomes must be assumed jointly by both sides. Or to put it another way, as Jean Renoir has his character remark in the “Rules of the Game”: “Everyone has his reasons.”