[Marxism] Enrique Lacolla: The historic dilemma of the Cuban Revolution

[Nestor Gorojovsky <nmgoro@xxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann has prepared an excellent translation of the article by 
Lacolla on the Cuban Revolution. Here it is.


The historic dilemma of the Cuban Revolution
by Enrique Lacolla
January 4, 2009

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2304.html
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Thanks to Nestor Gorojovsky for drawing this to my attention.

Torn between its far-reaching eagerness to deal out liberty and the
meagerness of its geography, the Cuban Revolution remains the
touchstone of a Latin American wave of popular fervor poised to take
over and duty-bound to reach higher levels.

On January 1st the Cuban revolution celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary. Not bad at all, especially if we bear in mind that it?s
been hounded since day one, by the hyperpower of the North no less.
It?s worth mentioning as well that very few revolutions, if any, have
managed to set such a radical, albeit realistic, tone for so long.
There?s been, no doubt, some stagnation and increasing
bureaucratization, let alone the fact that the fate of the 26th of
July Movement is still closely linked to the lives of its surviving
founders, but the example of integrity set by the Revolution and its
long-standing effort to educate the overall Cuban society are likely
to preserve the essence of that spirit when time gets its revenge and
neither Fidel nor Raúl Castro are no longer around.

The Cuban Revolution is a landmark in Latin America?s history. As
stated before, it sprang from a mistake: the United States?
assumption that those young university students who had dug
themselves in the Sierra Maestra mountains were, formally speaking,
good democrats and therefore akin to any other petit bourgeois kids
always willing to look askance at corrupt regimes, but ready to take
in the perquisites that power brings with it. Self-deception went
both ways. Those who came in the Granma yacht believed in the values
of radical democracy and their chance to use them to change the
world. Otherwise, the U.S. would have made sure to tighten up on them
rather than let them run on a free rein or even receive, from Florida
and Central America, the shiploads of weapons held by Washington to
have served to topple a dictator whose depravity had turned him into
an uncomfortable partner. As both the State Department and the CIA,
Batista?s replacement by a bunch of radical youths could be, like in
past occasions, a manageable event.

However, contrary to what usually happens when ?young people mount a
horse from the left side and dismount on the right?, everything
turned out to be different. The civil war experience and the
implementation of the agrarian reform fueled principles these youths
had already grasped by then: the need for a drastic change to solve
Cuba?s social problems. Such avenging convictions joined forces with
a nationalism spurred by endless U.S.-bred humiliation throughout
their country?s ?independent? history and the evidence that only by
expropriating U.S. property and boosting in-depth agrarian reforms
could the goals set by the Castro brothers, Che Guevara et al. be
attained.

Trouble broke out right away. Anti-revolution propaganda across the
U.S. media, together with the escape of Cuban bourgeois landowners
and businessmen ?who believed with almost absolute certainty that
their American buddies would crush that mob of madmen in no time?
were just a foretaste of a string of actions to undermine the regime,
the most notorious of which were the bombing of a ship loaded with
arms bound for the island and the Bay of Pigs invasion.

It was the onset of a period marked by uncertainty and harassment
that defined the whole revolutionary era and exposed the dilemma we
are dissecting here.

Great ambitions boiled in the Cuban Revolution?s caldron. For all its
original desire to transform its own society, its strong resemblance
to many other Latin American processes hinted that its example could
be quite contagious. Awareness of this fact among the powers that be
?and especially in the mind of the Argentinean doctor Ernesto
Guevara, who had become the Army?s second-in-command and the
Revolution?s most inspiring figure after Fidel Castro? opened up a
wide range of possibilities which both lit a fire under many youths
in the continent and urged Washington to put it out. Expelled from
the OAS and abandoned to its fate by governments across Latin America
in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Revolution had to find a
way out. The ideological formation of its leadership and the current
state of affairs ?at the height of the cold war? made Cuba lean
toward the communist bloc and the consequences that such a move
entailed for decades to come.

This evolution, however, took place in stages defined in principle by
Washington?s deep-set ill will toward the new regime. When Cuba
proceeded to expropriate U.S.-owned companies and make a land reform
without giving in exchange anything the Americans could call ?fair
compensation?, their decision to stop buying Cuban sugar threw the
island?s economy off balance. But then the USSR stepped forward to
buy the same sugar quota at preferential prices and pay with oil,
badly needed in Cuba since the suspension of fuel shipments it used
to receive from the U.S. and Venezuela.

Given the North?s resolve to strangle the Revolution ?as indicated by
repeated attacks from offshore, treacherous actions to destroy our
crops, infiltrations of Florida-based guerrilla groups and
assassination attempts on Fidel, Cuba had no choice but to swing to
the Eastern bloc. And since the aggression was real, why not take
such step and equip ourselves with a missile shield capable of
deterring the U.S. from attacking us? To do anything of the sort you
need assistance from a partner whose interests you should take into
consideration, so much so if the said partner carries a lot of weight
in the world?s political arena, like the USSR did in the early 60s.
The missile crisis in 1962 came up not so much the result of Cuba?s
wish to protect itself from its northern enemy as it was the result
of the Soviet strategists? conclusion that the deployment of nuclear
warheads in the island could prompt the U.S. to remove their own
[similar] military bases from Turkey. It was a parley held on a
knife-edge where Cuba had little or no say.

All in all, the game ended with a part public, part secret trade: in
line with the former, the USSR would withdraw its bases from Cuba in
return for the United States? pledge not to invade the island, while
the latter was the real quid pro quo: within the following six
months, the Americans would dismantle their military bases in Turkey.

Realpolitik and Revolution

Accepting the demands of realpolitik was a bitter blow for the Cuban
leaders, divided on the tack their relations with the Soviet Union
had taken ?not from a practical viewpoint perhaps, as they were all
well aware that the revolutionary phenomenon had little or no chance
to survive unless it joined the socialist bloc? with some of them
adapted, if a bit reluctantly, to the new realities and others
willing to try other solutions. Leaked rumors have it that the
fossil-like, bureaucracy-ridden, small-minded Soviet regime was
especially rejected by Che, who advocated the search for options to
save the premises that inspired the Revolution in the first place,
that is, a swell-like force bound to spread like wildfire across a
continent yet to be redeemed but capable of doing an about-face
similar to Cuba?s. Fidel Castro himself had flagged the precept of
this current when he said, ?May the Andes become Latin America?s
Sierra Maestra?, and plenty of attempts were made in the 1960s and
part of the 1970s to make good on his words.

When political action runs on something more than just opportunism
and personal profit, knowledge of history becomes paramount. What
happened in those years, therefore, must be clear to us so that we
can evaluate whether liberation is possible in Latin America and how
far should the action for change go to achieve it, without losing
sight of the fact that, even if the continent has only one body, its
limbs may not necessarily be equally mobile at all times. Robespierre
said that a revolution cannot be imposed at the point of bayonets,
and he knew very well what he was talking about.

Right from the start the Cuban revolution bumped into a key problem:
the existing contradiction between the ambition ?or hope, if you
like? of its followers and the smallness of its venue, an imperiled,
isolated land exposed to relentless harassment by the Northern
colossus. A mostly agricultural island with slender economic
resources and a small population, Cuba was hardly able to extend its
influence to the rest of a continent, caught as it was in the
maelstrom of the Cold War and the clutches of an economy dominated by
imperialism.

There was no way to solve the problem with the help of its Soviet
ally, whose intention was precisely to put all anti-imperialist
movements into an orbit outside the path of Russia?s foreign policy.
Nevertheless, their alliance was of essence if Cuba wanted to be
relatively safe from the U.S. menace and count on the energy and
industrial resources it needed to carry out on its own soil a social
search-and-rescue program like the one set in motion with great
success five decades ago in fields such as public health and
education.

The need to find ways to overcome this obstacle conditioned the whole
Cuban experience. Both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had set their
hopes on a Latin American revolution that would yank Cuba out of
isolation, much like Lenin, Trotsky and Bolsheviks expected Russia
would no longer be a backward state once the October Revolution
reached Germany first and the rest of Europe afterward. Neither did,
although we have to admit that at least Cuba paid a much lower price,
thanks both to the size of the testing ground and the moderate and
?in the final analysis? open of these societies, saved in no small
degree by their ductility and usual disorder from the somber legacy
of revolutions we have seen in powerful countries built on a past of
either feudal oppression or totalitarianism.

Be that as it may, the Cuban leaders? awareness of the need to break
the walls around the island and reach out to the continent testifies
to their grit and backbone as well as their grasp of the fact that
their own revolution was a constituent element of the Latin American
one. Still, never in the heyday of the revolutionary process did
their strategic wit managed to find the tactical means required to
field-test their beliefs. Che remains as much the best example of
such a sound strategic insight as he does of a tactical failure that
placed limits on the heroic years of the Cuban experience, and at a
very high price to boot.

Stifled by the burden of the U.S. blockade and the Russian bear hug,
the Cuban leaders groped for something they could pin their hopes on
and stumbled upon the ?focus theory?, French writer Regis Debray?s
brainchild. He had come to the island wearing the hat of a
progressive intellectual who commits to foreign causes because he?s
not quite sure to have one of his own, and spread a project sprung
from the objective needs of the Cuban experiment rather than from the
mind of a leftist resolved to find a long-coveted ?good
revolutionary? image in a place he found exotic. But then again, it
was more about designing policies fit for the middle and lower strata
of our societies ?considering their past as well as their distinctive
features? than the will of leaders pumped up by their Sierra Maestra
stunt, a victory owed, as we said before, to a monumental mistake.
You can put up a revolution using a universal formula no more than
you can boil it down to a militarism given by its very nature to
dampen or utterly shut out public sectors conscious that the said
method has failed in their own countries if industrial capitalism has
flourished there, deformed though its progress may have been. Change
by force of arms is only possible ?if at all? within a decaying
society in dire need of that kind of surgical renovation.

The adventure

Nonetheless, the experiment was put into practice, mostly encouraged
by Che. In theory, it involved planting a guerrilla force within
difficult reach of the regular army wherefrom they could get
increasing support from a long-starving, humiliated peasant
population forced to serve the local landowners and put up with their
abuse. The idea was a real flop: it failed everywhere except in
Colombia, where there already was a well-established peasants?
guerrilla. Che Guevara, the first who tried to put together a core of
rebels in Bolivia, was gunned down shortly after by CIA-trained
Bolivian Rangers; the priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, pioneer of
liberation theology, shared a similar fate in Colombia; and all
remaining attempts to organize a rural guerrilla fell through one
after the other.

Ernesto Guevara?s choice of Bolivia as the first target and his
devotion to the venture bear witness to his heroism and strategic
talent, but also to his shortcomings as a theorist of Latin American
revolution. Bolivia is indeed a focal point of South American
geopolitics, but? it had just finished an agrarian reform! Biased,
spineless and cheating as it may have been, the leaders of the
National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) had made it not too long after
the epic 1952 uprising, and the peasants were not looking forward to
joining the call to fight. Consequently, the guerrilla was soon left
to its own devices and cornered in the middle of the jungle until the
bitter, and unavoidable, end.

Guevara was dead, but not his theory, which other youths picked up to
try and introduce it in urban areas where they could take advantage
of the cloak of anonymity and chances to go unnoticed that big cities
provide, not to mention the banks waiting to be robbed, the ransoms
they could get from kidnappings, and the funds that a number more or
less significant of sympathizers would be happy to give them. But the
outcome was no different but for the level of violence that
relocating the theater of operations entailed, with guerrilla actions
as stealthy and bloody as the brutal crackdowns on them by indigenous
armed forces not exactly lacking in steel, unlike the out-and-out
?national guards? the United States had set up the length and breadth
of the Caribbean.

The extreme left-wing feelings of the above guerrilla groups and
their political wings caught on quickly among a youth imbued with
France?s May events in a sort of city-based insurrection of anarchic
and ludic persuasion which fanned out as an activism with a clear
military slant to it as soon as it was moved over to a setting where
social relations were a lot more troublesome than in Europe. They
jumped onto the growingly strong popular bandwagon that was gaining
momentum at that time ?mainly in Argentina and Chile? only to
undermine those currents from the inside, causing their division and
thus giving the right wing parties a long-awaited excuse to unleash a
repressive force backed by the U.S., overwhelmingly superior from a
military point of view, and largely unquestioned by popular sectors
who were either oblivious to, stunned by or scornful of subversion.
That?s how a baleful period of dirty war began which put paid to the
continent?s already feeble ability to stand up to unrestrained
capitalism, a primary attribute of neoliberal globalization.

No country escaped the slaughtering, and two generations passed by
before Latin America did anything to get rid of the neoliberal
walrus. Nowadays things are a far cry from what prevailed in the 60s
and 70s, when the revolutionary project sponsored by Cuba dared set
its sights on Utopia. There?s no bipolar world anymore, and to many
people?s surprise, the implosion of the USSR did not mark the end of
the Cuban revolution. Quite the opposite: after a ?special period? of
transition to the new circumstances, Castro?s regime seems to have
strengthen its hold on things and, what?s even more important, all
indications are that its message has struck a major chord among the
Latin American masses. Needless to say, even though people?s claims
for social equality and demands for sovereignty preexisted the Cuban
revolution, neither the original project devised in the island nor
the resolve of its leaders to set it in motion have fallen on stony
ground. There?s a complicated situation out there today, and the
future is likely to have anything in store from opportunities to
drawbacks. And even if the island can?t ?or won?t? play a predominant
role in the course of events, it?s not alone anymore: Cuba is now a
member of the Rio group, and various governments somehow acknowledge
its status as a precursor whose spirit, after so many battles, has
escaped the insular enclosure and landed on Terra Firma.

January 4, 2009.

---ooOoo---

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
========================================





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