:: Letter of the Month ::

Things can only get better…

Early one December morning in 1956 a battered motor launch called Granma - named after its original American owner’s grandmother - bumped ashore in the swampy mangroves deep in Cuba’s sleepy south-east.
Few of the 82 bedraggled, unshaven men blinking uncertainly in the tropical light foresaw the dawn of a communist Cuba. Even their supremely self-confident leader, Fidel Castro, could not have imagined that he was destined to outlast communism as well as to outlast nine and out-manoeuvre ten American presidents.
He nearly didn’t. Fidel Castro was not a communist. He was just one among many rebel leaders. And his revolution almost blundered into failure before it had even begun.
Castro’s previous record was not encouraging. He already had one disastrous rebellion against the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, under his belt during which had been captured and nearly shot. Reprieved and briefly imprisoned before being amnestied, Castro had fled to Mexico where he met a young Argentine doctor called Ernesto Guevara and began plotting his second rebellion.
The Granma itself arrived from Mexico two days late, delayed by bad weather, amateur navigation and a man overboard. Someone had also forgotten to pack the seasickness pills. When they finally arrived – at the wrong spot - the rendezvous party with their supplies had given up and left.
It got even worse. Before long they were under attack by government planes and the army. A local campesino who was meant to lead the rebels to safety double-crossed them into an ambush. Only a scattered handful of tired, hungry would-be guerrillas survived. Many, including Geuvara, were wounded. With no supplies, they chewed on sugar cane and sucked the glutinous flesh from raw crabs for sustenance, too afraid to light fires in case they were spotted. This was the near-farcical beginning of perhaps the most romantic revolution in history.
Of course, Fidel Castro’s two-year campaign in Cuba’s Sierra Maestre mountains was to became one of the great romantic guerrilla struggles, celebrated by middle class students and working class trade unionists the world over.
But despite Castro’s genuine feelings for Cuba’s poor, he was primarily a nationalist. Sure, there were socialists and even a few communists in Castro’s inner circle – not least his younger brother Raul, now Cuba’s de facto leader, and Guevara himself. But the Cuban revolution largely a liberal, democratic and nationalistic rebellion .

US policy drive Castro to the Soviets
This is the key to the Miami Cuban exiles implacable hatred of Castro. Most of the million or so Cubans who fled to Miami in the decade after the revolution were not supporters of the ousted Batista regime. Many had fought alongside Castro and the other rebel groups. They hate Castro because he betrayed what had been their liberal-democratic revolution.
And there was another bitter irony: the Cuban revolution was led by white, privileged upper-middle class boys against a Cuban leader, Fulgencio Batista, who was a mulatto former army sergeant who had risen against the odds and was despised by Cuba’s white upper classes from which Fidel had come.
So why did Castro turn to the Soviets? Throughout the nineteenth century, rich American planters had smacked their lips at the prospect of getting their hands on Cuba’s lush sugar plantations. “Like a ripe apple,” said President Quincy Adams, “Cuba will soon will fall into the American basket”.
America began meddling in Cuba’s affairs, which got worse as the island slid into a series of bloody rebellions against Spanish colonial rule.
When the Spanish responded with a brutality, which included the first use of reconcentration camps to separate the rural population from the rebels (no, it wasn’t the Brits in the Boer War who invented concentration camps) the US finally sent troops in 1898 on the pretext of liberating Cuba.
And they stayed, only granting Cuba limited independence four years later - and then only after being leased the infamous base at Guantanamo Bay to protect American interests. Those interests soon controlled three-quarters of Cuba’s sugar production. American tourists and mobsters fleeing Prohibition at home turned Havana and Varadero into giant casino-dominated tourist resorts.
If you want a real insight into how so often US foreign policy has bullied potential allies into a state of hatred, Cuba is perhaps the classic example.
United States policies shaped the Latin American psyche. During the nineteenth century, the avowedly anti-colonial United States had appropriated Indian lands in North America, grabbed much of what had been Mexico on its independence from Spain (California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada etc etc etc) and butted into its Latin American neighbours’ affairs with metronomic regularity.
When Ernesto Guevara set off on his motorcycle journeys through the Andean countries of South America (on a British-built Norton held together with wire), the young med student was no more than a sex-obsessed lad more interested in the next bottle of wine than world revolution.
Guevara only turned to Marxism when in 1954 he witnessed a CIA-backed coup overthrow the moderate, elected government of Guatemala, a coup supported by the American-owned United Fruit Company, which ran banana plantations in Latin America. The United States had turned Guatemala into the first ‘banana republic’.
Fidel Castro knew all about the power of the United Fruit Company. His father’s cane plantations at Mayari, in Cuba’s steamy south-east, were surrounded by their estates and mills. The Americans had also supported Batista – “he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard” was FDR’s reported comment.
So Castro was never going to be pro-American. But like most Cubans, respect jostled with resentment towards the United States. America was, after all, a democracy. American capital had, after the Spanish were booted out) developed Cuba’s sugar industry and installed sanitation systems in her cities. And as the rebellion against Batista grew, the Americans began hedging their bets, embargoing arms and even indirectly helping to fund Castro. The US also rushed to recognise the new regime.
But from there, it all went mango shaped. As so often, American foreign policy combined ignorance and arrogance, contriving to turn the new regime against its massive neighbour.
When Castro visited Washington just a few months after taking power, he above all wanted Cuba to be treated as an independent nation for the first time. Instead, President Eisenhower took himself off to play golf, leaving his vice-president, Richard Nixon, to meet Castro. The Cuban leader felt snubbed and patronised.
When Soviet oil arrived in exchange for surplus Cuban sugar - which the Americans had refused to buy to protect American producers - the US government pressurised western oil companies on the island not to refine it. The Cubans promptly nationalised the refineries and there followed a year-long spiral of mutually antagonistic policy responses, ending in a US trade embargo.
The Soviets, genuinely surprised, stepped gratefully forward. Within a year of the revolution, the CIA was already plotting Fidel’s downfall. The roadmap to Bay of Pigs and the farce of exploding cigar assassination attempts was in place.

New Labour before New Labour
So Castro’s Cuba was significantly defined by America’s policy responses - and Castro made sure he used those to his advantage. America’s policy allowed the Cuban leader to play the plucky new kid on the block, standing up to the American bully. The fact that he was the arch opportunist, tactician and publicist certainly helped. For Fidel Castro was in many ways New Labour while Tony Blair was still sucking on his dummy.
Two months after the shambolic Granma landing, when many observers thought Castro had been killed, a New York Times correspondent and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Herbert Matthews, was led into what he called “the rugged, almost impenetrable fastness of the Sierra Maestra” mountains. There he met a band of bearded fighters led by a tall man in a forage cap who he dubbed “the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth.”
“The personality of the man is overpowering,” Mathews reported. “It is easy to see that his men adored him. Here was a man of ideals of courage.” Castro had used the American press to establish himself as the leader of the rebellion, at the same time mobilising American opinion to pressurise their government into withdrawing support for Batista. He was way ahead of the game – and his rival rebel leaders.
Less than two years later, after Batista finally fled on New Year’s Eve 1959, Castro’s commandantes, including Che, rushed to Havana to fill the power vacuum.
Not Fidel. He first took supper with the US consul in Santiago before embarking on a leisurely, triumphal procession to Havana, all carefully recorded by the newsreels and the accompanying phalanx of reporters and photographers. His men had already secured the key military points. Once again, Castro was using media coverage to ensure his recognition as Cuba’s effective leader.
But it was above all in the art of spin that Castro was New Labour before his time. In September 1960, following the precipitous decline in relations with the US, Castro was in New York to address the UN when he was ejected from his smart New York hotel for refusing to pay in advance. So the Cuban leader decamped to a bohemian hotel in Harlem and summoned the world’s media to witness his greeting by cheering black crowds - and a bear-hug from the Soviet leader, Kruschev, in a blaze of flashbulbs.
On the face of it, the exodus of 125,000 Cubans in small ships from the port of Mariel in 1980 was a public relations disaster for the Cuban leader. President Carter had declared that America would provide “an open heart and open arms” to refuges from communism. But Castro smartly announced that anyone was free to leave the island - sending over several thousand hardened criminals for good measure. Carter closed America’s heart and arms to the refugees just four months later.
Again and again, American policy played into Castro’s hands. For that, Fidel should thank his worst enemies. Initial opposition to Cuba was led by American big business, furious at losing their assets on the island. But increasingly, the million Cuban refugees and their descendants in Miami took control, insisting on the strengthening the trade embargo.

Blockade – what blockade? Pass the Coca Cola
Yet when you order a Cuba Libre in Havana, the chances are it will be made with Coca Cola - imported from Mexico - rather than the local Tropicola. The truth is that the embargo’s effect on Cuba is limited. The island trades more or less freely with the rest of the world and the main loser is US big business, painfully aware that it is now missing out on opportunities as French, Canadian, Spanish, German and British companies take advantage. But above all, the embargo allows Castro to pass blame for the island’s economic ills on what he calls the Bloqueo –“ the blockade”.
The policy persists because to become President of the United States you have to win Florida. To win Florida, you need to win Miami. And for Miami, you need the Cubans. Bill Clinton paid court to Miami’s Cubans and won the presidency. George Bush Jr. in turn did enough to win 250,000 more Cuban-American votes than Al Gore in Florida where his overall victory margin was just 537. America once ran Cuba’s foreign policy. Now, Cuban-Americans pretty much control America’s.
But like New Labour, Castro was perhaps better at getting and keeping power than using it. The first decade of his rule saw a succession of radical economic plans come and go. It was as if Castro had stumbled into communism and was not sure what to do next. Cuba was eventually bailed out by Soviet oil, so much that Castro could sell the surplus to help fund the island’s medical and educational programmes. But when in 1991 the Soviets sailed away, the economy almost collapsed and it was ironically the dollars from an influx of capitalist tourists which kept the things going.
In fact, the very Cuban-Americans who hate Castro so much have also helped to keep the old leader in power. They travel to Cuba on direct flights to visit relatives, spending dollars and sending $1bn a year in remittances, much of which is spent in expensive, government hard-currency shops and recycled into the Cuban army and police.

Kruschev you little queer!
But Castro has not always come out on top. During the missile crisis of 1962, Nikita Kruschev went over the Cubans’ heads and agreed to remove Soviet nuclear missiles from the island in return for the withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. Castro had demanded the withdrawal should conditional on the Americans ending their trade embargo and the return of Guantanamo Bay. He was livid. Crowds were summoned onto Havana’s streets chanting “Nikita, mariquita, lo que se da no se quita” – “Nikita, you little queer – what you give you don’t take away!”
The truth is that nationalism was always more important to Castro and Cuba than socialism. Castro’s revolution was more Marti, the Cuban nineteenth century rebel poet, than Marx. His great skill was to appropriate these themes against his enemies. His failure, perhaps, was to allow his enemies to shape as well as define him.
For Cuba could have had a strong economy. Not by building steel mills, as Che once thought during a brief stint as industry minister. Nor by relying on a now-cheap commodity like sugar, which has in so many ways been Cuba’s curse.
Nor does Cuba’s comparative advantage lie in textiles or electronics. It lies, instead, in selling itself. The biggest island in the Caribbean, with fabulous cities built on sugar wealth and a great culture of music, dance and poetry – and excellent beaches - should be one of the great visitor destinations. Yet five times as many people visit the tiny neighbouring Bahamas.
Cuba does markets its medical skills and facilities, but could do much more. The island has some fine products: rum, cigars and coffee. But state-run companies are not always entrepreneurial enough in exporting these.
People ask whether Cuba will change after Castro. The answer is that it already has. Cuba’s economy has very slowly been liberalising since the early ‘90s. The sugar industry is being wound down. Foreign investors are allowed into sectors like tourism, mining and telecoms and some well known multinationals such as Nestle and Pernod Ricard are already well established in the island. Small businesses are falteringly tolerated.
A more enlightened American policy might have facilitated this. Instead, oil is lubricating Cuba’s transition. In the 1970s and ‘80s it was Russian oil. Now Fidel has a new best friend – Hugo Chavez, the populist Venezuelan leader who is pumping oil into the island in return for thousands of Cuban doctors. Last time I was in Havana it looked like more paint had been splashed out on pro-Chavez slogans than on Havana’s crumbling buildings.
And once again, the help has come just in time for the regime. There have been periods of unrest and severe shortages in Cuba in recent years. Chavez’s oil has ensured relative calm during the political changeover.
For the political switch has also already been made. Cuba has for a time been in reality in the firm grip of a cohesive group of well-educated, capable technocrats, though Fidel’s brother, Raul, now assumes the top spot.
So anyone expecting an Eastern Europe-style meltdown is likely to be disappointed, as they have been before. Cuba’s differences with the Eastern Bloc are greater than the similarities. Cuba is a small country, an island with no real democratic tradition. Many of the educated middle-classes have long since fled. They are unlikely to be welcomed back.
Race also enters to mix. Most Miami Cubans are white, of largely Spanish extraction. Most of the elegant mansion blocks once graced by the Hispanic middle-classes are now occupied by families of African descent.
The Miami Cubans have anyway built a new life in the US. The old exiles are dying off. Their sons and daughters consider themselves Americans first and Cubans second. Few now take seriously the possibility of rich white Cuban-Americans returning to kick poor black Cubans out of the rooms they have inhabited for decades. If the regime collapses too precipitously, the flow is likely to be from Cuba to America rather than the other way round. That is in no-one’s interest. Iraq has also jolted any lingering exile dreams of US intervention after Castro’s death back to reality. More likely, Cuban-Americans will quietly press to end the embargo and begin to cash in on the island’s possibilities, as the Europeans, Chinese and Canadians already are.
Above all, whereas eastern-Europe could turn to a big, rich friendly Europe, most Cubans view the United States as big, rich and unfriendly, a bully which unites them with their government.
So Cuba may slowly change, but don’t expect Ronald McDonald in Havana just yet. Cubans will have to make do with the deep-fried frozen chicken portions of their home-grown El Rapido chain for some time to come.
It would be wrong to idealise Castro’s Cuba, as too many do. Cuba’s human rights abuses have been well documented. Anyone venturing from tourist or government areas can see very real problems. Much of Cuba looks like nothing much has happened since Fidel entered Havana in triumph in January 1959, which, of course, is part of the charm – for tourists anyway.
But it is still difficult not to sympathise with the spirit behind the revolution, if not always the practice. “With the poor people of the earth, I want to cast my lot,” wrote the great Cuban rebel poet Jose Marti in the poem which became the song, Guantanamera. “The brook of the mountains,” he went on, “Gives me more pleasure than the sea.”
Plenty of Cubans will quietly complain when they get the chance. The average wage at $20 month has hardly moved since 1959. The flow of Venezuelan oil has not stopped petrol prices rising for those Cubans with cars. Many grumble they can’t get treatment because all the doctors have gone to Venezuela. The doctors protest they could earn more working as waiters.
But Cubans still enjoy a better free health and education system than most of Latin America. Over the last decade I have seen Cuba change as those with access to tourist dollars and remittances have eroded the egalitarian edge of the island’s society. But I have also rarely seen the full-on displays of wealth which disfigure much of Latin America. The spirit of Marti is alive in Cuba – if only just.
Perhaps Castro’s real bequest is that he allowed Cubans to stand up and realise who they were. Their leader dealt or the first time on equal terms with world leaders. And there is another legacy, too in a part of the world intimately connected to Cuba’s soul.
For despite the largely white face of the revolution, Castro genuinely took the issue of race to his heart. His policies in Africa may have been patchy – he supported the brutal Mengistu in Ethiopia. Yet his dramatic intervention with 4,000 Cuban troops in Angola in 1975, a land to which many Cubans could trace their ancestry, prevented a de-facto South African takeover.
The move was made without consulting the Soviets. The Cubans were acting as no-one’s Cold-War pawn. The defeat of white forces by a largely black army was seminal. The Soweto township exploded a few weeks later. Apartheid was dead not many years after.
The economic risk for Cuba in the post-Castro era is that, as once before with Soviet oil, Cuba becomes over-reliant on Venezuela and fails to continue the steady reforms needed to see the island through when Chavez’s tankers stop arriving, as they surely will.
The political danger is also in being seduced by the dead-end populism – and dollars – of Chavez into believing that the Cuban quasi-socialist model can survive for ever.
The hope is that the capable new generation of men and women who now run the island understand that and begin to make the changes while they have the chance. I hope that in doing so they manage to keep some of the authentic spirit of Cuba.
And here’s the great irony. America’s policies shaped Fidel Castro’s far more than he would have liked. Now America’s response will once again influence Cuba. This time, hopefully for the better.

END