All the Castro brothers have to celebrate this week is survival. But that in itself is a remarkable achievement
IN THE early hours of January 1st 1959, as New Year parties were in full swing in an otherwise unnaturally quiet Havana, Fulgencio Batista stole away. He flew from Camp Columbia, the city's main military base, to exile in the Dominican Republic with an entourage of relatives and cronies. The dictator's flight meant that just 25 months after landing with 81 men, all but a dozen of whom were immediately killed or captured, Fidel Castro, a lawyer and former student leader, had led his guerrilla force to an improbable triumph against Batista's American-backed army. The next day Mr Castro spoke to a jubilant multitude, many dressed in the red and black colours of his July 26th Movement, in the main square of Santiago de Cuba, the island's second city. "The revolution begins now," he proclaimed, adding: "This time, luckily for Cuba, the revolution will truly come into being. It will not be like 1895, when the North Americans came and took over…For the first time the republic will really be entirely free."
As they descended from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and entered Santiago, the columns of bearded rebels "were literally swept off their feet by the overjoyed people", as one of them, Carlos Franqui, recorded in his diary. "It was the hour of freedom after a long tyranny and a very tough fight." Such scenes were repeated across the island as Mr Castro embarked on a week-long triumphal march to Havana. They were echoed in the rest of Latin America, and beyond it. The dictatorship of Batista, a former army sergeant, had become notorious for its corrupt brutality. To many people, Mr Castro and his similarly handsome lieutenants, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine doctor, seemed to be romantic heroes. To others, they represented a renewal of socialism. Jean-Paul Sartre hailed Mr Castro's revolution as "the most original I have known".
Just as he had pledged, Mr Castro prevented the Americans from derailing his victory. But he did so at the cost of the freedom he had promised. Less than two years after his speech in Santiago—and before the United States imposed its economic embargo against the island—he had taken decisive steps to turn Cuba into the first, and still the only, communist country in the Americas.
Half a century on, the euphoria is long gone. Everyday life in Cuba is a dreary affair of queues and shortages, even if nobody starves and violent crime is rare. It is the only country in the Americas whose government denies its citizens freedom of expression and assembly. Cuba's jails contain 58 "prisoners of conscience" detained purely for their beliefs, according to Amnesty International, a human-rights group. But to the chagrin of the United States, and in defiance of its futile embargo, Mr Castro and Cuban communism stubbornly cling on just 90 miles (145km) across the Florida Straits. He and it have outlasted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of his Soviet patron, and lived to see new allies emerge in Latin America and elsewhere.
Fidel himself has not appeared in public since he underwent abdominal surgery in July 2006. But his views, expressed in a column entitled "Reflections of the Commander" that is published every few days in the state newspapers, still dominate Cuba. His slightly younger brother Raúl, who succeeded him as president last February, may be more pragmatic and more open to capitalism (though not to liberal democracy). But Raúl's plans for economic reform, already cautious, have been further stalled by two devastating hurricanes that hit Cuba this year (see article). What will be officially celebrated in Havana this week is not the prospect of change. It is the stubborn survival of a revolution that has had profound consequences for the Americas—though rarely those that Mr Castro wanted.
Outwitting the CIA
On the face of things, Cuba was an unlikely candidate for communism. The largest island in the Caribbean, it was also the wealthiest, thanks to sugar. Its insular status had allowed Spain to hold on to its "ever-faithful isle" for seven decades after it lost its colonies on the American mainland. As Mr Castro noted in his victory speech, a long struggle for independence was hijacked when the United States intervened: the Spanish-American war of 1898 marked the end of Spain's presence in the Americas and turned Cuba into an American neo-colony. Some 60% of farmland and much of the sugar industry came to be owned by Americans. A third of the workforce, most of them black rural labourers, lived in severe poverty.
Nevertheless, in 1958 Cuba was among the five most developed countries in Latin America: life expectancy was close to that in the United States, and there were more doctors per head than in Britain or France. Although Havana had its darker side as a mafia bolthole, it was also a glittering cultural and commercial centre. It is the music from that era—the son, revived under the label of the Buena Vista Social Club—that has once again in recent years got the world singing and dancing, rather than the nueva trova ("new song") of the revolution. As Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico note in the latest issue of Letras Libres, a Mexican magazine, Havana boasted 135 cinemas in 1958—more than New York City. Today only a score remain open, although the city's population has doubled.
As Rafael Rojas, a Cuban historian who lives in exile in Mexico, has pointed out, most Cubans wanted and expected Mr Castro to restore the democratic constitution of 1940, repudiated by Batista's coup of 1952. That, after all, was what he had promised in the manifesto of the July 26th Movement, along with agrarian reform and the nationalisation of the American-owned public utilities (though not of the rest of the economy). But Mr Castro had other ideas. He was determined that his revolution should not suffer the fate of Jacobo Arbenz, a democratic social reformer in Guatemala, who was overthrown by an invasion misguidedly organised by the Eisenhower administration in 1954 in the name of anti-communism. Guevara had witnessed that event, and learned from it.
Guatemala was the first skirmish of the cold war in Latin America. But it was the Cuban revolution that turned the region into an important theatre in that ideological and military conflict. Installing moderate civilian politicians in government, Mr Castro named himself head of the armed forces. He quickly dismantled Batista's army. Some 550 people more or less closely linked to Batista's regime were executed after show trials, a bloodbath in which Guevara played a particularly prominent role. Mr Castro deepened his alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (as Cuba's old-established communist party called itself), and set up a parallel government at a newly created National Agrarian Reform Institute headed by Guevara. Within seven months of victory he had shelved his promise of elections. The July 26th Movement splintered, with many of its non-communists (including Mr Franqui) going into exile, jail or quiet opposition. In October 1959, just nine months after entering Havana, Mr Castro began the contacts with the Soviet Union that swiftly led to a full-scale economic and military alliance.
The CIA quickly concluded that Mr Castro was a closet communist and set out to overthrow him. But it was not until October 1960 that the United States began to impose the embargo. By the time a CIA-organised invasion of anti-Castro Cubans landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Mr Castro was ready for them, as Arbenz had not been in Guatemala. In 1962 the Soviet Union's decision to station missiles on Cuban soil brought the world the closest it has ever come to nuclear war. In return for their withdrawal, the Kennedy administration guaranteed that it would not again invade Cuba. Mr Castro had consolidated his victory. His triumph would prompt an exodus of hundreds of thousands of the more entrepreneurial Cubans. It thus had the unintended effect of turning Miami from a sleepy beach town into a throbbing regional entrepôt.
Communism, Cuban-style
Precisely when Mr Castro became a communist is a matter of conjecture (though Raúl was a member of the Communist Youth and Guevara's experience in Guatemala strengthened his previous embrace of Marxism). The evidence suggests that Mr Castro imposed communism in Cuba of his own volition, not in reaction to American hostility. Certainly that hostility (which included endless CIA attempts to kill him) made his task easier. But it was not inevitable that the Cuban revolution should become a communist one. Mexico's revolution earlier in the 20th century installed a nationalist but non-communist regime. In Venezuela in 1959 a popular uprising against a dictatorship led to a democracy under Rómulo Betancourt, a social-democrat, though this would be corroded by the collapse in the price of oil in the 1980s and 1990s.
Even as Cuba turned into a Soviet client and a police state, Mr Castro's communism was always rather different from the drab variety imposed on eastern Europe by the Red Army after the second world war. That was partly because of its easier-going tropical ambience. It was more because Mr Castro presented himself as a nationalist first and a communist second: the "intellectual author" of the revolution, he always insisted, was not Marx but José Martí, a writer and political activist who perished fighting for independence in 1895. It was also because Mr Castro's rule relied on his own charisma, his oratorical machismo and the regular mobilisation of vast crowds, as much as on the Communist Party machine or on repression.
There were also genuine achievements. Mr Castro funnelled a chunk of Soviet subsidies into creating the best education and health systems in Latin America, as well as a fairly advanced biotechnology industry. What connects the Cuba of today with the ideals of the revolution is a commitment to "social justice, equity [and] national independence", argues Rafael Hernández, a Havana-based political scientist, in an article in Foreign Policy en Español.
But the impact of the Cuban example on Latin America was largely negative. It bewitched the region's left, detaching large parts of it from a path of social democracy for a generation. Cuba seemed to suggest that revolution was possible even in countries where the industrial proletariat was small. The countryside could be the focus of a peasant-based revolution. All that was missing was political will: "The duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution," as Régis Debray, a disciple of Guevara, put it. To many of Latin America's growing number of middle-class students, appalled by the injustices of their societies, this simplistic slogan was a call to arms.
Guevara misreads history
Contrary to official myth, however, the Cuban revolution was not primarily a peasant rebellion. Mr Castro's guerrilla army relied for its survival and eventual success on a range of allies, including trade unions and other urban groups. Even more important, many of the governments in mainland Latin America commanded greater legitimacy, and their armies were more effective, than Batista's tinpot dictatorship.
The result was tragedy. Thousands of idealistic young Latin Americans, and many more innocent bystanders, were slaughtered in failed attempts to mimic Mr Castro's Rebel Army. (Guevara himself was defeated and shot in Bolivia in 1967.) Their efforts contributed greatly to the advent of a new generation of ruthless military dictatorships across the region in the 1970s. Only in Nicaragua would the Sandinista guerrillas be successful, against a dictatorship not unlike Batista's. But they were voted out in 1990 after a decade, undermined partly by the United States but also by their own arrogant mistakes.
By then Mr Castro's own survival was in question. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Cuba of net subsidies of around $2 billion a year, and caused its economy to shrink by a third. In response, Mr Castro reluctantly nodded in the direction of the market economy, allowing foreign investment (especially to develop a mass tourist industry) and family-run small businesses, and legalising remittances from Cubans abroad.
These measures allowed partial recovery. Then, unexpectedly, Mr Castro found new patrons in the form of a rising China and, especially, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, an elected strongman armed with oil. Cuba now receives Venezuelan largesse on a scale similar to that once supplied by the Soviet Union. Mr Chávez in turn benefits from the services of Cuban doctors and political and security advice (Cuba's famously effective intelligence service has created a new division whose sole purpose is to keep the Venezuelan president in power). In Mr Chávez's wake, a handful of other radical left-wingers who have achieved office through the ballot box, such as Bolivia's Evo Morales, also seek inspiration in Mr Castro. He is treated with respect by social democrats such as Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In many cases that is because he offered them friendship in the past, when they were persecuted by dictatorships that had American backing.
Mr Castro's Cuba is a sad place. Although the population is now mainly black or mulatto and young, its rulers form a mainly white gerontocracy. The failure of collective farming means that it imports up to 80% of its food. The health and education systems struggle to maintain standards. Inequalities have risen. What matters for Cuban livelihoods is access to hard currency, through remittances or a widespread informal economy, rather than derisory wages or the threadbare official ration system. The best hope for the economy is the possibility that foreign investors may find commercial deepwater oilfields offshore when they drill this year.
For all its new-found friends, Cuba remains an exception in the Americas. But Mr Castro's lasting success has been as a masterful propagandist. Communism in Cuba has had a better press than anywhere else. He has exploited the cult of Che in particular. Guevara's myth—of the romantic rebel, not the murderous, militaristic Marxist of real life—burns as brightly as ever, recreated in hagiographical books and in a new Hollywood movie hitting American and British screens this month. In all this, Mr Castro has often been unwittingly helped by the United States, and rarely more than when George Bush set up a prison camp on Cuban soil at Guantánamo in defiance of American and international law. But Mr Castro is in the late evening of his life. And what happens after him remains unclear.
From The Economist print edition
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