Castro, Fidel
Castro, Fidel 1926-
RADICALIZATION OF THE REVOLUTION
NUCLEAR GAMBLE AND RELATIONS WITH SOVIETS
Fidel Castro, a first-generation Cuban, was born August 13, 1926, to a wealthy farming family in the eastern region of Oriente. Their 11,000 hectares produced wood, sugarcane, and cattle. His father had migrated from Galicia, Spain, while his religious peasant mother had been born in Cuba of Spanish parents. Both parents learned to read and write although neither went to school. Fidel Castro was one of six children.
When Castro was three years old, the worldwide economic depression hit rural Cuba. From 1929 to 1933 the island experienced widespread social and political upheaval, culminating when Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973), a sergeant, led a military revolt that put a radical government in power. Batista, at the behest of the American ambassador, then overthrew it and continued to dominate Cuban politics until 1959.
Castro initially went to a small rural school. At age six, in 1932, he left for a private Catholic elementary boarding school in Santiago de Cuba. Later he went to the leading elite Jesuit secondary school, Colegio Belén, in Cuba’s capital city of Havana. From the Spanish priests he learned self-discipline. In 1943 he earned an award as the country’s best secondary-school athlete. During school breaks, he visited the family farm and read newspaper reports about the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) or World War II (1939–1945) to his parents and workers. In the Spanish conflict, his family supported Francisco Franco (1892–1975).
ENTERING POLITICS
In September 1945, at the age of nineteen, Castro entered the University of Havana. The campus was his springboard to national politics. Just the previous year, national elections had allowed the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC), also known as the Auténtico Party, to set up a government. The PRC promised major social reforms and greater national independence. Castro immediately became involved in the tumultuous politics of the time. Students and professors transformed courses into discussions of Cuba’s social, economic, and political problems.
In 1947 he participated in setting up a new populist political party, the Partido del Pueblo Cubano, or Ortodoxo Party, which had separated from the PRC. The Ortodoxos shared the same values as the PRC but claimed the Auténtico government had failed to deliver on its promised reforms and instead had become thoroughly corrupt.
Early in his life Castro had absorbed anticapitalist ideas based on Catholic counter-reformation conservative thought. While attending high school, he discovered the nationalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary writings and biography of the Cuban patriot José Martí (1853–1895). At the University of Havana he became acquainted with radical works, including those of the German political philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) and the Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). He claims that in those days he became a utopian socialist and cites Martí as his primary influence.
During his university years, from 1945 to 1950, Castro was a political activist. In September 1947 he joined an armed expeditionary force composed of Cubans and exiles from the Dominican Republic intending to oust the government of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1891–1961). The invasion was never launched. The next year, in April 1948 as a representative of the Law Students Association of Cuba, Castro went to a Latin American University Students Congress in Bogotá, Colombia, which coincided with the United States’ initiation of the Organization of American States and the advent of civil war in Colombia. The populist leader of the opposition was assassinated. For two days Castro participated in some of the early armed skirmishes, and then he returned home. Both incidents indicate that he, like many contemporaries in Cuba, identified with political struggles in the region. He was also involved in a political organization promoting the independence of Puerto Rico. By then he had acquired lifelong contacts with Latin American progressive political parties and leaders.
He graduated in 1950 with a law degree, having specialized in international law and social sciences. His main interests were politics, sociology, history, theory, and agriculture. As a student leader, radio commentator, and investigative political journalist, he developed a significant following among young people. The Ortodoxo Party recognized his oratorical and organizational skills and nominated him for the planned June 1952 national congressional election. However, on March 10, 1952, the military, led by Batista, carried out a second coup d’état, ending hopes that electoral politics could reform the island and throwing Cuba’s constitutional system into a crisis.
ARMED REVOLUTIONARY
Like many other political reformists, the young Ortodoxos became committed revolutionaries, clandestinely organizing to oust the new military rulers. On July 26, 1953, civilians led by Castro attacked Santiago de Cuba’s Moncada army barracks, the second largest in the country. It ended in failure. Some men were killed in the confrontation; others were captured and then assassinated. The survivors ended up in prison. From the summer of 1953 to May 1955, Castro was imprisoned at the Isle of Pines, but he continued to organize his associates inside and outside prison. He also read about political, economic, and social matters. In mid-May 1955, the Moncadistas were granted a political amnesty. Batista hoped such a move would earn him legitimacy. It did not. Meanwhile, by serving time, Castro had become one of the primary national opposition leaders in Cuba.
He spent May 1955 to November 1956 in exile in Mexico, where he organized and trained a guerrilla force. On December 2, 1956, eighty-two men who had embarked from the Mexican port of Tuxpan days earlier landed in Cuba in the southern portion of the Oriente. The guerrilla insurgency had begun. The guerrillas gained control of significant portions of territory, launched an agrarian reform, recruited peasants, and created an alternative set of political institutions. Castro broadcast daily from a rebel shortwave radio station. From the Sierra Maestra Mountains, he coordinated the military and political struggle. From 1957 to 1958 the guerrillas were able to build a multi-class popular front against the dictatorship.
On December 31, 1958, the Batista military regime and political machine collapsed. This was a first in Latin America: a rural insurgency that defeated a regular military force supported by the U.S. government.
REVOLUTIONARY IN POWER
On January 1, 1959, less than six years after the initiation of open opposition to the Batista regime, Castro’s revolutionary forces seized power. The Cuban revolution was about to begin. The fundamental questions of how the society’s institutions would be organized and what the relationship would be with the United States and Latin America soon became paramount issues as the multi-class alliance that had supported the guerrillas fractured. Portions of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes wanted a return to a constitutional government without affecting social and economic institutions. However, landless peasants and the seasonally unemployed, among others, favored radical changes.
Moreover, the Cuban revolutionaries were aware of the political processes unfolding in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. While the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the cold war, third-world countries were addressing the pressing problems of national independence, integration, decolonization, and socioeconomic development. Some of the same issues needed to be addressed in Cuba.
Even before the guerrillas left the Sierra Maestra, the U.S. government tried to prevent them from seizing power. Also, the United States gave political refuge to Batistianos, allowing them to plunder Cuba’s national treasure. In January 1959, right-wing Batista forces in exile in the United States began hit-and-run attacks by air and sea, but the U.S. government turned a blind eye. Foreign relations between the two governments deteriorated rapidly.
Moderates and radicals within the new revolutionary regime immediately discovered the interconnection of domestic and foreign policy. Attempting to distribute land to the landless created confrontation with the United States because the best land was owned by American corporations. Increasing wages also affected American-owned corporations. Import-export policy impinged on the businesses that did precisely that, mostly American ones. Moreover, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961) had no intention of forfeiting American privileges enjoyed since 1898.
Nevertheless, the Cuban nationalists sought to bring about unprecedented independence. Any attempt to reform Cuba’s social, economic, and political institutions would create confrontation between the two countries. American opposition only contributed to the radicalization of the revolutionary process.
Cuba had a mono-export economy, with one major buyer (the United States), yearly cyclical high unemployment, and much social inequality. Cuba was a poor and underdeveloped country, although different in one respect from other nation-states in the Caribbean. With Cuban capitalism so closely connected to American investments, nationalist efforts to control the country’s resources easily became equated with anticapitalism. Cuban businesses did not come to the fore to defend their interests by differentiating themselves from U.S. interests. Rather, Cuban capital attached its politics and fate to the U.S. government.
RADICALIZATION OF THE REVOLUTION
The early Cuban revolutionary regime developed a threefold strategy: a progressive redistribution of income, a radical change in the property system, and a lowering of major daily costs (such as food, rent, transportation, and public services) to benefit the lower classes. This resulted in broader political support among the lower classes and a reduction of the income and wealth of the upper classes, thus diminishing their available resources for counterrevolutionary activity.
As this radicalization advanced, the moderates within the revolutionary coalition joined the opposition or went into exile. Many members of the professions did the same. As the country lost skilled personnel, the state further centralized political, administrative, and economic resources. Facing a shortage of expertise, the revolutionary regime relied on the politically trustworthy, usually people who were radical, including Communists. Such trends further exacerbated the political climate and relations with the U.S. government.
By March 1960, the United States had begun formal covert programs to overthrow the government and kill its leaders. In April 1961, a Cuban exile invasion (Bay of Pigs) was organized, trained, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The fact that it was defeated by the Cubans reinforced the United States’ commitment to oust the revolutionaries. The John F. Kennedy administration (1961–1963) further retaliated by organizing a second expeditionary force and imposing an economic embargo in February 1962.
NUCLEAR GAMBLE AND RELATIONS WITH SOVIETS
Havana and Moscow replied by surreptitiously installing tactical nuclear weapons on the island in 1962. Interestingly, Castro urged the Soviets to announce to the world that missiles were going to be installed as a matter of sovereign right on the part of Havana. The Soviet premier, however, did not listen to his advice.
Between April 1961 and March 1962, Castro removed key pro-Soviet Communists from critical positions in the government and the economy while negotiations with Moscow on missile installations were conducted. After October 1962, because of the way the Soviets handled the resolution of the Missile Crisis (Cubans were not informed of the negotiations), relations cooled. Havana made numerous moves to publicly assert its independence. The Soviets put up with Cuba questioning their position on the Sino-Soviet conflict, on the electoral politics of Communist parties in Latin America, the methods of building socialism, and the importance of politics based on moral rather than materialist perspectives. Havana, in other words, was to the left of Moscow. Such were the tense relations until 1972.
From 1972 to 1985, on domestic matters Cuba followed policies that were in accord with the Soviet model, but Castro constructed a foreign policy that challenged the Soviets. This was the case in Angola (1975), Ethiopia (1977), Nicaragua (1979), and an international organization called the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM; 1979). In 1980, Moscow informed Havana that it would not defend the island if U.S. military forces were to attack. Cuba had to develop its own military doctrine and structure from that point on. Thereafter, the political and ideological distance between the two countries grew, even though the island depended on Soviet economic subsidies.
From 1985 to 1990, Castro elaborated a critique of the old Soviet model while rejecting the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The government in Moscow responded by further reducing assistance.
SPECIAL PERIOD
The demise of the Soviet bloc from 1989 to 1991 had major domestic implications in Cuba. It initiated the most difficult economic period in the history of the island—the so-called Special Period.
The United States took advantage of that juncture to increase Cuba’s economic isolation. It was an extraordinary accomplishment that Castro’s regime adapted its policies and survived. Moreover, by 2000 the island had slowly begun to regain the economic standards it had enjoyed in the early 1980s.
To break away from American-imposed isolation policies while distancing itself from the Soviets, Cuba developed a global foreign policy. Castro cultivated a personal relationship with key political, social, and cultural leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. His close friends have included such nationalist progressives as Nelson Mandela (b. 1918; South Africa), Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970; Mexico), Omar Torrijos (1929–1981; Panama), Juan Bosch (1909–2001; Dominican Republic), Salvador Allende (1908–1973; Chile), Daniel Ortega (b. 1945; Nicaragua), Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974; Argentina), Sékou Touré (1922–1984; Guinea), Ahmed Ben Bella (b. 1918; Algeria), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (b. 1945; Brazil), João Goulart (1918–1976; Brazil), Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980; Yugoslavia), Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964; India), and many others. The closest of all associations has been between Castro and Hugo Chávez (b. 1954), the president of Venezuela beginning in 1999. The older man recognized the revolutionary qualities of the Venezuelan as early as 1994. The two have similar national histories with a heavy reliance on mass mobilization. Chávez, however, attained and has maintained political power through electoral politics. Moreover, while the younger man respects the elder statesman, there is a unique reciprocity of respect and influence. Castro provides political and tactical advice, and Venezuela’s economic resources have permitted Chávez to help Cuba surmount the economic crisis that began in 1991. Radical and revolutionary ideas and organization have been extended by their alliance beyond anything that Castro could have imagined.
In 1961 the Non-Aligned Movement was established in Belgrade, Serbia. Cuba was the only country from Latin America that was a founding member. In 2007 the NAM had 118 third-world countries. Twice Castro has been elected to lead the organization, an explicit mark of esteem for the political example and strategic perspectives of the Cuban revolutionary. Thus, Cuba has become identified with selfless internationalism, sending assistance, for example, to Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Grenada, Venezuela, Algeria, North Vietnam, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Haiti.
Once the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies were gone, the government in Havana devised more activist policies toward the third-world nations, providing them with the human capital the island had been so successful in creating, particularly teachers, doctors, dentists, and technical people. In January 2007, Cuba had diplomatic relations with 183 countries.
Relations between the United States and Cuba have gone through different periods, but they have never been friendly. Full diplomatic relations were broken by the United States in January 1961. Thirteen months later, normal economic transactions were terminated by Washington. Only during the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) was there a brief period during which some diplomatic ties were restored and travel between the two countries resumed. However, during the administration of George W. Bush (starting in 2001), travel to the island from the United States was highly restricted, including family and academic travel. Cuba cannot use the U.S. dollar in any international transaction, receive international credits, or use any banking institution tied to U.S. capital. Third parties outside the United States are also pressured not to engage in trade with the island. The degree of U.S. financial support to the opposition has increased, and the economic blockade/embargo has been heightened. Every year, the United Nations’ General Assembly overwhelmingly votes against the U.S. policy, but the policy remains.
REVOLUTIONARY LEADER
Castro has been the paramount strategist, executive officer, ideologist, and macromanager of the revolutionary regime. He has been the revolution’s main leader, spokesman, and coalition builder. Relying on historical reference, example, and metaphor, he has taught that action is the best educator. A radical nationalist, he integrated Martí and Marx. His political thought is rooted in ethical values rather than materialist theory. He has synchronized socialist European traditions with third-world customs while recognizing that each country must find its own way. He has dealt with development theory, nation building, internationalism, foreign debt, globalization, sustainable development, social justice, party building, and human psychology. Since the 1950s his political strategy has stressed unity among revolutionists. Mass mobilization has been a constant instrument and has included the literacy campaign, childhood vaccination, the creation of a territorial militia, and anticorruption campaigns.
Since 1959 resources have been concentrated in the rural areas and small towns, and the city of Havana has suffered. An ideology of inherent rights and entitlements has developed with a system that provides universal education, health and dental care, child care, and burial service free of charge. The state also assumes the responsibility of providing employment or giving the unemployed financial support. Cuba is one of the most educated countries in the third world, with a life expectancy of 77.5 years and an infant mortality rate of 6.5 per 1,000 live births (as of January 2007). Education and health claim 23 percent of the gross internal product. The number of libraries, schools, hospitals, and dams increased dramatically from1959 to the mid-1980s. Food has been subsidized since 1962, but it has been rationed as well. Just as libraries lend books, there are also centers that lend musical instruments at no cost. Every municipality has computer clubs where access is free. Thirteen percent of the population benefits from universal social security, and 4.2 percent receives social assistance checks.
The political system has changed from its original high dependence on charismatic leadership based on mass popular organizations (1959–1976) to a formal institutionalized political regime where officials are directly elected by the population, with no campaigning or Communist Party–proposed candidates. Still, charismatic authority continued to operate to balance and control the administrative state. Castro’s contact with the population, which began in 1959 through mass rallies, has been preserved. He has been the unifying and integrating force among disparate factions in the revolutionary family.
Cuba does not permit alternative political parties or a political opposition to openly publish political materials. However, thirty-two Catholic publications do express positions that are opposed to the government, although in a subtle fashion. The political leadership maintains, based on Federalist Paper No. 8 by the U.S. founding father James Madison (1751–1836), that the external threat posed by the U.S. government’s policies—including confrontation, isolation, invasion, financial assistance to opponents within the island, and an economic embargo that has lasted more than four decades—do not provide much space for a political opposition.
By the end of July 2006, Castro had transferred political power, in a provisional manner, to his brother and other individuals in what constitutes the establishment of a collective leadership. The question for most foreign observers is whether the Cuban revolution will survive the death of its leader. History will tell.
SEE ALSO Authoritarianism; Bay of Pigs; Bush, George H. W.; Bush, George W.; Chavez, Hugo; Cuban Missile Crisis; Cuban Revolution; Franco, Francisco; Guerrilla Warfare; Khrushchev, Nikita; Leninism; Madison, James; Marx, Karl; Marxism; Reagan, Ronald; Revolution; Socialism; Spanish Civil War; Third World; Totalitarianism
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Nelson P. Valdes