But this dependence on Russia came at a price, and the debt was collected in when Khrushchev and the Red Army began a secret deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
It was an audacious move that president Kennedy, when he became aware of it, predictably deemed an existential threat. It led directly to the so-called Cuban missile crisis , the closest the world has yet come to nuclear Armageddon. The crisis was defused, in part by the reciprocal, secret withdrawal of US nuclear-capable missiles from Turkey.
This fear-filled view of Castro as international bogeyman was exacerbated by a third aspect of his political life story — his self-appointed role as a prime exporter of revolution, unbending champion of the oppressed and bold advocate for the countries of the developing world. His support was practical as well symbolic. Castro also proved an inspirational figure for leftwing liberation movements and would-be revolutionaries across central and Latin America.
In s Nicaragua, scene of an undeclared dirty war between the Contra rebels illegally backed by the Reagan administration and the Sandinista Front led by Daniel Ortega, and likewise in El Salvador and Panama, Castro helped provide a counterweight to American efforts, both direct and indirect, to prop up or install conservative, pro-Washington regimes.
In his later years, even as he slipped out of public view, the story remained more or less the same. But for the most part, Castro, iconic hero of the left, was on the right side of history.
This article is more than 4 years old. Fidel Castro, left, and Che Guevara in the s. However, the party soon split into various factions, some of them abstentionist and some others favoring unprincipled coalitions with traditional, discredited parties opposed to Batista.
None of them were able to prosper under the unfavorable conditions of a military dictatorship that differed dramatically from the functioning of an electoral party in a constitutional, even if corrupt, political democracy. The other anti-Batista parties were, for a variety of reasons, no better than the Ortodoxos.
That is why Fidel Castro and his close associates started to act on their own and secretly began to recruit sections of the Ortodoxo Party and unaffiliated youth for the attack on the Moncada barracks scheduled for July 26, The political vacuum in the opposition to Batista considerably helped his recruitment efforts, since from the very beginning his consistent and coherent line of armed struggle against the dictatorship attracted the young people who had become thoroughly disillusioned with the irrelevance of the regular opposition parties.
These measures were not socialist or, aside from the nationalization of public utilities, collectivist, but were radical for the Cuba of the s. That is why, although he continued to insist in the armed struggle to overthrow Batista a position he never abandoned , by he had significantly modulated his social radicalism.
The Manifesto fell on fertile ground in a political culture where the notion of revolution, in the sense of a forceful overthrow of an illegitimate government, had wide acceptance, especially when the potentially divisive issue of a revolutionary, as distinct from a progressive reformist, social program, was set aside.
It is also worth underlining that Fidel Castro, like other left-inclined Cuban oppositionists except for the Communists , kept his anti-imperialist politics to himself throughout the struggle against Batista, both in his more socially radical and moderate periods.
For a variety of reasons, anti-imperialism had become dormant in the Cuban political scene since the s. Only the Communists and their close periphery used the term to describe and analyze US policies towards Cuba and Latin America. They were therefore not committed to, or bound by, any particular social program.
Confirming the class heterogeneity of the group of people closest to Fidel, historian Hugh Thomas notes that the people who joined Fidel in the attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, , came from a wide variety of social backgrounds, including accountants, agricultural workers, bus workers, businessmen, shop assistants, plumbers, and students.
Thomas further notes that the group of eighty-one persons that accompanied Fidel in the Granma expedition to Cuba in late —nineteen of whom had participated in the Moncada attack—might have had an overall higher education than the Moncada group, but that it was socially heterogeneous, too. To begin with, he physically survived the armed struggle against Batista without any significant injury, something that cannot be taken for granted when considering that out of the eighty-one people who accompanied him to Cuba in the boat Granma , no more than twenty survived the invasion and its immediate aftermath.
Even more important was the failure of the other revolutionary groups to overthrow Batista by force, and the death of other revolutionary leaders who could have potentially challenged his leadership. All other political groups and personalities had either been discredited or lagged far behind Fidel in popular support and legitimacy. Once in power, Fidel behaved in a remarkably similar manner as when he was in the Sierra: as the unquestionable leader of a disciplined guerrilla army controlled from above that strictly follows the military orders of their superiors.
To this he added, once in power, his extremely intelligent use of television and the public plaza to appeal to the widespread radicalization and growing anti-imperialist sentiment of the people at large. Although he undoubtedly consulted with and listened to those in his inner circle, he acted on his own, even disregarding previous agreements while often refusing to accept criticism. He treated his close comrades as consultants and not as full peers embarked in a joint project.
That is why, after victory, Fidel Castro prevented any attempt to transform the 26th of July Movement from the amorphous, unstructured group it had been during the struggle against Batista into a democratically organized, disciplined party. Doing so would have limited the room for his political maneuvering, particularly early in the revolution when his movement was still politically heterogeneous.
At that time, such a party would have inevitably included the political tendencies that he abhorred. In fact, Fidel and the other revolutionary leaders did have political ideas. This became clear soon after the victory of the Cuban Revolution with the creation, in the revolutionary camp overwhelmingly composed by members of the 26th of July Movement, of a powerful pro-Soviet tendency oriented to an alliance with the PSP Popular Socialist Party , the old pro-Moscow Cuban Communists.
The new revolutionary government also had in its ranks an important non-Communist, anti-imperialist left e. Fidel Castro did not immediately commit at least in public to any of those tendencies. Although he had been a leftist for many years and intended to make a radical revolution, he left it to the existing relation of forces inside Cuba and abroad, and to the tactical possibilities available to him given the existing relation of forces, to determine the path to follow while maneuvering to ensure that he remained in control.
By the fall of , less than a year after victory, it became clear that Fidel Castro was moving in the direction of an alliance with the USSR and, months later, towards the transformation of the Cuban society and economy into the Soviet mold. His decision was probably influenced by the fact that the victory of the Cuban Revolution coincided with the widespread perception in the late s and early s that the balance of world power had shifted in favor of the USSR.
And while the US economy was growing at a rate of 2 to 3 percent per year, various US government agencies had estimated that the Soviet economy was growing approximately three times as fast. Consistent with the findings of their survey, the PSP had obtained only 10 percent of the votes in the union elections that had taken place earlier that year as well as in the delegate elections to the Congress itself.
That was followed, in the subsequent months, by the purge of at least half of the union officials elected in —some were also imprisoned—who were hostile to the PSP and their allies within the 26th of July Movement, thus consolidating the control of the latter two groups over the union movement. In November , at the eleventh congress of the CTC, the hard polemics and controversies that had gone on in the Tenth Congress were replaced with the principle of unanimity.
With this move, Fidel Castro dealt the last blow to the last vestiges of autonomy of the organized working class and subjected it to his total control. It should be noted that notwithstanding the loss of some of their pre-revolutionary labor conquests, most Cuban workers were pleased with the gains they obtained under the young revolutionary regime, and therefore they did not protest the state takeover of their unions.
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