1968 (5 page)

It seemed little would be without controversy this year. The good news might have been that Christiaan Barnard of the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, had successfully transplanted the heart of a twenty-four-year-old into Philip Blaiberg, a fifty-eight-year-old dentist. This was the third heart transplant, the second by Barnard but the first that medical science regarded as successful. Barnard started 1968 and spent much of the year as an international celebrity, signing autographs, giving interviews with his easy smile and quotable statements, which from the outset in January was frowned upon by his profession. Barnard pointed out that despite his sudden fame he still earned only his $8,500 yearly salary. But there were also doubts about his feat. A German doctor called it a crime. A New York biologist, apparently confusing doctors with lawyers, said that he should be “disbarred for life.” Three distinguished American cardiologists called for a moratorium on heart transplants, which Barnard immediately said he would ignore.

In theory, the operation involves two doomed patients. One gives up his heart and dies but would have died in any event; the other is saved. But some doctors and laymen wondered if doctors should be deciding who is doomed. Shouldn’t everyone hope for a miracle? And how is it decided who receives a new heart? Were doctors now making godlike decisions? The controversy was not helped by Barnard, who said in an interview in
Paris Match,
“Obviously, if I had to choose between two patients in the same need and one was a congenital idiot and one a mathematics genius, I would pick the latter.” Controversy was also fueled by the fact that Barnard came from South Africa, the increasingly stigmatized land of apartheid, and that he had saved a white man by removing a black man’s heart and implanting it in him. Such an irony was not likely to be overlooked in a year like this.

Ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 New Year’s victory, the beginning of every year has been marked in Havana on January 2 with an anniversary celebration in the broad, open space known as Plaza de la Revolución. In 1968, for the ninth anniversary of the revolution, something new was added—a sixty-foot-high mural of a beautiful young man in a beret. This young man was the thirty-eight-year-old Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia two months earlier while carrying out the new Cuban approach to revolution.

This new approach had been described in a book called
Revolution in the Revolution
by Régis Debray, a young Frenchman who had become enamored of the Cuban revolution. The book, translated into English in 1967, was a favorite of students all over the world, with its premise certain to appeal to the impatience of youth. Debray wrote of tossing out the old Marxist-Leninist theories about slowly fomenting revolution. Instead, according to Debray, revolutions began by taking the initiative with an army raised from rural people. That was Castro’s strategy in the mountains of his native Oriente province. And it was what Che was doing in Bolivia. Only in Che’s case, it had not worked out well, and in November a photograph circulated of a Bolivian air force colonel displaying Che’s half-naked corpse. Debray, too, had been caught by the Bolivian army, but rather than killing him, the Bolivians kept him in a prison in a small town called Camiri. In the beginning of 1968 Debray was still there, though the Bolivians allowed his Venezuelan lover, Elizabeth Burgos, to come to the prison so the couple could be married.

So in 1968 Fidel Castro’s close friend and co-revolutionary became a martyr, a canonized saint of the revolution—forever young, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, bearded and bereted, with those smiling eyes, the pure revolutionary in deeds and clothing. At the José Martí International Airport in Havana, a poster of the martyr appeared with the message “Youth will intone the chants of mourning to the chatter of machine guns and cries of war. Until victory, forever.”

All over Cuba the phrase was written, “Until Victory, Forever.” Sixty thousand students in gray high school uniforms marched past Castro’s reviewing stand, and as each group passed they declared, loudly and enthusiastically, “Our duty is to build men like Che.” “
Como Che
”—to be like Che, to have more men like Che, to work like Che—the phrase filled the island. The cult of Che had begun.

Castro announced that this year the celebration would not include a display of Soviet weapons, explaining that such a parade was too expensive, in part because the tanks tore up the pavement on the Havana streets.

There were other troubling signs for Moscow, which began the year with a shaky economy and an unpopular trial of four intellectuals accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda after they campaigned in favor of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers in prison for the past two years because they had published their work in the West. The Six Day War in the Middle East had been a humiliation for the foreign policy of Leonid I. Brezhnev, chief of the Soviet Communist Party, at a time when collective farming was failing, attempts at economic reform had fizzled, youth and intelligentsia were growing restless, and nationalist movements such as that of the Tatars were becoming troublesome. The people of the Soviet bloc, especially young people, were increasingly rejecting the stances and language of the cold war. Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito had long annoyed Moscow with an air of independence, but now Romania’s Nicolae Ceaus¸escu had begun to exhibit the same tendency. Even in Czechoslovakia, where the Soviets had their most loyal and pliable leader, Antonín Novotny´, the population seemed restless. In April 1967 the
Bratislava Pravda,
the Slovak Party organ, had conducted a poll in Czechoslovakia and found a shocking general rejection of the Party line. Only half blamed the Western imperialists for international tension, and 28 percent said that both sides were responsible. Perhaps most shocking, only 41.5 percent blamed the United States for the Vietnam War, a stance with which even the populations of America’s closest allies would not have been in agreement. By the fall, Czech writers were openly demanding more freedom of expression, and students from Prague’s Charles University were demonstrating in the streets.

In the fall of 1967 a series of meetings of the Czechoslovakian Central Committee had gone very badly for Novotny´. His slavish loyalty to Moscow had been rewarded by his appointment as first secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party in 1953. In 1958 he had become president of Czechoslovakia. Now, an increasing number of Central Committee members, reacting in part to Novotny´’s relentless hatred of the 4.5 million Slovaks who constituted a third of the nation’s population, felt he should give up one position or the other. The president barely managed to save himself in a December meeting of the ten-member presidium of the Communist Party by closing the session “because it was Christmas.” The committee had agreed to reconvene the first week of January.

In the meantime, Novotny´ plotted. He tried to intimidate his opponents by spreading a rumor that the Soviet Union was poised to step in to preserve his position. But this backfired, turning key figures against him only further. He then plotted a military intervention that would affirm his positions and arrested his opponent, the Slovak Alexander Dub
ek, whom he despised. But a general informed Dub
ek of the plot and Novotny´ was outmaneuvered again.

So President Novotny´ began the new year with a broadcast to the nation that was intended to be conciliatory. He promised that Slovakia, always at the end of Prague’s priorities, would suddenly be a leading concern in all economic planning. He also attempted to placate writers and students by promising that everything progressive, even if from the West, would be permitted. “I do not mean only in the economy, engineering, and science,” he added, “but also in progressive culture and art.”

The Central Committee met again on January 3 and removed Novotny´ as first secretary of the Party, replacing him with Dub
ek. There was not enough consensus to remove him as president, but Novotny´ had suffered a major and bitter defeat. The people of Czechoslovakia were not told that their world was about to change until Friday, January 5, when Radio Prague announced the “resignation” of Novotny´ as first secretary and the election of Dub
ek. Czechs had not realized Novotny´ was in trouble, and most of them had no idea who this Alexander Dub
ek was. In a closed society, the most successful politicians operate out of the public eye.

But while all this was happening, curiously little was heard from the ironfisted Soviet leader. Brezhnev had visited Prague in December, and it had been widely reported that he had made the trip to ensure the preservation of the beleaguered Czech leader. But in fact, when Novotny´, whom Brezhnev never liked in spite of the Czech leader’s vaunted loyalty, was removed, Brezhnev told Novotny´, “
Eto vashe delo
”—That’s your problem.

In Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was preparing his annual report to Congress, in which he wrote, “In the 1960s the simple bipolar configuration which we knew in the earlier post–World War II period began to disintegrate. Solid friends and implacable foes are no longer so easy to label, and labels which did useful service in the past, such as ‘free world’ and ‘iron curtain,’ seem increasingly inadequate as descriptions of contending interests within and between blocs and of new bonds of common interest being slowly built across what were thought to be impenetrable lines of demarcation.”