A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (78 page)

Five years later it registered a failure it could barely cope with. The corrupt and dictatorial Cuban regime of Fulgencio Batista suddenly collapsed, leaving power in the hands of a group of guerillas led by Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and an exiled Argentine doctor, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

The guerillas had landed in a remote part of the island barely two years earlier. Following their victory a whole revolutionary mythology developed ascribing their success to the support either of the mass of peasants or the labourers who worked the island’s sugar plantations. In fact the guerillas’ remoteness cut them off from all but a tiny proportion of the peasantry and all the labourers. Their victory came from their ability to take advantage of the extreme political isolation of the Batista regime. It had alienated the island’s two main middle class parties and upset its capitalist class because of its extreme corruption—Cuba was a centre of Mafia gangsterism (as shown in the film
The Godfather
) and known as the ‘whorehouse of the Caribbean’. It had also embittered the mass of the population by whittling away social gains made in the 1930s. In the end even the US stopped providing support for a dictator it feared was going to fall.

Under such conditions it did not require much to bring about that fall. Castro’s small band of guerillas (only 20 survived the initial landing at the end of 1956,
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and there were only 200 in the summer of 1958) were like the snowball that causes an avalanche. So long as Batista’s army was too corrupt and feeble to defeat them, their mere existence proved his weakness, and in time his own army fell apart.

The rebel army which entered Havana on the first day of 1959 had the backing of all social classes in Cuba. But it still faced the objective conditions which had led to Batista’s regime having an ever-narrower base of support. The Cuban economy—dependent on fluctuating world prices for its major export, sugar, and with output per head no higher than in the 1920s—was incapable of meeting the contradictory demands of the different classes. The capitalists and their US business partners wanted to raise their profits and be free to move them abroad. The workers and labourers wanted increased earnings, and the peasants an improvement in their miserable incomes. Members of the young educated middle class, who had provided both the cadres for the guerrilla movement and its large support network in the cities, wanted to develop the Cuban economy so as to provide themselves both with a sense of worth and well paid careers.

Castro could not satisfy one class without antagonising others. To satisfy the capitalists would be to head down the road taken so disastrously by Batista, and this Castro was not prepared to do. Instead he opted for a policy of providing certain reforms to gain working class and peasant support (land reform, the provision of welfare benefits and healthcare, and literacy campaigns) combined with the use of the state to push ambitious schemes of industrialisation. It was a choice which inevitably meant a clash with entrenched capitalist interests and US big business since, ‘The Cuban economy was so wedded to the US economy that the country was in many ways an appendage of it’.
²⁸⁸

Eighteen months after Castro took power the US-owned oil refineries on the island refused to process cheap Russian oil. Castro nationalised them. The US retaliated by ending the arrangement by which it bought the bulk of Cuba’s sugar harvest; Cuba nationalised the US-owned sugar companies, factories and electricity and telephone monopolies, and developed its trade links with Russia. Anti-Castro hysteria swept the US media, while business exiles in Miami raised an ever louder cry about Castro’s ‘betrayal’ of the revolution.

Then in April 1961 the CIA tried to land an army of exiles intent on overthrowing Castro on the island’s Bay of Pigs, while unmarked US planes bombed Cuban airfields. The escapade was a miserable failure as the Cuban population rallied behind the regime.

Endorsement of the landing had been one of the first actions of new US president John F Kennedy. He became a cult figure for many liberals after his assassination in 1962. But he showed no sign of liberalism in his dealings with Cuba. He and his brother Robert developed a deep personal enmity towards Castro, and gave the go-ahead for the CIA to plot with Mafia figures against the Cuban leader’s life—including such ludicrous schemes as the use of exploding cigars! They also prepared contingency plans for a US-backed invasion of the island. In 1962 their manoeuvres led to a direct confrontation with Russia.

For many people who lived through it, the week of 20-27 October 1962 was the most frightening of their lives—the closest the Cold War came to turning into a nuclear war. US warships had surrounded Cuba, intent on using force to stop any Soviet vessels reaching it. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles and 1,400 bombers were on alert. Scores of bombers remained continuously in the air, each armed with several nuclear weapons and ready to move to targets in the USSR the moment the order came. And in Florida, just 60 miles from Cuba, the US assembled the largest invasion force since the Second World War—100,000 troops, 90 ships, 68 squadrons of aircraft and eight aircraft carriers.

Kennedy’s government had learned that the USSR under Khrushchev was secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. The US could already hit Russian cities from its bases in Western Europe and Turkey. The Cuban missiles would provide Russia with the same capacity to hit US cities. Castro and Che Guevara welcomed the missiles, assuming they would be a deterrent against a US attack on Cuba. Undoubtedly this was mistaken, since there was little likelihood of Russia risking the destruction of its own cities in a nuclear exchange merely to please the Cubans.

The US government, however, was prepared to risk nuclear war in order to get the missiles removed. How close the world came to nuclear war was later revealed by the president’s brother, Robert Kennedy. ‘We all agreed, if the Russians were prepared to go to war over Cuba, they were prepared to go to nuclear war and we might as well have the showdown then as six months later.’ Transcripts of the US presidential discussions show the government of the world’s greatest power was indeed prepared to risk nuclear war with Russia.
²⁸⁹
They also show the Kennedy obsession with Cuba was connected to a wider issue—the fear of an erosion of US global hegemony.

War was only avoided because Khrushchev backed down at the last minute and agreed to withdraw the missiles—a decision which he only narrowly carried in the Politburo and which antagonised the Cuban leaders. In effect, the Russian leadership decided it could not challenge the existing partition of the world between itself and US imperialism—just as the US had not challenged that partition at the time of the Hungarian Revolution. This had important implications in the years which followed. Both sides continued to accumulate enormous quantities of nuclear weapons. But they did so on the basis of what they called ‘détente’—an agreement not to trample too much on each other’s toes. This continued right through to 1980, despite huge upheavals in both camps in the interim.

The Cuban leaders were distraught at Russia’s decision to withdraw the missiles. They had been used as a bargaining chip, and there was little they could do about it, since they were dependent on Russian economic support. What that dependency meant at home was shown by a scaling down of plans for industrialisation and a return to the pre-revolutionary reliance on sugar exports. ‘Diversification of agriculture’, the message of the early years of the revolution, was replaced by a call for a record sugar harvest. Internationally there was a brief attempt to break out of the constraints imposed by Russian policy. The Cuban leaders arranged ‘Organisations of Latin American Solidarity’ and ‘Tricontinental’ conferences at which they made half-concealed criticisms of the policies Russia was imposing on Third World Communist parties and liberation movements. Che Guevara eventually left Cuba to attempt to put these criticisms into practice through guerrilla struggle in Congo-Zaire and Bolivia. But neither the criticisms nor Che Guevara’s practice were based on a concrete assessment of the class forces in a particular situation. Instead Guevara attempted to impose the model of revolutionary struggle which had been successful in the very special circumstances of Cuba. The Congo intervention was a miserable failure and the Bolivian action stumbled from disaster to disaster until Che was killed—shot after capture by a CIA agent. By 1968 Castro and the Cuban government were back supporting the Russian approach.

The Vietnam War

In the early 1960s the US government saw Vietnam as just one place among many where it was using ‘advisers’ to organise military actions against opposition forces. ‘We have 30 Vietnams’, Robert Kennedy told a journalist.
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On the face of it he had reason to be confident. A US government programme designed to stabilise Latin America, ‘The Alliance for Progress’, seemed to have been successful in stopping any repetition of the Cuban Revolution, and guerrilla movements in Venezuela, Guatemala, Bolivia and elsewhere were defeated. In the mid-1960s the timely deployment of US troops had stopped the advance of Congolese rebels against the capital of the US’s client dictator Mobutu and thwarted an attempt at a popular rising in the Dominican Republic. In Indonesia there was not even the need for US troops. The CIA worked with General Suharto, who used the excuse of an abortive putsch by left wing generals to murder half a million people, destroy the most powerful Communist Party in the Third World, and replace the populist independence leader Sukarno.

But Robert Kennedy’s boast about Vietnam proved misplaced. The country had been partitioned at the time of the settlement of the Korean War in 1954. France’s attempt to hold the country as a colony had been dealt a devastating blow when the Vietminh liberation movement inflicted a major defeat on it at Dien Bien Phu. But the Vietminh had been persuaded by Russia and China to take control of only the Northern half of the country, leaving the Vietnamese groups which had backed France to run the South pending elections for the country as a whole. The US, which had been funding most of the French war effort, now sponsored the government that ran the South and helped to ensure the elections never took place.

There was increasing repression directed against any opposition in the South. Buddhist monks protested by setting fire to themselves, and former Vietminh fighters fled to the countryside and took up arms in self defence. Soon there was widespread guerrilla warfare, continual unrest in the towns, and a government whose survival depended on increasing amounts of US support. The 400 ‘advisers’ when Kennedy took over the presidency had risen to 18,000 by the time of his assassination. In 1965 marines landed at Danang naval base, and there were 33,500 US troops in the country within a month, with 210,000 by the end of the year. Meanwhile the US air force waged the biggest bombing campaign in history, pounding away at both the North and South, day after day, week after week, year after year, in the belief that it could force the liberation forces to abandon the struggle.

The Vietnam War was not like the war in Korea, a struggle waged by regular armies which the rulers of the North could call off at any time. It had grown out of spontaneous struggles against a repressive regime, and the leaders of North Vietnam could not turn their back on these without doing enormous damage to their prestige as the pioneers of the struggle for national independence.

The US was trapped in a war of attrition from which there was no easy way out. It could establish a forward base at Khe Sanh near the partition line with the North and, at great cost, stop the liberation forces taking it. But it could not use the base to subdue the surrounding countryside, and eventually had to abandon it. It could maintain control of the towns, but it could not avoid being almost overrun by a sudden offensive by the liberation forces at Tet, the Vietnamese new year, early in 1968. It could not stop the escalating cost of the Vietnam War increasing its total military outlay by 30 percent and causing US big business to protest. Finally, it could not prevent the war causing huge fissures to open in US society as young people rebelled against the horror of war and being conscripted to fight.

China: from the Great Leap Forward to the market

China’s official image in the 1950s and early 1960s was of a land of smiling peasants and overjoyed workers, joint leader of the Communist world with the USSR, steadily moving towards a socialism of peace and plenty. It was an image carried in thousands of left wing papers across the world.

The US had its own rival image of China. It was of the biggest Red Menace of them all, a land of organised hate, a society in which hundreds of millions toiled mindlessly at the command of those at the top, even closer to the nightmare world of George Orwell’s
1984
than Russia. This image played a powerful role in US propaganda in support of the war in Vietnam. The US claimed that China was intent upon expanding its influence south and destroying freedom. If it succeeded in Vietnam the other countries of south east Asia would be next, falling like ‘dominoes’ until nowhere in the ‘free world’ was safe.

Neither image accorded with the realities of life for the fifth or more of the world’s people who lived in China. US propaganda ignored the growing schism between Russia and China from at least the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s Russia had cut off aid and withdrawn thousands of advisers from China, and the two countries were denouncing each other’s policies at international meetings.

Official Chinese propaganda glossed over the class divisions in the country and the extreme hardship in which most of its people lived. On taking control of China’s great cities in 1949 the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army had followed a policy of uniting all classes, including a section of capitalists, behind a programme aimed at economic reconstruction. In the early 1950s this gave way to a programme of industrialisation, loosely modelled on that pursued by Stalin in Russia and likewise aimed at accomplishing what capitalism had done in the West. Many industries had been state-owned under the Kuomintang regime or been confiscated from their former Japanese owners. The state now took over most of the rest, but paid their old owners fixed dividends (so there were still millionaires in ‘Red’ China). The apparatus of state control was staffed, in the main, by members of the educated middle classes, with most of the officials of the Kuomintang period left in place. There was land reform in regions dominated by landlords, but the better-off peasants were left untouched. The condition of the mass of workers remained much as before.