Victorious Insurgencies: Four Rebellions that Shaped Our World

3. Cuba: The House of Cards

3 Cuba The House of Cards When princes think more of luxury than of war, they lose their states. —Machiavelli During the Cold War, it was customary in some circles to refer to the seizure of power by Fidel Castro and his followers as the first Communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. This description was completely misleading. Castro did indeed impose a Communist regime on the Cubans, but he had not led a Communist revolution. Nevertheless, the flight of the dictator Fulgencio Batista out of Havana in the waning hours of the year 1958 signaled not only the complete collapse of his dictatorship but the beginning of a true transformation of the politics of the Western Hemisphere. This transformation had three main aspects. First, contrary to the expectations of many Cubans, including those who had opposed Batista, the triumphant rebels thoroughly dismantled Cuban society, drove out most of the middle class, and created a social upheaval rare in this part of the globe and in some other parts. Second, Cuba soon became that previously most unthinkable entity, a Soviet outpost in the very center of what Americans had long imagined to be their special sphere of influence, a situation that preoccupied Washington administrations (and obsessed one of them) for decades and produced the major American-Soviet confrontation known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Third, quite a few of those who desired to spread revolution throughout Latin America believed they saw in this Cuban experience a model they could easily imitate. Many Cuba Cuba ■ 143 years elapsed, much blood was shed, and much egregious nonsense was written before the total absence of success for Cuban-inspired revolts, notably the fatal fiasco of Ernesto Guevara in Bolivia, began to reduce the Cuban Revolution and its leaders to realistic proportions . Another factor in that reevaluation was certain undeniable shortcomings of the Castro regime: for example, Batista’s Cuba was a sugar island dominated by a foreign power; after several decades of Castro’s totalitarian rule, Cuba was still that. Before Castro Bathed by the waves of theAtlantic and the Caribbean, 135 miles from the southern tip of Florida, and forty-four thousand square miles in area (the size of Pennsylvania or Bulgaria), Cuba is the largest and most westerly of the Great Antilles island group. In the age of sail, Cuba was called the Pearl of the Antilles and heavily laden Spanish treasure fleets embarked for Europe from Havana’s excellent harbor. In the last days before the Castro takeover, Cuba had a population of about 6 million, of whom nearly one-quarter lived in greater Havana. The country arguably contained two societies: “one urban, educated, and well-off, the other rural, illiterate and poor.”1 Out of this condition arose one of the most fundamental of the many myths still surrounding and obscuring the reality of the Castro Revolution, themyththatcostGuevarahisunhappylife:themythofamassrebellion of poor peasants rising in their wrath against intolerable poverty. Quite on the contrary, “the Cuban experience belies the thesis that poverty alone is sufficient to cause revolutionary upheavals.”2 True enough, Cuba’ssugarmonoculture,thefoundationoftheisland’seconomicand sociallife,meantthatoneoutoffouremployableworkershadnojobfor muchoftheyear.Butsugargavethecountryoneofhigheststandardsof living in the Western hemisphere. Castro himself eventually embraced sugarasthebasisofhisongoingrevolution,andtoday,aftermorethana half century of Castro’s rule, Cuba is the world’s largest sugar exporter. In any event, it was not from the peasantry but from the urban middle classes that the thrust and leadership of the revolution derived, that is, fromthatsectorofCubansocietythatwas,byLatinAmericanstandards, well advanced economically. In 1958 Cuba was fifth among all Latin American nations in manufacturing, fourth in per capita income, and thirdinnumberofphysicians;itspeoplewere60percenturbanizedand 144 ■ Victorious Insurgencies 75 percent literate. Unions organized a higher percentage of the labor force in Cuba than in the United States; the average wage, allowing for purchasing-power differences, was higher in Cuba than in Belgium or Denmark. Havana had more Cadillacs per capita than any city in the United States, more television sets per capita than any country south of the Rio Grande. But Cuba had reached that most volatile condition for any society: its expectations had outrun its achievements. “The Castro revolution was born not so much out of grinding poverty, racial hatred, economic underdevelopment, or United States imperialism,” explains Howard Wiarda, although these factors were certainly present to some degree. More responsible for the revolution was “the fact that the development of a more modern Cuba was not proceeding fast enough to satisfy rising expectations. . . . Revolution...