The Dictator of the Cows (continued)

In these years, and into this world of science-as-magic, Castro constantly imported a lineup of foreign scientists who were commanded to be magicians. When the elderly, white-haired French farmer, teacher, and agronomist André Voison arrived at the Havana airport, he found the Cuban leader standing at attention. A head of state waiting at the airport "to greet a modest French scientist at two o'clock in the morning!" as the amazed Voison put it. Naty had already visited and charmed the modest Voison in France and had persuaded the specialist in pasture grass to visit Havana. Castro now took over. Voison was cyclonically wooed, glorified, deified; Castro mounted a massive campaign of "grass indoctrination" for the whole Cuban people, and the sixtyish Voison unwittingly became the single, unrivaled hero of all of Cuba's honored cows.

Dr. René Dumont, a highly respected French agronomist and scientist, came to Cuba, looked around, and came again and again, always wanting to believe in Castro's "revolutionary" agriculture, but always and ever disquietedly falling back upon scientific reality. At every turn the unhappy Dumont saw only waste and pseudoscience. Dumont just couldn't figure it out when he was informed that Fidelista economic philosophy meant that "a devotion to the community will be the fundamental basis for the creation of wealth." Instead, Dumont saw "mile upon mile of banana plantations where the trees were dying because they had been planted in badly drained soil where the water table was tainted with magnesium salts." But the most telling experiment that Dumont saw was the one in anti-soil erosion in Pinar del Río. Here Castro sought to build large parallel terraces on contour lines all up the mountain. Dumont finally understood: the experiment was meant not to fight soil erosion but to go against nature itself, to "dominate the mountain."

In the end, all the hated scientists who failed to recognize the brilliance of the "new genetics" and the "new agriculture" were thrown out, vilified, and excoriated by Castro. Professor Voison was saved, providentially perhaps, although he might have contested the idea, by the grave. He died of a heart attack on December 21 in the same year he had arrived in Cuba (too much excitement, they said). The father of Cuban pasture grass made the front page of Revolución and was given a state funeral. Castro himself gave the funeral oration.

Castro's stubborn fascination with genetic engineering fared only somewhat better in the field of cancer research. Just as he had taken a fancy to cows and pasture grass, Castro suddenly took an insatiable fancy to the drug interferon. A protein made by most cells of the body, interferon belongs to the first line of defense against viral infections and was thought to have properties that could block the transformation of normal cells to cancer cells. He struck out in all directions to make Cuba a center for interferon research.

Professor Karl Cantell, a specialist on interferon in Helsinki, was sitting in his office in the lovely gray old Finnish city when the Cuban embassy called: Would he please visit Cuba? The Cubans had converted a luxurious villa on the outskirts of Havana into a lab and had built a new research institute. They wanted Professor Cantell to come for its Inauguration. "Cuba is a poor country," the slim, professorial young doctor recalled one day in Helsinki, "but when a dictator wants something, everything is possible. I went there, spent some days, met Fidel Castro. When I saw Castro, there was always a photographer with us -- even when we were drinking, they were always taking pictures. They had a huge cow institute, and I saw Ubre Blanca there. I think they treated her with interferon because she had a malignancy."

In the end, however, although the scientific work performed by Cuban doctors was valid, they got little international attention for the simple reason that Castro would not allow them to publish in the international journals. His paranoid closure of Cuba was at odds with his dreams of glory.

Looming above all these dreams as the true zenith of scientific triumph was Castro's greatest obsession -- the "Great Ten-Million-Ton" sugar harvest. Into this effort, which pitted the strength of his own will against the cold rationality of science, he poured those mammoth energies that, only for the moment, had been diverted from military expansionism abroad. As he had once militarized his guerrilla international, so now he militarized the harvest and, indeed, the whole of Cuba.

Revealing his innermost self through his choice of metaphors, he said, prematurely, that the harvest "made a man of our country ... made it grow up . . . made it into a giant." Had the economic mobilization for the harvest or zafra been a mobilization for war, it would have been one of the great military mobilizations of all time. The entire country was called by its master illusionist to the grandiose delusion. In 1969, the harvest lasted 344 days (an eighteen-month harvest "year") and everyone participated. Christmas was not celebrated that year because of "activity in the cane fields," and the revolutionary "holy day" of July 26 was proffered by Castro as the "new Christmas." As it happened, Christmas was never again celebrated in Cuba. In place of the old holidays, monster rallies, with hundreds of thousands filling the plaza, were held regularly, but there was an almost desperate passion about them, for in truth there was little to celebrate anymore.

Everyone cut sugarcane. Foreign dignitaries cut cane, Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Andrei Grechko cut cane, wives of ambassadors cut cane. And then, it failed. Not only was nine million tons the maximum to be expected, but even that figure was misleading because much of the cane was in actuality left over from the previous harvest or prematurely cut from the next one. How would the proud figure of Fidel Castro get out of this one?

On July 26, 1970, the seventeenth anniversary of the Moncada attack, Castro stood before the Cuban people as much the master of dissimulation and manipulation as ever he had been. In the past he had emotionally and psychologically changed places with his masas, making them one with him. Now he made himself one with them, transferring dependencies just as he had transmogrified legitimacies. The all-knowing "macho" caudillo transformed himself for the moment into a contrite and humble human being, a man who could no longer perform "miracles." They were all responsible for the failure, he told his people, but he more than anyone. He was in the end one of the "illiterates." He recognized his mistakes and then, brilliantly, he offered to resign. This was a delicate and dangerous tactic, to be used, as he well knew, only in moments of special anger and pregnancy, as with Urrutia. Now, once again, he set himself up for rejection. This was a risk because, as Max Weber knew intellectually and Fidel Castro knew instinctively, the leader's "charismatic claim breaks down if his mission is not recognized by those to whom he feels he has been sent." But Castro's judgment that las masas would not (could not) reject him was, as usual, unfailingly accurate.

"No, no, no," the crowd shouted, in its utter dependency upon the líder maximo. "No, no, no!"

In the end the master political alchemist actually gained by his mammoth failure. He was not only anointed once again but he emerged stronger than ever. "The Cubans were well manipulated by Fidel," the high-level defector José Luis Llovio explained. "He told them he had known since April but did not want to say anything to the people." So, n addition, then, Castro in his "concern" for his people had tried to spare ~em the knowledge of failure. They were again bound forever together, defenseless against an outer world that would now criticize them and mock them more than ever before. He had protected them, and he had made them want to protect him, for he appeared suddenly vulnerable.

But it was hardly for naught. When the zafra was over, Castro's island ad been transformed into an economic military camp run on more purely and extensively military lines than any "Communist" country in the world. The economy was now organized as an exact national equivalent f the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra. Personally terrified of the slightest disorganization, Castro found both sense and security in the total militarization of everything.

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