The Cuban Revolution and Western Intellectuals and Cuba: A Personal Report (continued)

Karol concluded his book before latest events revealed the direction Cuba was moving in. In 1973, Cuba and the Soviet Union signed a twenty-five-year Cuban-Soviet trade agreement. Internally, Cuba introduced material incentives in production--a topic to be taken up shortly in this essay--and externally, Cuba sought to use the Soviet-U.S. détente as a vehicle for gaining acceptance of the Cuban Revolution.

One political development within Cuba was an obvious move away from internal democracy. The first sign, perhaps, was the arrest and imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. On March 20, 1971, Padilla was arrested on unspecified charges. After five weeks in prison, Padilla appeared before the Cuban Writer's Union, where he read aloud a confession of wrongdoing. His bourgeois ego, he argued, had led him to make unwarranted criticisms of the Revolution. He had gone so far as to express his views to European visitors, all for the purpose of gaining literary favor outside Cuba so he could be published abroad. His poetry itself, he continued, was negative:

There are clichés for disenchantment and these clichés were the ones I always mastered. . . . That is to say the driving force of my poetry has been pessimism, skepticism, and disenchantment. . . . This skepticism and disenchantment do not arouse enthusiasm; they do not encourage revolution. The poems contain a defeatist spirit, and a defeatist spirit is counterrevolutionary.

The Cuban government could not tolerate a poem which did not play its part in creating enthusiasm for the necessary labor mobilizations. To merely imply a state of disenchantment was grounds for being considered counter revolutionary. Defenders of the Padilla arrest ask why one should be so concerned with the ego gratification of a bourgeois poet. The Cuban government was embarrassed, however, to find that its most staunch defenders in Europe and Latin America defended Padilla. Writers protesting included Jean- Paul Sartre, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, José Revueltas, and Carlos Franqui. They were, Fidel Castro said, "bourgeois liberals" and "false friends" of the Revolution. What were important were the social advances of the Revolution, not the literary concern of a minor intellectual. The Padilla arrest, however, had serious implications for Cuban society. These were spelled out by José Yglesias, in the June 3, 1972, New York Review of Books:

I do not want to forget one lesson of Padilla's poetry--that even the fate of a single person cannot be glossed over. But I cannot help but ask what his incarceration and recantation signify for the Cuban people. That is the barrier to be leaped in this argument. The battle that the Soviet-oriented Cuban leaders--and they now seem to include Fidel--have recurrently fought with the Cuban intellectuals is a false one. It is a substitute for, a distraction from, a more difficult battle--to solve the nation's economic problems. It is false too because the leaders try to believe that the recalcitrant artists are one thing and the people are another. But if you silence one group it is very likely you are not listening to the other.

Here is great irony. At a time when Cuba was isolated and under true state of siege--the time of the Bay of Pigs--Fidel Castro proclaimed, as he did in 1961, that "the Revolution has to . . . act in such a manner that the whole group of artists and intellectuals who are not genuine revolutionaries can find within the Revolution a place to work and create, a place where their creative spirit, even though they are not revolutionary writers and artists, has the opportunity and freedom to be expressed. . . . within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing."

At the present moment, the grounds of what is considered within the Revolution have substantively diminished. The January, 1913, trade agreements between the Soviet Union and Cuba give Cuba about one million dollars per day, with debt payment deferred until 1986. Evidently, one price of that aid is enforced ideological uniformity. Pensemiento Critico, a journal published by the University of Havana's Philosophy Department, has been closed down by the government. The only organ of communication functioning outside the aegis of the state, it published resolutions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Yugoslavian articles, as well as theoretical contributions by European neo-Marxists, including the writings of Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and current material from U.S. independent radicals, including Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy. When the only other source of information is Granma, the official paper of the Communist Party, the cessation of the only remaining source of open political dialogue cannot be lightly dismissed.

The importance of such dialogue, and the necessity for institutional channels of political change, has been noted by a Canadian radical, C. Ian Lumsden, writing in International Journal for the Summer of 1969:

Cuba's problem is that it must retain the libertarian, humanistic character of its revolutionary socialism in circumstances that increasingly militate against it. . . Cuba's explicit liberation from the mythology of communism might lead it to reexamine the whole concept of the vanguard party and the political institutions that are associated with the European Communist countries. For example, Cuba has yet to develop institutions which permit popular participation in decision-making, and which encourage a political dialogue amongst the masses. Mass mobilization campaigns are not the same as political participation. What is disturbing is Cuba's unwillingness to encourage reasoned public discussion with regard to the political experiments that have taken place in other socialist countries, ranging from Yugoslavia to China. In the final analysis, the libertarian character of the revolution depends upon democratizing its political institutions and permitting conflicting points of view to be represented in its presently simplistic, propaganda-laden communications media.

Little has occurred since Lumsden wrote his article to indicate that the Cuban government has moved in a libertarian direction. True, Fidel Castro was unusually candid when he admitted Cuban failures--failures he attributed to the country's leadership--in their decision to harvest ten million tons of sugar in 1970. But, as René Dumont has pointed out, Castro followed his admission only with "a rather indefinite promise of democratization." The major theme of his speeches to follow was "the struggle against absenteeism; this seemed to emphasize an orientation that was still authoritarian." Socialism, Dumont argues in Is Cuba Socialist?, "demands true popular participation at all levels of decision-making. In Cuba, the present Party mechanisms provide for nothing more than a means of registering approval of government policy. Almost nobody tries to find out what the workers, the cadres, the intellectuals, and the peasants think." Castro, he concludes, does not understand "the extent to which he is increasingly following" a path not dissimilar to the one taken by Stalin in the Russia of the 1930s.

There is some indication that rather than lead to an internal liberalization, the prospects of détente may lead to a hardening of ideological conformity. One Cuban editor in formed Frances FitzGerald that it would mean heightened attention to ideological and political awareness, lest Cubans be tempted by the lure of US consumer goods. As modus vivendi looms on the horizon, Raúl Castro delivered a speech in which he warned Cubans against communication with capitalist nations, attacked US rock music and youth culture, and generally demanded ideological purity.

On the other hand, some signs do exist of a positive nature. For the first time since 1958, elections were held in Mantanzas province. The Cubans did not run one single slate of candidates. Each vacant position involved a contest between two candidates for the office. The real question, however, has to do with the nature of the electoral process. What were the grounds of competition for office? Did the candidates compete on the grounds that candidate A would be a better administrator than candidate B, given his or her experience serving the Revolution? Did candidates have the option of criticizing basic decisions of the Central Committee? Could they reflect criticisms coming from the populace? Only careful scrutiny of the changing contours of Cuba can answer these questions.

The point is that Cuba has yet to come to terms with the necessity for full and free debate on essential questions of policy. Will the average Cuban be encouraged to engage in debate on the course of development for Cuba? Will the average Cuban be given a chance to debate not the implementation of policy handed down by the Central Committee, but the entire economic and political course of their nation? Will the press begin to function as an organ of criticism, reflecting the sentiments of the citizens?--not as the official organ of the Communist Party, existing only to disseminate the line for officials. In a nation with only one paper, that becomes a problem of immense dimensions.

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