The rout of the Sandinistas was quickly followed by a major setback in the Cuban attempt to ‘export the revolution’. In 1966 Che Guevara devised a hopelessly unrealistic plan to set up a base in Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America, to train guerrillas from all parts of the continent and spread revolution across the Western hemisphere. Che convinced himself that he would turn Bolivia into another Vietnam. Argentina and Brazil would intervene and provoke mass protest movements which would bring down their military regimes. According to Che’s fantasy master-plan for continental revolution, the United States would then also be drawn in. The strains of fighting guerrillas in both Vietnam and Latin America would force Washington to set up a dictatorship whose inevitable disintegration would destroy the bourgeois state and open the way to revolution in the United States.
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To conceal his journey to, and presence in, Bolivia for as long as possible, Che employed some of the techniques used by the DGI Illegals Directorate. He shaved off his beard and moustache, had his long hair cut short, put on a suit, disguised himself as a Uruguayan bureaucrat and had his photograph inserted in two false Uruguayan passports, each made out in a different name. In October 1966 Che flew to Moscow, then - like most Cuban illegals - returned to Latin America via Prague on one of his passports. In November he arrived in Bolivia, where his grandiose scheme for setting the continent ablaze rapidly reduced itself to guerrilla operations in a small area of the Rio Grande basin.
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Only a few years earlier, before his revolutionary rhetoric lost all touch with Latin American reality, Che had insisted, ‘A guerrilla war is a people’s war . . . To attempt to conduct this kind of war without the support of the populace is a prelude to inevitable disaster.’
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Che’s Bolivian adventure ended in ‘inevitable disaster’ for precisely that reason. Not a single peasant in the Rio Grande basin joined his guerrillas. Even the Bolivian Communist Party (accused of treachery by Che) failed to support him. He wrote gloomily in his diary, ‘The peasant masses are no help to us whatever, and they are turning into informers.’
During a visit to Havana in July 1967 the Soviet Prime Minister, Aleksei Kosygin, complained that Cuban attempts to export revolution were ‘playing into the hands of the imperialists and weakening and diverting the efforts of the socialist world to liberate Latin America’. Castro’s refusal to heed Soviet advice caused a significant setback to the hitherto high-flying career of his friend, Aleksandr Alekseyev, the former KGB resident turned Soviet ambassador in Havana, who was accused in the Centre of going native and failing to restrain Castro’s adventurism. Alekseyev was recalled to Moscow, allegedly for medical treatment, in the summer of 1967. His successor as ambassador was a tough career diplomat, Aleksandr Soldatov, who did not arrive in Havana until the following year. The chief KGB adviser in the DGI, Rudolf Petrovich Shlyapnikov, was also recalled in the summer of 1967 after being accused by the DGI of conspiring with a pro-Moscow ‘microfaction’ in the Cuban Communist Party.
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Che’s guerrilla operations ended in October 1967 with his capture and execution by US-trained Bolivian forces. Death enormously enhanced his reputation, replacing the reality of the brave but incompetent guerrilla with the heroic image of the revolutionary martyr. Castro declared in an emotional address to the Cuban people that 8 October, the day of Che’s capture, would henceforth be for ever celebrated as the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla Fighter:
As all of us pay him homage, as all our thoughts are turned to the Che, as we look forward confidently to the future, to the final victory of the people, we all say to him and to all the heroes who have fought and fallen at his side: ‘Ever onward to victory!’
Moscow initially failed to see the symbolic value of the martyred Che as a weapon in the propaganda war against US imperialism.
Pravda
published instead an article by an Argentinian Communist denouncing the futility of the Cuban policy of exporting revolution. Leonid Brezhnev clearly had Guevara in mind when publicly condemning the idea that ‘a conspiracy of heroes’ could make a socialist revolution.
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The KGB was later to recognize the world-wide popularity of the Che Guevara myth as a useful element in active-measures campaigns against American imperialism. In October 1967, however, the only commemoration in Moscow of Che’s death was by a small, forlorn congregation of Latin American students who gathered outside the US embassy. In Washington, by contrast, over 50,000 Americans, most from various factions of the New Left which spread across American campuses in the late 1960s, assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial and bowed their heads in silent homage to the great opponent of US imperialism. A poll of US university students in 1968 discovered that more identified with Che than with any other figure, alive or dead.
In the immediate aftermath of Che’s martyrdom and the thinly veiled Soviet criticism of Cuban adventurism, Castro showed little inclination to mend his fences with Moscow. When in January 1968 he scornfully dismissed some of the ideas ‘put forward in the name of Marxism’ as ‘real fossils’, it was obvious that he had Soviet ideas in mind: ‘Marxism needs to develop, overcome a certain sclerosis, interpret the realities of the present in an objective and scientific way, behave like a revolutionary force and not like a pseudo-revolutionary church.’
It was clear to Castro’s listeners that Cuba was the ‘revolutionary force’ and the Soviet Union the ‘pseudo-revolutionary church’ which had succumbed to ideological sclerosis. Soon afterwards the Maximum Leader staged a show trial of a ‘microfaction’ of pro-Soviet loyalists within the Cuban Communist Party, who were found guilty of ‘ideological diversionism’ prejudicial to the ‘unity and firmness of the revolutionary forces’. During the trial, the head of the DGI, Manuel Piñeiro, gave evidence that members of the microfaction had been in contact with the KGB.
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With the threatened collapse of the Soviet ‘bridgehead’ in Cuba, the KGB’s grand strategy conceived in 1961 to orchestrate ‘armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments’ in Latin America seemed in tatters. The Centre’s early optimism about the prospects for a Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua had faded away. During the later 1960s the Centre was more interested in using FSLN guerrillas in operations to reconnoitre sabotage targets in the southern United States than in helping them prepare for revolution in Nicaragua. In 1966 a KGB sabotage and intelligence group (DRG) based on the ISKRA guerrilla group was formed on the Mexican-US border with support bases in the area of Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana and Ensenada. Its leader, Andara y Ubeda (PRIM), travelled to Moscow for training in Line F operations. Among the chief sabotage targets were American military bases, missile sites, radar installations, and the oil pipeline (codenamed START) which ran from El Paso in Texas to Costa Mesa, California. Three sites on the American coast were selected for DRG landings, together with large-capacity dead-drops in which to store mines, explosive, detonators and other sabotage materials. A support group codenamed SATURN was tasked with using the movements of migrant workers (
braceros
) to conceal the transfer of agents and munitions across the border.
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The year 1968 was a difficult one for the KGB in both Europe and Latin America. The show trial of the pro-Soviet microfaction in Havana was quickly followed by what Moscow considered an outrageous display of ideological subversion in Czechoslovakia. The attempt by the reformers of the Prague Spring to create ‘Socialism with a human face’ was interpreted by the KGB as counter-revolution. The near-collapse of official censorship culminated in a Prague May Day parade with banners proclaiming such irreverent messages for Moscow as ‘Long live the USSR - but at its own expense!’ The KGB played a major role both in assisting the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968 and in the subsequent ‘normalization’ which ensured the country’s return to pro-Soviet orthodoxy.
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Castro was widely expected to side with Prague reformers and to condemn the August invasion of Czechoslovakia. He began his first broadcast speech after the invasion, however, by saying that some of what he had to say would ‘run counter to the feelings of many people’. Castro acknowledged that the invasion had no legal basis but insisted that, in the greater interests of ‘the people’s struggle against imperialism’, it was fully justified:
In short, the Czechoslovak regime was moving toward capitalism and it was inexorably marching toward imperialism. About this we did not have the slightest doubt . . . The essential thing, whether we accept it or not, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which led to the breakdown of a socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism. From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another.
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All this was music to Moscow’s ears. The Maximum Leader’s emergence over the next few months as a dependable Moscow loyalist made it possible for the Soviet Union to shore up its crumbling Cuban bridgehead.
Probably the main reason for Castro’s ideological somersault only months after the show trial and imprisonment of Moscow loyalists within the Cuban Communist Party was a severe economic crisis which served to emphasize Cuba’s dependence on Soviet economic aid. Cuban industry and power stations ran on Soviet oil shipped from the Black Sea. When Moscow began to cut back its oil exports as a sign of its displeasure early in 1968, there were power cuts in Havana, and Cuban sugar mills and factories began to grind to a halt. Castro himself worsened the crisis by an economically disastrous ‘revolutionary offensive’ in March designed to destroy the remnants of free enterprise by nationalizing 55,000 small businesses which accounted for a third of Cuba’s retail sales. As a reward for the Maximum Leader’s newfound loyalty, the Soviet Union effectively bailed out the Cuban economy. By the end of 1969, Cuba owed the Soviet Union $4 billion.
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Castro’s decision to side with Moscow against the Czechoslovak reformers also reflected his own authoritarian leadership style and distaste for the political freedoms of the Prague Spring. By the mid-1960s the real achievements of the Cuban Revolution - the reforms in health and education and the end of
gangsterismo
chief among them - were increasingly overshadowed by an empty revolutionary rhetoric which bore little relation either to the regime’s shambolic economic mismanagement or to its intolerance of dissent. In 1965 Castro himself admitted that Cuban jails contained 20,000 political prisoners.
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A huge network of surveillance kept close watch for any sign of ideological dissidence. The DGI was assisted by the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), a nationwide network of neighbourhood associations which reported all suspicious activities. Founded in 1960, the CDRs expanded over the next decade to include almost a third of the adult population. Immediately after Castro’s endorsement of the crushing of the Prague Spring, the CDRs, acting on instructions from the DGI, arranged for a series of ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations to support his speech. Cuba thus developed a vast system of social control similar to, but more conspicuous than, those operated by the KGB and its east European allies. By the late 1960s, Castro was using the CDRs to dictate even the length of men’s hair and women’s dresses. In November 1968 the parents of long-haired youths and miniskirted girls were summoned to appear before the local authorities.
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Castro had a particular dislike of homosexuals and instructed that they ‘should not be allowed in positions where they are able to exert an influence on young people’. Gays were routinely refused tenancies in new housing projects and frequently singled out for service in forced-labour units.
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Just as some of the Old Left of the 1930s, seduced by the myth-image of the Soviet Union as the world’s first worker-peasant state, had been blind to the savage reality of Stalin’s Russia, so a generation later many of the New Left of the 1960s shut their eyes to the increasingly authoritarian (though much less homicidal) nature of Castro’s rule and his sometimes brutal disregard of basic human rights. The heroic image of Castro as a revolutionary David in battle fatigues blockaded on his island by the Goliath of American imperialism had a global appeal exploited by Soviet as well as Cuban propagandists. Among Castro’s most naively enthusiastic Western supporters were the Americans of the Venceremos (‘We Shall Overcome’) Brigade, who from 1969 onwards came to cut sugar cane in Cuba and show their solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Castro paid public tribute to the courage of the
brigadistas
‘in defying the ire of the imperialists’.
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Privately, however, he looked askance at the presence of gay and women’s liberation movements among his American New Left supporters. Venceremos feminists, for their part, were taken aback by the behaviour of the Cuban female singers sent to entertain the Brigade: ‘They frequently had bleached hair and tight-fitting skirts, and relied on sexual gestures and flirtation with the audience. We knew that, when not entertaining, these women were probably dedicated revolutionaries, doing hard work. The incongruity was hard to deal with.’
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