Guevara, Debray, and Armed Revisionism
by Lenny Wolff
[This
article appeared in the magazine Revolution,
#53, Winter/Spring 1985, published by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
It is also available as a printed pamphlet from Revolution Books, ordered online
at: http://revolutionbookscamb.org/
]
“This revisionist deviation
has taken on in the past both a ‘left’ and an openly right-wing form. The
modern revisionists preached, especially in the past, the ‘peaceful transition
to socialism’ and promoted the leadership of the bourgeoisie in the national
liberation struggle. However this openly capitulationist, right-wing
revisionism always corresponded with, and has become increasingly intermingled
with, a kind of ‘left’ armed revisionism, promoted at times by the Cuban
leadership and others, which separated the armed struggle from the masses and
preached a line of combining revolutionary stages into one single ‘socialist’
revolution, which in fact meant appealing to the workers on the narrowest of
bases and negating the necessity of the working class to lead the peasantry and
others in thoroughly eliminating imperialism and the backward and distorted
economic and social relations that foreign capital thrives on and reinforces.
Today this form of revisionism is one of the major planks of the
social-imperialist attempt to penetrate and control national liberation
struggles.” (Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
[RIM] 1984, 33)
Over 15 years after his
murder by CIA-trained soldiers, the image of Che Guevara retains a certain
power among the revolutionary-minded. To many he still seems the man of action who
cut through the endless excuses and equivocations of the old-line revisionist
parties in Latin America. More than a few profess to see important differences
between Guevara and Fidel Castro, who, in the period after Guevara’s death,
steered Cuba ever more firmly into an open and passionate embrace of the Soviet
Union. Others even liken Guevara to Mao Tsetung.
And with Guevara’s influence so too goes the influence of focoism, the military and political doctrine which he developed and
attempted to implement, and which was systematized into the book Revolution in the Revolution? by Guevara’s
erstwhile acolyte Régis Debray.
Yet appearance and
essence stand at odds in Che Guevara. Ever ready to criticize and denounce
revisionism in public forums, he predicated his entire project on the support
of the revisionist parties and the Soviet Union; constantly calling attention
to the vulnerability of the U.S. to revolutionary initiatives, he resisted
rallying forth the most massive and potentially powerful revolutionary forces
on the Latin American continent. Indeed, in the end, Guevara set himself in
opposition to revolution internationally.
Because Guevara is
associated with the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s, and because he fell
from the bullets of agents of U.S. imperialism, such an assertion is bound to evoke
emotion. Yet emotion and sentiment must be put aside. Guevarism retains
influence as a political line, and while the Soviets (and Cubans)
internationally often tend to rely more on elements within the armed forces to carry out their strategy of armed
revisionism, they pay no small attention to the directions and activities of
the neo-Guevarist groups. Particularly in situations of acute political crisis,
efforts are made to both foster these neo-Guevarist forces and bring them more
firmly on board the overall revisionist project. Because of all this, Guevarism
(and Guevara himself) must be scientifically evaluated in terms of its
objective social role. This article will examine the military and political
line of Guevarism, its conception of revolution, and its social and material roots.
Central to it will be unraveling the paradox of Che Guevara - the foe of
revisionism who maligns it the better to rely on it.
I
In early 1966 Castro and
Guevara brought Régis Debray
to Cuba for discussions on guerrilla war. The Cubans had asked Debray to
prepare a polemic which would synthesize the experiences of the Cuban
Revolution into a military doctrine and political line distinctively suited to
Latin American conditions. The end product of these discussions – Debray’s
book, Revolution in the Revolution? -
is the single most concentrated exposition of Guevarism. The central theses
of Guevarism run something like this:
(1) The revolution in Latin America has been delayed because the
revolutionaries have remained in thrall to one or another wrong line, or
"imported misconception"; (2)
The Maoist model of a people’s war - which in vast areas of the Third World
includes as a crucial element relying on the masses of peasantry and utilizing
base areas from which to wage the military struggle - simply does not apply in
Latin America due to different objective conditions, principally the more
developed state of the countryside and the sparser and allegedly more passive
character of the peasantry; (3) At the
same time, the views of the Moscow-influenced CPs (which only used armed
struggle as an adjunct to their legalistic/parliamentary maneuvers) and the
Trotskyites (who tailed an anarcho-syndicalist line of workers’ self-defense)
are no better, since after decades of their implementation they have not led to
revolution; (4) The real key to
revolution on the Latin American continent lay in studying the Cuban example,
where a small band of men built an armed unit in the countryside independent of
the peasantry and grew through engaging the regime’s army in battle. These
military focos could and had to be
reproduced throughout Latin America. In the words of Debray, this line gave a
"concrete answer to the question: How to overthrow the power of the capitalist
state? ... The Cuban Revolution offers an answer to fraternal Latin American
countries which has still to be studied in its historical details: by means of
the more or less slow building up, through guerrilla warfare carried out in
suitably chosen rural zones, a mobile
strategic force, a nucleus of a people’s army and of a “future socialist
state” (Debray 1967, 24).
Revolution in the Revolution? focused its main attack on military
line against Mao Tsetung’s conception of people’s war, particularly Mao’s stress on mobilizing the
peasantry and building up base areas from which to wage the war. (At bottom lay
a more fundamental difference concerning the role of the masses in
revolutionary war altogether.) Let us begin by examining the main arguments
made on this point.
Role of the
Peasantry
As noted, the foco line
entailed a basic rejection of any orientation toward the peasantry as a crucial
revolutionary force. Debray insisted on this. Rejected as well was the
revolutionary experience in China and Vietnam. There, Debray wrote, "the
high density of the peasant population, the over-population of the villages and
towns, and the marked predominance of the peasantry over the urban population
permit revolutionary propagandists to mingle easily with the people, ‘like fish
in the water.’”
In Latin America, on the other hand,
The guerrilla focos, when they first begin their activity, are
located in regions of highly dispersed and relatively sparse population.
Nobody, no new arrival, goes unnoticed in an Andean village, for example. Above all else, a stranger inspires distrust.
The Quechua or Cakchiquel (Mayan) peasants have good reason to distrust the
"outsider," "the white man." They know very well that fine
words cannot be eaten and will not protect them from bombardment. The poor
peasant believes, first of all, in anyone who has a certain power, beginning
with the power to do what he says. The system of oppression is subtle: it has
existed from time immemorial, fixed, entrenched, and solid. The army, the guardia rural, the latifundista’s private police, or nowadays the “Green Berets” and
Rangers, enjoy a prestige all the greater for being subconscious. This prestige
constitutes the principal form of oppression: it immobilizes the discontented,
silences them, leads them to swallow affronts at the mere sight of a uniform.
(Debray 1967, 50-51)
The contempt that drips
from this passage is little short of incredible - contempt both for the
peasantry and for history. From reading
it you’d never know that there was a rich tradition of peasant rebellions in
Latin America. Castro’s own native province, the Oriente (which was also the
stronghold of the rebel army) had seen over 20 peasant rebellions between 1900
and 1959. In Bolivia (where Guevara was directing his thoughts), the peasant
revolt had constituted the main fighting force of the 1952-53 Revolution. Going
back slightly further, of course, there had been the insurgency led by Sandino
in Nicaragua in the ’30s, the peasant rebellions in El Salvador in the same
period (in which 30,000 peasants were murdered in the repression that
followed), the series of revolutions in Mexico in the early part of the century
predominantly fought by the peasantry, etc.
For Guevarism the
peasantry’s ill-fittedness for revolutionary struggle is no minor matter. It
lays at the heart of its political line, and Debray returned to it repeatedly.
Debray cites Guevara’s “three golden rules” as “constant vigilance, constant
mistrust, constant mobility” and goes on to say that
Various considerations of common sense necessitate wariness toward
the civilian population and the maintenance of a certain aloofness. By their
very situation civilians are exposed to repression and the constant presence
and pressure of the enemy, who will attempt to buy them, corrupt them, or to
extort from them by violence what cannot be bought. Not having undergone a
process of selection or technical training, as have the guerrilla fighters, the
civilians of a given zone of operations are more vulnerable to infiltration or
moral corruption by the enemy. (Debray 1967, 43)
Did Debray and Guevara,
then, merely construct a slander of the peasantry with absolutely no basis in
fact? Hardly. The pervasiveness of backward ideas, the terror unleashed against
those who resist, the legacy and continued power of feudal relations, are all
too real. But whether through tendentiousness or due to problems with
mechanical and undialectical thinking, Guevara and Debray seized on one aspect
of the truth only to erase what lies at the essence of the question - the
revolutionary potential of the peasantry – the revolutionary potential of the
peasantry (recognition of which, incidentally, has historically been a point
demarcating Leninism from social-democracy, Trotskyism and revisionism). Mao in
particular utilized dialectics to distinguish between different strata in the
countryside and to grasp their contradictory motion and potential. He developed
the approach of relying on the poor peasants while fighting to win over the
more middle elements and to neutralize (or in different settings to win over)
the rich peasants. (And anyone who thinks Mao was a starry-eyed idealist with
no understanding of the difficulties of arousing the peasantry and raising its
political consciousness need only read his essays on the subject.)
The question was, and is,
so crucial because of the persistence of feudal and semifeudal relations and
survivals in Latin America, and the consequent importance of agrarian
revolution to the revolution as a whole in the countries of that region. This
is true despite the significant transformation of feudal agriculture that has
gone on there since World War 2.
The crucial point to
grasp here is that the societies in question are oppressed nations, integrated
into a subordinate relation to the imperialist countries. Agriculture, in both
its feudal/semifeudal and “capitalist” forms in the oppressed nations, is
integrated (along with industry) into the matrix of international accumulation
which is fundamentally controlled by finance capital rooted in the imperialist
nations. From this results the grotesque distortion and disarticulation of the
agricultural sectors of these countries, in which certain areas are developed
by finance capital (either through direct investment, or more often through
loans, state aid, etc., funneled through the local bureaucrat-capitalists in
the state sector and/or the big feudal landowners), while others are left to
stagnate and rot. And even in those areas which are integrated into finance capital’s circuit of accumulation it is
often the case that feudal holdings are maintained and propped up, while the
exploitation of the peasantry is intensified to satisfy the demands of the
world market.
Thus the countrysides of
Latin America often appear to be patchworks of different kinds of production
relations: there are plantations depending on minifundia, old-style latifundia,
kulak-type freeholders, corporate farms and farms producing for the
international market but still held by old feudal lords. The peasantry is often
subjugated in a manner little different from before. The feudal landholding
classes typically retain their despotic hold over much of the countryside,
terrorizing the peasantry with the rural guardias
and local police; even where relations have been partially transformed toward
capitalist ones this feudal tradition has been retained and often intensified
so as to contain social unrest arising from the transformation that has occurred. The continued severe
oppression of women in the countryside and the barbaric oppression visited
against the Indian peoples sharply express the persistence of these feudal and
sernifeudal relations, in both base and superstructure (as does the continued
power of the feudal classes in the
key institutions of the state and political life, including the army).
Meanwhile a landless
peasantry and rural proletariat arise side by side with the remaining tenant
farmers and semi-independent subsistence farmers. Politically combustible
material accumulates in the countryside, and the demand for land - even among
the expropriated peasantry early in the process of proletarianization - can be
explosive, as evidenced by the important squatters’ movement in the relatively
highly capitalist sugar districts of Cuba’s Oriente province during the 1950s.
All this points to the
continued importance of the agrarian revolution in almost all Latin American
countries, and to the objective basis to rely on and unleash the rural masses
as the main strategic ally (and in many cases the main fighting force) of the
revolution. And it points as well to the inextricable link between the revolutionary struggle against the
feudal and semifeudal relations and survivals, and the struggle for national
liberation: the two are inseparable.
As to Debray’s point on
the low population density in many Latin American rural areas and on the high
percentage - in some cases - of population located in the cities: while very
important, with few exceptions this does not obviate the need for mobilizing
the masses of peasantry and carrying forward the agrarian revolution. The Declaration of the Revolutionary
Internationalist Movement notes in reference to this that
The relative weight of the cities in relation to the countryside,
both politically and militarily, is an extremely important question that is
posed by the increased capitalist development of some oppressed countries. In
some of these countries it is correct to begin the armed struggle by launching
insurrections in the city and not to follow the model of surrounding the cities
by the countryside. Moreover, even in countries where the path of revolution is
that of surrounding the city by the countryside, situations in which a mass
upheaval leads to uprisings and insurrections in the cities can occur and the
party should be prepared to utilize such situations within its overall
strategy. However in both these situations, the party’s ability to mobilize the
peasants to take part in the revolution under proletarian leadership is
critical to its success. (RIM 1984, 36-37)
But this central truth on
the importance of the peasantry was ignored and/or opposed by Guevara and
Debray. Just how off-base and antirevolutionary their stand toward the
peasantry really was comes out in their line on the Indian national question
within Latin American society. Debray treats this more or less in passing but (as
can be seen from his previously cited passage on the peasantry’s backwardness)
it is plain that he sees the presence of large and viciously suppressed Indian
populations in the countrysides of (especially) Guatemala and the Andean nations as obstacles to revolution. (Guevara’s practice in Bolivia, to be
addressed later, reflected this same view.)
This seems a reflection of, or at least an adaptation to, the outlook of
the suppressed bourgeois forces in Latin America who at times resist the
national oppression they suffer at the hands of the U.S. (and other
imperialists), but attempt simultaneously to prevent the really oppressed
masses from getting "out of control" and to maintain their own
national privileges vis-à-vis these
masses. (Indeed, they will utilize such national oppression if they succeed in
replacing the compradors whom they fight.) Without portraying the Indians as
some sort of ideal revolutionary force, it should be noted that in the majority
of countries in Latin America which witnessed
significant guerrilla uprisings during the 1960s - including Peru,
Guatemala, and Colombia - the Indian question was extremely important and
Indians often made up an important social base for and a big percentage of the
fighting force. No genuine revolution against the prevailing social relations
could negate this important question or
afford to stand aloof from this important section of the masses and its
struggles. Debray’s view toward the Indians is a product and reflection of the
whole Guevarist line, insofar as that line resists mobilizing the peasantry and
opposes targeting the backward semifeudal
relations (including national oppression within Latin American society).
To sum this up: the
domination of imperialism is bound up with the disarticulated character of
agriculture in the oppressed nations, including the persistence of various
forms of feudal relations and survivals. By the same token, continued
disarticulation, feudal survivals, etc., serve to reproduce and reinforce those relations of domination. On
the other hand, this severe oppression inevitably generates resistance among
the peasantry and the agricultural proletariat and semiproletariat - resistance
which must be channeled and led towards revolution by the proletariat. To attempt
to skip over arousing and leading the peasant masses to carry through an
agrarian revolution means to leave that domination intact. Even if a new regime
should come to power, the form may change - state bureaucrats and ex-guerrillas
may replace those who formerly managed the more profitable farms - but imperialism
will continue to dominate. The less profitable sectors of agriculture will
continue to stagnate, the masses will be squeezed and the patterns and
structure of production, trade, etc., will remain the same. This is, with some
variation, exactly what happened in Cuba, and later, Ethiopia, and Angola (more
on this later). When those who want to shortcut mobilizing the masses,
especially the peasantry, for people’s war speak of revolution, in truth they
can only mean their own ascent to power, and that alone; and this is so even if
done in the name of more quickly carrying the insurgency through, as Debray and
Guevara attempted to do it. The real transformation of the social relations,
the “springing of society into the air,” in Marx’s phrase, is evidently
irrelevant to their calculations.
There is a further
implication to this entire line on the peasantry. If one posits an armed force
in the countryside existing without the active support of the peasantry -
indeed, if one is strenuously arguing against even daring to politically
mobilize these masses - who, then, is to be relied upon? While Debray and
Guevara never got around to explicitly spelling out their plans on this point,
we shall argue later that they envisioned their focos marching at the head of a
coalition of the revisionist parties and the radical bourgeois (and
petty-bourgeois) democrats. These forces, Guevara reckoned, could be hammered
together to defeat the old regimes, seize power, grant reforms in the name of
the masses, and then proceed with political consolidation.
Base Areas
Debray devotes a
significant section of his book to a polemic against the strategic goal of
constructing base areas for the revolutionary forces in the countryside, at
least until the rebel forces are on the very verge of seizing nationwide
political power. He attributed the failure of a number of attempts at rural
guerrilla war in the early ’60s in Latin America to premature building of base
areas.
To begin with, while the
forces evidently referred to by Debray may have attempted to actually mobilize
the masses and may, perhaps, have been influenced by Mao, it is hardly correct
to act as if they were Maoist forces trying to put Mao’s concepts into practice.
(Even if they had been, that alone would not necessarily prove the
incorrectness of the line; as Mao himself wrote, “In social struggle, the
forces representing the advanced class sometimes suffer defeat not because
their ideas are incorrect but because, in the balance of forces engaged in
struggle, they are not as powerful for the time being as the forces of
reaction; they are therefore temporarily defeated, but they are bound to
triumph sooner or later” [Mao 1971, 503]).
Base areas, as conceived
and put into practice by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao’s leadership,
are intended to serve as “great military, political, economic and cultural
bastions of the revolution from which to fight [the] vicious enemies who are
using the cities for attacks on the rural districts. . .” (Mao 1967, 2:
316-317). While the conditions and characteristics of such base areas have
historically varied widely (even within the Chinese Revolution itself), their
ear-mark is the establishment of the political power of the masses through
armed struggle. On this political foundation the revolutionary forces then
utilize these base areas as spring-boards for further annihilation of enemy
troops, expansion of the liberated zones, and preparation for nationwide
seizure of power. The establishment of the masses’ political power (and the
concomitant commencement of the agrarian revolution in both the economic sphere
and the superstructure) distinguishes base areas as a strategic concept from
the looser forms of support (and even land division, etc.) among the rural
masses seen, for example, in the Mexican Revolution, Sandino’s struggle in the
’20s and ’30s, and indeed in the Cuban Revolution itself. It marks the
transformation of spontaneity into consciousness.
There is no doubt that this important concept of Mao’s has to be
fitted to the particular conditions and tasks of Latin America; as noted, even
within China itself the kaleidoscopically shifting conditions of the revolution
during its twenty-two years gave rise to a variety of expressions, and Mao
himself urged Latin American revolutionaries during the 1960s to steer clear of
attempts to mechanically transpose or copy what seemed to "work"
elsewhere onto their own conditions. How to deal with the generally more developed
infrastructure found in many Latin American countries, what is the character of
the organs of power appropriate to liberated zones, how to handle the closer
relationship to the urban struggle necessitated (and afforded) by the greater
urbanization, how in today’s conditions to take into account and deal with the
looming threat of interimperialist war: all pose (and posed then) urgent
challenges for both theory and practice on the continent.
And to be clear, the
establishment of base areas should not
be viewed as the absolute first step in people’s war; still less should the
ability to sustain one from the very start be seen as a prerequisite whose
absence would preclude the launching of such a war. In many, perhaps most,
cases it may be necessary for revolutionary forces to engage in a period of
guerrilla warfare with enemy troops prior to establishing a base area; indeed,
Mao paid great attention to “contested guerrilla zones,” areas in which the
rebel forces could not yet establish political power but in which there was
enough support among the masses to enable them to operate against the enemy in
guerrilla fashion. But Mao also thought it necessary to work to transform these
zones into base areas as soon as conditions allowed. And such base areas are an
important strategic goal of the armed struggle.
In fact, there would seem
to be an important difference as to what exactly is meant by base areas. Some confusion seems evident in Debray when,
for example, he concedes the value of base areas after the rebel forces have
reached a certain point. He draws a cautionary lesson from the Cuban
experience, describing Che’s attempt in late 1957 to set up a base in the
Sierra Maestra. "He set up a permanent encampment, constructed a bread
oven, a shoe repair shop, and a hospital. He had a mimeograph machine sent in,
with which he published the first numbers of El Cubano Libre; and, according to his own words, he began making
plans for a small electric plant on the river of the valley." But Guevara’s
plans were smashed when government forces attacked. Only later, writes Debray,
could the guerrillas set up a base able to be secured, and did so in April
1958: “The small basic territory then cleared was the terrain on which were to
be found the field hospital, small handicraft industries, military repair
shops, a radio station, a training center for recruits, and the command post.
This small base enabled the rebels to resist the 1958 general summer offensive
from entrenched positions” (Debray 1967, 63-64).
What is stunning in Debray’s
discussion here is his fixation on the purely military functions of base areas
(and even in this sphere his conception is narrow!). Where is the mobilization
of the masses here? Where are the organs of political power? What political experience was accumulated in
this regard? Leaving aside Debray’s explanation for why the base area could be set up when it was - to which we will
return - there is really nothing here connecting the conception of base areas
to red political power that must be developed by the revolutionary forces, the
revolution which must be unleashed in the countryside, etc. He seems in fact to have confounded the
concept of base areas with the notion of a permanent base camp!
In sum, Debray’s aim in
taking up the question of base areas at all was hardly to explore the real
problems and challenges, but instead to deduce their supposed impossibility
from a few scattered instances in Latin America, and to marshal this “impossibility”
as one more argument against a war of the masses.
In light of Debray’s
arguments on the utter inapplicability of Mao’s theory to Latin America, the
practice today by the Communist Party of Peru is of more than passing interest.
Its initial successes in applying the Maoist line and orientation are highly
significant; as of this writing they have waged guerrilla war against the
government for four years with increasing intensity, and bourgeois observers
now are forced to concede both that the revolutionaries have significant
support among the masses and that the crisis for the Peruvian regime is
deepening.
The objective and
subjective basis for this struggle should be noted. To begin with, the Peruvian
party firmly consolidated around a correct political line, thus establishing
the force capable of leading the revolutionary
army. They then conducted intensive investigation and political work in and
analysis of the areas in which they initiated the armed struggle. In addition,
there are important divisions in the Peruvian ruling class today, particularly
between pro-U.S. elements among the traditional ruling classes and pro-Soviet
forces in parts of the military. This fissure, at the same time, has been
greatly aggravated by the insurgency itself. Finally, Peru is in deep economic
crisis, including bearing a crushing burden of debt to the imperialist
countries, resulting in severe hardship for the masses and ongoing political
instability. This kind of situation is hardly atypical or anomalous in Latin
America, nor is it a mere temporary rough spot likely to soon be passed through
by the rulers of Peru. It is, rather, symptomatic of the sort of opportunities
offered in the present period.
Unlike Guevara, the
Communist Party of Peru bases itself on mobilizing the masses for people’s war.
And in further sharp contrast to Guevara’s orientation - as we shall see - the
Peruvian revolution is not attempting to link with and/or draw in the support
of the Soviets or their local parties. Instead, while utilizing the
interimperialist contradictions, they are advancing the independent struggle of
the proletariat in leadership of the peasantry.
II
It is not as if at least
some of the previous points, in one form or another, were never raised against
the Guevara/Debray line. But Debray felt that he could trump any objections with
what he clearly believed to be the best argument of all for focoism: “it worked
in Cuba.” He begins the whole book by arguing against the phrase that “the
Cuban Revolution can no longer be repeated in Latin America,” and at key points
buttresses his case with illustrations from the Cuban Revolution. It is
certainly not wrong to examine new revolutionary practice and to draw new
theory from it, and it’s also true (and quite fine!) that the process usually
leads to a reexamination of - indeed, often a break with - some of what may
have become “conventional wisdom” in the Marxist movement. The question here is
just what the practice of the Cuban
Revolution really proves, and whether Debray and Guevara drew their conclusions
correctly.
Debray and Guevara believed
that the revolutionary army need not – indeed, should not – undertake political
work among the masses. In polemicizing, for instance, against “armed
propaganda” (the tactic of dividing armed forces into small units to
temporarily seize villages, execute local tyrants, and hold brief political
rallies), he first notes the greater political effect of decisive military
engagements with the enemy armed forces: “The destruction of a troop transport
truck or the public execution of a police torturer is more effective propaganda
for the local population than a hundred speeches.” He then delivers what he
considers his clincher: “A significant detail:
During two years of warfare, Fidel did not hold a single political rally
in his zone of operations” (Debray 1967, 53-54).
The first thing you
wonder on reading this is why Debray set up this dichotomy between military and
political in such a loaded way. Those
who’ve followed the Maoist line have carried out military action and political
mobilization in close conjunction. It’s true, of course, that when the
revolutionary forces reach a point at which they can actually contest for power
or even inflict some military defeats on the bourgeois army, many masses who
had hitherto wavered or even refused to entertain the possibility of revolution
will politically awaken. But it seems clear from the context that Debray had in
mind something in the nature of spectacular stunts, rather than the protracted
process of annihilating enemy troops and building up areas of political power.
Further, if any military success isn’t put in the service of and led by a
genuine revolutionary line and program, and if there is no party to raise the
sights of the masses when they do flood into motion, then the Debrayist
orientation will degenerate into a rationale for developing shock troops for
one or another bourgeois faction or imperialist including social-imperialist)
patron - and this in fact has repeatedly happened.
As to the military point
involved in dividing one’s forces, it’s true that the people’s army should
principally concentrate its forces for battles of annihilation against the
enemy. However, Mao also points to the role (secondary, but important) of
dividing forces at times to arouse the masses. This whole question is not an either/or
proposition as Debray tries to make it, but one of dialectically grasping the
relationship between principal and secondary aspects of contradictory
relationships (between military and political work, concentrating forces and
dividing them, etc.).
Debray, however, goes on
to try to analyze the roots “of this concept which reduces the guerrillero to a mere armed agitator.”
What accounts for it?
A misreading of the Cuban Revolution - a
revolution well known in its external detail but whose inner content has not
yet been sufficiently studied - may also have played its part…. A hundred men
incite the mountain population with speeches; the regime, terrified, collapses
to the accompaniment of jeers; and the barbudos
are acclaimed by the people. In this way one confuses a military foco - a motor force of a total war -
with a foco of political agitation.
It appears to have been simply forgotten that the “26th of July” Cubans first
made a war without a single unilateral truce; that during only a few months of
1958, the Rebel Army engaged in more battles than have other American fronts
during a year or two; that in two months the rebels broke Batista’s last
offensive; and that 300 guerrilleros
repulsed and routed 10,000 men. A general counteroffensive followed. (Debray
1967, 57)
But Debray himself is
here guilty of a “misreading,” of a self-serving oversimplification. It’s true,
of course, that Castro’s columns were the decisive military force in
overthrowing Batista; but the crisis facing the Batista regime ran deeper than
the challenge posed by the Castroist foco
and its military activities. Batista had seized power in 1952 through a coup d’état
and neither of Cuba’s main political parties - the Orthodox or the Authentics -
mounted any real resistance. After the coup, investment opportunities for the
Cuban bourgeoisie drastically slowed while new U.S. investment on the island
leaped ahead at a rapid clip. Sections of the aspiring Cuban bourgeoisie were
crowded out, and the problem was even more exacerbated for the relatively large
Cuban petty bourgeoisie. The pamphlet Cuba:
The Evaporation of a Myth, outlines both their dilemma and their political
stance:
By
the 1950s the petty bourgeoisie had become the most volatile class in Cuba. The
political groups that arose from it were the best organized to fight for their
interests. Castro’s 26th of July Movement came from the urban petty bourgeoisie, 25% of Cuba’s
population – the tens of thousands of businessmen with no business, salesmen with no sales, teachers
with no one to teach, lawyers and
doctors with few patients and clients,
architects and engineers for whom there was little work, and so on. In its 1956
“Program Manifesto,” it defined itself as “guided by the ideals of democracy,
nationalism and social justice ... [of] Jeffersonian democracy,” and declared, “democracy
cannot be the government of a race, class or religion, it must be a government
of all the people.”
... Its practical program aimed at
restricting the U.S. and the landlords by ending the quota system under which
the U.S. controlled Cuban sugar cane production, restricting the domination of
the biggest landlords over the medium-sized growers, distributing unused and
stolen farmland to the small peasants, and a profit-sharing scheme for urban
workers to expand the market for domestic manufactures and new investment.
Revolutionary Communist Party 1983, 9)
The Batista coup had closed off any chance for these forces to move
politically to gain concessions. Pressure mounted.
Castro first acted
against Batista with his assault on the Moncada army barracks in July 1953, and
he took the occasion of his trial to make his well-known “History Will Absolve
Me” speech. In fact, the speech reads almost like a Christian-Democratic
document, with little mention of the U.S. role in the Cuban situation and a
heavy focus on Batista’s corruption, the regime’s illegitimacy, violations of
legality and the Constitution, etc. But the Moncada incident, along with his
speech, turned Castro into a national figure, and some months later he was
released from prison and sent into exile in Mexico.
Similarly, his openly
declared intention from Mexico to launch the revolution in 1956, while leading
to a military disaster, made Castro even more of a political pole of attraction
for the growing anti-Batista opposition that was beginning to develop. But this
opposition, independent of Castro, was growing in any case: widespread student
struggles raged in Havana in 1955 and 1956; an organization known as the
Revolutionary Directorate militarily attacked the presidential palace in March
1957; other fronts were opened by different groups in the Escambray Mountains
and Pinar del Rio; and an unsuccessful general strike was even attempted by a
coalition of forces (including Castro’s movement, although not the CP of Cuba).
It was not, in other words, just 300 guerrilleros
versus 10,000 of Batista’s troops.
This is also important in
understanding why Castro could set up a base area – or rather, to be accurate
about it, a permanent campsite – a few months after Guevara had failed, a point
of Debray’s referred to earlier. While Debray never explains this, he implies
that the sheer weight of accumulated fighting was principally responsible. He
leaves out the all-around crisis which by then had enveloped Cuban society and
which increasingly denied Batista the freedom to concentrate his troops in the
countryside (lest Havana erupt), or to even rely on them to engage the rebel
forces at all.
Then too there’s the
character of the Oriente itself, where the main force of Castro’s troops were
located. Later in the book, when Debray wants to convince the reader that once
the military struggle turns favorable the masses will more or less fall into
the revolution’s lap, he cites a 1956 letter in which Castro wrote:
Now
I know who the people are: I see them in that invincible force that surrounds
us everywhere, I see them in the bands of 30 or 40 men, lighting their way with
lanterns, who descend the muddy slopes at two or three in the morning, with 30
kilos on their backs, in order to supply us with food. Who had organized them
so wonderfully? Where did they acquire so much ability, astuteness, courage,
self-sacrifice? No one knows. It is almost a mystery. (Debray 1967, 113)
In fact, it wasn’t really
as mysterious as all that. The peasants of the Oriente were some of the most
politically experienced in the world. They had fought for and defended rural
soviets in the ’30s. By the late ’50s, when Castro and his men made their way
there, they were embroiled in a volatile squatters’ struggle.
It’s valuable to ponder
for a moment the picture presented by the Oriente. The site of the bulk of the
fighting and of the revolution’s greatest support, it contained Cuba’s largest
sugar-cane farms, cultivated by a rural proletariat and semiproletariat, as
well as half of Cuba’s small peasant holdings. But the peasants were insecure
and often driven off their land, and there had been no less than twenty
significant peasant uprisings between 1902 and 1958. One historian notes that
The
Sierra Maestre squatters had for some time been organized in bands to protect
themselves against landlords who tried to evict them. The social bandit, a
mixture of outlaw and protester, was the form that peasant social and political
organization had taken. When Castro’s band appeared in the area, it was almost
immediately joined by these peasant bands, who no doubt recognized the
guerrillas as allies. (Dominguez 1978, 436-437)
Two other observers,
writing in criticism of Debray in 1967 in Cuba, note that when Castro reached
the Oriente there was already “direct peasant-army confrontation, in which the
army upheld the big landowners (rule by machete, evictions, violence against
the peasant masses).... The political confrontations had already taken the form
of direct clashes between the army and the peasantry” (Huberman and Sweezy
1967, 56). It would seem perhaps that one lesson of the Cuban Revolution lies
in the potential political and military explosiveness of the peasantry of the
oppressed nations, even in 1959 Cuba where large-scale capitalization of
agriculture and urbanization of half the population had taken place - Debray
and today’s neo-Guevarists to the contrary.
Insofar as the Cuban
Revolution proves anything, it is certainly not Debray’s model of a foco, divorced from the peasantry,
causing on its own a deep crisis and more or less single-handedly defeating the
government. More what it seems to point to is the powerful role a revolutionary
armed force can play in the presence of a political crisis and a peasantry
(along with an agricultural proletariat and semiproletariat) eager to take up
arms against their oppressors; or better yet, it indicates the dialectical
interplay between what is subjective (the military force, in this case) and
what is objective (the crisis of the regime and the sentiments and struggle of
the masses). This is not to say that the revolutionary armed force has no role
to play in sparking up-surge and deepening a political crisis; nor is it the case
that one can or should only launch the armed struggle in the oppressed nations
when such conditions are already fully present (although they generally must be
for a victorious conclusion to be carried through). But Guevarism attempts to
totally deny the importance of the objective situation to all phases of the
armed struggle, and prefers instead to act as if the objective situation is
“set” and all that is lacking is the courage and sound tactics of the
revolutionaries.
The Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
treats this question in the following way:
In
the oppressed countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America a continuous
revolutionary situation generally exists. But it is important to understand
this correctly: the revolutionary situation does not follow a straight line; it
has its ebbs and flows. The communist parties should keep this dynamic in mind.
They should not fall into one-sidedness in the form of asserting that the
commencement and the final victory of people’s war depends totally on the
subjective factor (the communists), a view often associated with “Lin Piaoism”.
Although at all times some form of armed struggle is generally both desirable
and necessary to carry out the tasks of class struggle in these countries,
during certain periods armed struggle may be the principal form of struggle and
at other times it may not be. (RIM 1984, 34)
What helps to make this
particular problem so tricky - and what adds to the appeal of Che Guevara to
those who really do burn to make a revolution - is that many a revolutionary
sentiment and initiative has been smothered by conventional revisionism under
the rubric of “objective conditions.” It won’t cut it, however, to oppose this
by way of denying the crucial importance of the objective situation and
essentially throwing materialism out the window. Instead, revolutionaries must
oppose the mechanical-materialist method utilized by revisionism with
materialist dialectics. Lenin, in an
essay on Karl Marx, made the distinction well:
Only
an objective consideration of the sum-total of reciprocal relations of all the
classes of a given society without exception, and, consequently, a
consideration of the objective stage of development of that society and of the
reciprocal relations between it and other societies, can serve as a basis for
correct tactics of the advanced class. At the same time, all classes and all
countries are regarded not statically, but dynamically, i.e., not in a state of
immobility, but in motion (the laws of which are determined by the economic
conditions of existence of each class). Motion, in its turn, is regarded not
only from the standpoint of the past, but also from the standpoint of the
future, and, at the same time, not in accordance with the vulgar conception of
the “evolutionists,” who see only slow changes, but dialectically: “in
developments of such magnitude twenty years are no more than a day,” Marx wrote
to Engels, “although later there may come days in which twenty years are
concentrated”. (Lenin 1970, 40-41)
And based on just such an
understanding Bob Avakian has, over the last several years, stressed the
necessity for a vanguard party to ascertain, base itself on, and develop the “revolutionary
elements” within any given situation. The dialectic involved is one of doing
the utmost to prepare for
revolutionary insurrection (or in the case of oppressed nations, where
the armed struggle may already have been launched, for a full and decisive
strategic offensive) while - as Mao put it – “hastening or awaiting changes in
the international situation and the internal collapse of the enemy” (Mao 1967,
2:126).
The voluntarism
undergirding Guevara and Debray’s method, because it tries to refute mechanical
materialism with subjective idealism,
ends up eventually falling into some of the same errors of passivity typically
associated with mechanical materialism. This comes out, for example, in Debray’s
examination of the ways in which Cuba’s revolution was exceptional, or “never
to be repeated.” He notes, for example, that U.S. uncertainty and laxness
regarding the intentions of the revolutionaries was highly unlikely to be
repeated elsewhere in Latin America. But while the Cuban Revolution certainly
made the U.S. much more wary, it is not the case that the U.S. could or can
always do whatever it wishes to crush
revolutions, even where the intentions of the revolutionaries are
unmistakably clear - as they were in China and Vietnam! Even in Central
America, the U.S.’s self-styled “backyard,” constraints beyond even the
strength of the masses operate; for example, Alexander Haig claims in his
recent memoirs that Weinberger and others in the Reagan administration rebuffed
his 1981 proposal to decisively
intervene in El Salvador and Nicaragua, for fear that it would conflict with
what they saw as the overriding priority: preparing the U.S. armed forces (and
U.S. public opinion) for a global war with the Soviets. But Debray’s
voluntarism leads him not only to denial of the importance of objective
conditions to revolutionaries, but to blindness to the real constraints they
also put on the imperialists. This method will lead to losing sight of or
ignoring important potential weaknesses in the enemy camp.
On the other hand, Debray
does not take sufficient note of other factors. Batista, for instance, was
forced by dint of the potential explosiveness of Havana as well as divisions
among the Cuban bourgeoisie into an “enclave strategy,” meaning that he
concentrated his troops in a few secure locations rather than sending them on
search-and-destroy missions. This allowed the rebel troops time to rest and
train. But it would be very unwise for revolutionary forces to rely on such a
situation developing in every case. It may happen, but it is far from automatic
and one must prepare for intense and protracted fighting as a rule. Further,
because the U.S. was, after all, unclear on the revolution’s goals and because
the leading group was not in fact
committed to a thoroughgoing revolution (or even at that point to a break of any
sorts with the U.S.), there was remarkably little destruction and no real civil
war in the Cuban Revolution. This marks a sharp contrast with what occurred in
Russia, China, and Vietnam and must be considered highly atypical (at least of
revolutions which really do aim at rupturing with imperialism and transforming
the social relations). Thus even the important lessons from the Cuban
Revolution (e.g., the role of the peasantry and the agricultural proletariat,
the political volatility of the urban petty bourgeoisie, etc.) must be
carefully drawn regarding their possible universal significance.
Debray draws only those
lessons which fit into the foco model
he was pushing at the time, and then absolutizes their relevance. And again,
what was that model? A small band relies on astute military tactics to defeat
an imperialist-backed army, with the political mobilization of the masses
presumed to follow in the wake of dramatic military success. The measures
associated with people’s war – including the mobilization and reliance upon the
peasantry, the establishment of base areas as an important objective of the
military struggle, the commencement of the agrarian revolution – are denied,
even bitterly opposed, as inapplicable to Latin America. The peasantry is viewed
not as a reservoir of forces for the revolution, but as a mass of potential
informers. Base areas are seen as little more than permanent military campsites
and then in effect dismissed as a dangerous diversion. The agrarian revolution,
is quite simply, ignored and thus negated.
But let us, even for the
sake of debate, grant Guevarism its central argument here: that a band of
guerrillas, keeping aloof from the peasantry to the very end, can catalyze a
revolutionary overthrow of the old regime. Even allowing for the exaggeration
found in Revolution in the Revolution?,
is there not in fact some truth to this? Did not Castro essentially lead his
initial handful of men to make a revolution in Cuba? Did not Guevarism work in
Cuba?
That depends in the final
analysis on what you mean by “working.” It’s true that Castro effected a
seizure of power, that the Batista regime was overthrown, that major changes
ensued in Cuban society. But as to the basic and underlying problems of Cuban
society – and by this we mean its status in world relations as an oppressed,
dependent nation with all the consequent ramifications – the change has been
one of form rather than content. Specifically focusing on the land question,
the Castro regime can be said to have basically finished the process begun by
Batista: they transformed Cuban agriculture into a massive, proletarianized
operation devoted to the production of sugar. The old farms, directly owned
either by U.S. corporations or Cuban compradors, were put into the hands of the
state, yes. But the role of the masses in agriculture as proletarians with no
control over their labor, the monocultural structure of Cuban agricultural
production (the bulk of production given over to the single export crop of sugar),
and most of all (and setting the terms for the other conditions), the
integration of Cuban sugar production into
the exigencies and rhythms of imperialist (even if Soviet imperialist)
capital - all these essentially remain the same. The difference lies in the
beards and fatigues (initially) worn by the new crop of administrators and the
language in which the new set of imperialist overlords give their orders.
The experience of Cuba
(and here again we urge the reader to turn to The Evaporation of a Myth for a deeper analysis and further
documentation) points again to the fact that in most oppressed nations
imperialism cannot finally be ousted without mobilizing the peasantry (along
with the rural proletarians and semiproletarians) to tear up the roots of the
oppressive legacy in the countryside and to step-by- step restructure agriculture from bottom to
top so as to break the chains of dependency and serve the world
revolution. The land question in these
countries is just too essential and too integrated into the whole structure of
imperialist domination to be somehow finessed, or dealt with mainly through
nationalizing the big farms.
Thus even if one concedes
to all of Guevarism’s (dubious) arguments, even if one ignores the potentially
explosive role of the peasantry (in favor of allying with their would-be new
bosses), even if important facets of what did happen in Cuba during 1953-59 are
left out - the fact is that this road cannot
lead to genuine emancipation.
There is a shortcut
offered here. You need only screw up your courage, review military tactics and
engage the enemy. This shortcut mentality extends as well to the other crucial
component of Guevarism: its view of the role of the party in revolutionary war,
of the relationship between party and army. Something else as well begins to
emerge in studying that area: the real plan guiding Guevara, Castro, and
Debray, their hidden answer to the question of: if not the peasantry led by the
proletariat, then who?
III
In examining the
Guevarist line on the relationship of the party to the army, more questions
arise while the basis for answering other ones begins to appear. Guevara and
Debray held that the guerrilla foco
must be entirely autonomous of party control. They argued that since the armed
struggle takes place in the countryside, the leadership must also be based in
the countryside, both to better guide that struggle and to elude capture by the
police. They further insisted that ideological and political struggle and
training within the ranks of the rebel army was at best an irrelevant
distraction, at worst a fatal diversion. According to Debray, the necessary
political unity will be forged in the furnace of battle, and the strategy and
tactics necessary for victory drawn from the lessons afforded by each military
engagement with the enemy.
Is Guevarism just arguing
a variation on the classical spontaneist line here - downplaying the key and
leading role of the party? While that is the form, and while some common
elements exist, something a bit different is actually at work: a proposed modus vivendi with the established
revisionist parties. To grasp this, however, it’s first necessary to address
Debray’s main points on the party/army relationship in their own right.
Debray purports to sum up
the experience of the failed guerrilla risings of the early ’60s, and he traces
many of the problems to the failure to allow the foco autonomy. For example, one sharp problem in these insurgencies
was the capture and/or murder of the leaders. Debray points to the perilous
journeys undertaken by these leaders to the cities for political instructions
and aid. By contrast, according to Debray, so long as the guerrillas stay in
the mountains, capture “is virtually impossible.... All that the police and
their North American advisers can do is to wait on their home ground until the
guerrilla leaders come to the city”
(Debray 1967, 69).
Further, he argues that “the
lack of political power [referring in this context to the power of the foco to determine its own political and
military line] leads to logistical and military dependence of the mountain
forces on the city. This dependence often leads to abandonment of the guerrilla
force by the city leadership” (Debray, 69). Debray recounts the experience of
one unnamed movement in Latin America which was given only $200 a year by their
urban-based leadership with which to purchase arms, supplies, etc. An oblique
criticism of the Venezuelan CP, which in 1965 abandoned and renounced a
guerrilla movement that they had been part of, may have been intended here. And
Debray also criticized those parties which utilized their armed wings only in
subordination to various parliamentary maneuvers. Again, one understands an
implied criticism of the Latin American CPs which at that point were still
involved in some sort of armed struggle.
In much of this argument Debray articulates the disgust of many
honest revolutionary forces with the stultified revisionist parties,
participating in the armed struggle (if at all), it often seemed, only to hold
it back. This disgust for revisionism - at least in its classical, suit-and-tie
parliamentary incarnation - soon slides over, however, into an opposition to any political training whatsoever.
Debray sharply opposes the presence of
political commissars in military units and training schools for military cadre.
He cites Castro: “To those who show military ability, also give political
responsibility” (Debray 1967, 90).
A number of different
contradictions have been mushed together here, including the contradiction
between city and countryside during the period of war, the contradiction
between the party and the army, and the contradiction between parliamentary and
armed forms of struggle. Let’s briefly try to untangle this mess.
First, where should the party be based during the
period of guerrilla war? If it is based in the countryside, as it should be and
as indeed it was during China’s revolutionary war, then don’t the Guevarist objections
as to the drawbacks of the military arm being subordinate to the political - at
least those concerning the safety of the military commanders, the inability of
the city cadre to grasp “the importance of a pound of gun grease or square yard
of nylon,” etc. - begin to melt away? Debray basically argues that the party
(assumed to be urban based) and the foco
should each be allowed to do its own thing. Why is he so resistant to waging an
ideological and political struggle as to what the real focus of the party’s
work should be - that is, waging, or preparing to wage, revolutionary war?
As to the contradiction
between the party and army: Debray notes that he is arguing against “an entire
international range of experience,” including the Russian Revolution and the
protracted people’s wars of China and Vietnam, with his opposition to party
leadership over the military. But he refuses to address the reasons why
international Marxism reached that conclusion.
This has everything to do
with how one conceives of the role of the party and the tasks of the
proletariat in the revolution. The party must act as the revolutionary vanguard
of the proletariat in every sphere. This includes carrying through a basic
analysis of the international situation and of the classes within the country in question, developing
a program and strategy for revolution on that basis, educating the masses on
the goal of the struggle and the path to victory, and developing a correct military line and forging the military apparatus
to actually lead the armed struggle. But the latter task, crucial as it is
in its own right, cannot really be done on a correct basis without doing that
basic analysis of classes and the international situation, without developing a
strategy and program. And unless the
masses are mobilized through the course of the war, and unless, moreover, their
consciousness is raised, then what will the war be fought over anyway? How will
the masses have been prepared to wield political power? The Declaration of the
Revolutionarv Internationalist Movement sharply sums up the historical
experience on these points, as it applies to oppressed nations:
The
key to carrying out a new democratic revolution is the independent role of the
proletariat and its ability, through its Marxist-Leninist party, to establish
its hegemony in the revolutionary struggle. Experience has shown again and
again that even when a section of the national bourgeoisie joins the
revolutionary movement, it will not and cannot lead a new democratic
revolution, to say nothing of carrying this revolution through to completion.
Similarly, history demonstrates the bankruptcy of an “anti-imperialist front”
(or similar “revolutionary front”) which is not led by a Marxist-Leninist
party, even when such a front or forces within it adopt a “Marxist” (actually
pseudo-Marxist) colouration. While such revolutionary formations have led
heroic struggles and even delivered powerful blows to the imperialists they
have been proven to be ideologically and organisationally incapable of
resisting imperialist and bourgeois influences. Even where such forces have
seized power they have been incapable of carrying through a thoroughgoing
revolutionary transformation of society and end up, sooner or later, being
overthrown by the imperialists or themselves becoming a new reactionary ruling power
in league with imperialists....
The Marxist-Leninist party must arm the
proletariat and the revolutionary masses not only with an understanding of the
immediate task of carrying through the new democratic revolution and the role
and conflicting interests of different class forces, friend and foe alike, but
also of the need to prepare the transition to the socialist revolution and of
the ultimate goal of worldwide communism. (RIM 1984, 32)
None of this at all
implies downplaying the necessity for the party to stress military matters. One
need only note the extensive military writings of Mao (who in fact developed
the first really integral, really comprehensive Marxist military doctrine).
Indeed the struggle over military line, finally won by Mao at the Tsunyi
conference in 1935, concentrated the overall line struggles in the Chinese
Communist Party at that point, and that was no accident: the gun was the
principal weapon of struggle and in that situation military line becomes the
concentrated expression of political line.
Debray, however, portrays
the struggle over political line as a distraction, nothing more than an excuse
to avoid the business at hand: launching an insurgency. No doubt more than a
few revisionists provided the basis for that caricature. But Debray tries to
cover over what Mao continually emphasized: if one line does not lead, then
another surely will. And the proletarian line never leads without acute
struggle. This was also stressed by Lenin, and lies at the very foundation of What Is To Be Done?, his work laying out
the relationship of the party to the revolutionary movement and preparation for
armed insurrection. There he wrote:
Since
there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses
of the workers themselves in the process of their movement the only choice is:
either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for
humanity has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn
by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology).
Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in
any way, to turn away from it in the
slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology....
But why, the reader will ask, does the
spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of the least resistance, lead
to the domination of the bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that the
bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than the socialist ideology; because
it is more fully developed and because it possesses immeasurably more opportunities for being spread. (Lenin 1975,
48-51).
In passing, we must speak
to Debray’s dismissal of political training of soldiers. Is this not really a
plan to use the masses as cannon fodder? The flip notion that the “masses will
know what they are fighting for” ignores a bitter history of new bourgeois
forces taking advantage for their own narrow interests of the eagerness of the
masses to take up arms against oppression. Even Debray, at the time he was
writing, would have argued this to be true of Algeria, for example, and history
provides other examples as well - with Iran and Nicaragua being only the most
recent. To intentionally keep vague the goals and stance of the revolution, to
deny the masses the theoretical tools
necessary for their emancipation, can only curtail their initiative and enhance
that of those who aspire to be their saviors – and new (if “enlightened”)
rulers.
How does the emphasis
given by Lenin and Mao to a centralized party relate to the need for local commanders
to have a measure of autonomy? Guevara and Debray are not wrong to stress that
aspect of autonomy, but it is not necessarily antagonistic to a strong party;
Mao himself attached great importance to it. The initiative is key in war, and
local commanders will hardly be able to seize it if they must check and recheck
every plan. The question however is what the basis is for that autonomy. If
such autonomy is to feed the overall military struggle, the commanders must be
firmly united around the basic military line of the party, the principles of operation
forged for the party, specific strategic concepts in various areas, etc. And
all of this must ultimately be based on the political line and objectives of
the party. Otherwise guerrilla actions
become pointless, rivulets that lead to no stream and eventually dry up.
But Guevara and Debray
addressed the de-emphasis on military struggle by demanding autonomy for the
army, and in the process negated the importance of political leadership and
consciousness altogether. Why did they not instead speak to the question of
what kind of party had to be built to really lead the armed struggle?
Finally, there is the
political question of the relation between parliamentary and military struggle.
The revisionist CPs of Latin America, even when waging military struggle,
usually saw it – at that point in history – as an adjunct to various
parliamentary maneuvers.
To this Debray and Guevara objected. Their solution (autonomy of the foco) is again wrong, however, and again
we ask: why not a struggle within the revolutionary ranks on the correct road
forward? Why just a “you do your thing and we’ll do ours” type of orientation?
After all, if the parties
of Latin America were seriously flawed - and the revisionist CPs by that point
were not so much flawed as they were hopelessly corroded and
counter-revolutionary - then why not carry out a thorough struggle and rupture
in the spheres of ideology, politics, organization, and the military and on that basis forge a new vanguard party?
As a matter of fact just such a struggle was being waged, internationally and
within the Latin American continent, by the Marxist-Leninist forces who
supported Mao. But Guevara and Debray bitterly opposed it. Why?
For one, as pointed to earlier,
they simply did not have in mind the sort of thoroughgoing revolution that
necessitates a genuine Leninist vanguard. They were aiming to “get something
going” - to be the “small motor that starts the large motor,” Debray says at
one point - and then to take it from there. The orientation is to cause a
crisis within the ruling regime, attempt to strike a deal with other bourgeois
forces, set loose - to a degree - mass upheaval and ride that either into power
or to a role in a coalition government. This was the real “Cuban model” these
forces had in mind. If you are not attempting to arouse the masses to really
uproot the old social relations and consciously transform society, if you are
not expecting the protracted war that almost surely will accompany such an
orientation, then, really, what need have you for a Leninist party?
Second, and obviously
related to that, the specific program and strategy they were pushing for, the
way in which they saw the forces lining up in Latin America (and internationally),
ruled out any attempt to forge a new party in opposition to the revisionist
CPs. Yes, they would fight for autonomy, and even raise the question of
hegemony at times, but they would have to be very careful not to risk upsetting
the revisionist applecart altogether. And this becomes clearer in considering
the international situation at the time and how Guevara and Debray (and of
course Castro above all) viewed their options within it.
IV
Guevarism arose in a
specific international situation, and its content is conditioned by the
dynamics of that situation. Throughout the 1960s the drive of imperialism
(headed by the U.S.) to more thoroughly exploit the oppressed nations of the Third
World ran right up against the resistance of the masses of those countries, and
this constituted the principal contradiction in the world at that time. It set
the political terms of a decade. Exemplified by the indomitable resistance of
the Vietnamese against U.S. aggression, this contradiction reached a breadth
and intensity during that period that was quite literally unprecedented.
This was, however, not
the only contradiction shaping world events. There was a particular character
to U.S./Soviet rivalry during that period: the Soviets pursued their
imperialist interests through a policy of (in the main) collusion with U.S.
imperialism. Necessity imposed upon them the tactic of attempting to secure
significant pockets of influence - even domination - in specific Third World
governments, while avoiding a decisive confrontation with a U.S. whose military
superiority was then unquestionable. All this was by way of preparation to more
aggressively push out to confront the U.S. later on, when changing conditions
would afford new opportunities (and a still greater necessity). But in the
situation of the ’60s this meant that oppositional and revolutionary forces of
different classes were not so drawn in as today to Soviet revisionism, and tended to look
either to socialist China or to their own devices (or both) to find the wherewithal
to rise in arms against U.S. imperialism.
That in turn points to
the important contradiction between then socialist China and each of the two
imperialist blocs. The U.S. had continued its aggressively hostile stance
toward China all through the ’50s and early ’60s, and China’s refusal to buckle
at all had inspired countless millions around the world. The Soviets had,
throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s, also attempted to dominate China: this
took the form of economic sabotage, sponsoring anti-Maoist forces within the Chinese
leadership, and attempting to isolate China by claiming that its firm stance
against the U.S. increased the dangers of world war. (In the late ’60s the
Soviets would actually launch military attacks against China’s borders and
float plans for a preemptive nuclear strike on its cities.) All this led to a
situation in which China “competed” with the Soviets to aid the liberation
struggles against (mainly U.S.) imperialism and tried to influence them in a
genuinely Marxist-Leninist direction. These intertwining international
contradictions - in which, again, the contradiction between the oppressed
nations and imperialism, finding expression in the powerful wave of national liberation struggles,
formed the principal factor - constituted the ground upon which Guevarism
arose, as a specific political (and ideological) response of a particular
class.
Analyzing Latin America
in particular, where Guevarisrn both arose and enjoyed its greatest influence,
one must understand the politically galvanic effect of the Cuban Revolution,
both on the masses generally and in particular on the national bourgeoisies and
petty bourgeoisies on the continent.
The U.S. had responded to the Cuban Revolution with invasion, espionage,
and attempts to diplomatically isolate the Castro regime, preparatory to
military action. Pressure was brought to bear on all the Latin American
governments to break ties; the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of
American States was only the most dramatic (and politically explosive) case in
point. But all this tended to generate widespread sympathy for Cuba among the
masses and among a significant layer of the revolutionary bourgeois democrats
on the continent. The groveling of the comprador regimes of Latin America to
the U.S. demands to punish the one country that was standing up to the beast –
which indeed had defeated it militarily – disgusted many of what could be
considered revolutionary and/or radical bourgeois-democratic forces.
As things polarized, these
forces launched revolutionary wars in a number of Latin American countries.
Venezuela, for example, saw the birth in 1962 of a guerrilla movement led by
the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), which had split off in
disgust from the ruling party in 1960. Their ranks were further swollen by
military men who rebelled in February 1963. Guatemala was also the site of a
guerrilla movement, beginning in 1962, and this one had even more significant
roots in the bourgeois military: two of its leading members, Yon Sosa and Luis
Turcios, had taken part in the November 1960 revolt in the army against the
presence of a CIA training base preparing Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs
invasion. In Peru, guerrillas appeared a few years later, and the leaders mostly
came from another organization called MIR, this one a breakaway from the ruling
APRA party; in Colombia, the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional drew its main
strength from the dissident members of the bourgeois Liberal Party.
Simultaneously the
revisionist parties of Latin America were undergoing great turmoil. On the one
hand a number of these parties had been outlawed, or otherwise subjected to
unusual repression, in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, including the parties
of Venezuela and Colombia. On the other, the success of the Cuban Revolution
against a backdrop of 40 years of CP impotence and reformism raised big
questions among the masses and put tremendous pressure on the revisionists. The
youth in particular demanded action. Finally, significant sections of these
parties were influenced by the Chinese polemics against the Soviet stress on
the “three peaceful” (peaceful coexistence, peaceful transition to socialism in
the capitalist countries, and the peaceful competitive victory of socialism over
capitalism on a world scale). This severe internal stress occurred in a context
where for a few years in the early to mid-1960s, especially during the initial
phases of the uprisings in Venezuela and Guatemala, at least sections of the
Soviet leadership felt that Cuban-type revolutions might happen in other Latin
American countries. This line became more pronounced for a brief period after
the fall of Khrushchev. So there were powerful pulls on these parties to get in
on the armed struggles that were burgeoning in Latin America.
But by 1965 things took
yet another turn on the continent. The U.S. launched a major and all-sided
initiative, including not only the Alliance for Progress but also the
large-scale training of military officers, the tremendous expansion of CIA
activity, and the virtual direction of the Christian-Democratic movement. The
1964 coup in Brazil against Goulart (rather openly coordinated by the CIA) and
the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic a year later made it brutally clear
that the U.S. was ready to use its might against any even mildly nationalist
initiative (let alone a full-blown revolutionary challenge).
Meanwhile, and linked to
this, the guerrilla movements had begun to run into trouble. The insurgencies
in Guatemala and Colombia stagnated; the Peruvian revolutionaries were brutally
crushed; in Venezuela the movement made little headway. Fabricio Ojeda and
Camilio Torres were assassinated, Luis de la Puente was caught and sentenced to
20 years in prison, other revolutionary-democratic leaders (e.g., Domingo
Rangel, the most important leader of MIR in Venezuela) capitulated and
abandoned the armed struggle.
The Soviets judged the
times to be not so promising any more, and effected a shift in policy. They decided
to pursue diplomatic and economic ties with the regimes on the continent,
deeming it a form of penetration more promising than supporting revolutions
which no longer seemed very likely to win and which, even if they did win,
might have been prohibitively difficult (from the standpoint of Soviet realpolitik) to defend and support
against a U.S. imperialism operating with renewed rabidity. It’s also true that
by this time the Soviet/Chinese split had become irrevocable, and many of the
Latin American parties had also split; it may no longer have seemed so
necessary to the Soviets to at least partially support some revolutionary
struggles in hopes of holding together these parties, since the splits had
already occurred.
All these factors -
along, no doubt, with the new offers of amnesty for the revisionist CPs - led
almost all those parties to renounce the armed struggle by 1965. This was most
concentrated in Venezuela, where the struggle had been the most advanced and
the role of the CP the largest. There the move by the leadership in April 1965
to withdraw from the guerrilla front and abandon the armed struggle led to a
serious split, with CP leader Douglas Bravo leaving the party.
Throughout this period of 1961-65 Cuba played
relatively little role in attempting to lead these struggles. Support and refuge
were provided, advice was offered, some training even went on - but Cuba made
no real attempt to form up a center for revolution on the continent. Guevara,
who left Cuba in
1964, did not at first journey to another Latin American country but
went instead to the Congo, where he attempted to link up with the guerrilla
movement then going on.
But this too changed in
1965-66. When Guevara was called back to Havana, the object was to re-ignite
the revolutionary brushfires in Latin America. In early 1966 Cuba held the
first conference of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS). While
revisionist parties of Latin America were invited, the Cubans more conceived of
it as a center for the radical-democratic non-CP forces interested in launching
armed struggle. (Almost all pro-Maoist parties and forces were screened out of
the conference by Cuba - an exclusion that will become more comprehensible later.)
At the same time, Debray was brought to Havana to write his book, and Guevara undertook
preparations for the Bolivian mission of 1966-67.
Why this shift? Castro
also attached great importance to the events of 1965, from his own particular
interests and angle. In particular, Cuba not only feared the heightened
American aggression around the world (and especially in Latin America), but was
also dismayed by the Soviet reluctance to
confront the U.S. When the U.S.
began bombing North Vietnam (in February 1965), Castro took a long hard look at
the Soviet promises to treat Cuba as an “inviolable part of the socialist camp”
should the U.S. land in Havana. After all, not only was North Vietnam just as
inviolable, it was more than a little bit
closer to the Soviet sphere of influence! Juan Bosch, himself a political
casualty of the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, commented in his
review of Debray’s book that one must first understand the fact that
Fidel
Castro is waiting for an attack by the United States. He waits for it day after
day and fears that when it occurs Russia will not fight for Cuba. Fidel Castro
does not hope to make fervent Cuban nationalists of world Communists, and
perhaps does not entirely trust the nationalism of Cuban Communists. Fidel
Castro, according to what can be deduced from what he says and does, seems to
depend more on the nationalist youth of Latin America than on the Communist
parties of the region. He sees that the Communist parties are withholding
support from the guerrillas organizing all over the continent, and no doubt
fears that these parties, formed during the Stalinist days of loyalty to Russia,
may follow the Russian line of coexistence with the United States. If the North
American attack occurs, they will make no serious effort to prevent a Cuban
defeat. (Huberman and Sweezy 1967, 104)
This strategic view finds
expression in Guevara’s assessment of the international situation, ironically
enough in his message containing the famous call for “two, three, many
Vietnams.” While Guevara correctly identified the principal contradiction as
that between imperialism headed by the U.S. and the oppressed nations, and
focused on the war in Vietnam within that, he did so in a peculiar way:
This
is the sad reality: Vietnam - a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes
of a whole world of forgotten peoples - is tragically alone. This nation must
endure the furious attacks of U.S. technology with practically no possibility
of reprisals in the South and only some of defense in the North - but always
alone. The solidarity of all progressive
forces of the world with the people of Vietnam is today similar to the bitter
agony of the plebians urging on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a
matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate;
one must accompany him to his death or to victory.
When we analyze the lonely situation of
the Vietnamese people, we are overcome by anguish at this illogical fix in
which humanity finds itself. (Bonachea and Valdés 1969, 172)
While the struggle of
the Vietnamese was certainly complicated and made more difficult, to wildly
understate the case, by the reversal of socialism in the Soviet Union and its
consequent policy of selling out the national liberation struggles, it was
nevertheless wrong, and profoundly so, for Guevara to have seen Vietnam as “tragically
isolated.” For one thing, it was directly backed by China, which had pledged
itself as a rear area; for another, there were perhaps a score of other
liberation struggles raging in the world at that time (as well as a
revolutionary reawakening beginning in the imperialist citadels, most notably
in the rebellions of the Black people in the U.S.). If none of these struggles
had yet reached (or ever did, in that spiral) the height of Vietnam, that
certainly cannot negate the real blows that were struck against imperialism,
and the real potential for even more serious blows had the revolutionary
movement been in a stronger position - a shortcoming for which Guevara and
Castro themselves bear no small measure of responsibility. Even when Guevara
does take note of other struggles, he uses these in the service of his “tragically
isolated” line of thinking: the “liberation struggle against the Portuguese
should end victoriously,” he writes, only to immediately dismiss its
significance by adding, “but Portugal means nothing in the imperialist field”
(Bonachea and Valdés 1969, 176).
Guevara’s statement
castigates both the Soviet Union and China for dereliction in their internationalist
duties: the Soviets for not daring to confront the U.S. over the bombing of
North Vietnam, and the Chinese for continuing their polemics against the
Soviets (and hence supposedly dividing the “socialist camp”). In regard to the
criticism of the Soviets, more than anything it reflected Cuban concern over
the reliability of Soviet guarantees of Cuban sovereignty which the Soviets
claimed to have extracted from Kennedy in exchange for their capitulation in
the 1962 missile crisis. It is above all a plea for the Soviets to act more
aggressively in pursuit of their imperialist interests (which is one reason why
Castro welcomed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia). We will deal with
the motivation for the attacks on China shortly.
For the Cuban leadership,
the question was urgent - in their view their survival might depend on the
revival of the guerrilla movements. It’s important to grasp that it was
primarily this narrow nationalist framework which led them to foster the
Guevara initiative.
Were one of the movements to take power, then Cuba would have an ally on the
continent, and even were it not to win immediately, if at least a credible
threat could be mounted, the U.S. could be tied down, maybe in several places
at once - thus taking some of the pressure off of Cuba. And then, too, the
possibility existed of bargaining off these movements in return for U.S.
security concessions to Cuba. (If this last possibility seems to ascribe too
much cynicism to a movement which has constantly advertised its own idealism,
we only note Castro’s profound silence during
the Mexican government’s murder of several hundred students during the
1968 rebellions; Mexico was the only Latin American government with ties to
Cuba at that time.)
Guevara envisioned
building these movements out of the radical bourgeois-democratic forces and the
supporters of the revisionist parties. These were the only forces which could
possibly be mobilized in short order to take up this new continentally
conceived and directed project. And short order was key from the Cuban
perspective, for they felt the U.S. threat to them to be an immediate one.
How was this coalition to
be hammered together? To appeal to the radical bourgeois democrats, a few
things were necessary. First, some summation of the earlier period of guerrilla
struggles had to be assayed. This was part of the task intended for Debray’s
book.
Second, the radicals were well acquainted with CP treachery, and some sort of
assurance that the revisionist parties would be kept on a tight rein was
necessary. This did not mean a total break; indeed, these forces generally saw
Soviet aid as ultimately necessary to any attempt to break from the U.S. (or to
any attempt to gain a better bargaining position vis-à-vis the U.S.) and felt
that if the revisionist CPs of Latin America could be drawn into an alliance
such aid would be more likely. One must figure as well that the assurance that
the experienced Cubans were now going to directly lead the military battle
(including the personal command of Guevara) also had an affect on these forces.
As for the CPs, the
Cubans hoped to generate enough pressure to at least neutralize them, and
hopefully force them to provide logistical support on the guerrillas’
terms. Thus Castro’s vitriolic public
attacks on the Venezuelan CP, the statements at the various OLAS conferences
excoriating the old-line revisionist parties, and the fanfare afforded Debray’s
book itself were all designed to create a certain amount of havoc within the
social base and the ranks of these parties. On the other hand, Castro hoped
that offers of aid ($25,000 was provided up front to the head of the Bolivian CP,
for example) coupled with visions of quick victory might also, from the other
side, help knock together this alliance.
All this makes it easier
to understand why Guevara and Debray were not pushing for ideological struggle
against the old parties, but instead preferred what amounted to the struggling
out of a quid pro quo with them.
Ideological struggle could mean definitive ruptures; yet that would make impossible
what the Guevarists needed so badly from the old-line revisionists. Their hope,
again, was not to shatter these parties, nor was it to make them change their
orientation; what Guevara wanted from them was basically an urban net-work that
could be relied upon by the guerrillas, and some ability to draw sections of
their youth groups into the guerrilla troops (under his hegemony). (Guevara may
also have hoped that the CP connections into the bourgeois governments could be
useful in promoting a coup favorable to Cuban interests - in Bolivia, for
example, one high-ranking CP leader had a brother high up in the air force and
was routinely utilized by the government as something of a pivot man in a
Washington-Moscow-La Paz connection. In any event, this particular aspect has
gained more prominence in the years since, especially following the 1969
Peruvian coup which afforded greatly increased influence for the Soviets land
Cuba].)
There was an even more overriding
reason, however, and that concerned the intricate relations between Cuba and
the USSR. Castro’s verbal denunciations of the Soviet Union during the 1965-67 period
reflected some real underlying contradictions. Cuba, as noted, worried about
the depth of the Soviet commitment to defending them in case of attack, and were
willing to publicly embarrass the Soviets as a way to force them into affirming
and carrying out such a commitment; Castro, for instance, refused to sign a
joint communiqué with Kosygin when the latter stopped in Cuba after his visit
with U.S. President Johnson in Glassboro, N.Y. in 1967. Nor did they like
Moscow’s turn toward seeking diplomatic, economic, and military ties with the
established (and anti-Cuban) Latin regimes, and its concomitant “counsel” to
its parties to withdraw from the armed struggle and carry out their parliamentary
cretinist traditions and inclinations even more wholeheartedly than before. But
with all these initiatives (centered in 1965-67) Cuba was not pursuing a basic break with the dependency on the Soviets
engendered by their earlier policies, but only better terms of the deal.
The Soviets, for their
part, would tolerate much from the Castro regime, and for several reasons.
First, there was not all that much that they could do about it - at that point. Open Soviet replies to Cuban
attacks and quasi-heresies would go against the Soviet efforts to patch up what
remained of their international
movement in the wake of the split with China, and would likely have the effect
of driving Cuba further away from the Soviet position and endangering their
ties in unpredictable ways. Economic pressure, which would in fact later be
brought to bear,
was also seen as premature - better to wait until Cuba began to taste the
results of Castro’s harebrained schemes and the wild promises had turned to
dust. In a word, the Soviets wanted and needed more leverage.
Second, as long as it was
kept within limits, the highly publicized “revolutionary renaissance” in Havana
benefited the Soviet Union more than it hurt it. For the Soviets, the principal
question in regard to the international movement still focused on China and how
to isolate it. Larger strategic concerns at that point dictated that the
Soviets not challenge the U.S. through support of revolutionary movements
in places of U.S. influence -
but this then provided an opening for substantial Chinese influence in key
arenas like Palestine, the Persian Gulf, parts of Africa, and almost all of
Asia. Cuba’s setting itself up as yet another revolutionary center, even
posturing to the left of and rabidly attacking China, not only undercut the
influence of Maoism but also provided the Soviets with an important conduit to
these movements (and these
strata) around the world. Part of the bargain - and as we shall see, the Cubans
certainly more than upheld their end of it - whether arrived at tacitly or more
explicitly, was that the Cubans direct their main fire against the Maoists and
that the Guevarist project should attempt to isolate them totally. Thus Castro’s
exclusion of Maoist parties, though not pro-Soviet ones, from the OLAS and other similar conferences;
the pledge made by Guevara not to work with Maoists in Bolivia; and Che’s
attack on the polemics in his statement to the Tricontinental. This carries
into Debray’s book, where the Maoist trend in Latin America is slandered as
being made up of “scatterbrains and even renegades” - the point is clearly
made that the revisionists have their problems, but these revolutionaries are beyond the pale.
We are not arguing that
this antagonism toward the Maoists was something forced on the Cubans by the
Soviets. Two opposed conceptions of revolution were at odds and struggling for
hegemony. For Guevara to carry out his
concept, struggle against the proletarian revolutionary line upheld by Maoism
internationally would be necessary. At the same time, one cannot separate
Guevara’s notion of revolution from the
role he envisioned for the Soviet Union, the actions he demanded of it, and the
trade-offs he was willing to make with it.
The Soviets, then, bided
their time. Rather than openly attack Guevara or reply to the insults of
Castro, they opened their journals to the more orthodox revisionist parties in
Latin America, which were more than willing to reply to Castro’s attacks on
them and to give back as good as they got in the vitriol department.
For Guevara to have
pumped for an open break with these parties along ideological lines was
inconceivable for a number of reasons. In the first place, at bottom the ideology of Castro and the Soviets was
not all that opposed: in the version of revolution and socialism they each
propounded, there resided a common view of the masses as the objects to be
manipulated by either a skilled elite or demagogues, depending on the case.
This finds an echo in the Debray/Guevara strategy of revolution, in which all
turns on the daring and skill of a small band of heroes. In addition to that
fundamental reason, there was also the fact that such a break would have
totally gone against Guevara’s plan for revolution (in which the revisionists
still had a large role to play) as well as the danger that that sort of
initiative ran the risk of being the last straw that would have forced the
Soviet Union to finally put its foot down, and hard. For the Soviets to allow
the Cuban leadership, which they had so fully committed themselves to, to
attempt to wreck the parties which had so faithfully served them - and for a “revolution”
the Soviets deemed to be chimerical - would have hurt the Soviets with the
forces they relied on in the international movement and in a whole host of
tasks in pursuing strategic and tactical political maneuvers in various
countries.
Finally, such a call for
ideological combat could have eventually fed into the Maoist trend; once such
combats are begun, it’s not predetermined how they will end. Some of the forces
at that point drawn to the Guevarist pole could, in the course of free-swinging
ideological struggle, have been pulled towards genuine Marxism-Leninism-Mao
Tsetung Thought.
At the same time, to have
called for the formation of a new party on the basis of ideological unity would
have made it impossible to unite with the radical democrats in the ways that
Guevara had desired. These forces did not want CP domination of the liberation
movements, but in most cases they were not even professedly Marxist and hence
had no interest in a conflict with the CPs over the content of genuine Marxism.
Many who could perhaps be united in the short term around picking up the gun
may have been driven out by such a struggle. Indeed, part of the selling pitch
to these forces was the possibility of a successful balancing act - of being
able to utilize the CPs without getting swallowed up by them, thanks to the
presumed hegemony of the Guevarists.
Debray’s attacks on the revisionist parties in frankly traditionally
anticommunist terms – “imported conceptions,”
“not knowing the conditions of Latin America,” etc. - was perhaps designed at least in part to further
prove Guevara & Co.’s nationalist
bona fides, and to win the trust of the radical
democrats for what seemed a possibly dangerous and dubious alliance.
(It’s important here to
note that had, against all odds, the Guevarist insurgency caught fire, the
Soviets would not necessarily have been
unable to find a use for such a movement. What the ultimate fate of the
Guevarists may have been even in this case, however, is open to question. A few
years after the death of Guevara, Cayetano Carpio left the CP of El Salvador to
launch an insurgency in the hills. After some years of fighting and some
important changes in the international situation and in Central America, a
juncture emerged at which a similar alliance - between, in this case, the revisionists, reformists under a
social-democratic banner, nationalists, and the neo-Guevarist Carpio forces -
became real, and in which Carpio initially had the upper hand. However, Carpio’s
resistance to negotiations in the service of the Soviet historic-compromise
strategy in El Salvador led to a concerted effort to undermine his leadership
and, according to the official story coming out of Nicaragua, to Carpio’s
assassination of a leading pro-Soviet cadre in his organization and his own
alleged subsequent suicide. If your hopes rest on getting something going so as
to attract a powerful patron, don’t be surprised when your patron decides that
your enterprise will be best served by your absence.)
Debray’s antitheoretical
approach was a key link in uniting both elements of this hoped-for coalition -
the revisionist CPs with the more traditionally nationalist bourgeois democrats. His refusal to polemicize for the
leadership of genuine
Marxist-Leninist parties served this alliance. But was it wrong to seek to unite with those bourgeois
democrats? To answer this, one must first draw a distinction between uniting with and relying on. Such class forces do in fact have a serious
contradiction with imperialism, and depending on the situation can often be
united with in the effort to drive out imperialism. But if they are utterly
relied on, as Guevara aimed to do, then the revolution will undoubtedly reflect
their class interests, which are
essentially the dreams of an oppressed and aspiring bourgeoisie to take over
the national market, etc., and develop
the country as an autonomous and integral capitalist country. Even when the
party is able to rally the proletariat and forge the worker-peasant alliance as
the backbone and basis for the revolutionary movement, the problems presented
by the revolutionary sections of the national bourgeoisie - how to unite to the
degree possible without sacrificing in any way the integrity of the communist
party program, how to lay the basis for the future advance to socialism within
the stage of a new-democratic revolution, how to garner the requisite
independent strength (political and
military) to more or less “force” these sections to “let” the proletariat lead
- have been more than a little complex. Indeed, more often than not, this has
been dealt with by tailing the national bourgeoisie. (With Debray and Guevara,
despite the “left” phrase-mongering, that tailing went on, as we shall discuss
shortly.) This, as noted earlier, all the more emphasizes the need for an
ideologically sound party.
Guevara attempted to get
around this with a two-into-one mushing together of the new-democratic and
socialist stages of the revolution, and with a seemingly left attack on the
national bourgeoisies. The revolution would have to be for socialism right from
the start, Debray declared in his book, and would have to break with the notion
that the national bourgeoisie had any role to play against imperialism.
But what view of
socialism was being put forward here? Essentially the goulash socialism
popularized by Khrushchev, the appeal to the workers to support a regime that would provide them with - or at least
promise to - provide them with certain economic benefits and social reforms in
exchange for political passivity. The model was Cuba, where even in the heyday
of “moral incentives” Guevara himself was promising a standard of living
comparable to Sweden’s by the late ’60s - if only the masses would put in
voluntary work now.
More principally,
however, this view of socialism was designed to appeal to a section of the
national and petty bourgeoisies, in which they were to become the controllers
of a huge state sector. Again, such had happened in Cuba (especially during the period when the 26th
of July veterans shared power with the
CP apparatus; after the Ten Million Tons disaster the CP became fully dominant,
and many of the so-called experiments of
Cuba, in which the petty bourgeoisie was
“given its head,” were ended). (Debray, for his part, tried to redefine these
forces out of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, at several points claiming
that participation in the guerrilla war in and of itself dissolved class
differences, etc.)
The rightism of this
formula also comes out in the attempt to bypass the new-democratic stage of
revolution, with its strong antifeudal component. In Cuba, the state sector
took over and directly administered the great majority of big farms shortly
after the revolution, and moved on to take over the majority of medium-sized
ones shortly following that. This was proclaimed by admirers of Debray and
Guevara as the most radical land program in history; in fact, the change in the
content of Cuban agriculture was little more than formal: the farmworkers had a
different boss telling them when and how they’d harvest the sugar, and the bulk
of the harvest would henceforth be sent to the Soviet Union rather than the
U.S. But the pattern of monoculture dependency, the chains of sugar, stayed the
same. The rural proletariat and
peasantry were not unleashed to step-by-step uproot, overcome, and transform
the relations and legacy of imperialism,
clearing the ground and fully restructuring
agriculture; they were told, and later forced, only to work harder.
As touched on earlier,
the legacy of imperialism in the oppressed nations cannot be reduced to
something as simple (and as rooted in distribution) as unequal exchange. It
extends to the very structure of agriculture, including what is produced, to
the ways in which feudalism has been
transformed (in the service of finance capital), and to the far from
insignificant elements of feudalism which have been retained (again in the
service of finance capital). In these situations it may well be necessary to
take a step backward to really go
forward, to go from big state or corporate farms to some (at first) smaller-scale holdings in the
hands of the peasants and recently
proletarianized farmworkers as part of
an overall plan to rupture agriculture from the patterns and structure of imperialist domination and to
lead the peasantry through the stages of
cooperation, collectivization, and finally state ownership, on a qualitatively
different basis. This can only be done, however, by a politically aroused
peasantry led by a strong and conscious proletariat with a strong vanguard. And
this - the full restructuring of agriculture away from imperialist domination,
the political awakening of the peasantry and, even more, the strengthening of
the leadership of the proletariat and its party - this is anathema to the
Guevarists.
So as to the question of
uniting with the national bourgeoisie, the answer must be that while the basis
exists due to the antagonism between sections of it and imperialism, this can
only be really successfully done when the proletariat is clear that such unity
carries with it struggle over many fundamental questions of the goals,
direction, and strategy of the revolution, at every stage of the revolution.
In regard to the
revisionists and the attempt to unite with them: this is a complex matter but
there are clear revolutionary principles which Guevarism tramples in the
interest of its unity with revisionism. The revisionist parties directly
represent the interests of the imperialists (specifically social-imperialism)
within the ranks of the revolutionary movement. This makes them (unlike the
national bourgeoisie) not potentially part of the popular forces of the
new-democratic stage of the revolution led by the proletariat, but rather part
of the enemy of that stage. Thus they can in no way be regarded as strategic
allies, and certainly the melding together envisioned by Debray is wrong in any
case. Because, however, it is most often true that in the colonial and
dependent countries the revolutionary struggle must be directed, in an
immediate sense, against one imperialist power or bloc and its agents, a
certain form of alliance may at times be necessary. This is spoken to in Basic Principles For the Unity of
Marxist-Leninists and For the Line of the International Communist Movement:
In
certain specific conditions, particularly for example where one imperialist
power (or bloc) actually carries out an invasion and attempts to occupy a
particular colonial or dependent country, it may be necessary and correct not
only to direct the spearhead of the struggle against that particular power (or
bloc) but even to ally with or at least seek to neutralize – “put to the side”
- certain domestic reactionary forces who are dependent on and serve other
imperialists (in particular the rival imperialist bloc).
But Basic Principles goes
on immediately to stress that
...
in such cases it is all the more important to expose the class nature and
interests and imperialist connections of such forces; to resolutely combat and
defeat their treachery in the struggle and particularly their attempts to
suppress the masses; to insist on and establish through struggle the leading
role of the proletariat and the independence and initiative of its party; to
continue the policy of refusing to join with or support any imperialist power
or bloc; and to keep clearly in mind and lead the proletariat and popular
masses toward the goal of victory not only in the immediate stage (or
sub-stage) but in the anti-imperialist democratic revolution as a whole, and
through that to the socialist revolution, in unity with the international
proletariat and the worldwide struggle. (RCP of Chile and RCP,USA 1981, 43)
But these are the very
questions - the character of the international situation, the class character
of the Soviet Union, the tasks of the revolution in relation to imperialism,
the class analysis of the nation, a roughing out of the relationship between
the two stages of the revolution - that one must have a communist party with a
clear and sound ideological foundation in order to deal with. The Guevarist
line on the party, and in particular the stubborn opposition to struggle over basic
principles - principles pitting revolutionary Marxism against revisionism -
represented an attempt to abort the necessary process of hammering out answers
to these questions. They had, of course, their own answers - specifically,
their alliance of revisionist CPs and sections of the national bourgeoisie to
shift the country, via armed struggle, into the Soviet camp - but they were not
about to even put these out clearly, lest they spark the very ideological
struggle they wished to avoid and drive some of the more naive and/or honest
radical-democratic forces out of their camp.
Guevarism, in sum, was
not and is not a different way of fighting people’s war: it’s a strategy
opposed to people’s war, and, moreover, opposed to the kind of revolution
necessary in the oppressed nations.
The Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
summarizes both the essence of this revolution and its relation to the strategy
of people’s war:
The
target of the revolution in countries of this kind is foreign imperialism and
the comprador-bureaucrat bourgeoisie and feudals, which are classes closely
linked to and dependent on imperialism. In these countries the revolution will
pass through two stages: a first, new democratic revolution which leads
directly to the second, socialist revolution. The character, target and tasks
of the first stage of the revolution enables and requires the proletariat to
form a broad united front of all classes and strata that can be won to support
the new democratic programme. It must do so, however, on the basis of
developing and strengthening the independent forces of the proletariat,
including in the appropriate conditions its own armed forces and establishing
the hegemony of the proletariat among the other sections of the revolutionary
masses, especially the poor peasants. The cornerstone of this alliance is the
worker-peasant alliance and the carrying out of the agrarian revolution (i.e.
the struggle against semi-feudal exploitation in the countryside and/or the
fulfillment of the slogan “land to the tiller”) occupies a central part of the
new democratic programme.
In these countries the exploitation of the
proletariat and the masses is severe, the outrages of imperialist domination
constant, and the ruling classes usually exercise their dictatorship nakedly
and brutally and even when they utilise the bourgeois- democratic or
parliamentary form their dictatorship is only very thinly veiled. This
situation leads to frequent revolutionary struggles on the part of the
proletariat, the peasants and other sections of the masses which often take the
form of armed struggle. For all these reasons, including the lopsided and
distorted development in these countries which often makes it difficult for the
reactionary classes to maintain stable rule and to consolidate their power
throughout the state, it is often the case that the revolution takes the form
of protracted revolutionary warfare in which the revolutionary forces are able
to establish base areas of one type or another in the countryside and carry out
the basic strategy of surrounding the city by the countryside (RIM 1984, 31)
Guevarism, however, makes
a principle of turning away from mobilizing the peasantry, and looks with scorn
on the fighting capacity of the proletariat. The class alliance that it seeks
to knock together and rely on consists of those mobilized under the banner of
the revisionists and the radical bourgeois democrats. The Guevarists neither
carry through the agrarian revolution in the countryside nor do they draw the
proletariat into the struggle over the cardinal questions of the day so as to
develop them into the leading class; instead there is only the scheming to
quickly climb to power and seize the reins of a rapidly expanded state
(capitalist) sector, in the name of the people.
Its internationalism,
when all is said and done, consists of appealing to the revolutionary
aspirations of the masses only to utilize them as cannon fodder for the Soviet
side in the interimperialist conflict between the two blocs. (In the case of
Che himself, it was a matter of seeking to mold the revolutionary movement from
the standpoint of narrow Cuban national interests.) The revolution it promises
is not revolution at all - not, at least, in the sense of a fundamental change
in the social relations - but is at most the institution of some reforms under
Soviet aegis. And in line with all that, the tasks of the vanguard itself in
leading the masses to consciously remake all of society, to not only overthrow
the capitalists but move forward to the continued revolution under proletarian
dictatorship and the transition to communism, are negated. In their place is
put the will of a small handful, backed up by the sponsorship of a big imperialist
power.
Bolivian Epilogue
The theory of Debray,
Guevara, and Castro found expression in Bolivia, shortly after publication of Revolution Within the Revolution?. A
core of Bolivians, sympathetic to the Guevarist line, began in 1966 to set up a
guerrilla base in the mountain region of the country, and in the fall of that
year Guevara, along with a number of Central Committee members from the Cuban
Communist Party, arrived in Bolivia. The plan was to both recruit Bolivians
into the force and to train Argentines and Peruvians through the practice of the
battle to form the cores of focos in
their countries. The hope was to develop an insurgency in Bolivia and in more
or less short order to move from there into the surrounding countries.
As is known the project
was almost a total debacle. The guerrilla
foco was defeated after six months in
the field, pursued and hunted down by the CIA-trained and directed Bolivian
Rangers, with hardly a single engagement. The foco was preoccupied with the sheer struggle for food and shelter,
and by February Guevara was ruefully noting in his diary the fights over food
in camp and the moral collapse of some of the prominent Cuban CP men.
Meanwhile, Guevara’s diary records almost no political discussion or education
among the foco and nary a political
thought of his own throughout the campaign.
In April Debray, who had
been with the foco, judged it the
better part of valor to leave the troops to go organize support in Europe.
Captured almost immediately, he, who so blithely labelled revolutionaries as “renegades,”
revealed apparently useful information to the authorities about the nature of the foco (“the Frenchman talks more than he needs to” Guevara noted in
his diary).
In June Bolivia was
wracked by a political crisis. The tin miners struck, and on June 24 the army
came in to occupy the mines. The resulting clash left an estimated 100 miners
dead, and threw Bolivia into an uproar, especially in the cities and campuses.
In a statement to the miners, Guevara called the army’s action a “complete
victory” and called on the miners to come to the foco. While it may not have been wrong to issue such a call
(assuming, for a moment, that the guerrilla army was guided by a basically
correct orientation and line in its struggle), what was missing was a grasp of
how to utilize the political crisis gripping the Bolivian government, how to
push forward and divert into the revolutionary movement what had erupted among the masses. In any event, despite widespread
sympathy for the foco, the upsurge
and the foco itself remained on two different tracks. No Bolivian came forward
to join.
Throughout the summer the
foco was riddled with disease,
desertion, and death by both accident and enemy fire. In October Guevara was
captured and then murdered in custody, with the apparent supervision of a CIA
man.
This defeat cannot and
does not, in and of itself, prove Guevara’s line to have been fundamentally
incorrect. No political theory can be made to rise or fall on the basis of a
single practical experience, and besides it can plausibly be argued that
Bolivia does not represent the best case of Guevarism, that one must look to
Cuba instead.
While that may be true,
the Bolivian experience does, however, contain a few important lessons. First,
it does show that Guevara’s view of insurrectionary war did hinge on the tricky
relationship he was trying to effect with the revisionist CP (and ultimately
with the Soviet Union). The Cubans never informed the Bolivian CP that Guevara
himself would be landing in Bolivia to command a national liberation movement.
Instead, in early 1966 Castro met with its leader, Mario Monje, to sound him
out on prospects for a national liberation struggle and gave him $25,000 for
the rather vague promise to begin preparations. Evidently the hope was to buy
Monje’s agreement to provide something of an urban support network and allow
cadre to join with the guerrillas. When
Monje was finally officially informed of Guevara’s presence, at a New Year’s
meeting at the guerrilla camp in 1967, he refused to cooperate unless Guevara
surrendered command to him, Monje. When such support was not forthcoming,
Guevara literally had nowhere else to turn.
The second, and related,
point concerns the Guevarist view toward the masses. Guevara slipped into
Bolivia in November 1966 to begin direct preparations for the guerrilla war.
But he conceived of this preparation solely in terms of learning the physical
terrain, digging caves and preparing caches, going on long training marches,
etc. No real study of Bolivia was carried on, nor was even the most rudimentary
class analysis made. The masses were so utterly absent from his calculations
that even the cursory course given the guerrillas in the Quechuan language was
useless, since an entirely distinct non-Quechuan language was spoken by the
Indians of the area! And while terrain is not without importance, the principal
thing (as Mao often noted, and as the
Cuban experience, in fact, bore witness to) is the political character of an area - the level of the
masses’ understanding and experience in
struggle, the political stability of the local
rulers, and other similar factors. As it turned out, even the physical
terrain was ultimately militarily unfavorable to the guerrillas, itself a
bitter testimony to the problems of a purely military approach to revolution -
even in military affairs.
In this light, those
analysts who trace the almost palpable air of depression in Guevara’s diaries
to his failure to rally the masses are probably reading their own assumptions
into things. In the diaries themselves the preoccupation is much more with the
demoralization of the troops; the masses hardly figure into it. And, in my
opinion, it is as Monje’s success in withholding support becomes clear that the
almost total lack of direction and élan begin to assert themselves in Guevara’s
writings.
Those points indicate a
fundamental difference between the defeat of Guevara in Bolivia and the genuine
attempts to launch people’s war during that period, many of which also met with
defeat. Unlike Guevara, these other forces were going straight up against
revisionism - ideologically, politically, organizationally, and (often)
militarily - and attempting to lead the
masses to make a revolution which would oppose both imperialist blocs. Guevara,
as noted earlier, attached importance to using the revolutionary movements to
move the Soviets into a more “revolutionary” (read: more aggressively
imperialist) stance; his differences with the Soviets were tactical, at most.
The genuinely Marxist- Leninist forces
who followed Mao, by contrast, took up arms to rid the world of all
imperialism, no matter what its
political wrappings.
Further - and again in
marked contrast to Guevara - these other attempts genuinely mobilized the
masses, raising their political consciousness
and leading them to begin to root out
the backward relations propped up and engendered by imperialist domination. The masses
themselves, in other words, were rallied and marshaled to consciously take the
political stage, guns in hand. For all these reasons, whatever their
shortcomings, the Maoist attempts to wage people’s war in that period fall into
a qualitatively different camp than the Guevarist adventure in Bolivia. The Declaration notes that:
In
a number of countries the Marxist-Leninist forces were able to rally
considerable sections of the population to the revolutionary banner and
maintain the Marxist-Leninist party and armed forces of the masses despite the
savage counter-revolutionary repression. It was inevitable that these early
attempts at building new, Marxist-Leninist parties and the launching of armed
struggle would be marked by primitiveness and that ideological and political
weaknesses would manifest themselves, and it is, of course, not surprising that
the imperialists and revisionists would seize upon these errors and weaknesses
to condemn the revolutionaries as “ultra-leftists” or worse. Nevertheless these
experiences must, in general, be upheld as an important part of the legacy of
the Marxist-Leninist movement which helped lay the basis for further advances.
(RIM 1984, 34)
* * * * *
The Soviets marked
Guevara’s defeat without comment, while unleashing the parties tightly under
their domination to crow (the Hungarians, for instance, called the whole affair
“pathetic”). For them, Guevara’s death held a number of benefits. It
strengthened the hand of the old-line revisionist parties, for one thing; in
the wake of Bolivia, it should be noted, the Soviet strategy of “historic
compromise” - briefly, the attempt to win a foothold in states in the U.S.
sphere of influence through penetrating the ruling coalitions of the government
as subordinate partners - came to the forefront in Latin America. The Peruvian
coup of 1969, in which the Soviets gained influence through important ties in the
military, and the election in Chile of Salvador Allende in 1970, marked as it
was by the maneuverings of the Chilean CP within the new government, were
promoted as new exemplars for Latin America, and by none other than Castro
himself.
As for Castro, his real
view toward Guevara’s mission is open to question. Some maintain that he set
Guevara up, and cite his failure to announce Guevara’s presence in Bolivia
despite what Guevara seemed to think (in his diaries) were prearranged plans to
do so. It’s also possible that Castro saw early on that Guevara’s scheme was
heading for failure and saw no point in opening Cuba to what he feared could be
an OAS-backed U.S. military reprisal against Cuba. In any event, the defeat in
Bolivia marked the beginning of the end of Castro’s brief and phony mutiny
against the Soviets. By 1968 he was welcoming the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, by 1969 Cuba was attending important Soviet anti-China
conferences, and by 1971 - following the Ten Million Tons fiasco - the Soviets
had put the Cuban economy and political apparatus into virtual receivership.
For the revolutionary
masses, however, there can be but one ultimate conclusion: not the rejection of
armed struggle (for the opportunities for such struggle are further opening up
today and will do so on a truly unprecedented scale in the years to come), but
the rupture with illusory shortcuts in league with revisionism. Such shortcuts
- and this is the sharpest lesson of Guevarism - are shortcuts only to a
renewed and recast, but essentially similar, imperialist domination.
References
Bonachea, Rolando E. and
Nelson P. Vaidés, eds. 1969. Che:
Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Debray, Régis. 1967. Revolution in the Revolution? New York:
Grove Press.
Dominguez, Jorge I. 1978. Cuba: Order and Revolution. Carnbridge:
Harvard University Press.
Harris, Richard. 1970.
Death of a Revolutionary. New York: W.W. Norton.
Huberman, Leo and Paul M.
Sweezey, eds. 1967. Régis Debray and the
Latin American Revolution, A Collection of
Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
Lenin, V.I. 1970. Karl Marx. Peking: Foreign Languages
Press. Originally published in 1914.
________. 1975. What is to be Done? Peking: Foreign
Languages Press. Originally published in 1902.
Mao Tsetung. 1967. “The
Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party.” Selected Works, in five
volumes. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. (Volumes 1-4, 1967; volume 5,
1977.) Originally published in 1939.
________. 1971. “Where Do
Correct Ideas Come From?”, Selected
Readings. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Originally published in 1963.
Revolutionary Communist
Party, USA. 1983. Cuba: The Evaporation
of a Myth. Chicago: RCP Publications. Third printing.
Revolutionary Communist
Party of Chile and the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA. 1981. Basic Principles for the Unity of Marxist-Leninists and
for the Line of the International Communist Movement. Available from RCP
Publications, Chicago.
Revolutionary Internationalist
Movement. 1984. Declaration of the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. Available from RCP Publications,
Chicago.
Bibliography
Avakian, Bob. 1979. Mao Tsetung’s Immortal Contributions.
Chicago: RCP Publications.
________. 1981. Conquer the World? The International
Proletariat Must and Will. Published as special issue number 50 of Revolution magazine. Chicago: RCP
Publications.
________. 1982. If There is to be a Revolution, There Must
be a Revolutionary Party. Chicago: RCP Publications.
Castro, Fidel. n.d. History Will Absolve Me. New York:
Center for Cuban Studies.
Communist Party of Peru.
1984. Develop Guerrilla Warfare. Berkeley:
Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru.
Guevara, Che. 1967,
Guerrilla Warfare. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
________. 1968. The Complete Bolivian Diaries. Daniel
James, ed. New York: Stein and Day.
Gott, Richard. 1971. Guerrilla Movements in Latin America.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Karol, K.S. 1970. Guerrillas in Power. New York: Hill
& Wang.
Lévesque, Jacques. 1978. The USSR and the Cuban Revolution. New York: Preager.
Lin Piao. 1965. Long Live the Victory of People’s War.
Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Mao Tsetung. 1972. Selected Military Writings. Peking:
Foreign Languages Press.
Mesa-Lago, Carmelo and
Cole Blasier, eds. 1979. Cuba in the
World. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Palacios, Jorge. 1979. Chile: An Attempt at Historic Compromise.
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Silverman, Bertram, ed.
1971. Man and Socialism in Cuba. New
York: Atheneum.
E.g.,
the almost routine characterization by bourgeois scholars of the 1966-70 period
in Cuba as the “Mao-Guevara period,” or the revolutionary writings of George
Jackson which point to “men who read Mao, Che and Fanon” as the revolutionary
element among prisoners.
Subjective
idealism holds that the ideas or beliefs of the individual give rise to
material reality, or in general more determine the character of that reality
than vice versa. While ideas play a powerful role and can become transmuted
into a powerful material force, this is based on the extent to which they
reflect objective reality and elucidate the underlying laws determining its
motion and development.
Today,
in Latin America, it is also seen by these revisionists as prelude to or
positioning for negotiations over power-sharing with various neocolonial
governments tied to the U.S.
To
be clear - we do not agree with the criticism of Guevara that the very fact
that he was not Bolivian doomed and invalidated his attempt to launch an
insurgency there. This criticism was unofficially voiced by some (rightist)
elements in China who went so far as to accuse him of “exporting revolution”!
The proletarian revolution is a world revolution. Revolutionaries must proceed
in all cases from that perspective, and make their contribution wherever it
will have the greatest impact and value internationally; there is surely
nothing wrong with 'exporting revolution' (as long, as Bob Avakian has pointed
out, as there is someone there to “import it”). The problem with Guevara’s
brand of ersatz internationalism (and what made it ultimately phony) lay in the
underlying perspective which guided it:
the national interest of the Cuban state.
The
Soviets did begin such pressure in 1968, when they lowered promised shipments
of oil to Cuba at the same time as they raised shipments to Brazil and Chile.
This period witnessed Castro beginning to be more fully brought to heel, a
process essentially completed with the Soviet custodianship of the Cuban
economy in the wake of the Ten Million Tons debacle and the transformation of
Castro from self-styled heretic to established ecclesiarch of Soviet
revisionism.
