Moscow's Man in Havana
Helicopters beat low over Havana, and Russian-built MIG-19 sweptwing jets sent sonic booms thundering down the capital's seafront Malecon Drive. In every town along the 760-mile length of Cuba, the speechmakers mounted their platforms to trumpet victory to the assembled populace. The first anniversary of Fidel Castro's triumph over the haphazard U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion was at hand, and May Day lay just ahead. It was time to celebrate in Communist Cuba.
But this year, unlike last, Cuba's revolutionaries have very little to congratulate themselves about. The regime still stands --a well-armed dictatorship is not easily overthrown, as the Bay of Pigs fiasco demonstrated. Yet it is a leadership in disarray, increasingly ostracized by its hemispheric neighbors, beset by economic catastrophe and torn by a bitter, not yet settled internal struggle for power.
The falling out among Marxists was something new for Cuba. Suddenly, Fidel Castro, until now Cuba's Maximum Leader and self-declared No. 1 Marxist, had lashed out publicly at the island's official Communist Party and had posed a fascinating question: Who is the real boss in Cuba--Castro, who takes orders only from himself, or the Communist Party's old-line professionals, who get their instructions from Moscow? Revolution in a Raffle. Castro's answer was as clear as he could make it--he was still in charge. Last month, in a marathon 3 1/2hour speech to his countrymen, he accused the old party regulars of undercutting his revolution, of shunting aside his followers in favor of its own cadres, of lowering a yoke on Cuba. Cried Castro: "The only comrade who could be trusted, the only one who could be appointed to an important post on a people's farm, a cooperative, in the state administration, any place, had to be an old Marxist militant. They thought that they had won the revolution in a raffle."
As quickly as the split was opened to public view, Cuba's Communists hurried to smooth it over. "There is no breach, but rather more unity for all," insisted Hoy, official organ of the Communist Party. Yet only a unity of necessity joins Castro's wild-eyed impulsive revolutionaries and the party's longtime regulars. And it is doubtful that any lasting meeting of minds can come between the mob-rousing and vain Fidel and the shadowy, heavy-set mulatto who heads Cuba's Communist Party and commands its maneuvers.
He is Bias Roca, 53, secretary-general of the party, for 26 years Moscow's most trustedly servile man in Havana, and now determined, if he gets the chance, to shape Cuba to the Kremlin's liking. Bias Roca is an orthodox Communist, cynical, opportunistic, dedicated. He believes in party discipline, and in a Cuba run by committees of technicians under the rigid control of a politburo of himself and his fellow professionals. By nature and by training he distrusts Castro's messianic brand of Marxism, his barefoot government-by-impulse, and his insatiable appetite for personal adulation. Because he could do nothing else, Roca joined forces with Castro, offering the party's organization in return for mass support. But so far, the partnership has brought only ruination to what was once one of the richest countries in Latin America.
Soot & Soup. The face of Cuba seems to be crumbling like the sea wall along Havana's beautiful Malecon Drive. The gay city is now grey and, for a Latin capital, uncharacteristically quiet. No visitor can fail to note the soot-smudged dinginess of the Habana Riviera and the Habana Libre, once the city's flossiest hotels. Silent knots of Iron Curtain technicians, gun-toting militiamen, and bewildered peasants brought to Havana for Marxist orientation have replaced the thronging tourists who once filled their lobbies. Nightclubs like the Tropicana--still ballyhooed as the world's biggest--continue to operate, but with a Cuba socialista beat, and the leggy pony chorus now does Russian folk dances. The great restaurants have two choices on the menu --half-dollar-sized steak (at $6 a crack) and spaghetti; on the street, the hamburger stands serve watery bean soup.
Nothing seems to work. Havana's transportation system is coasting to a halt for lack of spare parts and mechanics to install them. One of Castro's captive newspapers counted 280 bus breakdowns on Havana's streets in one day alone recently. "What am I supposed to do when this thing finally goes--join the militia?" said the disgruntled driver of a 1953 Cadillac taxi. Cubans are leary of the Coca-Cola they drink--it has been known to contain cockroach eggs; in bars they pointedly order Coke "sin bacilli" (without germs). "My father would be very sad to see this," said the son of the late president of Coca-Cola in Cuba.
Bitter Harvest. What is sadly visible on the face of Cuba is clearer still in the statistics of economy. The country runs on sugar, and under Communism sugar has been ruined. Little or no cane has been replanted for three years ; most fields have not been fertilized. Many of the ex pert cane cutters who normally harvest the crop are in the militia, and the "vol unteers" who replace them have hacked the stalks so badly that normal regrowth is stopped or stunted. In pre-Castro years, Cuba could count on about 5,000,000 tons of sugar, for which it got an average $500 million, most of it from the U.S. in preferential prices. Fortnight ago, Cuba's Minister of Industry, Che Gue vara, who, if nothing else, is the most candid of Cuba's new rulers, reported on this year's crop to a meeting of sugar workers: "The first thing we must say is that this harvest has been bad."
With the rainy season beginning, said Guevara, only three or four sugar mills of 160 in Cuba were meeting what he called "conservative targets." The outlook: 4,000,000 tons or less, which, with last year's carryover, will bring Cuba only $336 million, or a bare 53% of sugar earnings in pre-Castro 1957. Even that sum will not be in hard cash, but in high-priced barter goods from the Soviet bloc, which has replaced the U.S. as Cuba's major trading partner.
Profits into Losses. At night. Havana's once bright lights are dimmed for economic reasons; each kilowatt-hour of electricity, the Communists tell the people, costs 345 grams of oil, which comes from Russia and is paid for with scarce sugar.
The new poverty has halved Cuba's per capita income. The figure in 1957 was $374 for each of the country's 6,400,000 people, and Cuba ranked second among the 20 Latin American nations; now it is among the last seven on the list with a real per capita income of $185. Profitable domestic industries once made Cuba 90% self-sufficient in a long list of items: cigarettes, beer, soap, detergents, evaporated milk, tires and tubes, cement, refined petroleum, clothing, paints. Now all have been nationalized; production has faltered and profits have turned into losses.
The cigarette industry lost about $2,780,000 in the second half of 1961, the breweries more than $5,000,000. Soap was a big-time pre-Castro industry, with an annual 50,000-ton output, plus another 10,000 tons of detergent. Today the soap ration (when available) is one bath-size cake per person per month, plus a small packet of detergent for two persons per month.
The Communist world's promises to make Cuba a model of insular self-sufficiency have proved empty. The Cuban press has reported grandiose plans for more than 76 new factories, including plants for ballpoint pens, gum erasers, gasoline pumps, auto parts and batteries, poultry processing, machine tools, meat processing, shipbuilding, oil refining, electric power, steel milling and nail manufacturing. So far, Cuba's socialist partners have built four juice-canning plants, two cotton mills and a biscuit bakery. But in the other direction, Cuba has sent shiploads of machinery and furniture to Russia.
Making History. Before Communism, Cuba grew 70% of its food; today domestic food production has dropped by 50%, and little comes in from the rest of the Communist world. The country is not starving, but Havana, a city of 1,200,000, is getting hungry. In a way, its citizens are making history. In 1842, during the hated Spanish rule, the poorest-fed Cubans on record--Negro slaves from Africa--were guaranteed by law and custom at least 8 oz. of meat or fish a day, 4 oz. of rice, 12 oz. of cooking fat and 4 Ibs. of vegetables. Under Castro's rationing system, citizens of Havana are now allotted 3 oz. of meat or fish a day, 3 oz. of rice, ^ oz. of cooking fat and 8 oz. of vegetables. Even that meager ration is hard to come by. Housewives start lining up at 3 a.m. before the neighborhood groceries, which open at 8. Almost always, the end of the food comes before the end of the line.
"If this is socialism, you can have it." said a Habanero to a visiting journalist a few weeks ago. Some 200,000 of his fellow Cubans--mostly of the middle class--have already had it, and have fled into exile. Of 5,000 doctors before Castro, 1,300 have left; of 1,800 pharmacists, 300 left; of 700 agricultural engineers, 320 left; of 1,800 certified public accountants, 1,000 left; of 800 civil engineers. 350 left; of 520 electrical engineers, 200 left.
To top it off. Castro's noisv insults and his slave trader's offer to sell for $62 million the 1,179 Bay of Pies prisoners have disgusted and alienated many of the Latin Americans at first disposed to treat his revolution kindly (even though his may still be a name to reckon with among Latin America's back-country illiterates). Last week the strongest of the 60 sick and wounded prisoners Castro has sold on credit were in the U.S. to beg funds to buy themselves and the other 1,119 still in Jail-In Manhattan. Cardinal Spellman contributed $5,000 to their cause. From Mexico, onetime Cuban Vice President Guillermo Alonso Pujol flew to Havana, paid $100,000 cash for his son, a private in the exile brigade, and flew out again.
Chance to Ride. Despite what oratorical mileage he can still get out of the Bay of Pigs. Castro's people cannot live on oratory. The revolution is foundering, and for advice the amateur student of Marxism has had to turn increasingly to Cuba's old pros in the field. For Roca it was the opportunity the party had been looking for ever since it rose up 37 years ago in Cuba's eastern Oriente province. In all their years of maneuver and propaganda, the Communists had never found popular support among Cubans. Cynical and corrupt, the Reds had enjoved only brief periods of influence by dealing with detested dictators, which inevitably added to their later disfavor. Now suddenly they saw a chance for a ride on the wave of the future.
No one yearned more for power than Bias Roca, the dogged party chieftain who had made the long climb up through the ranks, memorizing his Marxist catechism and steadily following Communism's twists and turns. A largely self-educated and self-disciplined man, he knows how to smile when he is angry, agree publicly when he disagrees privately, listen when he wants to speak, make deals with those it is his instinct to detest, keep his temper even when slapped in the face.
A Way Out. Eldest son of a poor shoemaker named Francisco Martinez and his common-law wife, Bias Roca was born July 24, 1908 in Manzanillo's working-class district of San Nicolas. The children took their mother's family name; Roca was named Francisco Calderio, nicknamed "Paco," meaning Little Frank. Known as a vivo--someone not deeply intelligent, but clever--he managed to get through grammar school before he had to join his brothers cutting leather and stitching peasant shoes in a tiny home workshop. Against the bleak prospect of a lifetime at the cobbler's bench, the Communists offered a way up and out.
Before long, Roca was an official of Manzanillo's Communist-controlled shoe workers' union and deeply involved in the party's struggle for recognition. Unable to get anywhere on their own the Communists sought to make a deal in August 1933 with Dictator Gerardo Machado whom Cubans knew as "the butcher of Havana." Virtually the entire country was on general strike against Machado and the Reds were offered control of Cuba's entire Labor Confederation if they would denounce the strike. The party accepted the offer. Four days later, Machado fled, leaving the Communists behind as the dictator's last remaining supporters.
The mistake is still remembered as "the August error." Bias Roca survived the purge that followed, and even moved up to boss the Oriente provincial party machinery. He made a pilgrimage to Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, and there he obviously impressed his superiors, Jacques Duclos, the pudgy French Communist who once strongly influenced North American Communists, once described Roca as the most clear-thinking Red in the Americas. On Roca's return to Cuba, the middle-class intellectuals who had been running things were deposed. Shoemaker Roca, a man of the proletariat, was installed as the secretary-general and big boss, a post he has held ever since.
All for Cuba. Soon, like his predecessors, he was searching for a deal. Fulgencio Batista, the tough army sergeant who rode a coup to power in 1933, was now the man in charge. In return for what support the Communists could give, he allowed the party to start publishing its newspaper Hoy, and then, as the friendship warmed, gave the Reds what they wanted--control of the Cuban Labor Confederation. The next objective--real popular appeal--was somewhat harder to achieve. Hoping to disguise Moscow's controlling arm, Roca set out to "Cubanize" the party. The word commissar was banned from party publications, and the Communists even spoke gently of their bitterest enemy, the Roman Catholic Church, to which 90% of all Cubans belong. Yet Roca did not mistake where the orders came from. "We must never forget that the important thing is the security of the Soviet state," he once told a Hoy editor.
When Batista's term ended in 1944, the party tumbled back into obscurity. In true Communist fashion, Roca recognized no defeat: "Of course, Cuba will be a socialist country some day." he told a U.S. newsman. " 'When is the only question suitable for discussion." But he had little to go on. Batista's freely elected successors, first Grau San Martin, then Prio Socarras, wanted no part of the Communists, stripped away their control of the labor confederation. In two years from 1948 to 1950, registered party members dropped from 150,000 to 55,000. Even Batista, when he returned to power at gunpoint in 1952, had no deals to offer this time. Anxious to stay on the right side of the U.S., whose sugar and tourist dollars filled Cuba's (as well as his) pockets, he went so far as to outlaw the Communists and drive them underground. There they stayed until Castro came along seven years later.
"Petty Putsch." At that, the Communists almost missed the boat with Fidel. When Castro led a gang of young rebels in a foolhardy frontal assault on Batista's Moncada barracks in 1953, the old party-liners called it a "petty-bourgeois putsch." In 1957. when Castro went into the Sierra Maestra hills to start his guerrilla war, they again dismissed him as an ineffectual "adventurer"--a Communist phrase for amateurs. But Castro survived and grew stronger, and the possibility of an alliance began to dawn on both sides. Though Castro was a hero in the hills with great popularity among Cuba's peasants, he had little support in Havana itself. In April 1958 he called a general strike which failed miserably. Communists blamed the failure on the fact that they had not participated. Actually, the strike was doomed before it started. Cuba's workers were among the most advanced in Latin America; only seven countries paid higher industrial wages. The workers acted as if they had never heard of Fidel Castro.
Nonetheless, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a middle-class intellectual who was generally considered No. 2 to Roca in the party, went into the hills to make contact with Castro's revolutionaries. Fidel already had a woolly-minded vision of himself as a Marxist messiah, and he apparently believed that the professional Communists had something to offer his revolution. When Castro came down from the hills to Havana in January 1959. Rodriguez came too, proudly sporting the rebel beard he still wears. Once more the Communists, in their search for power, had found someone to hang onto.
The Hour Is Coming. Bias Roca was ready with his apparatus, and with his made-in-Moscow policies. Now he offered both to Castro, who had defeated Batista but had not the vaguest idea how to run Cuba, or carry on his revolution.
Not to alarm Cubans, Castro loudly proclaimed that "this revolution is not Red, but olive green." Behind the scenes, Roca's men quietly took over indoctrination of the army, and set up the G-2 security force. The original 26th of July rebels, many of them anti-Batista and anti-Yanqiii but Cuban nationalists all the way, bitterly protested the intrusion. In October 1959, a bearded leader of Castro's rebel army, Huber Mates, resigned, saying that "the hour is coming when anyone who does not commune with Communism has to leave or be accused of being a traitor." Castro had him arrested on charges of treason and sentenced to 20 years in jail.
Signs of Melonism. Next to go Communist were Cuba's unwilling labor unions. Though the Communists campaigned hard for elections leading up to the first Cuban Labor Confederation convention, they were rejected. Going into the convention, 26 out of 33 syndicates were Communist-free. As the delegates were about to choose confederation leaders, Castro appeared to harangue the union men about unity, and insist that the Communists be represented. Once in, they gradually purged anti-Communist elements. Castro opened the way for Roca's militants to take over the universities. He removed his anti-Communist Provisional President, Manuel Urrutia, and replaced him with Old Communist Osvaldo Dorticos. The anti-Communists who were left in the government joked bitterly that the revolution was "like a watermelon, green outside and Red inside." Before long it was Red outside as well.
Raul Castro and Che Guevara visited Moscow, but in doing so obviously contributed to Khrushchev's uneasy feeling that there was a decidedly amateurish quality to the new Cuban Marxists. While Castro could be used, he was dangerously eccentric, and while he proclaimed his socialism, he gave socialists everywhere a black eye by ruining Cuba's economy.
Last August, as the economic slide steep ened, Castro hastened to "confess I was one of the promoters of projects that were not planned." The next month, Castro Puppet President Dorticos and Roca were in Moscow together. Dorticos was re ceived cordially, and went home before the 22nd Party Congress. Roca stayed on for the congress, and for more Moscow coaching.
Something Up. When Roca got back to Cuba, the Communists started moving in at an accelerated pace. Castro announced himself "Marxist-Leninist." He accepted "collective leadership," and insisted that he had "never aspired to be a Caesar." Talk went around that the new directorate of the O.R.I. (Integrated Revolutionary Organizations), the planning group formed to make the transition to a single ruling Communist Party for Cuba, would consist of seven men, weighted in favor of Roca. Then. Castro was removed from the presidency of the National Agrarian Reform Institute and replaced by Roca's man, the bearded Carlos Rafael Rodriguez.
This winter it was plain that something was up. Rumors raced through Havana that Castro had been overheard in a restaurant cursing the old-line Communists, that Castro had sounded out a Latin American government (the whisper had it as Brazil) about the chances of asylum. On Feb. 4, Castro, whose monumental ego keeps him constantly before the public, dropped out of sight for 22 days. Word spread that he was being shoved aside. But Castro was holed up on Che Guevara's farm outside Havana, getting ready to give battle to Roca and the old Reds.
On his return, he expanded the O.R.I. directorate to 25 members, consisting of 15 of his own men, only ten of Roca's old guard. At the top of O.R.I., there would now be a five-man secretariat headed by himself; Roca, listed No. 5, was the only old Communist named. Cuba would now have a Vice Premier to take over in case anything happened to the Maximum Leader himself: he would be Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. Then Castro went on TV to denounce the Reds and reassert his own leadership. He could not lambaste Roca (he was too strong), but he lashed out at Roca's lieutenant, Anibal Escalante, purged him from O.R.I, and drove him into exile in Czechoslovakia. Bias Roca himself dropped out of sight on an "inspection tour" of the provinces. Mos cow pondered two weeks, then in a Pravda editorial proclaimed that Castro had been justified.
Spurt Up, Trend Down. In any struggle for power between Castro and the Communists, each side has strengths and weaknesses, and very likely there is currently an unsentimental and unresolved alliance. Castro's blunders and the hardships that have resulted have undoubtedly tarnished his hero's image. But he alone still has the charismatic name, the voice, the face, the popular appeal. For their part, the professional Reds have the organizational techniques, the indoctrination textbooks, and a more patient spirit (Roca wanted Castro to lay off the Catholic Church longer, and not to alienate prematurely the technicians needed for the first round of the takeover). Communists are more practical planners, even if they manage to botch up agriculture wherever they are. Mother Russia now controls Cuba's imports, and its purse strings, too. In the beginning, the Kremlin may have wanted only to use Castro without being stuck with him. But now it has a $750 million investment in Cuba, and as Castro fervently wraps his arms around Marxism, Soviet prestige before the world is deeply involved.
At present, each side has need of the other, but it is a precarious equilibrium, and neither can leave it at that. "If I were plotting a fever chart I'd give Fidel's line a short spurt upward, but surely the trend must point down," says a foreign diplomat in Havana. Working in Roca's favor, say the experts, is the massive indoctrination that has brought 60,000 young Cubans from the countryside to fill expropriated Havana mansions. By day, they learn a trade; by night they learn a Roca brand of Communist discipline. "One day," says a diplomat, "Fidel will have to face all those he has sent to school. He is not likely to shake off the Communists now. More than ever he is surrounded by the personnel of the party. If the Communists keep quiet, prod a little here and there, and offer adulation, eventually they will grab away the real power."
Wither on the Vine. Looking on, the U.S., exactly a year after the Bay of Pigs, is following a conspicuous game of "look, no hands." The Kennedy Administration, once burned on Cuba, puts little faith in the wishful theories that Castro might be helped in his fight with the Communists, or converted into a Caribbean Tito. Maverick expeditions to Castroland from Florida are headed off; the exile counter-plotters have dispersed--the CIA seeks them out occasionally to see what they are up to, but offers no real help. A few two-and three-man CIA expeditions land in Cuba to bury containers of weapons for possible future use. Small-scale guerrilla bands fight and die in Cuba without U.S. help.
But all the emphasis is on letting Castro wither on the vine, while other Latino nations are helped through the Alliance for Progress. The U.S.-imposed economic embargo and the U.S. diplomatic offensive to isolate Cuba from the rest of the hemisphere have had some effects. But it is Castro's own violent behavior more than U.S. propaganda that turns the hemisphere from him, and it is Cuban mismanagement more than U.S. starving-out that is wrecking the economy.
The desperate turns a disheartened Cuba may take are many. The Bay of Pigs invasion did Castro the invaluable favor--so essential in fastening a dictatorship on a people--of convincing the discontented that resistance is futile. Most of the diplomats and foreign journalists in Havana (who can no longer count on the frankness of those they talk to) see little chance of a popular revolt, and sense that, though greatly diminished, the reservoir of idealism and expectancy that Castro began with still exists among many campesinos.
The better-off who wish to leave still crowd the Pan Am and KLM flights at the rate of 2,000 a week, having been compelled to leave all their money behind.
Like Communists everywhere, those in Cuba may not know how to run an economy or make the public happy, but they know how to hold control. A likelier possibility is a fallout among the factions who govern, and it is a U.S. worry that when it suits the Communists, Castro might be found murdered with a U.S. pistol lying near by. The same thought must trouble Castro, for he no longer moves around freely, unattended. Already assassination attempts have been reported against Brother Raul.
For the present, old-line Communists still need Castro, must do him homage and dare not switch off his loudspeaker.
Perhaps they are not yet prepared to inherit the mess. But another realignment of leadership seems inevitable, and much of the betting favors increased power for Bias Roca, Rodriguez & Co. For Cuba, the melancholy prospect is of continued hardship and little hope of freedom or improvement. In which case, men of cunning and mettle have the best chance of survival. Bias Roca, the Rock, figures on being firmly in place.
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