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“To condemn the Revolution is to condemn Christ”: Radicalization, Moral Redemption, and the Sacrifice of Civil Society in Cuba, 1960

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-045

1527-1900

Lillian Guerra,

Cuban History and Society

Regardless of how one interprets the Cuban Revolution or its legacies, the year 1960 surely represents the most controversial and pivotal moment in its development. Punctuated by a rapid ideological radicalization of state policy, 1960 culminated in the rupturing of all diplomatic ties with the United States and Cuba’s official embrace of the Soviet Union, as well as a series of sweeping decrees that left over 80 percent of the Cuban economy under direct state control.1 Traditionally, scholars and observers have interpreted the radicalization process of 1960 and Fidel Castro’s decision to “go Communist” in one of two ways. Many analysts contend that Fidel Castro and other top leaders of the revolution deliberately betrayed the liberal democratic principles that defined the struggle against the Batista dictatorship in order to consolidate their own power.2 Others assert that U.S. covert policies of subversion and commitment to a neo-colonial status quo were responsible for forcing the hand of Cuba’s leaders, who then reacted defensively to protect Cuban sovereignty by seeking new allies and trading partners in the USSR.3 Today, evidence continues to mount in support of both views, that Cuba’s leaders manipulated the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War to serve their own ends and that U.S. officials attempted to subvert any kind of change in Cuba, not only after 1959 but throughout the anti-Batista war. Indeed, questions remain as to exactly when, why, and how Fidel and other leaders decided to channel the revolution toward state Communism.4 This essay seeks to enrich rather than undermine traditional approaches by examining closely the discursive process of radicalization that preceded practical shifts of policy. It argues that events and conflicts in the realm of symbols and discourse helped catalyze support for those policies in dramatically militant ways.Specifically, top leaders constructed the revolution as a millenarian moral paradigm in order to justify ever more authoritarian control over political expression, forms of speech, and the economy throughout 1960. They did so primarily to obfuscate the need for any public endorsement of Communism and to silence open debate over ideology. Ultimately, the willingness of supportive citizens to conceive the revolution as a militant struggle for collective redemption entailed the gradual sacrifice of civil society. In addition to exploring how civil society began to disappear, this essay asks and attempts to answer the vexing historical question of why the vast majority of Cubans did not seem to care.5 This question remains particularly relevant given the central role that civic organizations, workers’ unions, and student associations had played in Cuban politics before 1959, especially in the latest struggle against Batista.6While Fidel himself may have demanded unconditional support from citizens as early as July 1959, explanations remain vague as to why so many Cubans responded to his 1960 call for “unanimity” by applauding the sacrifice of such long-sought goals as freedom of the press and the autonomy of Cuban universities. This is particularly true of the first months of 1960, when workers’ militias began launching assaults on the independent media, and the Cuban Communist Party (then known as the Partido Socialista Popular, or PSP) continued to enjoy exclusive rights to organize, despite the fact that all other parties were banned. Importantly, public complicity with the erosion of opportunities for self-expression, protest, and political plurality took place before May 1960, setting these developments apart from the subsequent elimination of the autonomy of schools, social clubs, and associations that followed generalized nationalization.As most scholars concur, class interests proved central to citizens’ support or alienation from the revolutionary state and its policies. However, with the exception of Cuba’s landowning elite, most Cubans, including the vast majority of the middle class, stood solidly behind radical reforms and state intervention in the economy through the early months of 1960. The new government’s remarkable legislative velocity seemed to cause most Cubans to marvel more than to worry. After decades of political stagnation and increasing class disparities, passage of more than 1,500 revolutionary decrees in just nine months cut electricity rates, drastically reduced rents, renegotiated labor contracts, confiscated properties from corrupt public officials, and raised wages.7 When combined with state intervention in labor disputes, incentives for investment in industrialization, honest taxation, and the creation of state-run Tiendas del Pueblo (People’s Stores) offering low-cost goods to the rural poor, such reforms laid the foundations for profound economic growth and a more harmonious society. As prices fell and salaries increased, the Instituto Nacional de Ahorro y Viviendas (INAV) began building low-cost, prefabricated homes in order to improve conditions of life in the countryside and to clear city slums around Havana and Santiago.8Few of the state’s early projects would have succeeded without the political and financial support of Cuba’s middle class. Indeed, middle-class citizens made possible massive government spending on INAV and other social programs in three ways: by volunteering to pay the back taxes that they had owed for years, by supporting the confiscation of properties seized from batistianos, and by making direct donations to fund such controversial programs as the May 1959 Agrarian Reform.9 According to the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA), private donations for the purchase of farm machinery and supplies for a new class of small farmers totaled over $8 million.10 By January 1960, minister of the treasury Rufo López-Fresquet announced that the Cuban state was literally awash in cash: its new annual budget had reached $600 million.11Perhaps not surprisingly, Fidel Castro and other top leaders came to view middle-class Cubans’ role in facilitating socially transformative projects with increasing contempt. They drew this conclusion during the closing months of 1959 just as a coalition of U.S. intelligence agents and batistiano exiles increased the number of violent assaults they launched on Cuba from bases in Florida. Apparently, leaders became convinced that the anti-Communist, socially democratic, and pro-capitalist aspirations of the middle class severely limited the state’s ability to crush the counterrevolution, silence potential rivals to Fidel’s leadership, and impede the efforts of the United States to intervene in the revolutionary process as it had done so many times before.In fact, by December 1959, the enthusiastic activism of middle-class organizations, often affiliated with the Catholic Church, gave revolutionary leaders ample reason to be concerned: their monopoly on power and credit for producing dramatic social change was coming to an end. Not only had Catholics joined Christians of other sects, Masons, and Jews to form an “anti-Communist and anti-capitalist” civic movement modeled after Latin America’s Christian Democratic Parties, but progressive Catholic activists were also competing aggressively with state agencies in the distribution of clothing, food, and health care among slum dwellers and the rural poor.12 Moreover, in November 1959, Juventud Católica organized its own mass demonstration in honor of Cuba’s national patron, the Virgin of Charity, and its first (and last) National Catholic Congress. Although Juventud Católica counted a national membership of only 10 thousand men and 14 thousand women, observers estimated that at least 1 million Catholics participated in the congress and attended the religious mass/rally held in Havana’s Plaza Cívica, the primary visual stronghold of Fidel’s power to draw crowds of (previously) unparalleled size.13 According to Javier Arzuaga, a Franciscan priest who presided on the altar-stage, the sight of a million Catholics chanting “¡Caridad, Caridad, Caridad!” and the fact that Arzuaga refused to silence them so annoyed Fidel that he quickly decided to leave.14 Events like these revitalized formal participation in religious life as churches became highly politicized sites of autonomous national consciousness.15Thus, middle-class mobilization in favor of a socially transformative but anti-Communist and pluralist state apparently prompted Fidel Castro to adopt a highly Christian, messianic discourse and related set of Catholic-inspired rituals in 1960. Fidel’s claims to represent the radical fulfillment of Christianity justified an authoritarian, pro-Communist vision whose inherent millenarianism directly challenged the church’s power to bring about social change. As this essay shows, the adoption of this discourse proved critical to the marginalization of middle-class activists and progressive Catholics from the revolution. More importantly, it also propelled the radicalization of the revolution’s stated goals and the criteria for judging who could be included within revolutionary ranks and charged with defining and achieving such goals.By constructing the revolution as a divinely sanctioned struggle to create a uniquely moral society on earth, Fidel Castro actively substituted discussions of ideology with celebrations of the moral rectitude that leaders and loyal citizens shared. These celebrations effectively silenced possible questioning of the implications that many government decisions held for the future direction of the Cuban state. They also defined leaders’ decisions as so innately “good” that no paradox, contradiction, or reversal of position mattered, since only “true revolutionaries” were capable of understanding the revolution’s sacred meaning. Within this official fidelista frame, all institutions’ traditional claims to moral authority and conventional vehicles for participation in the political process were equally discredited as ideological dead-ends and impediments to long-lasting change. In short, Fidel’s campaign to define loyalty to the state and the state itself as the truest expressions of Christianity pushed all Cubans to choose sides long before government standoffs with the United States ensured that they would. At the same time, various currents of fidelismo emerged in response to Fidel’s self-constructed myths of divinity and messianic self-sacrifice. These popularly crafted forms of fidelismo further consolidated the framework of the revolution as a moral paradigm. Yet, they also empowered the most disenfranchised Cubans, especially those of African descent, to reconceive Cuban identity itself, placing the explosively contentious legacies of slavery, poverty, and pride in blackness at its center. Thus, class interests alone account neither for the revolution’s radicalization nor for the deep well of support that it tapped among marginalized sectors. Struggles over the politics of morality within the discursive field of symbols, performance, and words may have played an equally vital role.During the first six months of 1960, Fidel and other top state officials worked hard to discredit any rivals within the national media and the Catholic Church who claimed that they could uphold what Fidel called the revolution’s “truth.” Fidel explained that truth before hundreds of thousands of rural workers in December 1959. In this speech, Fidel acknowledged that the financial support and activism of affluent and educated Cubans had been principally responsible for the triumph of the movement against the dictator Fulgencio Batista in January of that year. But he also insisted that their past actions gave them no special influence over the state.In other words, the truth was that Fidel and the humblest of the revolution’s supporters represented the incarnation of Jesus. They were the revolution’s Chosen People, the saviors of Cuba.Because Fidel gave this speech only a few weeks after the National Catholic Congress, he undoubtedly meant to challenge Catholic activists who had long claimed as their own both anti-Communism and the right to determine the ideological direction of the state through electoral and civic participation.17 Yet, he also directed this and all subsequent speeches in which he invoked the figure and message of Jesus Christ to the poor and working-class Cubans who made up the bulk of his live audience — in this case, the half-a-million highland peasants whom organizers had assembled to hear him. Although in 1960 Cuba had the lowest proportion (72.5 percent) of nominal Catholics in Latin America, according to a nationwide survey, Fidel’s declaration that poor Cubans should compare themselves (and him) to Christ rested on a number of deeply inscribed national traditions.18 The most important of these was the secular cult of the ideas of José Martí. Equally given to self-identifying with Jesus’s mission during his lifetime, the nineteenth-century ideologue had become, by 1960, Cuba’s universally sanctioned messiah, the “Santo de América,” whose anti-imperialist mantle and promise to found a republic “with all and for the good of all” no figure would pursue as relentlessly as Fidel Castro.19 Fidel’s invocation of Christianity in defining his revolution “para los humildes [for the humble]” also resonated with a set of values for redefining democracy that he had articulated earlier. These values displaced “bourgeois” privileged concerns from this new definition’s core.What were these concerns? By early 1960, fears were growing that Fidel’s defiance of the United States would eventually entail an alliance with the Soviet Union and the elimination of not only individual property rights but autonomous forms of expression, education, and assembly. As early as March 1959, Fidel had predicted that such freedoms were meaningless for the 40 percent of the population that was chronically hungry, illiterate, and socially marginal.20 For them, he argued, personal guarantees from leaders rather than structural, constitutional checks on the state or an independent civil society were the best way to ensure and build a truly moral democracy.21 Exactly one year later, growing evidence of popular belief in the incontestability of Fidel’s rule and the revolution’s “truth” among poor Cubans seemed to prove he was right.That March, Fidel accused his critics of not knowing how to combat “those things [that the revolution does that] are so evidently good . . . so they invent what is unknown, then they begin to say: communism, communist. . . .they cling to the vague word, to the confusing word, which is applied to anything, which they apply to any policy. . . . But this is not a revolution of many words; this is a revolution of many deeds.”22 Many Cubans agreed with Fidel: words could not account for the unprecedented miracles the revolution seemed to have wrought. For example, INAV built 10,000 homes in 1960 alone and planned to build 20,000 more in 1961.23 If such deeds made the leaders’ right to rule uncontestable, it also placed the ideals that they espoused beyond the reach of mere political categories, in the realm of the sacred and unspeakable.Testifying to this, Fidel and other leaders soon encouraged Cubans to choose sides on the “battlefield of ideas” that the revolution opened up in every sector of society. Genuine participation and influence in the structures of government, they argued, could only be achieved through its defense. Joining armed workplace militias, making pilgrimages to newly designated “holy sites” of fidelismo, and shouting down the voices of the revolution’s enemies, whoever they may be — all of these actions constituted new criteria for admission to revolutionary ranks. Through them, citizens could become part of the government and consolidate the place of “the people” in a new, improved version of direct democracy.On January 1, 1960, Fidel Castro, Celia Sánchez, and other commanders of Fidel’s original guerrilla column launched this new vision of participatory democracy with a dramatic re-enactment. Joined by a large “brigade” of male and female students who belonged to university militias, Fidel went to Oriente, where the group climbed the highest mountain, Pico Turquino, with rucksacks and rifles strapped to their backs.24 Upon arriving at the summit, the group paused for pictures at the spot where Celia Sánchez’s father, a wealthy doctor and landowner from Manzanillo, had erected a large bust of José Martí. Finally, Fidel ordered the entire brigade to fire their weapons “to celebrate the conquest” and teased breathless members of the troop by saying that he was ready to climb an even taller peak.25Although it represented an ascent of scarcely 2,000 meters, climbing Pico Turquino was an unusual activity in a society where mountaineering had never taken hold and where white-collar workers generally engaged in less adventurous sports, such as baseball, basketball, or volleyball. In 1960 and afterward, the ascent of the mountain functioned much like classic rites of Catholic pilgrimage to holy sites by allowing self-professed revolutionaries to enter into the life of Fidel, much as Catholic pilgrims entered the life of Jesus by literally following in his footsteps.26 In ascending Pico Turquino, pilgrims emulated Fidel’s supposed sufferings during the anti-Batista war in ritualistic, deliberate form.27 Moreover, in making the pilgrimage to Pico Turquino, Cubans publicly recognized the enormous sacrifice Fidel had once made and performed self-imposed political “penance” for having failed to join him during the real, historic struggle against Batista.28 Also like a classic Catholic pilgrimage, accounts of Fidel and other ascents of Pico Turquino invariably involved stories of personal injury acquired along the way and evidence of having achieved a state of “communitas” among pilgrims that temporarily inverted normal hierarchies of power.29 For example, the magazine Bohemia noted that “Aleida, a black girl” had managed to switch roles with Fidel, becoming the very first to arrive at a key point along the route. When Aleida proudly hollered her triumph, Fidel shouted back his congratulations for beating the revolution’s Comandante en Jefe at his own game.30After Fidel’s New Year’s Day ascent of 1960, hiking up Pico Turquino became a ritualized standard of self-purification and penitential meditation open to all Cubans who recognized the need to purge themselves of any adherence to the political values of the past. Demonstrating this, a group of architects who had formed a workplace militia made the hike up the mountain within days of Fidel’s expedition. The architects added another element to the ritual: the swearing of an oath to “die for the ideals of the Revolution” before the summit’s bust of Martí. Because temperatures reached just two degrees Celsius that day, only 13 out of the 140 architects managed to finish the climb. “Now more than ever, we comprehend the moral and spiritual greatness of our grand leader Dr. Fidel Castro Ruz,” one of the militiamen commented to a reporter from El Mundo.31 So popular did the pilgrimage become in 1960 that the University of Havana consequently postponed final exams for law students who had joined militias so they could also go to the Sierra.32While such trips were supposed to be voluntary, getting a job in Cuba’s Foreign Service as of 1960 required not just one but five pilgrimages to the top of Pico Turquino.33 In 1961 at the first congress of la Unión de Artistas y Escritores Cubanos (UNEAC), it was even proposed that artists and writers be subject to the same requirement.34 The obligatory number of hikes corresponded to the five times Fidel had ascended to the summit during the war against Batista, although Fidel admitted that the first time he did so was for “psychological” reasons: he had hoped to impress television reporters who were there to interview him.35Making the trip up Pico Turquino evinced a particular interpretation of the role that citizens should play in consolidating the revolution that officials came to consider essential in the pivotal early months of 1960. It was not dialogue that the government sought to establish through such rituals but a dynamic of engagement with the mythic foundations of the revolutionary state, which surrendered one’s individual will to government control in the name of national defense. Just as Catholic doctrine distinguished itself from early sects of Protestantism by advocating the need for “good deeds” as a proof of conviction, in 1960 the revolution demanded actions, not simple testimonials of belief as it had in 1959. On the other hand, a common thread linked these new rituals to activities previously established as emblematic of support in 1959, such as participation in mass rallies. All disavowed traditional political discourse and spaces for public engagement of the state on which middle- and upper-class sectors had historically relied.By establishing these alternative practices, revolutionary leaders offered not only new vehicles and fora for political participation but instilled them with distinctive cultural values long associated with workers and peasants, not the bourgeoisie. Exerting one’s body; suffering hunger, cold, or hardship; wielding weapons; even sweating and going without a bath while marching in a militia or hiking Pico Turquino suddenly became marks of honor, not shame. These discursive elevations of the everyday experiences of the poor complemented state policies that endorsed greater austerity and condemned activities associated with bourgeois decadence and moral depravity. Such policies included severe restrictions on the importation of goods like television sets and Cadillacs.36 They also included preliminary efforts to rehabilitate Havana’s thousands of prostitutes and putting an end to the U.S. Mafia’s control over casinos. Singer Carlos Puebla chronicled the popularity of both actions in his famous song lyric of 1960, “Se acabó la diversion, llegó el Comandante y mandó a parar [The good times are over, the Commander arrived and ordered them stopped].”The logic that inspired pilgrimages to Pico Turquino soon generated other rituals and acts of self-purification to determine inclusion in the revolution, which simultaneously undermined the need for public debate on the nature of Fidel’s rule. Ironically, battles over the revolution’s new emphasis on the need for actions — not words — first emerged among typographers in the national press, who called for an end to the independent ownership of their own newspapers. Given typographers’ unions long association with the PSP, it is likely that some coordination among workers and Fidel Castro’s new crop of unconditionally loyal PSP advisors was to blame. Yet, the closure of most newspapers and television stations that followed did not, on the surface, result from specific acts on the part of the Council of Ministers. On the contrary, public sanction for a decidedly deliberate and organized process of demonizing the nongovernment press enabled not only its elimination through worker takeovers but ritual celebrations of its disappearance. These celebrations quickly became fidelista sacraments of revolutionary faith.Beginning on the day before Christmas in December 1959 and culminating in mid-February of 1960, a rash of unprecedented attacks on national newspapers swept the island, alarming journalists, editors, and subscribers alike. Without police or judicial interference of any kind, organizations supportive of the government had begun holding public burnings and symbolic “burials” of newspapers known for their anti-Communism and often critical coverage of the Cuban state. In Camagüey, women wearing the badge of Vilma Espín’s recently organized Unión Revolucionaria Femenina (URF) held a public burning of Diario de la Marina, Prensa Libre, Avance, and Life magazine in the city’s main plaza. On the day after Christmas in 1959, PSP leader Roberto de la Osa performed a public “burial” and mass burning of the same national dailies in San Antonio de los Baños.37These first incidents coincided with an anonymously organized campaign to prevent the public from reading certain newspapers. Four days after the first reported newspaper burning in Camagüey, Diario de la Marina’s staff filed charges against a young man in Corralillo whom they had caught stealing the package of that day’s edition and trying to burn it. In Cienfuegos, anonymous fliers circulated around the city, urging a boycott of almost all nongovernment news papers, including Diario de la Marina, Avance, Crisol, and Prensa Libre as well as the deeply anti-Castro foreign magazines Time and Fortune. In Bahia Honda, a cane workers’ union passed a resolution prohibiting the entrance of all nongovernment newspapers in the still privately owned sugar mill where they worked.38What made these newspapers subversive in the eyes of Cuba’s Communists and “true” revolutionaries? They regularly reprinted news articles from the Associated Press and other wire services in which U.S. officials denounced the revolution as increasingly Communist. For the Cuban Communist newspaper Hoy, the burnings were justified: as early as January 13, 1959, its editors had claimed that the anti-Communism of U.S. officials and other enemies of Cuba was the same thing as “counterrevolution.” Thus, according to Hoy, permitting anti-Communists to accuse the government of being either Communist or pro-Communist in the Cuban press or elsewhere was the same thing as endorsing anti-Communism and counterrevolution.39 In this sense, Cuba’s own Communists echoed Fidel’s position on the question of whether Cuba’s government was actually pro-Communist or Communist. It was better to say nothing at all; so pure were the revolution’s guiding principles that they should remain unspeakable and unspoken. To speak them was to betray the revolution’s central unquestionable truth: that it was morally pure and unquestionably “good.”Throughout the month of January, incidents like December’s newspaper burnings and anonymous boycotts would continue, punctuating a struggle for control over political discourse and the national press that laid bare the moral dividing line around appropriate speech that Fidel himself would draw. Critically, the burnings of newspapers coincided with an increasing number of attacks from abroad: At the height of the sugar harvest, planes piloted by batistiano exiles living in Miami had been deliberately firebombing Cuba’s cane fields, regardless of whether they were privately or publicly owned. In response, editors of newspapers like the right-wing, pro-business journal Diario de la Marina and the center-left, heroically anti-batistiano Prensa Libre called on Fidel to declare as “counterrevolutionary” the burnings of both Cuba’s sugar cane fields and Cuba’s newspapers. Fidel refused. His refusal launched and tacitly endorsed a war over who had the right to control words and voices published in Cuban newspapers that ended with forcible takeovers by armed workers of all independent newspapers, radio, and television stations.The first of these confrontations in the press occurred at the newspaper Información in mid-January. At the height of the conflict, both workers and editors filed charges against each other at the same police station for violating each other’s constitutional right to freedom of the press. In the end, workers abandoned their insistence that editors refuse to publish any foreign wire reports and instead demanded the right to insert an editorial statement after each article with whose source or perspective they disagreed. Known as a coletilla (little tail), such statements soon began to pepper the pages of most major dailies, beginning with Información. Claiming to speak for the newspapers’ graphic workers and journalists, each coletilla attacked the “truth” of the article it followed and indicted it for lacking “the most minimal journalistic ethics.”40Fidel’s response to the conflict at Información ensured that its example would not be contained. In an interview broadcast over radio the next day, Fidel took the side of the workers, pinning blame for the conflict on editors and owners, whom he accused of participating in a secret international plan to “defame” Cuba. Publishers and editors were deliberately trying to provoke worker takeovers of their own businesses, Fidel declared, in order to make it look as if the Cuban government practiced censorship, when that charge was untrue. Evidence that freedom of the press existed lay in the fact that the revolution tolerated such anticommunist publications as Selecciones, the Spanish version of Reader’s Digest. The revolution had even allowed Avance to publish the letters of exiled “traitors” such as Pedro Díaz Lanz, the former chief of the Revolutionary Air Force who had denounced Communist infiltration and left Cuba for Miami in May 1959.41Fidel’s remarks did not go unnoticed. Interpreting his remarks to mean that attacks on the press should be considered revolutionary acts, Cubans in the central coastal town of Caibarién inaugurated a new round of public newspaper burnings.42 In fact, so effective did the Cuban staff of Selecciones find Fidel’s harsh criticism that they felt compelled to issue a lengthy apology for articles they had published in their magazine from the pages of its rival Bohemia. Selecciones staff described their own articles as an “unjust act of [discursive] aggression.”43 Moreover, in an apparent show of belated outrage over the publication of Díaz Lanz’s letter months before, Avance’s worker militias took over operations from its owner and editor, Jorge Zayas, the very next day.As the grandson of former president Alfredo Zayas, Jorge Zayas had supported the 26th of July Movement ever since Fidel’s then obscure guerrilla movement was ensconced in the Sierra Maestra,