Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (6 page)

With these ideas in mind, Havana offered the most radical and consistent
challenge to the United States’ influence in Latin America during the 1960s. While the Cubans sustained their regional battle against what they considered to be U.S. imperialism, the USSR tended to accept the region as Washington’s sphere of influence. Particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this meant trying not to provoke the United States’ hostility by prioritizing nonideological economic ties over riskier support for socialist revolution. It also meant reasserting Moscow’s long-held view that Latin America was a place where revolution would progress gradually, through class alliances and constitutional means and in two stages (national bourgeois and then socialist). Indeed, in the postwar era as a whole, Moscow’s policies toward the region had mostly been reactive and focused on saving revolutionary processes rather than igniting them. When Nikita Khrushchev stressed the need for peaceful coexistence in the mid-1960s, this in turn led to a fierce rejection of what the Soviets—and Soviet-affiliated communist parties in Latin America—regarded as “adventurist” Cuban efforts to spark revolution through armed insurgency.
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The pro-Soviet Venezuelan Communist Party also denounced Fidel’s “role of judge over revolutionary activities in Latin America, the role of the super-revolutionary” and “his claim to be the only one who decides what is and is not revolutionary in Latin America.”
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Havana was meanwhile unrepentant about its radical brand of revolutionary activism. In March 1967 Castro publicly attacked Venezuelan Communists along with “shilly-shalliers and pseudo-revolutionaries” on account of their objection to guerrilla insurgency.
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And a month later, the Cubans published Che Guevara’s infamous call to fight decisive cumulative wars against the United States (“two, three, many Vietnams”).
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According to U.S. intelligence sources, the Cubans had already trained fifteen hundred to two thousand Latin Americans in guerrilla warfare between 1961 and 1964, a number that undoubtedly rose during the latter half of the decade.
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One of those who underwent such training later remembered Cuba as a “fascinating … link between revolutionaries from diverse countries,” the place to meet “proven combatants,” left-wing intellectuals, and guerrilla leaders. In secret training camps in Cuba, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Peruvians, Argentines, Bolivians, Brazilians, and Chileans could be found within groups of about thirty to forty receiving classes on firearms, explosives, artillery, mines, urban struggle, and topography. The cost and commitment that the Cubans expended on such training was immense; on one training exercise, for example, participants were expected to fire two hundred bullets a day over the course of several
weeks. However, as a graduate of the training camps remembered, this was “not the place to make friends” because everyone hid their real names and remained reluctant to share revealing information with each other. More ominously for the prospects of a continental-wide Latin American revolution, not all nationalities got on.
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Overall, however, Cuba’s offensive against U.S. influence in Latin America in the 1960s was far more restrained than was its offensive in Africa, a factor that Gleijeses ascribes to the perceived risks involved and problems of promoting insurgency as opposed to working with sovereign leaders.
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More important, Havana’s Latin American policies were also less successful. Guevara’s Bolivian adventure, which was Cuba’s biggest Latin American foreign policy venture before its involvement in Chile, had been quite literally the least-worst option for trying to spark a revolutionary insurgency in Latin America.
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After his failed mission to the Congo, Che Guevara had been impatient to embark on another revolutionary campaign, preferably in Argentina but otherwise on its border. With limited prospects for starting a successful foco elsewhere, and Castro desperate to stop Che Guevara from going to Argentina, which was considered acutely dangerous, Bolivia had therefore been an unsatisfactory compromise. Even those closest to Che and the preparations for creating a foco in Bolivia later recalled that the Argentine was searching around for just about any location to create a “mother column” to power a continental revolution.
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As the historians James G. Blight and Philip Brenner have argued, Fidel Castro then decided to “wait and hope for good news from Bolivia, even though the outlook was bleak…. If Che pulled off a miracle in Bolivia, many things might be possible.”
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Although Guevara had regarded Bolivia as a suitable base for pursuing guerrilla operations in Argentina and Peru since 1963, there were multiple reasons why fermenting a Bolivian revolution—or a continental war from Bolivia as a result of internationalizing the foco—was impracticable. As Régis Debray later explained, a tree bearing revolutionary fruits needed a seed with roots, and the attempt to start a guerrilla struggle in Bolivia “had nothing in common with the horticulture.” Among other things, it had been hastily organized, undermined as a result of divisions between Che Guevara and the Bolivian Communist Party led by Mario Monje, and strangled by the lack of concrete support it received from Bolivia’s rural peasant population.
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The “trauma” of Che’s death forced a drastic reevaluation of Cuba’s Latin American policies, which coincided with rising ferment and nationalist
upheaval throughout the continent. “New dynamics,” as Cubans termed the rise of revolutionary nationalism, appeared to indicate that a new—albeit significantly different—phase of revolution was on the horizon. Like leading U.S. officials who had formulated policy toward Latin America in the early 1960s, the Cubans grew particularly interested in nationalist military elites after witnessing the growing roles they assumed in Peru, Panama, and Bolivia from 1968 onward.
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Cuba was especially enthusiastic about Lima’s new military government, which expropriated the U.S.-based International Petroleum Company with great fanfare and made immediate efforts to build ties with it.
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In fact, Fidel Castro would personally tell one Chilean diplomat he was “very especially interested” in its leader, Juan Velasco Alvarado, whom he considered to be a man of the Left. To be sure, the new military leaders in Peru after 1968 were not Marxists. But Havana regarded their nationalization projects and social reform programs as a progressive step in the right direction—away from U.S. influence and toward some sort of economic and social justice.
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Although the Cubans acknowledged this type of revolutionary development would be slow, they also observed that Velasco Alvarado, together with Panama’s Omar Torrijos (1968–81) and the two presidents that ruled Bolivia in quick succession at the end of the decade, Alfredo Ovando (1969–70) and Juan José Torres (1970–71), were promoting independence from the United States. And, crucially for an island suffering the results of economic sanctions, they also seemed to be reconsidering Cuba’s isolation.
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In this context—and with Che’s death as a painful indication of the obstacles facing guerrilla struggles in Latin America—Havana began embracing a variety of non-Marxist nationalists and reformists after a decade of denouncing them as reactionaries. As a key protagonist of Cuba’s policy toward Latin America later put it, Cuba did not unilaterally change its policies but instead responded to regional transformations.
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Yet, by adapting to local conditions and working with a broad assortment of regional actors, Havana
did
change its approach to Latin America. As Cubans examined the continent’s shifting dynamics, Castro began to talk about many roads to revolution and adopt a more careful policy. On the one hand, he recognized that the United States’ growing intervention in Latin America to prevent “another Cuba” had hampered Havana’s regional approach and made it increasingly dangerous. Not only had the United States played a pivotal role in funding and training local armed forces in Latin America throughout the 1960s, but Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic had also raised loud alarm bells regarding the
United States’ willingness to use gunboat diplomacy again to achieve its aims. Finally, Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 deeply worried the Cuban leadership that worse was still to come. On the other hand, Cuba began to question the capabilities and prospects of its various different allies in Latin America. Having once been relatively unquestioning about the revolutionary movements and groups that it supported, its leadership now began to be more selective. Crucially, for example, at the end of 1968 Havana withdrew the Cubans who had been training to take part in a second major effort to ignite a guerrilla insurgency in Bolivia led by one of the survivors of Che’s column, Inti Peredo. Although those involved in the guerrilla effort never knew exactly why the Cubans had been recalled at the last minute, it appears that Castro had decided he wanted to see a guerrilla movement develop and flourish on its own before he committed more of his own people to Bolivia.
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CIA analysts observing Cuba’s approach to Latin American affairs in years to come would notice this new caution. As one of their reports later acknowledged, Havana had “sharply reduced its aid to guerrilla-orientated revolutionary movements in Latin America” after Che Guevara’s death and had embarked on what seemed to be “a more realistic approach to international relations … a less violent approach that is more likely to diminish Cuba’s isolation than continuation of support to guerrilla groups.” According to this analysis, “Training in guerrilla warfare and other paramilitary subjects” was henceforth “given only to small, select groups. Logistical support still continues to some rebel groups but it is restricted to very small amounts of arms, ammunition, and communications equipment…. Subversive groups in Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela are considered too disorganized, undisciplined, and untrustworthy to merit more than token Cuban support.”
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Although Cuba continued its long-standing support for Uruguay’s urban guerrillas, the Tupamaros, Cuba’s foreign minister, Raúl Roa, also privately explained to Cuba’s socialist allies that the guerrilla group could not be considered Marxist and was very unlikely to ever gain power, even if it provided a useful check on Uruguayan security services.
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Overall, Luis Fernández Oña, a Cuban intelligence officer who would serve in Chile during Allende’s presidency, described Cuba’s representatives abroad in the early 1970s as “more conscientious,” no longer revolutionaries “of impulse” but rather “revolutionaries of the heart
and
thought,” schooled in revolutionary theory.
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What he did not say, of course, was that they were also schooled in the implications of failure. At the very least,
Cuba remained diplomatically and economically isolated in the Western Hemisphere. And this fact, together with the changing nature of Latin American politics, called for a shift in tactics. As Jorge I. Domínguez, the author of a seminal study on Cuban foreign policy, argued, Havana’s leaders “are neither dogmatic nor stupid: they have learned from past mistakes.”
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Castro’s growing flexibility regarding the ultimate character and pace of Latin America’s revolution was also a consequence of Cuba’s domestic situation. By the late 1960s, it became clear that earlier hopes of skipping stages of socialist revolution had been idealistic. Facing Cuba’s failure to achieve a sugar harvest of 10 million tons, Castro publicly admitted responsibility in July 1970 for having been misguided. “We leaders of the Revolution have exacted too high a price [in] doing our apprenticeship,” he acknowledged. “More often than not we made the mistake of minimizing difficulties, and complexity of problems…. The going will be hard—harder than it seemed at first … building socialism is difficult … learning to build the economy is much more difficult for revolutionaries than we imagined.”
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Later that year, Castro was then openly and uncharacteristically acknowledging the need to “proceed slowly so as to reach our destination soon, slowly so as to reach our destination well … slowly so as to reach our destination safely.”
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During this period, Cuba also realigned itself toward the Soviet bloc and began looking in earnest at what Moscow’s development model could offer the island. After Soviet-Cuban relations had reached an unprecedented low in 1967–68 as a result of Cuba’s radical approach to Latin America, disagreements over the best path to development, and Cuban disdain for what it saw as Moscow’s halfhearted support for Third World allies, various factors had persuaded Castro to seek a rapprochement with Moscow. In the context of Cuba’s perpetual—and justifiable—fear of U.S. intervention, these included both Moscow’s warning that the Soviets would not intervene militarily to protect Cuba if Castro provoked the United States in Latin America and the USSR’s curtailment of oil shipments to the island in late 1967.
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But it was also influenced by Castro’s new approach to the task of building socialism after the failure to advance rapidly in the 1960s. As a high-level Polish Communist Party delegation would report after visiting Havana in 1971, the Cubans were embarking on “significant” changes to overcome earlier mistakes that had been founded on an “unrealistic approach to social and economic development.” Now, Havana’s leadership had returned to the practice of offering material—as opposed to moral—incentives
to the country’s workers, stressed the importance of Soviet help to the Cuban revolution, and recognized the “
need to benefit from the experience of other countries
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The extent to which Castro’s rapprochement with the USSR from 1968 onward transformed Cuba’s regional policy is nevertheless unclear and debatable. Cubans maintain that Moscow never had any decisive role in directing Havana’s relations with Latin America, and to a large degree this is borne out by what we now know about the Soviet-Cuban relationship vis-à-vis Africa.
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It also appears that the Cubans’ review of their Latin American policies began before this and that, if anything, this reappraisal may have pushed Castro back to the Soviet Union rather than the other way round. Certainly, members of the Soviet bloc continued to report on Fidel Castro’s position on Latin America as something somewhat alien to them—a particularly Cuban cause and principled obsession.
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Furthermore, even after Soviet-Cuban relations began to improve toward the end of 1968, Castro did not feel secure enough to abandon his efforts to make Latin America—and the world—safe for the survival of his revolution. “Will the Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Cuba if the Yankee imperialists attack our country?” Castro asked, as he simultaneously endorsed the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
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To make Cuba safer, and the hemisphere less threatening, the Cubans therefore continued to pursue their own, independent efforts to end their isolation and secure their revolution’s future in Latin America.