The Atlantic and Its Enemies

11. Berlin-Cuba-Vietnam

The fifties ended with two symbolic places: Berlin and Cuba. Over these, West and East duly collided. As Khrushchev looked at the world in 1957 — the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution — he could be quite optimistic. True, the Soviet people lived much less well than the Americans, and West Berlin was a permanent demonstration of this, but as Khrushchev angrily explained to the visiting American Vice-President, Nixon, man did not live by up-to-date kitchen equipment alone. The anniversary of the Revolution was triumphalist, with huge thermonuclear tests in the offing, and Khrushchev beamed: ‘It is the United States which is now intent on catching up.’ A 21st Congress in January 1959 announced that the USSR itself would ‘catch up’ by 1970. On the other side, Cuba was in its way a showcase of things that went wrong in the American hemisphere, and to this day the hero of Latin American revolution, Che Guevara, agonizes over T-shirts. In the view of Khrushchev, and not his alone, Russian Communism was the right formula to turn Cubas into modern places, without the unemployment and racism that came with capitalism. At the turn of the fifties and sixties, Cuba and Berlin meshed to cause crisis.

Khrushchev now lived in a very dangerous mixture of inferiority complex and megalomania, and that was only confirmed by events at home. He had taken time to secure his power and had needed the alliance of men of the old order, including Marshal Kliment Voroshilov and Molotov. But they and other seniors were alarmed at Khrushchev’s extraordinarily impulsive ways and they had never been happy with the denunciation of Stalin: whatever next? Wild reform schemes came up early in 1957, because, like Stalin before him, Khrushchev resented having to deal with the Party, and, like Malenkov and many others, would have liked to build up a state machinery with its own rules, as in normal countries. However, that would have meant (and, in the event, did mean) substituting a fabulously multiplied bureaucracy. He put up tower blocks in the cities, doubled Party membership to 12 million, shut an eye to rural migration, and thus created his own clientele. As matters turned out, he fashioned a huge and self-replicating bureaucracy, the leaders of which had their own clientele in the various national republics. In 1958 he was quite popular, and though the intelligentsia regarded him as a clown, he knew well enough how to square them: release of a critical novel, toleration of a critical poet, visas abroad, would get them going. Meanwhile, the Moscow ruler received visits that Moscow rulers had had in the past — envoys from China, from India, from Iran, from the West, all wondering what they might do to please.

He had boasted somewhat earlier of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), though in that — rather fatefully — there was less substance to the boast (only in the 1960s were they operational and even then there were only four of them). Khrushchev, who had sneered back at critics that he had no education beyond some lessons that the local priest had given in return for a present of a sack of potatoes, had done far better than any of them. Foreigners might look down their noses at his armpit scratching and his gobbling, spluttering table manners, but he was the leader of what would soon be the most powerful country on earth. At any rate, Khrushchev’s ascendancy was now beyond challenge, and he looked to foreign affairs. Here was pabulum for megalomania, as the world trumpeted the ‘Soviet achievement’ and wondered how to emulate it. Had the time come to get the perennial German problem out of the way? Stalin had tried force. Khrushchev applied the Leninist tactic, first used in 1922, of pretending to be just another ruler of just another state. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ could be passed off as just a piece of picturesque titling, on the lines of ‘King of Kings’.

Late in 1957 the Americans had placed limited-range nuclear weapons in Europe but there were evident disagreements in the West. True, it had a Cold War to fight, but each country fought its own version. The British were by now rapidly losing the substance of their power and could be expected to play up the shadow of it at international gatherings: classically ripe for flattery, and in any case not really willing to fight for, of all things, West Berlin. The Germans might be isolated, and might even come to terms, which, for Moscow, was the great prize. Adenauer had been shaken by the Americans’ abandonment of their allies over Suez, and there were fears in Germany that the Americans would not even reply with a nuclear strike to a land invasion of Central Europe: why should they risk an attack on their own cities? Adenauer approached Moscow with a vague suggestion that there might conceivably be an Austrian solution for East Germany. Khrushchev aired the possibility of a nuclear-free Europe and there was a Geneva conference as to the ending of nuclear tests, in October 1958. Meanwhile other tensions developed. The Middle East had been boiling since Suez, and Nasser was showing off. He proposed an Egyptian-Syrian union, then inspired a coup in the Lebanon, and then another, particularly gruesome, one in Baghdad. Finally there was another and rather strange trouble, the emergence of a sinisterly independent-minded Red China.

Khrushchev was not the only Communist leader to be showing off: Mao Tse-tung had his own remarks to pass. This time round, he had encouraged the intellectuals to criticize and promised to tolerate this (an episode known as ‘a hundred flowers bloom’). Nationalism was thus encouraged and the Chinese attacked India, a friendly country, over a trivial frontier dispute in the high mountains. Khrushchev had not supported this. Late in August 1958 there was a further crisis in the Far East, when Red Chinese artillery pounded the islands of Quemoy and Matsu — quite insignificant in themselves, but close to the Chinese shore and still occupied by the Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. Eisenhower responded, had his navy escort supply ships and even threatened to use nuclear arms (though he also made Chiang Kai-shek promise not to attack Red China). The crisis then ebbed away. However, this crisis created much more trouble than it appeared to. There were under-the-surface disagreements between Khrushchev and the Chinese because he told them not to invade Taiwan: there were to be no more Koreas. In 1959 he refused them a prototype bomb. Thereupon the Chinese started denouncing what they called ‘revisionism’. They were angry at the vilification of Stalin, whose statue still stood in the middle of Peking, and they especially resented, or claimed to resent, Khrushchev’s doctrine that nuclear war would be too destructive to be contemplated (‘peaceful coexistence’). Mao remarked that if 500 million or so people in the Communist bloc would be wiped out, the price might be worth paying for the utter end of capitalism and imperialism. The arguments between the two sides, couched in the usual wooden language, became public, as each side tried to convince other Communist parties of the correctness of its view. The depth of the disagreements became clear abroad only in 1963, and even then they were sometimes dismissed as part of some game to fool the West, ‘disinformation’, but they were real enough, and even caused one of the Soviet-dominated parties to defect, that of little Albania, fizzing with resentment at the preferential treatment accorded by one and all to Tito in Yugoslavia, which contained its own Albanians. Khrushchev now tried to stop China’s development, and in July 1960 withdrew his specialists. He had been clumsy — giving the Chinese too much in 1955 and then taking too much back five years later. The quarrel was to do with the role of war and revolution in an ideological world filled with such hatreds. At any rate, here was competition for Moscow, and Khrushchev responded adventurously. Off he charged, over Berlin.

Something needed to be done. The Western zones had become an open sore. The problem could be solved if a great wall were put up around West Berlin, thus preventing escapes into it. But it might also be solved if there were a deal with Germany; it might even be solved through a grand deal with the Americans, who (with the British and French) might be prepared just to abandon the place in return for some bargain over arms limitations or whatever. The East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, was cunning and repellent, a product of Comintern weasellings in thirties Moscow, and he understood that Khrushchev would dump him and his state if that were the price of a neutral Germany, detached from NATO, and ‘Finlandized’ on an enormous scale. Khrushchev himself well knew that walling in West Berlin would be wonderful propaganda for his enemies, in fact the crowning piece in the showcase that the West had built up. He strictly told Ulbricht not to take that step, but at the end of 1958 he threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and offered to let Berlin be a Free City inside it. But he wanted a Western military evacuation; and the West would have to recognize East Germany if it wanted to continue dealings with West Berlin. In January 1959 a draft peace treaty for two disarmed and neutral German states was sent off, and an emissary in Washington suggested that negotiations might go over Adenauer’s head.

All of this had military overtones, to do with German rearmament, and Eisenhower himself had had considerable, often very unpleasant, experience of what that might mean. In fact the old general was now quite seriously minded to enter history as the man who had done most to stop nuclear destruction. True, Eisenhower played the golfing old buffer, and his wife was plain cooking. But he saw well enough what was going on, and produced a line, ‘the military-industrial complex’, that summed up the realities of warfare and militarized economics better than ever Norman Mailer did. Might he not decide that Berlin was not worth a fight? Oddly enough, it was the French who were most firmly in favour of defending Germany, their new associate in Europe. To exploit the differences, in May 1959 Khrushchev agreed to drop his ultimatum in return for a general conference at Geneva, scene of the earlier and quite satisfactory conference that had settled the French war in Indo-China. The new conference might lead to realization of Molotov’s old scheme, a conference on European security, from which the Americans could be excluded by definition, and which the USSR would then dominate (the phrase ‘our common European home’ comes from this period, and not the 1980s).

In September 1959 Khrushchev went to the USA and talked with Eisenhower, drawing the conclusion that here was weakness to be exploited; the two agreed on a ‘summit’, as these gatherings were irritatingly called, for May 1960, in Paris. The clowning but at least not block-like Khrushchev even had a certain success as regards public relations, holding his own quite well in a roomful of Rockefellers and Harrimans. A string of Western concessions followed — East German control was accepted over the access routes, rather than Soviet; even a promise not to spy. Khrushchev waved these things aside, for they only convinced him that with another show of Soviet power the Western powers would fall apart in disarray. He always was brutal in his ways — on one occasion, at the United Nations, taking off his shoe and banging it on the table in rage — and now he was accidentally presented with an excuse for more temper. The Americans used special planes, the U2s, to spy on the Soviet Union, and one of these was shot down. The pilot survived and talked. Eisenhower at first clumsily denied that U2s were flown, because he had expected the pilot to swallow the poison pill supplied to him. This denial caused a gleeful Khrushchev to present his evidence; Eisenhower was duly humiliated; the Paris conference was cancelled. Eisenhower missed his chance to be the man who had saved the world.

He was succeeded by an altogether different figure, Kennedy, a considerably younger man who took time to find his feet. They were found for him. The US budget for ICBMs and Polaris went up to almost $10bn, and such missiles, hidden in submarines, enabled a crippling ‘first strike’ to be made. In other words, provided that there were no warning at all, the Soviet capacity to strike back significantly would be destroyed, and the USSR would be helpless. At the same time the military advisers (Maxwell Taylor in particular, but also two up-and-coming academics, Henry Kissinger and Albert Wohlstetter) were adamant that there should be a powerful non-nuclear force as well, i.e. a strong army in western Europe. It was therefore in a very tense atmosphere that the Berlin crisis went ahead. Kennedy and his advisers would probably have settled for some agreement with Moscow over their allies’ heads, and Walt Rostow, one of Kennedy’s academics, went to Moscow and explained Kennedy’s interest in disarmament. This was not the best background for negotiation over Berlin — it was in fact a considerable mistake, given Khrushchev’s peasant megalomania. In June 1961 Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna, and Khrushchev posed as the wiser, older man — he despised Kennedy’s youthfulness, enhanced all the more because the new President did not even look his age. Besides, just then, Kennedy had been involved in an absurd humiliation. In Cuba, which was in effect an American colony, there had been a revolution bringing a native radical, Fidel Castro, to power at the turn of 1958-9. He had attacked American interests and the Americans had mounted a coup against him, by exiles based in Central America. The coup fell to pieces at the Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, and Khrushchev, conqueror of Hungary, could shake his head patronizingly, and instruct Kennedy as to how the USSR was far better for the ‘Third World’ than was American capitalism. The Vienna meeting therefore turned out badly.

There was now no apparent solution to the Berlin problem, and Ulbricht had been pressing: if the flight of people, especially the skilled people, went on, then East Germany would implode (in which sentiments he was a generation later to be triumphantly confirmed right). For a time, Khrushchev demurred, hoping for some outright division among the Western powers; had he played the game more subtly, that might even have occurred. He told Ulbricht to wait, not to take any such step as building a wall. Ulbricht then announced publicly that he would not take it, and his subjects, used to such things, left in greater numbers than before — 2,000 every day in the spring of 1961, adding to the 3 million who had already gone. Khrushchev now gave way, thinking that, at the very least, there would be no opposition if a wall went up, and on 13 August 1961 it did go up. Barbed-wire entanglements appeared, and behind them came a whole defensive system complete with searchlights, swept fire-zones, Alsatians and minefields. In the shortest of short terms, Khrushchev was proved right, in that the West confined itself to verbal protests, and the Americans, later, in March 1962, even sent proposals that amounted to a Soviet-American condominium in Europe. But Khrushchev was after bigger game. He exploded a monstrous 50-megaton bomb on 30 October, expecting to browbeat West Germany into neutrality, and at the same time show the adolescent Kennedy who was the master. He would place missiles on Cuba, a few dozen miles from Florida.

‘Third World’ was a concept that made sense in the sixties, when there were economies of various sorts that appeared to need modernization. Even then, it only had meaning for the United Nations or the World Bank. Japan had already shown the emptiness of the idea, in that as early as 1905 she had Westernized far enough to defeat the Russians and take over a good part of the east-Asian trade. Now, countries as disparate as Korea and Haiti were included. Latin America was in an odd position. In places, the ‘First World’ was present, for in Mexico City or Buenos Aires you could think that you were in Europe, but if you travelled four stops down the tramway you were in a different world altogether, where ex-peasants huddled in boxes, and the obvious problem was that the progress of medicine meant that they could produce children who survived. In the suburbs of any city, the poor pullulated, as in a Dickens slum. Some fought their way out, but others gave up, went on making children for want of any alternative. The Soviet Union offered a path to modernity that had been quite successfully applied, and a good part of the intelligentsia of Latin America was sympathetic.

What, after all, could be done with a country like Haiti? To Europeans of the Left in the nineteenth century, Haiti was what Cuba was to become in the middle of the twentieth. She had become independent in 1804 as the outcome of a vast slave revolt against the French. After several years of murderous struggle, the former slaves had managed to set up their own state. It was called ‘Haiti’ after the old Carib name, and the chief figure in its making was Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black leader. It was one the many Haitian tragedies that he was not present when the country began: the French had hoodwinked him and imprisoned him in the frozen Jura, where he soon died. Toussaint had been a good man, and it was to him that Wordsworth addressed his lines on ‘man’s unconquerable mind’.

Eventually, Haiti was taken over by the Americans, for twenty years. They did not make very good imperialists, unlike the British, who were more used to taking over other people’s countries. Their chief, Admiral William B. Caperton, was a wooden and leathery Virginian, who could see no virtues in the place and who, when besought to co-operate with the Haitian elite, asked whether these were the ones who wore shoes. Still, there was justice, and some roads and schools went up; a black lower-middle class did emerge. Then when the bottom dropped out of tropical agriculture in the Slump, the Americans withdrew (in 1934) leaving a thin crust of collaborationist mulattos in charge, in the wedding-cake presidential palace. In 1946 they were challenged by a black who talked leftist language, whereupon the mulatto elite found their own black army officer to manipulate, one Paul Magloire, who was overthrown by a junta in 1956. At this point, the Americans insisted on an election. By now, the results of their earlier occupation were coming through: roads, and even a form of national transport, multicoloured vans called tap-taps, connected town and country more than before; and there was also a tremendous demographic explosion which began to fill Port-au-Prince, as was to happen with so many other cities in both hemispheres. A left-wing candidate, Daniel Fignolé, endeavoured to speak for them. A Belgian-educated mulatto, Louis Dejoie, spoke for the old French-oriented Haiti. The Americans found a convenient third force, as they thought: a little black doctor, François Duvalier, a product of the provincial lower-middle class (his father was alleged to be a schoolteacher from Martinique) whom the Americans had brought into existence. He knew the villages, where he was known as ‘Papa Doc’, and had spent a year at Michigan; he seemed quiet and manageable, and received support from the Syrian business element that had been cold-shouldered by the mulatto establishment. His private secretary, and link with the Americans, was a Therese Jones, daughter of a Welsh missionary (she had spent a year getting chilblains at an ecclesiastical establishment in forties London), and an American Anglican bishop also gave Duvalier his blessing: ‘Papa Doc’ would be pro-American but vaguely progressive and would not be a tool of the French (who still exercised influence). Duvalier was triumphantly elected in 1957.

Duvalier’s regime then turned out to be a legendary worst in the history of Central America. In fourteen years, he wrecked the country. Waves of ignorant blacks, with a thin layer of mulatto collaborators, swept into power, and stole. Roads turned into potholed tracks, impassable when it rained. The tap-taps took seven hours to travel the thirty or so miles from Port-au-Prince to Saint-Marc, and Jacmel in the south was cut off except by sea. The telephones mainly stopped because the copper wire was stolen, and rats gnawed at the rest (as happened with the national archives). The educated classes fled abroad or made their peace by bribery or gaining the ear of Therese Jones (whose husband, Franck Thébaud, ran the customs as the only honest man in the regime; his brother Fritz was finance minister, built a hotel, failed to bribe in the right quarters and found himself in the terrible prison of Fort-Dimanche periodically, later to resurface as development minister). Duvalier and his men in the provinces used voodoo for legitimacy; and from time to time there would be a burst of social energy — the Simone O. Duvalier Hospital and the like; there was even a miniature Brasilia, a huddle of concrete in the (originally Polish) village of Cabaret which was mainly given over to cockfighting. Haiti was in its way a gigantic dwarf, and it attracted the attention of Graham Greene. One of the characters in his The Comedians, set in Haiti, remarks that the government has claimed that illiteracy has declined in the north; he concludes that there must have been a hurricane. The country was run by a paramilitary outfit known to the peasants as Tontons Macoutes, ‘bagmen’ from the villages or the urban rabble, who dressed in blue denim (homage to Franco’s fake-proletarian Falange, though blue was also a good-luck colour in voodoo) and, sign of sinister sophistication, dark glasses. Fort-Dimanche and the other prisons filled up with their victims; in 1963, when the Americans attempted to get rid of their creation, a man was shot in a chair outside the airport, and was left there to greet arriving tourists.

Duvalier was aware of his growing unpopularity, and turned for inspiration to any or every dictatorship, however horrible. There was Mao (‘mon petit livre vert’); there was Hitler (‘un chef, un peuple, un pays’); there was Mussolini (‘le chef a toujours raison’). Slogans such as the emperor Dessalines’s ‘Je suis le drapeau haïtien’ would be put up in neon on the port-side, some of the sections then failing to light up, thus leaving some bits of incomprehensible tubing flickering dimly when the electricity was working. All of this was orchestrated by a strange figure named Gérard de Catalogne, a Guadeloupian quarteron who had picked up his knowledge of Fascism at first-hand, since he had served in the secretariat-general of the youth movement of Vichy France. A sense of survival had caused him to find an appointment in Tahiti. There he met a lady, the daughter of the Norwegian consul in St Petersburg and his Russian wife (who had gone into a camp). She was interpreting for General MacArthur. The two married, looking for a sympathetic refuge. Santo Domingo turned out to be overcrowded; across the border in Haiti, Duvalier offered a more promising outlet. They founded a newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, and advised Duvalier as to ideology. Curiously enough, the official name of the Tontons, ‘Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale’, came from Mussolini’s ‘Volontari per la Sicurezza Nazionale’, who had also confused national security with the operation of protection rackets on small grocers.

It is impossible to get rid of such dictators if they are ruthless enough, and so it was with Duvalier. He forestalled palace coups by exiling his son-in-law as ambassador to Paris and, over the radio, organizing the execution of his best friends. He himself died in his bed, after a long and painful illness, on 22 April 1971. His illness was a secret, though everyone knew; on the morning of the death, there was a strange calm in the town, as even the dogs somehow did not bark, or the cocks crow, as they generally and cacophonously did. It was a palpable grande peur, as in the start of any revolution. It was clear that the old brute had finally died when, on the radio, they played their classical record, of all oddities the K464 Mozart string quartet which had been Beethoven’s favourite. This only happened at times of national emergency, such as a hurricane or an invasion scare. The record had a crack in it, so that the same phrase was repeated again and again, though no-one noticed. Then, hour after hour, those Duvalier speeches were replayed, meandering through all the platitudes of twentieth-century megalomania: ‘je, je, je, moi, moi, moi’, ‘des anarchisses’, ‘le pèple’, ‘la politik que préconize mon gouvernèmon’, ‘contre les mersses demokratik’ etc. The Americans and the usual smooth mulatto middle-men managed, to everyone’s surprise, to organize a transition of power to Duvalier’s teenage son, Jean-Claude.

Duvalier’s funeral had a mass turnout. He lay in state in the presidential palace for rather too long, given the heat and the power cuts, and was then escorted to a vast mausoleum. There were some alarms in the crowd as it shuffled through the dust and the ruts. An aircraft hopping between Nassau and Kingston was thought to be bringing vengeful exiles; the wooden balconies, overloaded with spectators, sometimes let out pistol-like cracks; and a little gust of wind, a miniature tornado, suddenly swept the street rubbish into a column. In voodoo superstition, this means that a soul is entering hell, and it momentarily disconcerted the shuffling, blue-denimed or evening-coated procession. Life then got back to genial normality for a while. ‘Baby Doc’ liked parties with his young mulatto friends. He was first run by his mother, known as ‘La Cornélie du siècle’ from her overweight Gracchus, and then by his wife, who took her friends on shopping expeditions to Paris by private plane while the going was good. Hope there was, that light industry — sewing baseballs — and the use of Creole for elementary instruction by missionaries would help the country to progress. Instead, the rule was ampil pitit: a plague of children, swamping the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. These were the dragons’ teeth of la partie française de l’île de Saint-Domingue , and many sensible people might well look across from Môle Saint-Nicolas in the north-west, from where, at night, you could dimly make out the flickering lights of Cuba, across the narrow gulf.

There had been another revolution on Cuba, and it was set to have a vast effect on Latin and Central America because it stood for liberation from the American imperialism shown in those lights. The island had been taken from its Spanish masters by the Americans in 1898 and though it was independent that independence was limited, in that there was a permanent American base at Guantanamo, and the economy was more or less captured by the USA. It did make much progress: Cuba was the most developed of countries south of the USA in terms of literacy, medicine, etc. But there was something of a revolutionary tradition and for a good reason, much of the island having nothing else to think about. It was in one sense condemned to a semi-colonial status because of its chief and even only crop, sugar. Cuba was the largest producer in the hemisphere, and it was the Americans who bought it up, by a fixed arrangement which helped when world prices were low and and not when they were high. Sugar occupied half a million acres, and there were huge factories for grinding; transport took much labour. The revolts of the past had been for rent reductions, and there had also been revolts against the cattle-breeders or tobacco-growers: the landowners generally feared another Saint-Domingue, but anti-imperialism was a powerful enough cause, and had produced its local hero, José Marti, who had denounced the Americans. Their initial occupation had been contemptuous.

The GDP per capita figure was not too bad, but there was an enormous income gap. Sugar had the disadvantage that the cultivation and harvesting of it took six or seven months, and sometimes just four, after which the workers had nothing to do, especially given the heat of the climate, and if they did not develop a habit of saving, then they would be in debt for much of the year and would have trouble repaying out of the next year’s proceeds: a classic debt-spiral known throughout the peasant world (the real meaning of the word kulak is not ‘rich farmer’ but ‘usurer’). This was complicated again by the existence of a black minority, descended from the slaves that Spain had kept going even after the French had freed them (in 1848). The sugar-owners lived well, and Havana was a famous capital, with noble Spanish colonial architecture. It attracted literate Americans. But it also attracted gangsters, who took over the gambling and the prostitution: Havana became a place where the repressed Americans of that era could escape from the world of the Eisenhowers. Cuban politics was dominated by these interests, and there was much nationalist resentment of this. In 1933, an army sergeant of mixed blood, Fulgencio Batista, with Communist associates, led off with a campaign against the rich, then retired in 1944, but returned after a coup in 1952, this time just greedy; gambling franchises were given out freely, and required contributions towards Batista’s own funds; he became very rich. Meyer and Jack Lansky, as Mafia capos, became notorious. On the other side peasants in shanty towns might be evicted for small debts owed to grocers. Meanwhile a university did go up, and middle-class children often became disaffected in it, as they watched Havana obey the Americans. There was a strong enough current of discontent in Havana, much of it among students.

One such was Fidel Castro, illegitimate son (by his father’s cook) of a prosperous (and grasping) farmer who had emigrated from Galicia, the Scotland of Spain. He went to a religious school and like other revolutionaries of the Latin world — including France — seems to have taken an anti-clerical line early on because he was badly treated (in his case by Jesuits). His fellow students (in the law faculty) looked down on him because he was a flashy upstart. At this stage he was not a Communist and even had Mussolini’s Works in a dozen volumes on his bookshelves (for a time Mussolini himself had counted as a left-wing figure and had had good relations with the USSR), but in any case the Communist Party itself said that Batista should be supported. In 1953 (26 July) Castro and a few companions tried to seize the Moncada army barracks in Santiago, the rival city of Havana, the atmosphere of which Castro did not like. As with other such pre-revolutionary gambits — Hitler’s Putsch in the Munich beer-hall, or Louis Napoleon’s landing at Boulogne in 1840, when, unable to find an eagle as a symbol, his little group, before being rounded up by the police, made do with a parrot bought at a chandler’s in Southampton — Castro’s affair was near farce, but it gave him another essential revolutionary credential, prison (1953-5). That might have been the end of that, but Batista’s ways were such that opposition built up, from army officers, students, trade unions and even the Church in Santiago; the Americans themselves were uncomfortable, and pushed for improvements. Castro was released under an amnesty; a banker gave him support, and so did an exiled politician. He then escaped to Mexico and Guatemala, where the Americans had overthrown a left-wing movement (led by Colonel Jacobo Arbenz) in 1954 (‘a Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere’, Eisenhower had said, though rumour had it that keeping the low wages paid to the local Indian banana-cutters also counted for something). There, by chance, he met a young Argentinian rebel medical student, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara — a one-time sickly youth with a very pious mother who gobbled up stacks of literature. He was trying to make a living as an itinerant photographer. Anti-Americanism and then Marxist ideas were their medium, and the two young men went on to Mexico, where there was a real Left; Castro talked, and talked; he came to dominate a small group of Cubans.

The two gathered some eighty associates, planned a revolution and with $20,000 set off for Cuba in the Granma, a vessel meant for twelve. It landed in December 1956, got some immediate help from a cattle thief and set up in the Sierra Madre, on the south-eastern coast. The invasion began badly. The pilot had fallen into the sea, and most of the men were rounded up; the peasant rising did not occur, and on the contrary the locals were hostile. Castro moved on to a poor region, Oriente province, the poorest in Cuba (with a black population: the black Juan Almeida became a token figure later on) and attacked this or that demoralized, badly paid government post — not a threat taken very seriously to begin with but requiring in the end some response. Batista was clumsy. He had the police beat up people who sang the national anthem after Mass, and the like. It was again part of a pattern that the old order — if that is the right name for Batista’s regime — would make stupid mistakes of this sort, and present the revolutionaries with gifts. Castro was a good enough student of such things, and knew how a guerrilla movement could insert itself into local peasant affairs (as Mao had done) whereas Batista’s men were generally ineptly led conscripts.

When finally Batista’s men did make an effort, they moved up a river valley without securing the ridges on either side and were surrounded, Castro taking much weaponry from them but also releasing the 263 prisoners as a goodwill gesture. In the meantime he had attracted American attention, in June 1958 taking hostage some twenty-four sailors on leave from Guantanamo. He held on to them to deter Batista from using American rocketry. The trick worked: Batista grounded his air force. But there was another important element. Many Americans had a guilty conscience, and a sympathetic journalist, Herbert Matthews, had arrived early in 1957 to live with this new charismatic rebel: he put Castro on the map, himself striking poses of a kind used by Hollywood later on to portray the journalist-as-hero. Senator Mansfield, a warhorse in the making, spoke for an arms embargo against Batista, and, as had happened with the Kuomintang, there was now pressure for human rights, which made for trouble in Havana in 1957. Here, Castro was cunning. He did not want successful rivals, and therefore withheld help from the anti-Batista strikers and the Havana underground; it was not he but the Americans who, on 10 December 1958, told Batista that he should go. There was a final New Year party, and Batista used it as a blind: he got away (to Santo Domingo) beforehand, and early that morning, the Batista women in their finery had to escape by plane to Miami. The chief judge of the Supreme Court, Manuel Urrutia, agreed to take over as temporary president and a general strike in Havana ensured Castro’s arrival in the city. It was a joyeuse entrée of a new ruler, and he began quite well: there was not even much out-of-hand killing of the Batista men.

But this moment did not last for long. Very early in 1959, Castro at once took over from the Havana people, and Urrutia escaped, disguised as a milkman. Castro was not just aiming to succeed Batista and proclaim yet another exercise in radicalism. There was to be a social and by implication an anti-American revolution. The first steps involved rent reductions, wage increases and on 1 May 1959 the establishment of a militia. American property was taken over, and there were fights with Esso and Shell. But Castro was popular enough on the Left, and that included much of the American Left, which saw in him only a sort of Jacksonian democrat. Beards ruled (as they had done ever since the 1830s, as a badge of the Left: thus Marx). Writers and artists popular-fronted themselves in the thirties Comintern manner: Juan Goytisolo appeared; Picasso applauded; Le Corbusier offered to design a proper prison provided Picasso’s murals were not used; a well-known French agronomist, René Dumont, offered his services but was expelled for criticizing Castro’s plans for huge collectives to grow pineapples that could not compete with those of Abidjan. Pablo Neruda appeared but, out of jealousy, the local poet, Nicolás Guillén, tried to sabotage the visit. Castro had read some books, and he did impress men such as Graham Greene, who had lived for a time in Haiti and recognized the problems involved in the Caribbean. At this stage Communists were only tangentially involved: only one, Carlos Rodríguez, had joined Castro, at the last minute, in the Sierra, and even he had been a Batista minister. However, Castro made international waves as the fight against American interests grew, and in February 1960 Mikoyan appeared. He warned against precipitate action, but got the measure of Castro’s vanity: he ‘can’t stand not being front-page news’.

Radicalism proceeded apace. The trade unions were taken over, and a land reform was proclaimed (maximum holding: 67 acres). Castro refused to hold elections, and his brother Raúl appeared as a Saint-Just figure, shrilly and self-righteously denouncing opposition: it grew, even among the peasants, but was divided and in any case there was an expectation that the Americans would come to the rescue. They were certainly provoked, as their business interests were taken over, and as Castro refused, for weeks, even to see the ambassador (he himself ran affairs chaotically, from a hotel floor, and addressed million-strong crowds with hours-long speeches). Eisenhower was bewildered: he meant well enough and so did Christian Herter, the new head of the State Department, but early in 1960, with cattle ranches being invaded, there were television rantings by Castro as to the expropriation of property: American companies, including General Electric and Remington Rand, had $200m at stake in October 1960. Trials in public started, in the sports centre, with public executions, and Castro vastly resented the criticism. By May 1960 there were huge anti-American rallies, but there was also a small flood of refugees, at 2,000 per day on occasion. The free press was now closed down, the printers refusing to print it (‘anti-democratic’) and in July the US Congress voted to let the President reduce Castro’s sugar quota. Castro responded by expropriating all foreign property, and there were demonstrative foreign displays, as in the Organization of American States and in New York, when Castro visited the United Nations, stayed in a Harlem hotel, and met Khrushchev.

Either Castro gave way, or he went on. He went on. A single Marxist-Leninist Party was set up, in 1961, with the usual paraphernalia, including revolutionary fancy dress and a theoretical journal, Cuba Socialista, edited by an old Comintern hand. Castro made a show of associating himself with the ‘non-aligned’ leaders, including the Algerian Ahmed Ben Bella (who came on a visit in September 1962), Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia and the inevitable Tito. The USSR took a serious hand, and agreed to buy (at half the price) the sugar that the Americans were not taking, lent $900m (by 1964) and educated 4,000 Cubans. It was now that Castro, abroad, generally appeared in his guerrilla rig-out, no doubt an example for Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization later on, and that the CIA, with Richard Bissell and under Allen Dulles, began to plot Castro’s overthrow.

Relations were broken off, and a plot to use Cuban counter-revolutionaries went ahead. By now there was a new President, John F. Kennedy, and he allowed the plan to proceed. Preparations went ahead for a landing at the Bay of Pigs; but in Guatemala, where a hundred different Cuban exile groups were represented, there was an atmosphere of black farce: a brothel was built for them, while the American trainers, arrogant and speaking no Spanish, lived apart and better, and their commander, a colonel, simply said, ‘I just don’t trust any goddam Cuban.’ The counter-revolution turned into a huge version of the U2 fiasco. Of course, it needed some preparation from the air, but that was kept very limited, as Kennedy did not want to expose his involvement too far and anyway feared criticism from Castro’s friends in New York. Two planes attacked each of the airfields — warning of something coming, but not enough to affect the issue and, despite precautions of a clumsy sort, very obviously not the work of exiled Cubans. The landing at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April was music hall floundering. It occurred on a reef coast, which damaged the ships, and the deep water swamped the invaders’ mobile radios (‘walkie-talkies’). The coast was not, as expected, deserted: on the contrary there were charcoal burners at work, and they spread news of the landings. Almost at once the exile force — 1,500 men — was pinned own. Kennedy would not use air power to help; 1,200 men were taken prisoner (they were bought out, late in 1962). Here was another opening for Khrushchev: he would now pose as the protector of the People’s Cuba.

Cuba made for legend: Che Guevara agonizing on student T-shirts and posters the Western world over. But those T-shirts could as well have had a thermonuclear cloud instead, because the collision of the USA and the USSR over this and other ‘Third World’ matters did for a time threaten the ultimate disaster. Cuba now provoked this. Castro was full of himself, and so was Khrushchev: they had stood up to the Americans and their proxies, and in the United States Castro had many sympathizers who even blamed America for his turn to Communism: he had been, they said, just a sort of Jacksonian democrat, and it was only the vicious and interest-bound hatred in Washington that threw him into alliance with the Soviet Union. The truth was of course more complicated. The Soviet machine was used to dealing with such matters as national liberation fronts, had managed their precursors in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, and had handled European resistance movements. Raúl Castro and Guevara himself had been members of the Party and in April 1959, weeks after the capture of Havana, they sought Soviet military help: it came, through Czechoslovakian weaponry, and with mediation by the KGB, the resident of which in Havana subsequently became Soviet ambassador (in general, the affair was handled not by the Soviet foreign ministry but by the KGB and the Central Committee’s International Department). By March 1960 Castro himself was approaching Moscow, suspecting that the Americans would intervene. Khrushchev spoke out against American intervention early in July, described the Cuban revolution as ‘national-democratic’ (i.e. a step towards socialism, according to his own understanding of Lenin) and in January 1961 made a famous speech in which he offered Soviet protection for movements of national liberation, such as Castro’s. The speech came before Kennedy’s own Inaugural, which offered help to any nation saving itself from Communist takeover (an echo of the ‘Truman Doctrine’ of 1947). Then came the Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, which threw Cuba and the USSR together, and Castro, with KGB help, ruthlessly suppressed opposition.

Khrushchev was in forward mode: he had just exploded an ICBM, but needed to make up, he thought, for the Americans’ superiority there (and the moratorium on tests, of 1958, had been broken, first by himself, then by the Americans). Placing intermediate rocketry on Cuba would allow him to reach two thirds of American territory directly. In any case, the rockets were something of a counterpart to the American Jupiter missiles that had just been placed in Turkey. Khrushchev used this as an argument with the Politburo in May 1962 for the placement of Soviet missiles on Cuba (which the experienced and cautious Mikoyan thought risky). In July Raúl Castro came to Moscow and the despatch was agreed — Khrushchev insisting on secrecy, which meant disguising ships and sailors; not a realistic notion, given the U2 flights, which recorded everything serious. The Soviet Union sent far more than was until recently thought — 50,000 men and eighty-five ships, not 10,000 — and there were eighty nuclear weapons of differing range. In other words the operation went far beyond a simple defence of Cuba.

On 14 October an American spy plane did record the missile bases that were being constructed. Khrushchev wanted the secret kept so that Kennedy would not be forced into a public confrontation — the Soviet missiles could in private just be passed off as equivalent to the Turkish ones — and he intended, when he went to the UN in New York in November, to make a grand public announcement. This was completely to misunderstand Kennedy. There was an election in the offing, and the Republicans made a great fuss about the arrival of Soviet troops — at which Khrushchev ordered more missiles, including tactical ones, to be sent to Cuba (7 September). The Americans called up 150,000 troops, in part for Berlin purposes, and prepared for an invasion of the island. Kennedy told the visiting Algerian president, Ben Bella, that he could accept a Caribbean Yugoslavia, but not more, and stepped up his response, setting up a group named ‘Excom’ under his main lieutenants, including General Maxwell Taylor. There were ideas of simple invasion, to dispose of Castro, but the technicians warned that not all missiles would be wiped out by an initial strike and on 18 October it became clear that the position was worse than had been suspected — even the American ICBM sites were under threat. That evening Gromyko called; and he greatly angered the Americans by lying outright that there were no offensive weapons on Cuba. They did not say anything, and he sent a reassuring telegram back, such that Khrushchev did not take fright, as he might have done.

October the 20th was the decisive day, when Excom agreed that there should be a blockade around Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering any more missiles, and on 21 October Kennedy saw the British ambassador and revealed his thinking — air strikes would have alarmed the allies; a blockade, technically called ‘quarantine’ because the legality of a blockade was dubious, was to be imposed. Next day Kennedy revealed to the public, on television, that missiles were on Cuba and announced his response: ‘quarantine’. His behaviour, now, was sound enough because the difficulties were formidable, given that substantial parts of Western opinion were against him: what was so wrong about Cuba, given Turkey, and why risk all-out war over this? The Politburo was at first relieved on the 23rd that there would at least be no invasion of the island, and agreed to stop some of the ships; but a few others, to complete the missile preparations, would proceed on course. That day, Soviet forces were put on alert. Khrushchev sent a message that he would not respect the blockade. At the same time, American forces were also put on alert (24 October) with many nuclear-armed bombers permanently in the air. Would the USSR try to force the blockade? October the 25th and 26th marked the height of the crisis. Khrushchev realized that Kennedy was entirely serious, that he would invade Cuba, and was not bluffing. A letter was then composed — the Soviet missiles would be withdrawn, in return for an American pledge not to invade. A further letter was sent on the 27th, and seemed in part to revoke the concessions, this time read out over the radio — a condition was added, that American missiles should be withdrawn from Turkey. Khrushchev had claimed that if these missiles were indeed withdrawn, then it would be a Soviet victory. That evening, Robert Kennedy indicated that they might indeed be withdrawn, but not at once and not in public, since other allies might feel let down. On the 28th, a deal was done and revealed at 9 a.m. on the radio — no American invasion, and withdrawal in due course of Jupiters from Turkey; Soviet withdrawal of missiles from Cuba. The United Nations would inspect. Castro himself was enraged (he broke a mirror), especially at the last proposal, and refused; the American commitment was therefore never made formal, but at least a new code of conduct grew up around these potentially disastrous confrontations. Mikoyan was sent to calm down Castro and discussions as to nuclear disarmament — or control — went ahead. But the episode had vastly alarmed Khrushchev’s associates: so much for his ‘peaceful coexistence’. Plotting began, to be rid of him. In 1964 he was duly overthrown. He was replaced by safe pairs of hands: no more adventures. Kennedy, by contrast, was assassinated on 22 November 1963, the end of the post-war period, but the start of a very troubled period in the history of the United States.