(Review 1)
K. S. Karol, Polish born, Russian educated, and French resident, is not a man to be taken lightly, either as friend or enemy, and his massive narrative and interpretation of the Cuban Revolution has already been the object of substantial controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. Starting from what might be called a position of critical sympathy for the leaders and the expressed goals of the Revolution, Karol elaborates his story in a fascinating blend of narrative, first-hand reportage (based on conversations with Fidel and others), and speculative leaps into the minds and motives of Russians, Americans, Chinese, and Cubans. It is neither conventional history (although larded with footnotes) nor typical political analysis. The author is careless with the attribution of direct quotations (did he use a tape recorder?), and sometimes mistaken with respect to detail. Nevertheless, the total product is both compelling and extremely important. So bold and at times convincing is Karol’s analysis and so powerful is his prose that the book must go very high on the reading list of anyone interested in revolutionary experiments in general, or the Cuban variant in particular.
The book is divided into six long chapters. The first and shortest sets the stage and covers (roughly) the years 1959 and 1960. The second chapter, “The Communists and the Revolution” is possibly the most fascinating of all. It deals at length with the tangled pre-and- post revolutionary history of the old line Cuban Communists. All of Karol’s power as a writer and interpreter of intra-Communist politics is here used to analyze and ridicule the old-timers. In round two the guerrillas come off very well indeed by comparison. Chapter Three is once again more nearly in the narrative-analytical style. Titled “The Russians Arrive,” it carries the story through the missile crisis. Karol, hardly trying to conceal his scorn for Soviet methods and motives, ends this chapter with a section called “With the Russians— for want of anything better.”
The book then moves into Part Two, and a not-too-subtle shift in tone and emphasis takes place. Whereas the Soviets and their fellow- travelers in Cuba are the villains of the first three chapters, the guerrillas themselves move to center stage as at least the anti-heroes of the final three. Chapter Four, “A Cuban Heresy?” deals with the evolution and the substance of Cuban attempts in the mid-1960s to develop an indigenous model of national development and international relations. Still the tone is somewhat sympathetic, for Karol clearly finds the Cuban effort attractive despite elements of naivete, bad planning, and even bad faith. But by Chapter Five, when writing about 1968 and 1969, he is no longer willing to give the Cuban leadership the benefit of the doubt. Taking as his theme “Hay problemas, hay contradic- ciones,” he lashes out relentlessly at what he calls the Stalinization and militarization of the Revolution. In the final chapter, “The Reckoning,” his rhetoric has become something of a fire storm, first fusing guerrillas and Russians together, and then consuming them all in the heat of denunciation. It is thus no wonder that when the first excerpts of Karol’s book appeared in Paris, Fidel interrupted a speech in Havana to denounce “the super-revolutionary theoreticians, superleftists, real ‘supermen you might say, who are capable of crushing imperialism in two seconds with their tongues.” Although he did not mention Karol by name, among those knowledgeable in such affairs there was no doubt about whom he was referring to.
Why should Karol, originally embraced by the Cuban revolutionaries and very supportive and sympathetic to their cause, have come eventually to such a negative and in many ways unfair appraisal of the Cuban Revolution? The answer cannot be briefly given, but there is surely more to it than can be explained by the author’s well documented hatred for the Soviet Union, and his disappointment that the logic of revolutionary survival has dictated a partial rapprochement between Cubans and Russians. Perhaps more basic is his view of socialism. Only a few pages before the end of the final chapter, Karol presents a perspective on the correct goals of the Cuban Revolution. The theme has been implied by much of his previous comment, but nowhere else is it stated so explicitly: “The [proper] aim of the Revolution is to hand over to the workers in town and country, that is, to the immense majority of the people, effective control of all social institutions, so that they can freely organize their working life and decide on the collective distribution of its fruits” (p. 545). (It is textually unclear at this point whether Karol is “quoting” President Dorticós or quoting himself in conversation with Dorticós! The author’s intent, however, is perfectly clear). This is an eminently socio-political perspective on the meaning of socialism, and it is obvious that he is deeply critical of the leadership’s failure to seek new and meaningful forms of institutional life. It is also the great shortcoming of Karol’s analysis that in his haste to denounce the Soviets and those tendencies within the Cuban Revolution which remind him of the Soviet experience, he did not look in more detail and with a clearer eye at the actual organization of society and practice of governance in Cuba. Had he done so, he might not have so quickly and mistakenly identified the Cuban Revolution as now nothing more than a tropical variation of what he so rightfully detests about Soviet and East European political life.
(Review 2)
Fidel Castro has been accused of many things in recent years, but rarely of having been too conservative and Soviet-oriented in his domestic policies and social aspirations. Yet this is just what K. s. Karol charges in his imposing Guerrillas in Power, one of the most fascinating books ever published on the course of the Cuban Revolution. Written in what the author calls a spirit of solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, this book is a broadly conceived and often perceptive analysis and critique of Fidel Castro’s first eleven years in power by an internationally famous socialist with wide experience m Soviet, East European, and Chinese, in addition to Cuban, affairs.
According to Karol the Cuban Revolution can be understood only in an international setting, a premise that sometimes enriches and sometimes mars his analysis. It is clear from the early chapters—for those readers who do not already know it—that Karol loathes the Soviet Union and what he considers its baneful influence on the Cuban (and every other) revolutionary process. He argues that Castro became tied economically to the USSR in the early 1960s and then found it impossible to regain his independence, though he made an effort to do so amidst a plethora of “problems and contradictions” in the middle of the decade. After an extended visit in Cuba in 1968, his fourth in seven years, Karol concluded that Cuba’s “return to the fold” in 1968- 69 was “the unavoidable consequence of their failure—perhaps only temporary—to build a Cuban road to socialism” (p. 533).
It is only in the final chapter that Karol clearly reveals his yardstick for measuring the success—or more accurately, the failure—of the Cuban Revolution, namely the experience of the People’s Republic of China, the only country he thinks is run on truly collectivist and equalitarian principles. Recognizing profound differences between Cuba and China, he does not suggest that Fidel “copy the Maoist model.” Yet he insists that both peoples should strive to achieve “the same essential aims: fostering the growth of political consciousness before economic growth; trust in the ability of the masses to determine their own destiny; building revolutionary institutions in harmony with the professed principles of the revolution” (p. 549).
In Karol’s view Cuba at the end of the decade had failed to achieve any of these “essential aims:” emphasis on sugar production and on “vanguard” workers ruled out any chance for the political and social transformation of the people as a whole; concentration of decisionmaking power in the hands of Fidel Castro prevented the people from participating creatively in the work of the Revolution, made even Fidel’s closest aides into “Yes-men,” and precluded the development of socialism; and refusal to create or in some cases maintain truly representative and revolutionary institutions left the people in such increasingly authoritarian, militaristic, and repressive mass organizations as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Quoting I. Joshua, a young French economist who worked in Cuba between 1963 and 1967, he characterizes the Cuban system as “authoritarian centralization coupled to anarchic decentralization” (p. 464).
Karol believes that the spirit of the Cuban Revolution at its best, primarily when under the influence of Ché Guevara, was much akin to that of the Chinese. Even during the positive periods, however, Cuban policy consisted primarily of “coining slogans of the Chinese type while staking everything on developments of the Russian type” (p. 542). Predictably, he concludes that what all Cubans really want is the complete reorganization of their social system, from top to bottom. That is to say, a Cuban Cultural Revolution.
Many of the specific criticisms of Cuban policies and practices in this book are essentially accurate though overdrawn, and have been made by other recent critics of the Revolution. Some have even been acknowledged by Cuban leaders themselves since mid-1970. Karol’s substantive analysis and commentary, however, is often mixed with “superleftist” demonology on the Soviet Union, Maoist idealization of the Chinese revolutionary experience, and distortions of events and developments in Cuba. His penchant for seeing everything in essentially Maoist (and thus anti-Soviet) terms has prevented him from appreciating the Cuban experience, from recognizing the goals, accomplishments, and failures attributable in whole or in part to the Cuban leaders themselves; it has also kept him from making as many realistic reform proposals as René Dumont, another recent critic of the Revolution, in his Cuba: est-il socialiste? Yet Karol dares to challenge, from the perspective of a long-time friend of the Cuban Revolution, some widely accepted though doubtful interpretations of the Cuban experience. And, unlike some earlier analyses by less renowned individuals which have done the same but gone unnoticed, Karol’s book is written with a degree of authority that cannot be ignored.
