Correspondence

To the Editor:

Permit me to make a few remarks concerning Maurice Zeitlin’s review of my book, The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro: An Essay in Contemporary History, HAHR, 53:3 (August 1974), 537-540. Zeitlin went to considerable pains in his attempt to discredit the book. Although his treatment provides little knowledge of its contents and his spleen is excessive, I am not entirely displeased. Coming from someone of his political bent, his effort is something of a tribute to the book’s modest contribution toward a critical appraisal of the Castro regime. I am also grateful to him for mentioning Woodrow Borah’s flattering opinion of the book, an opinion, to be sure, which Zeitlin rejects.

Something should be said, however, about his unbelievable innocence—if that is what it is—on the subject of freedom of discussion and investigation in Cuba. Castro’s regime, by Fidel’s own definition, is a Marxist-Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The repression of dissent, and most emphatically political and ideological dissent, in such a regime, is not only considered to be necessary for state security, but something of a virtue in contrast to what is claimed to be the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberalism.

Zeitlin believes that in 1969 he “could freely discuss any issue with almost anyone.” The implication is that any Cuban could do likewise, without being penalized. What should be made clear is that Zeitlin was admitted to Cuba as a privileged and trustworthy foreigner (Cuban visas are very hard to come by). On the basis of his record, it could be assumed that in his reporting he would “accentuate the positive” with, if he wished, a dash of non-antagonistic criticism to preserve his credibility. But there are also penalties for those like Zeitlin who fail to perform as expected, though less severe than for the native, as, for instance, poet Heberto Padilla whose persecution I describe in my book (pp. 354-356).

The example of erstwhile friends of Castro like René Dumont and K. S. Karol is instructive. When they criticized sensitive matters in their latest books on Cuba, Castro publicly denounced them, along with other foreign backsliders, as unmitigated scoundrels, adding: “We are Marxist-Leninists and we are anti-liberal” (p. 357 in my book). Unlike Zeitlin, they are no longer eligible for Cuban visas. Or take the case of the late Oscar Lewis, who was in Cuba about the same time as Zeitlin, and as a personal guest of Castro. He had worse luck. His tapes, which contained some “hot” interviews, were confiscated by security agents, and he was summarily deported. One of his informants was imprisoned. I shall deal with this episode in volume two of my book.

Zeitlin’s claim to have located Roa’s En Pie “without difficulty” leaves me puzzled. I couldn’t find it, even in the Biblioteca Nacional. Concerning his statement about “easily accessible anti-Communist publications,” this would depend on when and which kind of “anti-Communism” was involved, and this in turn would depend on changing policy toward the Soviet Union, the “new left” in various countries, etc.—as well as the efficiency with which the censorship operated. I deal with these matters extensively throughout my book. It is a fair guess, for example, that with Cuba now totally integrated in the Soviet bloc no work by Trotsky would be “easily accessible” today. Finally, when Zeitlin chides me for not researching prison conditions, a most delicate matter in any dictatorship, he must be kidding. It would have been the surest way to get myself expelled from the country.

M. Halperin October 7, 1974

Simon Fraser University

Readers will have to judge for themselves whether Halperin’s book is flawed by “undocumented assertions, unspecified implications, and incorrect statements, as I wrote in my review. His hysterical ad hominem attack on me merely exemplifies well the way his book itself is written. Halperin offers no rebuttal to my specific criticisms of his book. I asked what he referred to in Fidel’s 1959 speech that “could not be written or even whispered” in Cuba “today, and he has no answer. I asked what he meant to imply concerning the alleged “disappearance” of Raúl Roa’s book, En Pie, which I located in the library when I was there in in 1969, and he now says merely that he couldn’t find it. That is rather different, isn’t it, than the insinuation left dangling in his book that it had been removed from bookstores and libraries by the government? He claims he deals with these matters “extensively” in his book. He does not. He discusses Cuba’s dreary press and the ugly treatment of Heberto Padilla, but he fails entirely to deal adequately with the complex political reality of Cuba—a reality summarized well recently by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as a “curious blend of carrot, stick, and exhortation, with emphasis on the first and the last….”¹ I asked in my review if Halperin had attempted to verify claims he reports, as if correct, that Cuban political prisoners were “tortured,” and he replies that, while living in Cuba comfortably for six years, he made no inquiry of any kind!

What’s more, he now says that the “repression of dissent ’ is even considered a “virtue” in Cuba, since, “by Fidel’s definition,” the regime is a “Marxist-Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’” Yet in his book, Halperin forgot his method of analysis “by … definition,” if only for a moment, to convey unwittingly another view of the situation. He noted, and just as quickly dropped without elaboration: “Parenthetically, contrary to the practice in the Soviet Union…, in Cuba all speeches by Fidel and other leaders, and all historical documents, have invariably been reproduced without omission or alteration” (p. 150, italics added). Further, after Fidel’s denunciation in March 1962 of old Communist Party official Aníbal Escalante’s attempt to impose a Party dictatorship, Halperin reports: “… for several years there was an astonishing amount of public debate on a wide range of topics” (p. 157). (This was precisely the period during which I did my research in Cuba, incidentally.) These observations appear and disappear in the book unaccompanied by any serious attempt to understand their meaning.

In his book, as in his letter, Halperin employs the Method of Historical Digression, flitting back and forth between the period he is supposed to be examining and any event selected at random from later years to make his point. Thus, suddenly, though it was not even mentioned in his book, there now appears a reference in his letter to the Cuban confiscation of the tapes of interviews by the late Oscar Lewis, in mid-1970. Oscar Lewis’s tapes were confiscated—an act which I unreservedly condemn. But it should also be clear that Professor Lewis had traveled to and from Cuba several times during the roughly 18 months of his research there, without any interference, and had taken much of his research materials with him to the United States. Furthermore, Halperin’s statement that Professor Lewis was “summarily deported” is misleading. The Cuban government invited him and his wife to remain in Cuba as tourists if they wished. Certainly, the facts are sufficiently unfortunate without Halperin’s embroidery.

The major deficiency of Halperin’s book, as his letter here amply indicates, is that he allows his personal rancor to contaminate his description of events. This is particularly evident in his soothsaying: Thus, not only was the failure to harvest 10 million tons of sugar “unmitigated economic disaster,” but it left Cuba without “a ray of hope for the future” (p. 356). Since Halperin has abandoned all hope, finding only “economic and social nightmare” ushering in “the second decade of the revolution” (p. 61)—a period that he does not analyze in his book—perhaps he may be interested in two recent reports on Cuba: Kalman Silvert, the eminent Latin Americanist, and his wife Frieda, report² that they “engaged in many political discussions, some of them in direct disagreement with Cubans, and incurred no open hostility or any hint of impatience.” It is their judgement that “Cuba has either solved or is well on the way to solving every standard ‘problem’ whose solutions development specialists seek in their work.” The Chief of Staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reports: “Shortages in Cuba are more an inconvenience than a hardship, reminiscent of the situation in the United States during World War II…. The Cuban Government … has started a process looking to the election of a pyramidal structure of local, provincial, and national popular assemblies… . [T]he Cubans are on the verge of making their system work—that is to say, of constructing a socialist show case in the Western Hemisphere.”³

Maurice Zeitlin

University of Wisconsin-Madison