Cuba: Slipping Caesar

Havana carefully did not tell the Cuban people that Fidel Castro was giving up one of his most important posts. The official announcement last week merely stated that the all-powerful National Agrarian Reform Institute, which runs Cuba’s communized agriculture, was getting a new boss. He is Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a longtime Communist economic theoretician and, next to Secretary-General Bias Roca, top man in the party’s hierarchy.

The shift marked the first time that Fidel Castro, oft-proclaimed “maximum leader,” has been removed from a position of power, and it made clearer still what has been apparent for months.

Though Castro continues to do most of the talking, the reins of government are being quietly gathered up by professional Communists (see box) who intend to make sure that amateurs do not ruin the revolution.

The near finality of the Communist Party’s takeover in Cuba raised anew the question: What ever became of the Monroe Doctrine? Asked just this at his press conference last week, President Kennedy answered, in effect, that what for 138 years has been the self-proclaimed U.S.

intention to keep outside powers out of the Western Hemisphere is now a responsibility shared with the Organization of American States.* The OAS at Punta del Este declared Cuba’s Communism incompatible with its membership, and last week in Washington the Cuban delegation walked out of the OAS before it could be asked to leave.

Petty Putschist. Confronted with the immensity of Castro’s mismanagement, the Communists are showing themselves less tolerant of Castro’s eccentric ego.

Cuba’s old-line Reds have always held a patronizing view of Castro. When he first began his guerrilla fight, the Communists dismissed him as inconsequential; Rodríguez himself laughed off Castro as a “petty putschist.” But when it seemed that Castro might win. Rodríguez was sent into the hills to join the rebels.

Playing to Castro’s monumental vanity, the Communists at first cheered his every move—harebrained or not—egged him on in his Yanqui hating, persistently praised him as the model of a socialist pioneer.

Now that he calls himself a “Marxist-Leninist,” they have started reading him lectures on party discipline and warning against the “cult of the personality.” Bias Roca made the point in a speech ostensibly praising a long-dead Cuban Communist Party official. The late Red hero, said Roca, “despite his enormous authority, despite his leading position within the party, gave constant evidence of strictly submitting himself to discipline. He never trusted his own decisions alone, he never believed that he alone could have the final word in all matters. He constantly consulted the committee, the organization . . .” The next night, addressing Communist newspapermen, Castro responded: “We were revolutionary apprentices, but we have been good revolutionary apprentices. We have learned rapidly and promptly. ”

Merger & Eclipse. Not rapidly enough, apparently. Castro’s inefficient handling of the economy (in which Communist planners deserve their share of the blame) has plunged Cuba into chaos. Every foodstuff except rice and bread is in short supply; only a few of the 40 state-run factories can meet their production goals.

Last spring the Communist Party and the tattered remains of Castro’s 26th of July movement were merged into a single outfit called the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (O.R.I.). In August, with Castro as official chief and with Economic Planner Rodriguez as working manager, O.R.I, was put in charge of the stumbling government enterprises. Castro’s old economic brain-truster, the Argentine Marxist Che Guevara, went into partial eclipse.

That left Castro still in operating command of the Agrarian Reform Institute, keeper of Cuba’s vital sugar industry.

Last month, as the 1962 harvest began, some 500,000 peasants and workers were serving in the militia. “Volunteer” cane cutters had to be dragooned from offices, girls’ clubs and factories. Only 81 of Cuba’s 161 sugar mills were grinding; the rest were out of operation.

As cutting went on, it soon became clear that the crop would produce only 5,400,000 tons of sugar, 1,300,000 less than last year. The Agrarian Reform Institute blamed drought and inadequate replanting after last year’s harvest. The whole truth was that, despite near-perfect weather, no replanting at all was done after last year’s harvest, though 20% of the crop should be replanted after each crop is in. Irrigation and fertilizing were ignored by the institute.

Submitting to Discipline. Last year most of Cuba’s sugar was bartered to Russia and the satellites for machinery, oil and arms. Last week Cuba was forced to admit that it could not deliver 500,000 tons of this year’s 560,000-ton quota to the East Europeans; it needed sugar to sell for hard currencies (desperately needed for food imports) on the world market. Without regrets, Cuba’s Communist directorate displaced Castro as boss of the agrarian reform he once called “the great battle of the revolution.” Like a good apprentice Marxist-Leninist, Castro had already pronounced himself ready to submit to party discipline: “It is right what the International says—neither Caesar, nor bourgeoisie, nor God—and We sincerely never aspired to be Caesar.”

* Though Yale’s famed Professor of International Law Samuel Flagg Bemis declared in U.S. News and World Report in 1959 that the U.S. has not irrevocably signed away its rights to-take unilateral action: “There remains the inherent right of self-defense.”