The Horse Lost the Way

By Richard Armstrong

CUBA, THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM by Hugh Thomas. 1,696 pages. Harper & Row. $20.

Villains somehow look blacker and heroines fairer under that Caribbean sun. In 1897, on the eve of the U.S. intervention to free Cuba from Spain, the fairest of all heroines to North Americans was a rebel named Evangelina Cisneros--"this tenderly nurtured girl," the New York Journal mourned, "imprisoned at eighteen among the most depraved Negresses of Havana." In the flesh, Evangelina was a bloodthirsty lass who tried to kidnap a Spanish officer, but no matter. The Journal had her smuggled out of prison disguised as a sailor and exhibited her triumphantly at an open-air reception in Madison Square. A half-century later came Fidel ("I am not a Communist") Castro, briefly a hero of U.S. journalism during the black-and-white-television era. He was, he said, fighting for a Cuba where "everyone could assemble, associate, speak and write with complete freedom." Now in his 13th year of power, "the Horse" (as Cubans call Castro) has already found it necessary, by his own admission, to shoot 3,500 of his countrymen and imprison 20,000 more.

With that dismaying image, Hugh Thomas' "pursuit of freedom" through 200 years of Cuban history has come full circle. Thomas is a historian of catholic curiosity who can construct engrossing narrative even from the balance sheets of 19th century sugar mills. To prepare his 1,696 pages of history, politics and anecdote, he has visited Cuba repeatedly. He seems to have talked to everybody not dead or in jail, and read everything, even all of Fidel Castro's speeches. As in his 1961 study of the Spanish Civil War, he seems scrupulously fair. The book furnishes the raw material for any number of interpretations at variance with his own.

As is often the case in Latin America, the reasons for Cuba's melancholy failure at democracy go back a long way. In the first half of his book Thomas deals with everything from 1762, when the British captured Havana, to Castro's 1959 takeover. He cites the peculiar vulnerability of a rich single crop (sugar), which made the island a major prize for colonial exploitation and left it with an economy still cruelly dependent on the whims of foreign buyers. Partly as a result, Cuba never developed a coherent, stratified society. In colonial times, unscrupulous slave traders could, and did, buy titles from the Spanish for $25,000, and no true and stabilizing aristocracy ever evolved. After a sugar crisis in the 1880s such aristocrats as there were fell under the influence of large corporations, many of them American. When at the turn of the century Cuba, with U.S. help, joyfully threw off Spanish rule and entered history as a nation, it was not ready for parliamentary democracy.

Students to the Sharks. Its helpful Yankee neighbor, moreover, as Thomas points out, proceeded with an unsettling mixture of high-minded amity and sheer avarice. Indeed, as Thomas presents it, the central failure of the U.S. in the turbulent and bloody story of the island was that it could neither take Cuba quite seriously enough nor leave it quite alone. After helping toss out the Spanish in 1898, it asserted the right to intervene in island affairs--through the notorious Platt Amendment, which was incorporated into the original Cuban constitution. Thomas argues that in fact the U.S. would have done better simply to take over the island British-style and prepare it for self-government.

The suggestion will no doubt stir rage in both Washington and Havana. But it is a sad and telling commentary that Cuba has rarely been so honestly run as during the brief U.S. occupation (1899 to 1902) under General Leonard Wood, who helped eradicate yellow fever and set up an ambitious, though thoroughly inappropriate public school system modeled on Ohio's. Thereafter, a succession of charming thieves and defective democrats occupied the presidential palace. The most candid was Alfredo Zayas (1921-25). Upon passage of a multimillion-dollar harbor bill, he announced that he had "300,000 good reasons for signing it." Cuba's two ablest home-grown rulers were the tyrants who followed Zayas. When Dictator Gerardo Machado (1925-33) snuffed out constitutional democracy, he had student and labor leaders thrown to the sharks off Morro Castle. After ex-Army Sergeant Fulgencio Batista took over in 1934, he remained, both in and out of office, the dominant figure in Cuban political life until the advent of Fidel Castro.

During Batista's reign, deadly groups of political gangsters flourished under the control of local bosses. Curiously enough, Fidel Castro ran with the roughest of these gangs while he was a law student at the University of Havana in the 1940s. As a result of this underworld experience, Thomas writes, "the future leader of the Cuban socialist revolution learned much about the nature of Cuban political institutions, their susceptibility to violence and their corruption."

Because of Castro's gangster connections, the middle-class democrats of Havana (lawyers, doctors and merchants) consistently underrated him, believing that nobody would flock to such a banner. When their own children did just that, they at least half believed Castro's protestations in his mountain redoubt that he was just another liberal like themselves. Castro cleverly avoided tests of arms with Batista, correctly perceiving, as Thomas puts it, that he was conducting not primarily guerrilla warfare but rather "a political campaign in a tyranny, with the campaigner being defended by armed men."

Socialist Shoe Heels. By 1959, the Cuban worker had attained a standard of living equal to that of the U.S. worker in 1941-42. But Cuba's position as a U.S. partner, however profitable, was becoming emotionally intolerable not only to Castro but to masses of Cubans. "To choose to be free meant for many Cubans," says Thomas, "and above all for Castro, to act in a way most calculated to anger the U.S." Thomas agrees with those observers who say that it was no fondness for Communism but a galloping hatred of American power that led Castro toward Communism and tyranny.

Typically, Castro has tried to outdo all other socialist leaders by abolishing material incentives and leaping straight into "pure Communism," a policy that resulted in various economic disasters. Long before Che Guevara departed to fight in the Congo and Bolivia, he was complaining that socialist shoe heels fell off in one day and that socialist Coca-Cola tasted terrible. There are notable consumer shortages as well--the meat ration is just three-quarters of a pound per week. Yet the economy has never been adequately organized, and some workers average as little as four hours a day on the job. Through it all, however, a charming and invincibly Cuban gaiety survives--"Viva el socialismo chachacha," as a revolutionary slogan goes.

The great value of Thomas' heavy volume is that it puts an appalling story together in one place for the first time--and in unemotional perspective. Though Thomas deplores the despotism into which Cuba has sunk, he points out that Castro himself is still widely popular, and he recognizes that some sort of break with the U.S. was necessary if Cuba was ever to escape her role as a U.S. appendage. Castro's worst problem is finding himself as dependent on the Russians as he ever was on the U.S. Russian officials brag that they can bring him to heel any time by shutting off the oil taps at Baku. Back during the missile crisis in 1962, when Castro learned that the Russians had sold him out, he swore, kicked the wall and broke a mirror. "Small powers can often begin a world crisis," says Thomas. "Great powers always end them." sbRichard Armstrong

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.