By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Guatemala is one of the saddest country in Latin America. The beauty of its verdant highlands dotted with whitewashed colonial towns, its shimmering lakes overlooked by soaring volcanoes and its Mayan ruins half buried in rainforest cannot conceal the ancestral oppression of its indigenous majority. It has had an elected civilian government since 1986. But a guerrilla war lasting almost three decades was settled only in 1996. It cost some 200,000 lives; most of the victims were Mayan Indians killed by the army.1 The war continues to cast a dark shadow. Guatemala’s democrats must struggle against what some have called poderes facticos — shadowy networks linking corrupt former army officers and organized criminal gangs of drug traffickers and money launderers. In many ways, these networks are the real power in the country. They appeared to flourish under Alfonso Portillo, the country’s president from 2000 to 2005, who fled to Mexico on leaving office and faced charges of stealing $i6 million of public money. Under Oscar Berger, a reforming liberal elected in 2004, a new effort began to cut Guatemala’s army down to size and to liberate democracy from military tutelage.

And yet Guatemala might have developed into a far more robust democracy much earlier. That it did not do so is in large part the fault of the United States: more than anywhere else in Latin America, Guatemala is a victim of American intervention. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration organized a coup to topple the democratic, reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz, which the American president alleged to be a possible ‘communist outpost on this continent’.2 Though the enterprise was initially hailed as a success by its authors, in the words of one historian sympathetic to them ‘in light of subsequent events it might reasonably be considered little short of disaster’.3 Not only did Guatemala itself pay a high price for the American intervention: the lessons drawn by the United States and by Latin Americans of both left and right had tragic consequences in other countries, handicapping democracy in the region for a generation or more. How was it that Guatemala came to be the first battle in the Cold War in Latin America?

Central America was an underdeveloped backwater throughout the nineteenth century. After independence in 1824, the United Provinces of Central America soon fragmented into five separate countries of which Guatemala, the seat of the colonial captain-generalcy, was the largest. Except in Costa Rica, an unenlightened despotism was the norm in the isthmus.4 In Guatemala, a long line of brutal dictators went through the motions of legitimating their rule through elections, but these were farcical affairs in which opposition was rarely registered. An oligarchy of coffee planters dominated the republic; they assured themselves of a seasonal Indian workforce through debt peonage.

When the Second World War drew to a close, democratic eddies washed across Latin America. Several dictatorships in the region fell, to be replaced by governments elected on a reasonably broad franchise. Labor unions expanded, and flexed their muscles in a strike wave. Communist parties grew rapidly, from a total membership of less then one hundred thousand in 1939 to 500,000 by 1947. In Latin America, as elsewhere in the world, there were expectations that a new era of democracy was beginning. According to one account, this opened up an opportunity for Latin American countries to move towards social democracy — as much of Western Europe would do in the aftermath of war — through an alliance between industrialists and the emerging middle and organized working classes.6 But the opportunity proved tantalizingly brief. In Latin America, the rural landlords had not been hurt by war, and they still exercised a powerful political grip, while the trade unions were still weak. By 1948, in most countries, the progress towards democracy had been rolled back, and Communist parties had been banned. By then, the Cold War had begun. It did not create anti-communism in Latin America. This had been espoused by conservatives and the Catholic Church since the formation by Lenin in 1919 of the Third Communist International (Comintern) with its brief of world revolution. So most Latin American governments were happy to line up with the United States in the Cold War. For Washington, it began to matter more that those governments should be reliably anti-communist rather than democratic.

In Guatemala the post-war democratic spring lasted longer. In 1944, protests by students, teachers and other members of an incipient middle class prompted Jorge Ubico, a dictator even more repressive than his predecessors, to step down. Three months later, junior army officers rebelled against his chosen successor. This ‘October revolution’ was carried out not in the name of Bolshevism but of ‘constitution and democracy’. Both were quickly achieved. Juan José Arévalo, a mild-mannered teacher of philosophy who had returned from years of exile in Argentina, was elected president in the freest vote Guatemala had seen. Arévalo claimed inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and from the Four Freedoms — of speech, religion and from want and fear — for which the American president had fought the war. A new constitution extended the franchise to all except illiterate women, created elected local authorities, made racial discrimination a crime and banned military men from standing for office. Arévalo’s government gave rights to trade unions, established a social security system, central bank and statistical office, and built hundreds of new schools. It brooked no restrictions on political or press freedom, despite suffering frequent plots from conservatives.

In 1950, Jacobo Arbenz, a leader of the ‘October revolution’, was elected to succeed Arévalo, with 65 per cent of the vote. While Arévalo had established democratic freedoms, Arbenz promised ‘to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state’.7 His plans to do this centered on agrarian reform and public infrastructure projects, several of which had been proposed by the president of the World Bank. On both counts, that meant a confrontation with the United Fruit Company, an American firm based in Boston. Known to Central Americans as el pulpo (‘the octopus’) because of its all-encompassing tentacles, in 1899 United Fruit had obtained a 99-year concession over a vast tract of jungle from Guatemala’s then dictator and with it, the right to finish and operate a railway to the Caribbean coast. The company thus obtained a monopoly over much of Guatemala’s trade: its port at Puerto Barrios was the country’s only Atlantic port, and its railway the only means of transport to and from the port. In return, it paid only a small tax on banana exports.8 Arbenz proposed to build a public port next to Puerto Barrios and a highway to it; United Fruit, which had already seen a rise in trade union organizing, became the main target of his land reform.

Even by Latin American standards, land distribution in Guatemala was highly unequal: 2 per cent of landowners held three-quarters of all cultivatable land, while more than half of all farmland was made up of large plantations (above one thousand and  one hundred, acres). Much of this land was left fallow. Arbenz’s reform affected farms larger than 670 acres whose land was not fully worked, or those above 223 acres where a third of the land was uncultivated. Compensation was paid in interest-bearing bonds according to the land’s declared taxable value. In two years a million acres — a third of this from German-owned farms nationalized at American insistence during the war — were distributed to 100,000 families. Arbenz ordered the expropriation of 380,000 acres of United Fruit land — a substantial chunk of its holdings, of which 85 per cent were left fallow, supposedly in case of banana diseases. The government offered compensation of $1.1 million; the company claimed the land was worth $i6 million, thus revealing the scale of its tax evasion. Its claim was backed by the US Department of State.

By then, the Eisenhower administration was bent on overthrowing Arbenz, whom it accused of presiding over a communist takeover. With support from Nicaragua’s notorious dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and his counterpart in Honduras, the CIA trained and armed a force of 170 men, and assembled a dozen planes. Their ‘invasion’ was a halting affair. But bombing and strafing from the air, combined with disinformation broadcasts suggesting a force of thousands, caused the army high command to oblige Arbenz to resign. Through a mixture of threats and manipulation, the Americans quickly secured the appointment as president of Carlos Castillo Armas, the undistinguished retired colonel they had chosen to lead the ‘invasion’. Guatemala’s ten-year democratic spring was over.

Ever since, controversy has raged over the American action. Was the coup an enterprise of crude economic imperialism, in which the Eisenhower administration was acting as enforcer for United Fruit? Since the days of Arévalo, the company had conducted an effective propaganda campaign in the United States, painting Guatemala as being in the grip of communists. The family of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, and his brother Allen, the CIA director, were shareholders in the banana company; both brothers had worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, a New York law firm which had represented United Fruit’s rail subsidiary. Several of the company’s officials had close contacts with the administration. But J F Dulles insisted: ‘If the United Fruit matter were settled, if they gave a gold piece for every banana, the problem would remain as it is today as far as the presence of communist infiltration in Guatemala is concerned.’9 Just five days after Arbenz was toppled, the US Justice Department began an anti-monopoly action against United Fruit; as a result, the company eventually agreed to hand over some of its land in Guatemala to local firms and sold the railway. In 1972, it sold its remaining interests in Guatemala to Del Monte. (United Fruit changed its name to Chiquita in 1989; the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001).

In recent years, as official archives have been opened, historians have come to accept Dulles’s contention. But many question his verdict on Arbenz. Not for the last time in Latin America, the critics argue, the United States failed to distinguish between a nationalist reformer and a communist. The Guatemalan Labour Party, as the communist party was called, was tiny; it never had more than 2,000 activists. Though an enthusiastic backer of Arbenz and the land reform, it was the smallest of the four parties in the governing coalition. It won only four of the 56 seats in Congress in an election in 1953, had no Cabinet members, and fewer than ten senior government jobs. Guatemala had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. Until the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had only three embassies in the whole of Latin America, a region which Stalin had dismissed as ‘the obedient army of the United States’.10 Dullesmade great play of an arms shipment from Czechoslovakia received a month before the coup. But the United States had imposed an arms embargo on Guatemala since 1948, and the Czech arms were of limited use. Arbenz’s coalition was fractious, the army restless and the middle class became disillusioned as tensions with the United States rose. The president did come to depend on the communists, who alone could mobilize popular support for the government. His wife is alleged to have been a communist sympathizer. The CIA feared that land reform would create a base for the communists in the countryside. Even so, it is hard to see the army or the civilian politicians acquiescing in a communist takeover.

In the event, the US crushed democracy not communism in Guatemala. Castillo Armas swiftly reversed the agrarian reform, reached agreement with United Fruit, and restored the old order of corrupt dictatorship. In 1960, junior army officers would rebel in the name of nationalism, angry that Guatemala was being used by the CIA to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles. The rebellion failed, but two of its leaders went on to found Guatemala’s first guerrilla group. This was crushed after right-wing death squads murdered thousands of civilians, many of whom had no connection to the guerrillas. In the mid-1970s, new Marxist guerrilla groups established a presence among the Mayan Indian communities of Guatemala’s western highlands. That prompted the army to undertake a scorched-earth campaign that saw scores of Indian villages wiped out, their inhabitants butchered and the survivors forcibly relocated and conscripted into army-backed auxiliary forces called ‘civil patrols’. Of all the counter-insurgency campaigns in Latin America during the Cold War, only that in Guatemala merits the much-abused term of genocide. Repression by dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, where most of the victims were middle class, attracted far more outside attention. But in the deliberate infliction of mass terror, the massacres of Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands in the late 1970s and early 198os had no parallel in the region. Those excesses caused Jimmy Carter to cancel the United States’ previous aid to the army. Another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, made a formal apology for that aid on a visit to Guatemala in 1999. But by then the Cold War was long over.

Guatemalan Labour Party, as the communist party was called, was tiny; it never had more than 2,000 activists. Though an enthusiastic backer of Arbenz and the land reform, it was the smallest of the four parties in the governing coalition. It won only four of the 56 seats in Congress in an election in 1953, had no Cabinet members, and fewer than ten senior government jobs. Guatemala had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. Until the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had only three embassies in the whole of Latin America, a region which Stalin had dismissed as ‘the obedient army of the United States’.1° Dullesmade great play of an arms shipment from Czechoslovakia received a month before the coup. But the United States had imposed an arms embargo on Guatemala since 1948, and the Czech arms were of limited use. Arbenz’s coalition was fractious, the army restless and the middle class became disillusioned as tensions with the United States rose. The president did come to depend on the communists, who alone could mobilize popular support for the government. His wife is alleged to have been a communist sympathizer. The CIA feared that land reform would create a base for the communists in the countryside. Even so, it is hard to see the army or the civilian politicians acquiescing in a communist takeover.

In the event, the US crushed democracy not communism in Guatemala. Castillo Armas swiftly reversed the agrarian reform, reached agreement with United Fruit, and restored the old order of corrupt dictatorship. In 1960, junior army officers would rebel in the name of nationalism, angry that Guatemala was being used by the CIA to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles. The rebellion failed, but two of its leaders went on to found Guatemala’s first guerrilla group. This was crushed after right-wing death squads murdered thousands of civilians, many of whom had no connection to the guerrillas. In the mid-197os, new Marxist guerrilla groups established a presence among the Mayan Indian communities of Guatemala’s western highlands. That prompted the army to undertake a scorched-earth campaign that saw scores of Indian villages wiped out, their inhabitants butchered and the survivors forcibly relocated and conscripted into army-backed auxiliary forces called ‘civil patrols’. Of all the counter-insurgency campaigns in Latin America during the Cold War, only that in Guatemala merits the much-abused term of genocide. Repression by dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, where most of the victims were middle class, attracted far more outside attention. But in the deliberate infliction of mass terror, the massacres of Mayan Indians in the Guatemalan highlands in the late 1970s and early 198os had no parallel in the region. Those excesses caused Jimmy Carter to cancel the United States’ previous aid to the army. Another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, made a formal apology for that aid on a visit to Guatemala in 1999. But by then the Cold War was long over.

The ease with which Arbenz was overthrown would lead policy-makers in Washington to adopt ‘regime change’ as their standard response to perceived communist threats in Latin America. A few years later, another such attempt on a much larger scale would end in disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Thwarted, President John F Kennedy would launch the Alliance for Progress in an attempt to stall the spread of communism in Latin America by encouraging democratic reform. ‘Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,’ Kennedy declared. Indeed, had Arbenz’s agrarian reform taken place a decade later — or a decade earlier when FDR was preaching freedom from want — it might well have drawn applause from Washington.

The Latin American left, too, drew lessons from Guatemala. A young Argentine doctor, Ernesto Guevara, had arrived there on New Year’s Eve 1953 and witnessed the fall of Arbenz. By the time he was given safe conduct from the Argentine Embassy to Mexico, he had acquired the nickname Che, bestowed by leftist exiled Cubans he met in Guatemala.11 According to one of his most perceptive biographers, Guatemala was Che Guevara’s ‘political rite of passage’. Guevara thought the coup showed that the United States ‘was a priori ruthlessly opposed to any attempt at social and economic reform in Latin America’. So he inferred that the left should be prepared to fight US interference rather than try to avoid or neutralize it.12 He also thought that Arbenz had allowed his enemies too much freedom, especially in the press, and had erred in not purging the army. This is confirmed by Hilda Gadea, Guevara’s first wife, who wrote: ‘it was Guatemala which convinced him of the necessity for armed struggle and for taking the initiative against imperialism’.13

 

From the Monroe Doctrine to the corollary of intervention

The overthrow of Arbenz was far from the first intervention by the United States in Latin America. Yet Guevara’s analysis was flawed: intervention was by no means constant, and it was almost wholly confined to the Caribbean basin. The policy of the United States towards its neighbors went through several contrasting phases. In the century following George Washington’s presidency, his successors had two main foreign policy priorities. One was to prevent European involvement in the Americas. The second was to expand their own territory across North America. The first aim was formulated by President James Monroe in 1823, when he warned the European powers:

‘We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.’14 The Monroe Doctrine, as it came to be called, was defensive in inspiration. It also envisioned a commonality of liberal economic principles and civil, political and religious freedom across the republics of the Americas.15 Thus President Harry Truman would say in 1947: ‘There has been a Marshall Plan for the Western hemisphere for a century and a half. [It is] known as the Monroe Doctrine.’16 In any event, the United States long lacked the power to enforce it; throughout the nineteenth century, European powers would occasionally intervene in Latin America, pursuing trade or protecting the lives and investments of their citizens.

The second aim came to be known as the pursuit of the United States’ ‘manifest destiny’ to occupy North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific seaboard.17 The process began with the purchase of Louisiana and Florida. It continued with the admission to the union of Texas, which had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836. This was followed swiftly by an expansionary war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848. To the victor went the present-day states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah in return for a payment of $15 million. Cuba, still under Spanish rule, was also the object of American covetousness. As early as 1823, John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state, argued that ‘Cuba, forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.’18

Together with Central America, Cuba would be the focus of the next phase of American expansionism, from the 189os to 1930. In this period, successive presidents — not just Theodore Roosevelt, the rough-riding Republican, but also Woodrow Wilson, the idealistic Democrat — concluded that control of the Caribbean basin was of crucial strategic importance for the defense of the homeland and its commerce. This control was challenged by Germany and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Kaiser Wilhelm II believed that Germany should be the ‘paramount power’ in Latin America, and that Cuba should be a ‘European state’. Germany sought a naval base in the Caribbean. Against the background of ‘a scramble for Africa’ among the European powers, many influential Americans reckoned that the United States had to assert a policing role in its ‘sphere of interest’ in the Caribbean and Central American region — or risk seeing another power do so.19 The chaotic misrule afflicting many of the small countries in the area provided ready pretexts for intervention in the name of stability. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt summed up the new policy thus: Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.20
This became known as the ‘Roosevelt corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine. It was an ex-post justification for American intervention in Cuba.

Since the 1850s, American policy-makers had made it clear that Cuba’s transfer to any other European power would be unacceptable. By 1898, Spanish control over its ‘ever-faithful isle’ was tenuous. When the USS Maine, an American battleship on a visit to Havana, exploded, killing 266, a clamor for American intervention followed. (That the explosion was almost certainly an accident, caused by a fire in a coal bunker that ignited the forward magazines, was ignored.) The four-month war that followed shattered the remnants of Spanish empire and signaled the advent of the United States as a world power; it annexed Puerto Rico, the Philippines (for which it paid $20 million) and the Pacific island of Guam. It had gone to war in support of Cuba Libre (Free Cuba), but opted to make the island a protectorate. Roosevelt turned a minor role as a cavalry officer in the expeditionary force in Cuba into a national legend that swept him to the White House. Two years later, he created a new country in Central America. The United States had negotiated a treaty with Colombia allowing it to build a trans-isthmian canal at Panama. When Colombia’s Senate was slow to ratify this (partly because of the Thousand Days’ War), Roosevelt organized and financed a revolution for Panamanian independence. Panama, like Cuba, became a de facto American protectorate. ‘I took the isthmus,’ Roosevelt would subsequently boast.21

Under Woodrow Wilson, American imperialism took on a more idealistic tinge, influenced by the Progressive reform movement. The man who joined the First World War ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ claimed a similar motive closer to home. ‘We are the friends of constitutional government in America; we are more than its friends, we are its champions,’ he said.22 Yet American views of the neighborhood were colored by a racism akin to that of the positivists in Latin America in that period. The countries of the Caribbean Basin, many assumed, were not ready for democracy. Wilson dispatched the marines for what turned into lengthy sojourns in the Dominican Republic (1916—24) and Haiti (1915—34), where they built roads and health clinics as well as imposing order.

In Nicaragua, the marines stayed from 1912 to 1933 (apart from a brief interval in 1925—7). But instead of building nations, they built gendarmeries. It would be a recipe for trouble. In Nicaragua, the marines trained a National Guard, which suppressed Sandino’s low-level guerrilla campaign. After Sandino made peace with the government, he was murdered on the orders of Anastasio Somoza, the guard’s commander. Somoza went on to seize power in 1936, inaugurating a kleptocratic family dynasty that would last until 1979 when it was overthrown by leftist revolutionaries who claimed inspiration from the memory of Sandino. In the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo would use his command of the American-created army to impose a personal tyranny from 1930 until he was murdered in 1961, by which time this tropical ourceissimo had become an embarrassment to his former sponsors.

From the First World War onwards the United States began to displace Britain and Europe as the main ource of trade and investment in the northern part of the region, though not in Argentina or some other South American countries. In the 39205, intervention went hand in hand with commercial aggrandizement and ‘dollar diplomacy’ as American banks lent to eager but cash-strapped governments. This often-inglorious period in the United States’ relations with Latin America was caustically summed up by General Smedley Darlington Butler, who was said to be embittered at having been passed over for the job of commandant of the US Marine Corps: I spent thirty-three years ... being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism ... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909—12. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.23

In all, between 1898 and 1934 there were some 30 separate military interventions by the United States in nine countries of the Americas — all of them in the Caribbean Basin. Most of these exercises were self-serving, even if they were driven, too, by a high-minded sense of the United States’ improving mission in the world — a mixture of motives that is once again familiar today. On the other hand, interventionism was restrained both by a desire to avoid foreign entanglements and by the moral rejection of imperialism on the part of a former colonial people. The result, in the balanced judgement of one historian, was ‘a kind of ambivalent imperialism continually modified by guilt, domestic politics and the lack of a true colonial drive.’24

These interventions impregnated the popular view in both halves of the hemisphere of US policy towards Latin America. They provided fuel for dependency theorists, especially when they were repeated in Central America in the 1980s. Yet they applied to only a small part of the region. And intervention is only one motif in the pattern of hemispheric relations.

Another is a search for peaceful co-operation. At the first Pan-American Conference, held in Washington in 1889, James G Blame, the US Secretary of State, proposed a hemispheric customs union and arbitration mechanisms to settle disputes between nations. These ideas were not adopted, because of opposition led by Argentina and Chile. But they set the stage for increasingly busy hemispheric diplomacy – and would find an echo in the Miami summit of 1994. A similar approach would be followed by Franklin Roosevelt. On taking office in 1933, he proclaimed his administration’s intention to be a ‘good neighbor’. Roosevelt read Spanish; he had visited both Central and South America, and gave the region great importance in foreign policy (until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 imposed other priorities). The United States committed itself not to intervene in the affairs of other countries. But that also meant it made no effort to promote democracy. Haya de Ia Torre, the leader of Peru’s APRA, noted pointedly that Roosevelt was ‘the good neighbor of tyrants’.25 However, the famous comment attributed to FDR concerning Somoza (‘He’s a son of a bitch but at least he’s our son of a bitch’) was probably apocryphal. With the advent of the Second World War, the administration’s main concern was to ensure access to Latin America’s raw materials. The ‘good neighbor’ began to dispense economic aid, such as a cheap loan to enable Brazil’s government to build a large, integrated steel mill at Volta Redonda.

The interventions of the first three decades of the twentieth century generated anti-Yankee feeling in Latin America. This had not previously been the norm. When the Monroe Doctrine was first enunciated, some in Latin America, such as Santander, saw it as a useful commitment by the United States to buttress still-fragile independence against Spanish and European covetousness. But Bolivar, for all his admiration of the United States, was wary. (Instead, he wanted an alliance with Britain.) To this day, Latin American leaders remain torn between these two impulses. Brazil, for example, enjoyed a special relationship with the United States, which lasted until the 1970s. The Baron of Rio Branco, whose career as Brazil’s premier diplomat spanned the empire and the early republic, argued: ‘Latin America has nothing to fear from Anglo-Saxon America ... Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the policies of the United States would be able to cause uneasiness to the national sensitivity of the other American countries. Just the opposite, these nations find in the preponderance of the first nation of the continent support for their causes and aspirations.’26 But some other countries, especially Argentina — whose special relationship with Britain endured until the Second World War — saw Pan-Americanism as limiting their options. As more confident nation-states emerged in Latin America, they began to elaborate diplomatic defenses. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, an Argentine diplomat, Carlos Calvo, had argued for a strict version of national sovereignty. He rejected the notion that foreign governments had the right to intervene to protect the lives and property of their citizens abroad, as both the European powers and the United States frequently did in Latin America. The ‘Calvo Doctrine’ held that foreigners, including investors, should be treated exactly the same as nationals, with no right of appeal to foreign governments even if host nations unilaterally changed the rules under which investments had been made.27 This principle was adopted by Carranza in Mexico’s 1917 constitution, and found adherents elsewhere in the region — including Nstor Kirchner, Argentina’s current president, in his handling of foreign investors in his country’s privatized utilities. A second principle, known as the Drago Doctrine after another Argentine, held that debts owed by one nation to another should not be collected by force. Again, its target was mainly European powers.

By the end of the Second World War, Latin America’s mighty northern neighbor had become a superpower, while Europe, immersed in its own reconstruction, was temporarily disabled and permanently weakened. As the United States embarked on the Cold War, it dusted off the Monroe Doctrine and applied it to the Soviet Union’s efforts to spread communism around the world (cautious though these were in the Americas). That was one inspiration behind what came to be called the Inter-American system, comprising the Rio Treaty of mutual defense and, in 1948, the establishment of the Organization of American States (OAS). In deference to Calvo, the OAS Charter emphasized the principle of non-intervention. Nevertheless, to obtain diplomatic cover for the Guatemalan coup, J F Dulles spent a fortnight personally arm-twisting his Latin American counterparts at an OAS Assembly in Caracas in 1954. Only with great reluctance did they accept Dulles’s proposition that ‘the domination or control of the political institutions of any American state by the international communist movement’ would constitute a threat to the Americas as a whole and would require ‘appropriate action’. This would be the guiding principle of American foreign policy in the western hemisphere until the fall of the Berlin Wall. At first Latin America was a minor theatre in the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. That would soon change.

Like the island of Hispaniola and Brazil’s north-east, Cuba was shaped and distorted by sugar. The cane plantations and sugar mills depended on slave labor. Between 1820 and 1865, up to 500,000 African slaves were imported; by 1841, they made up 43.5 per cent of the population.28 Such was Spain’s desire to maintain Cuba’s sugar wealth that it hung on to the island through the nineteenth century by means of an implacable dictatorship. In the words of Hugh Thomas, a British historian, Cuba was ‘a sugar prison rather than a sugar palace’.29 A prolonged guerrilla war from i868 to 1878 failed to dislodge Spanish rule. After the abolition of slavery in 1886, a more powerful independence movement emerged. Its leader was José Marti, a writer and political activist who founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC). Marti had spent fifteen years living in New York. He was just one among many Cubans, both white and black, who had migrated to the United States. They were the forerunners of a large Cuban-American community that has endured to this day while undergoing many changes. Marti admired the United States’ democracy, but was a critic of some aspects of its capitalism, and deeply mistrustful of its intentions towards Cuba. In his last letter, written in 1895 after he had landed on the island as part of a liberating expedition and two days before he was killed, Marti declared: I am now every day in danger of giving my life for my country and for my duty ... to be in time to prevent with the independence of Cuba that the United States extends itself through the Antilles and falls, with that great force, upon our lands in America. Everything I have done hitherto, and will do, is for that purpose ... I lived inside the monster and I know its entrails: and my sling is that of David.30

Marti’s fears were soon justified by the aftermath of the Spanish—American war. The rebel army (many of whose members were black) which had fought the Spaniards to a standstill in 1895—8 was disdained by the Americans. After four years of American military rule, Cuba emerged independent in name, but a protectorate and economic colony of the United States in practice. Into Cuba’s constitution were inserted restrictions known as the Platt Amendment (to the Army Appropriations Act of 1901). These limited the Cuban government’s freedom to contract debt and make military alliances; required it to grant bases to the United States (one was promptly set up at Guantánamo Bay, which has recently become notorious); and allowed the US the right to intervene in Cuba to ensure ‘the maintenance of a stable government adequately protecting life, property and individual liberty’.31 Although abrogated in 1934, the Platt Amendment served merely to inflame Cuba’s frustrated search for nationhood. During the first thirty years of the new republic, government was generally corrupt and elections rigged; the losers would rise in arms and appeal for American intervention, which was often forthcoming. Political gangsterism was common.32 Gyrations in the world price of sugar served to consolidate the control of deeper-pocketed American companies over the economy. Some 60 per cent of rural properties came to be owned by Americans. Cuban society was less racist than that of the southern United States, but power lay firmly with the whites.

The Great Depression hit Cuba very hard, prompting a collapse of sugar prices — the value of the island’s sugar crop plunged from $199 million in 1929 to $42 million in 1932. The resulting hardship and discontent brought down the repressive regime of Gerardo Machado, an elected dictator (dubbed a ‘tropical Mussolini’ by one of his opponents). An attempt by Sumner Welles, the American ambassador, to select a new government was thwarted by a rebellion of army NCOs led by Sergean Fulgencio Batista, a handsome mulato stenographer. Batista allied with students and university professors who formed a revolutionary government of socialist and radical-liberal inspiration. It decreed the nationalization of the American-owned electric company and of several sugar properties. But Welles withheld recognition of the government, and Batista withdrew his support. Subsequent democratic governments were marred by corruption, and the chance of reform was lost. Batista would remain the dominant figure in Cuba for the next quarter of a century, ruling as an elected president in 1940—4 and returning as a dictator in 1952. Within a year, his dictatorship was challenged by Fidel Castro, a young lawyer, former student leader and member of the radical Ortodoxo Party (which claimed descent from Marti’s PRC). Acting in the Cuban tradition of violent risings, he organized an attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago, Cuba’s second city. It failed, but Castro survived, He was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, but was soon released under a general amnesty. Having made his way to Mexico, in December 1956 he tried again, landing with 82 guerrillas (including his younger brother, Raül, and Che Guevara) in Oriente province, many of whose people were black and poor. Against all odds, the guerrilla force established itself in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. The rest is history – but history wrapped in many myths.

There is, of course, a vast literature on the Cuban revolution. The main question that need concern us here is why Castro and his fellow-revolutionaries did not restore democracy but opted instead to extinguish capitalism. After all, less than a year before Castro marched into Havana, across the Caribbean in Venezuela an alliance of civilians and dissident army officers had ousted another dictator, Marcos Perez Jiménez, but had established a democracy under a pact which excluded the Communist Party from power. The answer has much to do with Castro himself and with Cuban history, in which his revolution was grounded. As a student leader at Havana University, Fidel claims to have read Marx and to have become a ‘utopian communist’.34 Never an ideologue, he has always been a man of action, a political and military strategist, a man who wants and understands power above all else. As a young lawyer, he was a rising star of the Ortodoxo Party; he would almost certainly have been elected as a deputy in the 1952 election had this not been cancelled by Batista’s coup. Even before the coup, disillusioned by what he saw as the betrayals of the democratic governments of the 194os, he had decided that Cuba needed a revolution and that he would lead it. But what sort of revolution? The manifesto of Castro’s 26^th of July Movement (named for the date of the assault on the Moncada barracks) issued at the outset of the guerrilla war was couched in moderate terms: it called for the restoration of the 1940 constitution, agrarian reform, and nationalization of public utilities. Several of Fidel’s inner circle were communist sympathizers. Raül Castro had been a member of the Communist Youth while Che Guevara was a self-taught Marxist and fellow-traveler of communism, though not a party member. According to Tad Szulc, a well-informed biographer of Fidel, ‘the historical [sic] decision that the revolution should lead to the establishment of socialism and then communism in Cuba was reached by Castro alone in the late spring of 1958 probably during the series of crucial political meetings held in the Sierra during May and June’.35

That decision was carefully concealed. As Batista fled Havana on New Year’s Eve 1958, Castro named Manuel Urrutia, a provincial judge, as president; the cabinet was drawn mainly from the moderate, non-communist, wing of the 26^th of July Movement. But power lay with Fidel, who made himself commander-in-chief of the armed forces and established what Szulc calls a ‘parallel’ government, based on the new National Agrarian Reform Institute. He and Guevara applied the lessons they had learned from Guatemala: Batista’s army was destroyed; an alliance with the Popular Socialist Party (as the old Communist Party called itself) was struck but concealed for two years until Castro had full political control and had established the security apparatus of a police state.36 The Eisenhower administration saw through the democratic façade: although Castro would not nationalize all American businesses in Cuba until October 1960 and would not declare himself to be a communist until December 1961, as early as March 1959 the National Security Council began to review how ‘to bring another government to power in Cuba’.37 The CIA began sabotage operations; in March 1960, it blew up a Belgian freighter unloading a shipment of rifles in Havana harbour, killing a hundred people. When an invasion force of 1,500 Cuban exiles organized by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Castro, the master strategist, was ready as Arbenz had not been. The invasion was crushed on the beach by Castro’s militias, partly because Kennedy refused to commit American air power. In October 1959, just nine months after entering Havana, Castro had already begun the contacts with the Soviet Union that would lead to a full-scale military and economic alliance. In 1962, the Soviet Union’s decision to station missiles on Cuban soil brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had ever been.

Kennedy and Khruschev negotiated the withdrawal of the missiles in return for a guarantee that the United States would not again invade Cuba. Castro, who had wanted a military pact with the Soviet Union but not the missiles, was furious at being excluded from the negotiations, and at what he saw as Khruschev’s climbdown.38

The evidence suggests that those who have argued that Castro was somehow pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union and communism by the American trade embargo decreed in November 1960 are mistaken. The Cuban government’s decisions were of its own volition.39 It is safe to say that two, linked, political impulses drove Fidel Castro: one was anti-Americanism 40 and the other was to render permanent his revolution and his personal control over his country. Communism provided the tools to satisfy both impulses, rather than being an end in itself. Fidel has always claimed primary inspiration from Marti — the nationalist, anti-imperialist Marti, rather than the democrat — not Marx. ‘The intellectual author of this revolution is José Marti, the apostle of our independence,’ he said at the Moncada trial in 1953.41 It may not be coincidental that in both Cuba and Mexico revolutions whose aims included the consolidation of the nation-state in the face of what was perceived to be a threat from the United States led to the establishment of one-party regimes. Yet democracy is far from incompatible with national self-determination, as many other countries have demonstrated. Castro drew on Cuba’s traditions of guerrilla warfare and revolutionary violence, and its long struggle for nationhood and racial and social justice. The extent to which he came to embody that struggle explained the affection and respect many Cubans held for him despite their privations. But Fidel was also a Latin American caudillo, who militarized Cuban society as never before. The American trade embargo, and the countless failed assassination attempts against Castro by the CIA, served only to aggravate this. They allowed Castro to claim that Cuba was in a permanent war with American imperialism.

 

The left turns against democracy

As well as awakening outside interest in Latin America, the Cuban revolution inspired a generation of young Latin American radicals. Ultimately, it would have much less influence on the region than the Mexican revolution, but that would not be for want of trying. Its appeal to the Latin American left was enormous — and tragic. Before the Cuban revolution, the left in Latin America was in most places fairly weak. Its three main components were anarchosyndicalists, many of them European immigrants; Communist parties, formed in most places in the 19205 and subservient to the Comintern in Moscow; and third, the more radical supporters of populist leaders. In some countries, the Kennedy and Khruschev negotiated the withdrawal of the missiles in return for a guarantee that the United States would not again invade Cuba. Castro, who had wanted a military pact with the Soviet Union but not the missiles, was furious at being excluded from the negotiations, and at what he saw as Khruschev’s climbdown.38

The evidence suggests that those who have argued that Castro was somehow pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union and communism by the American trade embargo decreed in November 1960 are mistaken. The Cuban government’s decisions were of its own volition.39 It is safe to say that two, linked, political impulses drove Fidel Castro: one was anti-Americanism 40 and the other was to render permanent his revolution and his personal control over his country. Communism provided the tools to satisfy both impulses, rather than being an end in itself. Fidel has always claimed primary inspiration from Marti — the nationalist, anti-imperialist Marti, rather than the democrat — not Marx. ‘The intellectual author of this revolution is José Marti, the apostle of our independence,’ he said at the Moncada trial in 1953.41 It may not be coincidental that in both Cuba and Mexico revolutions whose aims included the consolidation of the nation-state in the face of what was perceived to be a threat from the United States led to the establishment of one-party regimes. Yet democracy is far from incompatible with national self-determination, as many other countries have demonstrated. Castro drew on Cuba’s traditions of guerrilla warfare and revolutionary violence, and its long struggle for nationhood and racial and social justice. The extent to which he came to embody that struggle explained the affection and respect many Cubans held for him despite their privations. But Fidel was also a Latin American caudillo, who militarized Cuban society as never before. The American trade embargo, and the countless failed assassination attempts against Castro by the CIA, served only to aggravate this. They allowed Castro to claim that Cuba was in a permanent war with American imperialism.

As well as awakening outside interest in Latin America, the Cuban revolution inspired a generation of young Latin American radicals. Ultimately, it would have much less influence on the region than the Mexican revolution, but that would not be for want of trying. Its appeal to the Latin American left was enormous — and tragic. Before the Cuban revolution, the left in Latin America was in most places fairly weak. Its three main components were anarchosyndicalists, many of them European immigrants; Communist parties, formed in most places in the 19205 and subservient to the Comintern in Moscow; and third, the more radical supporters of populist leaders. In some countries, the Communists had achieved a small but significant following, especially in trade unions. In Brazil, they had some support among army officers and conscripts. In 1935, the party attempted a coup against Getulio Vargas, with a rising at three army bases. It was crushed, and gave Vargas a pretext to declare the Estado Novo, a quasi-fascist dictatorship.42 Everywhere, the Communists faced a structural problem: how to make a revolution where its main presumed protagonist, the urban working class, was small and its trade unions weak. It was for this reason that populists — with their appeal to a broader, multi- class coalition — rather than social-democrats, were the midwives of mass politics in Latin America. (The main exception was Chile, whose mining industry, isolated in the distant Atacama desert, generated a powerful union movement, and Socialist and Communist parties.) The Communists’ answer would eventually be a cautious one: that they should first ally with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ against the ‘feudal’ agrarian oligarchy and ‘imperialism’ in order to create a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ (i.e. capitalist) revolution. Only then would socialism be on the agenda.

A dissenting response came from José Carlos Mariátegui, a journalist and essayist who founded what would become Peru’s Communist Party. His thought combined Marxism and indigenismo which, inspired by the Mexican example, took powerful root among Peruvian writers and painters alike in the 192os.43 Mariátegui argued that in Peru, at least, the source of revolution would be the peasantry in alliance with the workers. This was because Peru’s history was very different from that of Europe. He saw in the Andean Indian peasant community ‘elements of practical socialism’ and of ‘agrarian communism’. At the same time, the prevalence of the latifundio (a large landholding with indentured serfs) militated against capitalist development. ‘Democratic and liberal institutions cannot flourish or function in a semi-feudal economy,’ he wrote.44 Only socialism could bring development to Peru, he argued; achieving it was a long-term task and would require a mass movement from which would emerge a revolutionary party.

Mariategui was opposed from two sides. In Peru, it was Haya de la Torre and APRA, not the socialists, who led the opposition to the modernising dictatorship of Augusto LeguIa of 1919—30. Abroad, at the first Latin American Communist Conference, held in Buenos Aires in 1929, unimaginative bureaucrats from the Comintern imposed orthodoxy.45 Months later, Mariátegui, long an invalid, died at the age of 35 from a bone disease. He seemed to have lost the argument. Yet his thought is reflected in several of the traits that came to distinguish the Latin American left, such as the importance given to nationalism, popular religiosity and social movements. It was not surprising that in Peru, unlike the rest of Latin America, Maoism, which also gave a pre-eminent role to the peasantry, should find adherents. The fundamentalist Maoist guerrillas who Communists had achieved a small but significant following, especially in trade unions. In Brazil, they had some support among army officers and conscripts. In 1935, the party attempted a coup against Getfllio Vargas, with a rising at three army bases. It was crushed, and gave Vargas a pretext to declare the Estado Novo, a quasi-fascist dictatorship.42 Everywhere, the Communists faced a structural problem: how to make a revolution where its main presumed protagonist, the urban working class, was small and its trade unions weak. It was for this reason that populists — with their appeal to a broader, multi- class coalition — rather than social-democrats, were the midwives of mass politics in Latin America. (The main exception was Chile, whose mining industry, isolated in the distant Atacama desert, generated a powerful union movement, and Socialist and Communist parties.) The Communists’ answer would eventually be a cautious one: that they should first ally with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ against the ‘feudal’ agrarian oligarchy and ‘imperialism’ in order to create a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ (i.e. capitalist) revolution. Only then would socialism be on the agenda.

A dissenting response came from José Carlos Mariátegui, a journalist and essayist who founded what would become Peru’s Communist Party. His thought combined Marxism and indigenismo which, inspired by the Mexican example, took powerful root among Peruvian writers and painters alike in the 1920s.43 Mariátegui argued that in Peru, at least, the source of revolution would be the peasantry in alliance with the workers. This was because Peru’s history was very different from that of Europe. He saw in the Andean Indian peasant community ‘elements of practical socialism’ and of ‘agrarian communism’. At the same time, the prevalence of the latifundio (a large landholding with indentured serfs) militated against capitalist development. ‘Democratic and liberal institutions cannot flourish or function in a semi-feudal economy,’ he wrote.44 Only socialism could bring development to Peru, he argued; achieving it was a long-term task and would require a mass movement from which would emerge a revolutionary party.

Mariategui was opposed from two sides. In Peru, it was Haya de la Torre and APRA, not the socialists, who led the opposition to the modernizing dictatorship of Augusto LeguIa of 1919—30. Abroad, at the first Latin American Communist Conference, held in Buenos Aires in 1929, unimaginative bureaucrats from the Comintern imposed orthodoxy.45 Months later, Mariátegui, long an invalid, died at the age of 35 from a bone disease. He seemed to have lost the argument. Yet his thought is reflected in several of the traits that came to distinguish the Latin American left, such as the importance given to nationalism, popular religiosity and social movements. It was not surprising that in Peru, unlike the rest of Latin America, Maoism, which also gave a pre-eminent role to the peasantry, should find adherents. The fundamentalist Maoist guerrillas who terrorized Peru from 1980 to 1993, claimed inspiration from Mariátegui: their full name was the Partido Comunista del Peri — Por el Sendero Luminoso de José Carlos Mariátegui (Peruvian Communist Party - by the Shining Path of José Carlos Mariategui). Unlike the Shining Path’s founder, Abimael Guzmán, Mariátegui was an undogmatic Marxist, not a terrorist. But like so many other Latin American leftists he was a disciple of Georges Sorel, a French theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, and he did believe in revolutionary violence. Mariátegui’s vision of an indigenous Andean utopia, menaced by capitalism and imperialism, is today echoed by radical leaders such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales. It is based on myth. Mariátegui had little knowledge of the Andean world; his illness prevented him making more than one visit to the Peruvian sierra, and not a single peasant was among the founders of his party. ‘He had constructed the image of an egalitarian and conflict-free [indigenous peasant] community which had never existed and still less at that time,’ admitted Alberto Flores Galindo, a Peruvian historian sympathetic to Mariátegui.46

Thirty years later, the Cuban revolution seemed to many on the left to offer the solution to their frustrated quest — a ‘revolution in the revolution’, as Regis Debray, a French theorist, put it. In the view of Che Guevara — whose writings on the Cuban campaign in which he fought achieved wide circulation — the only thing that had been missing previously was the courage of revolutionaries. In Guerrilla Warfare, a slim but enormously influential volume published in 1961, he stated: We consider that the Cuban Revolution contributed three fundamental lessons to the conduct of revolutionary movements in America. They are:

1 Popular forces can win a war against the army.

2 It is not necessary to wait until all the conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them.

3 In underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.47

This seemed to make sense. There were, after all, tens of millions of poor peasants in Latin America, and Mao Zedong’s revolution in China had successfully based itself on the peasantry and rural warfare. Yet Guevara’s message found its most receptive audience among the middle-class youth of Latin America, a group which was expanding rapidly as a result of economic growth and urbanisation. Many of these middle-class students were acutely conscious of the injustices in their societies, and saw in the Cuban revolution an effective way to tackle them. At the same time, the Catholic Church — which had blessed injustice in Latin America since the moment a Dominican friar had taken a full part in the capture and murder of Atahualpa, the Inca— had an attack of conscience. Stimulated partly by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and Pope John XXIII, a new current emerged, which preached that the Latin American Church should concern itself primarily with helping the poor. The main impact of liberation theology, as it was called, was to form a network of grassroots ‘base communities’ which agitated for change. But some of its proponents flirted with Marxism and violence. Nearly a thousand priests submitted a manifesto to a conference of Latin American bishops, held at Medellin in Colombia in 1968, In which they differentiated between the ‘unjust violence of the oppressors’ and ‘the just violence of the oppressed’.48 That stance would create many martyrs, among both priests and nuns and their followers. As Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga, a Honduran archbishop, put it recently: ‘there were many priests in Central America who supported violent change ... There was a big temptation to try and change things through violence, and what did we get? Only dead people.’49

For the best part of three decades after 1959, across Latin America a radicalized left committed itself to revolution. Rural guerrilla focos soon appeared in more than half a dozen countries, including Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru. Yet Guevara’s prescription for the foco— the Spanish word means ‘focus’ or ‘centre’, but also ‘light-bulb’ — had two fatal flaws. The first was that, like Mariátegui’s vision, it involved a mythologized rewriting of history. Recent research has underlined that Fidel Castro’s rebel army did not make the Cuban revolution alone. It depended for its survival, and for its eventual victory, on a broad range of alliances with groups of middle-class professionals, the churches, labour unions, and various revolutionary organizations. Strikes, agitation and sabotage were important in wearing down the will to fight of Batista’s army, allowing the guerrillas to triumph.50 The second flaw in Guevara’s argument was even more serious. There was a world of difference between an armed rising against a corrupt and brutal dictatorship in an American neo-colony, such as Cuba, and attempting guerrilla warfare against the more powerful armies of the larger, independent nations of South America. That was especially so where governments enjoyed legitimacy and had carried out significant, if inadequate, social reforms. Guevara himself half-recognized this. In Guerrilla Warfare he had written: ‘Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been 51 But in practice, he would ignore this rider. His central message was that ‘it is the duty of the revolutionary to make the revolution’. The voluntarism of a self-appointed revolutionary elite and a murderous militarism would thus come to substitute for any missing political conditions.

Guevara was right, however, that after the Cuban revolution, ‘imperialism’ (i.e. the United States) ‘will not allow itself to be caught by surprise’; the same went for the ‘higher bourgeoisie’ in the region (i.e. Latin American governments).52 Ever since 1959, it has been a basic tenet of the United States’ policy towards Latin America to prevent a ‘second Cuba’. That led successive administrations into alliances with some brutal or unsavory dictatorships and served to stoke the fires of iiationalist anti-Americanism in the region. In Washington’s eyes, the first candidate for the role of another Cuba was the Dominican Republic. Following the assassination of Trujillo, an election in 1962 was won by Juan Bosch, an ineffectual social-democrat. Bosch was soon overthrown by a military coup. When a subsequent government collapsed, a ‘constitutionalist’ group of army officers and their civilian allies attempted to restore Bosch to power. In fighting in Santo Domingo, the capital, they drove back conservative military officers who opposed them. The administration of Lyndon Johnson feared that communists were behind Bosch. It dispatched the marines as the spearhead of a force that would total 23,000 American troops — the lesson of the Bay of Pigs was thought to be not to do such things by halves. Their ostensible mission was to protect American civilians from chaos. In an echo of the Roosevelt corollary, Johnson claimed in justification of his action that there were ‘headless bodies lying in the streets of Santo Domingo’. When opponents challenged this, he is said to have called the American ambassador, enjoining him, ‘For God’s sake see if you can find some headless bodies.’53 The outcome was the defeat of Bosch’s supporters, and the installation in a less-than-free election of JoaquIn Balaguer, a quiet and reliably anti-communist lawyer and amateur poet who had been Trujillo’s amanuensis and, at the end, his front man as president for a couple of years. He would win five more increasingly rigged elections. Though the outcome was less tragic than in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic would not become a democracy until well into the 1990s.54

For his part, Fidel Castro saw ‘exporting the revolution’ as a way to defend it on his island. Cuba trained, armed, financed and advised thousands of revolutionaries from other Latin American countries. In turn, the sudden advent of an increasingly loyal ally in the Caribbean caused the Soviet Union to take a much more active interest in Latin America. ‘Cuba forced us to take a fresh look at the whole continent, which until then had traditionally occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities,’ according to Nikolai Leonov, who was long the KGB official closest to the Castro brothers.55 In 1961, the Soviet leadership adopted a KGB plan to ‘activate ... armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments’ around the world, placing Central America at the top of the list.56 The bureau had a habit of overstating its powers, and the Soviet Union became increasingly cautious about provoking the United States in its ‘backyard’. Internal factors were almost always more important than external factors in the conflicts which played out in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. But the recent availability of archive material from the former Soviet Union underlines that outside intervention in the region during the Cold War was not a game played only by the United States.57

The main outcome of the first wave of rural guerrilla movements in the 196os was the slaughter of some of the best and brightest among a generation of idealistic middle-class youths — and of the peasants and conscripts who were unlucky enough to get in their way. Guevara himself famously practiced what he preached, going first to the Congo and then to Bolivia in answer to his own call to create ‘two, three ... many Vietnams’. His Bolivian venture summed up the arrogant futility of his quest. Although he had spent several weeks there on his way to Guatemala, he seemed oblivious to the fact that Bolivia’s 1952 revolution had granted land and appreciable benefits to many peasants.58 To compound his difficulties, most of Bolivia’s communist leaders were unenthusiastic about Guevara’s plan for a guerrilla foco, and steered him to barren and remote territory near Vallegrande in the south-east, far from the country’s mines and their powerful trade union movement. Not a single peasant joined the guerrillas, and several passed on information to the army, so the foco was quickly detected. A score of Green Berets from the United States swiftly trained a new Ranger unit of the Bolivian army in counter-insurgency. Together with regular army troops, within months they annihilated the foco, and captured and shot Guevara.

The manner of his death, at the age of 39, would make Guevara a universal icon. He had three times risked his life to bring revolution to countries that were not his own. That quest turned him into a symbol of romantic rebellion everywhere. Thus Diego Maradona, Argentina’s troubled multi-millionaire football hero, explained his tattoo of Che: ‘He was a rebel. So am I’59 To others among his acolytes, it seemed that Guevara, an ascetic, symbolised a selfless quest for utopia — that mirage which has dazzled so many Latin Americans and those who are drawn to the region. As Jorge Castaneda points out in his biography of Guevara, the photos of the dead guerrilla portrayed him as ‘the Christ of Vallegrande’ whose eyes expressed ‘the tender calm of an accepted sacrifice’.60 The stubborn, dogmatic and militaristic Argentine Marxist-Leninist thus became transubstantiated into a figure akin to that of a Christian martyr. His visage not only adorns the most unlikely products of global capitalism, from bars to coffee-mugs, but it takes its place in the gallery of popular saints with whose images Latin America’s truck and bus drivers choose to adorn their vehicles to ward off the demons of the road.

Only in Nicaragua would something resembling the Cuban revolution be repeated, with the Sandinista insurrection of 1979. Not by coincidence, Nicaragua, like Cuba, had suffered American intervention, was ruled by a corrupt dictator, and its army was a US-created gendarmerie which lacked legitimacy. The Sandinista regime was a far from cohesive coalition of Marxists, liberation theologians, nationalists and social-democrats. The Reagan administration saw in it the nightmare of a ‘second Cuba’. It moved to overthrow the Sandinistas by organising the contra guerrillas. The Sandinistas were determined to avoid the fate of Arbenz. With support from Cuba and the Soviet Union they created a 100,000-strong army and an increasingly militarized state — ‘a Central American Sparta’, as Castaneda puts it.61 The Reagan administration was hamstrung by opposition in the United States Congress, and further embarrassed by the exposure of its illegal efforts to funnel to the con tras the proceeds of clandestine arms sales to Iran. As a result, the contras were no match militarily for the Sandinista army. But the Sandinistas’ economic mistakes, their arrogant treatment of the peasantry and the hardships imposed by an American trade embargo and the contra war engendered a growing groundswell of discontent. By then, Mikhail Gorbachev was acutely aware of the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy: after providing $1.1 billion in mainly military aid, the Soviet Union told the Sandinistas that they were on their own.62 That encouraged the Sandinista leadership to embrace a peace plan authored by Oscar Arias, Costa Rica’s president, and backed by the rest of Latin America, involving free and fair elections.

Eventually this was supported by George H W Bush, who had replaced Reagan; he was eager to turn the page on Iran-Contra and involvement in Nicaragua. After electoral defeat, the Sandinistas left power voluntarily in 1990. Nicaragua became a democracy, albeit a poor and troubled one.

In neighboring El Salvador, another small Central American country with a dire history of dictatorship, a powerful left-wing movement based on trade unions, radical priests and peasant groups emerged. In 1972, a reformist coalition was denied victory in a presidential election only by fraud in favor of the military party, whose only platform was anti-communism.63 Thereafter, El Salvador spiraled into civil war between leftist guerrilla groups and the armed forces, some of whose leaders formed death squads. The United States pumped in military aid, while coaxing the generals towards democracy. The guerrillas of the Farabundo MartI National Liberation Front (FMLN) enjoyed considerable popular support; they fought the army to a standstill over a decade. By then, the Cold War was over. A peace agreement signed in Mexico in 1992 turned El Salvador, like Nicaragua, into a democracy. But it is one in which the right-wing Arena Party has held power continuously since 1989. That was partly because the FMLN, which turned into a political party, failed to throw up new, more moderate leaders.

As the Cold War ended, the cycle of US interventions in the Central American isthmus that had begun in Guatemala in 1954 closed with the invasion of Panama in 1989. At a cost of some 500 to 1,000 Panamanian dead, between civilians and soldiers, and the lives of 25 American troops, this overthrew Manuel Noriega, a thuggish strongman but one who was no nastier than many American allies (with he himself had been for much of his career as intelligence chief of the Panama Defense Forces).64 Noriega had annulled an election which appeared to have been won by a large margin by the opposition candidate, Guillermo Endara, whom the American troops installed in office. He was a troublesome figure in a country to which the US was committed to turning over the Panama Canal ten years later. But in the end Noriega was overthrown because of his links with drug traffickers at a time when the ‘war on drugs’ was almost as all-consuming in Washington as the ‘war on terror’ would become a dozen years later. Noriega was arrested and jailed on charges of aiding drug traffickers.65

If revolution and American pressure helped in the end to democratize Central America, that was not what Guevara and Castro had fought for. Under their influence, a generation of leftists gave priority to social justice and nationalism, and disdained democracy and the rule of law.66 Not all of the myriad ‘new left’ groups — of Maoist, Trotskyist and nationalist inspiration in addition to Guevarists — which sprung up across Latin America embraced violence and la lucha armada (‘the armed struggle’). But many were equivocal on the matter; some would even welcome the arrival of dictatorships in the deluded belief that repression would arouse the masses.

Meanwhile, Cuba itself would find that national self-determination again proved elusive. It became a Soviet satellite, a producer of Caribbean sugar for the eastern block in return for some $4 billion a year in economic aid — a vast sum for an island of fewer than  million people. Even after the initial fervor had faded, the revolution’s foreign defenders would point to its undoubted achievements in health and education. Its critics pointed to the cost — the extinction of all political and economic freedom. They also noted that back in 1959 Cuba was already one of the top five Latin American countries on a wide range of socio-economic indicators.67 True, the distribution of income, schooling and health was highly unequal then. A third of the workforce lived in severe poverty, dependent on seasonal work on the sugar harvest; most of these Cubans were black. But in average life expectancy, Cuba in 1959 was close to the United States, and it had more doctors per head than Britain and France. Fidel Castro poured resources into health, education and biotechnology, but that could not conceal the poverty and inefficiency of the communist economy. Sympathisers blamed the American embargo, of course, and there is no doubt that this ill-conceived and self-defeating policy added to the difficulties of the Cuban people while doing nothing to weaken the regime. But the main fault lay with central planning, which has failed as a method of economic development the world over.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of its subsidies had an impact on Cuba comparable only to that of the Great Depression: the economy contracted by a third arid discontent grew. Many believed that Castro’s revolution was bound for swift extinction.68 To save it, Castro enacted economic reforms for what he called ‘the Special Period in Peacetime’. He encouraged foreign investment, especially in the tourist industry. He gave state
enterprises much more autonomy over their trade and finances. He allowed the use of the American dollar, to attract remittances from Cuban-Americans (who now number more than a million). And he gave the smallest of nods to private enterprise in the form of peasant markets and small, family-run private businesses, such as restaurants and plumbing. Many in Cuba and beyond hoped that economic reform would lead to political liberalization. Yet such concessions turned out to be strictly tactical. At the start of the twenty-first century, Castro at last found replacements for his lost Soviet sponsor in China and, especially, in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. China provided Cuba with cheap loans for infrastructure and some consumer goods. Venezuela gave Castro all the oil he needed at a heavily subsidized price, as well as other goods. In return, some 16,ooo Cuban doctors (a third of the total) worked in Venezuela for several years, and Castro provided Chavez with political advice and advisers. Thus fortified, in 2005 Castro declared the ‘Special Period’ over. With it went many of the reforms. The year before he had banned the use of the dollar, and re-imposed central control over state companies. Foreign investors — except for a few large ones considered vital — and small businesses faced mounting bureaucratic regulation and harassment. By mid-2005, half the 8oo foreign investors had gone, while only 140,000 small businesses remained, down from 240,000 a decade earlier.69 After more than two centuries, sugar has finally been eclipsed — by tourism and remittances — as Cuba’s main source of foreign exchange, as it has been across the Caribbean. In 2002 the government decreed the closure of almost half the island’s 156 sugar mills; half of the land under sugar was to be turned over to other crops, and at least a quarter of the 400,000 workers in the industry lost their jobs (officially, they were to be retrained).70 Growing world demand for ethanol subsequently held out the possibility of a new lease of life for sugar. In his twilight years, Fidel Castro once again enjoyed a certain political influence in Latin America. His disciples included not just Venezuela’s Chavez -with whom Castro established a relationship of mutual dependence — but also Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and the leaders of some radical social movements, such as that of Ecuador’s indigenous peoples and Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra of landless workers. But Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua apart, no other government showed interest in a close alliance with Cuba, though they condemned the trade embargo against it. Other Latin American countries have begun to surpass Cuba’s social achievements, without its sacrifice of human freedom: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica all scored higher than Cuba in the United Nations Human Development Report in 2006, and Mexico was close behind.

Cubans retained residual respect for Fidel. But beneath the surface, there were many signs of widespread discontent over crumbling infrastructure, a health service weakened by medical diplomacy, the drabness and hardships of everyday life and the lack of opportunity and of freedoms. A mild relaxation of political control during the ‘Special Period’ was reversed too. In April 2003, while the world was distracted by the start of the war in Iraq, Castro’s secret police rounded up 78 dissidents and independent journalists. In the biggest crackdown in a decade, after summary trials they received jail sentences averaging 28 years. More than two-thirds of the detainees were independent journalists and/or activists for the Varela Project, a pro- democracy group of Christian democrat inspiration. The Varela Project is based inside Cuba, not in Miami. Its leader, Oswaldo Payá, refused help from the United States and condemned the American trade embargo.71 That made him especially dangerous for Castro’s autocracy as he could not be dismissed as a ‘mercenary’. At the same time, Castro launched a crackdown on pervasive corruption, sending brigades of unemployed youths, called ‘social workers’, to run petrol stations and getting students to stage unannounced audits of state companies.

Castro became increasingly preoccupied with arrangements for what the regime called ‘the succession’ to his leadership, shuffling provincial party bosses and ministers. In July 2006, the party’s central committee recreated its secretariat, apparently as a transitional leadership. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that Fidel Castro had undergone abdominal surgery and had ‘temporarily’ turned over his powers to his brother Raül and a collective leadership. Raál Castro was a powerful figure in his own right as head of the armed forces, which manage much of the economy and the tourist industry. After reportedly coming close to death through peritonitis, Fidel’s health appeared to improve in early 2007. As long as Fidel lives, the revolution will survive in its island fastness, just as Spain retained its ‘ever-faithful’ isle. After that, Cuba will head into the unknown. Raül Castro, by all accounts an efficient administrator, is said to favour a Chinese-style opening of the economy while retaining political control. Economic change might help to gain political consent for the ‘successor’ regime. But Raül, who turned 76 in June 2007, is likely to be a transitional figure.

After half a century of Fidel, ordinary Cubans both want and fear change. Nobody knows what would happen if discontent boils over and the army is called upon to fire upon the people — something it has not had to do since the revolution. Another unknown is whether the United States will seek to intervene as events unfold in Cuba, and whether or not it will restrain Cuban American claims for the restitution of homes and business premises. A further doubt concerns the role that Venezuela will play. Left to its own devices, Cuba could evolve towards an authoritarian capitalist regime in the style of Mexico’s PRI, or it could move fairly swiftly towards democracy.
 

1. This was the finding both of the Truth Commission setup under the peace accord and of the Human Rights Office of the Archbishopric of Guatemala. See Jonas, Susanne (2000), Of Centaurs and Doves: Guatemala’s Peace Process, Westview Press, Chapter 1.

2. Schlesinger, Stephen, and Kinzer, Stephen (1982), Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Sinclair Browne, London, p. ii.

3. Ronald Schneider quoted in ibid., p. 227.

4. Costa Rica had few Indians and, as a result, land was distributed more evenly, rural wages were higher and there were few haciendas. Although the franchise was limited, Costa Rica’s coffee-growing elite laid the basis of a civilian political system in the late nineteenth century.

5. Bethell, Leslie and Roxborough, Ian, ‘Introduction: The postwar conjuncture in Latin America: democracy, labor and the Left’, p. io, in Bethell and Roxborough (eds) (1992), Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War 1944—48, Cambridge University Press.

6. This paragraph draws on Bethell/Roxborough, Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, Introduction, pp. 1—32, and Conclusion, pp.327—34.

7. Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus, p. 52.

8. Ubico granted United Fruit a second tract of land on the Pacific coast on similar terms.

9. Quoted in Streeter, Stephen M, ‘Interpreting the 1954 US Intervention in Guatemala: Realist, Revisionist and Postrevisionist Perspectives’, The History Teacher, Vol. 34, No. 1, November 2000.

10. Andrew, Christopher and Mitrokhin, Vasili (2006), The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, Penguin Books, p. 27.

11. The nickname derived from the Argentine usage of che as a frequent interjection.

12. Castañeda, Jorge (1997), Companero: The Lfe and Death of Che Guevara, Bloomsbury, pp.64 and 71.

13. Quoted in Schlesinger/Kinzer, Bitter Fruit, p. 184.

14. Quoted in Smith, Peter H (1996), Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of US-Latin American Relations, Oxford University Press, p. 20.

15. Smith, Robert Freeman (1986), ‘Latin America, the United States and the European Powers 1830—1930’, p. 85, in Bethell, Leslie (ed.), Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. IV, c. 1870—1930.

16. Bethell/Roxborough, Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, p. 22, footnote.

17. See part 3, note 20.

18. Quoted in Smith, Joseph (1994), The Spanish—American War, Longman, p. 28.

19. Smith, R F, ‘Latin America, the United States and the European Powers’, pp.95—8.

20. Quoted in ibid., pp. 101-2.

21. McCullough, David (1977), The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870—1914, Simon & Schuster, p.384.

22. Quoted in Smith, PH, Talons of the Eagle, p.53.

23. Ibid.,p.63.

24. Smith, R F, ‘Latin America, the United States and the European Powers’, p.96.

25. Smith, PH, Talons of the Eagle, p.73.

26. Ibid., p. 100.

27. Smith, R F, ‘Latin America, the United States and the European Powers’, p. 103.

28. Thomas, Cuba or The Pursuit of Freedom, p. 169.

29. Ibid., p.74.

30. Laviana Cuetos, Maria Luisa (ed.) (1988), José Marti, Ediciones de Cultura Hispanica, Madrid, p.91.

31. Quoted in Perez, Louis A (1988), Cuba Be,’een Reform and Revolution, Oxford University Press, p. i86.

32. Gott, Richard (2004), Cuba: A New History, Yale University Press, Chapter 4.

33. Ibid., p.134.

34. Szulc, Tad (1986), Fidel: A Critical Portrait, Avon Books, New York, p. 203.

35. Ibid., p.38.

36. For a powerful account of the effectiveness of this police state a dozen years after the revolution see Edwards, Jorge (1993), Persona Non Grata, Nation Books, New York.

37. Edwards, a writer/diplomat, had been sent to Havana as chargé d’affaires by the Allende government in Chile, and was broadly sympathetic to the revolution. Szulc, Fidel, p.39.

38. Gott, Cuba, pp. 195—209.

39. DomInguez, Jorge I, ‘US-Latin American Relations During the Cold War and its Aftermath’, p. 40, in Bulmer-Thomas, Victor and Dunkerley, James (eds) The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London and David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University.

40. Like Marti, Castro rightly saw the United States as the chief threat to the revolution. But his anti-Americanism may have been given an edge by the Eisenhower administration’s support for Batista. Szulc cites a letter from Fidel to Celia Sanchez, his companion, written on 5 June 1958 shortly after a rebel position had been bombed by Batista’s air force using US-supplied bombs: ‘I have sworn that the Americans will pay very dearly for what they are doing. When this war has ended, a much bigger and greater war will start for me, a war I shall launch against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny.’ Szulc, Fidel, p.39.

41. Ibid., p. 150.

42. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, p. 112.

43. Vargas Liosa, Mario (1996), La Utopia Arcaica: José Maria Arguedas y Las Ficciones del Indigenismo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, pp. 63—6.

44. Mariategui, José Carlos (1968), Siete Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana, 13th edition, Amauta, Lima, pp. 44—5.

45. See Flores Galindo, Alberto (1991), La Agonia de Mariategui, Editorial Revolución, Madrid.

46. Ibid., p. 229. Guevara, Che (1969), Guerrilla Warfare, Penguin Books, p. 13.

48. Gillespie, Soldiers of Peron, p.54.

49. ‘John Paul’s People: A Journey Through the Catholic World’, by Stephen Moss, Guardian, 5 April 2005.

50. Julia Sweig, an American researcher who had access to the Castro government’s archives, provides convincing evidence of this. See Sweig, Julia E (2002), Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground, Harvard University Press.

51. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, p. 14.

52. Gerrasi, John (ed.) (1968), Venceremos: The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, p. 137.

53. Andrew/Mitrokhin, The Mtrokhin Archive II, p.31.

54.This paragraph draws on Kryzanek, Michael J (i6), US—Latin American Relations, Praeger, pp.72—6, and Smith, PH, Talons of the Eagle, pp.168—71.

55. Quoted in Andrew/Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II, p. 28.

56. Ibid., pp. 40—1.

57.The Mitrokhin Archive, cited in this chapter and Chapter 5, is a trove of KGB documents secretly copied over twenty years by Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB archivist, and smuggled out to Britain by the Secret Intelligence Service (M16) in 1992. Since the original documents have not been released, its contents cannot be independently verified but they are highly plausible.

58. Castaneda, Companero, pp.58—61.

59. Observer, 6 November 2005.

60. Castañeda, Companero, p. xiii.

61. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, p. 109.

62. Andrew/Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive IL pp. 134—5.

63. See Bonner, Raymond (1985), Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and El Salvador, Hamish Hamilton, Chapter 3; White, Alastair (1973), El Salvador: Nation of the Modern World, Ernest Benn Ltd, Chapter.

64. Dinges, John (1990), Our Man in Panama, Random House, pp. 299—319.

65. Kempe, Frederick (1990), Divorcing the Dictator: America’s Bungled Affair with Noriega, GP Putnam’s Sons, pp.418—25.

66. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, p. 193.

67. Perez-Stabile, Marifeli (i), The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and Legacy, Oxford University Press, Chapter 1.

68. For example, in 1992, Andres Oppenheimer, a journalist for the Miami Herald, concluded in a well-reported book on Cuba’s travails in this period that Castro’s ‘final hour may stretch [for] a matter of weeks or ... a few years’. At the time, this view was widely shared. Oppenheimer, Andres (1992), Castro’s Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba, Simon & Schuster.

69. ‘Cuba’s Economy: Unappetising’, The Economist, 23 June 2005.

70. Gott, Cuba: A New History, p.322.

71. Telephone interview with the author, December 2005.

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