James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the
Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
Take a dubious document produced by a bloody tyrant. Mix it with a few unscrupulous politicians,
shady ex-spooks, and a bunch of scholars who are either too naive or have been recruited by the
tyrant's intelligence services. Add plenty of lies told by the above mentioned characters under the name
of oral history interviews. Sprinkle a few declassified documents obtained by a peculiar
archive.
Mix all the ingredients together until they become an easily digestible, spoon-feedable disinformation
gruel. Cook it for a couple of hours over a low fire produced by burning plenty of greenbacks provided
by a few non-profit foundations whose founders have made billions doing business with both sides of
military conflicts. Finally, add a few drops of realistic empathy, a new ingredient discovered by
international chef Robert McNamara, of renown Vietnam fame, and, what have you got? Sad and
Luminous Days, a book that marks probably the lowest point of what passes for scholarship in
America today.
Castro's Too Secret Speech
The book is a giant with clay feet. It has been written basically around a single document: Castro's
alleged secret speech to his communist party. The problem with such a document is that it is not
a document at all. It is a copy of a transcript that has never been authenticated. No wonder Castro
donated it to an archive that is not an archive at all, because most of the documents it keeps are
non-authenticated copies of documents. Moreover, throughout the book, Castro's assertions are taken
at face value, without the slightest attempt at analyzing them critically. If Blight, Brenner, and the folks at
the so-called National Security Archive apply to their personal lives their careless professional
practices, I guess that their homes are full of fake Picassos and bogus Dalís, and that their wallets are
bursting with three-dollar bills.
It is not mentioned in the book if Brenner and Blight actually listened to the original recording of
Castro's speech. Assuming that they did, did they electronically analyze the tape looking for alterations
or forgeries? If what Castro gave them was a transcript of his speech there is a strong possibility that
they have been shortchanged. It is known that Castro heavily edits his own speeches before, and
sometimes after, publication. Therefore, if this was the case, what they actually got was not what Castro
said, but what Castro would have liked to have said.
It seems that, apart from maligning Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, one of the main purposes
of Castro's speech was to deny that during the Cuban missile crisis he asked the Soviet Premier to
launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the United States to annihilate the American people. But,
despite the fact that the authors twice claim that this was not the case (pp. 24, 147), the evidence
overwhelmingly indicates that he did.
Launch the Missiles and Kill the Bastards, Nikita!
Late in the night of October 26, Castro visited the Soviet embassy in Havana and stayed through the
early hours of the next day writing a letter to Khrushchev. The most important part of the letter is
Castro's efforts to convince Khrushchev that an American invasion of Cuba was imminent, and his
request that, in case of such an invasion, the Soviet Union should launch a preemptive nuclear attack
against the United States. According to the published version of the letter, Castro's words were,
"I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists aggressiveness is extremely dangerous and if they actually carry
out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be
the moment to eliminate such danger through an act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh
and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other."
In a letter of October 30, a terrorized Khrushchev refers to Castro's request in very precise terms:
"In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against
the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that should have led. Rather than a
simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear war".
A few days later, splitting semantic hairs, Castro wrote an answer to this letter in which he emphatically
denied that he had ever asked Khrushchev to launch a nuclear attack against the U.S., and explained to
the Soviet Premier that what Khrushchev believed he said, even if he said it, was not exactly what he
said, even though it was exactly what he meant --sometimes it is not easy to understand what Castro is
trying to say, particularly when he is lying.
According to Castro, "You base yourself on the alarming news that you say reached you from Cuba and, finally, my cable of October 27.
I don't know what news you received; I can only respond for the message that I sent you the
evening of October 26, which reached you the 27th. ...And I did not suggest to you, comrade
Khrushchev, that the USSR should be the aggressor, because that would be more than incorrect. It would be immoral and contemptible on my part. But from the instant the
imperialists attack on Cuba...the imperialists would be by this act become aggressors against Cuba and against the USSR, and we would respond with a strike that would annihilate
them. ...I did not suggest, Comrade Khrushchev, that in the midst of this crisis the Soviet
Union should attack, which is what your letter seems to say; rather, that following an imperialist
attack, the USSR should act without vacillation and should never make the mistake of allowing
circumstances to develop in which the enemy makes the first nuclear strike against the USSR.
And in this sense, comrade Khrushchev, I maintain my point of view, because I understand it to
be a true and just evaluation of a specific situation."(Emphasis added.)
But Khrushchev was adamant. According to the Soviet Premier, Castro suggested that in order to
prevent our nuclear missiles from being destroyed, we should launch a preemptive strike against the
United States. During Castro' visit to the Soviet Union in 1963, Khrushchev brought the subject up
again.
According to Khrushchev, "I told Castro, you wanted to start a war with the United States. If the war had begun we
would somehow have survived, but Cuba no doubt would have ceased to exist. It would have been crushed into powder. Yet you suggested a nuclear strike!
No. I did not suggest that, replied Castro.
"How can you say that?", I asked Fidel.
The interpreter added, "Fidel, Fidel, you yourself told me that", No! insisted Castro.
Then we checked the documents. It was fortunate that Fidel did not tell us this orally, but sent us a message. The
interpreter read the document and asked, "How shall I translate this? Here is the word war, here is the word blow.
Fidel was embarrassed.]
But there is more than meets the eye in the above exchange. The words war and blow do not
appear in the version of the letter published by Granma and reproduced in the National Security
Archive Documents Reader. The reason for this is because, in their typical careless fashion, the folks at
the National Security Archive had the gall to publish as a true original document an English version --
most likely a toned-down forgery-- of the original letter in Spanish Castro sent to Khrushchev.
Two, Three, Many Vietnams
It seems that, after so much uncontested disinformation work --these authors have published a long list
of totally misleading books about Castro's Cuba --the authors seemingly have lost all sense of shame.
The title of the book comes from a phrase of a letter Ché Guevara allegedly wrote to Castro in 1962.
The authors apparently have forgotten that the maniac they are honoring in such way is the one who
publicly confessed he would have fired the Soviet missiles to destroy New York.
In December 1962, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle and News Call Bulletin published a
UPI cable claiming that Ernesto Ché Guevara, acting as Castro s mouthpiece as usual, told a
reporter in Havana that to defend [himself] against aggression Fidel Castro had planned a nuclear
attack on key U.S. cities, including New York. Though the "Chronicle" buried the story on page 16, the
News Call Bulletin ran a dramatic front-page headline in big, bold letters: How Castro Plotted
Atomic Attack on US! The Chronicle added that Secretary of State Dean Rusk called Guevara's
remark about a nuclear attack just talk. []
But Mr. Rusk was dead wrong. Guevara's remarks were not just talk. In an interview Ché gave a
few weeks after the crisis to Sam Russell, a British correspondent for the Daily Worker, Guevara said
that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would had fired them off.[]
Moreover, in an editorial he wrote during the missile crisis for Verde Olivo, the Cuban Armed Forces
weekly magazine, Ché made his point even more clear, exhorting the Soviets to stand by their
commitment to Cuba, no matter what the cost:
"What we contend is that we must walk by the path of liberation even when it may cost millions
of atomic victims, because in the struggle to death between two systems the only thing that can
be considered is the definitive victory of socialism or its retrogression under the nuclear victory
of imperialist aggression.[]
The infamous Ché Guevara, was the one who sent hundreds of prisoners to the firing squads based
only on suspicions. He was the very same man who created the first concentration camp in Castro's s
Cuba to intern political dissidents, homosexuals and other deviates --Guevara's open and frequent
homophobic remarks have been amply documented. The camp was located in the Guanahacabibes
peninsula, an inhospitable place near a mosquito-infested coast, in the Pinar del Río province, west of
Havana. The lack of sensitivity of these authors is not only offensive to all democratic-minded people; it
is also repugnant.
Aside from the fact that there are indications that the letter was the price Guevara had to pay Castro for
allowing him to leave Cuba, at least one of Guevara's men who survived the Bolivian misadventure has
strong suspicions that Castro's long hands were behind Guevara's betrayal by the Bolivian Communis
Party.[]
If one is to believe the authors of this book, just by adding a touch of empathy, this new mysterious
ingredient of historical analysis, one can easily understand, and perhaps justify, events ranging from
Hitler s genocide of the Jews and Stalin's extermination of the Ukrainian peasants, to McNamara's
policies during the Vietnam war and Castro's crimes against the Cuban, Latin American, and African
peoples.
A Misleading Title
The title of the book is twice misleading. Despite the authors claims of Castro's struggle with the
superpowers, what transpires throughout the whole book is actually Castro's struggle against one
superpower, the Soviet Union, in tacit alliance with another superpower, the United States.
As some authors have noticed, the actions of the United States against Castro have always been more a matter
of appearance than reality --the so-called economic embargo is enough proof of it. (Just a few
months ago the allegedly tough-on-Castro President W. Bush, signed again, as all American
Presidents have done before him, a provision that avoids the implementation of the few parts of the
embargo that could be damaging to Castro.) Strangely, and I would add, suspiciously, the selling of
Fidel Castro to the Soviets was accomplished with the full secret support of the U.S. government.
As Peter Collier and David Horowitz have pointed out, "Far from being driven reluctantly into waiting Soviet arms, Fidel actively provoked and escalated the confrontation
with Washington in order to force a cautious, apprehensive and recalcitrant Kremlin to grant that embrace.]
But what both Collier and Horowitz apparently missed is the possibility that Castro's actions may have
had the support of the U.S. government. A recently surfaced secret cable of October 29, 1959, sent
home from the British Embassy in Washington, mentions Castro's threats that he will go behind the
Iron Curtain to get jet fighters if he cannot get then through us. [] As if on cue, another cable sent on
November 24, 1959, mentions Allen Dulles efforts to stop the U.K. from selling jet fighters to Castro,
so this might lead the Cubans to ask for Soviet bloc arms. [] These cables are the smoking gun
proving that Castro s rapprochement with the Soviets was not the product of American policy
mistakes, as many still claim, but of a carefully designed U.S. plan to entice the Soviets to adopt
Castro.
Moreover, Castro's struggle against the Soviet Union with the help of the United States did not begin
after the missile crisis. It actually began when the U.S. government stopped supporting Batista and
allowed Castro to take power in Cuba. It continued with the carefully planned betrayal at the Bay of
Pigs, which destroyed the anti-Castro underground in the Cuban cities, the guerrillas in the Escambray
mountains, and the anti-Castro organizations in exile. Castro's surprising victory at the Bay of Pigs was
the proof that convinced the reluctant and suspicious Soviet leaders that Castro was what he purported
to be -- which probably was the true purpose behind the whole invasion charade.
If one is to believe Castro's words in the spurious speech quoted by Blight and Brenner, the outcome
of the missile crisis betrayed his trust in the Soviets. That is, however, a gross distortion of the facts.
The historical record shows that, if it is true that the Soviets distrusted Castro and betrayed him,
Castro's lack of trust in the Soviets and his betrayal began as early as 1959, when he first approached
them purporting to be a very different person than the one he actually was.
Alexandr Alekseev, one of the first Soviet officials to meet Castro in 1959, recalls that during their first
meeting he was very much taken aback by Castro s ability to quote Marx, Engels and Lenin by heart.
Alekseev s surprise was total, because the information he had been given in Moscow about Castro
firmly stated that he was not a Communist and that his knowledge of Marxism was very limited. What
Alekseev ignored was that, in order to fool him as he has done with many others, the previous night
Castro, putting his photographic memory to good use, had spent several hours speed-reading whole
chapters of books by Marx, Engels and Lenin. The next day, he regurgitated them back like a human
tape recorder to a mesmerized Alekseev.
Just a perfunctory reading of Castro s speeches shows that his knowledge of Marxism is less than
rudimentary. There is a great deal of evidence pointing to the fact that Fidel Castro never was a
Communist. For example, Javier Felipe Pazos, who met Fidel in the Sierra Maestra mountains,
expressed his total disbelief in the theory that Castro was a Communist and that the revolution was a
Communist conspiracy from the beginning.
According to Carlos Franqui, not even Ché Guevara considered Fidel to be a Communist at the time of
the Sierra Maestra struggle. In a letter Ché wrote in 1957, he asserted that he considered Fidel s
movement motivated by the eagerness of the bourgeoisie to free itself from the economic chains of
imperialism. And Ché added that he always considered Fidel to be an authentic left-wing bourgeois
leader, although his figure is glorified by personal qualities of extraordinary brilliance that set him far
above his class. Franqui points out that neither the ideas not the language of History Will Absolve Me
--Castro's political manifesto at the trial for the attack on the Moncada garrison --reveals a
clandestine communism. Totally missing from History Will Absolve Me is the central idea of Marxism:
the notion of the self-emancipation of the working class under the guidance of its vanguard, the
Communist party.
Finally, on December 2, 1961, Castro made another bold step in his betrayal of the Soviets when he
delivered the famous speech in which, after admitting his bourgeois prejudices, he declared that he
has always been a Marxist-Leninist at heart.[] Fidel began his speech at about midnight on December
1 and finished his speech at 5:00 a.m. on December 2.
Author Loree Wilkerson, who wrote probably the best analysis of Castro s speech, observed that Fidel's self-analysis in this speech presents the
picture of a man desperately trying to modify his past so that it would conform to the present.
Castro s confession of Marxist faith was received with surprise by the Soviet leadership and with
extreme suspicion by the Soviet intelligence analysts in charge of Cuba. Evidently, Fidel Castro was
trying to create for himself, a posteriori, what in intelligence parlance is known as a legend, a false
biography or cover story, supplied mostly to illegals and sleepers, enabling them to live undetected
within a foreign country under a false identity. The Soviets were not alone in their misgivings about
Castro's claims. Fidel's non-Communist affiliation had been so widely accepted in international circles
that his speech caused a sensation abroad.
In January, 1962, Fidel confessed to a French journalist that, even though he had never read beyond
page 370 of the first volume of Marx's Capital, he had always been a Marxist.
Hugh Thomas said that Castro must be therefore the first Marxist-Leninist leader who had scarcely read any of the works of
the Master and who scarcely allowed more than a few words and few expressions taken from Marxism
to enter his vocabulary. Thomas' remark is highly accurate. An analysis of Castro's speeches shows
that, while giving lip service to Marxism, true Marxist terminology and concepts are totally absent from
them.
Though Fidel Castro has used Nazism rather than communism as the blueprint for the system he has
created in Cuba, that does not mean he is a typical Fascist. Being a Fascist, like being a Communist or
an Anarchist, implies commitment and enthusiasm for an idea outside the limits of personal
advancement, material gain or power control. It implies zeal on behalf of a cause, dedication to an idea,
likes and dislikes expressed with ideological fervor. But, disregarding what he says, Castro has shown
his total impermeability to ideological concerns as well as his contempt for people excessively moved
by ideas --like Ché Guevara, for example. On the other hand, Castro s personal secretary Celia
Sánchez, a woman known for her anti-communist feelings but blindly loyal to Castro, never had any
problems and for many years was the second most powerful person in Cuba.
Why, then, as it is evidenced in Blight and Brenner's book, was Castro, whose knowledge of Marxism
is close to null, apparently convinced that he was more communist that the Soviets, the Chinese, and all
the communists around the world? The answer is very simple: because Castro is a delusionary
megalomaniac who is convinced that he knows more than anybody in the world about any imaginable
subject --perhaps with the exception of music, which he detests.
If one is to believe the authors, one of the main causes of the superpowers conflict with the Cuban
leader has been their lack of empathy to see things from his perspective. But this argument is fallacious.
The imperial arrogance and lack of empathy with which the Soviets treated Castro, pales in comparison
with the arrogance and lack of empathy with which Castro treated his Angolan, Nicaraguan, and
Grenadian allies. When he found a leader like Allende, who refused to be fully controlled by his imperial
power, Castro, the same way the Soviets did to him, conspired to depose Allende.
It has surfaced that most of the problems Allende faced were intentionally created by Castro, in an effort to destabilize
Allende's government and force him to cave to Castro's imperial designs. Suspiciously again, the CIA
profited from Castro's work.
Castro, who cannot suffer what he considers a humiliation, is an expert in humiliating his allies and
friends. Empathy is the farthest thing has ever been from his imperialistic mind. He has never been and
anti-imperialist as he claims: he has only envied not been a member of the select imperialist club.
King Fidel I
Probably one of the most deceptive things of the book is the authors constant references to the
Cubans, or to an anthropomorphized Cuba, as in Cuba, humiliated, had betrayed Cuba, etc.
This conveys the wrong idea that Castro's Cuba is a democratic country where policy decisions are the
product of a consensus. But, in order to fully understand the Cuban phenomenon, the reader must bear
in mind that, when the authors mention Cuba, or Havana, or the Cubans, the actual meaning
is Castro.
Like in the absolutist monarchies of past times, everything in Cuba centers around Fidel Castro. He is
responsible for the course of events in Cuba to an incredible degree, which sometimes has included not
only national and foreign policy, but also the colors schools and public buildings are painted, and the
length of men's hair and women's skirts. Even more, Castro's aim is to control not only the bodies of
all Cubans, but also their minds Also, the readers of this book are never told that Castro commonly
uses the royal "we" instead of "I".
Castro controls power undreamed of by most of the greatest conquerors and rulers of the past. And
like them, the more power he gets, the more he wants. He seems totally absorbed by the pursuit and
exercise of power. If politics is the business of the world, for Castro power is its reward.
It is very difficult for Fidel Castro to delegate any power. He is possessed by such a love for total
power that he cannot share it even with his most loyal subordinates not even with his brother Ra£l.
One has to get at him directly if something has to be done in Cuba. As he rarely settles down anywhere
for any length of time, his ministers and head of departments always have trouble getting in touch with
him.
Fidel cannot accept any sharing of authority, any subjection of his will to any individual or body of
people. This drive for power is the only constant element in his makeup, though sometimes he has
tried to hide it behind some revolutionary philosophy like communism or Marxism. Castro believes in
nothing but power and action, not as the means to reach an objective, but as goals in life...
Fidel Castro is subordinate to no legal or institutional structure. He holds his job at his own pleasure.
He uses his absolute power over other people's lives as a tool to strike terror into everyone around
him, and make them feel insecure. They know that Castro will do anything, including killing his own
people, to cling to power. As I have shown above, he has gotten rid of many of his most loyal
supporters on grounds that they had gained a degree of influence and public recognition that he
perceived as a threat to him personally.
Castro: Wall Street's Man
The evidence indicates that Fidel Castro s claims of anti-Americanism have been highly exaggerated.
As a matter of fact, and for different reasons that are difficult to understand, he always ends up, one
way or another, playing Wall Street's card. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that Fidel
Castro is probably the best thing that ever happened to the American military-industrial-academic
complex.[]
On the other hand, it makes sense that a group of non-profit foundations have been eager to contribute
to the publication of a book whose name honors Ché Guevara. The American military-industrial-
academic complex craves for war, revolutions, low-intensity international conflicts and terrorism, and
Dr. Castro has been giving them precisely that medicine for many long profitable years. One can safely
assume that, when Ché Guevara sent his famous message to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana,
asking for the creation of Two, Three, . . . Many Vietnams, many presidents and CEOs of arms
manufacturing American corporations and their friends in the Pentagon became extremely excited about
their bright economic future. If one stops listening to Castro s rhetoric and looks closely at his actions,
the unavoidable conclusion is that he may well qualify for the dubious honor of being one of the most
pro-American leaders of all times in Latin America; a strong benefactor of the interests of the American
corporations he claims to hate.[]
Fidel Castro acts like a sort of moral magnetic anomaly which distorts the ethical and moral compasses
of some people --including some American scholars. The fact may explain the existence of a book with
a title like this. Only moral morons can honor with a title of a book a hateful homophobic assassin like
Ché Guevara. Only moral morons can rejoice in the company of a tyrant while the people on the streets
show evident symptoms of malnutrition and mental illness, as a result of long years of hopelessness and
despair. Only moral morons can believe that Cubans, who risk their lives every day escaping from
Castro's prison island, are a happy people. Only moral morons can enjoy the privileges of power as
personal guests of the tyrant, while honest people in the streets are forced to prostitute themselves and
their children in order to bring food to their mouths. Only moral morons who see themselves as
progressives can help to legitimize a reactionary regime that makes the dictatorships of Batista,
Somoza, Trujillo or Pinochet look like glowing examples of democracy, freedom, and respect for
human rights.
The final part of this book is a call for empathy between countries with different political ideologies. If
one is to believe the authors, just a little empathy here and there will end most of the conflicts of this
world.
As Robert Strange McNamara put it, Blight and Brenner show how the missile crisis was caused, in large part, by a lack of empathy between Washington, Havana, and Moscow.
Opposing this simplistically foolish concept of empathy I would like to advance my own concept of antipathy; that
is, antipathy for all tyrants and their supporters.
Blight and Brenner's Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba s Struggle with the Superpowers after the
Missile Crisis, will join someday the hall of shame of pseudo-scholarship in the company of such jewels
as Hans Horbiger's books explaining his Welteislehre theory, which was held in high steem in Nazi
Germany, and Trofim Lisenko's tracts on "creative Darwinism," which became popular in the Soviet
Union during Stalin s times. Unfortunately, this book is a typical example of what nowadays passes as
scholarship in politically correct America.
Copyright 2003. All rights reserved.
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Notes
