The Race War, by Ronald Segal
(excerpts)
New York, Viking Press, 1966, pp. 22-25

The strategy of guerilla struggle, as developed in China and Cuba, and developing yet in Vietnam, makes it difficult to believe that the power of the rich industrial states, even if combined, could permanently prevent the success of concerted revolution in much of the remaining world.

The likelihood that revolution itself will spread through the regions of the poor seems increasingly evident. This does not, of course, mean that the process is likely to be a speedy one, as the newspaper measures speed. The despair and confusion of the poor arc likely first to produce over large areas of the world – have begun to do so already, indeed – a semblance of endemic chaos, with military repression contending against not one but several movements of popular disaffection, themselves struggling against each other for supremacy. But in the end, because such chaos is insupportable and because no other escape seems possible, a cohesive revolutionary force will emerge, to absorb differences and attract general allegiance.

Revolution itself need not be dogmatically communist. In Cuba, although several of the guerilla leaders closest to Castro were Communists, the revolution was, in its early stages, itself undogmatic, and propelled to proclamation as communist in substantial measure under the pressures of American hostility and of Soviet protection. It is all too probable of course that similar hostility to similar attempts at radical reform, regarded as damaging to Western economic or security interests, will propel similar national revolutions to the protection of communist power and proclamation as formally communist. And this must restrict the excited experimentation, the search for new social forms and new patterns of individual liberty within a communal endeavour, that revolution produces. Not the least cruel aspect of Western hostility to revolution is precisely that it turns the successful struggle from independent striving to the safely beaten paths of dogma. Yet revolutions will continue to be undertaken as discoveries, not made as mere imitations of experience, for every new attempt seeks to evade the mistakes of the past. Moreover, the dogma of formal communism itself is stretching, to find room for revolutions that produce new patterns of strategy, leadership and endeavour. The Chinese revolution, in its achievement and employment of power, was different from the Russian, and the Cuban different from either. It will soon be as meaningless for a revolution to proclaim itself communist as for a religious sect to proclaim itself Christian.

This very elasticity of communism, of course, promotes revolution, since it diminishes the hostility of communist power to new probes and to new areas of popular assertion. The Cuban Communist Party, whose role under the Batista regime was scarcely edifying, speedily attached itself to Castro's July 26th movement after the revolution had accomplished power, and while naturally trying to influence the leadership, did not attempt to set up its own leadership and programme – such as it was –in conflict. Fidelismo today, for all Cuba's dependence on Soviet aid, remains a largely home-grown product, and Latin American pressures are likely to sharpen its individuality. The Sino-Soviet dispute has allowed far more room for idiosyncratic expression within the formal communist family than would have been generally thought possible for decades a few years ago. Poland is as different from Albania as, within the West, is Sweden from Portugal. And the principal communist powers are themselves increasingly pragmatic in their attitude to others. China especially, for all her pronounced devotion to Leninist purity, is concerned less with doctrine than with struggle in the rest of the poor coloured world. She will adopt and assist revolutionaries who know nothing of Leninism at all or have even shown themselves hostile to organized communism.

This enables revolutionaries who have no commitment beyond the ending of a minority despotism and foreign supervision, with the achievement of power and control over national wealth by the masses, to work alongside communist parties and take help from communist governments, in the belief that revolution will itself produce the necessary popular institutions, and promote a unique development suitable to the circumstances and aspirations of the whole society. The South African revolutionary movement is catholic in just this way, harnessing together A frican nationalists, liberals, socialists, and Communists for the eradication of white supremacy and the establishment of institutions which will promote the independence of the society and submit its resources to popular control. Of course there are wide differences of view within the leadership itself; there arc nationalists whose objective is a liberal democracy (though one with a Pan-Africanist commitment) and Communists whose objective is a tightly disciplined endeavour on the Soviet (or Chinese) pattern. Yet, to the consternation of many Western – and some Eastern – observers, the disruptions of the Cold War conflict have not taken place. In 1959 former members of the African National Congress, who had resigned in protest at its alliance with revolutionary movements of other racial groups and the influence of Communists within its leadership, established the Pan-Africanist Congress; by 1965 leaders of the new movement were not only wooing the collaboration of other racial groups, but seeking material help from Peking as well as from American trade unions. The African National Congress itself takes help wherever it can and continues to maintain an alliance of revolutionaries from distant areas of ideological commitment.

The South African situation is crucial precisely because it is concerned so overwhelmingly with race. Indeed, though the white supremacy doctrines and practices of the South African government are gratuitously crude, they correspond closely enough to the racial realities of power and wealth in the world as a whole for the coloured poor everywhere to see in them a sort of magnifying mirror of their own domination by whites. And the correspondence is not solely assumed. Asians and Latin Americans no less than Africans are aware of the economic relationship between South African industry and Western – especially British – capital, and of the influence that this relationship has wielded on Western policies. Certainly if they remained in any doubt, the persistent protection given to South Africa by the main Western powers against calls for international intervention, both openly at the United Nations and in covert diplomatic pressures, has confirmed their deepest suspicions. The result is not only that the racial clash in South Africa may exacerbate racial antagonism in the rest of the world but also that it may easily provide the specific occasion for spreading racial interventions and warfare to the ends of the earth.

In the very catholic character of its composition, the revolutionary struggle in South Africa, encompassing African, Asian and Coloured (with a scattering but calamitously insignificant number of whites), nationalists, liberals, socialists and Communists, may well mirror, too, the broad base of racial upheaval in the rest of the world. And that is why the Western – and especially, of course, American – obsession with communism is so dangerously irrelevant. It provokes hostility to revolution in itself, as an extension of communist power. But Western attempts to contain revolution must promote it, as a natural response to foreign domination, just as the blind seeing of communism in every revolution must spread communist influence by provoking calls for the aid and protection of communist governments.

In the end this refusal to countenance revolution simply advances the prospects of racial struggle, for it perpetuates the economic inequalities, the national poverty and the resentment at white domination in the present and the past that produce the coloured consensus of rebellion. And should the West and the Soviet Union really reach an agreement to police the world together, as an alliance of white communism and white capitalism to control unrest, it will increase, not diminish, the possibilities of race war.

The need for international peace is, of course, far more apparent to those who have much to keep than to those who have little to lose. Peasants in vast areas of the earth feel themselves somewhat closer to death from hunger or disease than from nuclear conflagration. And, doubtless unreasonably, some of their leaders see in the very proclaimed anxiety of the dominant peoples for peace an argument against it. If peace serves the interests of the rich and strong, how then can it benefit at the same time the poor and weak? Peace is a good thing, yes, but not at the price of preserving the world as it is. (And, after all, the rich are also devoted to peace only at a price – their own price. Or why is peace in any danger from the poor?)

What the world, therefore, has to face is a despair so deep among the poor, a resentment against established conditions so passionate, that normal fears are ceasing to exercise their expected restraint. That is why the war in South Vietnam goes on, however many new intimidating weapons the United States employs, and however high the casualty figures among the peasantry mount. And the violence must, surely, spread – till the rich and the poor, the dominant and the dominated, are alike, in the final accommodation of an equal humanity or an equal annihilation.

The waste of it all is stupefying. For poverty and ignorance and disease – as the leaders of the rich world themselves proclaim, when thinking of their own societies – are infinitely wasteful of the world's greatest asset, people, and their unused, indeed, undiscovered potential. Does it not seem probable that a world without rich and poor striving against each other to preserve or escape their unequal circumstances – a world instead of people striving together still further to dominate their environment – would be sheerly more efficient and creative, and clearly more free? For it is nonsense to talk of freedom for those who are captive to their circumstances, whether they are poor and so imprisoned by want, or rich and so imprisoned by fear. Would not the energies and resources of separate nations, now separately invested in degrading rivalries and a squandering on stockpiles of destruction, be better invested in a co-ordinated international endeavour? What does democracy mean if it exists only within the nation state and requires for its survival the perpetuation of privilege? How rancid humanity has become that such sentiments sound somehow

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and elections in the following year placed Dr Juan José Arévalo, a liberal of the left, in the presidency. The new government produced a constitution on the Mexican model of 1917, guaranteeing the basic rights of labour and free institutions, and authorizing land reform; but Arévalo was cautious and refrained from measures likely to provoke the serious displeasure of the United Fruit Company. His successor, elected in 1950 with his backing, was Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, a former army officer rather farther to the left and under much stronger left-wing pressure. All the evidence available suggests that Arbenz himself was not a Communist, and that the Communists, though by now some of them held positions of public influence, numbered no more than a few hundred. But the new regime was without doubt revolutionary, committed to improving the condition of the Indian labourer and drastically changing the feudal pattern of land ownership.

The Agrarian Law of July 1952 was, none the less, a moderate measure, aimed at distributing uncultivated land among peasant smallholders. Only holdings of over 666 acres were involved; owners were to be compensated by thirty-year 3 per cent bonds; and purchasers were required to repay the government in small instalments. But foreign firms, especially the United Fruit Company, which held large tracts of uncultivated land in reserve, regarded the new law as little better than communist confiscation. The government inevitably directed itself to the holdings of the Company, expropriated several hundred thousand acres, and allotted some $600,000 as compensation instead of the $4 million at which the company valued the land. The Eisenhower administration in the United States, pressed by the Company, and itself concerned at reports of mounting communist activity in Guatemala, decided to intervene.' The Central Intelligence Agency, entrusted with the task, arranged the appointment of a reliable diplomat as United States ambassador to Guatemala and settled on Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, a Guatemalan officer who had fled to Honduras after an unsuccessful revolt in 1950, as leader of an invasion force. Tiburcio Carías, the dictator of Honduras, and Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, were both party to the plot and provided training facilities for the army of invasion, while the C.I.A. itself contributed not only money and overall direction, but its own pilots and aeroplanes. On June 18th, 1954, Armas with his small `Army of Liberation' crossed the Honduran frontier into Guatemala, and C.I.A. planes bombed

1 For a closely documented account of United States intervention, and particularly the role of the Central Intelligence Agency, see The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross (Jonathan Cape, 1965), pp. 165-83.

THE COLOURED WORLD OF SOUTHERN AMERICA 151

San José, Guatemala's major port on the Pacific coast. The invasion force then settled down six miles within Guatemalan territory and waited for the government to collapse as the C.I.A. air force extended its attacks to the capital, and the United States ambassador there intrigued with senior Guatemalan officers. Accused by Guatemala of responsibility for the air raids, the United States government, through its ambassador to the United Nations, declared: `The situation does not involve aggression, but is a revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans.' It was not a contention that carried much weight with predominant European, let alone Latin American, opinion. On June 25th, Arbenz Guzman announced his resignation, and Colonel Armas took charge of the country at the head of a military junta.

As its first act, the new regime abolished the right of all illiterates to vote and so excluded some 70 per cent of the population - almost all Indians - from any even superficial role in the political life of the country. The junta appointed Armas as president, and he suspended all constitutional liberties, achieving his formal election in a referendum not notable for the secrecy of the vote. The government then seized several hundred thousand acres from peasant ownership, returned the land expropriated from the United Fruit Company, repealed legislation guaranteeing rights to workers and trade unions, and arrested thousands of citizens on suspicion of communist activity. Ten years and two caudillos later, the lot of the Guatemalan peasantry was as miserable as ever, with the land barons and especially the United Fruit Company in prosperous command. Former President Eisenhower himself, in June 1963, admitted the role of his administration in the overthrow of the Arbenz regime. `There was one time when we had a very desperate situation, or we thought it was at least, in Central America, and we had to get rid of a communist government...

Observers of the Latin American scene themselves friendly to the United States, subsequently declared that the Guatemalan intervention had probably done more to alienate Latin Americans and further the cause of communism in the area than any other single action that a United States government had ever undertaken. In the Congress of Costa Rica - a predominantly `white' country - one representative implied that the issues posed by United States policy in Latin America were racial as well as political and economic.

Honourable members, I am a Communist created by the White House. Juan José Arévalo [former President of Guatemala], who is

152 FHE RACE WAb

not and never has been a Communist of the first kind, but certainly of the second, declares that there exists `Communism with a C and Kommunism with a K: Communism with a C is the international current represented by the Communist Party whose seat is in Moscow; Kommunism with a K is every political and social democratic current which tries to defend the interests of the working masses, of the humble, of the exploited throughout the world, or those who speak of sovereignty, or nationalism, or those who dare to criticize the United States.'

I, honourable members, am a Kommunist with a K because I am openly against the foreign policy of the United States. Because this policy has done great harm to me and all my Latin American brothers. Because due to this policy thousands of Indians, Negroes and Mulattos have died of hunger. Hunger of the stomach, hunger of the conscience, hunger for liberty, hunger for work and hunger for a little culture ... This has been the policy of the United States towards us, the Latin American peoples.' For this reason, we in Latin America have known only one real dictator - the foreign policy of the United States.2

This United States confusion of Communism with Kommunism, the inevitable plethora of stupidities and mistakes it provokes, alongside the economic, political, cultural and, indeed, racial resentment that it has long produced, was now to make Cuba the first state in Latin America to ally itself openly with the Soviet Union and the communist world. Certainly, nowhere else in independent Latin America was United States economic domination more evident than in Cuba before the Castro revolution. The island had a classically colonial economy: the United States bought almost all its one important cash crop, sugar, and sold to it almost all the manufactures - as well as 7o per cent of the food - it consumed, registering a constant surplus on the two-way trade. Moreover, United States citizens directly controlled half of all Cuban sugar production, owning 67 - generally the largest - of the 174 mills, and a quarter of the cultivated land.3 The extent of United States financial involvement was measured by John Gunther in 1942 as near to $1,000 million - the `largest American investment in any country in the hemisphere, Canada excepted'.4

1 Author's italics.

2 Enrique Obregón Valverde, in a speech to the Costa Rican Congress, June 8th, 1959. Quoted in Latin America, by J. Halcro Ferguson, p. 66.

3H. Herring, op. cit., p. 411.

41 Gunther, op. cit., p. 368.

THE COLOURED WORLD OF SOUTHERN AMERICA IS3

United States capital controlled more than 90 per cent of the island's electricity and telephones, and about half the railways.'

The distribution of land on the island reflected the vast discrepancy between the few rich and the multitude of peasants. Of the 22,500,000 acres of farmland, 70 per cent belonged to 8 per cent of the individual holdings, and 25 per cent to a mere o•6 per cent. Some soo,000 of Cuba's 6 million people worked in the sugar fields or mills, but only 12 per cent had year-round employment; the rest worked seasonally, for four months or less each year, earning from $zoo to $400 each for themselves and their families.2 The sugar-cane cutters, the peons on the cattle ranches, the tobacco workers and the thousands of unemployed or casually employed in the capital of Havana itself, formed a forgotten layer of the deprived and discontented beneath the display of luxury tourist hotels and foreign-owned enterprise. Almost two-thirds of Cuban children had no schooling at all, and of those who were fortunate enough to reach the elementary classes, only a tiny fraction survived into secondary education.3

The latest caudillo was Fulgencio Batista, a one-time army sergeant who had first seized power in 1933; ruled Cuba directly or through puppets for thirteen years; retired with his millions to Florida for an eight-year civilian interlude; and taken dictatorship control through a military coup in 1952. Increasingly since then, Cuba had been ruled by a regime of corruption and terror, with Batista himself and his exorbitant entourage amassing immense fortunes from bribery and intimidation, from official manipulation of credit, and from organized gambling and prostitution. The United States government may well have disapproved; but, if so, it assiduously refrained from allowing principle to embarrass expediency. It courted Batista with decorations and military equipment for supposed hemispheric defence, while within Cuba itself the Batista regime increasingly alienated not only the suppressed peasantry but most of the middle class and the intellectuals. Peasant distress, middle-class disaffection and intellectual disgust did not commonly in Latin America, however, lead to anything but a new caudillo. It was the accomplishment of Fidel Castro that Cuba was to constitute an exception.

Castro was an intellectual of middle-class background - his father owned a sugar estate in the east of the island - who had been educated first at Jesuit schools and then at the University of Havana. Somewhere along the way he had acquired not merely a hatred for the Batista regime but a

1 Castro's Cuba, by C. Wright Mills (Seeker & Warburg, 1960), p. 25.

2 H. Herring, op. cit., p. 411.

3 C. Wright Mills, op. cit., p. 45•

~S4 THE RACE VW•.\ I

resolve to do something about it, and on July 26th, 1953, he led I70 nui~ and two women – most of them students – in an attack on the army gar i son of Moncada. It was, initially, a fiasco. Some of the attackers wch killed by Batista's 1,000 soldiers on the spot, some subsequently h Batista's police. A few, including Castro himself, were put on trial. 1kíí Castro used his trial as an occasion to denounce the regime, and his spec( I) – `History Will Absolve Me' – was smuggled out of the courtroom au I clandestinely distributed. The attack of July 26th became the symbol oI resistance to Batista. Castro, after influential intercession, was not executek I but imprisoned and then, in 1955, released under a general amnesty. I I~ went into exile, and at a ranch in Mexico organized a group of guerillas for an assault on the Cuban government.

In December 1956, with 81 other men, he landed from a yacht on the coast of Oriente, the province where his family lived, to launch what hr called the 26th of July Movement in memory of the attack on the Mon-cada garrison. It was again, initially, a fiasco. The insurgents got lost in a swamp, failed to meet up with the group awaiting them on the island, and fell an easy prey to the alerted troops of Batista. Only twelve of the original force survived. Yet these concealed themselves successfully in the mountains, gathering supporters and training them in guerilla warfare. The leaders were, like Castro himself, intellectuals; but more and more of the recruits were campesinos, peasants, whose families and friends provided concealment and information. This was no traditional Latin American revolt, plotted and promoted by the military élite; this was a rural insurrection. The guerillas burned sugar estates, starting symbolically with the one owned by Castro's family; blew up power stations, bridges and railway lines; sniped from trees. Batista sent 12,000 men, with tanks and planes, to crush the guerillas. But the pilots did not know where to strike, while the tanks were destroyed by petrol traps. Castro's men even captured a military transmitter and code book, and bamboozled the Batista force into bombing its own positions and parachuting supplies to the guerillas. More and more of Batista's soldiers crossed over with their equipment to Castro, whose cause was still further advanced by money, arms and volunteers from other parts of Latin America. At last, on

January 1 st, 1959, the guerillas entered Havana, a conquering army created by the activity and acquiescence of the Cuban countryside. It was a revolution in which the Communist Party itself had taken no part. The classic left in Cuba had long collaborated with caudillismo in return for control of the Cuban trade union movement, and when in 1952 Batista had outlawed it in deference to United States policy, it had set out,

THE COLOURED WORLD OF SOUTHERN AMERICA 155

a doctrinaire banker, to husband its proletarian reserves. And so, as previously in China, the orthodox communist policy of seizing power in the cities and only then consolidating the countryside was outflanked by rural revolution. But where in China the rural revolution had still been communist-led and controlled, in Cuba the victorious leadership – despite the influential participation of passionate Marxists like Dr Ernesto `Ché' Guevara and Fidel's own younger brother, Raúl Castro – was committed to little more than the promotion of a liberal democracy with the emphasis on sweeping rural reform. It was the obtuseness and arrogance of United States policy, its `Guatemalan' rather than `Bolivian' response, that combined with a new communist flexibility to change so far the character of the Castro revolution.

At first the United States government and press welcomed the new regime, acclaiming its steps to eliminate official corruption and organized vice. Fortune itself, an important periodical of the United States business community, praised the Cuban Finance Minister for picking businessmen as his assistants and running his department `like General Motors'.1 But the trial and execution of former Batista supporters, mainly soldiers and police, excited noisy protests from that section of United States opinion already viewing Castro's more radical colleagues with distrust. An agrarian reform law was promulgated, gradually expropriating holdings in excess of i,000 acres and offering compensation by 20-year 42 per cent bonds, while other measures lowered the price of development land, reduced rents by as much as half, and abolished real-estate speculation. Cuban and United States property interests on the island responded by instituting an investment boycott; private enterprise building virtually ceased; foreign capital investment began seriously to decline; and a sharp decline in the sugar price added to the new regime's financial difficulties. To conserve Cuba's foreign exchange, the regime then placed high import surcharges on a range of imported goods, especially luxuries, and this antagonized not only merchants dealing in such goods, but the United States, the island's principal supplier. Disaffected Cubans of the landowner and business class began organizing to reverse the revolution, while the United States government insisted on `prompt and effective' compensation for any expropriated property of United States citizens.2 Fortune carried an article sonic ten months after the revolution which was far from its earlier appreciation. Castro, the author declared, had alienated

1 Fortune, March 1959, p. 76.

2 `Social Revolution in Latin America – The Role of United States Policy', by Robert Freeman Smith, in International Affairs, London, October 1965, p. 641.

L

T56 THE RACE WAIL

private capital and was now faced with only three choices: to reverse tli revolution and return to orthodox economics; be overthrown by .n counter-revolution; or plunge into `out-and-out communism'.'

The Castro regime moved steadily leftwards, while relations between the United States and Cuban governments steadily deteriorated. For this the new policy of the Communist Party, which for the first time in Latin American history merged itself in a popular movement without possessing any immediate prospect of dominating it, was in significant measure responsible. It was a profitable policy, though not one welcomed by the more rigid party doctrinaires. By associating themselves completely with the Castro regime and unquestioningly accepting Castro's personal leadership, the Communists accomplished three important objectives: within Cuba itself, they now became part of a successful revolutionary force which they had previously done nothing to advance; in doing so, they acquired an effective weapon against the contention that theirs was a purely alien ideology, propagated in the interests of an alien power; and since Fidelismo - the developing revolutionary principles and programmes of Castro - was having a popular appeal far beyond Cuba, the Communists could hitch a ride on it to influence among the submerged and restless poor throughout Southern America.

Events tumbled over each other in 196o. The Soviet Union held a trade fair in Havana, and in March, when a French ship carrying munitions for the Cuban Army exploded in Havana harbour, the Cuban government blamed the United States. The United States House of Representatives discussed a Bill to cut the Cuban sugar quota, and the Cuban government turned the retail stores of a United States company into tiendas del pueblo or people's shops. In May the government of Guatemala, which Castro complained was entertaining an invasion force, broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Cuba established formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The foreign, mainly United States owned oil refineries on the island refused to handle cheap Soviet oil, and Castro expropriated them. In July the United States banned all further imports of Cuban sugar; the Soviet Union offered to take the sugar instead, and in August Cuba nationalized United States owned electricity, telephone and oil companies, together with 36 sugar factories. Reports mounted that Cuban exiles were receiving military training near Miami; in September Castro took over United States rubber companies and banks, cancelled bilateral military aid agreements with the United States, and recognized the

1 `What has Happened to Cuban Business?' by Freeman Lincoln, in Fortune, September 1959, pp. Iro—ri.

THE COLOURED WORLD OF SOUTHERN AMERICA 157

People's Republic of China. In October the United States proclaimed an embargo on all trade with Cuba, and at the end of the year, severed all diplomatic relations.'

Meanwhile, under the direction of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, an invasion force of anti-Castro exiles was being mounted, though the United States government self-righteously denied all Cuban accusations and even arraigned Cuba before the Organization of American States on a charge of increasing tension in the Caribbean by `resorting to lies and slander'. Already on March i7th, 196o, President Eisenhower had authorized the secret training and arming of Cuban exiles, and in April the C.I.A. had arranged for launching sites in Guatemala. An air strip had been specially constructed at Retalhuleu, and Cuban exiles transported there from Florida. For the next few months planes dropped equipment to guerilla bands already operating in Cuba; but most of the equipment fell into Castro's hands, the rebel underground appeared ineffectual, and the C.I.A. decided that an invasion in strength was necessary. Suddenly United States plans received a jolt. In November a section of the Guatemalan army rebelled against the current caudillo, and the C.I.A., fearing that a new regime might be less co-operative, sent its own planes to bombard the rebel stronghold. The rebellion collapsed, and the C.I.A. breathed confidently again.

By April 1961 its preparations were complete. On the isth C.I.A. planes bombed strategic targets in Cuba, and on the following day Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs, on the south coast of Cuba. Subsequently, as Cuban exile pilots were shot down or retired because of exhaustion, United States pilots took their place in the C.I.A. planes. At the United Nations, the United States ambassador categorically denied any involvement by his government, and the Secretary of State announced: `The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening ill Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no. What happens in Cuba is for the Cuban people themselves to decide.' The air raids on Cuba were explained as attacks by defecting Cuban pilots. On the 19th the Soviet Union threatened to give the Cuban government `all necessary assistance' unless the United States stopped the invasion. But victory was already Castro's. Despite frantic appeals from exile leaders, the Cuban people did not sabotage strategic installations or take to guerilla warfare, but rallied instead to the government. Moreover, the C.I.A. bomber raids had not destroyed all Cuban planes, and the invaders had to face substantial air attack. On the Goth Castro announced that his

1 Details from The Revolutions of Latin America, by J. Halcro Ferguson, pp. 141-4.

158 THE RACE WAR

forces had captured hundreds of prisoners and much valuable equipment. The United States government could retrieve the loss of its cause only by mounting a direct invasion, and this seemed likely to produce Soviet retaliation. It had no reasonable choice but to accept defeat, with the resultant plummeting of its prestige. For Castro himself it was a triumph. He had shown all Southern America that his revolution and his regime commanded the clear allegiance of the Cuban people, and that in consequence not even the power of the United States could safely overthrow him. His own forces were sufficient to deal with exile thrusts, and the support of the Soviet Union prevented direct intervention. In Southern America, the United States would never be feared in quite the same way again.

Castro was increasingly regarded as a continental revolutionary leader, whose success encouraged – as his material aid sometimes advanced – movements of dissent and rebellion. Fidelismo was an influence from Brazil, among the Peasant Leagues, to recently-British Jamaica, where the `back to Africa' Ras Tafari sect regarded Castro with open admiration. In all this race played a far from insignificant part. When Castro had visited the United Nations in October 196o, he had stayed at the Hotel Theresa in the heart of Harlem, to the delight of the Negroes and the discomfiture of the United States government. Cuban propaganda emphasized the racial integration of the revolutionary island, and the contrast with previous regimes, under which Negroes had been effectively excluded from the smarter tourist regions – except, of course, for entertainers or servants – so as not to upset white visitors from the United States. Negro newspapers in the United States noted and approved, while throughout the Americas, leaders of the dark-skinned poor relayed the message. The proclamation of the Cuban government on April 16th, 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, was directed at the coloured no less outside than inside Cuba.

Onwards, Cuban people! Let us answer with iron and fire the barbarians who despise us and want us to go back to slavery. They come to take away the land that the Revolution has given to the peasants and the co-operativists. They come to take away from the people their factories, sugar mills and mines ... They come to take away from our sons, our peasant girls, the schools that the Revolution has opened for then everywhere ... They cone to take away from the Negroes, men and women, the dignity that the Revolution has given back to them ... they come to destroy our country, and we fight for our country.'

1 Quoted by J. Halcro Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 145-6.THE COLOURED WORLD OF SOUTHERN AMERICA 159

A month before its Bay of Pigs adventure, the Kennedy administration had launched the Alliance of Progress, a ten-year plan which offered aid and protection to Latin American states in the cause of promoting and securing democracy. The attack on Cuba, so soon afterwards, confirmed the hostility of those who saw the scheme as United States imperialism in a new dress, while friendly critics wondered how democracy was going to be served by economic and military assistance to authoritarian regimes. Certainly the United States government began by assuming a radically new role. It pressed for drastic reform and severely criticized the cruder despotisms like that of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. When the army seized control of Peru in July 1962, the United States government immediately stopped all aid. But it soon persuaded itself of the necessity to recognize the regime and start giving aid again under the Alliance for Progress.

When elections in March 1962 returned peronista majorities in ten of the sixteen Argentina provinces and an army take-over seemed imminent, the United States government declared that aid might be withheld from a military regime. The warning had no effect, the army deposed the constitutionally elected president, and the United States government accommodated itself with a shrug to the seemingly inevitable. John Moors Cabot, former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, declared in November 1963: 'Whereas our policy seeks to promote reform and social justice in Latin America, the need to protect our large economic stake inevitably injects a conservative note into our policies.' In April 1964, the army overthrew the constitutionally elected government of Brazil. Seven months later, the army in Bolivia seized power, and the reformist regime of Estenssoro – an obvious rival to Fidelismo as a channel of necessary change – was no more. Less than four years after the Alliance for Progress had been launched, far more of Latin America was under military rule than before, and the cause of democratic reform had retreated rather than advanced.

Alongside the crumbling ofthe ideological facade to the Alliance for Progress was a public draining of prestige and independent purpose from the Organization of American States. The United States dominated attempts at Pan-American co-operation from the first International Conference of American States in 1889-9o. In 1910 the Pan-American Union was established, with its seat in Washington, and such was the control exercised by United States officials – the United States Secretary of State automatically served as chairman of the ruling board – that some Latin American leaders openly scorned the organization as the `American Ministry of