Fidel Castro was undoubtedly the central historical figure in the Cuban revolution. Farber locates Castro within the long Cuban and Latin American tradition of populist nationalism - as a caudillo with particular political ideas and organisational practices that “transcended” that tradition.

Fidel Castro came from an upper-class background. He emerged politically during his five years at the Law School of the University of Havana, between 1945 and 1950. He was involved in the anarchist group UIR as a student, enrolling in an ill-fated attempt to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1947. He was in Bogotá during the riots in April 1948. (Farber 2006 pp.55-56)

By the early 1950s Castro was a young lawyer and second-rank leader of the Ortodoxo party, founded by Auténtico Eduardo Chibás in protest at the latter’s corruption. Castro was on the party’s slate as a candidate for Congress in elections scheduled for June 1952, which were aborted by Batista’s coup in March that year. (Farber 1976 p.185)

Castro’s ideas were not particularly distinctive from the populist tradition before 1959. He emphasised the ideas of Jose Marti, who fought for Cuban independence against the Spanish. He upheld a morality of “honour” in contrast to the gangster politics that prevailed in Cuba. But as late as March 1956, in his resignation letter from the Ortodoxo party, he remained a mainstream Cuban politician, writing “for the Chibasist masses, the July 26 Movement is not something distinct from the Ortodoxia”. (Draper 1965 p.10)

What distinguished Castro was his emphasis on political control from the top down and his “obsession with organisation”. Farber argues that, “Castro’s leadership is strongly reminiscent of the Latin American phenomenon of caudillismo, except that Fidel Castro is a caudillo with political ideas.” (2006 p.58, p.63)

Recalling his involvement in the Bogotá riots in 1948, Castro drew the following lessons:
“There was no organisation, no political education to accompany that heroism. There was political awareness and a rebellious spirit, but no political education and no leadership. The uprising influenced me greatly in later life… I wanted to avoid the revolution sinking into anarchy, looting, disorder, people taking the revolution into their own hands…” (Fidel Castro, My Early Years, 1998 pp.126-27)

Castro himself says that he devised a revolutionary strategy in the context of the Cold War, which made a straightforward communist revolution impossible. He said:
“I worked out a revolutionary strategy for carrying out a deep social revolution – but gradually, by stages. I basically decided to carry it out with the broad, rebellious, discontented masses, who did not have a mature political consciousness of the need for revolution but who constituted the immense majority of the people… It was clear to me that the masses were the basic factor.” (Castro 1998 p.134 My emphasis)

His emphasis on control and leadership were evident from early on. As early as 1954, Castro wrote to his friend Luis Conte Agüero:
“Conditions that are indispensable for the integration of a truly civic movement: ideology, discipline and chieftainship. The three are essential, but chieftainship is basic… A movement cannot be organised where everyone believes he has the right to issue public statements without consulting anyone else; nor can one expect anything of a movement that will be integrated by anarchic men who at the first disagreement take the path they consider most convenient, tearing apart and destroying the vehicle. The apparatus of propaganda and organisation must be such and so powerful that it will implacably destroy him who will create tendencies, cliques, or schisms or will rise against the movement.” (Farber 2006 p.66 My emphasis)

What stands out is the contrast between Castro’s approach and the kind of collective, democratically elected leadership group that is an essential feature of a genuine Marxist organisation.

Was Castro a Stalinist from the start?
Castro himself has said that had been “a supporter or at least strongly influenced by “Marxist-Leninism” before the revolution.” (Farber 2006 p.34) As early as July 1956, Castro was accused of being a member of the Communist Party in the Cuban magazine Bohemia. (Draper 1965 p.27)

Certainly key people around him were connected to the Stalinist movement. Raúl Castro joined the youth wing of the Cuban Communist Party in the 1950s, while Che Guevara was also committed to Soviet Stalinism well before 1959 (see No hero of ours, [1] Solidarity 3/57, 2 September 2004).

Tad Szulc, who was a New York Times journalist during the years of the revolution, published a biography of Castro in 1986, in which he claimed Castro had made a secret deal with the Cuban Communists in mid-1958. Szulc argued that the deal was subsequently confirmed by the establishment of a “secret, parallel government” in early 1959. (Farber 2006 p.62)

Farber is not convinced by these claims, not least because the evidence for them (alleged interviews with Cubans in the 1980s) are not backed by other sources.

More significantly, the claim that Fidel Castro was a Communist before the revolution does not explain the clashes within the M26J (between Fidel and Raúl Castro/Che Guevara) and differences between the M26J leaders and the PSP in 1959.

Farber points out that, “according to declassified Soviet documents, Raúl Castro briefly considered splitting the rebel movement to convince his brother that he could not govern without the Communists, and Guevara threatened to emigrate if his spring 1959 proposals for a popular militia were not approved at the time.” (2006 pp.60-61)

Differences between the M26J and the PSP are evident from Revolución, the official newspaper of the July 26 Movement, which polemicised with the Communists until September 1959. (2006 p.125)

There is also indirect evidence that Castro was not a Communist in 1959, based on the assessments of both the US and Soviet governments, and from the PSP itself.

Farber argues that, “neither the Soviet Union nor the Cuban Communists had a clear idea of where Castro was going or where he wanted to go when he took power on 1 January 1959”. (2006 p.60)

He cites the testimony of Yuri Pavlov, the former head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Latin American Directorate, who said that, “the prevailing opinion in the Soviet Union in early 1959 was that Fidel Castro’s regime would not go beyond the limits of bourgeois democratic reforms”. (2006 p.145)

In his memoirs, Khrushchev unambiguously stated that he had been unhappy with Fidel Castro’s official declaration of the revolution’s socialist character in April 1961. (2006 p.143)

None of the PSP envoys visiting the Soviet Union in 1959 claimed Castro was a Communist or Marxist, suggesting that if Castro was planning the Communist transformation of Cuba, the Soviet leaders knew nothing about it. (2006 p.145)

A similar view emerges from US government documents. In the early months of the revolution, US ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsal, although orientated toward the liberal wing of the new government around Felipe Pazos, also hoped for a break between Fidel Castro and pro-Soviet and pro-PSP leaders around his brother and Guevara. (2006 p.99)

Other sources are more explicit. The CIA’s deputy director testified to the US Internal Security Subcommittee in 1959 that he did not believe Castro had been a Communist while he was a guerrilla chief fighting Batista or that he was at that point a member of the Communist Party. (Farber 2006 p.83)

Quite simply, the evidence that Castro was a Communist from the start is rather thin. In fact it suggests that he initially opted for a form of bourgeois rule, though this proved impossible given the international and domestic circumstances in which he came to power.

Farber concludes: “Castro’s brand of populist caudillismo, detached from any significant institutional ties with Cuba’s principal social classes, had an elective affinity with Soviet-style Communism. But only the presence of certain historical circumstances (e.g. US pressures, the widely shared belief in the international rise of Soviet power, and political pressures coming from the Partido Socialista Popular and the group around Raúl Castro and Che Guevara) converted that affinity into choice and commitment.” (2006 pp.67-68)

Castro’s Bonapartism
Farber argues that Castro’s government in 1959-60 represented a form of Bonapartism.

He argues, rightly in my view, that the situation in Cuba at the beginning of 1959 was conducive to “the thriving of Bonapartism”. Farber understands Bonapartism as “the ability of individual political leaders to acquire a considerable degree of power and freedom of action in relation to the ruling and subordinate classes”. The Cuban ruling classes were unable to govern on behalf of their interests, but with the social deadlock between classes, a declassed revolutionary leadership with no strong ties to any of the major classes was able to fill the vacuum. (2006 p.116)

He argues: “Fidel Castro’s leadership made a major difference in the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The Batista dictatorship, already in an advanced state of decomposition, would have collapsed sooner or later, even if Castro had died in battle in, say, late 1958. But Castro’s skilful political intervention helped to prevent a military coup that might have at least delayed the disintegration of Batista’s army. Castro’s political leadership made an even grater differences in determining the course taken by the Cuban Revolution after it came to power.” (2006 p.115)

Or as he puts it elsewhere in the book: “Fidel Castro’s declassed political leadership, with few or no organisational or institutional ties either to the petty bourgeoisie or to any of the country’s other major social classes, constituted the other side of the coin of Batista’s decaying Bonapartism.” (2006 p.168)

Castro’s success also depended to some degree on the absence of alternatives. Groups such as the Directorio Revolutionario and the Auténtico party suffered heavy defeats at the hands of Batista’s forces before 1959. Frank País and other leaders were killed in action. This gave Castro’s group the hegemony over the opposition to Batista that it never expected to have. (2006 p.132)

The other factor that facilitated Castro’s peculiar form of Bonapartism was the collapse of Batista’s army, the bulwark of the old Cuban state. In the absence of an existing state power, Castro was able to construct his own state and rule with greater latitude than he had expected.

Farber’s book is not an analysis of the Stalinist system that Castro created from 1961 until today. However its anti-working class nature can be illustrated in a number of ways. As Farber puts it:
“The mass rally, in which leaders control the podium and speak and spell out policies while the masses applaud, not daring to amend or object, became emblematic of the regime.
Such manipulative methods, together with the spying functions of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, the activities of the newly-established state security apparatus, the purging of many individuals and groups, and the elimination of all opposition and independent newspapers (which occurred during the summer of 1960, when most of the printed and visual media supported the regime and the government faced no clear and present danger), completed the tripod on which Castro consolidated his power: popular support, manipulation pf that support, and repression.” (2006 p.133)