“Deserves attention…makes genuine contribution”

Fidel’s ethics of violence: the moral dimension of the political thought of Fidel Castro. By Dayan Jayatilleka. London: Pluto Press. 235pp. Index. £17.99. ISBN 0 7453 2696 2.

Reviewed by Clive Foss

Prof Foss teaches history at Georgetown University, Washington DC, where he offers courses in the history of dictatorship, as well as the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. His most recent books are Fidel Castro and The Tyrants

(September 05, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) At first sight, this seems like an implausible and naive work: Fidel Castro is famed as a revolutionary, a skilled politician, a man of incredible activity and accomplishments, but hardly as a philosopher. Anyone familiar with his torrent of pronouncements realizes that they often have to be taken with a pinch of salt, and that Fidel is not above bending the truth to his own purposes. Jayatilleka tends to believe what he reads and to take a very uncritical point of view. Yet this work deserves attention because it presents an aspect of Castro’s policies that seems obvious once pointed out, but hardly ever gets stressed by his biographers (though it does come out in his recent ‘autobiography’, My life, a series of interviews with the prominent French journalist Ignacio Ramonet).

The thesis of this work is that Fidel’s idea of the correct and incorrect uses of violence is central to his political thought: although his success was based on war, he never used violence against unarmed civilians, did not carry out executions without trials, and did not kill ideological opponents. He avoided assassination and treated enemy captives well; he avoided torture, murder and a reign of terror. His most enduring legacy will not be military, social or economic, but his political thought.

Although some of this may need qualification, the general idea makes sense. Its corollary, that Castro introduced an ethical dimension to Marxism that gave it moral superiority over capitalism and helped Cuba survive the collapse of the Soviet Union, is far more questionable.

Jayatilleka sees Castro as combining the idealism of Savonarola with the realism of Machiavelli, avoiding extremes: he did not let power slip from his hands like Sukarno, Allende or Gorbachev; or capitulate to capitalism like China or Vietnam; or retreat into isolation like North Korea. Comparison with Mao Zedong is telling and could be pursued further. Both he and Castro began their revolution from a remote mountain base where they developed successful tactics of guerrilla fighting though neither had formal military training. They treated the locals well, neither stealing nor raping, and they released captive soldiers, letting them join the rebels or sending them home. The similarities end here: in power, Mao carried out violent purges, ‘thought reform’ and mass executions. Castro did none of that. His revolution, unlike the French, Russian or Chinese, was not followed by a bloodbath.

He did order or allow a few hundred executions, often with dubious legality, but most often solved the problem of opposition by letting dissidents leave the island. Castro might look less unusual, though, if compared with two other popular heroes who took power by war: Julius Caesar and Kemal Atatürk also showed clemency to their opponents.

This work constantly stresses the moral superiority of the Cuban revolution, shown by its international humanism and its distinction between the right and wrong use of violence, which makes it unique among revolutions; the distinction is not Marxist, but is Castro’s own contribution. Hence, according to Jayatilleka, his regime’s long survival. Why did the other socialist states collapse?

Because, it seems, their unrestrained use of violence led to a moral and ethical weakening, destroying the advantage they had over capitalism. Specifically (in an interesting chapter, pp. 27–59), socialism failed to triumph in the 1970s despite a promising beginning because of fratricidal strife and leftist fundamentalism, extremes that Castro always avoided. No notion here that communism might have collapsed because it went against natural human desires for freedom and property, that it imposed a violent tyranny, or that it manifested supreme incompetence in running an economy. Nor that Fidel’s regime might owe its survival to its very isolation in an island where the party controls all information.

Jayatilleka constantly takes Castro’s pronouncements at their face value. For example: Castro was mistreated without end in prison (he and his men were housed in the relatively cushy hospital wing of the prison); a revolution that accepts aid from embezzlers who have plundered the republic betrays its principles (Castro got a huge handout from Cuba’s crooked ex-President Prío to support his revolution); Cuban police have never broken up a popular demonstration (Castro sent in the tanks against the housewives of Cardenas in 1962, crushing Cuba’s last demonstration till 1994); Castro did not persecute the Church (well, he did not massacre priests, but he did kick them out and take over their schools).

Leaving aside the author’s idealization of the western hemisphere’s last dictator, his obliviousness to the real faults of the Cuban regime and his often tedious repetition of his main point, this work makes a genuine contribution by assessing the difference between Cuba and other revolutionary regimes in their use of violence and sheds an indisputably favourable light on one aspect of Fidel Castro’s ideology.

Clive Foss, Dept of History, Georgetown University, USA
Courtesy: International Affairs 85: 1, 2009

Sri Lanka Guardian