A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. Valerie Miles
from causing no end of headaches for me at the time and later. My immediate superiors very much disapproved of my coming here, and I suffered a setback in my career because of it. And during all those years I was a contributor to the magazine Casa de las Américas and corresponded constantly with its editors. How can you say, given all this, that I have been hostile to the Cuban Revolution?”
I looked at Raúl Roa out of the corner of my eye; he was very serious, watching me, not saying a word. He had always been, as I say, very cordial to me; I felt, therefore, that this scene must be more unpleasant and perhaps more dangerous for him than for anyone else. I never learned, and probably never will learn, what thoughts, what reactions my words provoked in him. Fidel, on the other hand, was following me intently, and his expression hid nothing of what he was thinking and feeling.
“That said, Prime Minister,” I continued, “I must explain to you what happens to a Chilean of good faith, a person who has never skimped on his friendship for the Cuban Revolution, who arrives in Cuba today as the representative of the Unidad Popular. A Chilean reads in the situation of Cuba today one of the possibilities of his own country’s future. To speak with complete frankness, I think it is only natural that this Chilean not particularly enjoy contemplating that future as it may be seen in the situation of Cuba today. Nor would the people of Cuba have much enjoyed contemplating that future if they had been able to anticipate in 1959 what Cuba would be like in 1971—if, for example, twelve years of a revolution had passed in Ecuador or some other country in Latin America and the Cuban people had been able to look at it and find there the situation that I have found in Cuba today. Because I recall very vividly the predictions that were made in Cuba in 1966 and 1967 about the economy of Cuba in 1970. A huge economic boom was predicted, a boom that would banish forever the specter of foreign economic dependency. There was to be a sensational increase in agricultural production, and it was promised that Cuba would export coffee, that no sugar harvest after 1970 would be less than ten million tons.”
Fidel stood up in uncontrollable irritation.
“And you don’t know the problems that Cuba has had to face! You don’t realize that we have been subjected to a merciless blockade, that the most savage imperialist regime in history lies eighty miles off our coast! You seem not to want to recognize that the sole desire of Yankee imperialism is to destroy us, wipe us off the face of the earth, destroy the Cuban Revolution and all it stands for to the nations of the earth, and that this Yankee imperialist government is the richest and most powerful regime that has ever existed!”
“But I do recognize that,” I said. “That is why I wouldn’t want to see Chile go through the same experience.”
“And do you think the Chilean experiment is going to be so easy?” Fidel broke in. “Do you think that the reactionary forces in Chile will fail to organize themselves, with the direct aid and support of the Yankee imperialists? Haven’t you heard of the Djarkata Plan?4 So far Allende has only conquered the government—which means he has only breached the first walls of power. When the inner bastion begins to give, the confrontation will be inevitable.”
In other words, the Chilean Revolution was still to be won. The electoral process, our historical innovation, was but a prelude, an apparently favorable accident, although it could well turn out to be a two-edged sword. If Allende was not to bog down in the quicksand of constitutionality, his only alternative was to radicalize the process, take it to the point of rupture. It must be granted that when the MIR faction cooled before September 1970, Fidel allowed Allende to play his electoral trump, but this didn’t mean that Chile had discovered the formula for a peaceful transition to socialism. Far from it. The Chilean situation had not led Fidel to revise his theories, as some people naïvely thought, but rather to refine them, and to confirm them by another route. I recalled that phrase from our first encounter: “If you Chileans need help, just ask for it. We may not be much good at producing, but we’re great at fighting!”
Later, during his visit to Chile, it was at first believed that Fidel really had changed.
But all it took was the “empty pot” demonstration5 (pots well salted with personal insults against Fidel from the right-wing press), and the Comandante, who theretofore had shown his most conciliatory face in all his public statements, became the Fidel of old. At the end of that day, the protest of the furious housewives, banging their pots and pans in the streets of Santiago, had turned into real street battles between the followers and the enemies of the government. He spent the night of the demonstration beside his machine gun, surrounded by his own armed guards, waiting with exasperated patience, in the internationalist spirit of Latin American revolution, for the Chilean government to ask him for help. But Allende kept his head, and the next morning Fidel discovered, to his rather noisily expressed surprise, that a regular-army general was in charge of the state of emergency. Chile was hopeless! In the National Stadium, while some members of his audience got up and left after the hours of Fidel’s speechifying that they were wholly unused to, Fidel confessed that he was leaving Chile “even more radical” than he’d come, and “more of a revolutionary” than ever. He attempted to demonstrate this renewed revolutionary zeal later by inviting Miguel Henríquez, leader of the MIR party, to Cuba shortly afterward, and going to the airport personally to greet him.
Fidel, in sum, seemed, in spite of certain indications to the contrary, not to believe in the real possibility of success via the evolutionary, constitutional route that Chile had chosen. And the most serious thing about all this was, as one might see from Fidel’s reaction to the “empty pot” episode, that Fidel’s lack of confidence might create further problems for Chile. In a film of a conversation that Fidel had with Allende, one can see Castro acknowledge that his trip to Chile was a “voyage from one world to another.” Yet there was little indication that he had reached all the possible conclusions from that observation. Of course such conclusions would have implied more modesty than Fidel could probably have mustered.
As a Chilean diplomat, and one accused of hostility toward the Cuban Revolution, I did not think it my place to enter into theoretical discussions regarding a country’s choice of political strategy. Instead, I returned to the subject of my relationship with the dissident writers, since that was the most serious charge leveled against me during that singular conversation with the Cuban head of state at midnight on Sunday, March 21, 1971.
“I refused to turn my back on my friends,” I said. “I knew they were expressing opinions critical of the government, and that their relations with the government had become somewhat antagonistic, but they have been my colleagues and my friends for years. I have probably acted more like a writer than a diplomat. It is quite possible that after this experience, and this conversation, which I am certain I will always see as very important to me, I will leave the diplomatic service and devote myself to literature. I’d like nothing better. I recognize that I’ve been a bad diplomat in Cuba. But I have one excuse: The real relations between Chile and Cuba have been carried on in Santiago. My presence here has been only symbolic. I insist, furthermore, that my writer friends, however much they have criticized the current situation, are neither gusanos nor counterrevolutionaries. And I’ve met with writers of every stamp, you know, not just with the most critical ones.”
“That much is true,” Fidel interrupted. “We know that you have been in contact with writers on our side.”
I had noted that in one way or another one would often be reminded of the efficiency of secret-police surveillance. The little book about the case of the Mexican diplomat, the TV program on the “CIA operative” Olive, the speech by the Dominican journalist in which he publicly confessed that he was a double agent, were all manifestations of that reminder. With this last statement, Fidel had not only demonstrated his personal knowledge of my “case” (for incredible as it might seem to a peaceful citizen of Chile, my stay in Havana had become a “case” within a socialist country), but also that the agents of State Security were very efficient at their jobs.
“But let’s take the case of Heberto Padilla,” I then said. “His criticism is always predicated on a standpoint within the Left. He once quoted Enrique Lihn to me, who said that when one leaves Cuba, the Revolution begins to grow larger and more imposing as one looks at it from a greater distance. Heberto talked to me about a