Hitch-22

remember that “Your Country Needs YOU!” Available only to the sons of naval and military officers who were obliged to lead low-budget lives at university, this award required an interview with some red-faced old buffers who wanted mainly to reassure themselves about one’s general soundness. I had a decent shave and put on a tie and played along. When asked what I did for extracurricular activity, I cited the Oxford Union. “Didn’t Her Majesty The Queen,” one of the whiskery veterans inquired, “just recently attend a debate there?” This was too good to miss: she had in fact shown up and I had been technically a member of the committee that ran the debate. Modestly, I made the most of this fact and knew in that moment that the scholarship named for the red-coated imperial hero of Khartoum would be mine and would help finance a socialist incendiary. (I think I may also have justified my duplicity by recalling the shameful way in which the Navy had treated my father over his pension. Yes, that’s right—they owe us. What great self-persuaders we all are.)

At Gatwick Airport I recognized quite a few of the brothers and sisters who turned up to board the scruffy Czechoslovak charter aircraft that was to take us to Havana, and I submitted sullenly to the business of being pulled to one side while plainclothes British policemen rudely grabbed my passport and wrote down all my details in a ledger before letting me proceed. (Who cares? I thought angrily. Their rule won’t last much longer.)

“The belly of the beast” was the expression commonly used for the United States in those days, and there seemed something gratifying in the way that our plane made only a brief touchdown in Newfoundland before embarking upon the second leg and setting course for Havana while avoiding the taint of Yanqui airspace. Arrival at the Jose Marti Airport, with its blinding sunshine and crushing humidity, was an excitement all of its own. We were greeted by smiling and good-looking young comrades who offered a tray of daiquiri rum cocktails: this first impression was as unlike the Berlin Wall version of official Communism as one could wish. But there came at once a slight moment of awkwardness. After handing over my passport, I waited awhile and, having by now heard a couple of rousing speeches of welcome, asked for it back. The hospitable internationalist grin on the face of the Cuban host contracted perhaps a millimeter or so. “We look after it for you.” “You do? For how long?” “Until you leave our country.” I felt an immediate sense of unease but decided to get over it.

I might perhaps have succeeded in getting over it, were it not for a couple of later developments. The scheme was for our planeload of mainly British internationalists to board the waiting buses that would take us to the Campamento Cinco de Mayo, a newly built work-camp in the hilly, verdant province of Pinar del Rio. Here we would join our French, German, Italian, African, and other companeros, and have dialogues with them in the evening while helping to plant much- needed coffee seedlings during the day. In this fashion, we would build links between different insurgencies at the grass-roots level while—at the seedling level—helping to rid Cuba of its notorious colonial dependency on the single crop (the infamous “monoculture”) of sugar.[19] What could be more agreeable?

I didn’t expect or want luxury at the camp, and I didn’t get it. Canvas bunk beds, very early starts, communal showers and meals: these were no sweat and no problem for one who had survived English public school, whereas in contrast to my boarding-school experience the food was excellent and plentiful, and there were females with red scarves in their hair. I didn’t especially like the way that uplifting music and hectoring speeches were played all the time on the camp’s loudspeaker system, but I was much more alarmed when, deciding on a hike one day to enjoy the surrounding scenery, I began to wave goodbye to the Cuban boys at the gate and was ordered to hold it right there. Where did I think I was going? On a hike. Well, I was told, I couldn’t. And why not? Because we say so. Now, I didn’t speak much Spanish and I didn’t have a passport (it suddenly came back to me) and I would have had only a vague idea how to negotiate my way to a neighboring village, let alone to Havana. But the guards—as I now thought of them—pointed emphatically back up the trail to the camp. Once you have been told that you can’t leave a place, its attractions may be many but its charm will instantly be void. A cat may stay contentedly in one spot for hours at a time, but detain it in that spot by grasping its tail and it will try to tear out its own tail by the roots. I wasn’t free to move at all, and the Cubans who wanted to leave Cuba were only free, after a long process, to be expelled from their country of birth and never allowed to return.

Naturally this qualified my attitude to the camp itself but then, I had come with my fellow Trotskyists and Luxemburgists precisely to test the Cuban claim that this was a new revolution, a brave departure from the grim, gray pattern of Soviet socialism. Also, it had to be admitted, Cuba was helping the many rebel forces that were even then fighting so bravely on a Latin American continent that was dominated by cruel and backward military dictatorships. Factional disputes in the camp kept us joyously and passionately awake. Of course we argued about everything from the Paris Commune to the Spanish Civil War, but two critical questions were these: Had Che Guevara been right in proposing that “moral incentives” should replace material ones? And what line should be taken about the increasingly bitter split between the Russian and Czechoslovakian Communist Parties?

On the question of moral incentives and the idea of “the new socialist man,” I had nothing but doubts. At the close of his beautiful essay Literature and Revolution, Trotsky had spoken lyrically of a future in which “the average man will rise to the stature of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx”; in which his very physique would become “more supple, muscular and harmonious,” and had closed by saying that “beyond these hills, new peaks will rise.” Myself, I could understand that political and economic conditions could make people very much worse (as in the case of Nazism, say) but I had too much English empirical schooling to believe that material circumstances on their own could make people all that much better. And surely, to be a materialist in the first place entailed the acceptance of mankind as a primate species? Karl Marx himself had admired and even hoped to emulate Charles Darwin. Anyway, here was my chance at witnessing a laboratory experiment. Was Cuba producing a more selfless and exemplary human type?

I shan’t easily forget the reply I received from a very sweet if slightly slow-spoken Communist Party official. “Yes,” he said. “In fact the ‘new man’ is being evolved in the town of San Andres.” As soon as I heard this, I demanded to visit this Utopian commune, as did many of my comrades, but the trip to San Andres was always somehow being postponed while they ironed out the wrinkles in the “new man,” and one was forced to wonder why in any case it should only “work” in this particular isolated hamlet. As a consolation prize, perhaps, we were instead invited to see Fidel Castro speak in Santa Clara, at a mass rally on 26 July, anniversary of the beginning of the revolution, in the very city that Che Guevara had personally wrested from the control of the old regime.

Although Guevara’s martyred cadaver had been displayed on televisions all around the world, looking more than slightly Christ-like in its defiant and bearded serenity, his actual resting place was—as with the Nazarene, indeed—unknown. (He had in fact been secretly buried by the CIA under the tarmac of a Bolivian airstrip, and after having his hands amputated for fingerprinting purposes, but this grisly detail was not to be uncovered, or the whole reliquary returned to Havana, until the 1990s.) Thus, the yell that “Che Guevara no ha muerte! ” had a sort of resonance, just as the innumerable images of his living visage possessed an iconic potency. The Cuban leadership declared 1968 to be the “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla” and issued a call to all the schoolchildren in the country that they should live their lives “Como el Che” or in the manner of Guevara. It was the impossibility of following this directive that hit me first, even before the realization that the whole thing was borrowed from what Christians called “The Imitation of Christ.” So there it was: Cuban socialism was too much like a boarding school in one way and too much like a church in another.

Long lectures from the headmaster were another feature that the two set-ups had in common. (That, and a huge overemphasis on team games and competitive sports of every kind.) I mustn’t pretend that it wasn’t somewhat thrilling to have a front-row seat and see the young Fidel Castro step up to the microphone and begin to stroke his beard in that way he once had. But after the first couple of hours and the first few standing ovations I felt that I had begun to grasp the main points. And a couple of hours later I was about ready to go and look for a cold beer. This commodity was actually easily come by, and for free, and one cynic suggested to me that that’s how so many of the audience had been recruited to the rally in the first place. What hit me even more in my midsection, though, was the astonishing availability of young hookers on the edge of the crowd. One of the claims of the Cuban revolution was to have abolished prostitution and though I had never personally believed this to be feasible (the withering away of the state being one thing but the withering away of the penis quite another), the whore scene in Santa Clara was many times more lurid than anything to be imagined in a “bourgeois” society. The same thing went, by the way, for the regime’s much more arrogant and nasty claim to have done away with that other “bourgeois” vice of homosexuality. In such working public lavatories as one could find, the slogan libertad por los maricons was frequently chalked or scrawled, to show that the Cuban gays were by no means willing to concur in their own abolition. As the macro address by the Maximum Leader showed signs of drawing to a close, the crowd began to disintegrate into its individual constituents of people