Hitch-22

hurrying home. The red-scarfed militants near the platform kept up a steady volley of cheers, but the masses were calling it a day. There was a distinct impression that more and better material incentives were what many workers and peasants would appreciate. I won’t claim that I saw this all at once, and another part of me was still with the zealous Cubans who wanted to make sacrifices for Vietnam and Angola, and who didn’t want a life of ease.

These and other reflections inevitably “raised the question”—as we never tired of putting it—of Czechoslovakia. The Cuban leadership took no decided view on the increasingly public quarrel between Prague and Moscow. The Cuban Communist Party paper Granma (later to be described by my Argentine anti-fascist friend Jacobo Timerman as “a degradation of the act of reading”) was then printing the communiques from both Communist capitals. This neutrality was not at all shared by the Cuban in the street, as I was to find out. Perhaps it had something to do with the natural bias in favor of a small country as against a superpower; equally probably, as I was told, it had to do with the arrogant conduct of the many Russian “advisors” in Cuba. Certainly when you have had your European features greeted by little showers of pebbles and dogshit and the taunt “Sovietico” from the street urchins of Havana, you have been granted a glimpse or a hint of that very useful thing, an unscripted public opinion. Moreover, the Czech crew of the charter plane that brought me to Cuba had issued an invitation. When we go back, they said, we stop in London to drop you off and we are not allowed to pick up any passengers. In other words, we fly on to Prague with an empty plane. If you care to stay on board, we can show you “Socialism With A Human Face” for no extra charge. I had instantly signed on for this marvelous opportunity. Reporting to the Czechoslovak Airlines office in Havana to reconfirm my ticket, I found that the Czechs and Slovaks of the city had mounted their own demonstration on La Rampa, the city’s main drag, and had been greeted by enthusiastic applause from average citizens on the sidewalk: another unfakeable test of popular emotion.

Back in the camp, though, it seemed hard to imagine that Party-mindedness would not emerge as the eventual victor. I can remember exactly how I came to realize this. Cuba was famous for its celebration of cinema and its lionization of its revolutionary directors like Tomas Guitierrez Alea, the great “Titon” (even if his best-known marquee title, Memories of Underdevelopment, was perhaps only rivaled in sheer balls- aching tedium of nomenclature by the Czechoslovak masterpiece Closely Watched Trains). Almost every night we could sit on a hillside and watch dramatic movies projected onto a huge open-air screen. On one tense and humid evening I watched Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, completely unaware as were many first-time viewers that the harsh, grainy sequences of street fighting were not taken from a documentary, and near-intoxicated (despite my supposedly better ideological training) by the visceral, sordid romance of the urban guerrilla. When it was over I sat around, part-hypnotized by the raw seduction of violence, until they showed it again. (Several of the people I met in the Campamento Cinco de Mayo later showed up in the dock in Europe as members of the “Angry Brigade,” the “Red Brigade,” and kindred nihilist organizations. One of them I had known quite well. I attended his trial at the Old Bailey in the early 1970s and, as an early “Angry Brigade” communique was read out by the prosecuting counsel, suddenly realized that it was almost word-for-word what I had heard young Kit actually saying under the palms of Pinar del Rio.)

At all events, to the camp one day, for a seminar on film and revolution, was brought the legendary Cuban director Santiago Alvarez. I had seen some of his stuff and been more impressed by its pace and color than I should have been: I knew perfectly well that the hideous President Johnson had not ordered the murders of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, but in that frenzied year it was exciting to see a piece of throbbing filmic propaganda called “LBJ” (the letters standing for “Luther, Bobby, and Jack” though even the order was weirdly wrong there) which blamed him for all three, and which additionally boasted a piercing soundtrack with the magnificent, defiant wailings of Miriam Makeba, wife of the crazed but charismatic incendiary Stokely Carmichael.

For all this lurid lapse into infantile pre–Oliver Stone leftism, old Alvarez then gave a reasonable-enough talk, and so I put up my hand and asked him a question. How did he find it, as an artist, to be working in Cuba, a state that had official policies on the aesthetic? Alvarez had obviously expected something like this and replied that artistic and intellectual liberty was untrammeled. Were there, I inquired, no exceptions to this? Well, he said, almost laughing at the naivete of my question, it would not of course be possible or desirable to attempt any attacks or satires on the Leader of the Revolution himself. But otherwise, the freedom of conscience and creativity was absolute.

I do not know if what I next said came from the “Left” or “Right” part of my brain, but I like to think I anticipated at least some of the huge cultural and literary defection that later cost Castro the allegiance of writers as diverse as Carlos Franqui, Heberto Padilla, Jorge Edwards, and many others. I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. Ah, please never forget how useful the obvious can be. And how right it is that the image of the undraped emperor is such a keystone of our folklore. I don’t think I have ever been so richly rewarded merely for saying the self-evident. There was quite an “atmosphere” until after Alvarez—whose reply, if any, I don’t remember—had left, and then this “atmosphere” persisted while I took my metal tray and lined up in the dining hall. When I pretended to ask what was up, one of the Scottish comrades informed me: “The Cuban brothers thought what you said and did was so obviously counter-revolutionary.” I was both annoyed and delighted by this obloquy. I certainly considered myself a revolutionary and would warmly have contested the right of anybody to deny me the title, but there was also the sheer pleasure of seeing cliche in action: almost as if one had been called an “enemy of the people,” or a “capitalist hyena” or—back to school again—someone who had “let the whole side down.” You do not forget, even if you come from a free and humorous society, the first time that you are with unsmiling seriousness called a “counter- revolutionary” to your face.

It cannot have been many mornings later when I was shaken awake and told “Get up, and get up NOW! The Russians have invaded Czechoslovakia.” The person who was doing the shaking had bet me a trifling sum that this outcome would not occur, so it was nice of her to bring me the news of her own loss. I had already felt, in the course of the annus mirabilis of 1968, the sensation of being somehow involved in a historical moment or conjuncture, but at that instant in Cuba I think I could have been forgiven the self- dramatization. For one thing, and merely because of the time zone, the terrible news from Eastern Europe came to us quite early in the morning. And as I have said, the Castro leadership had as yet taken no public position on what was still an inter-Communist quarrel. It was announced that Fidel would speak that night and give the “line.” I was quite sure that I knew what he was going to say (and indeed was frivolous enough to make a few more wagers on the side) but meanwhile one was in the almost unique position of being in a Communist state where for a whole day there was no official position on the most important item of international news.

I was in Havana itself by then, because it was almost time to catch the charter plane home or, in my case, to Prague. The Red Army’s first action had been to seize and immobilize the main airports of Czechoslovakia, so our plane hadn’t even been able to leave its base. I remember going to the campus of Havana University, where there were a surprising number of students willing to denounce the Russian action without looking over their shoulders or lowering their voices. All dissent had to be couched in Communist terms, so you heard it said that “Che” would never have supported such big-power bullying. (This I then half-believed but now doubt.) The Chinese leadership in Beijing had lost no time in denouncing “Soviet social-imperialism,” and there was a demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in support of this position, with people wearing little badges of Mao. I was told by somebody that if you went to call on the Chinese, they would ply you with cocktails and cigarettes while they explained their position, so I posed as an internationalist visitor and found the story to be true… the exquisite cigarettes, I remember, had the name “Double Happiness.” The politics weren’t so sublime: a tiny diplomatic bureaucrat explained that China had been the first to call for Russian intervention in Hungary to stop counter-revolution in 1956, so had every right to denounce the latest move as “counter-revolutionary” in turn. The logic of this didn’t seem exactly beautiful. And there was that unsettling term again…

At lunchtime came the news that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communists had supported the Russians. This was enough to sway quite a number of Cubans… then dusk began to draw in and the population mustered around the TV sets. I forget now where I watched the lengthy tirade in which Fidel Castro ended all Utopian babble about Cuba following a different course from the sclerotic Stalinists in the Kremlin, but I think it was in the same pink-facaded Hotel Nacional where Graham Greene’s sadistic Captain Segura once received a cold blast of soda- water in the face and shouted “Cono!” before he could stop himself. As the speech of the bearded one wore on, the faces of some of my comrades began to take on a startled and upset cold-shower look as