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Social Revolution in Cuba:
The Future of the New Regime
- Abstract
WHEN Fidel Castro was in the Sierra Maestra, he spent most of his time talking. What little fighting there was, was done by his firebrand younger brother Raul, and by Major Ernesto Guevara, his pro-Communist aide. Castro himself simply harangued the men about him-his officers, his barbudos, and the U. S. correspondents who came calling on him once Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times had shown the way. It would, of course, be too much to say that Fidel Castro talked the Batista dictatorship to death; it was already so rotten that it was doomed to fall apart. Still, there can be little doubt but that the revolutionary leader’s constant attacks on the dictatorship greatly hastened its collapse: what he kept saying about Fulgencio Batista was so obviously true that the latter’s own troops came eventually to believe it.
Ten months after having taken power in Cuba, Fidel Castro is still talking, as he moves about the country from Havana to Pinar del Rio and back to Havana again, stopping off always in the Sierra Maestra. He harangues the workers and the campesinos, holds innumerable press conferences, delivers long, rambling discourses over the government radio and television-he needs no special occasion to stand before the TV cameras and talk for three, or four, or even five hours. It would be a mistake, however, to deduce that Castro is merely a compulsive talker: if he says anything that comes into his mind, he also believes everything that he says.
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