The Cuban Story

Every major Revolution polarizes observers into partisans, but it seems a singular power of the Cuban Revolution to excite in its onlookers a deep sense of participation. As the body of literature devoted to Castro's victory grows, more and more books appear implicitly devoted to the impact of the Revolutionary struggle on the author's thought processes and outlook.

Such is the nature of Herbert Matthews' new book, and so it was with the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, C. Wright Mills, Jules Dubois and Warren Miller. It follows that none of the writing on Cuba thus far can be classified as objective history; what has been produced is a literary extension of the issues and conflicts raised by the Revolution. Sartre and Mills, to whom the Revolution was like an overdose of hormones, totally altered their styles in trying to influence popular attitudes. Mills even admitted to a quasi-military intent when he said that mobilization of public opinion against an invasion was a goal of Listen Yankee.

With Matthews, however, journalistic participation preceded commitment. As the New York Times correspondent whose interview with Fidel in February, 1957, established the fact that the guerilla leader was still alive, and as the editorial writer who martialed the forces in opposition to Batista, Matthews indeed turned out to be the equivalent of an army division to Castro. Since the Revolution has not developed in Matthews' image; it would be simple to say that The Cuban Story has been written from a posture of disillusion; but it would also be inaccurate.

When hostility to Castro mounted in this country, Matthews came in for a disproportionate share of the retrospective blame. The National Review carried what he himself admits is a clever cartoon, showing a happy Castro saying "I got my job through the New York Times." The attack on Matthews was far from humorous, however. The Eastland-Dodd Committee questioned his failure to warn of the Communist potential in Castro's movement. The author's primary concern, therefore, is self-defense, and he argues passionately, if not eloquently, that truth in a Revolutionary situation is not absolute but relative to the shifting logic of the Revolution.

Those who harped on the Communist line later said: 'I told you so," Matthews says of his critics--"They helped to make their guess come true." "After an event happens, it takes on an inevitability and one feels that-it had to happen.... Those who live close to the events, who are a part of them, who know that the forces and pressures involved at any given time in any particular circumstance are enormously complex... know there is no inevitability."

The State Department's refusal to believe in the plasticity of the Cuban Revolution, is Matthew's major regret. In his chapter on Fidel Castro, he complains: "Each year since 1957 there has been a different Fidel Castro to deal with, yet each year--each day, in fact--he is treated as if the ideas he holds then and the policies he is following will not or cannot change."

Castro's political-psychological make-up is one of the subjects that Matthews handles with a good deal of insight. There is notion in the United States that Communism is so analogous to disease that it spreads by the same mechanism. Thus throughout 1959 and 1960 it was suggested in the daily press and the newsweeklies that Castro could easily become a Communist by proximity to Che Guevara (who was identified as a congenital Communist). It was never hinted at this time that forced economic and political reliance on the Soviet bloc could have the same effect.

Unfortunately, The Cuban Story is not clearly written. Only two of the seven chapters, the one on Castro and the concluding analysis of American journalistic response, are free from redundancy and disorganization. In expressing his contradictory hopes and apprehensions, gratification and disappointment, Matthews scrambles criticism, rationalization and suggestions in no particular order. Often, following his line of argument is like watching a tennis match. His own self-defense takes on a Willy Lomanesque incoherence.

Some of the blame must rest with whoever edited the book for Braziller. For example, criticism of the American Ambassadors, Arthur Gardner, Earl E. T. Smith, and Phillip Bonsal is interspersed throughout the volume, and had it been collected and discussed within one chapter, a far clearer statement of what Ambassadorial responsibilities entail would have resulted.

Stylistically, Sartre and Mills may have altered their approaches too much, but Matthews has adjusted his too little. The four-paragraph clusters of the editorial writer sever many logical threads; and time and again there is a relapse into philosophical speculation and repetitive generalizations about the responsibility of the reporter.

Matthews concludes by defending his integrity with such genuine and profuse emotion that his sincerity becomes almost embarrassing. It is not the sincerity of a man recanting; the author's admiration for Castro and sense of loyalty to the Revolution's expressed ideals are real, while his disappointment is parenthetical. It is the insistence of a journalist who sees hope in any disruption of an impoverished, deprived society.