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By Root 920 0

the Left. In the Cultural Revolution they were Mao’s defenders, released from their schools to be vanguard “Red Guards,” as they were labeled in May 1966 by student radicals at Qinghua University. Mao’s stated purpose was to combat the creeping bourgeoisie mentality. In August he released his sixteen points “to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road” and to bring education, art, and literature into line with socialist doctrine. For leftist ideologues around the world, the Cultural Revolution was a fascinating effort to purge, recommit, and purify their revolution. The Chinese appeared determined not to let their revolution descend into the venality and hypocrisy of the Soviets.

But in practice, the Cultural Revolution was both brutal and disastrous. Teenagers walked up to adults and ordered them to replace their shoes because they had been made in Hong Kong. Girls forcibly cut the long hair off women. The army protected libraries and museums from the Red Guard, who wanted to destroy everything that wasn’t ideologically pure. Scholars were assaulted and publicly humiliated for knowledge of foreign languages. Given the extreme reverence for elders in the Chinese population, this behavior was even more shocking than it would have been in a Western country. Gradually society was becoming paralyzed by an almost universal fear. Even the Red Guard itself was split between students whose families were workers, peasants, soldiers, cadres, or martyrs of the revolution—“the five kinds of Red” singled out for special treatment—and the students from bourgeois backgrounds.

Many of the world’s governments were less interested in the issue of Chinese revolutionary purity than that of Chinese political and economic stability. By 1968, for the first time in years there were signs of food shortages, caused by the Cultural Revolution. Western governments were even more interested in the impact the Cultural Revolution was having on the Chinese nuclear weapons program. China had become a nuclear power in 1964 and in 1966, the same year as the launching of the Cultural Revolution, had demonstrated the ability to deliver a warhead by missile to a target five hundred miles away. The program had not shown much progress since. This may have been one of the reasons that the Pentagon was not particularly alarmed by it, but others feared the Pentagon was too optimistic. Even with the instability of the Cultural Revolution, physicist Ralph E. Lapp warned in 1968 that by 1973 the Chinese would be capable of hitting Los Angeles and Seattle and they seemed on the verge of a hydrogen bomb, which in fact they did explode by the end of 1968.

1968 poster from China of the Cultural Revolution showing a Red Guard with a book of Mao’s teachings in hand. The caption says, “Establish a new standard of merit for the people: Just as the heroic 4th Platoon and Comrade Li Wen’chung worked to defeat selfishness and promote the common good, we should convert Chairman Mao’s most recent directive into action.”

(Library of Congress)

Cuba’s leaders were intrigued by the Chinese effort to purify their revolution. Revolutionary purity had been a favorite topic of the martyred Che, who had vehemently opposed all financial incentives because he feared they would corrupt the revolution. Castro was more pragmatic, and this disagreement, along with the fact that the actual revolution was over, led to Che’s decision to resign from government and move on to another revolution.

Castro had declared 1968 to be “the year of the heroic guerrillero.” It was to be a yearlong tribute to Che. As though obeying its own propaganda—the ubiquitous signs urging everyone to be like Che—the government itself actually became more like Che. Che, like the New Left, was scornful and distrustful of the Soviet Union, which he felt had compromised away all revolutionary principles. Castro began the year in an anti-Soviet spirit. He said that he expected to expand exports to the point where in two years he would no longer be dependent on the Soviets.