1968 - Mark Kurlansky [14]
This new approach had been described in a book called Revolution in the Revolution by Régis Debray, a young Frenchman who had become enamored of the Cuban revolution. The book, translated into English in 1967, was a favorite of students all over the world, with its premise certain to appeal to the impatience of youth. Debray wrote of tossing out the old Marxist-Leninist theories about slowly fomenting revolution. Instead, according to Debray, revolutions began by taking the initiative with an army raised from rural people. That was Castro’s strategy in the mountains of his native Oriente province. And it was what Che was doing in Bolivia. Only in Che’s case, it had not worked out well, and in November a photograph circulated of a Bolivian air force colonel displaying Che’s half-naked corpse. Debray, too, had been caught by the Bolivian army, but rather than killing him, the Bolivians kept him in a prison in a small town called Camiri. In the beginning of 1968 Debray was still there, though the Bolivians allowed his Venezuelan lover, Elizabeth Burgos, to come to the prison so the couple could be married.
So in 1968 Fidel Castro’s close friend and co-revolutionary became a martyr, a canonized saint of the revolution—forever young, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, bearded and bereted, with those smiling eyes, the pure revolutionary in deeds and clothing. At the José Martí International Airport in Havana, a poster of the martyr appeared with the message “Youth will intone the chants of mourning to the chatter of machine guns and cries of war. Until victory, forever.”
All over Cuba the phrase was written, “Until Victory, Forever.” Sixty thousand students in gray high school uniforms marched past Castro’s reviewing stand, and as each group passed they declared, loudly and enthusiastically, “Our duty is to build men like Che.” “Como Che”—to be like Che, to have more men like Che, to work like Che—the phrase filled the island. The cult of Che had begun.
Castro announced that this year the celebration would not include a display of Soviet weapons, explaining that such a parade was too expensive, in part because the tanks tore up the pavement on the Havana streets.
There were other troubling signs for Moscow, which began the year with a shaky economy and an unpopular trial of four intellectuals accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda after they campaigned in favor of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers in prison for the past two years because they had published their work in the West. The Six Day War in the Middle East had been a humiliation for the foreign policy of Leonid I. Brezhnev, chief of the Soviet Communist Party, at a time when collective farming was failing, attempts at economic reform had fizzled, youth and intelligentsia were growing restless, and nationalist movements such as that of the Tatars were becoming troublesome. The people of the Soviet bloc, especially young people, were increasingly rejecting the stances and language of the cold war. Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito had long annoyed Moscow with an air of independence, but now Romania’s Nicolae Ceaus¸escu had begun to exhibit the same tendency. Even in Czechoslovakia, where the Soviets had their most loyal and pliable leader, Antonín Novotny´, the population seemed restless. In April 1967 the Bratislava Pravda, the Slovak Party organ, had conducted a poll in Czechoslovakia and found a shocking general rejection of the Party line. Only half blamed the Western imperialists for international tension, and 28 percent said that both sides were responsible. Perhaps most shocking, only 41.5 percent blamed the