Part I Latin America
Maoism in Latin America-Introduction
By the 1950s, Communist parties were present in all of the Latin American countries. Indeed, member parties of the Communist International (which was officially liquidated in 1943) had existed in most of those nations. Thus, Maoism appeared as a schismatic faction of a movement that had long been well established in Latin America.
Several things were characteristic of Maoism in Latin America. In the first place, Maoist parties appeared relatively early in the area; some of the first parties to receive the Chinese “franchise” were located there. Second, most of the Maoist parties that appeared in the region evolved out of factions in the traditional Communist parties.
In the third place, Latin America was the only place outside of Asia where a Maoist party actually tried to put into effect Mao’s strategy of “popular war.” That was the Partido Comunista del Perú Sendero Luminoso, which in 1980 launched such a conflict that was still being waged more than fifteen years later.
Maoism in Latin America was unique in another regard. It had to face a very serious competing movement that had great appeal to elements of the Far Left who were disillusioned with the pro-Soviet Communist parties. This was Castroism.
The Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro, which triumphed on January 1, 1959, occurred at almost the same time the Sino-Soviet split was developing. Although the Castro Revolution did not begin as a Communist one, within less than a year Fidel was leading it in that direction, and by early 1961, he had proclaimed Cuba a “socialist state.”
The relations between the Cuban Revolution and the Chinese regime went through several phases. These were influenced by Sino-Soviet relations, the economic and military situation of the Cuban regime, and political and ideological factors within Cuba.
As the Sino-Soviet split widened, both sides sought to court Castro and the Cuban regime, to win their support in the conflict. A priori, one might have expected to find Castro inclining toward the Chinese. His regime had come to power through guerrilla war, and Castro and other Cuban leaders insisted increasingly during the 1960s that that was the only way for Communists to triumph in Latin America and the Third World in general. This was true at a time when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was stressing the possibility of coming to power by following the peaceful road. However, Cuban national considerations, as well as certain ideological issues, made a Sino-Cuban alliance impossible.
In the early 1960s Castro tried to maintain a neutral stance in the Sino-Soviet conflict. Upon various occasions, he lectured both sides, complaining about their efforts to bring their dispute to Cuba and its party. However, by the end of the decade, the Castro regime was firmly in the Soviet corner.
In the beginning, the Chinese were very enthusiastic about the Castro Revolution. They underscored the similarity of the ways in which the Castro and Chinese regimes had come to power. They were much quicker than the Soviets to accept Castro’s proclamation that Cuba was a socialist state. They expressed strong support for Castro at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis late in 1962, when Khrushchev withdrew Soviet missiles from the island without consulting Castro and the Cuban government, to Castro’s consternation.
However, both very practical factors and ideological ones increasingly raised barriers between the Cuban and Chinese parties and governments. Given the Castro regime’s conflict with the United States, which presented real military dangers as well as major economic problems for the Cuban administration, Castro had to depend heavily on the aid—political, military, diplomatic, and economic—of the Soviet Union. In addition, serious ideological differences were growing between the Cubans and Chinese.
In 1965, a deepening chasm developed between Havana and Peking. During the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in January 1966, an open break came between the Cubans and Chinese, and at that point it seemed to be based principally on national rather than ideological issues. Castro, in a speech to that meeting, denounced the Chinese refusal to give the economic aid to which Castro insisted Cuba was entitled.
However, the same Tricontinental Conference marked the beginning of a unique period in the history of the Castro regime, which lasted until August 1968. During those two and a half years, Fidel Castro sought to rally revolutionary parties and regimes from the Third World behind Havana, and to this end organized a rough equivalent of the Comintern or Cominform, in the continuing organization of the Tricontinental Conference, and a similar specific organization for Latin America, the Latin American Organization of Solidarity (OLAS).
However, anyone who wanted to assume leadership in the world Communist movement had to have a differentiated ideological position. In Castro’s case, this involved two things: a peculiar position on “the road to power” and a distinctive view of what to do with power once it had been achieved.
The Castroite ideological position was best summed up in a pamphlet by the young French Marxist Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, published in Havana in 1967 and distributed throughout the world by the Cuban government. Based in large degree on the ideas of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, it presented a position that differed in major essentials from the Chinese on the priority of the guerrilla war road to power, and it disagreed with two other fundamentals of the Mao Tse-tung theory: the importance of political preparation among peasants before launching a guerrilla war and the leading role of the Communist Party in a guerrilla conflict.
Debray (and Guevara) deprecated both of these Maoist ideas. Debray ridiculed the Communist parties that “plotted” guerrilla war in city cafes. He denied the need for political preparation for a guerrilla conflict, arguing that the establishment of a guerrilla nucleus (foco) would itself provide political preparation.
Insofar as behavior of a Communist regime once in power was concerned, the Castro regime in the 1966-1968 period put almost exclusive emphasis on the use of “moral” rather than “material” incentives—a position clearly against that of the USSR, and only partially endorsed by the Maoists.
Castro’s efforts to establish Havana as a third center of world Communism ended abruptly in August 1968, when Castro grudgingly but definitely endorsed the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. But by that time, the Sino-Cuban split was definitive.
It is this ideological conflict between the Castroites and Chinese that was most relevant to the various Communist factions in Latin America. Following the Cuban Revolution, there developed in several countries a variety of groups—many of them dissidents from democratic Left parties such as Acción Democratica in Venezuela and the Aprista Party of Peru—which established Castroite parties. At the same time, elements in the traditional Communist parties also were strongly attracted by the Castroites’ call for the armed struggle for power.
Although in the early 1960s there was considerable confusion between Castroites and Maoists in the Latin American countries, as relations between the Cuban and Chinese regimes deteriorated, lines between Castroism and Maoism became sharply drawn. To an increasing degree, the clearly Maoist parties attacked the foco theory of the Fidelistas and the “revisionism” of the Castro regime in its increasingly close alignment with the Soviet party and government.[89]
89
For extensive discussion of Sino-Cuban Communist relations, see Cecil Johnson,