When Castro gained power in Cuba in 1958 it seemed to the democratic Left in Europe, and to rebels without a cause, that here was a revolution on the new frontier. Cuba appeared to have produced a revolution with a difference. Neither capitalist nor Communist, it would break the ideological stalemate, and so provide a model for the uncommitted third of the world. Disillusion was all the more profound, therefore, when the Cuba crisis of 1962 appeared to provide confirmation that Castro's revolution was but 'a variant in the family of Communist revolutions'. It seemed that those who had argued that Castroism was the best insurance against Communism would have to eat their words, while those who had always held that Castroism was a cloak for Communism felt their case had been proved.

It is still too early for final judgments; the evidence is far too scanty and, above all, there is no simple explanation of Castro's complex personality. Until that can be explained, the revolution will make little sense - for in Cuban politics, as in those of Latin America generally, personalities are still the prime movers. But this much at least can be said: although Castro's motives may be obscure, and although his revolution has been overlaid by Cold War classifications, both he and it have their roots in Cuban history. For example, it is difficult to begin to understand Castro himself without considering the 19th century nationalist Jose Martí (1853-1895), who has been a dominant intellectual influence on him. Unless, in short, the Castro Revolution is seen as a particular type of nationalist upheaval, closely conditioned by Cuban history, there is a danger that false analogies will be made with revolutionary situations elsewhere in Latin America.

It is too readily assumed that because Hispanic America shares a common language and the same colonial heritage there is a common unity and sense of purpose underlying the needs and aspirations of its many republics. Yet it may well be that the differences between them are more significant than their similarities. 'Hispanic America' and 'Latin America' are deceptively simple portmanteau terms behind which cluster the infinitely complex nationalist attitudes of a hundred and fifty years' separate existence.

There is a sharp contrast between those attitudes and the way in which Cubans think about their history and their national identity. On the mainland the independence movements at the beginning of the 19th century were nationalist only in a very limited sense, so that although they resulted in national states these were the most pathetic type of nation. They were without nationalist mythologies, and their limits were determined by the accidents of geography and the impermeable frontiers of Spanish administrative decisions. The creation of national mythologies thus became an obsession with many intellectuals: poised between a European culture towards which they had ambivalent feelings and, in a number of the new republics, an indigenous population which had remained largely uninfluenced by Western ideas, their task of finding a synthesis seemed insuperable. A further complication lay in the fact that in those countries where there was a minority of pure European stock (all except Chile, Argentina and Uruguay), the political nation as often as not excluded the indigenous peoples. An Indianist view implied a radicalism which ensured its rejection by the ruling groups. The great achievement of the Mexican Revolution was to make Indianism respectable, and to inspire other broadly based Indianist movements, such as Haya de la Torre's Indo-Americanism and the revolutionary nationalism of Bolivia.

The anti-Americanism which became an integral element in Latin American nationalisms had reactionary as well as radical overtones. Towards the end of the 19th century, fear of political dominance by the United States was sharpened by her expanding economic power, which threatened to disrupt a mainly static society and to sever the oligarchies' traditional links with Europe. The spirit of the entrepreneur, Protestantism and democracy were feared as much by the land-owning oligarchy in the 19th century as trusts, concessions and corporations are by the radicals of today. But in those countries with large, unassimilated mestizo and Indian groups, anti-Americanism had an additional and dual character; it was both a symptom of a deep malaise arising from a sense of rootlessness and a positive affirmation of each country's uniqueness in terms of its Indian heritage. Mexican and Bolivian nationalists, and Peruvian Apristas, can to some extent base their nationalist mythologies on the records of flourishing pre-Spanish civilisations and on deeply rooted Indian cultures.

In this, at least, Cuba has been less fortunate. An island exposed to international rivalry in the Caribbean, her national identity has been continually threatened by foreign influences, in face of which her nationalists have had no pre-Spanish past or a flourishing indigenous culture on which to base a nationalist mythology. In spite of the work of the great Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Afro-Cubanism as a movement cannot bear comparison with Afro-Brazilianism. The Spanish colonial legacy, and even North American racial attitudes, have been too strong for Cubans to have made, in racial terms, a virtue out of necessity.

A long gestation before independence was not enough in itself to give Cuban nationalism a sense of balance. The absence of a telluric basis for it tended to crystallise nationalist sentiment round the figure of Martí as it has also been a reason why the dynamic behind Cuban nationalism has often seemed to be little more than a febrile, hysterical anti-Americanism. It accounts, too, for the way in which, in Cuba, national myth-making has often lost touch with political reality. This was shown when the nationalists of the 1890s were prepared to devastate the island and so create the conditions for United States intervention rather than accept Spanish reforms. It has been shown, too, in Castro's own brand of nationalism when, on occasions, he has seemed prepared to invite the apotheosis of national martyrdom in the holocaust of a new war. There is also the fact that Cuban nationalism, whether in Martían or Castroist form, has always been couched in Latin American and universalist terms, not those of a narrow Cubanism. That is why the Castro revolution has seen itself as having the messianic mission of 'turning the Cordillera of the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of Latin America'.

Any analysis of Cuban nationalism must begin with a consideration of the island's social structure, not only because it has determined the form that nationalism has taken, but also because, in the case of Cuba, the axiom that nationalist movements are fomented, led and supported by the middle class needs some qualification. What middle class existed in the 19th century consisted of Spanish immigrants who, living in tight urban groups, failed to become assimilated, monopolised commerce, acted as bankers to debt-ridden criollo planters and were naturally a main support of the colonial regime. National independence was the objective of a small number of criollo lawyers, writers, liberal priests and students. Alienated intellectuals, rooted in no social class, make an early debut in Cuban history but, unable to convert any but a small number of landowners to the idea of independence, and despised by the Spanish middle class, they were either forced into exile, like Varela (1787-1853) and Saco (1797-1879), or, like Luz y Caballero (1800-1862) and Mendive (18211886), they accepted the patient task of educational preparation. The few schools and the University of Havana, after its secularisation in 1842, almost entirely criollo staffed, became hothouses of nationalist sentiment.

Yet the decisive impetus to nationalism did not come from these elements but from radical landowners in Oriente who, for mainly economic reasons, revolted against Spanish rule in 1868 and thus began the Ten Years' War. That war was, in essence, the expression of a new nationalism which developed in response to the embittered frustrated nationalism of a declining imperial power which regarded Cuba as an integral part of Spain, and which refused to recognise her separate identity. Absence of easily exploitable wealth, and a small indigenous population, had discouraged any intensive Spanish colonisation of the island until after Spain had lost her mainland possessions. The economic boom and the sugar revolution of the early 19th century kept Cuba loyal, but this loyalty was rewarded only with relentless political and economic exploitation.

Nevertheless, the war ended in a stalemate because the Oriente landowners failed to win over the wealthier planters in the rest of the island, whose ideology, whether annexationism, reformism or autonomism, was always conditioned by fear of the democratic implications of the nationalists' creed.

The Oriente rebels were, in any case, themselves divided over the implications of the abolition of slavery, and it was only after the war had destroyed the economic basis of the slave-system, and with it slavery itself, that this main inhibiting factor in the nationalist revolution was removed. By that time, however, the initiative in the struggle for independence had passed to a small but vocal group of Cubans in Havana and in exile.

***

The particular significance of Martí in the history of Cuban nationalism lies in his appearance in the depressed 1880s, at the moment when the nationalist forces were leaderless and divided, and when the abolition of slavery made it feasible, for the first time, to create a mass nationalist movement which would draw its strength from groups other than discontented planters. Sacrificing his health, marriage, happiness, and finally his life, to the cause of independence, Martí is both the greatest Cuban writer and the most famous of Cuban heroes. Born in Havana in 1853, the son of a Spanish sergeant and a Canary Island mother, his precocity attracted the attention of Rafael Mendive, the schoolmaster-poet, who became his spiritual godfather and from whom he inherited the intellectual tradition of nationalism handed down from Varela. Imprisoned at the age of 16 for sympathising with the rebels, forced labour in the chalk pits with common criminals left in him an undying hatred of colonial rule which was to keep him in exile for the rest of his life. Apart from a brief visit, and the few days before his death in action in 1895, he never returned to Cuba after he was exiled to Spain in 1871.

His four years of study in the turbulent Spain of the early 1870s convinced Martí that no justice could be expected from the Cortes or even from the distracted Republic of 1873. But his admiration for Spanish culture, and his ambivalent attitude towards his Spanish father, saved him from the type of Hispanophobia which has characterised many Latin American radicals. He believed that 'good' Spaniards could be persuaded to see the justice of Cuba's cause.

After spending some years in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela Martí settled in the United States, where he became one of the most perceptive foreign observers of the local scene. His experience in Mexico where his liberal friends, the heirs of Juarez, had been overthrown by Porfirio Diaz, and his experience in the Venezuela of Guzman Blanco, from which he had been expelled for criticising the dictator, made him appreciative of democracy in the United States. Yet his stay in Guatemala, and contact with Indians there, made him recognise that American-style democracy would be inapplicable in a Latin American setting where, he felt, the indigenous peoples should play a cardinal, not a marginal, role in future developments. Indeed, in the United States he sensed very clearly the growing imperialist mood of the later 1880s, with its undertones of racial superiority. The first Pan-American Conference in 1889 was a warning light, and he began writing of the need for Latin America's second liberation, this time from United State's economic domination.

Martí was a great Latin American figure and not just a parochial Cuban hero (1). Colonial censorship meant that during his lifetime he was better known outside the island through an unending flow of articles in the leading mainland papers. In his many-sided interests he is typical of the Latin American pensador. He was not only a committed intellectual but a brilliant political speaker, man of action and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) in which he achieved the seemingly impossible task of uniting the notoriously divided exiles - bringing together illiterate negro tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West, sophisticated middle class exiles in New York and the wilful veteran generals of the Ten Years' War, GOmez and Maceo. It was his remarkable personality that won over these two hardened caudillos who were distrustful both of civilian control and of each other.

***

In Martí's populist creed the political nation was all-embracing; his notion of class harmony may have derived from a mystical sense of the brotherhood of all men, but it was also the result of an acute awareness that Cuba had no revolutionary class strong enough to bring a nationalist revolt to fruition. But, however useful in creating a sense of unity against the Spaniards, the populist myth collapsed in the bitter divisions of the early years of independence. The War of Liberation was not the short sharp struggle which Martí had imagined would forestall United States intervention, and in which a mass uprising would both overthrow Spanish power and temper a new nationalist spirit. Instead, it dragged on for three years and ended in the foreign intervention which he had so much feared.

Yet it is doubtful if even Martí could have conjured national unity out of the devastation of a three years' war of extermination, or if he would have been able to prevent those developments which were to determine Cuba's future as a monoculture economy. United States capital restored the sugar industry but at the price of perpetuating the latifundia and reducing the small cane planters to complete dependence on foreign-owned mills. Martí believed that political and economic independence were inseparable, and he had argued that Cuban democracy must be based on a small-holding peasantry in a diversified economy. Instead, a relentless process of centralisation extended the great sugar estates of the colonial period, thus inhibiting the growth of a rural middle class and creating a landless, agrarian proletariat.

The alienation of the rural proletariat from the land was paralleled by the alienation of the middle sectors (2) from a dynamic role in the state. The neo-colonial economy of the Republic left little room for the development of a Cuban middle class. There was no wholesale exodus of Spaniards, and those who remained kept their Spanish citizenship and pre-empted the best posts in the Church and commerce, while a deficient education system rendered many Cubans unfit for technical posts in expanding United States concerns. They could turn only to politics, government service, the professions and teaching. The social system of the republic perpetuated the Spanish legacy that public office should be made a source of private profit. Politics thus became the key to social advancement, and so little more than a squabble between factions for the ownership of government. Parties cut across group interests, and personalismo rather than principle determined party alignments. Implicit agreements that parties should alternate in power, and thus share out offices, broke down and continuismo became the main cause of ' revolution ' as in 1905, 1917 and after 1928. But that type of 'revolution' meant merely a switch of government personnel, not a fundamental social or political change. Perhaps' the most striking example of the spoils system was shown in 1948 when Prio Socorras replaced Grau San Martín as President. Although both were members of the same party, 10,000 government posts nevertheless changed hands.

Government was, in fact, like the lottery which used to play such a prominent part in Cuban politics. Public life was permeated by a boom psychosis, with the middle sectors bidding against each other for government sinecures. In purely economic terms there might have been a middle class but in terms of self-identification and bourgeois culture values a middle class scarcely existed. Instead, there were what the Cubans themselves describe as the capas medias'. There was no strong bourgeois tradition to offset the rentier mentality which was one of the main legacies of the criollo plantocracy. Neither anti-clericalism nor anti-Americanism gave homogeneity to these groups, whose factionalism was the bane of Cuban politics. Living beyond their means to attain upper class status, patronising an enormous number of private schools, to the detriment of public education, and bombarded by the advertisements of a consumer society, they lived in a continual state of economic frustration and near-revolutionary ferment, plotting the overthrow of the political structure in order to hasten their accession to the upper reaches of the graft system.

The most coherent section, as might be expected, were the professional groups and the students. The common Latin American phenomenon of the under-employed intellectual can be related to the cultural legacy of the colonial regime, embalmed in a formalistic, literary and non-scientific university system. Critics, like Pozos Dulces (1809-77), Martí and Varona (1849-1933), who argued that the educational system was totally unrelated to Cuba's needs, were voices crying in the wilderness. Law and medicine were the most oversubscribed professions, the one as a prelude to politics, the other because of its high status value. Although the rural areas desperately needed doctors, a disproportionate number remained in Havana where the opportunities for advancement lay.

The inability of society to absorb the products of the higher educational system exaggerated the dichotomy between 'generals and doctors'. Caudillismo based on the power of the army was not an evil of Cuban government until 1933. The disbanding of the army of liberation, under United States' pressure in 1900, prevented it from filling the political vacuum during the early years of independence, as had so often happened on the mainland, and its generals were forced to seek alternative ways of capitalising their prestige. Even after it was re-established in 1909, the army did not itself act as a political force. The generals, however, expecting to dominate politics by right, did so through manipulation of a patronage system in which lawyers were able to share in the pickings. Zayas, President between 1921 and 1925, represented the new symbiosis where the astute lawyer-politician managed a vast graft system in which generals were co-beneficiaries. Thus not even professional groups were united in their opposition to the status quo, and it was left to the rootless younger generation, faced with a bleak prospect as underemployed intellectuals, to provide the dynamic for a new nationalist conception of culture and politics.

The ideas of the University Reform movement (3) had fallen on fertile ground in Havana University which, with its professors who did little or no work, was a microcosm of the graft in Cuban public life. From 1924, when students forced academic reforms on the government and began extension classes among the poor in the Universidad Popular Jose Martí, the University became both the focus of a regenerative movement and a centre of revolutionary politics. It was this lost generation of students, exiles in their own land, who re-discovered Martí with his nostalgic yearning for an idealised patria and his exile's vision of a socially united, racially harmonious and economically independent country. His stature grew as the expansion of United States cultural and economic influence brought a note of urgency to the intellectuals' search for national identity.

The concept of the 'frustrated revolution' of 1895 now helped to explain the contrast between Martí's dream of a rejuvenated nation and the reality of graft and corruption. In this interpretation, United States intervention, rather than the legacies of Spanish rule or indigenous weaknesses, was responsible for the distortions in public life, and for the diversion of Cuban history from the course which Martí had mapped out.

***

The Cuban belief that Spanish power had already been broken by the time the United States intervened in 1898, three years after the beginning of the War of Liberation, gave a keen edge to anti-Americanism, and the coincidence of national independence with a new phase of American imperialism made for an easy transference of nationalist antagonism from Spain to the United States. The attribution of all internal shortcomings to foreign intervention prevented a more fundamental analysis of the new republic's social malaise. There was also the fact that economic control from the United States, being more insidious than political control from Spain, precluded the possibility of heroic action.

After the post-war sugar boom broke in the early 1920s, American banks secured a dominant position in the sugar industry economy. By the late 1920s American interests controlled 70 per cent, of sugar production and had become the financial prop of the unpopular regime of President Machado (1925-1933). The humiliating Platt Amendment (4) and the repercussions of the 1929 crisis made anti-Americanism a main ingredient in the revolutionary movement which finally drove him from power in 1933. The revolutionary government of Grau San Martín, a university professor supported by university students, represented the radical nationalism of frustrated intellectuals, but it could rally little coherent support in the country at large. It was only to be expected that the United States would not recognise a regime which threatened nationalisation, but more significant was the hostility in Cuba itself of the two other revolutionary elements, organised labour, which was partly under Communist domination, and Batista's newly-promoted ex-sergeant officer corps.

Grau's reaction to the frustrated revolution of 1933 was to organise the nearest thing to a mass party in Cuban politics since Martí's P.R.C. Adopting the same name (although popularly known as the Autenticos) this party deliberately appealed more widely than to a specifically middle sector audience. But even so, Batista's power condemned him to 10 years of opposition. Ruling first through a succession of puppet presidents, and from 1940 to 1944 as president himself, Batista, supported by United States business interests, a pampered army and a tamed labour movement, could afford to ignore Grau whose potential nationalist support had been siphoned off by the Cubanisation law of 1933 (which compelled firms to employ 50 per cent. Cuban personnel), by the abrogation of the Platt Amendment in 1934 as part of Roosevelt's Good Neighbour policy, by the desperation of terrorist groups, like Guiteras' Joven Cuba which had been caught up in the mystique of violence, and by Batista's own brand of popular nationalism.

If Cuban reformers were frustrated during the 1934-40 period, at least this could be explained in terms of Batista's corporate-style dictatorship. After 1944, when the Autenticos were in power, explanations were more difficult. Why did a revolutionary party fail to implement the neo-Socialist constitution of 1940 introduced by Batista, under left wing pressure as the Communists have claimed, in order to revive his waning popularity? Grau's failure to break the pattern of corruption, and even his extension of it into the labour movement in an effort to smash the Communist hold on the unions, discredited his party and led, in 1947, to the formation of a splinter party, the Ortodoxos. This now became the repository of revolutionary virtue and the refuge of yet another rootless younger generation. Although the Communists had attracted intellectuals of the calibre of Marinello, few were prepared to accept that particular type of discipline which, in the 1930s, demanded working agreements with Batista in preference to the democratic Left (5).

The failure of the Autenticos reflected the personalities of its leaders, the whittling down of radical programmes through a need for working alliances in Congress, failure to stem graft and internal factionalism. It was a disaster for Cuba because it widened the sphere of corruption, further divided the middle sectors in the splintering of both Autenticos and Ortodoxos after 1952, and bred a cynicism about the abilities of Cubans to make democracy work. Except in the light of this failure of the democratic Left, Castro's revolution and his own political thinking make little sense.

***

Throughout the frustrating 1930s and 1940s the Martí cult gathered adherents, although an ambivalent attitude towards his writings reflected the divisions within the middle sectors where his popularity was greatest. The cult betrayed many of the characteristics of a sect mentality, providing a psychological compensation for a middle class lacking both power and faith in its own ability to change a society corrupted by United States influences. It provided a flight into a world of fantasy where, in the style of Rodo's Ariel, Cuban spirituality was contrasted with United States materialism and greed. But Martí's message became smothered in a torrent of words from those seeking a justification for present policies or a solace for past failures. Never was this more evident than in 1953, Martí's centenary and the first year of Batista's dictatorship, when over 500 articles on Martí were published. In contrast, there were those like Castro, to whom Martí was primarily a man of action, and for whom the cult provided not only the utopian vision behind the revolutionary movement but also a sense of continuity with the past and thus a means of identification with the heroic period of Cuba's history.

Castro's thinking has often been expressed in generalised Martían terms while Communism has implied a discipline which was neither in keeping with his need for self-dramatisation nor easy to reconcile with his earlier mode of thought. The relationship between Martí's Cuba-oriented humanism and Castro's Marxist-Leninism has not, so far, been widely recognised; but, in interpreting the dialogue between nationalism and Communism, it would be unwise to underemphasise the emotional links which bind pupil to master which are recalled by the revolutionary slogan De Jose a Fidel '. Castro sees himself as a disciple who undertakes the second liberation of Latin America which the Apostle' had preached (6).

'I carry in my heart the teachings of the Master', he said in his History will absolve me ' speech of 1953, in which he also described Martí as the 'instigator of the 26th July'. The Communist condemnation of the Sierra Maestra rising as bourgeois romanticism was a just comment on the way in which Castro saw himself as a romantic hero figure in the Martí idiom. Even the landing from the Granma on an isolated part of the south coast of Oriente was a replica of Martí's landing in 1895. Castro cast himself in a role inspired by Martí's belief in the supreme importance of the individual leader. 'A man does not make a nation', Martí had written, 'but the nation at times may find its vibrant triumphant incarnation in a Man' and again 'Such leaders must be held sacred and the errors they commit forgiven them '. The role of the lider maximo has been sanctified by Cuban tradition, and much of Castro's genius lies in the skill with which he plays on the patron relationship, in which a sense of kinship is built up between the leader and his dependents.

If Martí's cult of the hero appealed to the histrionic side of Castro's personality, the vagueness and ambiguity of Martían ideology suited him for political reasons. Unlike his predecessor, Castro had built up no party in exile, his contacts in Cuba were tenuous and, although he might see himself as the chosen leader, he had been chosen by no one except a handful of immediate followers. It was therefore necessary for him to cast his programme in broad general terms, and he underplayed ideas of radical socialisation in order not to antagonise those potential supporters whose opposition to Batista was primarily political. An ideology of class harmony rather than class conflict was a tactical necessity. This does not mean that Castro was a concealed Marxist. In March 1962 he described his position in 1954 as that of a young man who was being guided towards Marxism and who was beginning to act as a Marxist '. But however much he may now think of himself as a Marxist, or rely on Marxists like Guevara, his is in fact a personalised version of Marxism in which echoes of his Martí affiliations are never far away.

Martí's social ideas were permeated by a mystical sense of unity, a secularised version of Christian love, which found one expression in his passionate feeling for the poor, and which embraced the ex-slaves whom he carefully drew into his revolutionary party. There should be complete racial equality in the new society. 'There is no racial problem', he wrote, 'because there are no races, only humanity'. He was, no less, a social romantic, stressing class harmony; the basic conflict was not between classes or races but between good and evil in which personal redemption could be found through self-sacrifice for the patria. Outside the patria true morality was impossible. Echoes of this Martían view are heard in Castro's often reiterated concept of 'the honest man', and his division of people into the selfish and the selfless, the exploiters and the exploited. The Revolution poses a stark moral choice-those who are against it are immoral and are so through self-interest. Freedom, in this view, seems to lie not so much in obedience to the Marxist laws of necessity as to the moral imperatives of Martí's secular religion. The moral fervour of the revolution was, and in many ways still is, Martian rather than Marxist in origin.

The idea of Cuba's messianic mission to liberate Latin America from the imperialist yoke ' also has Martían rather than Marxist antecedents. Central to Martí's conception of nationalism was the idea that suffering exalts and purifies. Cuba's suffering during the Wars of Independence gave her a pre-emptive right to moral leadership in the struggle against foreign domination. His thought transcended a narrow Cubanism. 'In Cuba', he wrote, in words which are frequently repeated today, 'we are fighting not for the good of the island but to safeguard the independence of all Latin America by safeguarding our own'. He called Hispanic America back to the sense of common destiny which had been lost in the caudillismo and the chaotic early years of independence. He revived Bolivar's conception of a united Hispanic America as a counter to the United States' version of Pan-Americanism, which he saw, as many Latin Americans still do, as a sham designed to preserve artificial divisions which had been perpetuated by landowning oligarchies. When Cuba is described as 'una provincia de la madre patria de America Latina' the implication is that no Cuban action in Latin America can be termed interference because there are no real frontiers, only those which mark the boundaries of private fiefs created by landowning oligarchs who have betrayed the continent's destiny. Or, as Martí saw it, In America there are two countries and no more than two, with a very different soul because of their origin, background and customs, and only alike in their fundamental human identity'.

Castro's complete repudiation of the United States cannot be explained away as the result of pique or even of rational calculation. His anti-imperialism, imbibed from Martí, is directed against a suffocating spiritual patronage as well as against economic tutelage. The fact that Cuban culture has lacked the resilience to resist Americanisation has only added force to the impulse to assert a new distinctiveness, and towards a breach with the United States.

The unsystematic nature of Martí's thought has made it easy for the Castro regime, by careful selection, to cite him as its precursor. His views on education, economics, the Church and the destiny of Latin America can be used to justify the revolution's changing programme-as in the 1961 campaign aganst illiteracy. But those of his maxims chosen as propaganda are often an uneasy mixture of platitude and profundity. However, his influence is implicit in Castro's conception of politics as a duty and as a national regenerating force, rather than as the satisfaction of particularist needs or the conciliation of opposed interests.

Castro has sought to re-create the lost paradise of Martí's populist myth. 'Of all the pages in the history of Cuba', he wrote from prison, 'perhaps those I must admire are not so much those about the exploits of the battlefields as those which deal with that gigantic task, heroic and silent, of uniting Cubans for the struggle'. His refusal to return to 'a permissive society' may be explained by a fear that it would only have led to factionalism, and to a weakening in the face of the United States. The concept of the nation in arms sustained the long struggle against Batista as it must also sustain that against the United States. Those who opposed Castro from 1959 onwards were, in his eyes, opposing the embodiment of the Martían ideal of a unified nation.

Communists are experts at adopting dead heroes of national liberation movements for their own, as may be seen from the cult in Cuba of the Nicaraguan patriot Sandino and of Martí's contemporary, the mulatto general Maceo (7). Martí himself has been no exception: his works have long been known in Russia, and even Peking has celebrated a 'Martí day'. In Cuba he is still useful to the regime in spite of the official adoption of Marxist-Leninism (8). He can be used to emphasise the Cubanidad of the Revolution. In 1959, as in 1898, Cuba had no class strong enough economically to push through a nationalist revolution. On both occasions it was necessary for a foreign Power to underwrite the new regimes. Martí is the means by which Cubans can retain their national pride; equally his universalism, his Mazzinian emphasis on humanity enables them to equate their own struggles with those of all countries which have suffered from imperialist exploitation. His advocacy of armed revolt, and his rejection, in the 1890s, of the view that parliamentary activity through the Autonomist party would be the best preparation for independence, provides a reputable ancestry for the thesis, most forcefully expressed by Guevara, and shared by Peking, that the only way for revolution to succeed in Latin America is by armed insurrection on a Maoist-Cuban model. The mambises of the 1890s are the precursors of the barbudos of the 1950s and the prototypes of the Latin American guerilla.

***

Persuasive though the Cuban thesis may be in the context of Latin American social structures, Cuba's revolution, like her history, is sui generis. It provides an inspiration to Latin American radicals, but it is less clear that it provides a model. If the roots of Cuban nationalism were different from those of the nationalisms of the mainland, so, too, is Cuba unaffected by many of the contemporary problems of the other republics. Compared with much of continental Latin America, the island has an equable climate with neither the difficulties of altitude nor semi-desert. It has no Indian problem; its negro population is extrovert and easier to assimilate than Indians with their distinctive cultures and often different languages. It is 60 per cent. urbanised, with its economy entirely dependent on Eastern-bloc aid. Even before 1961 it was fourth among the countries of Latin America in the number of literates and third in the number of students receiving higher education. Uneven development, not underdevelopment, has been the cause of its social tensions.

Variations between the countries on the mainland are so great that no single revolutionary theory can apply to all. Yet it may well be that the determining factor in the Cuban revolution will be the same in future revolutions elsewhere in Latin America-the active student element within its disorganised and divided middle sectors. Success in Cuba has largely depended on the capacity of deraciné middle sector students to provide revolutionary leadership, and to canalise incoherent mass peasant discontent. Interpretations of the Cuban Revolution often overlook what perhaps will come to be seen as its most striking feature-that it was a revolution between generations. Where the radical nationalist movements of the 1930s failed to draw youthful energies away from negative terrorism, Castro succeeded in concentrating them in positive revolutionary action. The future of Castroism on the mainland may depend on failure or success in harnessing this potential revolutionary force.

The ease with which a nationalist movement has slipped into a Communist-style regime is explained by the way in which Cuban nationalist ideology has been capable of adaptation to the needs of current Communist policy. But it would be unwise, for that reason, to assume that Castro's Communism bears a close resemblance to any other variety. Perhaps the current disagreements between Moscow and Peking may give Castro the wider room he needs for manoeuvre if he is to maintain himself in power.

Revolutions nowadays are too often interpreted solely in terms of how they affect the two rival blocs but, in this age of nuclear stalemate, ideological factors may assume greater importance and, to understand these in Latin America, the deeper roots of nationalist attitudes will have to be uncovered. Revolutions are sustained by utopian visions; without these they are but rebellions. The visions may be those of nationalist mythologies or socialist ideologies. It is the unusual interweaving of such threads which has given Castro's Revolution its unique texture.

Alistair Hennessy is former Professor of History and founding Director of the Centre of Caribbean Studies at Warwick University, UK . He is author of numerous publications on Cuba and Latin America.

This article was originally published in International Affairs Vol. 39, No. 3 (July 1963) pp 345-359 and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, UK.