The Inevitable Meets an Iron Fist in Cuba

After more than 30 years, Fidel Castro’s decrepit regime in Cuba is coming unglued. Perestroika is flexing its muscles in Havana despite Castro’s efforts to keep the revolution in a straitjacket. The thrust toward change is so strong that a purge has been necessary just to delay what is inevitable.

This seems to be the real point of the Stalinist show trial that ended last week with Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez facing a possible death sentence for “treason.” That was followed by the sacking of Gen. Jose Abrantes Fernandez, the interior minister. The whole affair is a cover for crushing a diffuse movement for change in a society that Castro wants to keep among the most closed and reactionary in the world.

Ochoa is the most celebrated officer in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces today. He earned the status of hero during 25 years of Cuban military operations in Venezuela, Ethiopia, Angola and Nicaragua.

Ochoa probably has been mixed up in the drug trade, and in gun-running as well, for the two go hand in hand in the Third World today. Nicaraguan intelligence suggested as much when Ochoa was stationed in Managua in the mid-1980s.

But anyone who thinks that Ochoa ran the drug trade through Cuba from bases in Angola and Nicaragua, or that Castro wouldn’t have known about it, would buy the Brooklyn Bridge for a dollar. Ochoa has long been close to both Fidel and his brother Raul, and if he was dealing drugs it was with their blessing. In fact, Ochoa, a flexible, non-ideological officer, has been close enough to Fidel to be quite outspoken with him. That can be dangerous, as Cuban military leaders have known since 1959 when Huber Matos was sentenced to 20 years for quietly opposing Castro’s politics.

There are several overlapping issues here:

--Castro’s promotion of the drug trade as a way to attack the United States, and the use of Ochoa in part because of his loyalty.

--The increasing international recognition of Cuba’s ties to the drug world, which prompted Castro to make a dramatic denouncement of Cubans in the drug trade--thus admitting Cuba’s involvement while washing his own hands of any responsibility.

--A Stalinist purge of a potential threat to Castro’s almost absolute power that was incubating within the nation’s most powerful institution, the Revolutionary Armed Forces. This is the bottom line. Everything else is marginal. If Castro had not felt vulnerable, Ochoa would still be a hero of the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban drug trade would be moving along as usual.

The differences between Castro and other Cuban leaders that provoked the purge have been brewing for years, and for several reasons--above all, the economy.

Cuba’s economic position in Latin America has declined dramatically during Castro’s 30-year tenure, as the Maximum Leader himself has admitted, yet he arrogantly refuses to learn anything from the experience of the rest of the communist world--never mind from the non-communist world--even when Mikhail S. Gorbachev is his teacher. And many Cubans have long been upset by Castro’s emphasis on internationalism, particularly his Angolan “Vietnam.”

The dissidents may even have the silent blessing of the Soviet Union, for Gorbachev is fed up with pumping billions every year into Cuba’s economic black hole and getting little but ideological lip from Castro in return. But Moscow must be careful, for it would get a lot of mud on its face in the Third World if its support for a coup became known.

The dissidents, though little organized, seem drawn to some members of the military for several reasons, among them the fact that most top officers--Ochoa among them--have close intellectual ties to the Soviet Union. Like Gorbachev, many are flexible in their thinking and see the desperate need for economic reforms.

Castro voiced his fears of trouble within the military indirectly last December when he said: “No force of any kind, either external or internal (emphasis ours) . . . can stop our victorious and definitive march to the future.” He just happened to be speaking on the anniversary of the founding of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Rafael del Pino, a Cuban general who defected to the United States two years ago, told of a “nationalist” element in the army; he says that the purge is intended to wipe out some critics and scare others.

Plotting to remove Castro, or even leaning on him, can be extremely risky, as Ochoa may have discovered. Internal security is tight and Castro still commands the loyalty of many. In fact, Ochoa may have had no precise plans; it may have been enough that he merely appeared to be a likely future rallying point for the accumulating dissent.

So Fidel Castro will remain the Maximum Leader in Cuba for a while longer. But his determination to march Cuba forever down the same rutted road will require his doing so over the bodies of increasing numbers of his former supporters and the Cuban people.