Fidel’s Ethics of Violence

The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro

By Dayan Jayatilleka

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Dayan Jayatilleka
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2696-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii,
Preface, ix,
PART I: BACKGROUND,
Introduction, 3,
1 The Ethics of Violence, 13,
2 Comparative Historical Perspective, 27,
PART II: HISTORY OF FIDELISMO AS ETHOS,
Introduction, 63,
3 Evolution of Castro’s Ethics of Liberation, 64,
4 Defending the Revolutionary Regime, 92,
PART III: ANALYSIS,
Introduction, 115,
5 The Moral High Ground, 116,
PART IV: REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSION,
Introduction, 165,
6 The Achievement of Synthesis, 166,
7 The Contemporary Relevance of Castro, 183,
A Personal Postscript, 197,
Notes to the Text, 201,
Select Bibliography, 223,
Index, 226,

CHAPTER 1

The Ethics of Violence

This chapter introduces the question of violence and pacifism as modes of resolving conflict; criticises that dichotomy; and suggests a third way or synthesis, namely, the correct use of violence. It charts the limits of relevance of ‘really existing’ just war theory. It discusses the lacunae in radical and Marxian thought. It locates Fidel Castro’s ideas on violence against the backdrop of the perspectives on violence both in just war theory and the discourse of armed rebellion, and suggests that the gaps in these traditions are filled by Castro. It concludes with reference to the debate between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre as a discussion relevant and proximate to an evaluation of Castro’s specific contribution.

THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE

One of humanity’s oldest-recorded political thinkers, Kautilya (also known as Chanakya) unambiguously defined in the Arthashastra the central problem of philosophy as the good and bad use of force: ‘One should study philosophy because … above all it teaches one the distinction between good and bad use of force.’

There are two axes of demarcation within political practice involving resistance, rebellion or rulership: one between violent and non-violent perspectives of struggle, and the other between differing perspectives of violent struggle. In philosophical terms the division is tripartite: between those who say violence is wrong, those who say it is right if it serves a just cause or end, and those who believe that while a just cause and end are necessary conditions, the means adopted too must be ethical.

As long as there is a perception of injustice and oppression, there is the likelihood (some would argue, possibility) of its antipode: resistance, rebellion, revolt. But what will be the spirit of such rebellion, the sensibility of the rebels and revolutionists? In a demarcation that translates into the same as that set out here, Gail M. Presbey, a Fanon scholar, argues that there are three main perspectives on violence, exemplified by Gandhi, Fanon and Mandela. Gandhi was opposed to violence, Fanon stood for the liberating violence of the oppressed, while Mandela coupled non-violence with the limited use of violence. However, while Mandela may be presented as treading the middle path, in the study undertaken here it is Castro who is identified as effecting the synthesis between the contradictory perspectives of the non-use and the unlimited use of violence in the cause of resistance and emancipation.

The argument underlying the first perspective, that of pacifism/ Gandhianism, is fairly simple, which does not mean it is invalid. It is that violent means cannot but entail moral corruption, and that the risk, both spiritual and strategic, outweighs the possible gains. Violence is morally wrong because the taking of life is wrong and would corrupt the soul while brutalising society. It is also strategically unwise because it may set off an avalanche of violent repression that would either bury the struggle or necessitate an escalation of counter-violence, triggering an endless ‘inflationary’ spiral. The non-violent option is also strategic: the calculus is that the tangible material and often overwhelming superiority of the oppressor in weaponry and wealth cannot be challenged by those very means and on that very terrain, but can be matched and defeated only by moral means, which by definition have to be the antithesis of the oppressor’s chosen means. In this reckoning there is an explicit or implicit identification of the moral and the non-violent. A second consideration is that victory gained by violent liberation struggle would be Pyrrhic because the society and economy inherited by the victorious struggle would have been devastated through violence. Mandela is the most prominent advocate of this neo-Gandhian variant.

The other line of demarcation runs through a more complex, contested terrain of perspectives. These perspectives fall within an overall outlook that may or may not advocate the use of violence, but accepts the use of violence as a legitimate or inevitable (and in that sense legitimate) means of struggle. This outlook and approach accepts, in the words of anti-fascist martyr and Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the burden of guilt inherent in that choice.

Within liberation literature, only Mao Ze Dong touched upon these themes. In his ‘Rules of Discipline and Points of Attention for the Peoples Liberation Army’, he set out a protocol that included the non-harming of prisoners. In his ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’, written in 1957 as a revaluation of Stalin, he elaborated his distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, where he had classified as antagonistic those contradictions that involved irreconcilable conflicts of interests and thus could not but be resolved by violence, and as non-antagonistic those that did not and therefore could and should be resolved non-violently. In this essay, Mao argued that violence should be deployed against the enemy and enemy classes but not against competitors, that is, members of the Communist party or social classes including the ‘national bourgeoisie’ that formed ‘the people’. Stalin, he said, made the cardinal error of confusing these categories and deploying violence to resolve non-antagonistic contradictions. Mao’s ideas on the right and wrong use of violence were never a recurrent theme or major motif of his thought, unlike that of Castro. Its credibility was vitiated by Mao’s resort to or permitting of precisely the categories of violence he deplored during the Cultural Revolution. Castro would, for his part and by contrast, observe these distinctions, though there is no evidence that his ideas and practice derived from a reading of Mao.

JUST WAR THEORY – THE LIMITS OF RELEVANCE

The issue of the right and wrong use of violence is central to the doctrine of ‘just war’ of Saints Ambrose, Augustine and Aquinas. However, this doctrine and its developments deal mainly with the deployment of violence by existing powers, religious establishments and states. The doctrine does not primarily pertain to the resort to war by non-state/anti-state forces or by explicitly anti-status quo-ist states. The just war tradition is preoccupied with the right use of violence by established states, by statecraft, as James Turner Johnson emphasises. Indeed, one of the three principal criteria of a just war was that it should be waged by the rightful authority, the sovereign, and one of the criteria of a just outcome was stability.

From its inception, the problematique or interrelated set of concerns of this tradition was Western, in the sense of the global North or First World, and status quo-ist. Even in its modern mutations at the hands of Michael Walzer and Michael Ignatieff, and notwithstanding tangential treatment of the conduct of insurgent movements by these two writers, just war discourse not only remains concerned with the dilemmas, ethical and policy, of liberal democratic Western states and publics, but is written from that worldview and perspective. The treatment of guerrilla movements is almost a detour. Extensive as the literature on the ethics of violence is, particularly the corpus of writing on just war, there is little evidence, if any, that it has had an impact on those leaders who actually wage war or decide to do so. This may be because such leaders tend to be influenced by the writings of, or about, others who have been actors in history, while most of the writers on the ethics of violence/just war have not actually confronted the dilemmas involved in the use or non-use of violence, and are therefore seen to have little to offer. This attitude is most pronounced among leaders of anti-state/anti-establishment struggles, coming as they do from a tradition that is dismissive of purely academic contemplation and privileges practice instead. Of the modern writers, two who, by contrast, have had authentic experience with violent political practice, and whose writings are reflections arising from that lived experience, are Bonhoeffer and Camus.

Just war theory had little in common with and no attraction for, and therefore no possibility of influencing the thinking and conduct of armed insurgents, who were left with the task of evolving such doctrines out of their own experience. Most did not. Given the remoteness of just war theory from the doctrines and practice of rebels and revolutionaries, and the lack of evidence of any influence of the former upon the latter, the present study of Fidel Castro does not engage with this body of work. That is not the universe from which Castro or this study comes, and it is not the backdrop against which it must be located.

That backdrop is the intersection of Marxism and the anti-imperialist rebellions of the global South. In his landmark text ‘The Second Declaration of Havana’, Castro identifies and demarcates the common historical experience within which his thinking was formed and must be contextualised:

What is Cuba’s history but that of Latin America? What is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa, and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the cruellest exploitation of the world by imperialism?

Jon P. Gunnemann confirms the different origins and mental universes of just war theory and Marxian radicalism respectively, arguing that they refer to two different types of revolution. The former posits a pre-existing moral community, which the revolution is striving to restore by overthrowing the authority that undermined that community by usurping power. The latter is a revolution that makes no such assumption, bases itself on social contradictions and strives to establish a just order of a new type. Just war theory assumes a moral community and a social contract, while Marxism assumes a society riven with sharp contradictions and strives to generate radical transformation, not restoration.

It would seem that the obvious starting point for an inquiry into the ethics of revolution would therefore be this tradition of natural law and the just war. But a reading of the literature on revolution and particularly the literature of the Marxist tradition (which is the revolutionary literature of the modern world) shows that any attempt to apply the categories of the just war tradition would involve a fundamental distortion of what the Marxists mean by revolution. Natural law assumes a fundamental structure to the world and human society, an overarching ‘ideal’ human community … In contrast the Marxist tradition makes no claim for the prior existence of a moral community, nor does it justify the revolutionary impulse with an appeal to an immutable moral structure. This reflects not merely a different moral viewpoint but also a very different conception of what revolution achieves. In effect, the Marxist maintains that a revolution brings into being a mode of human existence that has no precedent. The revolution is not for the purpose restoring justice in the face of a contemptible violation of God’s law, but rather to change fundamentally the relations people have with each other.

Among modern political leaders, Mao was the most identified with the theme of violence, in that revolutionary violence bulked large in his doctrine ‘all political power flows from the barrel of a gun’. Castro, however, is quite distinctive among modern political practitioners for his repeated reference to the right and wrong use of violence, as well as his combination of the practice and justification of anti-establishment armed violence with a doctrine of its right and wrong use. His ideas on the subject are therefore more likely to have an influence on the minds and policies of contemporary and future leaders and cadres of armed rebellions/resistance movements.

While just war theory contributed little or nothing to Castro, Castro may have something to contribute to just war theory and tradition. Indeed, in an atypical reference to insurgent movements, Walzer mentions the treatment of prisoners by Castro’s forces (an episode sourced in an article in the US Marine Corps Gazette, and significantly entitled ‘How Castro Won’). Walzer cites Mao’s rules of attention as regards the treatment of prisoners, but qualifies it with another quote from Mao, which seems to justify the disposal of prisoners if the liberation army could not cope with them. Castro’s rebel army is the sole insurgent movement cited by Walzer, which goes uncriticised. Yet Walzer does not develop this into a line of inquiry. It is fair to say that Castro was the only leader of an armed revolutionary movement and state to stress the distinctions between the right and wrong use of violence. He was the only practitioner to evolve something akin to a just war theory within the anti-establishment space, or to independently apply what amounted to just war theory. In doing so he has arguably made a contribution to just war theory by being the only one outside the Western liberal tradition to grapple with its concerns. Yet, insofar as the established canon of just war theory was not an explicit source of inspiration or reference in his thinking and actions, it lies outside the field of this present inquiry.

The conceptual situation identified in this chapter, in which just war theory has not recognised and encompassed anti-systemic movements, and anti-systemic movements have not developed a just war theory, leads to an undifferentiated response on the part of both states and movements.

Today the two central phenomena are on the one hand that of the sole superpower, the USA, and on the other, that of terrorism. The US tends to view all armed resistance against its policies, interests and allies as terrorist and responds to it as such, while resistance movements consider terrorism as a legitimate and in some cases the only possible form of asymmetric warfare.

How then does Kautilya’s idea of the correct and incorrect use of force apply to armed anti-systemic leaderships/movements, and how is it applied (consciously or not) by such leaderships? Is it possible to differentiate between the correct and incorrect use of violence by armed movements, revolutionary and national liberation, in the post-war period and more especially the period of contemporary history in the global South (the so-called Third World or Tricontinental areas)?

This study deploys a fourfold identification of ‘the bad use’ of violence: (a) terrorism, understood as the deliberate targeting of unarmed, non-combatant civilians; (b) the torture and arbitrary execution of prisoners; (c) internal killings, that is, executions within the organisation; and (d) the use of lethal violence against political competitors within the broad anti-systemic movement/space. The correct use of violence is understood to be the avoidance of these target categories within the theory and practice of violence, not necessarily limiting the use of violence to a means of secondary importance, as a tactic (as did Mandela). Castro opted for sustained organised armed violence, war, as a politico-military strategy for the achievement of the cause and objectives he represented.

The study will argue that Castro illustrates the correct or good use of violence, which in turn leads to the accretion of moral and ethical hegemony in the Gramscian sense:

Here we are dealing with a subaltern group, which is prevented by this theory from ever becoming dominant, or from developing beyond the economic-corporate stage and rising to the phase of ethical-political hegemony in civil society, and of domination in the State. … Though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. … An analysis of the balance of forces – at all levels – can only culminate in the sphere of hegemony and ethico-political relations. [1933–34; first version, 1930–32]

Castro shows that one may arrive at what Nietzsche termed, in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘a typology of morals’ (emphasis in original) within the space of politico-military resistance and rebellion; a typology that has Castro at one corner and Bin Laden at the other. This point is taken up in the concluding chapter.

Unfortunately, within the radical and Marxian tradition in which Castro must be situated, there is for the most part a silence concerning the correct use of violence. The assumption tends to be that the violence of the oppressor is so endemic and the cause of liberation and the end of a better social order so intrinsically just that no further criteria except strategic and tactical ones, that is, no further moral criteria, are needed for the use of violence. Paul Hollander identifies the lacuna in question in the following way:

The single most important factor that enables the individual to retain radical leftist (or other radical) beliefs is the capacity to dissociate ends from means … Such a capacity rests on what Arthur Koestler called ‘the doctrine of unshakeable foundations’ – the overwhelming, superior moral importance attributed to the ends. …

(Continues…)Excerpted from Fidel’s Ethics of Violence by Dayan Jayatilleka. Copyright © 2007 Dayan Jayatilleka. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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