Castro and the Caudillo.

• Author: Horowitz, Irving Louis
• Position: Rocky Shoals of Reform - Fidel Castro, authoritarian political-military leader - Essay

ONE OF the singular moments in a dictatorship is its end point. And for Fidel Castro and Francisco Franco those points converge revealingly--indicating a possible future for Cuba after its leader's demise. True, there are some notable differences, but ultimately their fates, or more specifically that of Francoism and Castroism, will more than likely prove that the issue is less when each leader dies physically, so much as when their ideologies perish politically.

The Convergence

IN HIS day, Franco was heralded as the dictator who had held power for the longest time period: nearly forty years. Castro is coming hard upon fifty, years of rule. Both dictators assumed power after a preliminary period of armed struggle with a domestic enemy: Franco from 1936 to 1939, fighting against Juan Negrin Lopez and the Popular Front; and Castro from 1956 to 1959, combating Fulgencio Batista and his Military Front.

Castro followed the trail blazed by Franco in the consolidation of power--the elimination of political opposition, the institutionalization of single-party rule, a repressive police system that created a groundswell of exile life when possible and prison life when unavoidable, and a cult of personality for maximum leadership. Castro fused government and political functions to a much greater extent than did Franco; yet, five years after coming to power, Franco combined the positions of head of state, prime minister and leader of the Falangist movement--and enjoyed sovereign legislative authority. to boot.

Both Franco in the 1930s and Castro in the 1960s needed foreign allies. In 1939 Franco's Spain courted the pro-fascist Axis powers. And by 1961, Castro's Cuba had become openly aligned with the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership did not much care for Castro, and the Nazi regime likewise took a dislike to Franco, but in both cases such antipathy had little bearing on the global scheme of policy decisions.

Economically, both Franco and Castro feared a free-market system and were dedicated to the principles of a command economy. They embraced national economic self-sufficiency, and both Falangism and Communism preached the idea of an organized working class.

Franco was remarkably adroit at fusing the working class into a common trade-union front, while nationalizing production and setting price controls for all goods. He allowed some entrepreneurial activities, but only as a mechanism to support the totalitarian state. Indeed, being a far larger and more powerful nation with diversified resources, Spain could better implement a command economy than could Cuba.

The Divergence

FOR ALL of these similarities-and their significance to be noted below--the differences between the two dictators must also be duly noted because the comparison can provide important clues about Cuba's post-Castro direction. Whether it is a function of the orthodox military background of Franco, as opposed to the legal and guerrilla background of Fidel, is difficult to say, but clearly Castro wins the medal for sheer fanaticism.

The Franco regime maintained manifest neutrality even as the Nazi-Fascist Axis appeared to be winning. And later, as the Allied victories mounted, the ideological tone of the regime was muted. Franco became involved in a series of postwar diplomatic maneuvers aimed at restoring a sense of participation in the Western cultural milieu, and, significantly, displayed his ideological temperance through his succession plans--in direct contrast to Falangist suspicions of an empowered monarchy with...