12
12
ant
i-Castro leaflets.  Fidel's officials said that the plane had
machine-gunned the city.  One of Fidel's top revolutionary fighters
resigned his post in disgust over the pro-Communist direction things
were taking.  Fidel had him arrested and committed to a 20-year prison
term.  Fidel gathered a crowd of a million Cubans in Havana and
announced that these new gestures had been part of a massive
counter-revolutionary plot engineered by the fiendish Americans.  The
answer?  The creation of massive militias, the restoration of the death
penalty, and the reinstatement of "revolutionary tribunals" to ferret out
conspirators and send them to a string of concentration camps.
The ultimate result of these measures, of course, was to help
Fidel banish the old ideal of democracy and to move the country firmly
into the grip of the one man capable of "defending" it from its hulking
enemy to the north.17
Later, America played into Fidel's hands by plotting Castro's
assassination and launching the pathetically bungled invasion of the
Bay of Pigs.  These U.S. maneuvers provided the Maximum Leader
with an indispensable political tool.  If people complained about the
food shortages the Castro government had brought, if they were
disturbed by the crippling of the sugar industry or noticed the virtual
elimination, through incompetence, of the beef industry, Castro could
blame the problems on  America.
As Fidel often confided, there was one extremely useful device
for "keeping the spirit of revolution alive."  That tool: an external
enemy.18
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