The long night of dark intent

Since age six, I have asked why and how heroes become villains and why and how the Cuban revolution was betrayed. Not long thereafter, I also began asking why and how Castro remained in power and why and how scoundrels are often viewed as heroes by Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream press. The ultimate query soon took over: What and when would a post-Castro Cuba be. The Long Night of Dark Intent, 47 articles and essays by Irving Louis Horowitz, provides a factual and analytic presentation of probable answers. Robert Frost’s “night of dark intent” is indeed long in Horowitz’s book. After all, Castro’s dictatorship has already lasted more than fifty years, outliving the enmity of ten American presidents and surviving the fall of the USSR. To fathom its dark intent, Horowitz aims not to lose sight of pre-1959 Cuba and “to place in perspective the internal lack of opposition and the external support for the Castro family and its entourage.” Only a sociologist and political scientist in “passionate pursuit of the real” (Czeslaw Milosz’s definition of poetry) would have chosen such a poetic title. Asserting that much of Latin America’s contemporary history has been shaped by the Castro Revolution, Horowitz embarks on an analysis of sociological, military, economic, cultural, and political aspects of this intricate historical (and sometimes legendary) Cuban mosaic. He intertwines facts and observations and achieves balance by organizing his Long Night chronologically in five sections—“Guerrilla Dictatorship” in the 1960s, “Consolidation of Communism” in the 1970s, “Militarization of the Regime” in the 1980s, “Regionalization and Retreat” in the 1990s, and “Dissolution of Political Power” in the 2000s. It may appear overwhelming, but this scholar has spent some forty years lucidly aware of the Cuban phenomenon. Like Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, to whose memory the book is dedicated, Horowitz once stood faithfully in leftist zones of a political spectrum which is too often eager to blame America first for Castro’s crimes. If the United States was a threatening Goliath, Castro starred as David. Despite efforts to delegitimize Horowitz’s independent outlook, he is rightly regarded as a dean of Cuban studies. This is so because Horowitz exemplifies Raymond Aron’s realization that even though objectivity might be impossible for the human species, fairness is not. Indeed the latter can be attained by making rigorous distinctions and comparisons and by concretely defining terms. The Long Night of Dark Intent, as well as the eleven editions of Horowitz’s Cuban Communism, the three most recent co-edited with Jaime Suchlicki, illustrate this point. Essays throughout The Long Night’s first four sections, which mark decades that appear long past but not completely gone, prove that Horowitz saw far ahead and was often right. For example, in “The Stalinization of Fidel Castro” (1965), he already identified Castro’s Cuba as a one-party state “subordinated to the Party Leader.” Horowitz points out that “[t]he steady rise of police informants and a street-by-street spy system” are “an augury of things to come.” As if that were not a sufficient forecast, he writes, “A special characteristic of Castro is his growing reliance on nepotism, on familial contacts as political leaders. The steady rise in position of his brother Raul Castro...serve[s] to surround Fidel with non-threatening figures...and to bypass the only stable party apparatus remaining in the Soc (2009) 46:369–371 DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9216-7