THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
19
as well as learned opinion. The second reason for our failure is
perhaps even more serious because it obviously concerns a failing
of the revolution itself and of the whole ensuing history of the
country-i.e., the inability to solve the race question.
Let me point in conclusion to the last two major revolutions-–
the Hungarian Revolution, so quickly and so brutally crushed by
Russia, and the Cuban Revolution which has fallen under Russian
influence. After the American Revolution, the Hungarian Revolu–
tion was the first I know of in which the question of bread, of
poverty, of the order of society, played no role whatsoever; it was
entirely political in the sense that the people fought for nothing but
freedom, and that their chief concern was the form the new govern–
ment should assume. None of the participant groups or men-and
they included practically the whole population- even thought of
undoing the profound social change which the Communist regime had
effected in the country. It was precisely the social conditions which
everyone took for granted- just as, in vastly different circumstances,
the men of the American Revolution had taken for granted the
social and economic conditions of the people. Obviously, the Cuban
Revolution offers the opposite example; up to now, it has run true to
the course of the French Revolution, and for this very reason has
fallen so easily under the sway of Bolshevism.
If
I reflect on our
attitude toward these two recent revolutions, it seems to me that
whatever we did, or rather did not do, during the Hungarian crisis–
right or wrong-was based upon considerations of power politics
but not upon a failure to understand what the whole business was
all about. In the case of the Cuban Revolution, however, so much
closer to us geographically, and yet apparently so much farther re–
moved from our sphere of comprehension, our behavior, I think,
demonstrates that we have not understood what it means when a
poverty-stricken people in a backward country where corruption has
been rampant for a very long time is suddenly released from the
obscurity of their farms and houses, permitted to show their misery
and invited into the streets of the country's capital they never saw
before. The mistake of the Cuban adventure did not lie so much
in wrong information as in a conspicuous inability to comprehend
the revolutionary spirit, to grasp what it means when
les malheureux
have come into the open and are told: All this is yours, there are
