Uruguay in the geopolitics of communist revolutionary exportation. A web woven from Havana to Prague that ensnared an unprotected democracy.
OPERATION MANUEL
It is widely believed that deep differences existed between the Soviets and the Cubans, particularly because the Soviet Union was supposedly opposed to exporting revolution across Latin America in the manner promoted by Fidel Castro.
The writer, diplomat, and current director of Argentina’s National Intelligence School, Juan Bautista Yofre, challenges this assumption.
On the contrary, he argues that the 21st Congress of the Communist Party, held in early 1959, had already outlined a strategy that would later be formally approved within the framework of OLAS.
In his detailed work Fue Cuba, Yofre cites as a source the Madrid-based newspaper ABC, dated June 21, 1960.
In that edition, the newspaper stated:
“The headquarters of this gigantic operation is located in the Soviet embassy in Uruguay.”
What did the newspaper mean by “this gigantic operation”?
And why Uruguay?
According to a report by the head of the Czechoslovak intelligence service, Uruguay was considered an appropriate country from which to conduct the struggle against the main enemy, and its population was convinced that the United States was responsible for the deterioration of the country’s economic situation.
In addition, Uruguay offered full freedom to publish and disseminate propaganda to other countries in the region.
Finally, the report noted the presence of numerous refugees coming from “dictatorial regimes”.
Curiously, the intelligence officer did not include communist countries within that category.
The Spanish newspaper was referring specifically to what became known as Operation Manuel, a coordinated effort between Cuban intelligence and the Czechoslovak StB, through which Prague’s services assisted in transferring trained militants from Cuba to various countries across Hispanic America.
During the 1960s, approximately one thousand individuals were transported through Prague.
The passage through the Czechoslovak capital was intended to erase the Cuban trail.
Participants departed the island equipped with false documentation and military training.
At the same time, Czech intelligence services obtained valuable information provided by the individuals being transferred.
According to these same documents, Moscow was not in agreement with Castro’s policy of revolutionary exportation.
Sustaining the Cuban regime outside the laws of the market entailed a high financial cost, and the creation of additional “Cubas” throughout the region would only increase that burden.
The Soviet Union may not have agreed, but it proceeded nonetheless.
As a result, the Czechoslovaks were required to accept two contradictory positions at once: to disagree and to carry it out anyway.
No one in Czechoslovakia at the time imagined that all this information, considered absolutely secret, would one day be exposed.
As an example, one may cite the case of a Uruguayan citizen who, in July 1965, after undergoing twelve days of training in Cuba, traveled the Prague–Uruguay route.
His name was Jaime Collazo Odriozola.
Residing in Mexico since 1983, he became a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, which in 1998 published his work Fidel Castro Ruz and Revolutionary Cuba: A Simultaneous Deterioration.
In that text, Collazo offers an ambiguous analysis of the Cuban model’s failure, ultimately romanticizing the supposed achievements of the revolution and, more troubling still, presenting them as a goal to be surpassed by those willing to follow the same path.
He died recently in Mexico at the age of 83, without having recanted his actions or his writings.