The social and political reforms had a deceptive effect. Consumption figures shot up as unemployment fell away and people suddenly had more money in their pockets; the poor, in particular, could afford to eat better food and live in better accommodation. But it was an illusory boom, where the greater purchasing power was not covered by increased output and a higher GDP. Eventually, demand could no longer be met and no longer be financed by credit; indeed, productivity actually declined in all sectors of the economy, as a result of too little work and too little investment. More goods – especially food products – needed to be imported again, but for that too money was running short. Since the last thing Castro wanted was to go cap in hand to the United States, he traveled as early as January 21, 1959, to Venezuela to request a 300 million dollar loan from President Rómulo Betancourt. But it was in vain – as were other early attempts to borrow money abroad.
Castro’s conservative opponents eventually picked up on the unease in his own 26th of July Movement at the infiltration of all public institutions by the Communists. Pointing to the leaders of the revolution, they charged that the olive-green uniforms were like water melons: green on the outside, red on the inside. The prototype was allegedly Rául Castro, who was responsible for restructuring the old army and integrating it into the “Revolutionary Armed Forces.”
Raúl, unlike his elder brother, did not enjoy enormous popularity: he was not a tribune of the people. Rather, he was seen as the “Stalinist” among the revolutionary leaders, narrow-minded and hence uncompromising and inflexible, nicknamed long ago el casquito, or the “little helmet.” This was certainly a hasty judgment, however, as his unprepossessing exterior and often awkward manner concealed a personality with a great flair for organization and an iron discipline. Together with Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, he helped the Communists systematically to occupy key positions in the security apparatus, the government, the INRA, and the labor organizations. Partly with Fidel’s approval, partly at his instigation, once-close friends and allies were relentlessly sidelined or removed from their posts on the grounds that they were too bourgeois – people like foreign minister Agramonte and four other cabinet ministers who were replaced in June 1959.
President Urrutia’s turn came in July. After opposing and delaying more and more laws that broke the ostensible bourgeoisliberal consensus, he one day appeared on television to express his discontent over the growing influence of people from the PSP. This spelled the end of his presidency. In a televized speech, Castro angrily accused Urrutia of fabricating a “Communist legend” and of being “on the borderline of betrayal,” and then, in a theatrical gesture on July 16, he announced that he was resigning as prime minister. This had the intended effect: countrywide protests and a mass rally in front of the presidential palace called for Castro’s return and the removal of Urrutia. Dressed as a milkman, the humiliated president took refuge in the Venezuelan embassy and later went into exile. His successor was another cabinet member known for toeing the party line, Osvaldo Dorticós, who had previously been responsible for revolutionary legislation. (Dorticós kept the job until 1976, when Castro himself took over as Cuban president.) On July 26, in a speech commemorating the attack on the Moncada Barracks, Castro seemed content as he announced his return to the office of prime minister.
The signs of opposition continued, however, and eventually appeared in the ranks of the army. On October 19, two days after Raúl Castro was appointed head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Ministry (MINFAR), the influential military commander of Camagüey Province, Huber Matos, a former comrade of Castro’s in the Orthodox Party and a popular hero of the struggle in the Sierra Maestra, handed in an application to resign. This letter – which he significantly sent to Fidel, not to his immediate superior, Raúl – complained about Communist infiltration of the rebel army. It was an affront to Raúl’s ideological orientation, and Fidel was quite beside himself. Suspecting a conspiracy, he sped down to Camagüey and ordered the arrest of Matos, together with 40 other officers who evidently shared his views. In a show trial, Matos was subsequently found guilty of “betraying the revolution” and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Raúl Castro even wanted to have him shot, despite his great services to the revolution, but Fidel refused this after Che Guevara quipped: “I guess we’ll have to shoot the lot of them.”39
By the autumn of 1959 Castro – together with his brother Raúl, Che Guevara, and the popular favorite Camilo Cienfuegos – had consolidated his position as sole ruler of the country. No longer dependent upon tactical alliances with wavering liberals, he had filled nearly all key posts in the state and the security apparatus with people trusted by himself or Raúl. On November 25, to the horror of the financial world, he appointed Che Guevara, a man without any expert knowledge of economic policy, as director of the Cuban central bank, after the reputed former head, Felipe Pazos, had fallen out of favor for trying to help Matos after his arrest. One of Guevara’s first actions was to sell the Cuban gold reserves in Fort Knox and send the money to various Swiss and Canadian banks, so that Washington would not be able to get its hands on it if relations took a turn for the worse.
Camilo Cienfuegos, the fourth man in the quartet, was not to remain there much longer. Having been entrusted by Castro to take over Matos’s military command in Camagüey, he disappeared on the evening of October 28 as he was on his way to Havana for a meeting with the leader of the revolution; his Cessna 310 aircraft, said to have been flown by an inexperienced pilot, broke off radio contact shortly after take-off. A one-week search operation, even assisted by the US coastguard, came up with no trace. Speculation abounded that Cienfuegos had been assassinated by hostile officers and Matos supporters, or even that a Cuban fighterpilot had shot him down after confusing his plane with one sent from Miami to drop fire bombs on cane fields.40 As Cienfuegos’s successor, Castro appointed Juan Almeida, a close comrade since the Moncada days.
Immediately after the victory of the revolution, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos set about building their own security apparatus, and soldiers and officers from Batista’s army who had a clean record were integrated into the new “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias” (FAR). The highest rank, as in the guerrilla days, was that of Comandante (major). Military experts estimate that the FAR numbered approximately 100,000 in early 1960, and 300,000 by the year after.41 Most of them, however, were poorly trained and armed, the weapons inherited from Batista’s army having been for a force of roughly 25,000 men.
Ramiro Valdés, who took over as interior minister until the mid-eighties, built a new political police – the so-called G-2. Castro’s secret service, the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI), was organized with help from the KGB and soon had a reputation as one of the best informed and most efficient. A connecting link to the army and police were the lightly armed militias, a 100,000-strong force recruited from the general population, which could be rapidly mobilized against counterrevolutionary operations such as acts of sabotage or raids from abroad. They would play a decisive role in repelling the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 (when their numbers were increased to 300,000), and they also served as a counterweight to the army in Castro’s cleverly devised balance of power.
The militarization of Cuban society went further still. From the autumn of 1960, Castro had at his disposal a third force in the shape of the 800,000-strong Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), whose task it was to track down saboteurs and oppositional groups. CDR members were nothing other than “block wardens” for spying on the local area. Thus, under the pressure of external tensions, Martí’s heir was step by step converting his country into a totalitarian state and gradually making an absurdity of the revolutionary quest for freedom.
One year after the rebel army entered Havana, it was already a risky business to criticize political developments. Anyone who openly opposed the Communist influence was considered an opponent of the revolution and a friend of the United States. Opposition was tantamount to subv
ersion. Even those who tried to remain neutral came under suspicion. “There are no neutrals,” Castro said, “there are only partisans of the revolution or enemies of it.” And: “To be a traitor to the revolution is to be a traitor to the country.”42 The extent to which the Communists had by then penetrated the power apparatus may be gauged from a confidential report by Werner Lamberz (then secretary of the East German youth organization, the FDJ, and later a member of the SED’s Politburo) to state and Party leader Walter Ulbricht. Referring to a conversation on June 13, 1961, with Cuban PSP leader Blas Roca, on the margins of a session of the executive committee of the International Federation of Students, Lamberz wrote: “Already in the first stage of the revolution, a number of conditions were created which facilitated a rapid transition from the anti-imperialist to the anti-capitalist revolution.” Especially in the period from May to November 1959, the Cuban Communists had waged “a resolute struggle against the anti-communism [that was being] disseminated by some leaders of the 26th of July Movement and the 13th of March [Directorio Revolucionario].” The period from early January to late February 1959 had been one of “dual power of petty-bourgeois elements who represented the interests of Cuba’s national bourgeoisie.” Both President Urrutia and Prime Minister Miró Cardona had belonged to this category.
“This period of dual power ended in February 1959,” Lamberz continues, “when Fidel Castro became prime minister and these right-wing petty-bourgeois elements were excluded from the government. A change in the relationship of forces then ensued within the government.”43 What Lamberz does not say is that during Castro’s revolution the Communists at first had a timorous or wait-and-see attitude. Blas Roca told him that “often the Party’s work is not visible from the outside, but it exists,” and that the PSP “developed the theoretical programme for the Cuban revolution and helped to shape the decisive actions of the revolution” – which was quite simply untrue.
It is true that, once Castro’s victory was at hand, the Communists hurried to ensure that they had an early share in it. Already on December 17, 1958, an appeal for Moscow’s help from the comrades in Cuba landed (in the form of a confidential memorandum) on Walter Ulbricht’s desk: “The leadership of the Cuban Socialist People’s Party has turned to the CC of the CPSU with a request that it support the fighting people of Cuba with a solidarity campaign.” The Batista dictatorship, it went on, “after the fiasco of its attempts to crush the democratic and national liberation struggle of the Cuban people, has recently initiated widespread terror.” Batista, “with the active support of American imperialist circles,” was said to be “preparing another open armed intervention by the USA in Cuba.”44
Castro’s old friend and correspondent from his prison days on the Isle of Pines, the former Orthodox Party general secretary, Luis Conte Agüero, publicly criticized his growing tendency to use power arbitrarily against those who did not think in the same way as himself. In March 1960, when he tried to read an open letter to Castro on television, he was forcibly prevented by people from G-2. In the end, he took refuge in the Argentinean embassy and applied for asylum.45
Critical media were gradually reduced to silence during the period up to May 1960. Newspapers, radio, and television stations were expropriated or closed down – for example, the former house organ of the pro-Batista oligarchy, the Diario de la Marina, and soon after (when it attacked the measures against the Diario de la Marina as an attack on press freedom) Prensa Libre. The remaining papers, such as the Communist Hoy and the 26th of July organ Revolución, were as loyal to Castro as most of the closed ones had been to Batista.
This provoked the Catholic Church, most of which had anyway come out against the revolution, to denounce the latest developments from the pulpit; and members of the clergy who had initially been sympathetic now also took their distance. Even Bishop Pérez Serantes, the old friend of Castro’s family who once saved his life, wrote a pastoral letter in which he said that “the frontier between the church and its enemies was now clearly defined.” “It can no longer be said that the enemy is at our door, for in reality he is already inside, loud and strident, as if he was at home here.” With Communism there could be “absolutely no cooperation of any kind.”46 Already in spring 1959 the leaders of the Cuban Revolution were being warned against “utopian levelling.”
The measures against opposition platforms were also, however, a reaction to the growing number of attacks and sabotage actions, mostly organized by Cuban exiles working with the CIA in Florida. Early in 1960 an anti-Castro guerrilla force, the so-called Second National Front, began operating in the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba; its leader was a former comrade of Castro and Guevara, a passionate anti-Communist called Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, who received funds and weapons from Miami. Although revolutionary troops managed to isolate this guerrilla campaign, Castro himself estimated that it then numbered as many as 5,000 men, and it took until 1965 for it to be finally broken up.47
There were also several incidents where small civilian aircraft carried out terror attacks on people on foot and on industrial plant, or dropped fire bombs on sugar factories and plantations, killing people and causing great damage to the national economy. Papers found on a dead American pilot after one such attack proved that the organizers were based in Florida.
One of the most spectacular operations of this kind was the work of Castro’s own former pilot and air force chief, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, who changed sides in late June 1959 and emigrated to the United States. On October 21 of the same year, in a kamikaze-style bombing and strafing raid, he flew low over Havana itself and managed to kill two pedestrians and wound another 45. Next to him in the aircraft was said to have been a CIA special agent by the name of Frank Sturgis, who had once fought with the rebels in the Sierra Maestra (a photo exists of him with Castro), become head of Castro’s secret service in the air force, and then, like Díaz Lanz, gone into exile in Florida. It remains unclear whether he had been working throughout for the CIA. But in any event, he continued his close association with Díaz Lanz in subsequent years, and the two men became key figures in the clandestine operations and assassination attempts mounted against Castro by the CIA and the American Mafia.
5
Old Enemies, New Friends
The great powers at the gates
Following the victory of the revolution, Castro always expressed in public a wish to reach agreement with Washington. Rationally, there was a lot to be said for such a pragmatic attitude, since Cuba’s economic dependence on the United States was too great to permit a sudden turning away. Emotionally, in his innermost being, he seemed more inclined towards a break. This is easy to understand if we bear in mind the documentary evidence left behind by Batista’s men, as well as Cuba’s long history of relations with the United States, and Castro’s own experience of a dictatorship which, in waging war on its own people, had received military and other forms of support from the mighty neighbor to the north. “When I saw the rockets that they fired on Mario’s house,” he angrily wrote on June 5, 1958, in a letter to Celia Sánchez, “I swore that the Americans are going to pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war is over, I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of my own: the war I’m going to fight against them.”1
In the US capital, meanwhile, it was thought that the same grip as before could be kept on the sugar island 50 miles south of Florida; numerous observers attribute the later complete loss of Cuba to precisely this self-assurance. As one government analyst put it in an internal report: “We were probably so … fully persuaded of Cuba’s total dependence upon the US that we could not recognize the face of Cuban nationalist pride and apparently found it difficult to take Cuba or Castro seriously.”2
Nor did US politicians have any inhibitions about looking to the realm of psychopathology for explanations of the Castro phenomenon. Bonsal, the new ambassador in Havana, considered that the Comandante suffered at times from “mental instability;” President Eisenhower thought in the winter of
1959–60 that he was beginning “to look like a madman,” who, like Nehru in India, worked himself up into a frenzy;3 a CIA report claimed that his policies had nothing to do with the policies and actions of the United States, but only with his own “psychotic personality;”4 and Vice-President Richard Nixon came away from a three-hour meeting with Castro, during his trip to the United States in April 1959, with the impression that he was “either incredibly naive” or “under communist discipline.”5 Nixon did, however, recognize “those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men,” and thought he would be “a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally.”6
What especially angered official America were Castro’s “David against Goliath” gestures – for example, his statement in the presence of journalists, a week after entering Havana: “Yes, I tell you, two hundred thousand gringos will die if the United States sends marines to Cuba.”7 As to the man who was to be his toughest adversary in Washington, future president John F. Kennedy, Castro still sneered at him in September 1960 at the UN General Assembly as “an illiterate and ignorant millionaire” who “has read some novels or even some Hollywood film about guerrilla warfare.”8 This would prove to be a big mistake.
For Kennedy was clearly one of the few people in Washington with a relatively sophisticated view of Cuba, and he was not afraid to take the Eisenhower administration to task for its record on the matter. At a later-forgotten election rally in Cincinnati, he explained his view of the causes of the Cuban Revolution: “Fidel Castro is part of the legacy of Bolívar, who led his men over the Andes Mountains, vowing ‘war to the death’ against Spanish rule.”9 Kennedy could see that someone as ambitious and full of himself as Castro would not be content with the little stage of Cuba.
Fidel Castro Page 12
