Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  What kind of people were these, who came here to fight the workers and peasants? We have … established that among them were roughly 800 sons of wealthy families. Altogether, these 800 individuals owned 372,000 hectares of land that the Revolution has now expropriated, 9,666 rental properties, 70 industrial companies, ten sugar plants, two banks, five mines and two newspapers.… The rest of the thousand prisoners included 135 professional soldiers from the Batista army; the remainder came from the declassed petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat.56

  Right from the start Castro made it clear that he had no interest in keeping the prisoners, and he made an offer (doubtless with intent to humiliate) that the United States should supply 500 tractors in return for them. Only a year later, after they had been tried by a military court and sentenced to terms in a labor camp, did the US give up its opposition to any deal of that kind. On December 23, 1962, 20 months after the invasion, they were finally released in exchange for US medical supplies to the value of 53 million dollars.

  Two days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy had accepted full responsibility for its outcome, as “the responsible officer of the government.”57 This was also the view of the CIA: if the US aircraft carrier Essex and its escort had been lying some 50 miles off the coast and been told to take no action, the blame for this rested with the White House and the State Department. Indeed, many CIA people and Cuban exiles never forgave Kennedy’s refusal in advance to allow the intervention of US forces, especially in the form of massive air attacks. What they failed to appreciate was the wider political context of the Cold War, which meant, for example, that the Soviet Union was waiting for an opportunity to absorb the Western part of Berlin into the GDR, and that the US president – out of consideration for his NATO allies – must not engage in any military action that might provoke this.

  The gulf between the CIA and the White House is shown in the previously quoted report by the CIA’s head of paramilitary operations, Colonel Hawkins. Complaining of the extent to which military requirements were subordinate to political affairs, he argued that certain “restrictions” would have to be overcome if the cold war against Communism was ever to be won, and bluntly demanded a greater willingness to take political risks as well as a greater presence and influence of military experts in the President’s circle of advisers. Schlesinger, one of these advisers, later considered:

  When Kennedy said that whatever happens, there will be no American military involvement … he meant it. They did not understand that he meant it.… Kennedy would go to great lengths to avoid escalation of a crisis, especially a military crisis. He refused to escalate at the Bay of Pigs; he refused to escalate in the Berlin crisis; he refused to escalate in the Cuban missile crisis.… He was essentially a very cautious foreign-policy president.… Bissell and Dulles apparently didn’t understand this and the country paid a terrible price for their willful misunderstanding of the President.58

  Whereas Hawkins claimed that, at the time of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba had been “ripe for an uprising,” that Castro’s navy had been planning a putsch, and that Castro had deployed only militia forces but no army or navy units to repel the invasion, we can read in a “Top Secret” report by Kennedy’s security adviser, McGeorge Bundy: “Particularly important was the failure to estimate accurately the proficiency of the Castro forces.… Hope was the parent of belief.”59 Special adviser Schlesinger, for his part, noted:

  For the reality was that Fidel Castro turned out to be a far more formidable foe and in command of a far better organized regime than anyone had supposed. His patrols spotted the invasion at almost the first possible moment. His planes reacted with speed and vigor. His police eliminated any chance of sabotage or rebellion behind the lines. His soldiers stayed loyal and fought hard. He himself never panicked.… His performance was impressive.”60

  In November 1961 Allen Dulles was removed from office, along with his deputy, General Charles P. Cabell, and Bissell, following the production in October of a 150-page internal CIA report by the agency’s inspector-general, Lyman Kirkpatrick. This top-secret document, which only became public in 1998 and of which there appears to have been only a single copy, exposed those responsible for the operation to devastating criticism.61 It specially emphasized the fact that the CIA had greatly exceeded its powers by allowing support for anti-Castro Cuban rebels to mutate into a military project of its own; it then “became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically,” so that its agents ended up “playing the invasion by ear.” Its operational budget had skyrocketed from 4.4 million to 46 million. A resistance force of 30,000 Cubans supposedly waiting on the island had never actually existed. It was not Kennedy’s refusal to intervene but the CIA’s own incompetence which had been the “main cause of the disaster.” Bissell’s command structure for the invasion had been “anarchic and disorganized” – indeed, all the planning had been “frenzied.”62 Bissell had obviously misled the President and, in the face of highly sensitive operations, made it impossible for him to retreat into a position of “plausible deniability.” Attorney-General Robert Kennedy even accused Bissell of deceiving his brother in the White House with an old map from the year 1895.63

  The air raids of April 15 were scarcely over when Castro ordered mass arrests of all the usual suspects – a list that included nearly everyone on whom the invasion force could count for support. Thus, by the time the white flag was raised at Playa Girón, somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 people were detained in prisons, sports halls, or other holding centers. Others, such as the Catholic bishops – who had long taken their distance from the revolution – were placed under house arrest. Castro had no scruples about including the old family friend Bishop Pérez Serantes in Santiago.

  Early in the year the revolutionary government had already begun to take more severe measures against the opposition. Using his militias and a neighborhood watch system, Castro had succeeded in almost completely crippling the resistance – as Hawkins acknowledged in his secret memorandum of May 5.64 But it was only in late 1961/early 1962 that the outside world came to hear of a dozen trials before revolutionary courts of 37 “counter-revolutionaries,” nine of whom were sentenced to death and executed.65 The most active period had been the first half of March, when round-ups led to the capture of numerous contacts of resistance organizations in Florida. One of these was the first agriculture minister after the revolution, Humberto Sorí-Marín, a man who so hated Castro that he gave the CIA advice on how best to remove him with plastic explosive at a mass rally;66 he was sentenced to death on April 18 and executed on April 19, the day on which the Bay of Pigs adventure collapsed.67 Sorí-Marín, shuttling back and forth between Cuba and Florida, had been involved in acts of sabotage and the construction of a “transitional government” (handpicked by the CIA to exclude any of Batista’s obvious henchmen), which was supposed to take power after a successful invasion. In fact, all its members belonged to the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FRD), a political umbrella organization for Cuban exile groups in the United States. The intended prime minister was none other than José Miró Cardona, the man who had already once before been appointed the man of the transition – under Castro in early 1959.

  During the days of the invasion, however, the CIA choreographers treated this exile government in rather a peculiar manner. Before it could get up and running, Howard Hunt gave orders for Miró Cardona and his cabinet to be taken to a building at the Opa-Locka air base in Miami, where the CIA held them incommunicado for several days. “Government statements” distributed to the media after the beginning of the invasion, such as the one claiming that “Cuban patriots” had begun the “liberation” of Cuba, actually came from a public relations agency in New York with which the CIA occasionally had dealings. When the invasion ended in failure, the puppet government was still in a state of shock because of the way it had been treated, but the CIA consoled its members by flying them to Washington, where
they were received by a disconsolate Kennedy.

  Fidelismo

  After April 19, 1961, “Playa Girón,” the strip of beach on the Bahía de Cochinos on the south coast of Cuba, came to stand in Cuban history books for the fact that the awesome American superpower was far from almighty and invincible. A modern version of the biblical tale of David and Goliath came into being, in which Washington’s defeat at the Bay of Pigs gave Castro legendary status as a victorious hero. Carlos Franqui, who, like so many of Fidel’s friends, grew disenchanted and turned his back on the revolution, wrote: “His enemies were totally discredited and he became the incarnation of the revolution.”68

  Castro now had a free hand to go his own way. On the day when the victims of the air raids of April 15 were buried, he later told Frei Betto, “I gave not only a military but also a political response: I proclaimed the Socialist nature of the Revolution before the fighting at the Bay of Pigs.… At the Bay of Pigs [the people] were fighting for socialism.”69 The next step came within a fortnight, at a mass rally on May 1, 1961, when he officially declared Cuba a “Socialist state.” At the same time, he finally retreated from his earlier decision to hold elections under the 1940 Constitution: “The Revolution has no time to waste on such foolishness.” The 1940 Constitution was “too old and outdated;” the revolution had “exchanged the conception of pseudo-democracy for direct government by the people.”70

  Castro immediately follows up words with deeds. “For a political task that required a cadre who was completely trustworthy, … we sometimes chose an experienced member of the Communist Party. Sometimes it was safer to do this than to choose a younger comrade who had less experience.”71 The problem with the “younger comrades” from the 26th of July Movement was that they mostly came from the countryside, and unlike the strictly led and trained Communist cadre they were uneducated and less disciplined, often unable even to read or write. “The People’s Socialist Party was a more homogeneous organization than ours; it was a working-class organization with better political education.”72

  On July 26, 1961, the eighth anniversary of the attack on the Moncada Barracks, Castro announced the fusion of his old 26th of July Movement with the remnants of the Directorio Revolucionario and the PSP into an alliance called the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI), the forerunner of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). In 1961, Castro turned mainly to the 50,000-strong PSP to implement his mass literacy campaign right down to the remotest corners of the island. He wanted Cuba to become in a few years the model for underdeveloped societies elsewhere in the world.

  The kind of services asked of the PSP naturally came at a political price. Used by Castro, patronized by Raúl and Che, remote-controlled by Moscow, driven by their own ambition, the old Communists of the PSP got straight down to dominating the key structures of the ORI and building up their power in the military and security apparatus, so that the revolution would soon be under their control. Castro’s old comrades in the 26th of July Movement were progressively sidelined. Uneasy and suspicious, they watched with growing bitterness as their Comandante allowed the control centers of the revolution to fall into the hands of people who had dismissed the struggle against Batista as a sectarian adventure and opportunistically stood aside until the hour of victory. The chief architect and beneficiary of this evolution was the power-hungry PSP leader Aníbal Escalante, who, partly because of his good connections with Moscow, was appointed by Castro as general secretary of the ORI National Directorate.

  Carlos Franqui, the 26th of July man and founder of Radio Rebelde, acrimoniously described the consequences:

  Any opposition was automatically considered counterrevolutionary, automatically seen as fomented by the CIA.… The victory at Girón [Bay of Pigs] could have been the beginning of a setting to rights of internal errors, of a cessation of Party politics, of a recovery of the disaffected, of understanding that within Cuba there was no counterrevolution. Just the opposite took place.… The most heavily attacked groups were the old underground fighters, the independent unionists, the Directorio, the independent students, Catholics, members of the Ortodoxos, professional people, technicians, and peasants.… The Communists hated my crowd even more than they hated the capitalists we had overcome, because they could not stand the idea of a radical revolution that was not inspired, directed, and organized by the Soviet Union. Now, with the new powers Fidel had graciously granted them, they were destroying the revolution with all their hate and fury. Fidel gave the green light. Raúl organized the persecution with Ramiro Valdés and Security.

  Franqui experienced the atmosphere as ever more oppressive: “Fear, the mortal enemy of our revolution, grew like a weed.”73

  When the Cuban apparatchiks set about purging the ranks, they did it precisely where the revolution had found its most fertile soil: among the artists and intellectuals. The dream of combining social justice and artistic freedom soon proved to be an illusion, as the breakthrough to a new age seemed to be ending before it had even really begun. Any criticism was seen as a counter-revolutionary act that served imperialism. Among those who were denounced at this time and subjected to humiliating internment in a labor camp were many who believed in something other than socialism: Catholics, Protestants, and members of the santería cult popular among Afro-Cubans. Male and female prostitutes, homosexuals and pederasts had to wear prison uniforms with a large letter “P” on the back for pimpillos (pretty boy or girl – in other words, rent boy or prostitute). Franqui tells us that Interior Minister Valdés, who was already familiar with the ways of the Soviet, Chinese, East German, and Vietnamese comrades, once bragged to the laughing Castro brothers about an especially sinister device he had obtained from Czechoslovakia: a machine that could detect homosexuals.74

  Fortunately, the policy of deliberate humiliation soon came to an end, after cultivated Communists such as Carlos Rafael Rodríguez (who was aware of the negative impact abroad) made indignant representations to Castro. Beneath the surface, however, the persecution continued. What happened in the months after the Bay of Pigs victory was only the beginning of a creeping censorship and restriction of cultural freedom.

  The excesses and overreactions during those months reflected the nervousness of the Cuban leadership at the acts of sabotage, infiltration, and incitement orchestrated from Florida, which by no means fell away after the Bay of Pigs. “What the imperialists cannot forgive us,” Castro said on April 16, 1961, “is that we have made a socialist revolution under the noses of the United States … and that we shall defend with our rifles this socialist revolution!”75 The Cuban and Soviet secret services, which began working closely together after Raúl’s visit to Moscow in autumn 1960, discovered at the last minute two CIA plots (also involving governments in Central America and Venezuela) to assassinate the Máximo Líder, one in June and one in July 1961.76 The attempt with a telescopic-sight rifle planned for July 26, at a mass rally to commemorate the attack on the Moncada Barracks, was intended to eliminate not only Fidel but also his guest of honor on the platform: Yuri Gagarin, who on April 12 of that year had beaten off the American competition and become the first man to circle the earth in a space capsule.77 On another occasion, Cuban exiles smuggled into the country planned with opponents inside to fake an attack by Castro’s “revolutionary armed forces” on the US naval base at Guantánamo, providing the pretext for the US general staff attached to the President to occupy the island with 60,000 troops, in line with a decision already taken in April.

  On December 1, 1961, Castro further angered Washington by taking a decisive step in the direction of Moscow. In a four-hour radio and television address to mark the fifth anniversary of the Granma landing, he surprised the world by declaring: “I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall be a Marxist-Leninist until the day I die.”78 Then, a few months later, the ORI was converted into the Marxist-Leninist United Party of the Socialist Revolution (Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista – PURS). When the American journalist Lee Lockwood asked Castro i
n 1965 whether he would have come to power if he had already embraced Marxism in the Sierra Maestra and espoused a socialist program, the revolutionary leader admitted:

  Possibly not. It would not have been intelligent to bring about such an open confrontation. I think that all radical revolutionaries, in certain moments or circumstances, do not announce programmes that might unite all of their enemies on a single front. Throughout history, realistic revolutionaries have always proposed only those things that are attainable.… Furthermore, the degree of development of the people’s revolutionary consciousness was much lower than it was to be when we came to power. In those days, there existed many prejudices against Communism. Most people did not know what Communism really was. I myself, when I was a secondary school student, had more or less the same prejudices as did any young man who had been educated in a parochial school.… I remember that I had the ideas which I had heard in my own house, from parents, from my family, and which I heard from my teachers and professors. Many people had no other idea of Communism except what the enemies of Communism told them about it.79

  In the Sierra Maestra, then, Castro did not go so far ideologically as to propagate his revolution as Marxist – contrary to his claim in 1985 that he had already been “Marxist-Leninist” at the time of the Moncada attack. In 1965 he told Lee Lockwood that his development in that direction had been a much longer process, constantly driven by external influences and internal reflection.

  Nobody is born a revolutionary. A revolutionary is formed through a process. It is possible that there was some moment when I appeared less radical than I really was. It is possible too that I was more radical than I myself knew. Ultimately, a revolutionary struggle is like a military war. You have to set for yourself only those goals that are attainable at a given moment.… If you ask me whether I considered myself a revolutionary at the time I was in the mountains, I would answer yes, I considered myself a revolutionary. If you asked me, did I consider myself a Marxist-Leninist, I would say no, I did not consider myself a Marxist-Leninist. If you asked me whether I considered myself a Communist, a classic Communist, I would say no, I did not consider myself a classic Communist. Today, yes, I believe I have that right. I have come full circle. Today I clearly see that, in the modern world, nobody can call himself a true revolutionary who is not a Marxist-Leninist.80