Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  More and more often, Cuban trade delegations had to return home empty-handed. With a touch of gallows humor, Castro mocked the quality of the things that did arrive: for example, the Hungarian Ikarus buses, which had such a huge fuel consumption that they needed a gallon every 4 miles and poisoned the city with their exhaust; or the Bulgarian forklift trucks, which would never have been offloaded anywhere but in Cuba. As if it was all the same in the end, he angrily announced that Cuba would no longer take Eastern Europe’s “junk.” Former “fraternal countries” did not even keep to firm contracts, and simply cut off agreed credit lines. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia were now struggling to gain entry into the European Union. And German reunification killed off the republic from which Cuba had received the most development aid, and which had been not only a major supplier of military hardware but also a competent partner and adviser on internal and external security.

  It borders on a miracle that, despite all the prophecies, the crisis did not produce social unrest in Cuba or quite simply lead to its collapse. If there were no mass revolts, no violent clashes, no bloody repression, this was partly due to the iron grip of the security apparatus. Another reason was probably the widespread feeling of resignation. It is also true, however, that Castro still managed with his speeches to get the people to pull together in the face of each new challenge. He seems to be one of the few political talents in history capable of wearing down resistance through speeches that often last several long hours.

  Signs of the end of the Cuban–Soviet partnership began to appear soon after Gorbachev’s visit. The mood noticeably cooled, even if the official rhetoric still tried to patch up the ever larger tears in the relationship. In the summer of 1989, the Cuban censorship suddenly banned the Spanish-language editions of Moscow News and Sputnik from sale in street kiosks. The magazines were much sought after among young people, because they described with unusual candor the political changes in the Eastern bloc, and presented political alternatives to Marxism-Leninism that were poison for Castro’s autocratic system. As there were few copies in circulation, they were snapped up and passed from hand to hand at black-market prices. A leading article in the Party paper Granma justified the ban by attacking those in the Soviet Union who:

  deny the leading role of the [Communist] Party and demand a multiparty system, advocate the free market, exalt foreign investments, have rediscovered popular [political] participation and question internationalism and solidarity aid to other countries. . . . With pain and bitterness we have had to confront the consequences of this confusion, of all these ideas, in young people who have been poorly instructed in terms of ideology and history, a state of affairs for which we are responsible.72

  Soon afterwards, Soviet people also disappeared from the island. In 1989, at the time of Gorbachev’s visit, some 5,000 Soviet technicians (mainly engineers) and 7,000 “military advisers” and their families were stationed there. Still in February 1990, against the background of the renewal in 1989 of the friendship treaty with Cuba that reaffirmed the need for a Soviet military presence, Gorbachev declared: “The military threat has not disappeared; the United States and NATO maintain offensive doctrines and concepts. At the same time, they are maintaining their armies and military budgets; that is why we need an army which is well prepared and well equipped.”73

  Until the end of his days as general secretary of the CPSU and head of the Soviet state, Gorbachev tried to keep a balance between reformists and conservatives on the Cuban issue too, and refused to abandon in a rush allies of such long standing. When the United States wanted Cuba to be brought for judgment before the UN Human Rights Commission, Moscow parted company with its former East European allies and stuck by Cuba’s side. Whereas Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in his role as spokesman for the reformers, wanted to end all further support for Castro’s Cuba – on the grounds that it was a police state from the Brezhnev era – the old Communists argued for aid to be maintained at least as long as the United States refused to normalize its relations with the Caribbean island.

  But Washington, thinking that Castro’s fall was imminent, was not about to opt for normalization. The screws were indeed turning on Cuba, and there no longer seemed to be any escape as the ending of the East European commitment intensified the effects of the US embargo. The Bush administration tried to help things along a little. “Freedom and democracy, Mr Castro! Not sometime, … but now!” the man in the White House could be heard saying. Only if Castro permitted free elections and a UN investigation of human rights abuses, only if he gave political prisoners their freedom and ended “subversive activities in Latin America,” would there be a prospect of improved relations. Of course, even in the form of their presentation, these conditions were meant to bring about a rejection by the other side, so that this could be immediately used against Cuba.74 Susan Eckstein noted:

  Washington maintained a hard line toward Cuba while improving relations not only with Gorbachev’s Communist government, … but also with China after Beijing’s repression of a prodemocratic movement. . . . To justify his China policy, President Bush used the opposite rationale that he articulated in his Cuban stance. He argued that isolating China was not the best way to pressure for democratic reform.75

  Whereas Gorbachev still resisted political pressure to give up the Soviet link with Cuba before Washington was visibly prepared to restore normal relations with Havana, the Bush administration exploited the growing economic difficulties of the Soviet Union and tied any further economic assistance and development loans to Moscow’s ending of its military and economic relations with Cuba. One bilateral agreement, for example, specified that the USA would purchase nickel from the Soviet Union, but only on condition that not an ounce of it was of Cuban origin. In 1992 Russian President Yeltsin was helped out with a loan so that he could buy 2 million tons of sugar on the world market, instead of from the Cubans at a more favorable price – with the result that Cuba was stuck with its sugar harvest. And, although in 1992 the General Assembly of the United Nations again recorded a clear vote for an end to the US embargo against Cuba, the West European states – particularly Germany, Spain, and Sweden – supported Washington’s persistent efforts to bring Castro to his knees through the withholding of development aid.

  According to official estimates, the collapse of the Soviet Union cost Cuba roughly $5.7 billion in 1992 alone.76 The Caribbean island had lost 70 percent of its purchasing power in the space of three years, and the great American power was still tightening the garrote to choke the life out of Castro’s system. In 1993, at the summit meeting in Vancouver with bankrupt Russia’s President Yeltsin, Bill Clinton made further financial assistance to Russia dependent upon its suspension of all oil deliveries to Cuba.

  By then, the military alliance between Moscow and Havana was already a thing of the past. The last Soviet technicians had left the island almost unnoticed not long after Gorbachev’s promises to the contrary: the first 1,700 having departed in 1990, and the rest in the following year. Autumn 1991 also saw the withdrawal of the last Soviet military units. After Russian President Boris Yeltsin had defeated in August 1991 the abortive putsch by Moscow’s old-style Communists against Soviet President Gorbachev, the Moscow reformers were able to assert their will and to clear the way for the return of troops based in Cuba. Until then Castro had been able to count on his strong lobby in Moscow, especially in the Kremlin’s military apparatus, but now that was being rapidly stripped of its power.

  For Castro there was a strong sense of déjà vu: another “betrayal” by the friends in Moscow. As before, when Khrushchev ordered the removal of Soviet missiles in October 1962, Castro first heard from a news broadcast that all Soviet units had been instructed to pull out.77 Gorbachev himself announced the measure on September 16, 1991, ironically enough when he was standing beside US Secretary of State James Baker. On the same occasion, he also let it be known that the Soviet Union – whose days were clearly numbered – was prepared to
place all its future economic relations with Cuba on a world market footing. Moscow anyway no longer had the means to subsidize the Cuban economy.

  Along with the Soviets, diplomats of other East European states also gradually left the island. The large embassies of former Warsaw Pact countries shrivelled into caretaker missions; reunified Germany installed its representatives in the former embassy of the GDR.

  Moscow’s only interest was the huge listening system at Lourdes near Havana, where every year more than 2,600 specialists eavesdropped on the United States and Latin America. In autumn 1992, the new Russian-dominated CIS signed a 20-year contract for the right to use the facilities, but it was only in 1994 that the two sides agreed on the terms of payment. Havana wanted a million dollars a year for the service, and they eventually settled on a sum of $200 million.78 (The contract was finally cancelled in 2002, under President Putin.)

  The electronic spy station – similar to the ones operated by the United States on the Teufelsberg in Berlin, at Bad Aibling in Bavaria, and elsewhere along the Iron Curtain – became a kind of bargaining-counter against the 44-square-mile US naval base at Guantánamo in the east of the island. Gorbachev’s foreign minister Pankin did in fact demand that, after the Soviet troop withdrawal, the United States should pull out its own 2,000 men from Guantánamo and hand back the land they had appropriated in violation of international law. But Washington was deaf to such appeals. In later years – especially at the beginning of the new millennium, when American plans to build a national missile defense again aroused the hostility of the Russian military – the listening post near Havana acquired new political and military significance.

  In the difficult juncture following the departure of the friends from Eastern Europe, Cuba made its peace with an old “enemy:” the People’s Republic of China. Already in 1990 Beijing was Cuba’s second-largest trade partner, with a rather modest total approaching US$600 million. A five-year agreement governed the exchange of Cuban sugar, citrus fruit, nickel, iron, medicines, and medical equipment for Chinese food, bicycles, and financing of industrial plant. The relations remained limited: China too wanted to see hard dollars on the table. But the old ideological differences seemed to be safely buried in December 1995, when Castro visited the Great Wall as a guest of the Chinese state.

  The brother’s power

  On July 13, 1989, Fidel Castro demonstrated to friends and enemies alike, in a way that stirred public opinion, his determination to do everything in his power to maintain the same ground rules for the revolution. At dawn, following a spectacular trial before a military court, a firing squad executed the 49-year-old “hero of the revolution,” General Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez, a prominent commander of the Angola campaign and for many years a close comrade and personal friend of Castro’s. Three other senior officers and employees of the defense and interior ministries died together with him, ostensibly for high treason against the revolution in connection with drug-trafficking, illegal business deals, and corruption. One of them was the 50-year-old Captain Antonio de la Guardia, a top secret service agent, with the reputation of a kind of Cuban James Bond, who had formerly headed an elite combat unit under the interior ministry.

  The affair gave rise to numerous conjectures at home and abroad, because it was set against the background of the debate over perestroika and rectificación. Already in earlier years, in Africa, Ochoa was said to have been outspoken in his criticisms of the political course of the Castro brothers. Cuban exiles in nearby Miami immediately suspected that he had become a danger to Raúl Castro in particular. The hero of Angola was a charismatic leader of frontline troops and – unlike Fidel’s younger brother – as popular among the masses and the Party hierarchy as among the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR). Not only did he have credit, as it were, for safeguarding the independence of Angola and Namibia; he had won for Castro, despite heavy losses, a surrogate war against the United States, in which the CIA had backed the right-wing Angolan UNITA forces against the left-wing MPLA of future President Agostinho Neto. Ochoa and those executed with him represented a progressive, reformoriented wing of the FAR that had recently been gaining in strength. At the time of his arrest, the General was on the verge of being appointed supreme commander of the armed forces in the west of Cuba, the most important of the three defense sectors, which included the capital and Havana province.

  At his trial, which was shown in censored excerpts on nationwide television, Ochoa admitted that he was guilty of illegal business deals on a grand scale. He justified himself by saying that the foreign currency earned in this way had not been for his personal use but exclusively to remedy shortages of food and medicine for his troops, and to build much-needed infrastructure such as a military airfield in Angola. The charge that Ochoa had been directly involved in drug-trafficking did not seem proved beyond doubt, unlike in the case of the three others executed with him. Apart from the four death sentences, another ten men received long terms of up to 30 years’ imprisonment, as did Brigadier-General Patricio de la Guardia, twin brother of the executed Antonio de la Guardia. The pre-trial investigations uncovered an extensive underground world of business dealings centered on Panama, in which senior Cuban officers, including several generals and employees of the defense and interior ministries, had lined their own pockets.

  A few weeks later José Abrantes, a personal friend of Castro’s who lost his job as interior minister at the beginning of the Ochoa trial, was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, along with Diocles Torralba, former transport minister and father-in-law of Antonio de la Guardia. They too had been found guilty of involvement in the corruption cartel. Less than two years later, Abrantes succumbed in prison to a heart attack, but before his death he apparently told Patricio de la Guardia that Castro himself had known of occasional cocaine transactions that the Colombian Medellín cartel had routed through Cuba. Miami Herald reporter Andres Oppenheimer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the Iran–Contra affair under President Reagan, claimed that, according to statements by la Guardia’s relatives and former Cuban secret service agents, Abrantes had accused Castro of instructing him to sell via Eastern Europe, for $50 million, 10 tons of cocaine confiscated by the Cuban coastguard.79 No convincing proof of this grave charge was ever produced, and in any event the deals were said to have spun out of control and developed behind Castro’s back.

  It is still shrouded in mystery whether the drugs and currency network served only to enrich its organizers, or whether it also involved a conspiracy to discredit the Castro brothers by associating them with drug-trafficking. What was proved, however, was that the trial defendants had entered the shadowy drugs world through close official and unofficial contacts in Panama. In the late eighties Panama, with its Canal Zone inhabited by 13,000 troops of the US “Southern Command,” was a banking paradise that gave the Cubans a gateway to the world and constituted a kind of Hong Kong of the Caribbean and Central America. With its intertwined and unsupervised access to currency markets and money-laundering facilities, this little country was as attractive to serious businessmen and politically correct governments as it was to Colombian drug-traffickers and their middlemen. Panama’s ruling clique around General Antonio Manuel Noriega was at the disposal of anyone prepared to give it a share. And when it was a question of helping a country to get round an embargo, the pickings could be especially rich. Using Panama, Cuba was able to sell export goods for dollars and purchase Western technology and consumer goods to an annual value of at least $60 million. But Castro did not trust Noriega an inch and had a personal antipathy for the corrupt general.

  As early as 1986, the US media revealed that for at least ten years Noriega had been on the CIA’s payroll. While he enabled it to channel through Panama weapons for the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua, the CIA in return shut its eyes to his dealings with the Medellín cartel that was flooding the United States with cocaine. As to the Cubans, Noriega gave them permission to use Panama as a foreign currency hub in exchange for
supplies of military equipment. He seemed to need these rather urgently, since the peace process in Central America meant that his services in sowing conflict there were no longer required in Washington. In the middle of 1987, in fact, his links to the Colombian drug-dealers suddenly put him on the hit list of the Reagan administration.

  At Christmas 1989, US troops occupied the whole of Panama. Noriega, who hid for days with friends and in the Vatican Embassy, eventually gave himself up and was taken in chains to the United States, where he received a long prison sentence for drug-trafficking. His disappearance from the political scene also cut Cuba’s Panamanian link to non-socialist markets.

  It was already known in Batista’s time that Cuba’s 3,000 miles of coastline and more than 3,000 offshore islands made it a paradise for drug smugglers. After the victory of the revolution, it was not only the CIA’s saboteurs who came and went illegally: many a member of the Cuban exile community also made a fast buck there in the depths of night. Such activity lined private pockets, but it also filled the war chest for use against Castro – apparently with the approval of the CIA. At the same time, quite a few smugglers fell into the hands of the Cuban coastguard.

  In 1985, four years before the Ochoa trial, Castro told the Washington Post of his concern at the island’s use as a staging post for the drugs trade. “Of all the Caribbean countries, Cuba is the one that has the largest number of drug traffickers in jail. . . . We’ve really become the police of the Caribbean and we often wonder why, since the United States doesn’t pay us for this service.” Others would have been quite happy to pay him – not for keeping an eye on things, but for looking the other way. But, he insisted, that had always been out of the question. “I assure you that we’ve had plenty of offers. You know how brazen these underworld characters are. We would practically have solved our foreign exchange problems, but we’re not interested in that kind of money.” Why not? Ideologically speaking, would it not be a legitimate contribution to the ruin of the capitalist system? “I don’t know whether it has to do with morals or the fact that I studied the catechism or studied all about Christian morality in Christian schools, but to me it is a question of Christian morality and Marxist-Leninist morality, and that’s what we go by.”80