by Tad Szulc
In the closing days of November, a meeting attended by the thirteen presidents of Havana University schools and about five hundred students was held late in the afternoon in the Martyrs' Gallery on the campus. In the words of Max Lesnick, "Fidel takes the floor and delivers a demolishing denunciation of the whole gangster process, and makes the confession that he, too, had the misfortune of falling into it."
Fidel then proceeded to name all the gangsters, politicians, and student leaders profiting from Prío's secret "gangs' pact," and the effect was absolutely stunning. With his network of friends and acquaintances in the political world, he had no trouble procuring detailed information on this subject. Castro must have realized that he was embarking on an extremely dangerous venture in terms of his very life, but he had evidently made a classical risk calculation—a blend of intellectual analysis and pure instinct—that his challenge would succeed, that he would be cleared once and for all of gangsterism accusations, and that his political stature would rise significantly. It was not bravura but an act of deliberate political courage. No sooner had Castro finished speaking than automobiles with armed thugs began to materialize around the university.
"The problem now," Max Lesnick says, "was to get Fidel out of there alive. I had a red convertible, and I told him that I would drive him out. It was seven o'clock in the evening. . . . I didn't do it out of courage, but figuring that if Fidel is seen in the open car next to me, the gangsters wouldn't dare to shoot. It would be too much of a scandal to attack a well-known Ortodoxo leader's car."
Lesnick took Fidel to his Morro Street apartment, hiding him there for fifteen days "because he would be killed if he went out in the street." The Havana newspapers prominently displayed Castro's speech, and he was an inviting target. It is not clear what, if anything, Mirta—still in the hotel room with the three-month-old baby—was told about her husband's whereabouts and plans. As a rule, Fidel never discussed his political activities with her.
The rest of this story has never been told publicly, presumably because Castro wished it kept quiet. Having agreed with his friends that he should leave Cuba until tempers cooled and it was relatively safe for him to return, Castro decided to go to New York for several months. The decision was wise, but Castro may have feared that under the circumstances a clandestine departure from the country could be regarded as a cowardly act, and he did not desire any taint on his reputation.
While his trip was being prepared, Fidel spent the time at Lesnick's apartment reading, listening to the radio, talking, and being bored. According to Lesnick, one day Fidel grabbed a broomstick and, pointing it from his bedroom window at the north terrace of the presidential palace, said to Lesnick's grandmother: "You know, if Prío steps out on that terrace to make a speech, I could get him from here with a single bullet from a telescopic-sight rifle . . ." Other friends tell the story that in 1947 when Castro went to the presidential palace as part of a FEU delegation conferring with President Grau, he said in all seriousness to a colleague as they waited for the audience: "What would you say if we grab Grau when we enter his office and we throw him off the balcony?" But Fidel does have an unusual sense of humor.
It was Lesnick and a mutual student friend named Alfredo "Chino" Esquível who drove Castro to the railroad station in Havana in mid-December; there Fidel and Chino boarded a train for the city of Matanzas, then another train to Oriente to the Castro home in Birán. Apparently, Fidel was able to obtain enough money from his father to finance his trip to the United States. Castro flew to Miami, then to New York, where he remained for three or four months. Virtually nothing is known about this trip except that he lived in a room in a brownstone on 155 West Eighty-second Street. It is unclear whether Mirta, with or without the baby, joined him for any part of the New York stay or how he supported himself, though he most likely received money from home.
It is possible that Fidel attended some classes at Columbia University, and even that he considered enrolling there for further study after graduating from the Havana law school; he spoke subsequently of his frustrated desire to study abroad for postgraduate degrees. He may have been attracted to the idea of living in New York because that was what Martí had done as he prepared his Cuban revolution. In any case, Castro had ample opportunity to read and think and even write. He improved his knowledge of English, but one has the impression that somehow he was not able, not then or later, to grasp fully the mechanics and nuances of American moods, attitudes, and politics. This shortcoming may have had an unfortunate effect on some of his later policy decisions.
Three months before Castro's self-imposed exile in September 1949, Mao Zedong's Communists achieved ultimate victory in the long civil war with the United States-supported Nationalists, a milestone in the history of great modern revolutions. The struggle that led to the creation of the People's Republic of China that year had immense relevance to Castro's own revolutionary interests—from ideology to guerrilla warfare—yet he seemed to ignore it, and Mao was certainly never a military model for him. Strangely, this lack of outward interest in Communist and revolutionary events abroad (except where Cuba is directly involved, as in Nicaragua or Angola) is part of a pattern. He rarely refers to them, and during the 1950s he is not known to have spoken publicly of the Chinese experience, the Vietnamese victory over the French at Dienbienphu, or the anti-regime uprisings in Poland and Hungary. To Castro, Cuba evidently was and is the absolute center of his attention, and he did not seem to need Mao or Ho Chi Minh to teach him guerrilla warfare. He always knew best.
Castro had resolved to graduate from law school during 1950, and through the spring and summer he lived day and night with his books. Rather than attend classes, he prepared himself for the exams at home by reading voraciously, absorbing in less than six months a normal two-year work load. His willpower and superb memory helped him greatly. His friends were astounded that he had so totally removed himself from all political activity, and feared that in staying away from meetings and discussions he might be forgotten. He knew he would not be. Though he had very little time for his family, he evidently doted on Fidelito, and right after his return from New York, he took photographs of the baby, sending prints to grandparents in Birán and Banes. His brother Raúl was in Havana, about to enter the university, and his youngest sister, Emma, came through the city en route to private school in Switzerland.
Finally, September 1950 saw Fidel Castro graduated from the University of Havana with the titles of Doctor of Law, Doctor of Social Sciences, and Doctor of Diplomatic Law; the Cuban system permitted a student to work for multiple degrees. Fidel says that during his crash study program he completed forty-eight out of fifty courses on his own schedule, a record that no other student had matched during a comparable period. Being short of the fifty courses, Castro was not eligible for the scholarship abroad that he had thought of pursuing. By this time, Fidel says, he was too impatient with the political "realities" at home to pursue the scholarship-abroad notion, deciding to bid farewell to academia and dedicate himself to politics as well as to a law practice.
In terms of conventional politics, Castro recalls, his ties with the Ortodoxo party remained "strong" as he graduated from the university, "although my ideas had advanced much more." This party, he says, was able to channel much of the discontent, irritation, and confusion of the Cuban masses over unemployment, poverty, and the lack of housing, schools, and hospitals. As an Ortodoxo youth leader, Fidel was not "preaching socialism as an immediate goal at that point," he says, but campaigning against "injustice, poverty, unemployment, high rents, low salaries, expulsions of peasants [from the land they tilled], and political corruption." In his opinion, looking back nearly thirty-five years, this was a program for which Cubans were much better prepared, the phase during which the start had to be made to move the people in a "veritably revolutionary direction."
Castro had never alluded publicly to his Marxist-Leninist evolution and persuasion until he declared himself a Communist in a speech in December 19
61, and over the ensuing years he maintained a high degree of imprecision as to the stages of his socialist conversion, blurring considerably and deliberately his whole educational process. But he is consistent in stating with complete candor that he had concealed the socialist character of his political program until he thought Cubans were ready for it and he felt sufficiently in control of the country to reveal it. He goes to the extreme of insisting that his first political program, publicly enunciated in 1953, was really socialist in nature if one reads it a posteriori in the proper context. Cuban revolutionary ideologues have, in fact, published thick essays to substantiate this interpretation. Castro cannot escape the temptation of manipulating his own political history.
In an interview in 1977, Fidel declared that "I became a Communist on my own, and I became a Communist before reading a single book by Marx, Engels, Lenin or anyone. . . . I became a Communist by studying the capitalist political economy. . . . When I had a bit of understanding of those problems, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman that I simply began on my own to elaborate formulas for production and distribution that would be different." This, according to Castro, occurred when he was in his third year in law school, which would have been around the time of the Bogotá uprising in 1948, and his revolutionary baptism by fire.
However, in 1981 in a discussion of his involvement in Bogotá, Fidel remarks that at that juncture, "I had already some rudiments of Marxism-Leninism, but one cannot say that I was then a Marxist-Leninist," though he was "almost a Communist." He adds that "potentially" he was close to "a Communist political conception" while still being very much under the influence of the struggles of the French Revolution. In his 1985 conversations with the Brazilian friar Betto, Castro claims that after starting out as a "utopian Communist" (a description he often uses), he already "really had contact" with Communist literature, again in his third year at the university. He says that by then he was familiar with "revolutionary theories" and the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Whatever the true version of Castro ideological progress, there is no question that he never deviated from what he calls his "anti-imperialism" and his deep resentments of the United States and its foreign policy. His old friend Alfredo Guevara says that while Fidel's Bogotá speeches to students were intellectually "impeccable and coherent" in "anti-imperialist terms," it does not follow that they were based on "Marxist analysis." Guevara's opinion is that Castro seriously embarked on "theoretical studies" only after Bogotá.
In 1950, while completing his university studies, Fidel signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal shortly after the start of the Korean War in June. The Stockholm document has been widely regarded as a pro-Soviet propaganda operation, and while great many non-Communists around the world signed it in good faith, it is unlikely that Castro was too innocent not to realize what he was doing. In Cuba the appeal was sponsored by the Cuban Youth Committee for Peace, and the text with all the signatures was published in the September issue of the periodical Mella, a Communist publication at the university. Fidel identified himself as a "student" and member of the national committee of the Ortodoxo party (whose founder, Eddy Chibás, abhorred the peace appeal and the Soviet Union). In November, Castro published an article in the Havana daily Alerta urging independence for Puerto Rico and stressing that Cuban students were united against "tyrants" in the Americas.
After graduating from law school in September 1950, Fidel Castro decided to go immediately into law practice, but to concentrate on political cases and what his friends would call the "lost causes" of litigation on behalf of the poor. To proceed in this fashion was a conscious political move on Fidel's part, consistent with both his professed beliefs and his political-revolutionary ambitions. It would have been easy for him, particularly through the Díaz-Balart marriage connection, to seek partnership with influential firms and lawyers and rapidly command a lucrative practice, but Castro chose another route.
The partners Fidel selected for his law office were Jorge Aspiazo Nuñez de Villavicencio, a former bus driver, nine years older than Castro, who graduated in the same class with him, and Rafael Resende Viges, another fellow student with a poverty background. Jorge Aspiazo, now retired in Havana, recalls that Fidel met with him and Resende on the escalinata of the university one afternoon in September to propose the partnership. Aspiazo, who voted against Fidel for class delegate in their first year in the law school because he suspected him of being a "rich boy," soon became a friend, though to this day he remains apolitical. Resende, the same age as Fidel, was also a friend. Later he would swerve to the right, joining the Batista camp and ultimately emigrating to the United States.
As Aspiazo recalls it, their quarters consisted of a small reception room and a tiny private office on the second floor of a rundown building at 57 Tejadillo Street in Old Havana. This was the capital's banking and business area, in narrow streets and small squares of colonial structures near the harbor, and most law offices were located there. The ancient Rosario building, where Castro and his partners went to rent space, was almost entirely occupied by law firms.
The monthly rent was $60, and the owner, José Alvárez, insisted on a first month's payment and a month's security, for a $120 total. However, the three young lawyers had only eighty dollars between them, and it took persuasion for Alvárez to agree to settle on that. They also talked him into lending them some furniture, including a desk and a single chair, so that they could start working. They bought a typewriter on installment.
Aspiazo says that their first professional arrangement was with a wealthy Spanish immigrant who owned a wholesale lumber business, Madereras Gancedo, that sold materials to local carpenters. A typical Fidel proposition, the deal was that the Gancedo firm would provide the lawyers with free lumber to build their office furniture, and in return they would collect overdue bills from carpenters who had purchased wood from the Spaniard.
This was collection-agency work, but not the way Fidel conducted it. Instead, Aspiazo recounts, Fidel summoned Gancedo's debtor carpenters to the office and asked them for a list of people who owed them money for their services. The lawyers then spent their time collecting on behalf of the carpenters, and whenever they succeeded, Fidel would call his "client" to say that they had money for him. Aspiazo says that when the carpenter would ask Castro to pay, for example, twenty dollars to the lumber merchant, Fidel would reply, "No, you need this money now, and our client does not," and he would hand the man the twenty dollars.
On one occasion, Castro and Aspiazo went to collect from a carpenter in the Lawton district of Havana, one of the poorest, but the man was away. Aspiazo says that the carpenter's pregnant wife asked them to wait, stepping into the kitchen to make coffee for them, and Fidel asked his partner to lend him five pesos, placing the banknote under a plate on the table. When the wife served them coffee, Fidel told her that the carpenter should not worry about his debt to Gancedo and to come by their office when he could.
Aspiazo adds that they never paid the lumber company a cent, and that after sending them bills for their furniture materials, "they got tired and never collected from us." But the law firm itself did poorly in collections because Fidel insisted that most of its work be pro bono publico, or as a free public service. They represented the stall owners at the municipal market in Havana, peasants in Havana province who were being expelled from farms, students involved in riots, and just about every worker who had a legal problem of some kind and turned to Aspiazo, Castro & Resende. In their three years of partnership (which ended, in effect, when Castro left to lead the attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953), they earned a total of 4,800 pesos, of which 3,000 pesos was for one case and 1,800 pesos for the second one. They also sued the American-owned Cuban telephone company for lower rates on behalf of the subscribers, and the court actually found in their favor, but by that time Castro was already in prison.
Whether concerning his law firm or his own affairs, Fidel had a total disdain for money and, in fact, he n
ever had any. Theoretically, his allowance from Birán was designed to support his family, but, as his friends say, Fidel often gave it away the moment it arrived; it was enough even for a casual acquaintance in his political circle to ask for a loan for Castro to produce the money.
On his graduation from the law school, Fidel received a brand-new Pontiac sedan as a present from his father. Shortly thereafter, a friend borrowed it for a trip out of town, totaling the Pontiac in an accident and suffering serious injuries. At the hospital, where he rushed as soon as he heard about the accident, Fidel met his friend's father, a powerful and rich conservative politician, who told him he would pay for the car. Castro replied: "You are wrong. Your son is dying. How can you be concerned about the car? You don't have to pay anything; you should worry about your son." Three years later, the politician would intervene with his friend Fulgencio Batista to assure that Castro received decent treatment in prison; he may have even saved Fidel from assassination by the wardens.
When his old friend Baudilio Castellanos came from Oriente to visit Havana, Fidel invited him to lunch at home. On Castellanos's arrival, however, Castro suggested they drive first to the municipal market, where he went from stall to stall, picking rice, potatoes, and malanga (an edible root, popular among poor people in Cuba), but without paying for anything. Castellanos remarked on it, and Fidel said, "Oh, I never pay here . . . they are my clients, and they pay my fees with food." Thereupon, they drove back to the apartment on Third Street where Fidel cooked the lunch.
