Fidel: A Critical Portrait
Page 27
The enormously detailed accusation, full of names and figures, was published the next day in its entirety in Alerta under the headline 1 ACCUSE (Castro having read Émile Zola) and broadcast over the Voice of Antilles radio station. Prío, Cubans were told, had constructed "ostentatious palaces, swimming pools, airports, and a whole series of luxuries" and acquired "a chain of the best farms and most valuable lands in the vicinity of Havana."
Never quitting when ahead, Castro issued a second indictment of Prío on February 19, 1952, this time charging that the president was paying eighteen thousand pesos monthly to political gangs and pistoleros and keeping 2,000 gangsters in public jobs, the price of the 1949 "gangs' pact" negotiated by Prío and denounced by Castro at that time. Fidel also charged that in four years, Prío's land holdings rose from 160 to 1,944 acres. All these revelations stunned Cubans, and Jorge Aspiazo, who was Fidel's principal law partner, remarked later that "friends were assuring us that Fidel would not last more than a week."
Castro succeeded in so shaking up the Cuban political establishment that his own Ortodoxo party was scared to have him as a candidate, especially now that the fiery Chibás was dead. Playing it safe, Roberto Agramonte, the party's presidential candidate, simply omitted Castro's name from the Ortodoxo electoral list issued in February. However, Agramonte underestimated Fidel's determination to have his own way by any imaginable means (Fidel was forever being underestimated), and such means were instantly devised.
The device was for one or more districts in Havana province to select him as the congressional candidate at their local party assemblies, and this is where Castro's gift for planning ahead paid off. The poverty-stricken Cayo Hueso district of Havana, where Fidel had begun his door-to-door campaign in 1951, was the first one to pick him. Then came the rural district of Santiago de las Vegas, where Castro had been investigating Prío; Jorge Aspiazo says that the dwellers from La Pelusa (where Fidel had been fighting for the rights of the homeowners about to be dispossessed) collected coins in tins in the streets to raise enough money to rent a bus to take them to Santiago de las Vegas so they could attend a Castro rally and support his candidacy. He had a way of exacting loyalty, if not gratitude.
Now a candidate, Castro engaged in what by Cuban standards was a political blitzkrieg, rich in new techniques. Jorge Aspiazo says that in December 1951, Fidel inaugurated a new program on the "Voice of the Air" radio station that within two months attracted fifty thousand listeners, according to the ratings. Max Lesnick, who as chief of the Ortodoxo party's Youth Section watched it closely, recalls that Fidel mounted "a fabulous campaign," obtaining mail-franking privileges from five friendly congressmen plus a list of 100,000 names. Then, Lesnick says, Castro had 100,000 envelopes addressed and sent to every Ortodoxo party member in Havana province with a personal message in blue ink, signed by him. He had cut a stencil for the message, but the workers and the peasants did not know it. "This had never happened in Cuba before," Lesnick adds, "inasmuch as political leaders simply went to rallies to deliver their speeches." Raúl Chibás, himself a candidate for senator, says that Fidel "had his own group that followed him, his own organization within the party." This was Castro's Orthodox Radical Action (ARO) group inside the party, the young rebels who were the forerunners of his revolutionary movement and whom the older leaders always tried to neutralize. Conchita Fernández, who had been Eddy and Raúl Chibás's secretary, also ran for congress from Havana province, and she recalls how Castro often appeared at the end of her rallies to speak in her support. On the day his first anti-Prío indictment was published, Fidel appeared in the township of San Antonio de Río Blanco, just as the small crowd was dispersing after hearing Conchita. But, she says, he summoned the people back by shouting and waving a copy of Alerta with his exposé and the photographs of Prío's finca's he had taken from the house of a friend nearby. "And within five or ten minutes," Conchita recalls, "that park was full because he had such magnetism that all people needed was to hear him." Conchita, who had known Fidel since he was a student leader in 1947, and always admired him (she would become his secretary after the revolution in 1959), says that crowds applauded Castro "deliriously" because he spoke the truth, "and he didn't care if the next day someone shot him, or did something to him." Thus the Castro legend was being born with the young candidate delivering as many as four hour-long speeches in four localities in one night.
In an interview with Lionel Martín, an American journalist who has lived in Cuba since 1961, Castro said of his campaign that "I addressed myself directly to the masses; I had one hour of radio, and there was the press with all those denunciations. . . . There was a great political vacuum." He told Martín, the author of a book titled Young Fidel, about his direct-mail campaign and the use of congressional franchise "to which I had no right, but I had no other way of doing it, either."
"They couldn't brake me," Castro told Martín. "This was a problem I had studied well. They could not brake me in any way. They did not see me with much pleasure, but I was supported by the masses. They couldn't fail to present me [as a candidate]. But this wasn't yet popularity on a general level; it was popularity on party level. I hadn't stepped out yet from this environment, although my writings had repercussion among all the people."
At that stage, the Communists withdrew their support from Batista (they had no presidential candidate of their own for 1952), realizing that the Ortodoxos could win even without Chibás; they were also impressed by Castro's possibilities as a congressman. Consequently, they proposed an electoral pact in all the Senate and Chamber of Deputies races, and announced that they would vote for certain Ortodoxo candidates anyway even after their offer was turned down. Castro thought the Ortodoxos rejected the Communist alliance because of their fear of the United States.
The general assumption early in 1952 was that Castro would be elected to the Chamber of Deputies with the votes of the Havana province urban and rural proletariat. Max Lesnick says that there was not "the slightest doubt" about his victory, adding that "I knew the influence he had among all the young people in the party, the most sincere people in the party, and the working people."
The elections were never held because of the Batista coup, but it is nevertheless useful to ponder how Castro would have acted in the congress, reconciling the representative system with his revolutionary ideas. The next question is whether Castro might have advanced all the way to the presidency through the electoral system, or if he needed the Batista dictatorship to create the revolutionary climate leading to his ultimate victory. In reconstructing Castro's intellectual and political processes, it is relevant to know what he had been planning for his anticipated congressional investiture.
Many Cubans think that without a coup, Castro would have served as a congressman for four years until 1956, then run for the Senate, and made his pitch for the presidency in 1960 or 1964. Given the fact that Cuba was wholly bereft of serious political leadership and given Castro's rising popularity, such a scenario is not implausible. In that case, it would appear that he was fated to govern Cuba—no matter how he arrived at the top job.
Castro himself said in a 1965 interview with an American visitor that even before the Batista coup, "I already had some very definite political ideas about the need for structural changes. . . . I had been thinking of using the parliament as a point of departure from which I might establish a revolutionary platform and motivate the masses in its favor. . . . Already then I believed that I had to do it in a revolutionary way." Speaking of his situation in 1952, Castro volunteered that "in many ways I was still not a Marxist, and I did not consider myself a Communist"; this contradicts his subsequent statements that when the coup came, he had already become a full-fledged Marxist-Leninist, and it is part of his tortuous interpretations of his own ideological growth.
Fidel told the interviewer in 1965 that "once in parliament, I would break party discipline and present a program embracing practically all the measures that . . . since the victory of the Revolution
have been transformed into laws," knowing that the program would never be approved but would rally the population around it for subsequent action. And he said, "I already definitely believed in the need for seizing power by revolution." Ten years later, Castro told Lionel Martin that he realized that the Cuban problem could not be resolved through the parliament, and that his plan was to "break institutional legality" at the proper moment and proceed to take power. His parliamentary resources and immunity, he remarked, would help him "to move more freely and to conspire more freely."
In 1985, Castro said in a discussion of his political past that even before the Batista coup he had "a revolutionary concept and even an idea how to carry it out" by passing through a political phase—his anticipated congressional seat—and then attaining the "second phase of 'revolutionary capture of power.' " But he also touched on a fundamental point of his philosophy: That to make a revolution, one must first assume power. This was a concept that most Cubans did not understand until the victory in 1959.
Whatever Fidel Castro had in mind as a candidate, including plans that might never have worked out, it is unquestionable that the Batista coup and the end of the electoral process in 1952 saved him the "political phase" of his secret and seemingly improbable dreams of revolution and conquest of power.
Castro's suspicions that Batista was preparing a coup were reinforced early in February 1952. Raúl Chibás recalls that around that time he ran into Fidel on the stairs of the Havana house of Roberto Agramonte, and a conversation ensued about various perils ahead. He says that suddenly Castro asked him if "I had any news about a conspiracy, that Batista was conspiring and thinking of a coup d'état." Chibás replied that he had not heard anything; in retrospect, he thinks that Fidel "had soldiers, army people, in his campaign, and that was how he learned about the plot." He saw Castro again the following week, and Fidel was even more certain that a coup was in the works.
One version maintains that Castro had been apprised of unusual activity, involving comings and goings by military officers and civilians at Batista's Kuquine estate. Castro hid outside the estate, the story goes, photographing all this traffic a day or so before the coup, but by then it was too late to be of help. According to another account, President Prío had received a letter from a woman in Oriente province, reporting a military conspiracy. But when the Chief of Staff of the army asked the head of his bureau of investigations to look into it, the officer advised his superiors that there was nothing to it; the military intelligence officer was a Batista agent.
At dawn of March 10, 1952, Fulgencio Batista strutted into the army's Camp Columbia in Havana with his officers to be warmly greeted by the troop commanders. This was the coup that, meeting no resistance, ousted Carlos Prío Socarrás from the presidency. It was quick, silent, bloodless, surgically precise, and wholly cynical. The next day, already proclaimed chief of state, Batista moved to the presidential palace that he had left eight years earlier as constitutional president.
III
THE WAR
(1952–1958)
CHAPTER
1
As directed and inspired by Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolution was born directly from the Batista coup d'état, to become both the island's conquest of its full national independence and the implantation of a social, economic, and political order without precedent in the Americas. Whether a revolution so uncompromising and of such magnitude could have occurred without the political conditions suddenly created by the advent of the dictatorship is most unlikely. Batista's rule was so widely hated, it brought more unity to Cubans than any government since the Machado dictatorship twenty years earlier, a unity which Batista failed to understand and which would serve as the main trigger for the revolution. Even with Batista on the scene, the great revolution could be set in motion only through the leadership provided by Fidel Castro, then a twenty-five-year-old Havana lawyer already known for his dedication to rebel causes, his oratorial gifts, and his single-mindedness. The events encompassed between 1952 and the last days of 1958, when the guerrilla army achieved military victory and captured political power, show that while Batista opened the portals to this historical revolution, it was Castro who would inevitably march through them to crown his six-year war.
In Castro's mind, however, the ouster of Batista was only the first tactical objective in his revolutionary enterprise. The strategic objective, which he chose not to reveal until the successful completion of the first phase, was the social revolution that ultimately turned Cuba into a Marxist-Leninist state, today financed by the Soviet Union but in the final analysis still molded by Fidel Castro.
Castro was the only personage who knew exactly where he was going politically at a time when nobody in Cuba, neither the old nor the new generation, had any sense of direction or orientation, let alone historical vision. When one looks back over nearly forty years of Castro's adult life, analyzing his youthful and then the more mature spoken and written views and opinions, listening to his old friends and companions, and, above all, observing the societal transformation of Cuba, it seems evident that he possessed this vision in ways that history bestows upon the chosen few. Fidel often engages in contradictions over causes or the nature of past events or his role in them. If it suits him at a given moment, he embellishes memories and he manipulates them, yet the record shows his absolute consistency in working for a revolution. He talked social revolution and prepared himself for it long before the Batista coup, and his Bogotá experience four years earlier was part of his revolutionary trajectory. Simply to get rid of Batista did not loom as a life goal for Castro.
Castro's opening military challenge to Batista was the assault on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago and a simultaneous attack in Bayamo, the other stronghold in Oriente province, by rebels of the still-unnamed Movement sixteen months after the dictatorial takeover. Fidel personally led the charge on Moncada, barely escaping death, then defied Batista in the courtroom, and vanished for a year and a half in a prison cell where he tranquilly planned the next challenge while devouring hundreds of books on politics, history, philosophy, economics, and literature. Prison was, in effect, his postgraduate school in humanistic studies, and imprisonment also turned out to be a surprising political asset, as a nationwide campaign to grant him and his companions amnesty made Fidel even more famous than the assault itself; he always managed to turn things to his advantage.
In the history of the Cuban revolution, the 1953 attack on Moncada is revered as the equivalent of the launching of the first war of independence in 1868, and of José Martí's uprising against Spain in 1895, both of which likewise failed at the time. But Moncada is the cornerstone of modern Cuban history, and Fidel Castro's courtroom oration in justification of the assault—"History Will Absolve Me"—is regarded as Cuba's real declaration of national independence, the great revolutionary manifesto, and something akin to the scriptures, all magnificently fused together. It is also the most cited text in Cuba, constantly analyzed and interpreted, with the dogmatic verities never questioned, but new insights into Fidel Castro's mind and heart devoutly discovered and deepened with the passage of years.
With the dictatorship of "His Majesty King Sugar," as the Cubans called their principal product, unbalancing the economy and pushing unemployment up to frightening levels, social conditions during the Batista years were ripening for an explosion sooner or later. While the luxury Havana Hilton Hotel and casino for rich American tourists and businessmen was built in the capital, the average farmhand had only 108 days of available work at a dollar per day (and no food) in 1952, and 64 days of work in 1955. The rest was "dead time" with no employment of any kind. Social justice had to be a clarion call for a leader like Castro. It would be powerfully sounded in the Moncada oration, and it has remained the unquestioned justification for every revolutionary act after the victory, including the permanent imposition of a politically and intellectually oppressive state apparatus.
Fidel Castro set out to organize his Movement (much l
ater it would formally become the famous 26th of July Movement, complete with black-and-red flag and stirring hymn) and to plan the revolution virtually within minutes of learning that Fulgencio Batista and his officers had occupied the Columbia army camp in Havana at dawn of Monday, March 10, 1952, thereby deposing Carlos Prío Socarrás from the presidency. In Cuba in those days, the real power resided at Columbia, and Batista, who had no chance of being elected to a new presidential term though he had contrived to be chosen senator in the meantime, resolved to seek it there. General elections had been scheduled for June 1, and Castro was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies from the capital's poorest workers' barrios, but the coup put an instant halt to the electoral process. Fidel, who never trusted "liberal bourgeois democracy" anyway, was delighted with this turn of events, though he violently denounced Batista for "a brutal snatching of power." Castro realized that even if elected to congress, his revolutionary aspirations had limited possibilities, as did his political career, in a representative type of government. In 1974, Castro claimed that his notion had been to abandon "institutional legality" and grab power at the "opportune moment." It had been just brave talk to say that he would use his congressional seat as a revolutionary platform. Thus, Batista's coup was a gift from heaven for Castro, putting him seriously and promisingly in the business of revolution. And Fidel did know in principle how to do it, improvising when needed as he went along. Writing about the coup two years later, he noted that its "only positive value" was to set off a "new revolutionary cycle." From the first day of the new regime, he dedicated himself to plots, plans, maneuvers, seductions, feints, and attacks, and to the creation of a conspiratorial revolutionary movement in a brilliant and amazingly systematic manner. He left nothing to chance.