Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Castro spent two days and nights at Eva Jiménez's apartment, drafting and redrafting in longhand (no typewriter was available) a proclamation against the Batista takeover under the heading "Not a Revolution—A Bang!" The proclamation was written strictly on his own behalf on a kitchenette table, and on March 13, Fidel dispatched René Rodríguez and Eva Jiménez to the newspaper Alerta, which had published his articles in the past, to ask the editor to print his broadside. However, Ramón Vasconcelos, the editor, turned it down on the grounds that anti-Batista opposition was "unrealistic and on the moon." Because press censorship had been established, Fidel's envoys made no effort to contact other newspapers.

  But Castro was determined to circulate his proclamation, and so he sent Rodríguez to contact a friend who lived above a pharmacy in downtown Havana and had a mimeograph machine in his apartment. Raúl Castro and Antonio López Fernández, a six-foot-six worker whom Fidel had befriended during his electoral campaign and was known as Ñico, mimeographed five hundred copies of the proclamation to be distributed in the streets as soon as possible.

  The opportunity to do so came on Sunday, March 16, when Fidel left his refuge and drove to the Colón cemetery to join Ortodoxo leaders and students, who gathered at the grave of Eddy Chibás as they did every sixteenth of the month since his death the previous August. The Ortodoxo party leaders' speeches were so tepid that Fidel could not restrain himself. He raised his right arm and shouted, "If Batista grabbed power by force, he must be thrown out by force!" As policemen approached menacingly, the tall figure clad in a white guayabera was encircled by his friends to protect him (Alerta, which had refused to publish his manifesto, reported Castro's cemetery outburst, commenting that his words were "well received by the crowd . . . demonstrating again the sympathy he enjoys among the masses of the party").

  Finally distributed at the cemetery, the mimeographed proclamation charged that "there is nothing as bitter in the world as the spectacle of a people that goes to bed free and awakens in slavery," that there is "infinite happiness in fighting against oppression," and that "the fatherland is oppressed, but someday there will be freedom." Castro ended by quoting from the Cuban national anthem: "To live in chains is to live sunk in shame and dishonor. To die for the fatherland is to live!"

  As far as Castro was concerned, he was now personally at war with the Batista dictatorship, quixotic as this notion may appear. In his proclamation he urged "courageous Cubans to sacrifice and fight back." Looking back at these events twenty years later, Fidel told Lionel Martin that he had launched his campaign "a bit as a guerrillero, because in politics one must also be a guerrillero. . . ." Once embarked on his war, Castro would never relent. On March 24, a week after the Colón cemetery gathering, he presented in his capacity as attorney a brief to the Constitutional Court in Havana, accusing General Batista of violating "the constitution [and] the form of government" by his military coup. He then went on to list the punishments for such acts as prescribed by the penal code, concluding therefore that "Fulgencio Batista's crimes have incurred punishment deserving more than one hundred years' imprisonment."

  Castro's goal in presenting this brief was not so much to attract new attention to himself (Alerta published a report on it the following day), and certainly not to obtain legal satisfaction from the court, but to establish a fundamental revolutionary principle for the future. Specifically, he set out to proclaim the concept of revolutionary legitimacy, making the point that "if, in the face of this series of flagrant crimes and confessions of treachery and sedition, [Batista] not tried and punished, how will this court try later any citizen for sedition or rebelliousness against the illegal regime, the product of unpunished treason?" Knowing perfectly well that the court would never try Batista, Fidel was carefully building the legal base for his planned revolution, justifying it beforehand as a legal act against an illegal regime. This would grant full legitimacy to the revolutionary government he would install in 1959. To the highly legalistic Latin American mind, such formal legality is paramount.

  Fidel gave up his actual law practice, such as it was, in the aftermath of the Batista coup, but his law firm stayed in business and, on his instructions, proceeded to conduct additional legal battles against the dictatorship. Jorge Aspiazo, his former partner, says that Fidel had him sue three Batista cabinet ministers in criminal court for defrauding the State Unemployed Persons' Fund by naming "imaginary persons" to public posts, "firing" them, then collecting the unemployment payments themselves. The case wound up in the Supreme Court, which threw it out.

  Castro kept up the barrage. On April 6 the newspaper La Palabra (closed by the regime after its first issue) published another ferocious attack on Batista by Fidel along with his poetic warning that "the seed of heroic rebellion is being sown in all the hearts" and that "faced with danger, heroism is strengthened by generously shed blood." Castro understood that revolutions demand romanticism and rhetoric.

  On clandestine fronts Castro kept equally busy. Operating from different safe houses and from the Ortodoxo party offices on the Prado (strangely, the regime allowed political parties to go on functioning, although the congress was closed and the elections canceled), Fidel held literally hundreds of meetings and interviews with prospective Movement members between the time of the March coup and the start of May when a new phase would begin. According to Jorge Aspiazo, he often drove to the countryside at night to meet in a field with local Ortodoxo members from rural sections of the party.

  Historically, it is relevant that the Castro Movement was born almost entirely from the rank-and-file of the Ortodoxo party, the reformist and radical but essentially establishment organization founded by Senator Chibás in 1947. Great numbers of working-class and middle-class Cubans, including sugar workers and mountain farmers, became powerfully attracted to Chibás and his party as a new and "clean" phenomenon in the country. The now-aging Communist party, on the other hand, seemed unable to penetrate what should have been its natural constituency among workers, and, typically, its strength was chiefly among intellectuals, students, and labor-union leadership. The claim that cold-war propaganda against communism was responsible for this state of affairs is not credible.

  When Fidel rejected the Communists' entreaties to join them at the university in opposing Batista, he was being realistic. Young Ortodoxos (and even middle-aged ones) from modest backgrounds were much more revolution-minded than the Communists, they had no use for Communist ideological discipline, and they admired Castro. Fidel used the intervening years to develop wide contacts, especially inside the Youth Section and the Orthodox Radical Action (ARO) faction he had organized. Despite the animosity of older party leaders, Castro expanded his contacts and loyalties in the course of his electoral campaign. When the Batista coup came on March 10, 1952, and Fidel made his decision to fight "independently," he already had a potential revolutionary network. Now the problem was how to turn it into a fighting instrument.

  The solution emerged unexpectedly from a chance meeting at the Colón cemetery when Castro was introduced to Abel Santamaría, a twenty-four-year-old accountant at a Havana Pontiac dealer's office. (It seems as if cemeteries are a major scene in Cuban politics. This stems from an old tradition of using major and minor anniversaries of dead personages, even of such heroes of the past as Céspedes and Martí, as an emotion-laden pretext for political demonstrations that the police under any regime would hesitate to break up. This tradition no longer exists, however, although Castro used Colón as a venue for political proclamations after 1959.) On this particular occasion, the Batista government had forbidden May Day labor celebrations, and many opposition militants went on May 1 to the grave of Carlos Rodríguez. Rodríguez had been killed by the police during the Prío presidency, and Castro took two key police officers to court on murder charges. Now Castro was at the cemetery as a revolutionary gesture, and he was being presented to Santamaría by Jesús Montané Oropesa, an accountant at the General Motors office. Fidel had met Montané shortly b
efore the coup when he unsuccessfully tried to swap his ailing car for a better one. Since March, Montané, Santamaría, and a few other friends had been looking for ways of fighting Batista.

  Castro and Santamaría, a tall, light-haired man from Las Villas province, hit it off immediately, and their May 1 encounter was a turning point for the incipient Movement. For one thing, they shared rural origins: Abel was born at the Constancia sugar mill, where he worked until coming to Havana at the age of nineteen, and Fidel was from the Oriente canefields. That Castro came from a landowning family and Santamaría was the son of workers made no difference. Besides, Abel, along with Montané, was an Ortodoxo. Abel lived with his sister Haydée (she was called "Yéyé") in an apartment near Castro's home, and his and Fidel's first and endlessly long conversation took place at the Santamarías'. It produced a deep relationship between them, with Fidel acting as the chief of the Movement and Abel as his deputy. It was the less spectacular but more cool-headed Abel who would be crucial in giving shape to the Movement that Castro had conceived.

  In the weeks and months that followed, the Movement grew and improved. Montané joined the nucleus with his friend Boris Luís Santa Coloma, also an accountant (an exiled Cuban scholar wrote in all seriousness that the accountancy background of so many key Cuban revolutionaries deserves to be analyzed); Melba Hernández, the Ortodoxo lawyer who was so impressed with Fidel, and her friend Elda Pérez did likewise. Melba brought in Raúl Gómez García, a twenty-three-year-old poet and teacher; Fidel added his friends Pedro Trigo and Ñico López. By midyear, this was the core of the Movement.

  From the outset, Castro's authority was undisputed, and he ran his Movement like a military organization. Melba Hernández, who was the closest to Fidel and the Santamarías during the whole preparatory period, recalls it as "militancy twenty-four hours a day," and a life of extraordinary discipline, which also required a complete change in the social relationships of all the Movement members.

  Melba, nowadays honored as a Heroine of the Revolution and still very active politically in her seventies, says that Castro demanded a series of "compromises" from the revolutionaries. First, she says, "we had to hate the regime that oppressed us, which was easy, then to repudiate that society that lived from corruption, and to take the decision to fight against it." To be able to fight the corruption, great temptations had to be resisted, she recalls, "and because this was a clandestine movement, it had very rigid discipline, very strict discipline and secrecy, complete discretion, and militant behavior . . . this is how we were being educated, and a militant would be expelled from the Movement for the violation of any of these rules." "As the Movement grew," she recalls, "the groups of young people who already belonged to the Movement met every Sunday. It was like a test. For example, they would be summoned for 5:05 P.M. If someone wasn't there at exactly that time, we would analyze it, and then the person was admonished, or punished, or expelled. Indiscretion, any kind of indiscretion, no matter how small, was cause for expulsion."

  Additionally, Melba Hernández says, the Movement's general staff, composed of Fidel Castro, Abel Santamaría, Haydée Santamaría, and Melba, met once a week to discuss the activities and behavior of all the members (some published accounts state erroneously that only Fidel and Abel formed the general staff). Fidel and Abel conferred regularly with the military committee and the political committee. The two headed both committees, each of which had four other members. But only Fidel and Abel had the power to select recruits and make all the strategic and tactical decisions, ruling out any dissent. The Movement was organized into cells ranging in membership from ten to twenty-five, and their orders came from the general staff or from one of the committees, depending on the subject and its importance. It was a totally vertical structure without political bodies or functions, a principal difference between the Castro Movement and Communist or other political revolutionary parties. Fidel had intended it, in effect, as a "caudillo" structure designed to win the war and stay away from politics.

  Whatever Castro's inner ideological convictions, he was determined to keep his Movement from ideological identification with Marxism-Leninism. Melba Hernández says that "in our ranks in that period there was never talk about communism, socialism or Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, but we did speak of the day that when the Revolution will come to power, all the estates of the aristocracy must be handed over to the people and must be used by the children for whom we are fighting." Melba makes a point of noting that "the problem of workers' exploitation was not discussed," but "we did talk about the workers' wages, the abuse of the workers, the abuse of the peasant." She says that "in the language that was then accepted, we insinuated what we were doing." And Fidel and Abel insisted on "the importance of the incorporation of the woman in revolutionary struggle."

  In a 1977 interview with the Soviet Communist party's theoretical journal Kommunist, Castro said that "during all that period I maintained contacts with the Communists [who] had their own objectives in the situation," but "one could not ask them, either, to have confidence in what we were doing." He remarked that it "would have been difficult for a party educated in a classical form, with its plans, its concepts" to have faith in the Movement. Besides, "a Communist party could not contemplate the conquest of power . . . it wasn't possible to attempt the conquest of power in Cuba if one had a Communist label . . . a revolutionary power could be conquered in Cuba, but it could not be done as a Communist party." This analysis is consistent with the position Castro took toward the Communists in 1952, though it can also serve as a justification both for his refusal to deal with the party in preparing the revolution, and for the communists' own unwillingness to help the Fidelistas until very late in the war.

  Mario Mencía, the only serious historian of the Cuban revolution working in Havana, has written that though Castro had a "Marxist formation" since his student days, "he eluded this [public] identification with iron willpower even in his declarations." Mencía finds that while early on Castro "had a revolutionary project pointing toward socialism," he faithfully followed José Martí's precept that to achieve one's goals "one must conceal [them]" because to "proclaim them as what they are would raise difficulties too great to be able to reach them in the end." The only time that Castro departed from this rule during the early period, Mencía writes, was when he accused Batista, in an underground publication in mid-1952, of being "a faithful dog of imperialism" and an ally of "great Cuban and foreign interests." But even this attack was signed with a pen name.

  After Pedro Miret, the engineering student and arms expert, met Castro in September 1952 and agreed to train Movement members for military purposes, internal discipline became even stricter. As Melba Hernández recalls it, constant personal control over the members was the leaders' great preoccupation, and at the weekly meetings Castro and Santamaría analyzed the behavior of each revolutionary over the previous seven days, including their personal lives, and often "criticism was made . . . leading to expulsion." But Fidel and Abel also practiced self-criticism, which is a Marxist concept.

  Jesús Montané, the accountant who was in the first revolutionary nucleus, recalls that "in our Movement it was absolutely forbidden to ingest alcoholic drinks," and those who had the drinking habit "could not be militants." Montané says that "the lives of these revolutionaries was guided by the most absolute austerity and morality," and that on one occasion Fidel had suspended an important member of the Movement for drinking, letting him return only when he gave it up completely. Subsequently this revolutionary "offered his precious life to the sacred cause of the Cuban Revolution."

  The Movement's principal headquarters was at the Santamarías' apartment at Twenty-fifth and "O" streets in Vedado (it is now a national shrine), but the plotters also used the apartment of Fidel's sister Lidia, three blocks away, the apartment belonging to Melba Hernández's parents (who were fervently pro-revolutionary) on Jovellar Street in downtown Havana, and an office on Consulado Street, just off the seaside MaleCón boul
evard, provided by a secret member of the organization who worked for a rich businessman. The office on Consulado, Melba says, offered the best "camouflage."

  As usual, propaganda was foremost on Fidel's mind. Before they met him, the Santamarías and Montané published irregularly a mimeographed publication called Son Los Mismos (They Are the Same) to attack Batista, the name indicating the present military regime was as bad as the previous governments. But as soon as they joined forces, Fidel proposed that the publication be renamed El Acusador (The Accuser), and he began to edit it with Abel and the young poet Raúl Gómez García. Son Los Mismos went on being printed simultaneously for some weeks, then it was dropped altogether. At the university the Communists printed their publication, Mella, for which Fidel had written in the past and continued to do occasionally later.

  Castro signed his articles "Alejandro," his middle name. Raúl Gómez, the poet, signed his articles "The Citizen," another sign of the influence of the French Revolution on the Fidelistas. The Movement's publications were produced on an ancient mimeograph machine purchased by Abel Santamaría and Montané for seventy-five pesos; to avoid discovery by the police, the copying machine was constantly moved from place to place by a friendly Spanish taxi driver, and Montané said later it spent most of the time in the trunk of the car parked in front of the Detroit bar on Twenty-fifth Street.