Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  But Castro wanted to be on the air as well. A few days after he met Santamaría, he convinced Abel to come with him and Montané to visit a physician in Colón, some 150 miles from Havana, whose name he had received from a Movement member. The physician was Dr. Mario Muñoz Monroy, and at the age of forty-one, he was an ardent revolutionary, ready to follow Fidel. As it happened, Dr. Muñoz was a light-aircraft pilot and a ham-radio operator, too. What Fidel wanted from him were two ham transmitters to announce an antiregime demonstration that was being planned at the university for the following week. He wanted two transmitters in case one failed, and the enthusiastic doctor was miraculously able to provide the first one in time to broadcast the "Free Airwaves of the Resistance and National Liberation Movement" rally on May 20 on the forty-meter band.

  The name of the Movement was invented by Fidel for the occasion, and the broadcast was barely heard, but Son Los Mismos was able to report the existence of the underground radio, and this was one of the main objectives in having the transmitters built. Castro believed correctly that different types of propaganda feed on each other; Dr. Muñoz's stations were the forerunners of the Rebel Radio in the Sierra six years later. As Montané recalls it, Castro bubbled with new ideas for the Movement all the way to and from Colón in Abel's car.

  Anti-Batista opposition also took shape in the formation on May 20, 1952, of the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) by Rafael García Bárcena, a well-known professor of psychology, sociology, and philosophy at the University of Havana and the National War College. García Bárcena had founded the Ortodoxo party with Eddy Chibás in 1947, and now he attracted to his MNR young middle-class opponents of Batista, such as Armando Hart, Faustino Pérez, and Juan Manuel Márquez, all of whom later joined the Castro Movement. In Santiago the MNR recruits were Frank País, who would become a hero of the war, and Vilma Espín, now Raúl Castro's wife.

  Fidel took a noncommittal stance toward the MNR—he distrusted middle-class liberals who relied on the conquest of power through military coups—and toward the Liberating Action (AL), organized in July by a politician named Justo Carrillo. He concentrated on his own Movement. At that time, Pedro Miret was busying himself training MNR members in the use of arms at the university; he had not yet met Castro. Justo Carrillo was trying to infiltrate groups of young army officers.

  On August 16 a huge rally was held at the Colón cemetery to commemorate the first anniversary of Senator Chibás's death, and Fidel had his associates print ten thousand copies of the third issue of El Acusador, an enormous press run for a mimeographed publication, to be distributed there and in Havana streets. As "Alejandro," Castro had written two fiery articles, one criticizing the Ortodoxo party for the cowardice of its leadership, and proclaiming that "the movement is revolutionary and not political," and the other accusing Batista of being an "evil tyrant." In his best style of political invective, Fidel informed the dictator that "the dogs that lick your wounds every day will never conceal the awful smells emanating from them," and that "when history is written . . . it will speak of you as it speaks of plagues and epidemics . . ."

  However, this was the end of El Acusador. Even before the cemetery rally began, the secret police finally found the mimeograph machine at the apartment of Joaquín González, a Movement member. The agents smashed the machine and seized about one half of the copies that were there. As they approached the cemetery with copies of El Acusador, Abel Santamaría, Edla Pérez, and Melba Hernández were arrested. Only Fidel and Haydée Santamaría escaped arrest in the ranks of the Movement's directorate. Elda and Melba were released later that day, and were able to find Fidel to tell him about the companions in jail.

  The next day, Castro and Melba appeared at the Castillo del Principe prison in their capacity as attorneys to seek freedom for Santamaría and González. On the way, Fidel said, "Let us buy them something," but he had only one peso in his pocket, and all he could get were cigarettes and matches. At the prison, they were stunned to see most of their other companions in detention, too: Montané, the poet Raúl Goméz, and all the others. It was only then that Castro realized that the Movement had been betrayed by an infiltrator, a police informer, and that the arrests had been carried out methodically the previous day and night.

  Castro spent the day arguing for the release of his companions, and then devoted days and nights trying to track down the "traitor," who was never discovered. This effort, however, prevented him from going to the hospital where Fidelito again had to undergo emergency surgery. He was only able to see his son back at the apartment days later. Several days after the arrests, the Military Intelligence Service—the murderous SIM—tracked down one of the Movement's two radio transmitters.

  These setbacks did nothing to discourage Fidel. All his companions were 'released within a few days, and during the first week of September, he presided over a clandestine meeting of new Movement members in Old Havana. He told them: "All those who join the Movement will do so as simple soldiers; any merit or post which one might have had in the Ortodoxo party will not matter here. The fight will not be easy and the road to be traveled will be long and arduous. We are going to take up arms against the regime."

  The next day, Fidel and Abel were arrested in Castro's sedan on a Vedado street by police in a patrol car. At the station, they and the car were searched, but nothing incriminating was found and they were let go. This was Fidel's first arrest as the secret Movement's head, making him even more careful about all his moves.

  Then once again a tragic anniversary was the occasion for a revolutionary act. November 27 was the eighty-first anniversary of the execution by the Spaniards of eight nationalist medical students, and Castro and student leaders gathered at the university for an anti-Batista rally. Fidel and his companions brought along the second radio transmitter Dr. Muñoz had built for them to broadcast the demonstration. But the police cut off electric power to the university, preventing the holding of the rally.

  It was one more disappointment, and it marked the end of the first phase of the Movement's revolutionary activities. But the evening was not wasted altogether. In the darkness of the campus escalinata, Fidel was introduced by his friend Jorge Valls to Naty Revuelta, the rich and beautiful wife of the heart specialist, the woman with revolutionary sympathies who back in March had tried to send him a key to her apartment so he could hide from the police. A romance was born that evening.

  CHAPTER

  2

  The hundredth anniversary of the birth of José Martí fell on January 28, 1953, and for Fidel Castro this was an extraordinary opportunity for spectacular revolutionary gestures. Despite the fact that clandestine military training had acquired momentum in the closing months of 1952, and Castro had practiced extreme caution in his personal visibility, the celebration of Martí's centennial could not be ignored.

  The Movement was in its second phase: Planning and preparation for actual revolutionary action had begun. By this time Fidel had cut himself off from any direct identification with the training operations. He never went to the university grounds where Pedro Miret conducted clandestine excercises, and most of the new recruits were unaware that Castro was the man who headed the Movement; he, of course, knew who each individual was and what he was doing.

  As a basic rule, Castro believed that he and his fighters should not call unnecessary attention to themselves. They had been involved in university demonstrations the previous November, but now the Fidelistas lay low, staying away from university affrays during December and the start of January 1953. On the other hand, Castro was too much of a committed public figure, and he understood that it might be harmful to him politically for his absence to be noted. Fidel had to walk a thin tightrope, a situation aggravated by his penchant for acting on impulse.

  On January 13, Castro attended a Havana meeting of the leadership of the Ortodoxo party to hear a proposal to form an alliance with other political parties to oppose Batista. The session collapsed in chaos when the most prominent of the Orto
doxos walked out in protest against what they suspected would be the end of their party's independence, or what was left of it after the coup, and an ultimate sellout to the dictatorship. Stomping out, too, Fidel shouted, "Let's get out of here. . . . You can't count on these politicians to make a revolution." This was Castro's final contact with traditional politics in Cuba.

  At about the same time, Communist and other extreme leftist students formed a committee to erect a statue to Julio Antonio Mella, a university leader and cofounder of the Cuban Communist party, who was assassinated in Mexico in 1928. The idea was to consecrate the memory of Mella and thereby virtually make him a national hero. By placing the statue in the street outside university buildings, they would also expand the territory of campus autonomy which the authorities could not legally breach.

  The committee was organized by Alfredo Guevara, and on January 10 the Mella statue was unveiled. Fidel made a point of not attending for tactical reasons, but his brother Raúl was present. There was a certain political ambivalence in the relations between the two brothers (who were personally quite close, with Raúl living for varying periods with Fidel and Mirta), inasmuch as Fidel insisted on keeping him out of the Movement at that time, but kept him partially informed of its progress. That Raúl was involved with the Communists evidently did not trouble Fidel, and he may have thought that it would be useful to have his younger brother become a link between the Movement and the party; Alfredo Guevara could not discreetly play that role.

  On the morning of January 15, students discovered that during the night the white marble bust of Mella had been splashed with black paint, and quickly a crowd of angry youths began to gather. By noon, thousands of students were marching down Havana streets, hanging Batista in effigy, and battling the police, who began firing on the demonstrators. It was the biggest riot since Batista's assumption of power, and in midafternoon the youths decided to march on the presidential palace. The police fought back with tear gas and bullets, and a twenty-one-year-old student named Rubén Batista Rubio was fatally wounded.

  After dark, groups of students, among them Alfredo Guevara and Raúl Castro, returned to the university to regroup and to await a police attack. Thirty other students, who formed a protective cordon around the Mella statue, were arrested and taken to police stations. At the Third District police station, a student named Quintín Pino suddenly saw a familiar figure entering the precinct around midnight, and he cried to his companions, "Hey, here comes Fidel . . ." Castro, who meticulously avoided the riot in which Raúl had fought all day, now chose to appear as attorney, obtaining the release of the thirty students before dawn. Politically, this had more value than hurling stones at the police.

  University tensions and disorders went on until the week of the Martí anniversary celebrations, an occasion on which the Batista regime and its opponents battled over the proprietorship of the memory of the Apostle. The government launched the celebrations with a reception at the presidential palace on the evening of January 25, and the festivities continued with a formal session in front of the National Capitol (where parliament functioned before the coup) on the night of January 27.

  Counter-celebrations were simultaneously set in motion by radical opposition groups, ranging from the University Students' Federation (FEU), the Ortodoxo party, and the Socialist (Communist) Youth to the Women's Martí Centennial Civic Front, the latter a very new entity. The FEU organized a Martí Congress for the Defense of the Rights of the Youths, and Raúl Castro acted as a key member of the founding commission. The congress produced a permanent committee, with Flavio Bravo, the chairman of the Socialist Youth (and a full-time Communist organizer), as one of its fifteen vice-presidents, and Raúl Castro as one of ten permanent secretaries, personally responsible for propaganda. Fidel Castro had no part in the congress, but inevitably he was caught up in its aftermath.

  The evening of the Martí youth congress, January 26, the police raided a house in a Havana suburb where about twenty women belonging to the Civic Front were preparing for distribution the following day a leaflet condemning the regime for collecting additional taxes to pay for the anniversary celebrations. The women were pushed into a waiting police van to be taken to the headquarters of the investigations section, but they shouted and sang inside the vehicle, and their voices were recognized by three occupants of a car that happened to pass them at the entrance to the bridge over the Almendares River. The three men were Fidel Castro, Aramís Taboada, and Alfredo "El Chino" Esquível, all three were lawyers and all three belonged to the secret Movement.

  "Let's turn around and follow them," Fidel said, and the three attorneys reached the investigations office immediately after the van. Castro announced that he was the women's legal representative, and, as one of them said later, "He didn't move from there until the last one of us left the police office at dawn." But Fidel Castro's grand revolutionary gesture was yet to come. He and his Movement were to celebrate the Martí centennial by staging a public parade of his clandestine "army" the following evening.

  The Movement's so-called army had begun to take shape at both the university and in the countryside in the early autumn of the previous year when Castro decided to act "independently" and met Pedro Miret, who then undertook to mold the Movement into a military weapon. At the outset, Miret and others at the university were engaging in sporadic weapons training in the basements of buildings, but because silence had to be maintained, the guns could not be fired except occasionally at the sports stadium. The instruction centered on arms handling, assembling, and disassembling, and crawling with rifles in hand. When Miret began to train the first volunteers (before joining Fidel's Movement, he taught almost anyone who asked), all he had was an ancient Halcón submachine gun, one M-1 rifle, one Springfield rifle, one Spanish-made Mendoza rifle, two Winchester shotguns, and a few pistols.

  Miret's operation changed totally after he met Castro on September 10, 1952. Fidel had heard about him, and sent Ñico López, his Ortodoxo worker friend, to ask Miret to train "a little group" he had. Miret, then a fourth-year student, was disenchanted by the old-line political organizations for which he was training young men, and after meeting with Fidel, he devoted himself completely to the Movement. When Fidel formed the Movement's military committee shortly thereafter, Abel Santamaría, Miret, José Luís Tasende, who worked in a refrigeration plant, Ernesto Tizol, a chicken farmer, and Renato Guitart, a young man from Santiago, where he worked in his father's small trading firm, were the members.

  Most of Fidel's recruits were poor workers from Havana and nearby localities. They spent their Sundays (and their few extra cents for bus fare) at the university, learning the mechanism of a weapon that, as Miret once said, could not even fire, and dragging themselves in the dust under the burning sun. Most of them had never set foot in a primary school, let alone a university, and they had to overcome a sense of social inferiority when they met students.

  The recruits came to the university in cells of ten or fifteen men, each cell being assigned beforehand the exact hour and place to report for training. First, the groups stopped at a Havana high school to receive the password for the day. Once, the password was "Alejandro," which was Castro's code name, and a man would say before a locked door at a university building, "We have been sent by 'Alejandro.' " Tasende and Tizol usually checked the identity of the recruits at the entrances before letting them enter.

  Security precautions were so great that men from different cells were forbidden to talk to one another, and names were never given or exchanged. Castro himself not only avoided ever being present at training sessions, but he even concealed his relationship with Miret. When messages had to be exchanged or plans coordinated, Ñico López, Tasende, or Tizol would act as contacts between Castro and Miret. By the same token, Miret never went places where he could run into Fidel, Abel, or other senior Movement members. Armando Hart, later one of Castro's most trusted companions and a Politburo member, remembers that after meeting Fidel for the first time at the O
rtodoxo party headquarters in Havana, he was asked how his military training at the university was coming along. For months Hart could not figure out how Castro knew about it because he had no idea that Miret, who invited him to undertake military instruction, had links with Fidel.

  To build his Movement, Castro says he traveled forty thousand kilometers in his car during the fourteen months before mid-1952 and the Moncada attack to contact groups and individuals all over Cuba so that the revolutionaries would be equipped and ready to strike. Given the Movement's lack of funds and access to weapons, this was a miracle of improvisation and secrecy. Fidel said, "We succeeded in having twelve hundred men, and I spoke with them, one by one, I organized each cell, each group, the full twelve hundred . . ." Miret estimates that between 1,400 and 1,500 trainees passed through his hands (not all of them remained in the Movement) between September and December 1952, divided among 150 cells. But because the Movement was woefully short of weapons at the time of Moncada, the attackers were selected from only twenty-five cells in Havana and Pinar del Río provinces. In these cells, members knew only each other, and in one instance in the town of Artemisa, two young workers who were close friends discovered only on the eve of the Moncada assault that they belonged to different cells of the same Movement.

  Artemisa, with its working-class and anarchist traditions, was one of Castro's best recruitment pools. It produced 250 volunteers and some of the best sharpshooters of the Movement, among them Ramiro Valdés, the future interior minister. When Pedro Miret decided early in 1953 that field training was required, too, the rebels practiced in rural areas around Artemisa and in Havana province.