Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Raúl Castro said later that "Fidel had concluded that the small engine would be the capture of the Moncada fortress . . . which, in our hands, would set in motion the big engine, which would be the nation fighting with the weapons that we would have seized for the laws and the measures and the program that we would have proclaimed."

  In the meantime, Fidel Castro ordered the acceleration in the training of his forces. The period between August 1952 and January 1953 was mainly devoted to recruitment, organization, and creating the structure of the Movement. Military training, conducted by Pedro Miret, Harriman, Tasende, and Tizol in university basements and atop roofs, was now moved to rural farms and fields to allow actual firing and combat practice; after January 1953, there was no more military activity on the campus.

  The Fidelistas trained wherever they could. They used the small farm where Pedro Trigo (one of the first Movement members) and his wife lived in the southeastern suburb of Calabazar, and the farm belonging to another friend in Catalina de Guïnes, not far from Havana. In all, at least fifteen different field locations were used for training, sessions being switched from one place to another for security reasons. The trainees usually came in small groups by bus, often getting off individually at different points, then following instructions to reach the ultimate destination. Sometimes, an unknown person—for example, a tall (or short) man in a sport shirt with blue (or red) squares—had to be spotted to be given final instructions. There was split-second coordination involving different cells who were training.

  Oscar Alcalde, who owned a laboratory and worked part time as a Finance Ministry inspector, joined the Cerro Hunting Club, where he regularly brought Movement members as guests (but never the same ones twice) to practice target shooting with shotguns. Alcalde had to pay thirty or forty pesos each time for bullets and additional pesos for tips to avoid problems with club employees. The club was also used for final firing practice with .22-caliber sports rifles for those selected to participate in the Moncada attack (although they were never told where they would be going). There were fake mobilizations and emergency drills, and the military commanders winnowed out one by one those volunteers who were not considered fit for combat.

  Castro attended field training sessions very rarely, but when he came, he displayed his meticulous habits. On one occasion during training at a farm near Los Palos in Pinar del Río province, a small metal part was lost from a damaged rifle, and in the rain and falling darkness, Castro searched in tall grass for the tiny spring mechanism until he found it; turning to the volunteers, he said, "Perseverance will give us our victory."

  Castro was aware of the vital importance of every weapon in the Movement's small and antiquated arsenal, and he kept track of individual bullets as well as rifles. Modern weapons were not only expensive but difficult to obtain. One day, Pedro Miret and Oscar Alcalde, the treasurer, almost fell into a secret police trap when they went to buy ten old Thompson submachine guns from a man who claimed to be a Spanish Republican refugee, but was actually a military-intelligence agent. The contact had been made through a third party, but the Movement security was so solid that the police had not identified the prospective buyers beforehand; Miret and Alcalde fled when they realized they were being surrounded by plains-clothesmen in identical blue sports shirts at the spot where the transaction was to occur.

  Miret says that the military committee finally decided to arm the Fidelistas with relatively cheap and easy-to-find .22-caliber sports rifles and hunting shotguns. Still, it was on surprise and not firepower that they relied. In the end, the arsenal included sawed-off .44-caliber Winchester shotguns, automatic Remington shotguns, and several semiautomatic ..22-caliber Browning rifles—plus the old M-1, the Springfield, and the Spanish submachine gun that Miret had treasured all along. Ernesto Tizol was in charge of purchasing most of the shotguns because he owned a chicken farm and could make it appear plausible. In other cases, Movement members falsified order forms from businesses where they had friends. Fidel received a Luger pistol purchased for eighty pesos, and he carried it at Moncada. In Santiago, Renato Guitart was able to buy a number of shotguns and rifles, and five thousand bullets.

  Raising funds for the purchase of arms, ammunition, food, and everything else needed to equip the little army was a constant preoccupation. More and more Movement members and their families had to be supported because they were too busy with the revolution to be able to work. At his trial, Castro told the court that 16,480 pesos had been donated by individual volunteers, most of whom died at Moncada or were murdered by the army and the police afterward. The best estimate is that overall, the Movement was able to collect up to forty-thousand pesos during its entire pre-Moncada existence, an amount so small that the prosecutors refused to believe it.

  There was a tiny trickle from the sale of the works of the sculptor Fidalgo (who reappeared late in May when he failed in his attempt to escape police by sailing to New York as a stowaway) and impressively generous donations from individuals in and around the Movement. Jesús Montané contributed his entire 4,000-peso severance pay when he quit his accountant's job; Oscar Alcalde gave 3,600 pesos from mortgaging his laboratory; Tizol mortgaged his chicken farm; the photographer Chenard gave 1,000 pesos; and Pedro Marrero sold all the furniture from his apartment except for the bedroom set because Castro would not let him do it. Abel Santamaría sold his car. Naty Revuelta turned over her 6,000-peso savings.

  Naty also joined a group of Movement women who worked endless hours at Melba Hernández's parents' apartment, sewing uniforms from material bought cheaply from a nearby department store, making military caps, and sewing noncommissioned officer's stripes on the sleeves of a dozen uniforms. Castro had decided the rebels would wear Cuban Army uniforms to conceal their identity until the last moment. His idea was to buy two or three hundred uniforms, and Pedro Trigo located a medical corps corporal named Florentino Fernández Léon who detested Batista and was willing to purchase the uniforms from soldiers he knew in Havana. But he was able to buy only one hundred uniforms by June, and Castro decided to have the Movement sew the additional ones he needed. As usual, nothing was being left to chance, no detail was overlooked.

  Fidel Castro arrived in the Oriente town of Palma Soriano on April 3 to confer with a local dentist named Pedro Celestino Aguilera, the chief of one of the Movement's cells in eastern Cuba. Aguilera briefed Castro on the political situation in the region, emphasizing the widespread opposition to the Batista dictatorship. Castro thanked him, told him he would be in touch, and departed without saying what he was planning to accomplish in Oriente.

  Having already selected Moncada as the attack target on the basis of information from Movement contacts in Santiago and on the basis of his own conclusions, Castro began dispatching secret emissaries to study the area in detail. Oscar Alcalde went to Santiago in May to observe the change-of-guard pattern and timing at the fortress downtown. Lester Rodríguez, a senior Movement member, followed him to concentrate on every detail of the small area between a nearby courthouse and the barracks, a stretch of street through which some of the attackers would drive. And so on.

  During his April tour of Oriente and accompanied by Renato Guitart, Castro instructed Ernesto Tizol to buy a small farm on the road between Santiago and Siboney Beach where Fidel used to go as a high-school student. He, Guitart, and Tizol spent a day walking up and down the road until they agreed on the farm they deemed suitable. Then they went to swim at the beach. Castro calculated that the farm would be the perfect spot to concentrate his forces on the eve of the attack, and as a place to fall back on in case of need. The farm was ten miles from downtown Santiago and Moncada, and seven or eight miles from the Sierra Maestra foothills in the other direction. In the event of a disaster at Moncada, Castro's plans contemplated a retreat to the Gran Piedra Mountains nearby, which he knew well from his schoolboy climbing days. Tizol was instructed to say to the owner that he was buying the farm to raise chickens as well as to have a vacation place not far fr
om the sea. After initial hesitation, the owner sold El Siboney farm to Tizol.

  In June, Abel Santamaría departed for the Siboney farm to prepare it to receive clandestine arms shipments. Before Abel left Havana, Castro told him to assume the overall command of the Movement if anything happened to him. Abel did not tell his sister Haydée where he was going; the reasoning was that in case of detention it was better for her not to know her brother's whereabouts. Fidel instructed her to move to Melba Hernández's apartment.

  While Abel and Tizol worked at the farm in secrecy, other Movement members in Oriente were instructed by Castro to buy furniture and a refrigerator for the Siboney farm, to rent mattresses for the men who would arrive later, and to rent rooms for others in hotels and boardinghouses in Santiago and Bayamo. Castro was planning a simultaneous attack on Bayamo army barracks on the western approaches to the Sierra Maestra. After his visit to Palma Soriano, he went to the manganese mines of Charco Redondo to establish contact with the miners. Charco Redondo, just outside of Bayamo, was to serve as a support area during the attack on the barracks. The blueprint was rapidly turning into military reality.

  On his way back to Havana from Oriente, Fidel stopped overnight at the Birán farm to see his parents and to borrow 140 pesos from his brother Ramón. Fidel had asked him for a larger amount, without saying that it was intended for the Movement, but Ramón refused. This was the last time Fidel saw his father: He would be too busy to see Don Ángel before departing for Mexico two years later, and the old Spaniard would die before Fidel could return in triumph.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Fidel Castro's great adventure, culminating fourteen months of conspiracies and preparations, finally began to turn into reality on the evening of Friday, July 24, 1953, in the suffocating heat and humidity of summertime Havana. Having completed all the last-minute arrangements, delivered updated sets of instructions to those staying behind, and made his farewells to the very few people who mattered to him personally, Castro climbed in a rented 1952 blue Buick sedan with a cream-colored roof for the long journey to Oriente and what he called his encounter with destiny.

  Castro, Abel Santamaría, and the rest of the Movement's military committee had picked Sunday, July 26, as the date of the planned dawn attack on Moncada and Bayamo. They were the only six men in the whole organization who knew the places and date of the action. Sometime in May, but just before Fidel left for Santiago, the entire battleplan was reviewed one more time. Castro, Pedro Miret, José Luis Tasende, and Ernesto Tizol, the four members of the military committee still in Havana, went over every operational detail.

  As a security precaution, Castro slept at a different home every night in the weeks preceding the departure for Oriente, rarely appearing at his latest apartment on Nicanor del Campo Avenue in Nuevo Vedado where he had moved with Mirta and Fidelito some months earlier. His movements around the city avoided any pattern or routine. On that last Friday he shifted from using a black Dodge to a blue Buick (rented that morning for fifty dollars for a weekend "vacation at Varadero Beach"), with a young black Movement member from Oriente as his driver. The responsibility for driving Castro had been given to Teodulio Mitchel on the eve of the trip to Santiago, although Fidel had only met him a week earlier. Mitchel was an ex-soldier, and for the past year or so he had been a truck driver in his native Palma Soriano, where Dr. Aguilera, the local dentist, recruited him into his Movement cell. The idea was that Castro's driver should be someone from the area who knew the territory and was known there himself, so Aguilera had sent Mitchel to Havana to meet Fidel. They hit it off instantly, and Castro bought Mitchel a meal of steak with fries to mark the start of their friendship. For at least forty-eight hours, Fidel's life would be in Mitchel's hands, based on his instinct that he was someone he could trust.

  In, the preceding weeks Castro had gradually dispatched key personnel to Oriente, starting with Abel Santamaría, and in the last week he began moving the bulk of his force, traveling in small groups or individually by train, bus, and car. Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández, the only two women in the combat ranks of the Movement, went separately by train to Santiago on July 21 and 22, respectively. They each carried weapons in their suitcases; Melba had rifles in a florist's box. Larger shipments of arms and ammunition along with the uniforms had been sent to the Siboney farm during June and July through a variety of means. The last weapons purchase was made in Santiago two days before the attack.

  Raúl Castro was away during these preparations. Working very closely with the Communists at the university (though not yet a party member) and notably with the Socialist Youth's chief, Lionel Soto, Raúl left the country in February as a member of the Cuban delegation to the Communist-sponsored Fourth World Youth and Student Festival in Vienna. Then he went on to Bucharest, spending a month in Rumania, and continued his discovery of Communist Eastern Europe with leisurely visits to Budapest and Prague, "visiting factories," which he followed with a nine-day stay in Paris. Raúl sailed home, arriving in Havana on June 6. Part of his European tour was financed by his parents, who gave him five hundred dollars after his sister Juana talked them into it.

  As a result of his absence, Raúl played no role whatsoever in the growth and molding of the revolutionary movement. Raúl, who formally joined the Communist Socialist Youth after returning from Europe, said later that when he received word on July 24 to leave Havana immediately for an unknown destination, he failed to inform the Socialist Youth. "In not advising it, I may have committed an error," he said. "I surely committed an error, but I belonged to the party for a month and a half, and I didn't have a very keen sense of obligations [to it]." Still Raúl almost missed the Moncada assault altogether.

  On his return to Havana in early June, Raúl had been arrested on charges of carrying subversive propaganda along with two Guatemalans he had befriended during the crossing (another member of the shipboard group was a Soviet citizen who was not allowed to disembark in Havana, and whom Raúl later called "my first Soviet friend"). The Guatemalans were released when Guatemalan diplomats intervened, and they were placed back aboard the liner. Raúl was the only one to remain imprisioned.

  Melba Hernández, who went to the Castillo del Principe prison as an attorney to try to free Raúl, says that she found him "very enthusiastic" about his European trip. The police confiscated his diary, and the chief of the secret-police investigations told Melba that Raúl had written in it that "the socialist world is a paradise." She was unable to obtain his release because he had now been charged with "public disorder" and had to stand trial. The next day, Fidel obtained from a judge a "provisional liberty" warrant, but the case never came up: For one thing, Raúl would be in a Santiago prison for participating in the Moncada attack when the date of his court appearance for "public disorder" rolled around.

  Raúl was unable to undergo a minimum of military training in the short time remaining before Moncada, but he seemed to doubt the success of any armed action by the Movement because he thought the group was too small. Perhaps he was taking the orthodox Communist view of putsch conspiracies, but when his friend José Luis Tasende asked him whether he would come along if the Movement launched an operation, Raúl replied, "Yes, I shall come. . . . In the Movement there is my brother and my best friends: you, Miret, Juan Almeida . . ." Robert Merle, the French historian who has written widely about Moncada, believes that "at the decisive moment, sentimental fidelity overcame ideological loyalty."

  Raúl was sharing a boardinghouse room with Pedro Miret when Tasende came to tell him, "We are taking the train tonight." Suffering from an awesome hangover after attending a late party the night before, Raúl summoned his energy to meet Tasende later that afternoon to pick up a shipment of weapons, and to go to the railroad station to board the train. Sixteen other Fidelistas under Tasende's command were traveling on the same train, but they pretended not to know one another. Raúl received his ticket from Tasende, who sat next to him, and saw that Santiago was the destination.
"Moncada?" he asked. "Yes," Tasende replied softly. They arrived in Santiago in the afternoon of the next day.

  Between 120 and 130 men traveled from Havana and Pinar del Río provinces to Oriente between July 23 and 25, a feat of Fidel's logistics. In addition to buses and trains, fifteen automobiles were used in this deployment, Fidel going in one, Pedro Miret in another, and so on. Each departure followed a precise timetable that included stopovers and arrival times. The cars were borrowed or rented from travel agencies. The overwhelming majority of the volunteers had no idea where they were going until reaching their destinations, but the discipline was so great that, except in one or two instances, no questions were asked, nothing was questioned.

  Fidel Castro had always demonstrated the most acute interest in the personal lives and welfare of his fellow revolutionaries. Melba Hernández recalls, for example, that shortly before the departure for Oriente, Castro suddenly realized that Gildo Fleitas López, one of the most active Movement members, had been engaged for years to a girl whom he had known from childhood and that he might die at Moncada without a chance to marry her. "Therefore," says Melba, "Fidel organized rapidly here in Havana a wedding with all the requirements of the law, a wedding with a veil and with everything that goes through a girl's head, with everything a girl dreams about—the wedding of Gildo with Paquita. Gildo had his honeymoon with Paquita. Gildo fell, he did not return." In Mexico three years later, Castro decided that Arturo Chaumont, one of the rebels selected for the Granma expedition, should marry his woman companion, Odilia Pino, so that she did not become a spinster in the event of his death during the landing. As Melba tells the story, neither of them had actually planned marriage, but Fidel kept insisting that "we must marry them." His companions began to complain that Castro was interfering in people's private lives, but Melba says that he conducted the project like a "military campaign" to press Arturo and Odilia to go to the altar. In the end, Fidel prevailed, and money was somehow found not only for a church wedding, but for a honeymoon in Acapulco and a cash wedding gift from the Movement. Three months later, Arturo Chaumont was captured by the Batista troops, never to be seen again. Says Melba Hernández: "Fidel has this preoccupation with giving his friends a bit of happiness . . ."