Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  In December 1961, when he announced to the world his allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, Castro noted that he had been asked whether at the time of Moncada he had thought the same way he did now, and he added, "I thought very similarly to how I think today. This is the truth." And in a Moncada anniversary speech in 1965, he made a point of recalling that "among the books they took away from us [after Moncada] were books by Martí and books by Lenin."

  Speaking in 1975, Fidel volunteered that "the fundamental nucleus of the leaders of our Movement . . . dedicated part of its time to the study of Marx, Engels, and Lenin," and specifically to the lecture of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, Lenin's The State and Revolution, and Franz Mehring's Karl Marx: The Story of His Life. (Castro's critics have seized upon the remark he made in an interview shortly after the revolution that he had read only 370 pages of Das Kapital before Moncada as proof of his ideological inadequacies, but this is not a serious argument.) Melba Hernández, who was the closest person to Castro and the Santamarías during the conspiracy period before Moncada, says that "it was Fidel who formed Abel in the reading and the study of Marxism-Leninism. . . . It was Fidel who formed Abel Santamaría ideologically, and this has to be stated clearly." Melba saw them several times a day, every day, for a year.

  Before her suicide in 1980, Heydée Santamaría reminisced about her brother Abel, assassinated at Moncada, being encouraged by Castro to study Marxism more intensively when they were organizing their revolutionary movement. But Haydée added that even at the risk of "being impolitic," she had to say that Abel refused in those days to join the Communist party because he knew he could not enjoy there the political freedom he had in the Ortodoxo party. After Moncada, at El Siboney farm the army found a copy of the first volume of a two-part Spanish edition of Lenin's selected works with Abel's name written flourishingly across the cover; the Batista regime used it as evidence that the assault was a Communist plot, and newspapers printed photographs of an army lieutenant at the farm, a rifle in his right hand and the captured Lenin book proudly displayed in his left hand.

  There is therefore remarkable consistency in Castro's descriptions between 1961 and 1985 of his own, his friends', and his Movement's ideological evolution. In his own case, the emphasis is on his advance from phase to phase both in the ideological content of his thought and its public disclosure. His principle was to proceed one step at a time, strategically and tactically. At Moncada, Fidel Castro wished to be seen as the defender of Cuban democracy and social decency from the ravages of the Batista rule. Subsequently, he chose to espouse Marxism-Leninism publicly. To his critics, he has practiced deception; in his own eyes, he deserves plaudits for brilliant revolutionary strategy, and he always falls back on Marx's and Martí's thesis of "historical justification"—that history's requirements justify the means. And the record shows that Castro never publicly criticized the Communists during the entire insurrection, even when they denied him help.

  Looking back at Fidelismo's trajectory, it is evident that even for the purpose of ousting Batista, Castro had organized a revolutionary movement totally lacking in internal democracy. From the outset, the Movement was dominated by a few individuals (Fidel and Abel Santamaría, then Fidel alone after his friend was killed at Moncada) with the conviction that the military program must be fulfilled before the political program could be unfolded.

  In the intervening years, Castro has demonstrated another dimension of consistency in political behavior: Once he imposed Marxism-Leninism as the official Cuban doctrine, he proceeded to bring to power the Communists who were his university friends but had never participated in any of his revolutionary actions, often promoting them at the expense of veteran Fidelista fighters. From the university Communist network were Lionel Soto who took Raúl to Eastern Europe, who served for long years as Cuban ambassador to the Soviet Union, and at the Third Congress of the Communist party in 1986 was named to the key post of secretary of the Central Committee; Flavio Bravo Pardo, once secretary-general of Socialist Youth, is a Central Committee member and chairman of the National Assembly; Alfredo Guevara, who was Castro's first Communist friend, commutes between Paris and Havana as a "cultural ambassador," as close as ever to Fidel and Raúl. And from the ranks of the old Communists, the party leaders and guiding lights before and during Batista's time, most have held Politburo and Central Committee posts as long as their advancing age and health permitted. At the 1986 Third Congress, it was the octogenarian Fábio Grobart, the only surviving cofounder of the Cuban Communist party in 1925, who officially introduced Fidel Castro to the delegates.

  When Fidel Castro outlined his plan for the attack on Moncada, he assured his followers gathered in the darkness of El Siboney that with the element of surprise in their favor, the attack itself would be short and swift. He abstained from explaining what would happen afterward. At his trial, too, he said only that he was certain that the people of Cuba would rise to support him and liquidate the dictatorship. While Castro may have deliberately refrained from sharing his strategic concepts with his enemies, he was already thinking of the next revolutionary phase. There is considerable evidence that his plans were extremely ambitious.

  Thus Pedro Miret, a member of the Movement's military committee, emphasized in a conversation in Havana in 1985 that the assault on Moncada was specifically designed to "isolate the region of Oriente, which could have been easily isolated." This would have been possible at the time, Miret said, because there were no adequate communications between Havana and regional military commands and facilities; such communications were established after Moncada. Castro, a born strategist despite the lack of formal military studies, reasoned that for army reinforcements to reach Santiago and to try to retake Moncada and the city, it would have been necessary to come down the central highway from Holguín, a city in the north of Oriente province where at least a regiment was stationed. But the mountain highway led through Bayamo, which is south of Holguín and west of Santiago, and this was the reason for the effort to secure the Bayamo barracks simultaneously with the capture of Moncada. Then, the revolutionaries would blow up the bridges over the Cauto River, which flows through Bayamo, there cutting off the Holguín-Santiago highway. Theoretically, at least the southern part of Oriente province would have been sealed off by the rebels, creating in effect a "liberated zone," a concept to which Castro returned in launching the Sierra war at the end of 1956.

  As he had said, Castro assumed he would have widespread popular support after taking Moncada in historically rebellious Oriente province, where the Cuban independence wars had been launched, and he had hoped that armed "people's militias" would emerge to bolster his revolutionary power. Moreover, nestling between the Caribbean and the mountains, Santiago would be relatively easy to defend; it had only one major land access route. A study of the Moncada operation by the Historical Section of the Political Direction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces issued in 1973, confirms that Castro's strategy was to make "a rebellion erupt in a region, try to keep it alive, call a general strike, and gain time for a popular mobilization that would raise the struggle to a national level." Santiago being Cuba's second largest military center, located at the opposite end of the island from Havana, made the plan even more enticing, the study said, because it would have been extremely hard to move loyalist troops there. After removing arms from Moncada and Bayamo barracks (Moncada had 4 heavy machine guns, 10 submachine guns, 865 Springfield rifles, and 471 revolvers, which would have been enough to equip a major rebel force), Castro would abandon the buildings to avoid being attacked from the air. There were no antiaircraft guns at either location, and the rebels would have spread throughout the areas they controlled and would not present a single target to aircraft in each city.

  The Moncada study reported that if the Batista regime did not collapse immediately, the Castro forces would engage in "irregular war" in the mountains and fields as the independence fighters had done in the nineteenth century. Closeness to the mountains, it said, wou
ld allow a rapid transition to guerrilla war if the conflict became prolonged. The official study concluded the Castro blueprint was excellent, but allowed itself the remark that "the weak aspect of the project was the reliance on the exclusive result of a single action, making the rest of the plan depend on it." If the attempt to capture the barracks failed, the study said, "the whole plan would fail." But, it added, this was "the only possibility open" to the rebels, and "they had to follow it."

  This conclusion amounts to the judgment that for Fidel Castro there are risks, no matter how extraordinary, he is always willing to take because such are his nature and his instinct. It is reminiscent of the comment made by an American historian about Prussia's Frederick the Great (whose life Castro had studied) that the king was a romantic, "and part of Frederick's romanticism was surely the ability to envision ultimate victory when all rational calculation indicated it was clearly impossible."

  And Castro had instilled his faith in victory in his men. In the darkness of El Siboney, a few minutes before five o'clock in the morning of Sunday, July 26, the young Cubans sang the national anthem in whispers. They were ready to go.

  CHAPTER

  4

  The Moncada barracks is an ugly sprawl of buildings and fields in the shape of an irregular rectangle, occupying a 15-acre area of high ground in downtown Santiago. It was originally built as a fortress by the Spaniards and reconstructed after a fire in 1938. Named for General Guillermo Moncada of the Liberation Army in the independence wars, following the establishment of the Cuban republic, it served an essentially internal security function inasmuch as an external attack on Santiago was wholly unlikely.

  At the time of the assault at dawn of July 26, 1953, Moncada was the headquarters of Infantry Regiment 1, known as the Maceo Regiment (General Antonio Maceo was a hero of the last independence war), and its normal complement was 402 men, of whom 288 were privates. A twenty-six-man Rural Guard squadron was also stationed there. Castro's calculation was that on a carnival night, the barracks would contain less than one half of the total number, including those missing on general holiday leave, and those remaining asleep or drunk. For the attack, Fidel would have seventy-nine men with him to try to take Moncada, the rest of the force being assigned to related targets in the fort's immediate vicinity, and a separate detachment being deployed in the town of Bayamo. His plan was designed in such a manner that it had to succeed totally, or fail totally, regardless of whether or not he had additional men.

  The Moncada compound was divided into two main parts. The eastern portion of the rectangle was a firing range, the western portion was the fort proper—the objective of the rebel operation. The fort's perimeter was formed by thick-walled, two-story crenellated yellow barracks buildings on its east side, where the official entrance to Moncada headquarters was located, as well as along the south and north sides for a half-block each. The other half-blocks on the northern and southern flanks and the entire length of the western side of the compound were protected by high walls and fences; officers' and enlisted men's clubs were behind in the southwest inside the fort's perimeter, and exercise fields in the northwest.

  The fort could be penetrated through the main entrance into the command building with its guardroom, but such a frontal attack would have been foolhardy. There were gateways on the west side of the compound and on the east side; they were too far, however, from the center of the fortress, obliging the attackers to cover much terrain in the open. Castro therefore chose Gate 3 in the southeastern corner of the fort, directly south of the headquarters building entrance. Automobiles could enter the fort through this gate to reach the courtyard, with the rebels then storming the structures from inside the compound and seizing them in a moment of surprise.

  For additional insurance, Castro had decided to occupy the Palace of Justice (the Santiago courthouse), a three-story building one block south of the compound's southern perimeter line, to provide covering fire on the courtyard area inside. Small houses and bungalows of regimental officers and noncommissioned officers filled the block between the fort and the courthouse. The military hospital was next to the courthouse, but Castro did not think it was a useful firing position. He did order, however, the occupation of the Saturnino Lora civilian hospital, a two-story building with single-story wards in the back, which looked down on the compound's western wall and could provide additional cover for firing across the street.

  Having studied the Moncada layout and security for months, Castro concluded that the fort could be rushed through the number 3 gate, after the commando team in the lead automobile disarmed the three guards in front of two blockhouses with firing slits in the sides, then lifted an iron chain across the roadway to let the other commando cars into the courtyard. Once inside, the rebels were to run up the stairs of the buildings, disarm the sleeping soldiers (killing them only if they resisted with weapons), take over the fort's radio transmitter, and fan out throughout Moncada with freshly captured army weapons. This was the plan and Castro saw no flaws in it; his scouts had even determined with absolute precision the times a two-man army patrol passed Gate 3 during its nocturnal rounds along the perimeter. The assumption was that the patrol would adhere to its split-second schedule that dawn, too.

  The sixteen automobiles with Fidel Castro and his 123 attackers, including Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández, began departing from El Siboney at 4:45 A.M. The first car was a 1950 Pontiac driven by Abel Santamaría; the commando team that was to disarm the guards was in the fourth car, a 1950 Mercury, and Fidel drove the fifth car, a brand-new 1953 Buick. The automobiles would take their assigned places in the attack column en route to Santiago because it was easier to organize the caravan on the highway than in the dark confinement of the farmhouse front yard.

  All the men wore brown Cuban Army uniforms with black neckties, wide-brimmed campaign hats or visored caps, and knee-high boots or leggings (Haydée and Melba were in slacks and blouses). The only difference between the attackers and the soldiers was in their armament. Whereas the Maceo Regiment's troopers carried modern .30-caliber New-Springfield rifles, the Fidelistas were equipped with an assortment of hunting shotguns, ..22-caliber semiautomatic sports rifles, a few ..44-caliber sawed-off Winchester rifles, a single M-1 rifle, and a single Browning submachine gun. Pathetic or brave, the rebels were superbly trained in the use of their weapons.

  To avoid identification in the event of premature detention, the rebels had no documents of any kind on them. Castro and a group of older-looking men (many in the force were barely over twenty years old; Raúl Castro was twenty-two and appeared still younger) wore sergeant's stripes on their sleeves to exact even more respect from Batista's soldiers: Batista himself having led a sergeants' rebellion in the 1930s that handed him power over Cuba, this was a highly respected rank. Fidel had shaved off his moustache a day or so before the assault, possibly so as not to be recognized.

  There was no sign, however, that the regime had any advance notice of the uprising. When Castro had reached El Siboney the previous night, he learned to his immense frustration that Colonel Alberto del Río Chaviano, the commander of the Oriente military district to which the Maceo Regiment belonged, had opened Moncada to the public on Friday the twenty-fourth as part of the carnival celebrations. "What a lost opportunity!" he kept muttering angrily, imagining the ease with which he could have taken over the fort had he known of Chaviano's plans in advance and could have gathered his men in time to infiltrate Moncada.

  At this peak of the summer, the rest of Cuba was completely tranquil. General Batista was spending the holidays at the luxury Varadero beach resort and had been aboard his yacht, Marta II, off the coast for the last few days. Near Batista's hometown of Banes in Oriente (not far from Fidel Castro's home in Birán), 150 peasants had been arrested by the Rural Guard for putting up squatter homes on land belonging to the Santa Lucia sugar mill, and the story happened to be published in the newspaper Alerta on Sunday, July 26, just as the Fidelistas converged on Moncada
.

  But all began to go awry instantly. The third car to leave El Siboney was a black 1948 Chevrolet driven by Mario Dalmau and bringing the five other men, including team commander Raúl Castro. (At the last moment, Fidel made his brother the cheif of one of the three detachments at Moncada, albeit the smallest.) On the way to their target, the Palace of Justice, they made a wrong turn, winding up at a downtown square in the opposite direction, and finally arrived at the courthouse several minutes behind schedule, when the fighting had already begun.

  The sixth car, carrying Boris Luis Santa Coloma (Haydée's fiancé and a member of the Movement's civilian committee) and seven other fighters, had a flat tire right after leaving the farmhouse. Boris and three others were able to transfer to other vehicles, but four men had to be left behind for lack of space, and the car was abandoned. Now the force was reduced to 113 combatants and 15 automobiles.

  The four university students who had decided hours earlier not to participate in the operation, and were ordered by Fidel to be the last to leave the farm en route home (after their detention in the bathroom), disobeyed him and managed in the darkness to join the middle of the motorcade. As they approached Santiago, they turned left on the central highway in the direction of Havana, but the car behind them with eight rebels assumed that this was the way to Moncada and followed them. The driver realized his error only when far past Santiago. When the eight men returned to the city, it was already too late to fight. Thus the total assault contingent that finally struck the fort area was down to 111 persons, including Fidel Castro, and 14 vehicles. In a 1959 interview with Carlos Franqui, the editor of Revolución, Castro said that "the best armed half of our troops was delayed at the city gates and so was not present at the vital moment. . . . Our reserve division, which had almost all our heavy weapons—except for those with the advance party—made a wrong turn and completely lost its way in a city that was unfamiliar to them." But this is completely misleading: Castro had not been denied the "best armed half of our troops," but only twelve men from the number that left El Siboney, and his own force, including himself, contained eighty-three fighters when the rebels moved on the barracks. Raúl and his five-man team were a few minutes late, yet in position at the courthouse during the battle. Abel Santamaría with twenty-three rebels, including the two women and Dr. Mario Muñoz, reached the civilian hospital precisely on time.