Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  It was literally a mass trial. The 122 defendants were represented by 22 lawyers, there were 6 forensic-medicine specialists, dozens of relatives and friends, and about 100 rifle-wielding army soldiers. They were crowded into a courtroom forty-five feet by fifteen feet, and the humid heat of Santiago notwithstanding, the doors and windows were closed as a security measure. Chief Judge Piñeito-Osorio described it as "the most transcendental trial in Republican Cuba," and despite press censorship imposed by the government under the national state of emergency in force since July 26, the nation was well aware that Fidel Castro was being tried. Six journalists, including Marta Rojas from the Havana weekly Bohemia, were allowed inside, although they would not be allowed to publish their accounts (their presence, however, would later directly help Fidel Castro as well as assist in the creation of the historical record).

  Hours before the trial started, armored units cut off the streets around Moncada and the Palace of Justice. About one thousand soldiers with automatic weapons lined the route from Boniato Prison to the courthouse. Then, the prisoners arrived in buses at the back door of the Palace of Justice. Fidel Castro was transported alone under heavy guard in an army jeep. He wore his old, striped dark-blue wool suit, a white shirt, a red print necktie, and black shoes and socks. His wife, Mirta, had sent him the suit in prison at his request (he wrote her asking that it be dry-cleaned first and sent with a belt), and now Fidel was sweating profusely in the morning sun. His new moustache was well trimmed and his hair neatly combed. The prisoners, all of them handcuffed, were taken to the library of the Palace of Justice where for the first time they had the opportunity to talk, however briefly, with their lawyers.

  As the prisoners entered the courtroom, there was a chorus of whispers: "This is Fidel! This is him! . . ." and the chief judge gaveled for silence. Before taking his seat, Castro raised his manacled hands toward the judges and addressed them in a loud, clear voice: "Mr. President . . . I want to call your attention to this incredible fact. . . . What guarantees can there be in this trial? Not even the worst criminals are held this way in a hall that calls itself a hall of justice. . . . You cannot judge people who are handcuffed . . ."

  Castro went instantly on the offensive, but the chief judge sided with him. He declared a recess until handcuffs were removed from all the prisoners, and warned the chief of the army escort that he would not allow prisoners to be brought handcuffed into his courtroom again. Fidel had easily won the first round, and suddenly there was a new mood in the tribunal of justice. That Castro and his principal associates would be sentenced was taken for granted from the outset because in the light of the confessions they avidly volunteered, the judges had no choice but to find them guilty under Article 148. What was different, however, was the atmosphere in which the proceedings unfolded. Chief Judge Nieto Piñeito-Osorio and Judge Juan Francisco Mejías Valdivieso were thought to symphathize with the accused, and the third judge, Ricardo Díaz Olivera, was behaving in a similarly benign fashion although he was believed to be pro-Batista. The prosecutor did his job, and no more. In the end, Castro and his companions were given an astounding latitude in making accusations against the regime rather than defending themselves. Captain Manuel Lavastida, the SIM chief in Santiago, later told one of the defense lawyers that politically the government had lost the case: The public was for the defendants, the judges were for the defendants, he said. And in Santiago, Castro had going for him the Oriente tradition of rebellion and freedom wars.

  That Castro and his companions enjoyed so much latitude in the Santiago court also stemmed from the fact that Batista evidently failed to understand the political implications of what was occurring with the three judges; there is no indication that he tried to exercise pressure on them to control the rebels' attitude. At the same time, the Cuban judiciary had jealously guarded its independence from interference by the government. The Santiago judges would go on maintaining this stance even during the most climactic moments of the Sierra war, and even then Batista failed to confront them.

  The central concept in Castro's courtroom appearances was to establish the principle of legitimacy for the Movement's attack on the army barracks, arguing that the rebels had the right to try to overthrow Batista because he was an usurper who had gained power through a military coup and the violation of the constitution. With an absolutely straight face, Castro reminded the court that, acting as attorney, he had brought charges against Batista before a special court in Havana immediately after the coup, and had demanded up to one hundred years in prison for the dictator for violating the whole body of Cuban jurisprudence. Fidel was not attempting to defend himself and his companions from the charges of instigating an uprising; he was confirming the charges and proudly justifying their actions. By the end of the first day before the Provisional Tribunal of Santiago, the accused had become the accuser.

  Castro then proceeded to play a dual role before the judges. The first one was that of the indignant defendant delivering political and revolutionary lectures in his replies to the prosecution. When Prosecutor Mendieta Hechavarría asked him whether he had participated in the Moncada and Bayamo attacks "in a physical or intellectual form," Fidel shot back: "Yes, I participated!" Answering the next question concerning the participation of the other defendants, he declared: "These young people, like me, love the freedom of their country. They have committed no crime unless it is considered to be a crime to wish for our country the best there is. . . . Isn't this what they taught us in school?"

  Fidel's second role, even more successful, was acting as his own attorney. He demanded it as his right as a lawyer, and the chief judge could not refuse, having granted permission to do so to two political leaders charged in the same trial who had preceded Castro on the stand. Being his own attorney gave Fidel the opportunity to cross-examine his accusers, including the Moncada commander, Colonel Alberto del Río Chaviano, and to heap more insult and scorn on the dictatorship. Castro had to pay five pesos to an attorney for the courtroom license an attorney required to become an officer of the court. He went through the dramatic sequence of donning a black robe when he acted as lawyer (in Cuban courts, judges and lawyers had to wear robes, and that first day a robe large enough for Fidel could not be found, forcing him to perform in one several sizes too small), then taking it off when he returned to his defendant's bench. On his lawyer's table, he placed a copy of the Social Defense Code and a volume of Martí's works.

  Castro produced the next dimension of drama when he was asked who was the "intellectual author" of the attacks on army installations on July 26. The question was fundamental in the trial because the law prescribed punishment for leaders of an armed assault against the state, and because in the Cuban legal tradition, the notion of the "intellectual author" of a crime, the person who inspired it, was as important as that of the "leader" physically carrying out an attack. To this question, Castro answered calmly: "The only intellectual author of this revolution is José Martí, the Apostle of Our Independence." Now he was turning the proceedings in the suffocatingly hot Santiago courtroom into a trial of history.

  To each defendant the prosecutor confined himself to the single question of whether he (or she) had participated in the assault. The rebels responded with a yes, and then with accounts of atrocities by the Batista forces against their companions. Baudilio Castellanos García, Fidel's childhood friend and law-school colleague, defended forty-six of the rebels, the bulk of the accused (including Raúl Castro), and his statements and questions were perfectly synchronized with the overall Castro strategy. Between them, Castro and Castellanos established for the court who had participated in the attacks and who, in effect, should be acquitted, following up on the prosecutor's same question. Under the secret selection system, each rebel knew beforehand how to answer. Raúl and Miret had done their job well.

  And one by one, the accused went on stunning the courtroom with horror tales: the beatings by the soldiers, the tortures, the summary executions of captured rebels, the bruta
lities, and the insults. The day after the Moncada attack, the Santiago "summer court" (that is, judges on the bench in the criminal tribunal substituting for vacationing regular justices) had ordered the autopsies of thirty-four cadavers found in the vicinity of the barracks—before the authorities had had time to bury thirty-three of them in a common grave at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery. The autopsy reports, describing "unidentified" individuals with smashed skulls and other signs of violent death by beatings or point-blank gunshots, were entered in the trial records of Case 37-053, enormously damaging evidence for the government's political image.

  Astoundingly, it was Prosecutor Mendieta Hechavarría who through persistent questioning of Haydée Santamaría brought out the story of what the army had done to her fiancé, Boris Luis Santa Coloma, and her brother Abel before killing them. Haydée testified that after the soldiers had occupied the civilian hospital and captured her and Melba Hernández, a guard approached, saying that Boris was in the next room and "to tell me that they had extirpated his testicles" to make him talk (Jesús Montané had testified earlier that an army officer had approached him in the Moncada detention area, holding in his blood-covered glove a rotting ball of flesh, and said, "You see this? If you don't talk, I'll do the same thing to you I did to Boris. I will castrate you." The officer held a razor in the other hand). About her brother, Haydée said, "They gouged out one of his eyes." An army witness then added that Abel's eyes had been removed with a bayonet.

  At the end of the testimony about army brutalities presented by scores of the defendants, and after his own statement on the subject in his capacity of defendant, Castro assumed the role of attorney. In his black robe, he requested the court to separate all the testimony on the army's treatment of the prisoners and the killings from the record of the Moncada trial so that it could form the basis for subsequent trials for "assassination and torture" he proposed to seek against Batista regime officials. To Fidel Castro's own surprise, the court instantly agreed. Thus Castro was now formally both a defendant and an accuser.

  It is interesting to note that in the course of the Moncada trial, the Communists chose not to show any support for the Fidelistas. Two top leaders of the Popular Socialist Party, Joaquín Ordoqui Mesa and Lázaro Peña, were arrested in Santiago on the day of the attack and charged under Article 148 along with Castro's rebels and a half-dozen well-known opposition politicians. Asked whether they had conspired with others in an insurrection against the government, Ordoqui and Peña denied it, declaring they had come to Santiago, as they did every year, for the birthday celebrations of the party's secretary-general, Blás Roca. The two Communist leaders said they had no contacts with opposition political parties and no advance knowledge of the Moncada assault. They restated that Cuban Communists had opposed the Batista coup. But they volunteered no expressions of sympathy or solidarity with Castro and his revolutionaries. They were acquitted at the end of the trial.

  Batista, in fact, must have found solace in the stand of his old Communist allies. Not only did they eschew public support for the rebels when the trial was under way, but the Popular Socialist Party actually denounced the Castro uprising. In a statement issued by the Communist leadership and disseminated by its clandestine publications as well as at cadre meetings, the party repudiated Moncada as "a putschist method peculiar to all bourgeois political factions." It called the attack "adventurist" and "false and sterile," even though the Communists recognized the "heroism" of Castro's men. The Communists thus threw the whole arsenal of Marxist-Leninist invective against the Fidelistas, presumably because the party's (and Moscow's) policy was to oppose any initiatives it did not control, especially when they were not in conformity with the dogma.

  One does not know what, if anything, Fidel said on this subject to his brother Raúl, a member of the party's youth wing, but he was extremely bitter about the Communist stance. In a letter from prison to his friend Luis Conte Agüero, a journalist and radio commentator, Castro wrote in December that instead of "sterile and inopportune theories about a putsch or revolution," it should have been "the hour of denouncing the monstrous crimes the government had committed, assassinating more Cubans in four days than in the previous eleven years." He did not mention the Communists by name—he always refrained from direct criticism of communism in Cuba—but the context makes it obvious whom he had in mind. Twenty years later, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, an old-time Communist who after the revolution rose to become one of Castro's most powerful and influential advisers, told an American journalist that at the time the party had judged Moncada by its "external characteristics" and described it as a "putsch" because "Fidel had not made his position explicit" about his political and insurrectional program. But this is a disingenuous effort to justify Communist actions at the time.

  Meanwhile, after five days of the trial, the Batista regime finally concluded that the situation was getting politically out of hand, and that Fidel Castro could no longer be tolerated in the courtroom. His dual-role performance was too damaging and embarrassing to the government, and the Provisional Tribunal was clearly not disposed to curb him. Not wishing to confront the court directly, Fidel then let the army take matters into its own hands; this opened the way for another spectacular episode in the Castro drama.

  When the court convened on Saturday, September 26, and the routine roll call of the defendants got under way, the rebels answered, "Present." But when the name of Fidel Castro was called, there was silence—the first time, the second time, the third time. The principal defense lawyer, Baudilio Castellanos, rose to tell the court that Castro was not present; he had not been brought to the Palace of Justice that day. The chief judge said the trial must proceed, but Castellanos jumped to his feet to demand that the court determine first why the principal defendant was absent. When the chief judge summoned the army officer in charge of guarding the prisoners, he was handed a letter from the office of Colonel Chaviano, the Moncada commander, saying that Castro could not be brought to the courtroom because he was ill at the Boniato prison; a medical certificate was appended to the letter. A court official read the communication aloud. Castro, the certificate said, was suffering from a "nervous crisis."

  There was commotion, and a woman's voice shouted, "Fidel is not ill!" It was Melba Hernández, who had risen from the defendants' bench and marched toward the judges, removing a scarf from her head. She extracted a folded envelope from her hair and handed it to the chief judge, announcing, "This is a letter from Doctor Fidel Castro." Returning to her seat, Melba whispered to Haydée, "Now they can't kill him anymore . . ." Castro and his friends had again beaten their enemies to the punch.

  Sometime earlier, Fidel and his principal associates had reached the conclusion that there was a plot afoot to kill him in prison. His food would be poisoned, he believed, and for some weeks he ate only what was sent the rebels from the outside by families and friends, or purchased through the ever-helpful common prisoners. He would not even smoke prison cigars. Whether or not the Batista regime had actually set out to kill Fidel is impossible to prove. However, Lieutenant Jesús Yanes Pelletier, the prison's military supervisor, was removed from his post shortly after Castro's arrival at Boniato, supposedly for refusing to obey orders to poison him (Yanes later became a captain in the Rebel Army and chief of the Castro bodyguard). Besides, Fidel has a keenly developed sense of dangers facing him; as his former interior minister, Ramiro Valdés, says, "He can smell the dangers and the risks in the air. . . . This Fidel is a sorcerer, a sorcerer . . ."

  In any event, Castro's suspicions were confirmed, at least in his mind, when he was informed on the evening of September 25 that he would not be taken to court the next day because he was thought to be ill. The secret network inside the prison was activated at once. While his companions and the common prisoners strolled back and forth in front of his cell, as they did every evening, Castro whispered that he would be writing an urgent letter that had to be delivered to the court the next day. Then, he proceeded to write it on oni
on-paper sheets held inside a magazine he pretended to be reading. Leonel Gómez Pérez, a prisoner who had been mistakenly charged with participation in the Moncada operation, was assigned the mission of receiving the letter from Fidel. Leonel had a habit of reading a book as he walked up and down the prison corridor, and therefore the guards paid no attention to him that particular night and did not notice that the prisoner was coming closer and closer to the bars of Castro's cell. When the guard in the corridor looked away for a moment, Fidel threw the letter in an envelope through the bars so that it would land inside Leonel's book. Leonel kept walking for a while longer, then calmly returned to his cellblock. He gave the letter to one of the Fidelistas who, in turn, had one of the common prisoners deliver it to Melba Hernández. Melba folded the envelope into a tiny square and concealed it in her hair.

  In his letter to the court, Castro, describing himself as his own attorney in the proceedings against him, charged that all possible means were being used to prevent him from being present at the trial so that he could not destroy "the fantastic falsehoods" about the events of July 26, and make known "the most terrifying massacre in the history of Cuba." He insisted he was not ill, and that the court was being subjected to unprecedented lies, and he complained that he was kept illegally incommunicado for fifty-seven days, "without being allowed to see the sun, talk with anyone, or see my family." Fidel informed the court that he had learned with certainty that "my physical elimination, under pretext of an escape attempt or through poisoning, is being planned," and that "the two girls" (Melba and Haydée) faced the same danger because "they are unusual witnesses of the massacre of 26 of July."

  Castro then demanded an immediate medical examination by the dean of the medical school of Santiago, the assignment of a court officer to the prisoners while being transported between Boniato and the Palace of Justice, and the delivery of copies of his letter to the Supreme Court and the Cuban Bar Association. He named Melba Hernández as his representative in court and concluded: "If I have to sacrifice a particle of my rights or my honor to keep my life, I prefer to lose it a thousand times: A just principle at the bottom of a grave is more powerful than an army!"