Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  The three judges agreed to order an independent medical examination of their famous defendant, and two distinguished physicians undertook it despite the army command's opposition and found Castro in perfect health. On the basis of their report, the court requested his return to the trial. The Boniato wardens refused, however, to let Castro leave the prison, and the judges gave in to the pressure. This was their compromise with the regime over the way they were treating Castro, allowing him the freedom to accuse Batista at will. They ruled that he was to be separated from the main trial, to be tried separately afterward, and that the proceedings against all the other defendants would continue normally. Fidel never again set foot in the Palace of Justice. At Boniato, he was transferred to a cell on the ground floor, far away from his companions. Melba and Haydée were also punished: They were separated from the other Fidelistas and placed in a cell from which, in the words of the military warden, "you won't even be able to see the sky."

  Castro's transfer to a remote cell revived concern among his companions that he was still an assassination target, and at the next session of the court, on September 28, Raúl Castro rose to announce at the top of his voice that "I fear for the life of my brother! They have mounted a dangerous conspiracy to assassinate Fidel, and I propose that you suspend this trial because our presence at Boniato might protect him . . ." Raúl was ordered to sit down and shut up, but the chief judge also announced that when the court had received Fidel's letter two days earlier, "it took the required measures for the protection of the defendant." This was exactly what Raúl had wanted to hear, but he was on his feet again as the court was adjourning for the day to warn that "if they kill Fidel, they will have to organize a massacre there and do away with all of us."

  The trial continued for another week with a parade of witnesses drawn from among army and police officers as well as hospital nurses. But their testimony demolished the charges originally presented by Colonel Chaviano, the Moncada commander, that the rebels used "modern arms," hand grenades, and knives and daggers to behead the soldiers, and that they had murdered patients in their beds in the civilian and military hospitals. The defense lawyers along with the prosecutor forced out the denials or admissions of "I really don't know" from the government's own witnesses, rendering the proceedings another notch more embarrassing for the regime. Finally, the court convened on October 5, to conclude the trial in an aptly bizarre fashion. Prosecutor Mendieta Hechavarría first announced that he was dropping charges against all the political party leaders, including the Communists, who were among the defendants, and against the Fidelistas whose links with the insurrection could not be proved; this vindicated Castro's basic strategy of determining who should be acquitted by advising the court of the "innocence" of some men and the "guilt" of others.

  Now twenty-nine rebels were left to be judged. In his summation, the prosecutor praised them for "acting with honor, for having been sincere and very courageous, proper in their confessions . . . and noble in their attitudes." He said he "sincerely applauded" their integrity in admitting their guilt. It was an astonishing spectacle as the prosecution virtually apologized for being forced by these men's confessions to ask the court to sentence them to prison terms under the provisions of Article 148. On October 6, the chief judge handed down the sentences: Raúl Castro, Pedro Miret, Ernesto Tizol, and Oscar Alcalde—the top leadership group—were given thirteen years in prison. Twenty other men received ten-year sentences, and three men got three-year sentences. Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were sentenced to seven months detention at the women's prison at Guanajay, west of Havana. Relatively speaking, the sentences were not heavy: The maximum under the law was twenty years imprisonment for the leaders and the minimum was one year.

  Still undecided, however, were the fates of Fidel Castro in his cell at Boniato Prison and of Gustavo Arcos, the man who had been in Fidel's car at Moncada and was now recovering from his wounds at the Colonia Española hospital. No date was set for their trials, and the rebels again began to worry that Fidel could be in danger after they had left Boniato for their ultimate destination. Twenty-six prisoners were placed aboard an army aircraft on October 13; to their surprise, they were taken to the Isle of Pines, which lies immediately south of the Cuban coast, to the island prison, while Melba and Haydée continued on to Havana en route to Guanajay. The court had specified that the men would be held at La Cabaña fortress in Havana, but the regime decided otherwise; the Isle of Pines was more remote from civilization.

  Fidel Castro's trial lasted exactly four hours on October 16, and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The extraordinary aspect of the trial was that the regime held it in virtual secrecy in a small nurses' lounge, a room measuring twelve feet by twelve feet, in the nurses' school at the Saturnino Lora civilian hospital, captured by Abel Santamaría's detachment on July 26. The other extraordinary fact was that it produced Fidel Castro's defense speech, which immediately became known as "History Will Absolve Me," and remains to this day the fundamental and legendary document of the Cuban revolution, the venerated scripture of the rebel movement.

  The decision to hold the trial in the hospital room was designed to perpetuate the official fiction that Castro was too ill to attend the main proceedings in the Palace of Justice, though he had to be transported from Boniato to the hospital. To add credibility, a wounded rebel and a prisoner who had nothing to do with the whole affair were also brought to the nurses' lounge. Fidel could not resist remarking that it was unwise "to render justice in a hospital room, guarded by sentinels with bayonets on their rifles, because the people might conclude that our justice is ill."

  The surroundings were, indeed, absurd. A life-size skeleton hung inside a glass case, and a wall was adorned with a picture of Florence Nightingale. Enough desks and chairs had to be put in the hot, airless room to accommodate the three judges, the prosecutor, the secretary of the court, three lawyers, six journalists, and the three defendants (Abelardo Crespo was on a stretcher on the floor). Two army officers and twenty armed soldiers assured security at the trial. The room had a single barred window, and the morning heat was excruciating.

  Fidel Castro, handcuffed and wearing his heavy dark-blue wool suit, arrived at exactly nine o'clock in the morning with his military escort, and the proceedings began. There is no official transcript or record of the trial, and all the descriptions are based on the oral or written recollections of those present. Castro delivered his speech extemporaneously, and Marta Rojas and the other journalists took copious notes, but the official text of "History Will Absolve Me" was later reconstructed from memory by Fidel and put on paper.

  By that time, Fidel had spent seventy-five days in solitary confinement, and he had lost so much weight that his watchband kept slipping off his wrist, but he was in fine form. Asked the ritual question of whether he had participated in the Moncada attack, Castro replied, "Affirmative." When the prosecutor inquired whether the purpose was to overthrow the government, Castro answered, "It could not have been any other." The prosecutor said he had no other questions. Then, Colonel Chaviano and other military officers testified about the Moncada events, repeating earlier charges. Castro again requested permission to act as his own attorney, and a young mulatto lawyer named Eduardo Sauren lent him a black robe; again it was too small and kept bursting at the armpits whenever Fidel raised his arm to make an oratorial point. Cross-examining Major Pérez Chaumont, the Moncada deputy commander, Castro charged that two additional members of his Movement had been murdered by the Rural Guard; and, as before, he insisted that the army had killed the captured rebels, wanting no prisoners. And this was the end of the proceedings.

  Prosecutor Mendieta Hechavarría chose not to deliver a summation, speaking for barely two minutes to ask the court to apply the maximum punishment to Fidel Castro, as the principal leader of the insurrection, under the terms of the Social Defense Code. Castro looked up and said matter-of-factly, "Two minutes seem to me to be a very short moment to demand and j
ustify that a man be locked up for a quarter of a century." The maximum sentence could be twenty-six years in the case of a top organizer of an insurrection. Then Castro announced that he insisted on delivering his own defense brief, and the chief judge authorized him to proceed. Standing behind a small table, Fidel had a sheaf of notes, a copy of the code, and his book of Martí quotations. Held overnight at Moncada, Fidel had kept his cellmate awake until dawn while he practiced his delivery.

  Castro spoke for two hours, one half the time allotted to his trial, and it was a stunning tour de force of memory, coherence, erudition, and patriotic and revolutionary emotion. Evidently, he had meditated deeply in his prison cell on this masterful piece of oratory—it is really much more than a speech—and his superb command and love of the Spanish language transformed it into a work of literature as well. Just as he claimed that José Martí was the "intellectual author" of the Moncada attack, Martí was equally clearly the inspirer of this oration. As it happens, Martí's first great feat of political writing was an essay on "The Political Prison in Cuba," published when he was eighteen years old, after serving time at hard labor for conspiring against Spain, and it was the perfect literary model for Fidel. In the copy of the Martí book before him at the trial, Castro had underlined twenty-nine major passages, and he quoted the Apostle fifteen times in his discourse.

  Castro opened his oration in low, slow tones. First, he reviewed the "illegalities" surrounding his trial and his thesis that insurrection against a tyrant was legitimate. Then, he traced the history of his Movement, discussed the reasons for the defeat at Moncada, denounced the tortures and the killings of his companions, and stressed governmental corruption in Cuba and the unfair treatment of soldiers in the army (from the beginning, Fidel always sought to attract the "honest" military to his side). But the brunt of his condemnation was aimed at Batista: "Dante divided his hell into nine circles; he put the criminals in the seventh, the thieves in the eighth, and the traitors in the ninth. What a hard dilemma the devil will face when he must choose the circle adequate for the soul of Batista . . ." He called him in Latin, Monstrum Horrendum!

  Next, Castro turned to the Movement's political program, the awesome social-economic conditions prevailing in Cuba, and the revolutionary laws the rebels would have proclaimed had they won at Moncada: the return to the 1940 constitution, agrarian reform, recovery of stolen resources, educational reform, profit-sharing by the workers, and public-housing policies.

  "I bring in my heart the doctrines of Martí and in my mind the noble ideas of all men who have defended the freedom of the people," Castro said. "We have incited a rebellion against a single illegitimate power which has usurped and concentrated in its hands the legislative and executive powers of the nation. . . . I know that I shall be silenced for many years. I know they will try to conceal the truth by every possible means. I know that there will be a conspiracy to force me into oblivion. But my, voice will never be drowned; for it gathers strength within my breast when I feel most alone, and it will give my heart all the warmth that cowardly souls deny me."

  To Fidel, the struggle for the people meant "the six hundred thousand Cubans who are out of work who want to earn their daily bread honestly . . . the five hundred thousand farm workers who live in miserable huts, who work four months and go hungry the rest of the year . . . the four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been stolen . . . the one hundred thousand small farmers who live and die working land, that is not theirs, contemplating it as Moses did the Promised Land, only to die before owning it . . . the thirty thousand self-sacrificing and devoted teachers and professors who are so badly treated and poorly paid . . . the twenty thousand debt-ridden small merchants, ruined by economic crises . . . the ten thousand young professionals [who] leave the schools with their degrees, only to find themselves in a dead-end alley . . . To these people, whose road of anguish is paved with deceit and false promises, we are going to say, 'Here you are, now fight with all your might so that you may be free and happy.' "

  Reaching into his monumental memory and erudition, Castro built history's case to justify taking up arms against tyrants: He noted that Charles I and James II of England were dethroned for despotism; he cited the English revolution of 1688, and the French and American revolutions; the independence of European colonies in Latin America; and summoned up the spirit of freedom and defiance of Stephanus Junius Brutus of ancient Rome, St. Thomas Aquinas (in Summa Theologica), John of Salisbury, Martin Luther and John Calvin, the Scottish reformers John Knox and John Paynet, Montesquieu (in The Spirit of the Law), Jean Jacques Rousseau (in The Social Contract), John Milton, John Locke, Thomas Paine, the seventeenth-century German jurist John Althusius, the French revolutionary jurist Léon Duguit, Honoré de Balzac, and, of course, José Martí.

  But, Castro said, "It looked as if the Apostle Martí was going to die in the year of the centennial of his birth. It looked as if his memory would be extinguished forever, so great was the affront! But he lives. He has not died. His people are rebellious, his people are worthy, his people are faithful to his memory. Cubans have fallen defending his doctrines. Young men, in a magnificent gesture of reparation, have come to give their blood and to die at the side of his tomb so that he might continue to live in the hearts of his countrymen. Oh, Cuba, what would have become of you if you had let the memory of your Apostle die!"

  And Fidel Castro concluded: "As for me, I know that jail will be as hard as it has ever been for anyone, filled with threats, with vileness, and cowardly brutality; but I do not fear this, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who snuffed out the life of seventy brothers of mine. Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!"

  Castro finished, and the three judges and the prosecutor consulted in whispers in the crowded room for a few minutes. The chief judge ordered "the defendant, Doctor Castro Ruz" to be kind enough to stand, then announced: "In accordance with the request of the prosecutor, this court has imposed on you a sentence of fifteen years in prison. . . The trial has been concluded." Fidel put out his hands to be handcuffed, but when a soldier had trouble doing it, he suggested that the officer of the guard put the manacles on him because of his greater experience. "And careful with my watch," he added. Walking out of the nurses' lounge, Fidel turned to Marta Rojas, the young reporter, and asked, "Did you get it all? Do you have all the notes?" As Castro left the hospital building under heavy guard, people in the street cheered him.

  A week later, the last of the rebels, Gustavo Arcos, was sentenced to ten years in prison at a special trial held at the Colonia Española hospital where he lay wounded. At about the same time, General Batista announced incongruously that presidential elections would be held in Cuba on November 1, 1954, more than a year away. As for the Eisenhower administration, it named Arthur Gardner, a financial expert and an admirer of General Batista, as the new United States ambassador in Havana.

  In seeking to trace the evolution of Fidel Castro's ideological allegiances, a complex and tortuous enterprise, the character of the "History Will Absolve Me" discourse is an important milestone. The problem, however, is how this pronouncement should be interpreted from hindsight as distinct from the interpretation given it at the time—or, for that matter, from what Castro might have had in mind.

  Since the formal implantation of Marxism-Leninism in Cuba, the official version is that "History" was decidedly an "anti-imperialist" document, forged with the tools of Marxist dialectics and Leninist inspiration (apart from the Martí inspiration). Castro himself nowadays accepts this interpretation of his 1953 thoughts, albeit the Communists failed to reach the same conclusion. The widely accepted view is that he had subtly disguised his real objectives in the revolutionary program to avoid antagonizing the Cuban middle class and the Americans. The French historian Robert Merle writes very perspicaciously that Castro was faithful to Martí's strategy of fighting only one enemy at a time. Merle adds that Fidel failed to explicitly attack the Uni
ted States economic domination over Cuba, even though he hinted at the nationalization of the American-owned telephone and power companies, but, he says, "what was said in this manifesto was less important than what was being insinuated."

  The Cuban revolutionary chronicler Mario Mencía observes that when Castro defined the Moncada assault as "the battle for freedom," his growing use of Marxist-Leninist theory made him take that concept beyond "the narrow confines of apparent bourgeois personal and institutional liberties." Theodore Draper, a severe American critic of the Cuban revolution, has written that only "official, orthodox pro-Castro propagandists" insist that "everything Castro has done, in power, is consistent with 'History Will Absolve Me,' that it contained the essential outline of the entire Fidelista revolution."

  Given that it is impossible to plumb Castro's mind and selective memory, none of the "official" interpretations are necessarily convincing. If Fidel had fashioned his pronouncement so subtly that even Communist intellectuals at the time missed the point and kept suspecting him of "bourgeois" and "putschist" tendencies, the conclusion is inescapable that the whole exercise served no purpose ideologically. If, indeed, he was concealing his true goals in relatively harmless language, there is no way of proving it. Castro's own contribution to this debate was a comment to a visitor in 1966 that "my Moncada speech was the seed of all the things that were done later on" and that "it could be called Marxist if you wish, but probably a true Marxist would have said that it was not." He went on to say that "it would not have been intelligent to bring about . . . an open confrontation. I think that all radical revolutionaries, in certain moments or circumstances, do not announce programs that might unite all of their enemies on a single front. Throughout history, realistic revolutionaries have always proposed only those things that are attainable." In the end, one is left with the impression that Castro was keeping his options open when he dramatically addressed the court in October 1953, and that his ideas evolved in a firm Marxist-Leninist direction much later. It is an empirically and historically flawed notion to assert that "History" pointed Cuba irreversibly toward communism. Perhaps more to the point, the Castro oration very soon overshadowed the Moncada defeat, allowing him to build on the terrible experience of July 26 and become the revolutionary hero of Cuba. It is a good example of words being mightier than arms.