Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  In February Castro arranged for his group to use Los Gamitos firing range, also near the city. There were mountains around the range, and Bayo and his instructors used this terrain for guerrilla training. Armed with .30-'06-caliber rifles with telescopic sights—these were the first weapons the Movement could acquire—the rebels practiced firing and ballistics in the most professional detail: deviation rate, trajectory tension, line of fire, plan of fire, angle of fire, trajectory origin, projection line, sighting angle, range, initial velocity, correction in firing on aircraft, and on and on, hour after hour. Bayo was convinced that in a guerrilla war, individual proficiency makes up for enemy numbers and firepower. Then he taught them compass reading and map reading, and how to transfer terrain measurements from a 1:300000 to a 1:100000 map, how to dig shallow trenches, and how to string communication lines. "You men need to learn military culture if you're going to be guerrillas," the one-eyed Spaniard kept telling the men.

  Bayo's two principal assistants were Miguel A. Sánchez, a Cuban who had fought with the United States Army in the Korean War and was known as "El Coreano," and José Smith, another U.S. Army veteran. Sánchez was brought from Miami by Castro and lived with Fidel as one of his two bodyguards, but he was later accused of betraying the Movement. Both Sánchez and Smith were top specialists. Fidel rarely participated in the exercises because overall organization, political contacts, and fund raising took up most of his time, but he made a point of checking periodically on progress in the training, observing firing exercises through a theodolite. Melba Hernández recalls Fidel once spent a whole day, from dawn until late afternoon, observing the training, then decided to calibrate the rifle sights. "We were terribly tired," Melba says, "having practiced all day, and having had only a half orange each for food, most of us just relaxed. I, for example, stretched on the ground, chatting with someone. The only one to go on working with Fidel was Che. When they finished, Fidel gathered us, telling us with infinite sadness that the struggle ahead was very long, that if we became exhausted so easily, we wouldn't be able to keep up, and that he was very upset that Che, an Argentine, a foreigner, hadn't gotten tired, that he had gone on training, while all of us, the Cubans, just did not. . . . He spoke with such sadness that afterward it never occurred to us to get tired—we had no right to be tired . . ."

  Castro, as seen by his closest associates, was absolutely single-minded about the revolution, but he tried very hard to be sociable on a variety of occasions, and he may even have fallen in love with a young woman in the months immediately preceding the invasion. He had a blend of patience and impatience—patience in terms of knowing how to wait for the correct historical moment to act, and impatience in hating to see even one revolutionary moment wasted. His friends soon learned how to cope with his temperament and his moods. One morning in January 1956, Fidel burst into Melba Hernández, and Jesús Montané's bedroom at 5:00 A.M. shouting, "But this is not possible! . . . We came here to make a revolution, and not to sleep until nine o'clock in the morning!" He had evidently concluded that an extra hour or two could be gained for revolutionary practice (none of them actually ever slept until 9:00 A.M.), and he wanted instant action. From then on, they started marching down Insurgentes at dawn for some eight or nine miles to a street corner, where they took a bus to the Gamitos firing range.

  But a few days later, Fidel made up for his martinet behavior. It was February 14, St. Valentine's Day (Cubans call it Lovers' Day), and he started out by wishing Melba a happy holiday, making breakfast (he had taught her earlier how to fry eggs "the best way"), and proposing an evening on the town. As with his military operations, this was planned with equally precise mathematical calculation. "Well," he said to Melba and Montané, "we have sixteen Mexican pesos [roughly $1.20]. Now, a woman, a compañera named Lucy, has just arrived from Havana. So, we could invite her somewhere for refreshments, or go to the movies, which would be four pesos per person. But this is your day, so you decide." Melba chose the movies, and the picture they decided to see was a Hollywood production called Four Feathers, concerning Indian wars. After fetching the compañera, whom Melba thought was very pretty and "in whom Fidel later became interested," they ran into Jesús Reyes, a Movement member often assigned to protect Castro. Reyes insisted on going with them because he had no money at all, and they could not get rid of him, being four pesos short for movie tickets for five. Walking past a pastry shop, they saw tamales and realized how hungry they were. But as Melba remarked, "This was forbidden fruit; we were broke." Finally, the young woman said, "Come on, tell the truth: you have no money, and you feel like eating the tamales. Let's eat them; I'll invite you." Fidel refused flatly, but finally allowed himself to be persuaded to accept a loan. They ate tamales, took Reyes along to see the picture, "and really it was a very improved evening." And as soon as new money arrived, Castro rushed to repay Lucy. He saw her again, but she was not the woman to whom he would propose a few months later.

  The problem with Fidel Castro and women was that he insisted on their being as passionately interested in politics and revolution as he was. One evening, for example, Melba, Jesús Montané, and Raúl Castro persuaded Fidel to go out with two young Mexican women who were being very helpful in the invasion preparations. Fidel agreed, and Raúl said, "But Fidel, we are not going to talk about politics; we are going to pay attention to the girls, we're going to make it a fiesta evening for them, because otherwise your date will get bored—so let's make a deal not to discuss politics." Fidel nodded pleasantly, promised to keep his date amused, to pay attention to her. The three couples, Melba and Montané, Raúl Castro with a girl named Piedad, and Fidel with his date whose name was Alfonsina González, went to a Mexico City nightclub. Presently, Montané and Raúl and their women companions rose to dance, but Fidel did not move from the table. Melba recalls that when they returned to their seats, Fidel was lecturing Alfonsina on politics. They kicked him under the table, and he briefly changed the subject, soon to return to politics.

  Melba says that Fidel lost interest in a girl "as soon as he realized that she was not interested in his goals; then the relationship would grow cold." But, she recalls, "on other occasions, I saw him very interested in a girl if she understood the Cuban situation, and especially if she was involved in working for the Revolution . . . but for various reasons, he never wanted to link his life with such a person." Melba believes that Fidel is "stimulated" by the presence of women, that he always "needs a woman" because "he has a great trust in women," but with him "the intellect is above everything else" in a woman.

  Teresa Casuso, a Cuban novelist who became Castro's friend in Mexico and later a diplomat in his service (until she broke away from the regime), thinks that he fell in love with an "extraordinarily beautiful" eighteen-year-old girl from Havana who was her house guest. Casuso identifies the girl only as "Lilia" (other friends say her last name was Amor), adding that she had "an exceedingly polished and liberal education . . . disconcerting frankness, and an ingenuousness that enabled her to talk on every subject on earth." Castro often visited Teresa Casuso in the latter part of 1956—he had convinced her to let him store weapons and ammunition in locked closets in her villa—and usually tarried, waiting for Lilia to come home. Casuso remembers that "as the days and weeks went by, the romance between Lilia and Fidel flowered." Casuso says that Castro "sought her out with a youthful effusiveness and impetuosity that both startled and amused her . . . the amusement gave her an appearance of imperturbability which, combined with her great beauty, enchanted him, although it may also have been the quality which finally exasperated him, for Fidel cannot suffer people to remain unconquerable before him." According to Casuso, "Fidel had made a proposal of marriage to Lilia, and she had accepted," and he proceeded to obtain her parents' consent. He bought her "a pretty bathing suit to replace her French bikini, which infuriated him." But the engagement lasted no more than a month because Fidel had virtually no time to see Lilia as the invasion preparations quickened; in the end, Lilia deci
ded to marry her former fiancé instead. When she informed him of her decision, Casuso says, Fidel "with that terrible pride of his, told her to marry the other man, that he was 'better suited' to her." Later, as he assembled a machine gun in Casuso's house, he told her that the revolution was his real "beautiful fiancée."

  Whenever possible, for example, Fidel made a point of visiting the spot where Julio Antonio Mella, the student leader and young cofounder of the Cuban Communist party, had been assassinated by Machado agents in Mexico City in 1929. He evidently feared the same fate at the hands of Batista's agents, and held forth before his friends about Mella's life and death, but, Melba Hernández recalls, "as a man, not as a Communist." Castro was hungry for books, but his shortage of funds prevented him from buying enough volumes for himself and the rebels' safe houses until the day he persuaded a bookseller named Saplana to grant him credit. After their first conversation, Fidel loaded his car with books as if it were a truck, then went on getting them until the invasion. Thus, he acquired volumes about the history of Mexico and the Second World War, about Simón Bolívar, about economics and political science, and everything he could find about Marxism and Leninism. Afterward, the bookseller refused to accept money in repayment.

  Fidel's obsession with his personal independence extended to his health. After agreeing to see a physician for a checkup, on the insistence of his companions, he was given a sedative to slow him down a bit. Melba Hernández tried to make him take a pill every morning at breakfast at their house, but Fidel refused. Finally, he told her: "Look, I can't develop a habit and depend on a little pill. I have to depend on myself because this is going to be a long struggle, and when we are in the midst of the war, I won't be able to have any pills. If I'm going to link my activities to pills, then I'm very bad off. I won't be a prisoner of pills." Once, while talking in his bedroom to Melba and Jesús Montané, Castro became depressed and the mood affected them, too. Suddenly, he jumped up and began pacing up and down the room, saying that "this is a bad example, a chief must never do this sort of thing, and, besides, this is a very transitory state of mind because I have full confidence in the Revolution." Melba says Castro apologized profusely, "promising never again to commit this error that he considered very grave."

  Most of Castro's free hours in Mexico were spent with Melba and Jesús Montané, the Guevaras, his brother Raúl, his sisters Lidia, Emma, and Angelita, Fidelito, and Eva and Graciela Jiménez, Havana sisters who were old friends. On February 18, three days after the Guevaras' daughter, Hildita, was born, Fidel visited them. He was the baby's first visitor and told them, "This little girl will be educated in Cuba." On another occasion, Che Guevara offered Fidel bitter Argentine mate tea in a metal mug from which one drinks with a thin tube, passing the mug from person to person. Fidel at first refused because it was not "hygienic," but then joined the mate drinkers. Once, Guevara produced at dinner a bottle of mezcal firewater with a worm inside in the Mexican manner, and defiantly proceeded to swallow the worm. With infinite repugnance, Fidel swallowed a worm, too.

  Early in 1956 the Military Intelligence Service (SIM) in Havana announced the discovery of a "subversive plot to overthrow the government, which is directed from abroad by Fidel Castro." Numerous Movement members were arrested, and Colonel Orlando Piedra, chief of the investigations bureau of the National Police, was dispatched to Mexico to try to uncover the conspiracy there. Castro heard from friends in Havana close to the regime that Batista had ordered his assassination. Twenty thousand dollars had been offered to two hit men to disguise themselves in Mexican police uniforms, "arrest" Castro in the street, and take him somewhere out of town to kill him and make his body vanish. A letter would be sent to María Antonia González over Castro's forged signature informing her that he had had to leave Mexico suddenly, and that there should be no concern about him. According to Castro's information, this operation was conducted by the Cuban naval attaché in Mexico City, but it collapsed when the rebels were somehow warned of the planned murder (there were sympathizers within the Batista secret police), and announced it publicly. The regime's next move against Castro would be through the Mexican authorities.

  In the meantime, Castro finally decided to break his ties with the Ortodoxo party, proclaiming the 26th of July Movement as the only real opposition to the Batista rule, "the revolutionary organization of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble." The pretext for the rupture, announced in a long declaration on March 19 and published in Bohemia, was the Ortodoxo position that Castro's insurrectional line had not been authorized by the party's directorate council. The policy of insurrection and armed struggle had been approved in August of 1955 by the Ortodoxo activists' congress, and Castro now denounced the leadership for its "infamy" in rejecting it. He accused it of "cowardice" and submission to the regime.

  In truth, however, the break was most convenient for him. The link with the party, which belonged to the traditional political establishment in Cuba, was no longer necessary to legitimize the growing 26th of July Movement, which was ready to emerge as an independent organization controlled by Castro. He felt free to denounce the wealthy landowner leaders of the party and charge them with betraying the Chibás heritage, and to proclaim that his Movement was "the hope of the Cuban working class . . . the hope of peasants for land, living like pariahs in the motherland their ancestors liberated . . . the hope of return for the refugees who had to leave their country because they could not work or live there . . . the hope of bread for the hungry and justice for the forgotten." The Movement, Castro emphasized, is "a warm invitation . . . extended with open arms to all the revolutionaries of Cuba without picayune partisan differences . . ." Significantly, Castro was telling the nation that the removal of Batista no longer constituted the foremost or the only objective of the revolution, and that what was at stake was the nation's whole structure.

  In Cuba organized opposition to Batista was rising rapidly. On April 4 the secret police uncovered plans for an uprising by a group of liberal army officers, hours before it was to occur. This was known as the "Conspiracy of the Pure," and its leaders were part of a network established in the Superior War School with contacts in all the Havana commands. The rebellion was aborted because of a spy infiltrated among the officers, and a court-marshal sentenced thirteen of the leaders to six years in prison. Among them were José Ramón Fernández, then a lieutenant (and later a vice-president of Cuba under Castro), and Colonel Ramón Barquín, who was one of the most respected army officers and subsequently helped to build the Rebel Army. On April 20 a Students' Revolutionary Directorate (DR) commando seized the studios of Havana's Channel 4 television station, but a student was killed in the ensuing shootout, and the revolutionaries were unable to get on the air. On April 29 a group of militant members of former President Prío's political organization assaulted the Goicuría army barracks in the port city of Matanzas, sixty miles east of Havana, to force Prío to abandon his conciliatory attitude toward Batista and employ his huge financial resources in armed actions. Fourteen of the attackers were mowed down by machine-gun fire, and Prío was forced into exile in the United States. To Fidel Castro, Goicuría was reminiscent of Moncada, and he charged the government of deliberately staging a "massacre" inasmuch as it knew beforehand that the assault was being prepared. Hundreds of persons were arrested throughout Cuba in the aftermath of this incident in order to destroy the Prío organization. A leader of the DR was murdered by the police on May 15. At the same time, the first issue of the 26th of July Movement's clandestine mimeographed publication, Aldabonazo (The Blow), was put out in Havana by Carlos Franqui, a former Communist editor who had joined the Castro forces.

  Propaganda and political contacts abroad were also of major importance to the Movement because it needed the support of international public opinion in the struggle against Batista and in tandem with invasion preparations. Mexico was a strategic point for such activities. Fidel himself was in charge of political contacts, which ranged from the so-called Democra
tic Left, Latin American groups dedicated to representative democracy and social justice, to the extreme left, including Mexican and other Marxists. In those days, one of the pillars of the Democratic Left was ORIT, the Mexico-based Inter-American Regional Labor Organization, which fought the Communist-backed International Federation of Trade Unions in Latin America, and interestingly Castro made a point of cultivating its leaders. He frequently visited ORIT headquarters on Vallarta Street to meet with Secretary General Luis Alberto Monge of Costa Rica or the assistant secretary general, Arturo Járegui, of Peru, who were among the best-informed sources on Latin American politics (Monge would become his country's president in the early 1980s). ORIT was also a haven for democratic political exiles from all over the area, including Venezuela's Rómulo Betancourt and Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Betancourt fought the Venezuelan military dictator, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and Haya (the founder of the leftist-nationalist but anti-Communist APRA party) was the enemy of the Peruvian president, General Manuel Odría. ORIT's Járegui was an APRA member, as was Hilda Gadea, Che Guevara's wife. The antidictatorial tide was beginning to rise in Latin America, and the Democratic Left was a natural (if temporary) ally for Castro. All these men were close to Mexico's president, Adolfo Ruíz Cortines, and his labor minister (and successor), Adolfo López Mateos.

  Ben S. Stephansky, then labor attaché at the American embassy in Mexico, remembers running into Fidel Castro at least twice at ORIT offices, once with Monge and once with Járegui. Castro seemed to know both men quite well, and had no reluctance in discussing politics with them in front of Stephansky. The American diplomat recalls that Labor Minister López Mateos had mentioned having met Castro, furthering his impression that the Cuban rebel was extremely well connected in the Mexican political world. Talking with Járegui, according to Stephansky, Castro was curious about ORIT's relations with the United States and Mexican governments, and its role in Latin America. At the meeting with Monge, his interest was in ORIT's ties with former Mexican President Cárdenas, and in the Mexican labor movement. Stephansky, who was probably the first United States official ever to meet Castro (he later became U.S. ambassador to Bolivia), was struck by what seemed to him to be the Cuban's "arrogance" and the speechmaking quality of his conversation. Fidel, he thought, was "professorial and cold." Later, Monge told Stephansky, "This Castro is a strange one." Stephansky also remembers that his colleagues at the American embassy, including the CIA station chief, showed absolutely no interest in his encounters with Fidel Castro; they did not even seem to know who he was.