Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  By mid-spring of 1956, Castro decided that the Los Gamitos firing range was no longer adequate, so he instructed General Bayo to find and lease a ranch better suited for the organization of his small army. Weeks went by as Bayo drove around the Mexico City area with Ciro Redondo, one of Castro's most trusted aides, until he came upon a perfect spot near the town of Chalco, some twenty-five miles from the capital. The Santa Rosa ranch covered ninety-six square miles, including fields and mountains. The ranch house had 6,600 square feet, large enough to accommodate more than fifty men comfortably, and was surrounded by a nine-foot stone wall. It had four towers for protection from bandits, and Bayo remembered that it looked like "an ancient castle."

  Santa Rosa belonged to Erasmo Rivera, a rich landowner in his seventies who once fought against Americans with Pancho Villa's guerrillas and was left for dead after a firefight; Bayo thought the significance was striking. Castro had authorized Bayo to spend $240 monthly to rent the ranch, but Rivera wanted to sell it for $240,000. After long days of negotiation, Bayo convinced the owner he was fronting for a millionaire Central American colonel who would certainly buy Santa Rosa, but the ranch house would have to be repaired and painted first. He offered to bring some fifty "Salvadorans" in this colonel's employ who would work on the house for the two or three months it would take to get it in shape—this was the period for which Castro needed the ranch—and finally Rivera agreed to the proposal and to a "nominal" rent of $8 monthly during the repairs. Bayo warned him that the arrangement had to be kept secret because if the press in El Salvador learned about it, the deal would be off. It was necessary, he said, to keep the "Salvadorans" away from the villagers, especially from women, to avoid problems. And when Bayo complained that the area was very arid, Rivera told him where water was to be found. Bayo was very proud: He had saved Fidel $232 a month.

  The first rebels arrived at the ranch within a day or two, and Castro named Che Guevara chief of personnel under Bayo at Santa Rosa. Che wrote later that the Fidelistas "learned plenty" with Bayo, and that after he attended the Spaniard's first class, "my impression was that there existed a possibility of triumph that I had considered very doubtful when I signed up with the rebel commander [i.e., Fidel Castro], which whom I had from the beginning ties of romantic adventurous sympathy and of shared belief that it was worth to die on a foreign beach for such a pure ideal." Bayo worked his men day and night: They rose at 5:00 A.M. and trained until dark, always sleeping on the floor. As the training advanced, Bayo led nocturnal marches that started at 8:00 P.M. and ended at sunrise, with only a compass as a guide. To create conditions similar to the Cuban Sierra, two camps were set up in the mountains where the fighters would spend several days in simulated combat, forced marches, and guard duty. Water and food were brought by donkeys. Weapons were obtained in Mexico City through a friendly arms merchant, or in the United States by several Castro emissaries. Now that the Movement's treasury was richer, the revolutionaries had twenty Johnson automatic rifles, several Thompson submachine guns, twenty hunting rifles with telescopic sights, two .50-caliber antitank rifles, a Mauser light machine gun, and numerous smaller weapons. Uniforms and sleeping bags were sewn at the warehouse of the Mexican arms dealer. Fidel was delighted with the progress of his guerrillas. He took time out to serve as godfather at the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico to the daughter of Bayo's son, Alberto, a pilot who subsequently became an officer in the Cuban revolutionary air force. This was, Bayo said, the first of hundreds of Castro's godchildren. Bayo selected Che Guevara, his chess partner at the ranch, as the top guerrillero at Las Rosas. The general also wrote epic romantic poems in tribute to Fidel and several of his favorite fighters.

  Toward the end of the training, the rebel leadership was faced with an extremely serious problem. A fighter named Calixto Morales Hernández, a rural schoolteacher, one day broke the rigid discipline by refusing to continue marching, sitting down, lighting a cigarette, and ignoring the officer who ordered him to rejoin the column. The men were then ordered back to the camp, and Fidel was instantly informed by telephone of Calixto Morales's defiance. This was the kind of disciplinary breach Fidel would not tolerate, and he arrived from the city with Raúl Castro and Gustavo Arcos. Fidel convoked a court-martial at once (there were such courts at Santa Rosa as well as at every safe house in Mexico City); he presided over the court, the other members being Bayo and Arcos. Raúl Castro was the prosecutor. The jury was composed of all the men at the camp. When ordered by Fidel to explain his behavior, Calixto Morales insisted that thirteen-hour marches were unnecessary and that he refused to take part in them.

  Fidel said that he would not allow a major breach of discipline to go unpunished because without discipline the revolution could not triumph, and that it was therefore imperative that Calixto's punishment serve as an example. Bayo recounts that Castro "was eloquent, passionate, convincing. . . . He sweated indignation through all the pores of his skin, and he demanded in shouts that his compañeros halt this pus because otherwise it would spread gangrene among all of them." In effect, he was demanding the death penalty for Calixto. Then Bayo argued that it would be an error to execute Calixto on Mexican soil because no matter how great the secrecy, there was always a risk the body would be discovered and then Mexican police would enter the case. If that happened, Bayo added, it would be "adiós to the expedition . . . to the freedom of our adored Cuba . . . to the dream of entering Havana triumphantly . . ." Calixto spoke again, repeating his arguments calmly. Bayo thought that "his defense made no sense."

  At that point, Bayo recalled, "Raúl, the prosecutor, leaped like an infuriated lion, interrupting the proceedings. . . . 'What disillusion have I felt this afternoon with the words of General Bayo,' he shouted. 'What a tremendous disillusion with what I have just heard! . . . You spend your life speaking of military discipline . . . of the dignity of the revolutionary uniform, but when a saboteur of our ideals, a bad soldier, appears among us to destroy our revolutionary mystique . . . you, General Bayo, our professor of military ethics, of military morals, you throw in the towel and attempt to save the life of this individual. . . . No, a hundred times, no! We cannot start our history with a hoggishness, we cannot stain our history by dirtying our hands with the pus flowing from this undisciplined individual. . . . I come to you, begging that you be implacable with the companion who broke our laws. . . . Calixto's attitude is incomprehensible, leaving us all filled with perplexity and bewilderment. How was it possible? Has he gone mad? His attempt to dismantle our forces has failed . . . I must ask you to be inflexible with our companion, that you apply to him the code of your conscience since we haven't yet drafted a war code, that you hurl upon him the full weight of your ire . . .' "

  Reflecting on this intervention, Bayo later wrote: "I didn't know this Raúl. I knew a youth, almost beardless, but how did he grow before my eyes with his oratory? . . . He grew before me like a giant. . . . We have in Raúl a colossus in the defense of revolutionary principles. . . . If the mad assassins some day sever the life of our idol, our Fidel . . . thinking that in sacrificing him they will extinguish the light of the Revolution, they do not know, they do not have the slightest idea of the man who would pick up the torch, because Raúl is Fidel multiplied by two in energy, in inflexibility, in fiber. . . . Fidel is a little more flexible, Raúl is tempered steel. Fidel is more reachable, Raúl is a calculating machine: You press the lever, and what comes out, comes out. Fidel is a goal attained through talent, persuasion, and personality; Raúl is the ray aimed at a target. . . . Let us halt those who think of eliminating Fidel, asking more softness in his revolutionary laws. His substitute in his own right, Raúl, whom we the lovers of Revolution will follow blindly, will be more implacable with them."

  Afterward, according to Bayo, the sentence on Calixto was pronounced by Fidel. He was to be expelled from the Movement and kept prisoner under armed guard until the rebels left Mexico. Fidel did not explain his reasons for saving the man's life; Calixto listened in
silence. As Bayo tells the rest of the story, Calixto volunteered to cut wood, clean the kitchen, set the table, and do every chore in the camp. So that his two guards would not be deprived of continued training, he obtained permission to participate with them in the long marches, fourteen or fifteen hours at a time, without uttering a word. In the end, Fidel ordered that Calixto be permitted to march without a guard. One evening, Bayo asked Calixto why he had rebelled in the first place, but the ex-teacher only asked for a chance to fight and die in Cuba. He was given the opportunity to sail on the Granma, fight in the Sierra Maestra, and to redeem himself in the eyes of his companions. Bayo ran into him in Havana after victory over Batista, and Calixto told him he could now reveal the reason for his insubordination in training camp. He removed his trousers, and Bayo saw that his lower back was wrapped in tight bandages. "You see," Calixto said, "I have a bone deviation that prevents me from walking a long time because when I get tired, the pain I feel prevents me from going on. If I had told the truth, my companions in camp would have eliminated me from the invasion, which I feared the most, and I knew that in the end the death penalty would not have been applied to me . I would have then revealed my physical impairment . . ." After victory, Castro named him military governor of Las Villas province.

  Universo Sánchez, who belonged to Castro's inner circle and was Che Guevara's deputy at Las Rosas, recalls that Calixto had actually been sentenced to death for indiscipline, and that he was charged with carrying out the execution. Fidel, however, reversed the decision. A former Communist who joined the Movement before Moncada (but missed the attack), Universo Sánchez was so highly regarded that Faustino Pérez and Armando Hart had personally arranged for him to sail to Mexico aboard an Italian ship late in 1955, to join Castro. In Mexico he became Fidel's shadow and the commander of a safe house. He was entrusted with the most delicate missions, of which counterespionage was the most important. Universo recalls that an infiltrated agent could and would be executed for treason or spying, and added: "We have shot people there." He says that in one instance, he was able to prove that a man who had never been suspected of anything, actually turned out to be a Batista spy. The man, whose identity is unknown, was sentenced by a safe house court-martial and executed on Universo's instructions by one of the rebels. "He was shot and buried there in a field," he says. Every day, Universo recalls, Movement leaders were told of suspected infiltrators, and Fidel always assigned someone to check on the reports, often leading to confrontations. As Universo says, "We always went armed with one or two pistols."

  Fidel Castro was armed when Mexican policemen surrounded and arrested him in the street on the evening of June 20, 1956. He pulled out his pistol, but the policemen used Universo Sánchez and Ramiro Valdés, whom they had grabbed seconds earlier, as a screen to prevent him from firing. Fidel was disarmed at gunpoint, and forced into a police cruiser together with Sánchez and Valdés. The three of them had left a safe house on foot after being informed by a Movement member that the police were inspecting cars parked in front of the house. Fidel and his two companions were taken to the Interior Ministry jail on Miguel Schultz Street, and in the course of the night the police rounded up twelve more rebels and their friends, including María Antonia González and Alberto Bayo Cosgaya, General Bayo's aviator son. The general went into hiding for weeks, escaping arrest. Seizing documents and arms, Federal Police agents learned about the existence of the Santa Rosa ranch and prepared to raid it. Fidel, however, insisted that he be allowed to go along with the police to avoid a bloody clash. Arriving in Santa Rosa on the afternoon of June 24 with heavy police contingents, Fidel urged his companions to surrender peacefully. Thirteen men were arrested at the ranch, Che Guevara among them. But most of the weapons and ammunition had been removed to Mexico City the day before. Fidel and twenty-seven of his followers were in jail; of the Movement's leadership, only Raúl Castro was at large. It seemed as if the Castro revolution had come to an abrupt end that June week, and General Batista had succeeded in having the Mexican authorities smash the 26th of July organization. Now, Havana demanded the prisoners' extradition.

  Castro had known that the plot on his life had failed, but had not realized to what extent the Mexican Federal Police were willing to act on Batista's behalf; nor did he understand adequately the labyrinthine ways of Mexican politics in which various official factions and agencies often acted independently both of each other and of the country's president. In fact, Castro had felt sufficiently relaxed about the situation that he flew to San José, Costa Rica, on June 10 to meet with Cuban refugees and Costa Rican politicians, returning to Mexico just in time to be arrested.

  The assumption within the Fidelista camp was that they had been betrayed from within by an agent or a traitor, because the Mexican police knew everything about the location of the safe houses and addresses of their Mexican friends. But the urgency at hand was to obtain the freedom of Castro and his colleagues before they were deported to Cuba. Juan Manuel Márquez, one of Fidel's top associates, rushed back from the United States, where he was buying arms and collecting money, and he and Raúl Castro were able to retain two influential Mexican lawyers to defend the prisoners. On July 2 a judge ruled that the Cubans should be released, but the Interior Ministry refused to do so; the judge's order, however, prevented their deportation. In the meantime, Castro found it necessary to defend himself from charges that he had Communist ties. He had been accused of planning Batista's assassination in Havana, and the Mexican police charged that Castro had come to Mexico with the help of Lázaro Peña, the Cuban Communist labor leader, and Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Mexican Communist labor leader. Moreover, the police described him as one of "seven Communists" detained in the June 20–21 roundup.

  Clearly, it did not suit Castro to be identified as a Communist; so on June 22, he wasted no time in issuing a denial from prison, a denial couched in extremely careful language. Published in Bohemia in Havana the following week, Fidel's statement read: "No one in Cuba is unaware of my position toward communism, for I was a founder of the Partido del Pueblo Cubano [the Ortodoxos] along with Eduardo Chibás, who never made a pact nor accepted any type of collaboration with the Communists." He added that his Movement had no contacts, either, with former President Prío. In a long article in Bohemia on July 15, Castro went back to the Communist issue in considerable detail:

  "Naturally the accusation of my being a Communist was absurd in the eyes of all who knew my public path in Cuba, without any kind of ties with the Communist party. But that propaganda is elaborated for the consumption of Mexican public opinion and international news agencies and for the purpose of adding the pressure of the American embassy to that which they have been applying to the Mexican authorities. . . . Captain Gutiérrez Barros himself read me the report forwarded to the president of Mexico after a week of minute investigation; among its observations it was categorically affirmed that we had no ties whatsoever with Communist organizations. . . . What moral authority, on the other hand, does Mr. Batista have to speak of communism when he was the Communist party presidential candidate in the elections of 1940, if his electoral posters took shelter under the hammer and sickle, if his pictures beside Blás Roca [then the Communist party's secretary general] and Lázaro Peña are still around, if half a dozen of his present ministers and trusted collaborators were well-known members of the Communist party?"

  This was the first time that Castro had publicly connected the Communists with Batista, and the question arises whether he was doing it because he was truly angry at the party, which was ignoring him, or as a tactical maneuver to save the Movement. Blás Roca told an American journalist in 1974 that "it was a tactic, "but at that stage there was nothing else he could have presumably said; Castro himself is not known to have returned to the subject in public. But the fact remains that at the time of his imprisonment in Mexico, Castro and the Communists were very much at odds over revolutionary strategy.

  Fidel wrote in the Bohemia article that "it seems a c
ommon thing in my public life to have to wage the most difficult battle in favor of truth from a cell," and he devoted his Mexican detention to writing and speaking without pause on behalf of his revolution. Behaving with considerable aplomb, he received visitors in the patio of the jail (the Mexicans were lenient about his social life in detention), always wearing a suit and tie, making new friendships, and sending out instructions to his underground Movement. Teresa Casuso first met him in the jail yard when she paid a call on him. Describing the jail scene, she wrote: "More than fifty Cubans were gathered in the large central courtyard. . . . In the middle, tall and clean-shaven and with close-cropped chestnut hair, dressed soberly and correctly in a brown suit, standing out from the rest by his look and his bearing, was their chief, Fidel Castro. He gave one the impression of being noble, sure, deliberate—like a big Newfoundland dog. . . . He looked eminently serene, and inspired confidence and a sense of security." For years, Casuso has belonged to the sisterhood of highly intelligent and impressive women supporters of Fidel.