Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Universo Sánchez remembers that Castro had borrowed the "brown suit" which Casuso saw Castro wearing in jail because "Fidel had very bad clothes, and since he was put on television at lot, we wanted Fidel to look elegant." The suit was borrowed from Armando Bayo, the Spanish general's other son, and Universo remarks that "for Fidel to represent the group, he needed a little cachet . . ." It was also Universo who, with Castro's permission, tried to bribe a senior Mexican official with $25,000 to release the group (although, as Fidel admitted later, the Movement only had twenty dollars in its treasury at that point), triggering a shocked reaction. But the shock stemmed from the size of the proposed bribe, and Universo says he subsequently learned that "they thought they had grabbed something very important, much more important than what it really was, because I had offered so much money."

  The bribe did not work, but the Mexican authorities began releasing the Cubans anyway. Twenty-one rebels were sprung by July 9, including Universo Sánchez, Ramiro Valdés, and Juan Almeida, and four more later that week. That left only Fidel, Che Guevara, and Calixto García still in jail on charges of residing in Mexico with expired permits. In desperation, the Movement lawyers succeeded in contacting ex-President Lázaro Cárdenas, the old revolutionary, and he agreed to intercede directly with President Ruíz Cortines. Because nobody in Mexico, president or not, could ever refuse any request from the legendary Cárdenas, the government released Fidel on July 24, more than a month after his arrest. Che and Calixto García were let go on July 31. Fidel made a point of calling on Cárdenas to thank him.

  The revolution was back in business as Castro ordered the Movement reorganized, and most of the fighters and arms moved to Mérida in Yucatán (where the police seized, then returned a weapons cache) and to Veracruz and Jalapa on the southeast coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Fidel remained in Mexico City with a contingent. Che Guevara wrote later that the Mexican police, paid by Batista, had "committed the absurd error of not killing [Fidel] after taking him prisoner." Guevara also noted that when he and Calixto García were the only ones left behind in jail, he had urged Castro not to let the revolution wait for him—he did not know how much longer he would be imprisoned—but Fidel replied simply, "I won't abandon you." To Che, this was a gesture that subordinated his revolutionary attitude to personal friendship, and he remarked that "these personal attitudes that Fidel has with people whom he appreciates are the key to the fanaticism that he creates around him . . . and to an adhesion to principle is added a personal adhesion, making this Rebel Army an indivisible block." Che also composed a "Canto to Fidel," an epic revolutionary poem, ending on the note "If iron halts us on our way/We ask a kerchief of Cuban tears/To cover the guerrillero bones/In transit to American history/Nothing more . . ." Guevara told his wife he would give the poem to Castro "on the high seas, en route to Cuba."

  Fidel Castro turned thirty on August 13, deep in revolutionary politics and invasion planning, making up for the month in prison and the loss of Santa Rosa. Forty new carefully selected recruits arrived from Cuba and the United States, ten of them Moncada veterans. The new contingent included Camilo Cienfuegos Gorriarán, a young Havana worker who had been wounded in an affray with the police, then had emigrated to California where he married an American woman. His older brother, Osmany, was already in Mexico, but not as a member of the Castro Movement; he belonged to a clandestine group of Cuban Communists that maintained liaison between Havana and Mexico City. During August Frank País, the twenty-one-year-old Oriente coordinator of the 26th of July Movement and the son of a Protestant minister, traveled secretly to Mexico to confer with Fidel about the support to be given the rebels the moment they landed in Cuba. Castro, who remained determined to keep his word and to land in Cuba before the end of the year despite his summer reverses, proposed that the arrival of the invasion force be accompanied by armed uprisings throughout Oriente, and that the political climate be prepared for a general strike. The idea was to force the Batista army to become distracted by multiple armed actions, making it easier for the rebels to reach the Sierra Maestra. In the meantime, Castro and País agreed not to send any more men to Mexico, but to start building up the Movement militarily at home in anticipation of the invasion. Simultaneously, Fidel instructed the Movement in Oriente to retain for itself the collected funds that were normally sent to Mexico, or 80 percent of the total (the balance went as usual to the Movement's National Directorate).

  But Castro had also concluded that the time had come for unity among various revolutionary movements in and out of Cuba. In Havana, where Batista was attempting to persuade the opposition to participate in congressional elections in November 1957, Castro's call for unity became the central subject of political conversations. In an interview printed in Cuban newspapers, he acknowledged that the unity he now advocated represented a change in his "tactical line," saying that it was necessary to absorb the lessons of reality. "We can discuss later," he said, "but now only the struggle is honorable." Castro had broken away in March from the Ortodoxo party, yet the summer setbacks required him to seek outside support and alliances. Privately he believed he would always remain in control.

  The first step was the pact he worked out with José Antonio Echeverría, the twenty-four-year-old president of the University Students' Federation (FEU) and secretary general of the Students' Revolutionary Directorate (DR). Echeverría arrived in Mexico on August 29, meeting with Fidel for forty-eight hours, virtually without rest, at the apartment on Pachuca Street where Castro now lived with Melba Hernández, Jesús Montané, and Cándido González. On August 30 they signed the "Mexico Letter," declaring that their respective organizations had decided "to unite solidly their efforts in order to oust the tyranny and carry out the Cuban revolution." Castro and Echeverría added that the social and political conditions in Cuba were "propitious" and the revolutionary preparations sufficiently advanced to offer liberation to the nation in 1956, and that "insurrection backed by a general strike in the whole country will be invincible." In practice, the 26th of July Movement and the DR committed themselves to organizing armed actions throughout Cuba ahead of the invasion to create a revolutionary climate and after the invasion to coordinate with Castro's rebels. However, no specific plans were outlined, and Castro and Echeverría made it clear that their organizations would remain independent; no joint command was contemplated by either side. Besides, the immediate problem was that neither group had enough weapons to launch serious operations.

  In the meantime, the Batista regime sought to undermine Castro by accusing him of accepting money and arms from the Dominican Republic's rightist dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and to plan with him a joint invasion of Cuba. This was patently absurd, given Castro's involvement in the 1947 conspiracy against Trujillo and his general opposition to dictatorships. He fired off a four-column letter to Bohemia, declaring that "the barrage of calumny hurled against us by the dictatorship exceeds all limits. . . . It had [just] been imputed to me to be a member of the Mexican-Soviet Institute and a Communist party militant." Castro wrote that he continued despising Trujillo, and that he believed that a "revolution of principles is worth more than cannon. . . . We shall never change our principles for the arms that all the dictators may have together. . . . Batista, on the contrary, will not renounce the tanks, the cannon, and the aircraft the United States sends him, not to defend democracy, but to massacre our defenseless people." Now Castro was the favorite theme of discussions and polemics in the Cuban press—to his immense satisfaction. It was propaganda at work for his cause.

  The cause, however, urgently needed funds to succeed. Many of his friends at the time claimed that Castro worked out a secret arrangement with Carlos Prío, the millionaire ex-president of Cuba he had so often denounced, to secure money for the 26th of July Movement. Castro never confirmed it, but in an article published in Bohemia in August, he went out of his way to say that "Batista has been merciless with Prío beyond all limits, by insults, taunts, and humiliation. . . . When we were ar
rested in Mexico, and people spoke insistently about our deportation, Prío—a man I have fought several times—was very much a gentleman. . . . He wrote in his capacity as former president of Cuba an open letter to the president of Mexico asking him not to deport us."

  According to most accounts, Castro's search for funds came under the heading of revolutionary unity among anti-Batista groups. After his release from jail, he met in Yucatán with Justo Carrillo, the president of the Cuban Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank before the 1952 coup and who was close to the Montecristi military anti-Batista faction whose rebellion had been recently aborted. Reportedly, Carillo gave Castro five thousand dollars. But the crucial source of funds was Prío. Teresa Casuso—Fidel's new friend and the widow of the famous poet Pablo de la Torriente Brau killed in the Spanish civil war—was Prío's friend also. Casuso says that on Castro's request, she flew to Miami where she spent five days with Prío, who "was eager to talk to Fidel." As a result, Castro entered the United States illegally sometime in September, according to friends' accounts, to meet Prío at the Casa de Palmas Hotel in McAllen, Texas. Many published accounts claim that Castro immediately received perhaps as much as fifty thousand dollars from the former president, whom he had once investigated for corruption. Casuso says that "Prío helped to sustain the expense of two years of costly expeditions . . . and clandestine shipments of arms and men."

  Late in the spring, Castro saw in an arms catalog a photograph of a PT (patrol torpedo) boat for sale in Dover, Delaware, on the Delaware River. Equipped with torpedoes and 40-mm. cannon, this boat was known for both its speed and maneuverability. Antonio del Conde Pontones, a Mexican arms supplier known as "El Cuate" and Castro's friend, was dispatched to Dover with Jesús Reyes to look the PT boat over. The craft was in good condition, so the two emissaries agreed to pay twenty thousand dollars for her, making a down payment of ten thousand dollars in mid-June; they were to take possession of the PT boat and make the final payment on their return within a few weeks. However, Castro was then arrested and El Cuate was picked up by the police on his return to Mexico. In August El Cuate,Onelio Pino, and Rafael del Pino, the student who had gone to Bogotá with Castro in 1948 and now belonged to the Movement, were sent back to Delaware with another ten thousand dollars to sail the PT boat to a Mexican port. Because everything seemed in order, El Cuate was ordered to Miami to meet with Prío while the two Cubans were completing arrangements for the craft.

  El Cuate says that in Miami he was introduced to Prío by Juan Manuel Márquez, who was then representing the Movement in the United States, and the ex-president handed him twenty thousand dollars, "which I delivered to Fidel in Mexico." The fresh money was providential because at this juncture it was impossible to obtain an export permit for the PT boat from the United States government, and for obscure reasons the owner refused to refund the money. Normally, export licenses were granted easily, but now the State Department was reluctant to do so in view of unrest in the Caribbean, and it was too risky to sail the boat illegally. The revolution was now short a precious twenty thousand dollars, and it had no vessel to take it to Cuba in time to fulfill Castro's pledge. Briefly, Fidel considered buying a Catalina PBY flying boat to land him off the Cuban coast, but he dropped the idea along with Universo Sánchez's proposal that they start the war by bombing La Cabaña fortress in Havana from a plane.

  Late in September, Castro and El Cuate went to the hills above the port of Tuxpán on the Gulf Coast between Tampico and Veracruz so as to test .30-'06-caliber Remington automatic rifles in topographic conditions resembling Cuban sierras. El Cuate told Castro that he wanted to go down to the Tuxpán River to look at a yacht he was buying for himself, but when Fidel saw her, he said, "In this boat, I'm going to Cuba . . ." The Mexican argued that the white craft was a luxury boat, too small for an expedition. But Castro said, "If you can get it for me, I'll go to Cuba aboard this one," and El Cuate agreed. As he said later, "You just can't say no to Fidel . . ."

  The yacht was the Granma, and she belonged to Robert B. Erickson, an American who lived permanently in Mexico City. The wooden thirty-eight-foot yacht had been built in 1943, and she could carry up to twenty-five persons safely. Granma was propelled by two diesel engines, carrying fuel tanks holding less than two thousand gallons. But she had sunk during a 1953 hurricane, remaining for a time under water, and much work was required to make her seaworthy again. Erickson was willing to sell her for twenty thousand dollars, providing that he could get another twenty thousand dollars for a modern house he owned on the Tuxpán River. Castro decided to go ahead with the purchase because, he reasoned, they did need a house for the men who would be working on Granma and for those ready to leave. A seventeen-thousand-dollar down payment was made to Erickson, and Castro ordered that work on the yacht start instantly. Two rebels were assigned to live in the house, and Onelio Pino was named Granma's captain.

  Fidel was supremely optimistic now that he had acquired Granma, but he kept an eye on revolutionary politics as well. Pedro Miret, Faustino Pérez, and Ñico López had arrived in Mexico to join him on the expedition; thus the entire general staff of the Movement was with their chief. The FEU student leader, José Antonio Echeverría, returned to Mexico City in mid-October for another conference with Castro; the differences in their personalities and approaches to the revolution were etched even deeper than at their first meeting. Apart from being natural political rivals, Echeverría and Castro saw tactics in different ways, the former insisting on continued violent action, and the latter preferring more coordinated operations; clearly at stake was the ultimate leadership. One week after Echeverría returned to Cuba, however, Students' Revolutionary Directorate commandos ambushed and killed Colonel Manuel Blanco Rico, the chief of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), as he was leaving the Montmartre nightclub. The attack, carried out by Juan Pedro Carbó Servía and Roland Cubela (who in the 1960s tried to assassinate Castro on behalf of the CIA), had originally been intended for Interior Minister Santiago Rey, but when he did not turn up as expected, the colonel was shot instead. Castro took a dim view of this event, saying in a newspaper interview: "I do not condemn [assassination] attempts as a revolutionary weapon if the circumstances require it. But such attempts cannot be indiscriminately perpetrated. I do not know who carried out the assault on Blanco Rico, but I do believe that, from a political and revolutionary standpoint, assassination was not justified because Blanco Rico was not an executioner." In Havana the police raided the Haitian embassy looking for Carbó, who was not there, but killed ten other youths in political asylum.

  On October 24 Frank País brought more bad news from Santiago. País came to persuade Castro to postpone the rebel landing until sometime the following year because, as he had said in an earlier letter sent through secret channels, he had doubts about the efficiency of his armed groups in Oriente "because they were unprotected, unprepared, and uncoordinated." País and his friend Pepito Tey had worked hard to organize a clandestine network in the province, collecting arms and readying the 26th of July units to rise in the cities while others covered the rebels' landing along Oriente's western coast between Manzanillo and Pilón. In charge of the Movement groups in the landing zone was Celia Sánchez, one of Frank País's closest collaborators. Still, País felt an immediate invasion was inadvisable. Fidel and he spent five days arguing, and the young man finally accepted that the landing would come within the next two months. Castro was simply adamant, stressing that his credibility would be destroyed if he broke his promise to return to Cuba in 1956, and that after the June imprisonments it was too risky to stay longer in Mexico.

  Then Castro faced a problem with the Communists. In mid-October Osvaldo Sánchez Cabrera, a leader of the illegal Popular Socialist Party (PSP) who spent most of his time in Mexico, had attempted to talk Fidel out of invading Cuba. Speaking in the name of the party, Sánchez Cabrera proposed that the expedition be postponed until late January, when the sugar harvest would begin, so that a sugar workers' strik
e could be launched to support the landing. Again, Fidel explained that it was vital to keep his word. In mid-November the PSP leadership met secretly in Havana to dispatch another emissary to Castro; this time, it was Flavio Bravo, formerly the secretary general of Socialist Youth, a university friend of Fidel's, and the ideological mentor of Raúl. Lázaro Peña, who also resided in Mexico, was to bring them together, but Flavio ran into Melba Hernández and Jesús Montané in the street, and the contact with Fidel was made at once.

  The Communists' message was that in the party's opinion the internal situation in Cuba was "unfavorable to military action prior to December 31, "that an invasion did not take realities into account, and that it could result in a failure. Flavio Bravo reminded Fidel that at one stage in the independence war, José Martí himself recognized the need to "postpone military action and create more favorable material and subjective conditions." But Fidel thought he understood "subjective conditions" better than the PSP (not to mention Martí), and he said so to Flavio Bravo. The envoy continued to insist that anti-Batista opposition was "very disunited," and that the Communist party's line of "united front and mass struggle" was not progressing well. The PSP, he said, wished to bring all the young revolutionary groups together before embarking on an insurrection because otherwise the masses would not follow. Specifically, the Communists urged Castro to accept this concept of unity—which presumably they would strive to direct—and postpone the invasion. Then, Fidel would issue a short document denouncing Batista, calling for unity of the opposition, demanding general elections with guarantees for all the political parties. The Communists suggested that it would best be couched as an "open letter" by Castro to workers, students, peasants, the youth, and all the civic institutions. It would be, Flavio Bravo said, the "final call" for a peaceful solution, and the anticipated refusal by Batista would justify before public opinion the turn to armed action against the dictatorship.