Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  In Havana the junta collapsed before nightfall. At noon a diplomatic delegation, which included the American ambassador, Earl Smith, met with General Cantillo at the presidential palace, but by the afternoon, Camp Columbia was turned over by its officers to Colonel Ramón Barquín, who had just been released from prison on the Isle of Pines where he was serving a sentence for conspiring against Batista. Barquín placed Cantillo under house arrest, and by midnight a plane arrived from the Isle of Pines, bringing other officers who had been imprisoned there, including Captain José Ramón Fernández and such civilian leaders as Armando Hart. Cienfuegos and Guevara would not reach Havana until the afternoon of January 2, so for three days the capital was without government or authorities; but there was no violence and no vengeance in the city, only joy, chanting, and singing into the night. Cubans had taken to heart Castro's broadcast appeals not to take justice into their own hands.

  Fidel Castro and his entourage entered Santiago on January 2, surrounded by an explosion of popular happiness. Symbolically, he took possession of the Moncada barracks where he had launched the revolution on July 26, 1953. He named Manuel Urrutia as the provisional president of Cuba, declared Santiago the provisional capital of Cuba, and that evening delivered his first speech as the victorious chief of the revolution to a delirious, joyful crowd. Immediately, he set the tone for the future, the future that had already arrived: "The Revolution begins now. The Revolution will not be an easy task. The Revolution will be a very difficult undertaking, full of danger. This time, luckily for Cuba, the Revolution will truly come into power. It will not be like 1898, when the North Americans came and made themselves masters of our country. . . . At this moment we must consolidate power before anything else. . . . The Revolution will not be made in two days, but now I am sure that we are making the Revolution; that for the first time the republic will really be entirely free and the people will have what they deserve. . . . This war was won by the people! . . ."

  IV

  THE REVOLUTION

  (1959–1963)

  CHAPTER

  1

  Fidel Castro took over Cuba and launched his great revolution in January 1959, to the thunderous applause of an overwhelming majority of his compatriots. Within eighteen months he had guided the country to the threshold of being a Marxist-Leninist society and to an alliance with the Soviet Union. In the words of his closest Communist associate, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, "the democratic-bourgeois period in Cuba really ended in August 1960," and Castro himself said at the time that "we are entering a new stage" of the revolution. He also explained that the revolutionary movement had to be the work of "new communists. . . because they were not known as such." The same month, the Central Intelligence Agency formally approved top-secret plans to assassinate him.

  Castro set out from his first day in power to destroy every vestige of the old social order in Cuba. He accomplished it through the extraordinary procedure of operating for well over a year a "parallel" government in Havana, concealed from his own cabinet ministers, to say nothing of his fellow Cubans, until his revolutionary controls were fully consolidated. In an equally secret fashion, he instantly negotiated a pact with the "old" Communists, and, in a separate move, entered into the first conversations with a Soviet emissary over caviar and vodka in his INRA office in the autumn of 1959.

  The inside story of the origins of the present Communist state in Cuba has never before been published, and its substance remains unknown to Cubans in general. It has been reconstructed here from interviews, held in Havana during 1985, with those who were personally involved in running Castro's "hidden government" and in such related activities as the creation of special schools where "old" Communists taught Marxism-Leninism to the "new Communists" among top Fidelistas, at first in total secrecy Publicly, Castro savagely rejected domestic and foreign accusations that communism was creeping into his "humanist" revolution, and imprisoned on charges of treason those of his wartime companions who resigned their posts over this issue. Castro's Ariadne thread remained invisible while the "Maximum Leader (as Fidel was now known)," basking in national adulation, put together his "real" revolutionary structure.

  In peace as in war, Castro was the master of strategy and tactics as well as the master of timing. Looking back at events of the first year of the revolution with the benefit of hindsight and inside knowledge, it is clear that he knew exactly what he was doing all along, that his apparent improvisations had been carefully thought out, and that nothing was left to chance. Castro understood above all else that his own personality was, as a purely practical proposition, the key to the success of his entire enterprise, and he exploited this factor to the utmost. Having always insisted that propaganda was vital in mobilizing the masses for a revolution, Castro immediately seized on television, which was already quite developed in Cuba in 1959, as the ideal vehicle to advance himself and the revolution. He was a natural television personality, and he literally sold the revolution on TV. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, the erudite geographer and writer who was the coordinator of Castro's "inside team" and has remained at his side for nearly thirty years, says that in terms of a leader's relationship with his nation, "the case of Fidel is unique in modern history. . . . Lenin did not have radio and television, and, moreover, Lenin never had the ascendancy over the Soviet people that Fidel has had over Cubans."

  Politically, Castro conducted himself with remarkable acumen from the moment power came within his reach. Having forced the collapse of the junta, which had attempted to replace Batista in Havana, by calling a general strike and threatening a military attack on the capital and Santiago, he kept up the political pressure for a full week. He maintained the work stoppage for two more days as a guarantee against new coup attempts (it also constituted a victory holiday with Castro as the center of national attention), and on January 3 he initiated a slow, triumphant march to Havana in the Roman manner. That morning, however, he first conferred with Camilo Cienfuegos, who flew from Havana to brief him on the security situation in the capital, and instructed Raúl to stay behind in Santiago to protect his rearguard. The advance to Havana lasted five days and nights, with Fidel, surrounded by his barbudos, riding atop a tank or in a jeep, receiving wild acclaim from the population, every step of the way relayed to the rest of the island by live television. His telescopic-sight semiautomatic rifle (now an American M-2) slung over his shoulder and his horn-rimmed spectacles perched over his Roman nose, Castro presented the image of the warrior-philosopher king. The famous beard, the cigar clenched in his teeth, and the olive-green combat fatigues (with a small medallion of the Virgin of Cobre on a chain around his neck conveniently visible under his open-collar shirt) were the symbols of the Fidel Castro personality, precisely the way he intended to be seen and remembered forever. Inching ahead through thick crowds, he halted almost every other minute to greet or embrace somebody he knew or recognized, to shout a slogan, deliver a few words, even to make a speech. When his final offensive began in the autumn, Castro commanded three hundred men and when he entered Santiago, he had a total of three thousand armed rebels. As he marched to Havana, he was like the Pied Piper, attracting more and more military followers. He says that when he reached Bayamo in western Oriente, the two-thousand-man regular army garrison with tanks and cannon joined his column of one thousand fighters (the balance of the Rebel Army was distributed in Santiago, Havana, Las Villas, and elsewhere). He welcomed these soldiers for the time being. The weeding out and the creation of the new army would come soon after.

  It was unquestionably a risk for Castro, physically and politically, to be on the road for five days, but he had calculated that his trusted commanders throughout the island would assure that nothing untoward would happen; he was in permanent radio and telephone contact with them. Concerning the danger of assassination, Castro was always fatalistic, not prepared to sacrifice his relationship with the masses to security requirements. And the idea of the march to Havana down the length of the central highway represente
d such fantastic political exposure, and was such proof of his absolute sway over the nation and the adoration of him that was growing geometrically—thanks to television—that it simply could not be forfeited. Castro was even able to control the politics of the revolution from the road despite the maddening chaos and confusion that surrounded his progress. With Celia Sánchez firmly in charge of communications and of the whereabouts of people who mattered to him, Fidel managed to conduct private conferences with the men whom he wanted in key posts (for example, Raúl Chibás, the treasurer of the 26th of July Movement, flew from Santiago to Camaguey where he caught the Maximum Leader to say he was not interested in the Finance Ministry post being offered to him; others grabbed Castro elsewhere to discuss their futures). At the same time, Celia busily sent out messages around Cuba and abroad to summon old friends whom Fidel wanted to see as soon as possible.

  In Cotorro, at the approaches to Havana, Castro finally encountered his son, Fidelito, whom he had not seen since leaving Mexico over two years earlier. Fidelito, now nine years old, was brought by relatives to meet his father; Mirta, his mother, evidently did not oppose the reunion and was already losing control over the boy. Soon, Castro took him out of a private Havana day school and put him in a public boarding school, making sure he could see him as often as possible. Soon, Mirta and her husband and children left for Spain for good, and Castro's old friend Naty Revuelta took it upon herself to find a school for Fidelito.

  Whatever Castro was planning for the future of Cuba, his instinct had convinced him that a smooth and widely acceptable transition was politically advisable. For this reason, he let his hand-picked provisional president, Manuel Urrutia, select the prime minister and the cabinet in Santiago that first week, though naturally he kept a watchful eye on the process. For himself, Fidel reserved the title of military Commander in Chief that he already held in the Sierra Maestra, knowing that his real power lay in the blindly loyal Rebel Army. Urrutia, who had arrived in the Sierra the preceding December (but saw Castro only twice), named an exceptionally talented cabinet. Drawn mainly from the 26th of July Movement's moderate wing, the group included only three guerrilla companions as ministers, one of them being Faustino Pérez, a veteran mountain fighter but an ideological moderate. The other barbudos were Augusto Martínez Sánchez as defense minister and Humberto Sorí-Marín, who had drafted the Sierra agrarian reform law, as agriculture minister. From the founders of the 26th of July Movement after Moncada, only Armando Hart was invited to the cabinet and named education minister. The only ideological leftist was Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, the minister of revolutionary laws, who had belonged in the late 1930s to the university committee of the illegal Communist party, joining the Castro movement in the late 1950s and serving for a time as chairman of the Cuban Bar Association. That same chairmanship had also been held by José Miró Cardona, whom Urrutia appointed as prime minister. Urrutia wrote later that he had proposed to Castro "the desirability of appointing a centralized cabinet representing all the revolutionary sectors, but Castro opposed it, asserting that the government should be as homogeneous as possible." At that juncture, Castro wanted this homogeneous group to be formed along the lines of the 26th of July Movement, which enjoyed worldwide respect.

  More to the point, Castro needed instant competence. The Rebel Army, peasant based and overwhelmingly illiterate, could not provide administrators on any level, certainly not ministerial (Faustino Pérez, Martínez Sánchez, and Sorí-Marín were pre-guerrilla army intellectuals with university degrees, and all three were identified with the 26th of July Movement). While Castro explained later that the revolution had to turn to the "old" Communists because the Sierra rebels lacked government-management expertise, he could not actually do it for at least two years without triggering violent opposition from large segments of the Cuban population and from the United States. By the end of 1960, his police and political controls were strong enough to cope with domestic opposition, and his relations with the United States had deteriorated to such a point that he no longer had to take the American factor into account when formulating his defiant policies. At that point, Castro could afford to ally himself openly with the Communists of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP).

  In keeping the Communists out of the cabinet in 1959 (Dorticós whose past Communist ties were generally unknown was easily accepted by Urrutia), the "Maximum Leader"—had to keep out the Students' Revolutionary Directorate as well maintain the "homogeneous" character of the provisional government; besides, the DR had challenged him by occupying the presidential palace in Havana and the university with armed guerrillas before the Rebel Army reached the capital. To avoid premature opposition, Fidel deliberately gave his brother Raúl and Che Guevara very low public profiles. Raúl had his military command in Santiago, and Che was the chief of the La Cabaña fortress in Havana, but their power and influence in real life greatly exceeded their job descriptions. They participated in all the secret revolutionary policy decisions, and they were instrumental in placing Communist-oriented Rebel Army personnel from their wartime commands in strategic middle-level positions throughout the country. With the impressive façade of the 26th of July Movement cabinet studded with such internationally recognized economic specialists as Rufo López-Fresquet as finance minister and Felipe Pazos as president of the National Bank, providing the new regime with respectability, Castro and his collaborators used the interval to discreetly construct the Marxist-Leninist edifice.

  As usual, Che Guevara insisted on being frank and outspoken when the rest of the core leadership labored behind the façade. Enrique Oltuski, who was the regime's first minister of communications (and, at the age of twenty-three, the youngest minister) before being fired and imprisoned, later recalled this frankness in his encounter with Guevara during the Las Villas campaign in autumn 1959, when he was in charge of the 26th of July Movement in that province. As they discussed the future, and Oltuski urged caution in order not to provoke the United States, Che told him: "So, you are one of those who think that we can make a revolution behind the back of the Americans. . . . What a shiteater you are! We must make the revolution in a struggle to the death against imperialism from the first moment. A true revolution cannot be disguised . . ." In a Havana lecture on January 27 on the "Social Projections of the Rebel Army," Guevara went far beyond anything Castro was ready to say publicly when he declared that the agrarian reform law signed in the Sierra in 1958 was "not complete" without the seizure of large land holdings and that the "peasant mass" and the Rebel Army would impose a new law. At a time when Castro was pledging respect for foreign investments, Guevara informed his audience that "we are an armed democracy," that public utilities (which were owned by American companies) must be nationalized, and that "the entire Cuban nation must become a guerrilla army" to defend itself from aggression "by a power that is almost a continent." However, not much attention was being paid to the Argentine physician and his lectures before obscure groups—yet.

  It was on Fidel Castro's public activities that the attentions of Cuba and much of the fascinated outside world were focused during these first months of the "Year of Liberation" (Castro liked the French Revolution's concept of designating years through reference to its own calendar, as if to erase the past), and he was mesmerizing. His entrance in Havana on January 8 was an apotheosis, marvelously staged. As Fidel drove into the ancient colonial city at the head of his Column 1, church bells tolled, factory whistles blew, and ship sirens sounded. The first stop was the harbor, and he stepped aboard the Granma, which was moored there—it had been recently brought to Havana—to the boom of cannon salutes from the navy frigates. The Castro motorcade then fought its way through the dense mob in the plaza in front of the presidential palace, where the Commander in Chief wished to call on Manuel Urrutia and the cabinet. Urrutia had been able to move into the palace earlier in the week when the Rebel Army persuaded the rival DR guerrillas to leave the building, but the armed students were still occupying the university, and now Cas
tro was facing his first major crisis. He chose to solve it through rhetoric rather than through force, and this won him new acclaim and support.

  Night had fallen on January 8 when Fidel reached the army's Camp Columbia headquarters in northwestern Havana to deliver his great victory speech before the tens of thousands of Cubans who had been waiting for him for long hours. His main theme was the Rebel Army's responsibility for the success of the revolution then being launched, and this led him to emphasize the need for revolutionary unity, and finally to bring out into the open the seizure of weapons by the DR. Turning to Camilo Cienfuegos, the Rebel Army's chief of staff and the second most popular revolutionary figure, Castro asked, "Am I doing all right, Camilo?" and Cienfuegos replied, to the roar of the crowd, "You are doing all right, Fidel!"—and a new revolutionary slogan was born.

  Letting his voice drop, Castro announced he had a question for "the people," thereby inaugurating a new approach to the art of governance: a dialogue with the masses, through which they would affirm his policies by chanting responses to his "questions." Soon, he would call it "direct democracy. . . of the marketplace," cleaner and more honest than the old-fashioned corrupt electoral procedures of the past. But on that first night, the questions were: "Why hide arms in different places in the capital? Why smuggle arms at this moment? For what? . . . Arms, for what? To fight against whom? Against the revolutionary government that has the support of the whole people? [Shouts of: NO!] . . . Is it the same with Judge Urrutia governing the Republic as it was with Batista governing the Republic? [Shouts of: NO!] . . . Arms, for what? Is there a dictatorship here? [Shouts of: NO!] . . . Will they fight against a free government that respects the peoples' rights? [Shouts of: NO!] . . . Arms, for what, when elections will be called in the shortest time possible?. . . Hide arms, for what? To blackmail the President of the Republic?. . . Arms, for what? . . . So I must tell you that two days ago, members of a certain organization went to a military base and took five hundred weapons and six machine guns and eighty thousand bullets!" (Shouts of: LET'S GET THEM!)