Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  "Arms, for what?" became the latest revolutionary expression, and later that night the DR guerrillas, watching Castro on television, surrendered the weapons to the Rebel Army, ending the crisis without bloodshed. Shortly, key DR leaders would join Fidel's circle, becoming the mainstay of his Security Services as he ushered in socialism in Cuba. At Camp Columbia, Castro consulted the crowd whether he should accept the "petition" addressed to him by the provisional government to serve as Commander in Chief of the land, sea, and air forces, and to reorganize the armed forces, arid received a unanimous "Yes!" Then he informed the nation that while "decent soldiers who have not stolen and who have not assassinated" would have the right to continue in the army, "I'm also telling you that those who have assassinated will not be saved by anybody from the firing squad." This was his way of serving notice that trials and executions of Batista "war criminals" would soon start. Castro ended his first great public performance as the leader of Cuba with these words: "For us, principles are above my other considerations and we do not struggle because of ambitions. I believe we have demonstrated sufficiently that we have fought without ambitions. I believe no Cuban has the slightest doubt about it!"

  As he finished speaking, the spotlights bathing him illuminated a pair of white doves that suddenly came to rest on his shoulders. This astounding symbolism touched off an explosion of "FIDEL! . . . FIDEL ! . . . FIDEL!" as the night was caressed by the first colors of the dawn. Cubans are a people with powerful religious and spiritistic superstitions, going back to the Afro-Cuban traditions of slavery, and that night in January confirmed their faith: The dove in Cuban myths represents life, and now Fidel had their protection. And, as it happened, doves again and again would alight on Fidel's shoulder as he faced his people. The deification of Fidel Castro became a phenomenon in Cuba in the aftermath of his victory, so greatly had he touched the hearts and souls of the people. Soon, Bohemia magazine published an immensely controversial portrait of the thirty-one-year-old Maximum Leader with a Christlike halo subtly drawn around his bearded countenance. Some Cubans thought this was overdoing political allegiance. But Raúl Chibás, who traveled with Castro a part of the way from Oriente to Havana, recalls that between Santiago and Bayamo, "elderly ladies embraced him as he went along. . . . Every five minutes, at every intersection of the highway, women stopped him, the old women kissed him, telling him he was greater than Jesus Christ. "

  Castro himself must have felt a profound kinship with Christ; in a pre-Easter speech in March he intoned: "Because there are those who say they are Christians and are racist. And they are capable of crucifying one like Christ because one tells the truth to an insensitive and indolent society. Because Jesus Christ—and I don't want to compare myself even remotely, I don't want to compare myself in the least—because what I say is, why did they crucify Jesus Christ? It is good that we should speak of this during this Holy Week. They crucified Christ for something. And it was simply because He defended the truth. Because He was a reformer within that society, because within that society He was a whip against all that Pharisaism and all that hypocrisy. Because for Christ there was no difference of race, and He treated the poor the same as He treated the rich, and the black the same as the white. That society, to which He told the truth, did not want to forgive His preachings, and they ended up simply crucifying Him because He told them the truth. "

  Antonio Nuñez Jiménez says that later in 1959, in a "secret speech" before officials of the new Agrarian Reform Institute, Castro said, "The Revolution. . . ceased to be that romantic thing to become that in which there is only room for those who are suffering the metamorphosis of conversion into revolutionaries, and are in accordance with that precept of Christ when He said: 'Leave all that you have and follow me.' This is the reality." In a televised speech in December delivered in defense of the revolution, Castro said he made a point of attending a Roman Catholic congress in Havana because "our Revolution is in no way against religious sentiment . . . our Revolution aspires to strengthen the noble desires and ideas of men. . . . When Christ's preachings are practiced, it will be possible to say that a revolution is occurring in the world. . . . Because I studied in a religious school, I remember many teachings of Christ, and I remember He was implacable with Pharisees. . . . Nobody forgets that Christ was persecuted; and let nobody forget that He was crucified. And that His preachings and ideas were very much fought. And that these preachings did not prosper in high society, but germinated in the heart of the humble of Palestine . . ." Twenty-five years later, Fidel Castro continued to invoke Christ as his role model, and Christianity as the philosophical basis of the Cuban socialist revolution.

  This socialist revolution was secretly set in motion through Fidel Castro's "hidden government" and his clandestine dealings with the "old" Communists within days of his arrival in Havana. Having ostensibly no governmental responsibilities during the first six weeks of the new regime, being "simply" the military Commander in Chief, Castro could engage in these enterprises without attracting undue attention. In any event, his whirlwind activities in and out of Havana were a perfect cover. During the month following his arrival in the capital on January 8, Fidel delivered at least twelve speeches, some of them major policy statements before huge crowds, and declarations to various groups; he held five major news conferences, mainly for foreign journalists, and made two lengthy television appearances (the speeches and press conferences were televised, too). At the end of January, he flew to Caracas on his first foreign trip as the victorious revolutionary leader to thank Admiral Larrazábal and the ruling Venezuelan government junta for dispatching arms to the Sierra in 1958; he also called on President-Elect Rómulo Betancourt despite the contempt he had for him as a reformist (and not a revolutionary) of the Latin American "Democratic Left." Venezuelans, liberated from dictatorship a year earlier, gave Castro a deliriously happy reception. He made a quick visit to Artemisa in Havana province and to Pinar del Río, the two areas from which most of his Moncada companions hailed, and spent four days in Oriente in the foothill towns of the Sierra Maestra, telling people about land reform. And on February 9 he announced the revolutionary regime's decision to declare Argentine-born Che Guevara a native Cuban citizen as an act of gratitude and as the legal step required to allow him to hold office in Cuba. All in all, it was hard to keep up with Fidel as he burst in and out of his penthouse suite on the twenty-third floor of the Havana Hilton Hotel, which served at the outset as occasional home and main office.

  Meanwhile, his secret political operations worked on two levels simultaneously, that in the end became fused into one level, when socialist "revolutionary unity" was implanted in Cuba eighteen months later. On the first level were contacts and negotiations with the old-line Communist leadership of the Popular Socialist Party, growing out of Castro's lengthy discussions with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez in the Sierra Maestra in the latter part of 1958. On the other level was the "hidden government." That Castro made the decision to seek Communist collaboration before Batista's fall is corroborated by Fábio Grobart. Now in his eighties, the cofounder of the Cuban Communist party and presently its historian and the oldest member of the Central Committee, Grobart recalls that these consultations began "in the first days" of the new regime. However, the secret conversations between Castro, his associates, and the Communist leadership were not a short cut to a power-sharing deal, but highly complex debates on how a unified revolutionary party could be fashioned into a Marxist-Leninist force, and, in the meantime, how Communist talents could best be used in running the country and preparing the transition. Castro insisted from the outset that the "old" Communist party be incorporated into a new one under his leadership, thus requiring the actual delivery of the party to him, an unprecedented act in Communist history.

  It goes without saying that Castro engaged in this process as part of his broader judgment that the moderate regime under Urrutia was transitory, unacceptable in the long run as an instrument of the revolution, and this is why he had to create
a "hidden government" to move the nation rapidly along the revolutionary road while the unity concept with the Communists was being ironed out. Moreover, consultations had to be conducted in absolute secrecy because of immense ideological sensitivities shared by both the Communist party and the 26th of July Movement, and their deep resentments and mistrust of each other. Neither Castro nor the top Communist leaders meeting with him could admit that, in effect, they were involved in liquidating their respective political organizations in their present form. All these considerations existed quite apart from what might be expected from the United States if it became known that the Maximum Leader was in business with communism. This caution was expressed in a private wartime remark by Castro that "I could proclaim socialism from the Turquino peak, the highest mountain in Cuba, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that I could come down the mountain afterward. "

  As Fábio Grobart put it in a long discussion of the Castro-Communist relationship, "A process, taking months and years, was necessary to prepare public opinion for the necessity of having a unified Communist party, and that communism is not so grave, so dangerous, so bad . . ." But in 1959 the orthodox Communist party was not ready for Castro, either. On January 11 the party's Executive Bureau issued a declaration urging the defense of the revolution and the maintenance of revolutionary unity, but only in August of the following year did the party formally recognize its longstanding "errors" in minimizing and misunderstanding Castro's movement from the time of the Moncada attack. Pending this act of contrition, the top leadership had to tread very carefully, and Fábio Grobart says it was impossible to state publicly in the first months of 1959 that all these meetings were occurring. Even after the decision to form a unified Communist party under Castro was announced, some important old-line Communist leaders sought to sabotage it to the point where several of them were imprisoned for "conspiracy."

  Castro held most of these clandestine encounters at a hilltop house in the fishing village of Cojímar, some ten miles east of Havana. This house was lent to him for an indefinite period in March by Agustín Cruz, a former Ortodoxo party senator, though the first meetings took place in private Havana homes. The large Cojímar villa, overlooking the sea from a distance, was under heavy Rebel Army guard, affording maximum privacy. Fidel used it as a residence, alternating with Celia's Vedado apartment and the Hilton penthouse, during the first years of the revolution. In his meetings with the Communists, Castro was always accompanied by Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ramiro Valdés, and often by Raúl, who commuted between Santiago and Havana. Cienfuegos, the Army Chief of Staff, appears to have been a "closet Communist" during the war, identifying with Marxism during the Las Villas campaign the previous autumn. His brother Osmany, an architect who sat out the war in Mexico, belonged to the party. Ramiro Valdés, veteran of Moncada, the prison, the Granma, and the Sierra, had been Che Guevara's deputy at the end of the war, and was now chief of the Rebel Army's investigations department, the G-2 (i.e., secret police). Valdés was an unabashed admirer of communism and the Soviet Union. Raúl Castro had been a party member since 1953, and Che Guevara was far to the left of all the Communist parties. Fidel, then, was the only one without an open Communist commitment. The party's negotiators were led by Blás Roca and its secretary general since 1934, and included Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and Aníbal Escalante of the Executive Bureau. All of them were considerably older than the Fidelistas, and were held in some awe by the young rebels—except by Fidel.

  Blás Roca, who was seventy-seven years old and recovering well from a stroke when he agreed in 1985 to reminisce about the past, was the first to meet with Castro after the revolution, keeping up personal exchanges in addition to the group discussions. He says that "we began to hold meetings as soon as Fidel, Che, and Camilo arrived here," and remembers Castro, laughingly exclaiming, "Shit, now we are the government and still we have to go on meeting illegally." On another occasion, there was great merriment when Che remarked, "Yes, things have really changed now that we have an agenda before us." Blás Roca says that in those days the party's rank and file were not told that the top leadership had come to regard Castro as the principal revolutionary leader of Cuba: "We were not informing the militants, only a small group in the leadership." Likewise, according to Blás Roca, the party leadership refrained from informing the rank and file that Castro was regarded as a socialist and a Marxist because "the success [of the negotiations] was linked to the need of preventing the Americans from having a banner for an intervention, as they had done in Guatemala, and we had to go on maintaining the secret that had prevailed until then and had contributed to the success." However, top Communist leaders, he says, began educating party organizations to accept Castro's decisions on government appointments, stressing that party membership did not confer special rights during revolutionary periods, contrary to the belief of many activists. Blás Roca says that at labor-union conferences, he made a point of telling the workers that "a new leader of the Cuban working class was born, and this new leader is Fidel. "

  Fábio Grobart recalls that in time the meetings between the Fidelistas and the Communists became institutionalized. "There was," he says, "a coordination of activities and a collaboration. This was the beginning." Late in 1959 or early in 1960, Castro and the Communists concluded that the time had come to move ahead with the organization of a unified Communist party, but Fábio Grobart points out that the first step was setting up the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) by bringing together the 26th of July Movement, the Popular Socialist Party, and the Students' Revolutionary Directorate. Each party maintained its identity and autonomy, he says, though Castro's overall leadership was recognized. In 1961 the three organizations were formally fused as a prelude to the establishment of the new Communist party in 1965. The real birth took place, however, in 1959, in the villa at Cojímar, the fishing village where Ernest Hemingway had found his old man and the sea.

  Among the first decisions Castro and the Communists took together was to create special schools to teach Marxism-Leninism to the Fidelistas, particularly those with an obvious political future, in preparation for the ultimate transition to Communist rule on the island. They were called "Revolutionary Instruction Schools" (EIR), which at first disguised Marxist teachings behind a façade of showing officials how to run revolutionary institutions. In fact, they were the counterpart of the military political-education centers that were set up at the Havana commands by Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara, and subsequently expanded to all the Rebel Army units. These centers grew out of the Troop Instructors School conducted by Communist officers in Raúl Castro's "Second Front" in 1958, and were run by members of the Popular Socialist Party and officers with membership in the party. This was consistent with Castro's principle that the Rebel Army must play a leading ideological role in the revolution, and the basic military text was the Civic Preparation Manual issued late in 1959. It was used in the Rebel Army's literacy program, and its language was generally Marxist, stressing "anti-imperialist struggles. "

  On the civilian side, the first Revolutionary Instruction School was established late in 1959, in a house on Primera Avenida in the Playa section of western Havana, and a full network of these schools was officially inaugurated in December 1960. The first director of the school was Lionel Soto, the head of Socialist Youth at Havana University in the 1950s and one of Castro's close friends, and the first teachers were Communist party intellectuals, like Raúl Valdés Vivó, and its top leaders, such as Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Blás Roca, and Lázaro Peña. Fábio Grobart says that "the principal heads of the Revolutionary Instruction Schools came in the beginning from the Popular Socialist Party because they had the greatest experience in teaching and organizing such schools. "

  With the unveiling of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations in 1960, the Marxist-Leninist schools became crucial in equipping the "new" Communists for their tasks in the unified party soon to be set up. In Grobart's words, "The person graduating from this school i
s a cadre prepared in multiple ways to be a political leader of the revolution." Over the years, these schools became centralized under the Ñico López Central School of the Cuban Communist party, which is in effect a Marxist-Leninist university offering everything from three-month basic courses to a five-year doctorate in the social sciences. All top Cuban officials must be Ñico López graduates (José Ramón Fernández, Cuba's vice-president and education minister, for example, went back to school in his fifties to earn this degree), and the curriculum includes scientific communism and atheism, party construction, ideological struggle, universal history, Cuban history, philosophy, the political economics of socialism, and the political economics of capitalism. By late 1961 over thirty thousand persons went through the indoctrination schools, but the elite was a class of fifty-three of the most promising young leaders who, starting in January 1962, were given exhaustive nine-hour-a-day courses in Marxism, economics, and philosophy. In March Fidel Castro came to the school to pick from this class a secret task force of twenty young officials to supervise a shift from the ORI to the United Party of Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC), a shift that just had been announced publicly and constituted the transitional stage to the new Communist party. By the end of 1960, there were still no Communists in the Cuban Council of Ministers, but Marxism-Leninism had made immense inroads in Cuba. This was certainly true of Fidel Castro's "hidden government" in 1959.

  This group carried the innocent-sounding name of the Office of Revolutionary Plans and Coordination, in case questions should be asked, but its existence was virtually unknown outside the most intimate circle around Fidel Castro. Operating as a secret task force carrying out fundamental policy assignments for Castro, its chairman was Antonio Nuñez Jiménez and Che Guevara, Alfredo Guevara, Vílma Espín, Oscar Pino Santos, and Segundo Ceballos were members. Nuñez Jiménez, who knew Castro slightly from their university days, joined Che Guevara's column in Las Villas during the fall 1958 offensive, then, as a Rebel Army captain, became his deputy at the La Cabaña fortress. Ardently committed to Marxist-Leninist thought, Nuñez Jiménez was brought into Castro's personal entourage by Che Guevara, immediately turning into a full-time companion and trusted planner. As a geographer, geologist, and historian, he was (and is) very familiar with Cuba's problems—just the man Castro needed intellectually and ideologically for the transition.