by Tad Szulc
Alfredo Guevara was Fidel's Communist friend from the university, his companion at the 1948 Bogotá uprising, and a victim of torture by Batista police in Havana in the last year of the war. He then went to Mexico, and Fidel had his sister Lidia summon him from Matanzas where he had just returned from exile, while still en route from Oriente to Havana during the first week of January. Alfredo Guevara, who had become a moviemaker, had hoped to launch a revolutionary motion-picture industry, but Fidel told him he was urgently needed for other tasks. Vílma Espín was an MIT-educated young woman from Santiago who joined Raúl Castro's "Second Front" in 1958, then married him in January 1959 at an Oriente wedding Fidel was too busy to attend. Raúl's presence with the army in Santiago was still required, but he was nevertheless deeply involved with the "hidden government" as he commuted between the two cities. Oscar Pino Santos, a Communist economist, and Segundo Ceballos, an elderly journalist who specialized in agrarian problems, were advisers but never participated in policy decision. Pedro Miret was Fidel's aide-de-camp, increasingly involved in the secret planning as the initial group evolved during 1959 into a full-fledged "hidden government." Celia Sánchez was Fidel's principal assistant.
The task force met at a house at the beach resort at Tarará, where Che Guevara was convalescing from illness and fatigue; two years of asthma attacks and malaria bouts during the Sierra war had ravaged him physically. Tarará was a half-hour drive from Havana, a few miles east of Cojímar where Fidel moved during March. The main assignment of the Tarará team was to draft, also in secret, a new agrarian reform law, much more drastic than the one Castro had signed in the Sierra the previous year, as well as additional revolutionary laws, and to become familiar with crucial areas in government operations in preparation for the ultimate takeover. Nuñez Jiménez says that "for two months, we held meetings during the night in Tarará where Che was recovering his health." Castro, he says, kept track of the drafting of the agrarian reform law, the centerpiece of the revolutionary legislation, "suggesting ideas and modifications." According to Nuñez Jiménez, the drafting was kept secret until Castro presented it to Revolutionary Laws Minister Dorticós for a review, bypassing the rest of the cabinet; Dorticós was a Castro ally.
Alfredo Guevara offers the best description of the latitude and mandate enjoyed by the task force. He says that "we met every night until dawn at Che's house, then Fidel would come and change everything" in the land-reform bill, "but we also prepared a merchant marine law, and we had to become specialists in the craziest things; for example, we began to work in the National Bank." Felipe Pazos was the regime's new National Bank president (he, Raúl Chibás, and Castro had drafted the first Manifesto from the Sierra in 1957), but, as Alfredo Guevara recalls, "Castro wanted us to start going to the bank, and we went there once a week. . . . Fidel kept saying, 'We don't know what a bank is, and we must know what a bank is.' " Subsequently, Che Guevara would replace Pazos as National Bank president.
"Nobody knew what we were doing," Alfredo Guevara says. "For example, the minister of agriculture did not know we were preparing the agrarian reform law, and nobody else knew it." The minister at the time was Humberto Sorí-Marín, who had drafted the Sierra law, and was later shot for conspiring against the Castro regime. But Guevara recalls, "We discovered in our discussions that nobody had any knowledge, that everybody favored agrarian reform, but nobody really had mastered what needed to be done in that field. . . . Merchant marine was another subject we had no knowledge about. "
The activities of the "hidden government" changed and grew when Castro persuaded President Urrutia to obtain the resignation of José Miró Cardona as prime minister and to appoint him, Fidel, to this post on February 13, an easy undertaking. The circumstances did not allow Miró Cardona to be effective in the premiership, mainly because most ministers cleared their projects first with Castro privately at the Havana Hilton penthouse suite. Urrutia wrote before his death in exile that Castro had visited him several times early in February to say he would accept being prime minister, "but since he would be responsible for the policy of the government he would need sufficiently broad powers to enable him to act efficiently." Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, writing many years later about these events, put it more brusquely: "The government that emerged on January 1, could not be considered a true revolutionary government in the light of its composition or its procedures. . . . Revolutionary power at that moment resided outside of the government—in the rebel army headed by Fidel Castro. His designation as prime minister served to fuse together revolutionary power and the government." But Castro wanted to keep all the ministers in the cabinet for a time, and rejected Urrutia's offer of resignation. He was still proceeding step by step, although he obtained from Urrutia and the cabinet a change in the new Cuban constitution, giving the prime minister the power to direct government policy; that constitution had been approved by the cabinet only six days earlier on February 7.
Urrutia's power was reduced to signing laws, even though, as he wrote, Castro "conceded me veto power but asked that I use it as seldom as possible." From thereon, Castro began to preside over cabinet meetings at the presidential palace, with Urrutia in mute attendance, and with the Tarará task force acting as the invisible coordinator of policy. Alfredo Guevara says that Castro put him in charge of summoning the cabinet and helping him to run it. Shortly thereafter, Castro moved to Cojímar, where the task force set up its headquarters with still greater secret power. Che Guevara had recovered completely, and the Tarará site could be dropped. The first stage of the Cuban revolution had been completed with Castro's open assumption of total power. Now he and his teams prepared for the next phase.
CHAPTER
2
Yet, the immediate and overwhelming reality facing Fidel Castro's Cuba was the relationship with the United States, only ninety miles away. The antagonism between the new Cuban revolution and the Americans next door was instant, implacable, powerful—and inevitable. What Castro had touched off on both sides of the Straits of Florida was an explosion of nationalisms, historical resentments and misunderstandings, sharply differing perceptions of national interests, and an earth-shaking cultural shock for which neither side was even remotely prepared.
This antagonism, soon turning into open mutual hostility, predated the great Cuban-American clashes and confrontations stemming from Castro's choice of the Communist road to the revolution, the questions of ideology, and the ultimate Cuban-Soviet military alliance. Seen from a perspective of more than a quarter-century, it is evident that the antagonistic relationship was, in effect, foreordained by the forces of history, and there was virtually nothing either side could have done to avoid the collision course within the parameters of what was then politically possible. In a nutshell, Fidel Castro obsessively feared that his revolution would be stolen from the Cubans by the United States, as independence was stolen at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, while Americans (and not only the Eisenhower administration) saw in the barbudos's cry of defiance ominous threats to their national and economic interest, and were not always capable of distinguishing among real and imagined threats.
These fundamental attitudes, then, defined from the very beginning the behavior of the big and the little neighbor toward each other. It would be an enormous historical error, however, to conclude that had Castro and Eisenhower (and their political constituencies) acted in a less paranoid fashion the final outcome might have been different. The fact was that the United States could not tolerate a revolution it was unable to influence or control immediately south of Key West, Florida. Also, Castro, rejecting the traditional "geographic fatalism" that always made Cubans discard national decisions potentially objectionable to North Americans, was determined to assert his total independence. In his mind this freedom of choice already included implanting Marxism-Leninism in Cuba, although he was still far from ready to proclaim it. Therefore, no lasting compromise was ever possible, and it is demonstrably incorrect to believe that American actions push
ed Castro toward communism or that, obversely, the United States resolved to try to oust him only after he had molded his revolution into an anti-American and pro-Communist instrument.
There is abundant evidence that Castro's aim in the immediate aftermath of victory was to forge revolutionary unity around his own Communist party when practicable, and there is no reason to doubt his comments on this theme twenty-seven years later: "We were carrying out our program little by little. All these [United States] aggressions accelerated the revolutionary process. Were they the cause? No, this would be an error. I do not pretend that the aggressions are the cause of socialism in Cuba. This is false. In Cuba we were going to construct socialism in the most orderly possible manner, within a reasonable period of time, with the least amount of trauma and problems, but the aggressions of imperialism accelerated the revolutionary process. "
In Washington the mind-set was equally firm. Even before Eisenhower policy-makers began to understand what was happening in Cuba (and they never succeeded in really understanding it, as the Bay of Pigs invasion two years later would show), a top-level decision was made to get rid of Castro. Specifically, the secret agenda of the National Security Council meeting on March 10, 1959—two and a half months after Batista's defeat and with President Urrutia and a moderate cabinet still ostensibly governing Cuba—included as a principal topic the modalities of bringing "another government to power in Cuba." The Cubans had not yet seized or nationalized any American property on the island, and the United States had no reason thus far to complain about any Cuban actions. In fact, the official policy was to appear to be friendly to Castro, on January 7 the United States was the second country in the world (after Venezuela) to recognize the revolutionary regime. The Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with Havana, and seemed to ignore altogether Castro's struggle against Batista. Philip W. Bonsal, a U. S. career diplomat with a liberal reputation, an excellent knowledge of Latin America, and fluency in Spanish, was immediately named ambassador to Cuba to replace Earl T. Smith, the friend of Batista. Bonsal (who had served in Cuba as a young diplomat and whose father was a war correspondent in 1898), met Castro at Cojímar on March 5, the day after presenting his credentials to Urrutia, and their first conversation was pleasant. The ambassador wrote later that "I was encouraged to believe that we could establish a working relationship that would be advantageous to both our countries," and "Castro had gone out of his way to express a warm desire for frequent meetings with me." The following day, Castro spoke during a television speech of his "cordial and friendly conversations with the ambassador of the United States," and disclosed his plans to visit the United States the next month as a guest of American newspaper publishers (but in December 1961, Castro offered a different version in another TV speech, accusing Bonsal of "a style of someone who came to deliver instructions").
It remains a mystery why the National Security Council discussed Castro's liquidation within five days of his first encounter with the American ambassador without giving diplomacy a chance. The council did not know that Castro was not amenable in the long run to a cordial relationship with Washington since he undoubtedly realized that it was impossible in the light of his revolutionary plans, so the whole discussion made little sense—unless the Eisenhower administration had a secret second plan to derail the revolution as a matter of principle. A similar approach had worked in Guatemala in 1954, under the same White House and CIA leadership, and it may have seemed easy to rerun the operation in Cuba five years later. That such a policy undermined Ambassador Bonsal, who was not informed of it, posed no problems to the policy-makers: it was par for the course in this type of situation.
However, the Intelligence Community was split on Cuba. Late in March, for example, a special panel on Cuba in the CIA's Board of Estimates concluded in a secret review that Castro was not "a Moscow-oriented Communist" at that time, a correct estimate in which Ambassador Bonsal had concurred. The full board rejected that conclusion under pressure from CIA Director Allen W. Dulles, the architect of Guatemala, but as late as November 5, 1959, General C. P. Cabell, the Agency's deputy director, testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that even the Communists in Cuba did not consider Fidel Castro "a communist party member, or even pro-communist. . . . We know that the communists consider Castro as a representative of the bourgeoisie, and were unable to gain public recognition or commitments from him during the course of the revolution." In retrospect, it is obvious that these opinions were culled by the Havana CIA station either from low-ranking party members, unaware of the secret talks between the Fidelista command and their leadership, or from those in the know who wished to continue the impression that Castro was unsullied by Marx and Lenin. It was not until March 1960 that the United States government formally decided to mount a paramilitary operation against Castro, the CIA had begun to arm the first anti-Fidelista guerrilla bands appearing in the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba in the latter part of 1959. These guerrillas were mainly ex-Batista soldiers, wealthy peasants, and a sprinkling of rightist ideologues and adventurers; just as these bands started posing a problem for Castro, the CIA abandoned them as incongruously as it had initially encouraged them.
In the spring of 1959, as Fidel Castro prepared to go to the United States in triumph, the real tensions developing between the two countries had to do with an endless series of daily irritants, feeding on each other, rather than with broad government policies. Again, emotional and psychological factors colored the relationship—and the gulf of cultural misunderstanding grew. The problem was that Americans insisted on judging Cuban attitudes by American standards, and Cubans responded by judging Americans by Cuban standards—in a quickening and damaging vicious circle. Nowhere was this phenomenon more obvious than in the case of the trials of the Batista "war criminals" by revolutionary courts.
Reduced to its simplest terms, the issue in the eyes of Fidel Castro and masses of Cubans was that while the United States government never protested the killing and torture of thousands of the old regime's opponents by the Batista police and soldiers (and U. S. public opinion hardly took notice of it), Americans were now indignant that the victorious revolutionaries were punishing culprits with executions and lengthy prison sentences. Neither Castro nor a great many other Cubans who were not normally bloodthirsty could comprehend why, in effect, a double standard was being applied to them, and why the United States was so roundly and vociferously condemning the revolution for enforcing its notion of justice. The climax in this tragedy of misunderstandings came when Wayne Morse, the great liberal from Oregon, rose on the Senate floor to denounce the Cuban "bloodbath" and urge that executions be halted "until emotions cool." Castro, who saw a threat to his revolution in any and every criticism of Cuba, shot back that justice would proceed "until all criminals of the Batista regime are tried," and that "if the Americans don't like what's happening in Cuba, they can land the Marines and then there will be 200,000 gringos dead . . ." That was an off-the-cuff remark to a crowd of newsmen, and Castro had the sense to apologize for it, but the threat made worldwide headlines, and the atmosphere became even more poisoned. It was only January, less than a month after the revolutionary triumph.
There is no question that Castro used the trials issue, an immensely emotional one to thousands of families whose sons, brothers, and husbands had been mutilated and killed, to orient Cuban public opinion against the United States. It obviously could not have been planned that way, but this whole question served to accelerate as well as justify the extreme radical course he was giving his revolution. In this sense, Americans were playing into his hands, but it is just as important—historically—to place the episode of the trials into perspective. The first point is that in the normally accepted meaning of the expression, no "bloodbaths" occurred in Cuba after Batista fell. In other words, no vengeful crowds took revenge into their own hands, and former Ambassador Bonsal, a most objective observer, wrote afterward that "thirty years earlier, the hirelings of the Machado
regime deemed guilty of similar crimes were simply ferreted out by the mob and killed. . . . The Castro procedure of setting up special tribunals to try the cases of people who, on the basis of the Nuremberg principles, were accused of serious crimes could have been an improvement over the earlier method. . . . These special courts were subject to all sorts of pressures including those generated by the circuslike atmosphere in which many of them were conducted. "
Castro acknowledges that around 550 of these Batista "criminals" were executed after summary courts-martial and then by special revolutionary tribunals in 1959 and 1960 (the special courts were abolished after the first six months or so, then reactivated late in 1959 to deal with "counterrevolutionaries" who were beginning to emerge, sometimes with CIA assistance). Whatever can be said of the procedures before these tribunals, defendants were not picked at random, but because they were believed to have committed crimes and brutalities on a large scale, and so were punishable under the provisions of revolutionary laws proclaimed from the Sierra in 1958. Cuban revolutionary trials, then, bore no resemblance to the real bloodbaths that followed the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese social revolutions in the twentieth century—or to the vengeance-in-the-streets that erupted in Cuba after Machado, in France, and other Nazi-occupied nations after liberation in World War II, or in Venezuela following the deposition of the dictator Pérez Jiménez in 1958 and in the Dominican Republic after Dictator Trujillo was murdered in 1961. By the same token, the Cuban revolution refrained from institutionalized mass killings such as those perpetrated against hundreds of thousands ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in the aftermath of the 1965 army anti-Communist coup, or those thousands attributed to Chilean military authorities when they overthrew the Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossens, in 1973. Considering that in the first few days of revolution, public order in most of Cuba was assured by 26th of July Movement local militias, Boy Scouts, and advance units of the Rebel Army, it is quite remarkable that violence-prone Cubans remained so unviolent.
