Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Castro's worst mistake, however, was to hold a "show trial" in Havana's sports stadium in January for three exceedingly brutal Batista ex-commanders. He may have thought that such public televised proceedings would both defuse the temptation for a private enforcement of justice and show the people that Batista's crimes were being swiftly judged. From the viewpoint of international public opinion, however, it was an unmitigated disaster and created the legend of "circuslike atmosphere" to which Bonsal alluded (in fact, only one trial was held in the sports stadium). The principal defendant was ex-Major Jesús Sosa Blanco, charged with scores of murders in Oriente and famous for brutality, but this was not a kangaroo court. The three judges were Agriculture Minister Humberto Sorí-Marín, a Catholic lawyer who was the Rebel Army's judge-advocate (later shot for counterrevolutionary activities), Raúl Chibás, the moderate treasurer of the 26th of July Movement (who fled Cuba two years later), and Castro's wartime companion, Universo Sánchez. Sosa Blanco and his codefendants had defense attorneys. However, Sosa Blanco contributed to the circuslike atmosphere by shouting that he was subjected to a "Roman circus" procedure. He was sentenced to death, then resentenced later at a more tranquil trial in a military courtroom.

  Raúl Chibás, who at Castro's personal request had served as judge in other trials, says a quarter-century later at his exile home in the United States that these procedures were totally justifiable. "Sincerely, I was in agreement with these trials," he says. "I was in agreement beforehand, and I discussed with Fidel [in the Sierra] the need for carrying out justice after Batista's fall . . . on the grounds that if there is no justice, people would enforce it as in the time of Machado when mobs dragged corpses through the streets. . . . When one tries to do it legally, adverse reaction sets in. Unfortunately, this is people's hypocrisy, and we talked about it with Fidel in the Sierra. . . . They [Batista officers] had been forewarned because we issued proclamations from the Sierra that justice would be applied to all those who robbed and murdered the peasants, and I thought we had to act accordingly." Chibás thinks that the idea of holding the trial in the stadium was a "boomerang," but "Fidel wanted to demonstrate that these were assassins, that they had committed over 100 murders, that they had raped women . . ." Castro's next error was to demand a new trial in March when a revolutionary court in Santiago acquitted forty-four aviators from the Batista army for bombing peasants in the Sierra. He announced on television that "revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction." Major Manuel Piñeiro Losada, a founder of the Castro secret police, was named chairman of the tribunal, at which all the fliers were sentenced to varying prison terms.

  There remains a philosophical aspect to the question of the trials, which were decisive in poisoning the Cuban-American discourse. The central point is that Castro believes that the revolution had every right to hold them on the basis of wartime revolutionary laws, while American opinion in 1959, a sanctimonious view that ignored Cuban emotions and demanded Anglo-Saxon legal procedures, denied the Cubans this right. Apart from the fact that Cuban law is based on the Napoleonic Code, which (unlike the English common law) places on the defendant the burden of establishing his (or her) innocence, Castro takes the view that "in the Sierra Maestra, when we were an embryo state, we wrote a penal code to punish war crimes . . . when the Revolution triumphed, the courts of the land accepted these laws as applicable laws, validated by the victorious Revolution, and the tribunals tried many war criminals who could not escape . . ." Castro says that "this started the first campaigns abroad against Cuba, especially in the United States, which realized quickly that we had here a different government, not a very docile government, and which began furious campaigns against the Revolution." Rufo López-Fresquet, the moderate and pro-American treasury minister during the first fourteen months of the Castro regime, has written that "the foreigner, especially the North American, put his emphasis on the legal aspects of the revolutionary trials," but "the Cuban was interested in moral justice . . . When a man who has boasted of killing dozens of men while protected by his Batista uniform was executed, the Cubans believed justice was served. The rest of the world concentrated on criticism of the revolutionary judicial process. Perhaps both were right, but they were miles apart. Not many calm voices dedicated themselves to explaining these differences. . ."

  (The trials should not have surprised Cubans or Americans: Early in February 1958, a year before the war ended, Look magazine in New York and Bohemia in Havana published a photo-reportage piece on "Justice in the Sierra," showing Castro sitting informally on the ground while interrogating prisoners charged with murder and rape before a "revolutionary tribunal," trials lasting twelve days, and Raúl Castro commanding a firing squad.)

  Consequently, anti-Cuban campaign did begin to shape up in the American government, in Congress, and segments of the media, and Castro let nothing escape his attention. Convinced that a "Plattist mentality" still existed among many Cubans and Americans—the belief in the applicability of the long-abrogated Platt Amendment granting the United States the right to intervene in Cuba—he saw conspiracies and his self-fulfilling prophecies coming true. When Americans condemned the trials, Castro reacted with accusations that the United States had granted asylum to the worst Batista "war criminals," which was true, and that they would plot against the revolution, which also was true.

  From his first week in Havana, Castro used every speech to tell the United States as plainly as possible that it no longer had a say in Cuba. Before the Lions Club on February 13, he reminded his hosts that "the Platt Amendment is finished," that the revolution was already being attacked in the United States, and that Cubans had the right to trace their own destiny and "do things better than those who spoke of democracy and sent Sherman tanks to Batista." Two days later, he told the Rotarians that "nobody can intervene here because sovereignty is not a favor that is granted us, but a right we deserve as a nation." The following afternoon, he touched off approving roars of hundreds of thousands attending a rally at the presidential palace when he warned that if the United States wished to have good relations with Cuba, "the first thing they have to do is to respect her sovereignty." At a mass rally at the palace five days later, Castro reopened the question of the validity of the trials by demanding the huge crowd to raise their hands "if you agree that the murderers must be executed"—a forest of hands rose over the plaza, and Fidel said: "The jury of one million Cubans of all ideas and all the social classes has voted! . . ."

  During March Castro engaged in political activities that were contradictory, to say the least, if he truly wanted a favorable shift in United States public opinion about the Cuban revolution. Accepting an invitation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors to speak to their annual meeting in Washington (thus allowing him to visit the United States without an invitation from the Eisenhower administration) and launching "Operation Truth" for the benefit of American newsmen willing to see Cubans as official guests, Castro appeared to be courting Americans. But at the same time, he had "intervened" in the American-owned Cuban Telephone Company, which meant that the regime took over management in order to investigate its operations. This was consistent with Castro's statements dating back to Moncada about Cuba's need to operate its own utilities, but the political timing was awful in terms of his approaching United States trip. Next, he publicly embarrassed José Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica and one of his early supporters, by accusing him of intolerable "imperialist" tendencies for having suggested at a rally in his presence that in the Soviet-American struggle, there could be only one place—alongside the United States. With that, Fidel Castro departed for the United States.

  Most new Latin American leaders made a pilgrimage to Washington as soon as possible to curry official favor and seek emergency economic aid. However, Fidel Castro was an exception in his refusal to ask for money, or even talk about it. That threw American officialdom off balance. Rufo López-Fresquet, the finance minister, who was among the hundred-
plus Fidel entourage on the trip, recounted in his memoirs in exile this conversation with Castro: "I don't want this trip to be like that of other new Latin American leaders who always come to the U. S. to ask for money. I want this to be a goodwill trip. Besides, the Americans will be surprised. And when we go back to Cuba, they will offer us aid without our asking for it. Consequently, we will be in a better bargaining position." López-Fresquet replied that "the reasoning was not completely illogical," although at that point the government's cash reserves were below $1 million. What Castro did not confide in his minister, however, was his determination to demonstrate to Cubans and other Latin Americans that he could appear in the United States on his own terms (and without an official government invitation), act as an equal, and not tarnish himself with money discussions in which he, as the poor party, would be the supplicant. The American visit, in Fidel's mind, had to underscore the absolute independence of the Cuban revolution from the United States, mainly because he already saw himself as the great hemispheric leader. Nevertheless, he brought along all his top cabinet economic and financial experts.

  Castro's visit to the United States, which was primarily an exercise in public relations and an attempt to educate North Americans about Latin American nationalism, began on the evening of April 15, amid the chaos and confusion characterizing all political activities. He was two hours late in boarding his special Cubana Airlines plane for Washington, keeping everybody waiting on both sides (he told a nervous adviser: "We are going to be in the United States fifteen days; what difference does an hour or two make?"). Clearly, Fidel was savoring the moment. His last visit to the United States had been nearly four years earlier, when, as an impecunious and rather obscure revolutionary, he asked Cuban communities for cash contributions to finance the promised war against Batista, and had to humbly request an extension of his visitor's visa. And for all his anti-Americanism, Castro had come to seek, consciously or not, North American approval for the person and the deeds of Fidel Castro; this is presumably why, even thirty years later, he remains exceedingly sensitive to what is being written about him in the United States, down to the smallest detail.

  In the United States, Castro was lionized and continually lectured on the dangers of communism and the beauties of democracy by American government officials, congressmen, and editorial writers in that patronizing and irritating fashion Americans apply to foreigners. Having a marvelous time, he went along with this game, and being the modest charmer, he said what he knew Americans wanted to hear. He basked in the applause and the huge national attention he was commanding, drawing additional sympathy from the presence of nine-year-old Fidelito, whom he took almost everywhere, and saving his private contempt for his hosts in comments to friends in his personal bodyguard. President Eisenhower arranged to be playing golf out of town during the five days Castro spent in Washington, which was not a slight inasmuch as the Cuban was not a head of state and not even an official guest, although it might have been a useful gesture to have invited him to the White House. Nonetheless the olive-green-fatigue-clad Castro enjoyed red-carpet treatment in Washington: a lunch given by Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter; a two-hour-and-twenty-five-minute private meeting with Vice-President Nixon at his office in the otherwise deserted Capitol (they met there Sunday afternoon after Fidel refused to go to the vice-presidential home) that was notable for an absolute lack of mutual understanding and for Nixon's conclusion that the Cuban was controlled by Communists; a lunch at the National Press Club, where he treated newsmen to twenty-minute answers to questions in his surprisingly fluent if heavily accented English; a Meet the Press television interview; visits with key senators and congressmen; and hosting a reception at the Cuban embassy on Sixteenth Street, where he was staying. On that occasion, Castro appeared for the first time in a formal uniform with tie and jacket, and had a brief conversation with the Soviet ambassador, Mikhail A. Menshikov. It was his first known encounter with a Soviet official.

  In his free time, Castro went to see the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, and walked for an hour around the grounds of Washington's home at Mount Vernon. At the Jefferson Memorial he was asked whether he thought governments should ever be overthrown, and he was ready with appropriate words: "I am not an advocate of frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and constitutions must go hand in hand . . . this is a revolutionary principle for . . . progressive changes of institutions as the minds of men change." Saturday night, after the embassy reception, Castro playfully reverted to his Havana practices, disappearing for four hours from the surveillance by the enormous American security apparatus to tour Washington in a private automobile with five Cuban companions. He dined in a downtown Chinese restaurant, debated with a group of university students at nearby tables, and finally returned home at three o'clock in the morning.

  Politically, Castro was most adroit in Washington, although in retrospect it is clear that he had engaged in deception, which in his mind had continuing "historical justification." On the issue of communism in Cuba, endlessly raised with him in Washington, he repeated time after time that "we are not Communists," that if there happened to be any Communists in his government, "their influence is nothing," and that he did not agree with communism. It has been argued subsequently that at the time of his 1959 United States visit, Castro had not yet fully resolved his ideological allegiances, and therefore was being truthful in his responses about communism. However, this argument did not take into account the fact, not known then, that Fidel had initiated secret coalition talks with the old Communists at least three months before his American trip. Presumably to reassure Americans during the postvictory transition period—pending ultimate consolidation—Castro announced that Cuba would not confiscate foreign-owned private property (which meant mainly American-owned concerns), and would seek additional investments to provide new jobs. Addressing the luncheon meeting of the newspaper editors who had invited him to the United States, Castro said: "The first thing dictators do is to finish the free press and establish censorship. There is no doubt that the free press is the first enemy of dictatorship. "

  It was in Washington that Castro for the first time publicly ruled out elections in Cuba in the foreseeable future, telling television interviewers that four years would have to elapse before the revolutionary regime could "establish conditions for free elections." Heretofore, Castro had been saying that the delay before holding elections would be no more than two years, and he had not attached conditions to the timing. But the first indications of a fundamentally changed political line were voiced in a Havana speech on April 9, a week before flying to Washington: "We want that when elections come . . . that everybody be working here, that the agrarian reform be a reality . . . that all the children have a school . . . that all families have access to hospitals . . . that every Cuban know his rights and his duties, that every Cuban know how to read and write. . . . Then, we can have truly democratic elections!. . ." What Castro was proposing was a generational delay, but in Washington he chose to say that the conditions would be ripe within four years and, in the meantime, "real democracy is not possible for hungry people. "

  Almost imperceptibly, Castro had changed the rules of the Cuban political game as he smiled disarmingly before television cameras in a Washington studio. The "conditions" for free elections—and Castro certainly was not saying there would be no elections—sounded eminently sensible, and after all he had the trust of 90 percent of the Cuban population. Advancing along several fronts, including some not visible, the Prime Minister of the Revolution had the overall strategy and tactics well in hand. Very soon, the slogan of "Revolution First, Elections Afterward!" began to be heard and read in Cuba, and Fidel could say he was simply responding to vox populi, and by midyear, elections (like anticommunism) became a counterrevolutionary theme.

  Secure that revolutionary politics at home were under control with Raúl Castro fully in charge (though Defense Minister Martínez Sánchez was the acting prime minister), Fidel cou
ld enjoy his North American tour and quietly prepare to extend his travels to South America. He also found himself in the midst of an extraordinarily bizarre episode, which was also a great game of bluff with neither player knowing enough about the other. In fact, to this day Castro may not know the whole truth; only old-time CIA insiders do. Either to test his non-Communist protestations or to profit from his experiences with the Communists, the CIA arranged to have Castro receive its supposedly leading expert on communism in Latin America, a cigar-smoking wartime German refugee named Gerry Drecher (afterward often mistakenly identified as "Droller") who used the pseudonym of "Frank Bender." He had no Latin American experience whatsoever. Castro had refused to see him in Washington but relented and agreed to a meeting at his hotel suite in New York, where he arrived by train (after giving a speech at Princeton University) on April 21.