by Tad Szulc
The contact was arranged through Finance Minister López-Fresquet (urged on by his American friends) who wrote later that Castro and Bender talked privately for more than three hours. Then, Bender "returned to my suite in a state of euphoria . . . he asked for a drink, and with great relief exclaimed, 'Castro is not only not a Communist, but he is a strong anticommunist fighter.' " Bender next informed López-Fresquet that "he had arranged with Castro an exchange of intelligence information on the activities of the Communists and that I was to be the Cuban contact." López-Fresquet wrote that "the following month, during a reception at the French Embassy in Havana, a high U. S. official approached me and gave me an oral message for Castro from Mr. Bender. At the next Cabinet session, I gave Castro the intelligence. He didn't answer me, and he never gave me any information to pass on to Mr. Bender, the 'expert' on communists." What López-Fresquet did not mention was that Bender-Drecher was already preparing for his role as one of the main architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion that would take place two years later; he would be the chief of political action of the operation. It was a strange encounter: Did Bender really expect Castro to be his informant on communism, and was he a dupe (he had no way of knowing about Castro's Cojímar sessions with the Communists)? Did Castro suspect that he was receiving an arch-plotter-to-be (probably not)? And to López-Fresquet, who still had his illusions, Castro said in Washington, "Look, Rufo, I am letting the Communists stick their heads out so I will know who they are. And when I know them all, I'll do away with them, with one sweep of my hat. "
In New York Castro spent four days as a conquering hero, touring the United Nations, addressing a nighttime crowd of thirty thousand in Central Park, visiting the Coffee and Sugar Exchange and City Hall, and speaking at luncheons and dinners to publishers, businessmen, and financiers. He made a superb impression, and little attention was paid to his remark at the United Nations that Cubans were "unanimously" opposed to immediate elections because they would risk the return of "oligarchy and tyranny." Likewise scant attention was paid to a page-one dispatch in The New York Times from its Havana correspondent, Ruby Hart Phillips, on April 23 that "the communist Popular Socialist Party is organizing every town and village . . . the communist influence in unions is rising . . . leaders of the 26th of July Movement are combatting these communistic efforts, but the youthful rebels are amateurs at organization compared with the communists." From New York Castro traveled by train to Boston, gave a speech at Harvard University, then went on to Montreal, where he said that he would go immediately to Buenos Aires to attend an inter-American economic conference.
Fidel Castro's decision to fly to South America at the end of his North American tour resulted from his determination to reach out instantly for Latin American leadership and statesmanship—it was his first Bolívarian gesture—and to emphasize his independence from the United States. At the same time, Castro was evidently keen to clarify his stand on Latin American revolutions and any possible Cuban assistance given them in the light of his own pronouncements and a series of odd events occurring in Cuba during his stay in the United States.
Castro's principal statement in this context was that Cuba would provide "hospitality," the opportunity to work, and help to exiles from Latin American countries who hoped to overthrow dictatorships at home. This was, in effect, his first declaration of what has become known as Castro's "internationalism," but, as he would keep repeating for the next thirty years, "the Cuban revolution was not for export" because revolutions must stem from internal conditions. Nonetheless, he must have been aware of nervousness in the region following reports coinciding with his presence in Washington and New York that Nicaraguan, Panamanian, and Haitian rebels were on the verge of invading their countries from Cuban bases. In fact, he was clearly embarrassed by the reports and there were strong suspicions at the time that these expeditions had been authorized by Raúl Castro in Fidel's absence. Thus on April 18, over one hundred Nicaraguans were arrested at a camp in the province of Pinar del Río, and their arms seized, by the provincial Rebel Army commander, who declared that Fidel had forbidden invasions from Cuba. That same day, a Panamanian opposition leader named Ruben Miró said in Havana that his armed groups would land in Panama within a month. On April 21, Dame Margot Fonteyn, the ballerina, was arrested in Panama and expelled, and her politician husband, Roberto Arias, went into hiding after their yacht had circled off the coast in a suspicious fashion. López-Fresquet, who was in Boston with Castro, remembered overhearing an angry telephone conversation between Fidel and Raúl on the day the Panamanians announced the capture ashore of three rebels, two of them Cubans; Fidel was apparently chastising his brother.
When Fidel stopped in Houston, Texas, en route from Montreal to South America on April 27, Raúl flew up from Havana for a half-hour face-to-face conference with him at the airport. It was never explained publicly why Fidel had summoned Raúl, but the next day, in his aircraft flying over Cuba, he broadcast a denunciation of "irresponsible" Cubans landing in Panama, damaging the prestige of the revolution. At the Organization of American States in Washington, the new Cuban ambassador, Raúl Roa García, also denounced the Panamanian venture—and Fidel was widely applauded for being so statesmanlike. True to his "internationalism," however, he never turned his back on any Latin American revolutionaries. It was Castro's talent for having the best of all worlds.
Castro devoted ten days to his South American journey, another triumph for him and his revolution, attracting vast crowds, wild applause, and the riveted attention of local leaders. In Port of Spain he was greeted by Prime Minister Eric Williams; in São Paulo he announced that "our aspirations are the same as those of all Latin America," and then flew to the site of the future capital of Brasilia to confer with President Juscelino Kubitschek; in Buenos Aires he met President Arturo Frondizi; in Montevideo he was welcomed by the Uruguayan government and spoke at a huge street rally; back in Brazil he conferred again with Kubitschek, addressed a mass rally, and appeared on the television program This Is Your Life, loving the exposure. But the high point of the journey was the economic conference in Buenos Aires where Castro sat in his olive-green fatigues among the hemisphere's ministers of economy (the United States sent only an assistant secretary of state, a sad counterpoint) to proclaim that "the hour has come for the people of Latin America to make a daily effort to find a true solution to the root of our problems that are economic in character." In this May 2 speech before the "Committee of 21," Castro urged the United States to grant Latin America $30 billion in economic aid over a decade, an idea immediately derided in Washington as ridiculous and demagogic. But less than two years later, President John F. Kennedy would offer $25 billion for Latin American development under the Alliance for Progress program, over which Castro later chuckled as an attempt to steal his thunder. To be sure, Castro had an uncanny sense of Latin American needs and moods that no United States administration in the decades to come could or would comprehend. And the contrast between his conquering voyage and the rock-and-spit assaults on Vice-President Richard Nixon across South America exactly one year earlier underlined dramatically the moods of the region.
Mixing with crowds everywhere he went—in the United States, in Canada, and in South America—Castro was always an easy target for assassination. Yet, no public attempt was ever made against him anywhere, and Fidel displayed the guerrillero fatalism. In New York when shown a headline about an "assassination plot," he smiled and said, "I'm not worried. I will not live one day more than the day I am going to die. "
Castro returned to Havana on May 7, and the following day launched the next major phase in the Cuban revolution. Always conscious of the need for contact with the masses, he convened a rally of tens of thousands on the vast civic square (now called Revolution Plaza) to pledge that "the Revolution will never renounce its human principles . . . nor the existence of social justice in Cuba." Then he drove off in a motorcade of Oldsmobiles to his seaside house at Cojímar to present his ministers with the tex
t of the agrarian reform law that the "inside team" had secretly drafted previously at Che Guevara's residence. On May 17 the law was signed by the entire cabinet just below his wartime La Plata headquarters in the Sierra Maestra, and Castro announced on television from there that "Cuba is beginning a new era. "
The main provision of the new law (replacing the 1958 Sierra agrarian law) limited land ownership to 966 acres per individual; sugar, rice, and cattle holdings were allowed to be as large as 3, 300 acres. Private land ownership was not established as a matter of principle, and indemnifications were promised for nationalized lands. For practical purposes, however, the latifundium was abolished in Cuba as an economic and political phenomenon. Chiefly, the law was intended to lead to the consolidation by the state of nationalized lands so that great plantations and pastures could go on operating efficiently. In this sense, agrarian reform marked the first real revolutionary milestone; as Castro said afterward, "It truly established a rupture between the Revolution and the richest and the most privileged sectors in the country, and a rupture with the United States, [and] with transnational companies." As Castro noted, some American companies each owned as many as 480,000 acres of Cuba's "best land." Not surprisingly, the law was immensely popular among Cubans, especially the peasants, and the already finely honed internal propaganda apparatus instantly produced the slogan "The Agrarian Reform Works!" which was repeated endlessly on radio and television, and by every telephone operator in the country answering a call.
Politically, the law handed Castro his greatest instrument of unchecked power by creating the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), which, in effect, provided the structure for his "hidden government." Castro became the president of INRA in addition to his premiership and his post as Commander in Chief, and Antonio Ńuñez Jiménez, the coordinator of the Taratá secret task force, was named executive director. A nexus was immediately established between INRA and the Rebel Army, the latter executing the economic and political decisions of the former: It was a logical step in the unfolding of Castro's governance concept that a strong and modernized rebel army be the revolution's power center and its vanguard. INRA and the Rebel Army became, in fact, indistinguishable. Castro rarely attended the ministerial cabinet at the presidential palace, since it was no more than an adornment.
Looking back at that first year, Nuñez Jiménez says that under Castro, INRA "was the bastion where the Revolution occurred in those initial months . . . the organism that dealt the real blow to bourgeoisie and imperialism." He remarks that "it was not tactical to change suddenly the Council of Ministers . . . our people were not yet prepared ideologically for the outbreak of an open battle between the revolution and the counterrevolution within the government itself." Therefore, Nuñez Jiménez recounts, "Fidel duplicated in INRA the most important functions of the Revolutionary Government." One of these functions was the creation within INRA of a department of industrialization, headed by Che Guevara, which was a de facto ministry of industries. When Guevara subsequently became president of the National Bank, Nuñez Jiménez was named its executive vice-president to assure INRA's voice there; the old Commerce Ministry was transformed into INRA's Department of Commercialization. Gradually, ministries and INRA departments overlapped "until the Council of Ministers," Nuñez Jiménez says, "was formed totally by revolutionaries." Next, INRA created its own armed 100,000-man militia units with the aid of Raúl Castro, and eleven million pesos in INRA funds were used to organize an army artillery school and the first antiaircraft and antitank artillery units. Likewise, INRA financed the construction of most of the highways in Cuba in the first revolutionary period, built peasant housing and tourist resorts. Rebel Army officers were given the power to seize private land and to run farms as cooperatives under INRA, and Che Guevara decided that the new industrialization projects should be directed by Rebel Army companions. There was, indeed, a "hidden government," but strangely most Cubans, even those in senior positions, were unaware of it.
Using the tall INRA building (erected by Batista as Havana's city hall) as his principal office, Castro fueled the revolution in periodic meetings with the Institute's top officials and field administrators. In what Nuñez Jiménez has called Fidel's "secret speeches," the prime minister announced late in 1959, for example, that all sugarcane fields would be seized from individual small owners after the winter 1960 harvest and turned into cooperatives; this action violated the May agrarian law, but what counted were Fidel's orders. And at that stage he proposed to go on running Cuba from INRA, declaring in another "secret speech" that the Institute "is a political instrument and the apparatus for activating the country's masses to carry out a task and to defend this task . . . INRA will be gigantic apparatus with an extraordinary power of mobilizing [the people], especially if we organize peasants in social groups and military groups. . . . An armed people is the definitive guarantee of the Revolution, precisely because it is armed. "
And Castro said, "In this whole situation INRA is the decisive apparatus and it has a tremendous revolutionary responsibility. INRA and the army are the two decisive apparatuses for the Revolution, and we must rally around them all the forces that we can marshal for the battles that await us in the future. . . . We shall consolidate what has been won. Let us not look for more enemies that at a given moment we must find. Remember that in the war we first attacked small towns, then big towns . . ."
Late spring of 1959 was a moment of danger for Castro's revolution, internally as well as externally. Still, as he kept reminding his companions, the revolution had to move carefully and gradually while he consolidated power from his INRA "bastion." At home, Castro and the revolution retained their immense popularity, but Fidel's sensitive political antennae were attuned to disturbing signals in the air. He was uncertain of the revolutionary loyalty of his own 26th of July Movement, particularly of its "bourgeois right wing," as he called it, and this was why he set up the secret INRA government to bypass the cabinet and President Urrutia—until he was ready to discard them. As Pedro Miret, one of Fidel's closest associates, recalls that period, "It was necessary to dilute the 26th of July." Though Castro had finally succeeded in bringing the Students' Revolutionary Directorate to his side after the past rivalries and to attract DR's chief, Faure Chomón, to the government, he still felt uncomfortable with this middle-class organization. Then, there was the problem of the strutting barbudos (some of whom did and some did not actually fight in the mountains) demanding rank and privilege, an attitude that drove Fidel to paroxysms of fury. In a rage, he denounced "the stupidity, the demagogy, the opportunism, and the politicking of all those who today give the appearance of being more revolutionary than anyone else. "
And, finally, there were the Communists. Though he continued to hold long-range unity talks with the party's leaders, Castro was aware that the Communist leadership was split, and many old-timers resented and envied him. The party as a whole had still failed to pay him fealty (possibly because Moscow remained unconvinced) and recognize his revolutionary genius in triumphing his way instead of the orthodox Marxist-Leninist way. Pragmatic as they may have tried to be, key party leaders found it hard to swallow Castro's denials in the United States of Communist influence in the Cuban revolution, and his occasional private outbursts of impatience with the assertiveness and arrogance of some party members. A polemic over Communist support for Batista in the 1940s developed between the Movement's official organ, Revolución, and the Communist daily, Hoy. For a time, only Carlos Rafael Rodríguez kept the channels open at the top level; Conchita Fernández, who was Castro's secretary at INRA, recalls that Rodríguez was the only Communist of importance to join the inner circle there in those days.
Externally, Castro increasingly feared an American intervention, especially after the signing of the land-reform law. Bonsal, the American ambassador in Havana, wrote later that "in the spring of 1959 Castro believed it probable that the Cuban revolution as he envisaged it would sooner rather than later come into irreconcilable
conflict with American interests on the island and that the United States government would respond with a full-scale invasion of Cuba." But Bonsal also commented that "Castro's scenario at this time did not contemplate the massive help in the form of economic aid and weapons that he later received from the Soviet Union . . . [he] became oriented toward dependence on the Soviet Union only when the United States, by its actions in the spring and summer of 1960, gave the Russians no choice other than to come to Castro's rescue." This is a complex proposition, and set forth by a diplomat of Bonsal's acuity, it is worth examining.
If Bonsal's assessment is correct—and, in the end, only Fidel Castro knows the truth, free of ideological and mythical embellishments—then my own impression is that the American determination to prevent Cuba from acquiring arms anywhere in the world during 1959 and 1960 was a decisive factor, even before Eisenhower launched economic and covert-action warfare against the revolutionaries. It is certainly arguable that Castro might have chosen domestic Marxist solutions without becoming wholly dependent on the Russians economically and militarily if the United States had not threatened his survival; Yugoslavia and China are not such farfetched analogies, and are not a world away from the Soviet Union. Moreover, at least a year elapsed before Soviet assistance began arriving on the island, and Washington did not have to close off all alternatives. Finally, a careful study of the record will show that Castro had begun to move headlong toward a socialist revolution long before Moscow promised or gave him help. And all of this history is consistent with the Castro claim that American "aggressions" simply accelerated the socialist process of the revolution.
Immediately after victory, Castro made the modernizing of the Rebel Army—and subsequently of the new people's militia—a top priority. The militia was particularly important because Castro, much as he believed in the Rebel Army as the chief instrument of revolutionary power, did not want the army to become an elite organization that even theoretically could some day turn into a political threat, especially in the absence of a ruling political party. But Castro also thought that it would be too costly to maintain an oversized standing army even if he daily feared an American invasion, and that a well-trained militia, which could be mobilized for action within hours, would be the perfect complement to a smaller though heavily armed professional army. Finally, he considered that the militias as "an armed nation" represented an additional dimension of popular revolutionary commitment. In mid-1959, in his "secret speeches" Castro was telling INRA associates that he wanted one hundred thousand peasant militias (in addition to workers' and students' militias) to be trained in the use of weapons, including .50-caliber tripod machine guns, at a rate of one thousand every forty-five days. What Batista had left behind, however, did not suit the modern mobile forces Castro had in mind, so by mid-May, trusted emissaries fanned out overseas to try to buy arms.
