Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Castro and Khrushchev were among the heads of state and government who had decided to attend the 1960 session of the United Nations General Assembly, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of the world organization. There was an unprecedented gathering of notables—President Tito of Yugoslavia, President Nasser of Egypt, Premier Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Prime Minister Macmillan of Britain, and President Eisenhower were there—but the tall, bearded Cuban and the rotund, bald Russian instantly emerged as the stars, even aside from their personal eccentricities. Khrushchev's visit to Castro at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem, where in pique the Cuban and his entourage had moved from a midtown Manhattan hotel earlier in the week, was designed to crown their new alliance publicly.

  This alliance took visible shape when First Deputy Premier Mikoyan, one of the few surviving "old Bolsheviks" of the Russian Revolution, alighted in Havana on February 4, 1960, for a nine-day visit. Mikoyan came with plenipotentiary powers to strike a complex and far-ranging deal with Fidel Castro, one that has never been made public in its entirety. Castro and Che Guevara, who greeted Mikoyan at the airport, were the principal Cuban negotiators, the Argentine in his capacity as National Bank president. After Mikoyan inaugurated the Soviet Science, Technology, and Culture exhibit at Havana's Bellas Artes Museum, the ostensible reason for his trip to Cuba, he delivered a speech to the government-controlled labor-union confederation (incongruously handing Castro a little check for ninety thousand dollars to purchase planes and arms.)

  Then he was taken to see land cooperatives in Pinar del Río, Camagüey, and Oriente, and he visited Fidel's beloved Ciénaga de Zapata and the Isle of Pines, where he was shown the prison cell once occupied by the chief of the revolution. On February 13 a joint Cuban-Soviet communiqué was issued, emphasizing that the consolidation of world peace depended largely "on the inalienable right of every nation to decide freely its own political, economic and social road," which was the first Soviet commitment, indirect as it may have sounded, to the protection of the Cuban revolution. Another political aspect of the communiqué was the agreement to discuss, when convenient, the resumption of Cuban-Soviet diplomatic relations; it was obviously convenient very quickly because this resumption "on the level of embassies" was announced on May 8. Cuban officials say that Castro sought to obtain some form of explicit security guarantees from Mikoyan, but the communiqué does not touch upon this theme. It is known, however, that the deputy premier informed Castro that Soviet arms would be delivered to Cuba as soon as possible; indeed, they began arriving late that year, immediately after the initial Czech shipments. In this broad sense, a strategic understanding was reached.

  Economically, the results—as outlined in the communiqué—were not particularly impressive, but this relationship had to develop gradually in terms of Cuba's ability to absorb Soviet aid. The arrangement worked out by Mikoyan with Castro and Guevara was called a "trade agreement," a term that would always be applied in the future to all economic dealings between the two countries; "assistance" was not a word the Cubans desired to see in print. Specifically, the Russians agreed to buy 425,000 tons of Cuban sugar during the balance of 1960, in addition to the 345,000 tons they had already bought during the spring (the total exceeded somewhat the 1959 purchases, but it was less than one fifth of the current Cuban crop). Because the communiqué did not mention the price, it was assumed that Moscow was paying the very low prevailing world price, roughly one half the subsidized price per pound the United States was paying under its quota system, in which Cuba still participated. Additionally, the Soviets committed themselves to buy one million tons of sugar annually (the 1960 total was 770,000 tons) for the next four years, certainly not enough to meet Cuban foreign-exchange requirements inasmuch as it was basically a barter transaction with payment in kind. Thus, for the 1961–1964 period, the Soviets offered Cuba $100 million in credits "for the acquisition of equipment, machinery and materials" and for technical assistance.

  Contrary to Cuban assertions, this was not a phenomenal deal for Havana—actually, it was a better one for Moscow—but it did involve the Soviets even more deeply in the survival of the Cuban revolution. If this was Castro's and Guevara's long-term objective, they did outfox Mikoyan (who was of Armenian-descent) who could not possibly predict how Cuban-American relationships would subsequently develop. On the other hand, the Cuban explanation of the agreement showed that their leaders either did not understand world economics or were willfully misleading the citizenry. In speeches a month after signing the Mikoyan accord, Castro and Guevara argued that it did not matter that only 20 percent of the Cuban sugar harvest going to the Soviets under the trade agreement would generate actual dollars because, as he put it, "the dollar is nothing more than an instrument for purchasing, the dollar has no value other than its purchasing power, and when we receive manufactured goods or raw materials [from the Soviets], we are simply using sugar as if it were dollars." A quarter-century later, when 80 percent of all Cuban exports went as barter to the Soviet bloc, Castro was desperate for dollars because the high technology he now needed could be obtained only in the West and only for dollars he did not possess. But on March 18, before the Mikoyan deal was four weeks old, Castro received a helicopter as a present from the Soviet Union for his personal use. It was handed over to him ceremoniously by the chief of the Soviet trade mission, which had already installed itself in Havana.

  (Curiously, one person Mikoyan specifically asked to meet in Cuba was Ernest Hemingway, who had lived on and off since 1939 at Finca Vigía in San Francisco de Paula, a southeastern Havana suburb. Hemingway had been in Cuba during the first half of 1958, the last year of the war, and his ample published correspondence shows a certain interest in the revolution. For example, in a letter to his son Patrick written from Idaho in November, he said that "Cuba is really bad now . . . living in a country where no one is right—both sides atrocious—knowing what sort of stuff and murder will go on when the new ones come in—seeing the abuses of those in now—I am fed on it . . ." Still from Idaho, he wrote a New York editor late in January 1959 that "the officer commanding Havana Garrison is an old San Francisco de Paula boy who used to play ball on local team I used to pitch for . . . I knew Phil Bonsal the new ambassador when he used to work for I. T. T. . . . He is a very sound able guy but will naturally be working our interests. . . . Castro is up against a hell of a lot of money. . . . If he could run a straight government it would be wonderful . . ." Hemingway was away from Cuba all of 1959, but shortly before returning to the island early in 1960, he wrote his friend General Charles T. Lanham that "I believe completely in the historical necessity of the Cuban revolution. I do not mix in Cuban politics but I take a long view of this revolution and the day by day and the personalities do not interest me. . . . In the present situation there is nothing I can say that would hot be misinterpreted or twisted. I have a terrible amount of work to do and want to be left alone to do it." Nevertheless, Hemingway found time to entertain Mikoyan at lunch at Finca Vigía; a photograph shows him smilingly pouring a drink for the deputy minister and Vladimir Bazikin, then the Soviet ambassador in Mexico. Castro did not accompany Mikoyan, and the only time Hemingway and Fidel did meet was in May at Havana's Barlovento Yacht Club where both attended the Hemingway Fishing Tournament. Castro had won the individual championship that day, catching the biggest blue marlin. It is intriguing why Castro never sought out Hemingway while he still lived in Cuba in 1960, given his admiration for the writer and Hemingway's support for the revolution; this may be the only time when Fidel was uncomfortable imposing on someone, in this case a man he regarded as a genius. Gabriel García Márquez has written that Castro knows Hemingway's work "in depth, that he likes to talk about him, and knows how to defend him convincingly." In a 1984 interview, Castro said lamely that he never got to know Hemingway "because those early days of the Revolution were very busy ones, and no one thought that [he] would die so quickly." He added: "What I like most about Hemingway are his monologues. ")
/>   After the Mikoyan visit and the establishment of Soviet-Cuban diplomatic relations (Sergei Kudryatsev, a specialist on Latin America, was the first ambassador to Havana, and Faure Chomón, the former Students' Revolutionary Directorate leader, went to Moscow), the new alliance's growth was directly proportionate to the increasing hostility between Cuba and the United States. In retrospect, it does appear that at this stage both Castro and Khrushchev were keen on exploiting this hostility—Castro probably more than Khrushchev—and that the United States did not quite know what to make of the emerging Havana-Moscow axis, other than being scared of it. Ambassador Bonsal wrote that the Mikoyan trade agreement in his opinion "did not in itself jeopardize the American economic position in Cuba," but that "the pleasantries exchanged by Mikoyan and Castro in February had been given the most alarming significance in some Washington quarters. The economic arrangements between Cuba and the Soviet Union seemed intolerable to people long accustomed to a dominant American position in Cuba. "

  Then a ship blew up in the Havana harbor, destroying the last chance for an accomodation between Fidel Castro and the Americans. The vessel was La Coubre, a French freighter that docked in Havana's inner harbor on March 4, with seventy tons of ammunition and explosives from Antwerp, which was the balance of the matériel purchased from Belgium the previous year. The first explosion, killing and maiming mainly crewmen and stevedores, came around 5: 00 P. M., and a second one about an hour later killed and injured Cuban soldiers, militiamen, and firemen. The death toll was eighty-one. Castro arrived and directed rescue operations while accusing the United States of "sabotage." No proof of sabotage was actually produced by the Cubans, and the cause of the explosion was never officially established. The United States angrily rejected Castro's charges, pointing out that docking an explosives-laden ship inside a busy harbor violated international safety rules; however, the French captain never explained publicly why he had tied up his ship there. In any event, the La Coubre incident rallied the Cuban masses around Castro at a time when he was beginning to face growing internal political problems and there were signs of erosion in his popularity. At funeral services the next day at Colón cemetery, Castro delivered an immensely emotional oration, declaring that "today I saw our nation stronger than ever, today I saw our revolution more solid and invincible than ever" and vowing that "Cuba will never become cowardly, Cuba will not step back, the Revolution will not be detained. . . . The Revolution will march ahead victoriously!. . ." He ended by using for the first time his great revolutionary slogan Patria o Muerte, Venceremos! (Motherland or Death, We Shall Win!). Since that day, every revolutionary speech in Cuba ends with this phrase, which the audience picks up and repeats with rising fervor.

  La Coubre was a milestone in many ways. For a majority of Cubans, the explosion confirmed Castro's predictions that the United States was determined to stamp out the revolution; they believed that this tragedy was the work of "enemies of the revolution. . . who do not wish us to receive arms for our defense." For Castro it was another useful confirmation of his premise that external danger strengthens the revolution because of the powerful impact of nationalism on popular reactions; the United States, of course, obliged him from the first year of the new regime to the 1983 invasion of Grenada when armed Cubans fought an overwhelming force of armed Americans.

  For the United States, Castro's accusations over La Coubre became, in the words of Ambassador Bonsal, the official argument that "perhaps . . . tipped the scales in favor of Washington's abandonment of the policy of non-intervention in Cuba." Likewise, 1960 was an election year, and, as Bonsal put it, "the American posture of moderation in the face of Castro's insulting and aggressive behavior was becoming a political liability." Bonsal was never informed of it officially, but he believed that "the new American policy . . . was one of overthrowing Castro by all the means available to the United States short of the open employment of American armed forces in Cuba. "

  Indeed, on March 17, President Eisenhower approved a basic policy paper on the subject: "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime." Developed by the CIA and the White House "Special Group" (the deputy under-secretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the special assistant to the president for national security affairs), the plan's principal feature was "the development of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla action." Before long, the concept of the paramilitary force for guerrilla warfare grew into a full-fledged invasion brigade. It is now known that Vice-President Nixon was the chief advocate of the March 17 plan. After meeting Castro in Washington the previous year, he concluded he was dealing with a Communist. And Nixon was also a presidential candidate in a race in which the question of Cuba loomed large.

  However, it is not really credible that the Cuban reaction to La Coubre was crucial in the U. S. decision to attack Castro. Such a program could not have been elaborated in only twelve days. In fact, the report of the board of inquiry on the Bay of Pigs invasion emphasized that the Special Group had drafted the program for covert action against Castro at a meeting on January 13 for Eisenhower's signature on March 17. There is ample evidence that the initial idea to remove him already constituted top-secret policy in March of 1959, and almost any excuse would have served for the presidential approval of the anti-Castro "Program." The Cuban regime, and most notably INRA's Rebel Army officers controlling land reform, were seizing American property in absolute disregard of Castro's own law, anti-American propaganda was unbridled, and the revolutionary government felt much more secure now that Mikoyan had given it Moscow's blessings. Washington's responses, produced in the heat of approaching elections and in incomprehension of Cuban realities, played into Castro's eager hands and rewarded him with the fulfillment of his prophecies.

  The astonishingly patient Ambassador Bonsal had concluded in mid-spring that Cuban-American relations had no future, though he neither favored violent action against Castro nor was he being kept posted by the Eisenhower administration on its latest secret plans. In a private conversation one afternoon, he remarked, "You know, it's a no-win situation. . . . It's damned if we do, and damned if we don't. . . . You just can't please Castro." Bonsal and Castro had not met since the previous September (their third and last encounter), and official Cuban propaganda criticized the ambassador frequently. For example, in January he was attacked in the press for going to the airport to say good-bye to the Spanish ambassador, Juan Pablo de Lojendio, whom Cuba had ordered expelled on a twenty-four-hour notice. Lojendio was ejected because he had burst into a TV studio as Castro was speaking to protest Castro's attacks on the Franco regime made earlier in the broadcast. The Spaniard had watched the televised speech at his residence and, full of indignation, rushed to the station to confront Fidel. The ambassador was a short, balding man, and there was a touch of the grotesque to his brief shouting duel with the towering Castro before he was bodily removed.

  Before La Coubre, there was a final attempt by the State Department at basic Cuban-American negotiations, but they were frustrated by Castro's insistence that as a first step the United States should take no steps against Cuba while the talks lasted. He had wanted to make sure that the U. S. Congress would not cut or reduce the Cuban sugar quota in the interim—the administration had requested Congress in January to grant it executive discretion on the quotas, but the State Department decided to turn him down on the technically correct grounds that it could not speak for the legislative branch. Had there been goodwill, however, a way to negotiate might have been found, but basically Eisenhower and Nixon were sick and tired of Castro: They had other solutions in mind. Since Castro was equally correctly convinced that the term "historical fatalism" would be brutally applied to him, he was in no mood to compromise, either. This mind-set on both sides would—with brief periods of relaxation and mutual probing—define the Cuban-American relationship in the next quarter-century.

  Economic warfare broke out in earnest in May when Che Gu
evara informed two American and one British company, each owning a refinery in Cuba, that henceforth they would have to process crude petroleum imported from the Soviet Union. The companies had traditionally shipped to Cuba the oil they were producing in Venezuela as part of the worldwide production-shipping-marketing-refining system then practiced by the multinationals. Guevara argued that Cuba had the sovereign right to import the cheaper Soviet crude (the Soviets chose to make it cheaper and, besides, Cuba would be paying for it with sugar instead of dollars, under the Mikoyan accord), and warned the companies that the government would not pay them $50 million owed for earlier imports. Acting on the direct advice of the Treasury Department (the State Department not having been consulted), the companies decided to reject the Cuban demand without any serious negotiations. On June 29, Castro seized the three refineries while the Soviets assembled enough tankers to transport all the crude Cuba needed from Black Sea ports, and Soviet technicians adjusted the plants for processing the new oil. The arrival of the Andrey Vishinsky, the first tanker, is now celebrated as a revolutionary anniversary in the country. Castro portrayed Cuba as an aggrieved party in the dispute, and Bonsal wrote that "the Cuban Revolution had won a great victory and had had a powerful ally thrust into its arms." That day, a U. S. aircraft carrier sailed past Havana, and sent two of its jets roaring over the refineries. Both Eisenhower and Khrushchev were, in effect, doing Castro's bidding in their apposite fashions.