Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  This was the attitude prevailing toward him in the United States government when Castro materialized on short notice in New York to lead the Cuban delegation to the U. N. General Assembly. The great unwitting irony of his reception was that the U. S. government confined him and his entourage to the island of Manhattan "to insure his personal safety," and that during his ten-day stay in the city, the special 258-man police detail guarding him was nearly as large as Castro's Rebel Army of 300 when it launched its final offensive in 1958. The Police Department obviously had no way of knowing that another official United States agency was planning to kill elsewhere the man they were guarding in New York, and the State Department (also unaware of the CIA plot) was desperately searching for a city hotel willing to accept the Cubans. To compound matters, the Cubana Airlines plane that brought Castro to New York had to race home to Havana to avoid being seized by American creditors; another Cubana airliner had been placed under lien at the airport two days earlier. Castro's presence in New York triggered a mass of misunderstandings, plenty of American harassment, dangers to Fidel from Cuban exiles, and—secretly—the shadow of official assassination. Castro may not have known about Maheu, Roselli, and poison pills, but he was thriving on the rest of it. In Havana, where Raúl Castro was acting prime minister, the American ambassador's movements were restricted to the Vedado residential section in reprisal.

  Nikita Khrushchev had planned to meet Fidel Castro even before he boarded the liner Baltika in Kaliningrad for New York. Arkady N. Shevchenko, then a junior diplomat traveling as an adviser, recalls that the chairman began talking to him about Cuba one day on the Baltika's deck as she sailed north of the island. (Shevchenko, who later rose to the rank of Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, defected in 1978 and wrote his memoirs in Breaking with Moscow.) Shevchenko recorded Khrushchev's remarks: "I hope that Cuba will become a beacon of socialism in Latin America" and "Castro offers that hope, and the Americans are helping us." Khrushchev said that the United States was trying to drive Castro to the wall instead of establishing normal relations with him, adding, "That's stupid, and it's a result of the howls of zealous anti-Communists in the United States who see red everywhere, though possibly something is only rose-colored, or even white. . . . Castro will have to gravitate to us like an iron filing to a magnet. "

  In New York, Khrushchev took immediate steps to accelerate this gravitation by visiting Castro in Harlem. Fidel's choice of black Harlem as his headquarters made the visit even more interesting politically to the chairman. The day Khrushchev landed in New York, Castro had abandoned the Shelburne Hotel on Lexington Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street, a comfortable establishment near the United Nations, in protest against what he described as the management's "unacceptable cash demands" for deposits; he may not have realized that the Shelburne had rented the Cubans the twenty suites (at twenty dollars each) only because the State Department had pleaded with the hotel to house the Cuban delegation. The next day Castro and fifty Cubans rushed eight blocks in the descending dusk to the United Nations Secretariat Building on First Avenue to confront Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. Dressed in olive-green combat fatigues, Castro piled into a black Oldsmobile with seven companions, followed by other Cubans in cars or on foot, by police, and by hundreds of newsmen. Once arrived, Fidel informed the mild-mannered Hammarskjöld that his delegation would stay there until the housing problem was solved. He said the Cubans were prepared to march to Central Park, remarking that "we are mountain people, we are used to sleeping in the open air. "

  Turning down an offer of free accommodations at the fairly luxurious Commodore Hotel, just three blocks from the United Nations, Castro then directed his wild-looking motorcade to the eleven-story Theresa Hotel at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem, where the management evidently awaited the Cubans. They took forty rooms, finally moving in at 12: 30 A. M. Having totally overshadowed all other United Nations-related activities with his nocturnal thrusts around the city, Castro announced that he had thought all along about staying in Harlem because blacks would be more sympathetic to the Cuban revolution. Then, he stayed up most of the night, receiving black journalists and the Black Muslim leader Malcolm X.

  Khrushchev's account of these events appears in his memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers, in which he reports his indignation upon learning that the Cubans "were thrown out" of their hotel and invited to Harlem. The next morning, he drove to Harlem to "shake Castro's hand as a gesture of sympathy and respect" after phoning the Cuban that he was on his way uptown from the Soviet U. N. residence. Khrushchev wrote that Castro had offered to call on him instead because "he thought that the Soviet Union was being a great country and his being a young revolutionary government representing a small country, it would be proper for him to pay a visit to me first." But, Khrushchev went on, "I felt it would be better for me to make the first visit, thereby emphasizing our solidarity with Cuba, especially in the light of the indignation and discrimination they were being subjected to. . . . By going to a Negro hotel in a Negro district, we would be making a double demonstration: against the discriminatory policies of the United States of America toward Negroes as well as toward Cuba. "

  At high noon on Tuesday, September 20, Fidel Castro greeted Khrushchev at the entrance of the Theresa Hotel in one of the most improbable diplomatic encounters of the postwar years. Khrushchev himself described it best: "He made a deep impression on me. He was a very tall man with a beard, and his face was both pleasant and tough at the same time. His eyes sparkled with kindness toward his friends. We greeted each other by embracing. When I say 'embrace,' I'm using the word in a rather specialized way. You have to take into consideration my height as opposed to Castro's. He bent down and enveloped me with his whole body. While I'm fairly broad abeam, he wasn't so thin either, especially for his age." The two men went up to Castro's ninth-floor suite for a twenty-two-minute conversation through interpreters. Khrushchev wrote that the Cuban "expressed his pleasure at my visit, and I repeated my sentiments of solidarity and approval of his policy. The meeting was very brief; we exchanged only a few sentences. . . . You can imagine the uproar this episode caused in the American press and elsewhere as well." The New York Times reported that "it was the biggest event on 125th Street since the funeral in 1958 of W. C. Handy, who wrote 'St. Louis Blues.' "

  Back at the Soviet residence on Park Avenue and Sixty-eighth street, Khrushchev told reporters he was "very much pleased with the conversation I've had with Dr. Castro," whom he described as "an heroic man who has raised his people from the tyranny of Batista and who has provided a better life for his people. . . . I salute Fidel Castro and wish him well." But this was not the end of Khrushchev's courtship of the revolutionary chief. At the afternoon session of the General Assembly, he walked from his seat, almost at the rear of the hall, to the front, across the rostrum, and over to the front row of the other side where Castro sat with his diplomats. Castro then rose to his feet, and the two men embraced repeatedly and beamingly for the benefit of photographers. Three days later, Castro dined with Khrushchev at Soviet headquarters on Park Avenue for four and a half hours, which was evidently when they held their substantive talks—including discussion of the scope of Moscow's military backing for Cuba. After the meeting broke up at midnight, Khrushchev walked arm in arm with Castro to the Cuban's car. Their next meeting would be three years later at the Kremlin when they tried to make up after a bitter dispute over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.

  Shevchenko writes that on his return from Harlem, Khrushchev told his staff that "he had found that Castro wanted a close friendship with the U. S. S. R. and asked for military aid . . . moreover, he got the impression that Castro would be a good communist. While Khrushchev was enthusiastic, he also added that it would be necessary to be cautious. 'Castro is like a young horse that hasn't been broken,' he said. 'He needs some training, but he's very spirited—so we'll have to be careful.' "

  Apart from his meetings with Khrushchev, the Cuban prime minister
saw only Czechoslovakia's president, Antonin Novotny, and Bulgaria's Premier Zhivkov, and, from the neutralist group, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Prime Minister Nehru of India, and President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito declined to see Castro despite efforts by Foreign Minister Raúl Roa. Fidel treated the General Assembly to a four-and-a-half-hour speech on September 26, speaking from only a single sheet of notes, accusing the United States of "aggression" against Cuba. Khrushchev sat through the entire address, often interrupting with smiling applause.

  While in New York, Castro also chaired by telephone a cabinet meeting in Havana to decide on diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and North Korea. He spent much time in his suite at the Theresa Hotel, presumably because there were not enough diplomatic contacts available to fill his ten-day stay in New York. He brought from Havana Major Juan Almeida, the Army Chief of Staff, who is black, to meet with black United States leaders, but little came out of it. He worked with Celia Sánchez and Captain Nuñez Jiménez to keep track of developments in Cuba, and many of his meals were chicken-and-rice dishes delivered to the hotel from a nearby restaurant. One evening, he invited the Theresa's black employees to a steak dinner at the hotel with him and Major Almeida; on another evening, Castro received the leaders of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, including the poets Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg. After a few days, the novelty of his presence in Harlem wore off, the crowds thinned out, and only the police maintained a heavy presence. A police horse named Bangle collapsed in front of the Theresa from a kidney ailment resulting from exhaustion.

  On September 29, Castro finally flew home aboard a Soviet Ilyushin-18 turboprop airliner, so as not to risk the seizure of a Cuban plane by American creditors. At the airport, before leaving, he declared that "the Soviets are our friends. . . . Here you took our planes—the authorities rob our planes—Soviets give us planes." Back in Havana, greeted by 150,000 cheering fellow citizens, he told them the United States was a "cold and hostile nation" and New York was "a city of persecution." But on balance, Castro evidently achieved what he came to seek in New York: a great deal of public attention and a solid understanding with Nikita Khrushchev concerning all forms of assistance for Cuba. It would be very urgently needed—and very soon.

  On his return to the island, Fidel Castro instantly discovered a plethora of problems. Most of them were related to American pressures now that the Eisenhower administration was absolutely determined to liquidate his revolution. On October 18, Ambassador Bonsal was recalled "on extended consultations," knowing perfectly well that this marked the end of his Cuban assignment; the United States no longer wanted any dealings with Castro. The following day, the administration banned exports to Cuba of any American goods—except nonsubsidized foodstuffs, medicines, and medical supplies. This was the embargo, or "blockade" as Castro calls it, and it was still in force twenty-six years later, complicating the Cuban economy, having made Cuba totally dependent on the Soviet Union but failing to demolish the revolution.

  The internal-security situation was a dangerous problem on another level, but it too was linked to American efforts to oust Castro. By September, he had to accept the reality that the rebel guerrilla groups in the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba (and to a much lesser extent in Oriente) could no longer be tolerated. Castro knew from his own experience how tough it is for a conventional army to deal with guerrillas—and now he had a conventional army—if they are allowed to expand. Moreover, he was aware that the bands in Escambray were air-supplied by the CIA, even if most of the drops never actually reached the rebels, being recovered instead by the Rebel Army and the militia.

  Castro's principal advantage was that these rebels had no centralized command and no nationally identifiable leader—since he had been the undisputed leader in the Sierra Maestra—and therefore no coordination. On September 8, shortly before Castro flew to New York, the Rebel Army organized special battalions to launch the "Escambray Clean-up Operation," surrounding the mountains with as many as one hundred thousand militiamen in a massive search-and-destroy effort. Just before Fidel's return to Havana, the regime announced it had scored a victory over a rebel unit in Escambray—the first public admission that there was fighting in the central Sierras. At the same time, the first heavy Soviet arms—82mm mortars and 122mm howitzers—began arriving to bolster the island's defenses. The first Soviet tanks came early in 1961. Castro and his advisers believed late in 1980 that the Escambray uprisings were linked to a subsequent invasion, and that therefore it was urgent to destroy the guerrillas. Fidel was quite right because the CIA had considered a linkage between the Escambray forces and the Bay of Pigs landings (the mountains are adjacent to Zapata); when the exiles came ashore, however, the Escambray had already been neutralized.

  Vice-President Fernández, then one of the few professional military commanders serving under Castro, says that the most dangerous moment in Escambray was between December 1960 and February 1961. That was why Castro had assumed personal command of the operations on his return from the United Nations, spending days and nights with the militia battalions and showing himself to the troops and the local population. Again, his guerrillero experience came in handy. Fernández recalls that the Escambray strategy devised by Castro was to place a militiaman permanently every forty or fifty yards along a road or a ridge, to live in his trench, and have food delivered three times a day. In this fashion, the mountains were completely sealed off, and other units moved into the hills to pursue the rebels. The rebel bands, Fernández says, never had more than twenty men each, moving rapidly from spot to spot, but never forming a strong group. Castro's and Fernández's best estimates are that the total guerrilla numbers may have reached five thousand at one point; in a single operation, for example, five hundred rebels were captured. They were a mix: small landowners who feared agrarian reform, ex-Batista soldiers, disgruntled Rebel Army fighters, and simple adventurers; much of the combat by then was in the name of anticommunism.

  According to Fernández, the last band in Escambray was liquidated as late as 1965, which meant that the militiamen were tied down there, in greater or lesser numbers, for over five years. To deal with these uprisings without denuding other Cuban defenses, the militiamen were given twenty-one days of basic training before being sent off to do battle. Around six thousand men were trained simultaneously at any given time, and in time the militias became the backbone of Cuban defenses. They were crucial, for example, at the Bay of Pigs.

  Another vital Castro weapon was his intelligence service under the command of Ramiro Valdés and Manuel "Redbeard" Piñeiro. The Rebel Army's intelligence arm had infiltrated to an astonishing degree inside rebel and antirevolutionary groups, making it possible for Castro to hold all his enemies at bay for nearly three decades, including the CIA. Castro says that at one stage there were as many as three hundred "counterrevolutionary organizations," each expecting American support, and that "we knew more what they did than they knew themselves" because of the infiltration. He claims that "a moment came, almost at the end, when our people were the chiefs of almost all these counterrevolutionary organizations." According to Castro, his security files were so complete that when a plotter was arrested, say in 1962, the regime knew everything he had done and whom he had seen in 1960 and before.

  Full-time security organizations, however, were not considered sufficient, so on September 28, the day he came back from New York, Castro announced the creation of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) as a system of the people's "collective vigilance." The CDRs were Castro's invention because nothing on such a scale exists even in the Soviet Union, and their immediate function was to keep the police and Security Services informed of strangers appearing in their neighborhoods (there is a CDR for every urban block and in every plant and farm), of citizens voicing criticisms of the regime, and so on. Castro estimated in 1986 that 80 percent of the population belonged to the CDRs, an unparalleled security network. But nowadays the C
DRs are also responsible for the vaccination of children and other community tasks.

  For all practical purposes, the first major phase of the Cuban revolution was completed at the end of 1960, a two-year period. In the words of Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, this was the finish of "capitalism" in Cuba with the nationalization of foreign companies as well as Cuban industry, farms, and businesses. Ties with the United States had been broken, and an alliance with the Soviet Union created as a basic new relationship. Internal security was firmly in hand with the militias and the new CDRs, and the revolutionary government was free of "liberal" or "moderate" influences.

  On October 13, Castro ordered the expropriation of 382 large industrial and commercial companies "belonging to the Cuban bourgeoisie," and all Cuban and foreign banks (except Canadian banks). On October 15 he went on national television to say that his revolutionary program outlined in "History Will Absolve Me" had been fulfilled—nationalization of foreign companies and agrarian reform—and that the revolution had entered a new stage. In the same speech, however, Castro pledged that the revolution "has no need" of liquidating small private businesses, such as shops and small factories. To set up "People's Stores" in the cities, he said, would create "an obstacle to the revolution," and the revolution has no interest in retail distribution mechanisms. In 1968, when Castro came up with still another revolutionary stage, he went back on his word to nationalize everything from the cornet coffee shop to taxis in the cities. Not even ambulatory vendors were permitted to exist when Castro was experimenting with "pure communism," one of his greatest errors, as he would say much later.

  When Castro presented the ideological program to the First Congress of his new Communist party in 1975, he declared that during the second half of 1960, "the Cuban Revolution entered its era of socialist construction." In October 1960, of course, he had omitted the word "socialist" in announcing the new revolutionary phase. Cuba was not quite ready yet for the "construction of socialism." But on December 31, 1960, Castro ordered general mobilization in Cuba to defend the nation from an imminent military attack "by the troops of Yankee imperialism," which he insisted President Eisenhower would carry out as his last act at the White House. Fidel Castro did not know he would be dealing with John F. Kennedy, now the president-elect and already partially briefed on the Bay of Pigs plans, and not with Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, the new phase in Cuban life would be more complex and explosive than Castro seemed to realize as he was ordering his New Year's Eve mobilization.