Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

Soviet military deliveries to Cuba were formalized when Raúl Castro met Khrushchev in Moscow in July 1960, and their joint communiqué restated that the Soviets would use "all means not to consent to an armed United States intervention against the Cuban republic." This assured Fidel he could adequately equip the FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) and the militias to resist a conventional forces' attack from the outside; (the deal Guevara had signed in Moscow at the end of 1960 gave him a breather in trying to keep the economy afloat the deal included the assignment of 189 Soviet industrial advisers to Cuba). And Castro made no secret of his dependence on Soviet aid: In an interview on February 1, 1961, with Jiřy Hochman, the correspondent of the Czech Communist party organ, Rude Pravo, he remarked that "if it were not for the intervention of imperialism, the Cuban revolution would have developed without difficulties. . . . The solidarity and the aid given revolutionary Cuba in this situation by the socialist countries have played a decisive role for the definitive victory of our people. If the socialist camp and its attitude did not exist, we would pay very dearly for our revolutionary laws. . . . Thanks to arms that we have received from socialist countries, we were able to create a defensive force capable of arousing the respect of the mercenaries and the respect of the aggressive circles of imperialism. . . ."

  The stage was now set for the Cuban-American confrontation. Castro felt secure that he could defend Cuba from anything short of a full-fledged American attack, though, as he said later, he doubted that Kennedy would engage United States forces in support of the exiles' brigade whose existence was amply known to Havana. In Washington, the new president was being urged by the CIA not to delay the invasion because, according to the CIA Havana Station, Cuban pilots in Czechoslovakia were about to complete their training and would be returning home any day to fly the MiG jets that the Soviets were expected to provide (none had yet arrived).

  Still concerned about the Escambray bands that he suspected of having been instructed by the CIA to support in some fashion the exiles' invasion, Castro went back to the mountains on March 1 to satisfy himself that the situation there was really under control. Again, he appeared in battle gear, going up some hills, chatting with militiamen and their officers, joking with local peasants—all these activities being televised, photographed, and reported in detail. He was orchestrating everywhere his preparations for the battle, though in the case of Escambray, the CIA had lost interest in the bands there in terms of the planned landing on the shores of the Bay of Pigs. They were no longer considered an asset, but Fidel could not be sure of this and was taking no chances. In the meantime, the United States had banned travel to Cuba by Americans, which Castro took to be another sign of approaching hostilities. However, on February 14, he made a point of telling United Press International correspondent Henry Raymont that Cuba wished to have relations with the United States provided that Washington halted its active support for the "counterrevolution. "

  But now events were picking up momentum. On March 2, the Kennedy administration announced it planned to prohibit all imports from Cuba. On March 11, Kennedy blocked the sales of U. S. farm products to Cuba. And in the days and weeks that followed, Kennedy and Castro engaged in a chain of simultaneous activities affecting each other's countries—sometimes in surprising and contradictory ways. March 13 was such a day.

  Speaking in inspired tones, President Kennedy invited Latin America to join the United States in an "Alliance for Progress" to ameliorate peoples' lives and achieve economic advancement, pledging $25 billion over a decade as the American contribution to this goal. The irony, which Castro suspected, was that even as Kennedy spoke in Washington, the invasion-brigade training was being perfected in the Guatemalan camps. Still that same day, rockets were fired from a high-speed boat at the oil refinery in Santiago, killing one sailor and injuring a militiaman; this was part of the CIA-organized pre-invasion softening up of Cuba. And in Havana, Castro went to the great stairs of the university to commemorate with a fighting speech the fourth anniversary of the assault on Batista's palace by the Students' Revolutionary Directorate.

  We now know that Kennedy approached the Alliance for Progress with much greater enthusiasm than the supposedly secret plans for the Bay of Pigs. Both enterprises, however, had roots in the Castro revolution, one to prevent its repetition elsewhere in Latin America, and the other to liquidate that revolution. The rationale in the administration, to the extent that a coherent one existed at all, was that the Alliance would build a bright future for Latin America on the ruins of the Cuban revolution. It evidently had not occurred to the planners that in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, the great gesture of the Alliance might have been regarded in Latin America as something other than pure altruism. Having turned a deaf ear for long years to Latin American urgings for a large-scale economic-development program, the United States, under a younger man's administration, finally chose to do exactly what Castro had proposed in Buenos Aires two years earlier, but it still completely underestimated how the Cuban revolution had captured imaginations in the hemisphere.

  Discussing the Alliance many years later, Fidel Castro easily admitted that there was a direct nexus between his revolution and the Kennedy initiative. He made the point that the Alliance sought the same goals as the first phase of the Cuban revolution under the Moncada program: concepts of agrarian reform, social justice, a better distribution of national wealth, tax reforms, and so on. Castro thought that the Alliance was an "intelligent strategy," but it was a hopeless attempt because Latin American establishments would not have allowed real reforms. In his view, Latin American conditions could be approached in only two ways: social reform or "political repression," and in this sense the Alliance was a "politically wise idea," though even reforms were not enough to meet the needs. Basically, Castro said, the Alliance sought to avoid revolutions. In a long, thoughtful discussion of Kennedy in January 1984, he remarked that the Alliance emerged with "the political objective of acting as a brake on the revolutionary movement, and I think it was a merit of Kennedy to have really understood [and] recognized that there was an economic and social situation that sooner or later had to become translated into revolution. "

  Castro was also impressed with Kennedy's idea to create the Peace Corps, albeit this was not sufficiently revolutionary for his taste. What he saw in it was an American version of what he called "internationalism," that is, direct involvement in the development process of other countries through assistance teams or individuals. In a way, Cuba's assignment of thousands of Cuban doctors, nurses, teachers, and technicians in Africa and Nicaragua is an imitation on a vast and political scale of Kennedy's Peace Gorps: Kennedy and Castro both understood the need for establishing person-to-person contacts in the Third World as a factor of influence. So aware was Castro of what he calls "Third World internationalist solidarity" that in the spring of 1960, when Cuba herself lacked resources, he dispatched a shipload of medicine, foodstuffs, and clothing aboard the freigther Habana for the victims of a terrible tidal wave that had hit Chile. As it happened, Senator Salvador Allende Gossens, the Marxist physician who ten years later would be elected Chile's president, was a frequent guest in Havana, and it was to him that Castro made the first offer of aid. Also in 1960, Castro lent $5 million to Cheddi Jagan's leftist British Guyana.

  To be sure, both Castro and Kennedy thought in guerrilla terms, too, concerning the Third World. From the outset, the Cubans proceeded to train young Latin Americans and Africans for future guerrilla operations in their countries (aid shipments to Chile included copies of Che Guevara's The War of Guerrillas, his manual on rural insurrection and warfare). There was Cuban support for Venezuelan urban and rural guerrillas in 1960, and the leaders of the movement that grabbed revolutionary power in the British colony of Zanzibar in 1963 had been trained in Cuba where they maintained an office since 1960. (Zanzibar later merged with Tanganayka to form the republic of Tanzania whose leadership has cordial ties with Cuba.) Much more such guerrilla training came later, and it continued
into the late 1980s. Kennedy responded to the threat of the Cuban subversion by creating a special warfare school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the U. S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, now known as the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, and Guevara's War of the Guerrillas, hurriedly translated into English, became one of the principal textbooks in the art of insurgency and counterinsurgency. U. S. Army Special Forces Detachments (or the Green Berets) as they now exist were born at the JFK School, and one of the first units assigned overseas was sent to Panama to aid Latin American armies in counterinsurgency. Ironically, it is quite probable that American advisers who helped the Bolivian army track down Che Guevara and kill him in 1967 had studied Guevara's manual.

  The United States and revolutionary Cuba competed for Latin American influence on the highest political level as well. After President Eisenhower toured South America early in 1960, Castro sent Osvaldo Dorticós, Cuba's nominal president, to make a similar journey in May. Kennedy made two trips to Latin America during his brief presidency, and Castro returned to the region in the seventies. On May 1, 1961, Radio Havana inaugurated its short-wave international service in scores of languages (from English to the Andean Indian Quechua language) with one of the world's most powerful signals as part of Castro's "internationalist" offensive. The Prensa Latina international news agency was started about the same time. Somewhere along the line, Fidel seriously proclaimed that the Indian chieftain Hatuey, born on the island of Hispaniola in the Age of Discovery and later the head of a tribe in Cuba, was the "first internationalist." This was his colorful way of saying that in Latin America, leaders moved from one country to another from the start of history as "internalists" because to them frontiers had no meaning.

  Between the end of March and mid-April 1961, tensions went on rising. Kennedy ordered the suspension of the Cuban sugar quota for the year (the law gave the president the authority to "suspend" or cut quotas, but not abolish them altogether), and on April 3, the administration issued its "White Book" on Cuba that decried the denial of democracy under the revolution. It was, in effect, the intellectual justification for the coming invasion, and this was certainly the way Castro read it when he received news-agency reports on it that afternoon. Now he addressed Cubans daily with warnings of an imminent attack: He spoke to thousands of construction workers who had organized Committees for the Defense of the Revolution at the Public Works ministry, to labor-union delegates preparing May Day celebrations, to another labor rally to protest the flight abroad of Cuban workers, intellectuals, and technicians, and to the nation over television to discuss revolution and education. He also found time to dispatch a message to Khrushchev to congratulate the Soviet Union on the first manned space flight.

  That an attack was about to happen was no secret to Castro and his highly efficient intelligence apparatus, and in his April exhortations he blended sarcasm with dire warnings to his foes. Speaking of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FRD), the CIA-constructed political organization in whose name the invasion was being prepared—and its chairman, José Miró Cardona, who was the first revolutionary prime minister—Castro asked, "Are those the men who will come to overthrow the armed people? Don't make us laugh! . . . This mercenary government will not last twenty-four hours in Cuba . . . ." The next day, he taunted the exiles: "The people here have asked many times, when will they come? People, too, are impatient. . . . Those who have illusions and vain hopes in those plots, they have no alternative but to come here, sooner or later. . . . It is inconceivable that they do not understand that a struggle against the revolution could be started here, but it would never end, never in the fields, never in the cities . . . ." Fidel was determined to have the nation psychologically ready for the attack when it came, and he gave this preparation as much importance as he gave his military planning.

  And his intelligence and security networks were functioning with perfection. Ramiro Valdés, who was Interior Minister until 1986, and who had created the security services as one of the first endeavors of the revolutionary regime in 1959, says that Cuban intelligence was able to track invasion preparations step by step, from Miami to the training camps in Guatemala. "It was an open secret," Valdés adds. Because of the traditional indiscretion of Cubans, he recollects, the "Little Havana" district of Miami was so full of invasion talk that Cuban security's biggest problem was to sort out truth from rumors in the mass of information streaming from the mainland. (Miami, of course, was full of infiltrated Valdés agents at the time.) He says that the flow of intelligence was so heavy that there were moments when he suspected that the CIA had mounted a campaign of "disinformation" or a psychological warfare campaign to keep Cuba off balance. "When reports of invasion reach you every day, on the other hand, you catch the wolf on the day he finally arrives. "

  Based on information from Miami, Central America, and from within Cuba, State Security Services began on April 1 to round up people suspected to be CIA-linked or involved in clandestine antiregime activities. As Valdés says, "We knew who everybody was, what weapons they carried, how much ammunition they had, where they were going to be, how many of them, at what time, and what they proposed to do. . . . We were very seriously infiltrated in the counterrevolutionary bands." The CIA's justification for not informing the anti-Castro underground beforehand about the date and place of the invasion was that the information could fall into the hands of Cuban intelligence, and according to Valdés, the Agency acted correctly. However, the invasion made absolutely no sense without instant and massive support from the underground, such as it. was, and for this reason the invasion was doomed to total failure. Meanwhile, the Security Services arrested members of six separate antiregime groups in the first week of April, mainly men and women involved in CIA-aided sabotage acts. In several instances, shootouts preceded the arrests. And neighborhood Revolution Defense Committees in the cities were crucial in ferreting out suspicious persons. Nevertheless, Havana's El Encanto department store was torched and burned. But in Oriente, 145 members of "counterrevolutionary bands" were captured early in April.

  On April 12, President Kennedy offered assurances at a Washington news conference that United States forces would not intervene in Cuba. Castro reasoned—correctly—that Kennedy would not make a point of excluding an American participation unless an attack, presumably by exiles, was in the offing. He took Kennedy's comment as a confirmation that an invasion was imminent, and he based his defensive strategy on the assumption that he would be fighting only exiled Cubans (but American planners did not realize Castro had reached that conclusion). Fidel naturally had alternative contingency plans if Kennedy, after all, did send Americans into combat (which nearly happened in terms of air support). He was not certain exactly where and when the main landing would be made, but he thought it would come in the south, around Cienfuegos or Trinidad, with simultaneous attacks in the south and the north of Oriente and in Pinar del Río in the west. On the eve of the battle, Castro had the relative planning advantage of being ready for a number of alternatives, whereas the CIA and its Pentagon advisers, as it soon turned out, had no real idea what they were facing; a board of inquiry discovered subsequently that the planners believed Castro had "no doctrine" of any kind. Once more, he had the luck of being underestimated.

  To defend the island with his clear doctrine of main-force deployments and mobility by tactical units, Castro had the regular rebel army of about 25,000 well-trained and equipped men plus around 200,000 militiamen organized in battalions and stationed throughout the country in strategic areas. The army was divided into three tactical regional commands, and Castro's battle plan provided for Raúl Castro to command forces in the east (Oriente and Camagüey), Che Guevara in the west (western Havana Province and Pinar del Río), and Chief of Staff Major Juan Almeida in the center with headquarters in Santa Clara. Fidel, as Commander in Chief, would coordinate all operations from a secret command post in the Nuevo Vedado section of Havana (he also commanded directly the troops in the capital), although he
was prepared to move rapidly from place to place as required. As he explained later, "Every time there was talk of an invasion from the United States, we divided ourselves in the country." Under this defensive doctrine, no main-force units would move from their respective assigned areas unless battle developments made it necessary; early tactical operations were assigned to the militia battalions. Thus Castro would not be trapped in diversions and deceptions the CIA had planned.

  About two weeks before the invasion, Castro had paid one of his periodic visits to the Ciénaga de Zapata, and at one point strolled along the Girón beach at the entrance to the bay to see how a tourist-village construction was coming along. Suddenly, he turned to a Cuban journalist accompanying him, and pointing to a one-story concrete house, he said, "You know, this is a great place for a landing. . . . We should place a fifty-caliber heavy machine gun there, just in case." The day before the invasion, Juan Almeida had toured the Bay of Pigs area and decided to send a militia company there, dividing it among three principal beaches because he thought communications were inadequate. At that moment, the invasion fleet was already sailing from Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua (where the brigade had been moved from Guatemala) under a U. S. Navy escort. The first ship of the invasion force left on April 11, and the last one on April 13: The landings were set for post-midnight hours of April 17.

  Fidel Castro spent the night of April 14–15 awake at his emergency command post known as "Punto Uno" (Point One), a two-story house at Forty-seventh Street in the residential district of Nuevo Vedado in Havana, near the Zoological Gardens. Major Sergio del Valle, his Chief of Staff, who had been a guerrilla physician in the Sierra Maestra, and Celia Sánchez were with him. Castro had had so many signals in recent days that "something" was about to happen that he made "Punto Uno" his temporary home; it was principally a communications center with the rest of the country. Specifically, Fidel was informed on Friday, April 14, that a suspicious-looking ship had been spotted off the coast of Oriente, not too far from Guantánamo, and he had to conclude that it could be the vanguard of a major invasion force. Oriente was the traditional gateway to "liberations" of Cuba. Castro's information was correct, but the ship, a freighter named La Playa, was carrying a diversionary force—not the main one. The CIA's idea was that diversionary activities at various points on the island forty-eight hours before the Bay of Pigs landing would confuse Castro and force him to desperately improvise his defense. La Playa therefore was to land 164 men commanded by Major Nino Díaz at the mouth of the Mocambo River, some thirty miles east of Guantánamo, in the small hours of April 15, after steaming three days from Key West, Florida. Nino Díaz had fought under Raúl Castro in that same area of Oriente, but he had turned against the revolution and now was willing to fight there again. However, a reconnaissance party from La Playa aboard a rubber boat reported back that there were militia units on the beaches, and Díaz decided to abort the landing, sailing for home.