Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  When Fernández in Australia telephoned Castro in Havana to report the capture of Palpite, Fidel exclaimed, "We've already won the war! . . . Aviation has sunk three or four ships, and it continues in action. . . . You are to attack Playa Larga with the militia battalion . . . ." Castro had triumphantly shouted "We've won the war" when he and the two other survivors of Alegría de Pío encountered Raúl Castro and his few companions after the December 1956 debacle at the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, and this time his assessment was equally precise. With the invasion fleet eliminated and the invaders bottled up on the beaches, Castro faced what was essentially a cleanup operation, although much heavy combat still lay ahead.

  Thus Fernández's attack on Playa Larga by five hundred militiamen armed with mortars, machine guns and rifles was repulsed at 2: 00 P. M. with considerable casualties for the battalion. But Castro now felt that his presence might energize his troops in general (and anyway he wanted to be in the thick of the action), and he arrived by car at Australia at 3: 15 P. M. —a three-hour drive at breakneck speed. He did not take a helicopter because it would be vulnerable to air action in the skies all around. At the sugar mill, he informed Fernández that artillery, antiaircraft guns, and tanks were on their way, and that the attack on Playa Larga must be resumed promptly. He wanted to go to the front at Palpite, but Fernández talked him out of it. His first photograph in the combat area—walking in battle dress and brown beret, rifle in the left hand, and cigar clenched in his teeth as he listened to Fernández a step behind—was taken there and immediately circulated around the world. The other famous Castro war picture, showing him jumping off a tank at Playa Larga, was shot the following day; it has since been made into millions of heroic posters.

  That Castro materialized in the war zone the first afternoon also served to emphasize that he felt militarily and politically secure. The troops and militias in Havana were totally loyal, the seaside Malecón boulevard was ringed with artillery and antiaircraft guns, and in the capital alone about thirty-five thousand persons suspected of antiregime sentiments were detained during the morning by State Security, the police, and the Revolution Defense Committees. Havana's Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop was among the detainees. Sixteen thousand of them were placed in Havana prisons, ten thousand in the sports stadium, and four thousand in the huge Blanquita theater. If the CIA had really ever hoped for anti-Castro Cubans to rise in support of the invasion, Fidel made sure that they did not have any leadership anywhere. And before leaving Havana, he drafted an appeal to "The People of America and the World," signed by him and President Dorticós, for "solidarity" with Cuba in her struggle against "the imperialism of the United States" and its "mercenaries and adventurers who have landed at a place in the country. "

  There was tough combat for two more days as the Brigade fought the rearguard actions well, even in Castro's opinion, notwithstanding the hopelessness of the situation. Despite heavy artillery bombardment, the Brigade defended Playa Larga until the morning of the next day, April 18, when additional militia units arrived. That morning Fidel returned to Havana because of reports that enemy troops were landing in Pinar del Río in the west, but it was another CIA deception involving electronics gear aboard small boats well offshore, and he was back on the battlefield early on Wednesday the nineteenth—in time to see final victory. He was with Pedro Miret's artillery batteries east of Girón when San Blas was retaken and the noose tightened around the "Blue Beach." Brigade B-26s, which inflicted heavy casualties on Fernández's militias as they moved toward Girón on Tuesday, could no longer fly because their Cuban pilots were totally exhausted from the seven-hour round-trip flights from Nicaragua. Four CIA-recruited American pilots from the Alabama Air National Guard died when their two B-26s were shot down by Castro's T-33s. Kennedy had authorized one-hour morning sorties by American jets from the carrier Essex on Wednesday to help protect the evacuation from Girón beach, but unexplainedly they appeared too early to be of any help. The last efforts at resistance ended at 5: 30 P. M.

  Considering that he had no radio or telephone communications within the vast battle region of the Zapata—handwritten messages were rushed by jeep or motorcycle or even on foot—Castro maintained a remarkable control over the events as they unrolled for three days. Celia Sánchez was at the Havana command post, keeping him informed by microwave radio and telephone of developments elsewhere. And, above all, his strategic instinct was unerring. When Fernández reported to him on the nineteenth that two U. S. destroyers were approaching the beach at Girón in what might be the prelude to a new landing, Castro replied, "What you're seeing are not landings but evacuations. . . ." He wanted the rubber boats with escaping exiles pinned down, but cautioned Fernández not to fire on the destroyers even though they were within Cuban territorial waters. He assumed correctly that the warships would fire back, and a sudden clash with the United States would erupt with unforeseeable consequences.

  Castro spent Thursday the nineteenth on the beach in Girón satisfying his curiosity by inspecting the enemy positions and talking to the prisoners. There were so many prisoners that quite a few still had their weapons with them as they surrounded Fidel to answer his questions. Fernández, who knew most of the Brigade officers personally from the old days, says that the prisoners first feared immediate execution by their captors, then "were surprised that they were treated with total correctness. . . human dignity was scrupulously observed." It took several days to round up the remnants of the Brigade; in the end 1, 189 prisoners, including the entire high command, were taken to Havana and interned at the Naval Hospital near La Cabaña fortress. Castro lost 161 dead in the battle, and the Brigade lost 107.

  Castro's victory at the Bay of Pigs defined for the future the basic relationship with the United States as well as with the Soviet Union. In the first instance, Castro proved that he had an extremely high capacity for military defense, and in the second instance, the invasion demonstrated that the Kremlin was prepared to act in Cuba's defense. As Khrushchev said in a note to Kennedy on April 18, "We shall render the Cuban people and their government all necessary assistance in beating back the armed attack on Cuba." Still, eighteen more months would elapse before Khrushchev showed how far he was really prepared to go: Unquestionably the Bay of Pigs affair led directly to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

  There is also little question that Soviet and Czech weapons, including artillery and tanks, made Castro's triumph quicker and easier, even though it was his use of air power that was the decisive factor from the outset. The weapons were so new that, Fernández says, some of the tank crews were learning how to fire the weapons en route from the depots to the battlefield. There is nothing to suggest, on the other hand, that the Soviet advisers who began arriving in Cuba with the equipment late in 1960 had anything to do with the victory. General Aleksei Dementiev, the first Soviet officer of this rank to be stationed on the island, arrived several months after the invasion to be chief of the military advisory group, and no one of lesser caliber would even dare to second-guess Castro. The revolutionaries won because Castro's strategy was vastly superior to the CIA's; because the revolutionary morale was high; and because Che Guevara as the head of the Instruction Department of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, in charge of the militia training program, and Fernández as commander of the militia officers' school had done so well in preparing 200,000 men and women for war. Moreover, the battle at the Bay of Pigs brought a new sense of unity to Cubans.

  The report of the Taylor board of inquiry, parts of which remained classified twenty-five years later, freely recognized that Castro had been totally underestimated. It said that his forces' "operational doctrine was estimated to be virtually non-existent, and yet they seemed to have a very clear understanding of the value of control of the air." Richard Bissell, the CIA's architect of the invasion, testified that among the wrong judgments was "the underestimation of Castro's capability in certain specific respects, mainly his organization ability, speed of movement and will to fight
. . . . Contrary to our opinion, the T-33s were armed and flown with skill, loyalty and determination." Finally, the board agreed that the notion that defeated Brigade troopers might join guerrillas in the Escambray (an idea pushed by the CIA) was pure fantasy.

  To Ambassador Bonsal, the Bay of Pigs "was a serious setback for the United States. . . . It consolidated Castro's regime and was a determining factor in giving it the long life it has enjoyed. . . . It became clear to all concerned in Washington, in Havana, and in Moscow that for the time being, the Castro regime could be overthrown only through an overt application of American power." A quarter of a century later, a huge billboard overlooks the Girón tourist beach, proclaiming: GIRÓN—THE FIRST IMPERIALIST DEFEAT IN AMERICA! On a sunny day in summer 1985, a group of Soviet sailors from a visiting warship in Cienfuegos had their pictures taken in front of the billboard; most of them had probably not yet been born when that event occurred.

  Having "defeated imperialism," Fidel Castro lost no time in extracting from the victory every drop of glory for the revolution and political and ideological advantage for his revolutionary regime—and, as always, for the Cuban sense of national pride. He did so by staging an extraordinary revolutionary passion play, running from spring to fall. On April 23, victory Sunday, he opened it with a four-hour appearance on Popular University, his favorite television program, to narrate the saga of the invasion and revolutionary triumph, using maps, a pointer, and captured documents. Fidel blended humor, sarcasm, scorn, defiance, and rousing explanations of revolutionary strategy to narrate the tale of Girón, and his voice soared in crescendo when he proclaimed that "our men know how to die and they have demonstrated it to excess in recent days!" Practically the entire population of Cuba watched Fidel on television that Sunday. Streets and plazas and parks were deserted, and his popularity seemed even greater than on the day of his first victory, the victory of 1959. Girón had unified the nation behind him, and, as Castro would say later, "Our Marxist-Leninist party was really born at Girón; from that date on, socialism became cemented forever with the blood of our workers, peasants, and students. "

  At the same time, Castro began producing captured prisoners on television to explain their backgrounds and involvement in the invasion Brigade. In what became a veritable television serial for days on end, the exiles repented their participation in the Bay of Pigs expedition (or were maneuvered into repentance), or stolidly confirmed having volunteered to invade their own country. Under questioning, fourteen of the prisoners confessed to murders and other crimes while serving in the Batista forces after the 1952 coup—and again the "imperialists" were shown up as the sponsors of assassins of the Cuban people. But some were defiant, asking why Castro held no elections if he was so popular. The following week, Castro had the prisoners assembled at Havana's Sports Palace where, also on television, he questioned the men, and argued and discussed with them—another act in the passion play.

  Castro had decided while the battle was still progressing that the prisoners would not be harmed, and he did not wish to damage the image of revolutionary purity and generosity with brutality, summary executions, or a mass trial. Much more subtly—and practically—he held out for ransom from the United States for the overwhelming majority of the men, including all the commanders, and had revolutionary courts try in September only the fourteen prisoners accused of prerevolution crimes. Five of them were executed, and nine sentenced to thirty years in prison. Seven of the nine had their terms shortened, and in 1985, only two were still imprisoned.

  The negotiations for the release of the Brigade prisoners took twenty months—Castro had first asked for five hundred tractors in exchange for them, and the Kennedy administration had balked at it—and Fidel came up with another sensation in his drama by allowing ten of the men to fly to the United States on May 20, to support his demands. The prisoners were personally told by Castro that ten of them, chosen by the whole group, could go to Miami and Washington for seventy-two hours, or longer if required for the negotiations, on their word of honor as officers and gentlemen that they would return to Cuba. He stunned them with this offer when he visited the captives just after being awarded the Lenin Peace Prize at the Soviet Embassy, a touch of Fidel's sense of ironic timing. And the other touch was that they traveled in their Brigade camouflage battle uniforms, clean and shaved, a gesture of military honor Castro always applied to his foes in war. They brought mail for the families of those left behind when they flew back to Havana a week later, and they were allowed to carry 660 pounds of gifts for their fellow prisoners. Though Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to chair a "tractors' committee" (and Castro immediately announced his willingness to negotiate with "the widow of the great president"), no accord could be reached, in part because the United States refused to let the Cubans make the exchange appear as a form of indemnification of Cuba for the invasion. Only on December 23, 1962, were the prisoners released against the delivery of 53 million dollars' worth of medicines and food.

  On two widely separated occasions, I had the opportunity of discussing the Bay of Pigs—and President Kennedy—with Fidel Castro. The first time was in June 1961, less than two months after the invasion, when I joined Castro on a tour of the battlefield. He was the guide, the victorious commander, and the military historian as he pointed to sites where crucial events had occurred. Describing the second day's battle for Playa Larga, he said emphatically, "The attack was incessant, and we attacked them incessantly." On Girón beach, Castro rested his boot on the wreckage of a Brigade B-26 bomber, and said, expansively waving his long cigar, "They underestimated us and they used their own forces incorrectly." He went on to say that the invaders were lethally surprised by his mastery of the air, and that they should have engaged in multiple landings, instead of a single one.

  "That was their first error," he expounded. "And because they had established a large beachhead, it became an urgent political problem for us to oust them as quickly as possible so that they could not establish a government here." The second major error, Castro said, continuing his critique, was the Brigade's failure to prevent tanks on flatbed trucks from reaching the Zapata area from Havana; the failure was due to the fact that paratroopers were dropped too late on D-Day morning to cut off the road communications already controlled by the militiamen. The paratroopers, he said, were used "too conservatively," but when he was asked how he would have used them, he wagged his finger, laughingly remarking, "I am not going to tell you that." Furthermore, Castro commented, attacking troops were not landed fast enough after the first wave came ashore at Playa Larga, allowing the Houston to be sunk with a whole battalion still aboard.

  "Their problem," Fidel said, clearly enjoying the lecture, "was that they did not have a guerrilla mentality, like we do, and they acted like a conventional army. We used guerrilla tactics to infiltrate their lines, while attacking steadily from the air and on the ground. You must never let the enemy sleep." He thought, however, that the Brigade had first-rate equipment and excellent firepower. His error, he added, was to let a militia battalion advance on the second day on the open road that rises above the quicksand of the marshes where they were easy targets for enemy aviation. Yet the CIA planners' greatest miscalculation, Castro concluded, was to believe that the air strike on the three Cuban bases on April 15 had destroyed most of his planes. This was the key to the "imperialist" defeat and his victory.

  The next time Castro spoke to me of the invasion was at his office at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana late in January 1984—almost twenty-three years later. We had not seen each other in the intervening period, and the conversation picked up where, in effect, we had left it off on Girón beach. I mentioned to him that in November 1961, seven months after the Bay of Pigs, I had been summoned by President Kennedy to the Oval Office for a private discussion of Cuba, and that I had been stunned when he asked me, "What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?" I told Castro that my reply was that the United States should not be involved in political assass
inations, and the President said, "I agree with you completely." Kennedy had added, I informed Castro, that he was under pressure from some of his advisers to have the Cuban leader killed, but was "glad" that I opposed the idea because, indeed, he felt that for "moral reasons" the United States must not be party to assassinations. Richard N. Goodwin, then Assistant to the President, who was present at this conversation, testified in 1975 before a Senate committee that when he asked Kennedy several days later about this discussion, the President replied, "We can't get into that kind of thing, or we would all be targets." I made a point of mentioning this to Castro, too, and my story started him on the subject of John Kennedy. Castro, of course, knew in 1984 that numerous attempts had been made by the CIA in the 1960s to murder him, but, as he said, he could never bring himself to believe that President Kennedy would have authorized them.

  "Well, what you tell me is really very interesting, and I had never heard it before," Castro said. "This is very illustrative for me because, in the first place, there is a great coincidence between what you have mentioned. . . and Kennedy's idea of having a dialogue (with Cuba]." Castro told me that on November 23, 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, he was meeting in Cuba with Jean Daniel, a French magazine editor, who had brought him a secret message from the President. This was a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy, according to Castro, had asked Daniel to come to Havana and ask him how he felt about "discussing and having a dialogue with the United States . . . to find some channel of contact, of dialogue, to overcome the great tensions that had existed." Castro said that the radio flash about Kennedy's death came just as he and Daniel were discussing over lunch the presidential message to him. "For this reason," Castro said thoughtfully, "I have always kept the impression that Kennedy was meditating about the question of relations with Cuba. "