Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Historians have been debating for many years whether or not the Kennedy administration's efforts to oust Castro after the Bay of Pigs fiasco were directly responsible for the Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons in Cuba. All the available evidence, including Castro's own judgments, suggests that an affirmative answer is possible only if it is accepted that the Cubans and the Russians did really believe that an actual invasion, as distinct from Mongoose, threatened the island in 1962. Since it is now known that Kennedy entertained no invasion thoughts, the debate over American responsibilities for the nuclear crisis is couched in false terms. The nuclear issue in 1962 was strictly a matter of Soviet strategic decision-making once Khrushchev was convinced (or convinced himself and Castro) that there would, indeed, be an invasion. Naturally, Castro had every right to seek maximum Soviet protection because he was facing great uncertainties, but it may never be known whether Fidel used Khrushchev to escalate the nuclear crisis with the United States—or vice versa. The existing record is fragmentary and contradictory.

  There is no question, however, that Cuban-Soviet negotiations over significant Kremlin support for the revolutionary regime began in earnest in the spring of 1962, just as Castro completed liquidating the Escalante "sectarian" Communist challenge to his leadership. Not only did Castro see imminent military dangers from the United States, but in January the Organization of American States expelled Cuba from membership, under Washington's pressure, at the hard-fought foreign ministers' conference at Punta del Este in Uruguay. This was seen in Havana as political preparation for an invasion, the idea being to present Cuba as the Communist enemy of the entire Western Hemisphere, not only of the United States.

  Castro fought back politically by issuing the "Second Declaration of Havana" in an exceptionally emotional speech on February 4, charging that at Punta del Este "Yankee imperialism gathered the ministers together to wrest from them—through political pressure and unprecedented economic blackmail in collusion with a group of the most discredited rulers of this continent—the renunciation of the national sovereignty of our people and the consecration of the odious Yankee right to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin America." Always on the offensive, Fidel responded to the expulsion from the OAS with the kind of challenge calculated to make Washington even more hysterical about him. Addressing the vast crowd at Revolution Plaza, he said: "The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. . . . The revolution will triumph in America and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job doesn't suit a revolutionary."

  At home, Castro also had cause for intense concern over the reappearance of guerrilla bands in the Escambray Mountains and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere in Cuba, after the successful "cleanup" operations late in 1960 and early in 1961. That "clean-up" had neutralized the Escambray as an area of operations in support of the Bay of Pigs landing, but already in 1962, the guerrillas were again a serious problem. Strangely, the CIA provided no help to these bands in the context of Mongoose, but the situation was grave enough for Raúl Castro to describe it as "the second civil war." In any event, Escambray was a costly drain on Cuba's defense resources, adding to the regime's overall vulnerability. The Castro brothers and men like Che Guevara realized that the existence of the guerrillas was intolerable to the regime—they knew it from their own experience as mountain rebels—and they watched with great concern the bands add up to approximately three thousand men by mid-1962. This was ten times as many men as Fidel had had in the Sierra at the end of the war, but, fortunately for him, there was no unified leadership and no real leader, and the guerrillas were split up into scores of groups without communication among them.

  Politically, it was embarrassing for Castro to admit that so many men were up in arms against him, even if they did not constitute a coherent force, and practically nothing on the subject was published in Cuba well into the 1960s, when the last remnants of the guerrillas were finally destroyed. Most of the guerrilleros were small landowners—the Cuban rural middle-class—and former estate managers, foremen, and workers, but there were also rural merchants and quite a few ex-officers of Castro's rebel army and the Students' Revolutionary Directorate. This was a group to whom revolutionary socialism had nothing to offer, and, in fact, these men had lost much privilege in the wake of the revolution. Unlike Castro in the 1950s, they had no support in the cities, and they did not present ideological or political positions. According to a Cuban specialist on this subject, the Escambray bands "were not a true danger for the revolution if we acted in time and in silence, and we did not convert it into a national preoccupation. "

  At a strategy meeting in Havana, Fidel suddenly interrupted one of his commanders, who was referring to the new rebels as guerrilleros, to say, "Don't ever again say that they are guerrilleros—they are bandits." The counterinsurgency units that were then being trained were consequently given the names of "Battalions of Struggle Against Bandits," and the description of "bandits" caught on. Castro had understood the psychology of the situation facing him, and he never allowed the problem to get out of hand. Many years later, Castro explained at great length in a confidential speech before Angolan officers, that he had defeated the "bandits" through a combination of throwing great military resources against them and secret negotiations with guerrilla chieftains for surrender on generous terms and for encouraging others to surrender. These included bands totaling over five hundred men in the Oriente mountains as well. Still, these were costly operations, and Castro's casualties reached more than three hundred killed in Escambray alone; economic losses were calculated at around $1 billion in ruined crops, burned houses, destroyed rolling stock, roads, and bridges—and the military cost of the "antibandit" operations. Castro, despite his other concerns, was always in overall command of this fight; on one occasion, he personally captured a number of "Bandits" when with several soldiers he climbed a wooded hill above the Cienfuegos highway, where, he was told during a trip, a guerrilla band was hiding. But the last of the Escambray "bandits" were not caught until 1966.

  Things could not have been worse for Castro than in the spring of 1962, when he turned to Moscow for military protection. There were guerrillas in the mountains, "old" Communists were trying to undermine him, the farm economy was collapsing, and the Americans were after him with Operation Mongoose on one level and diplomatic isolation in Latin America on the other. There is no single event that seems to have triggered Castro's requests to Moscow, but indications are that he raised the issue for the first time when S. R. Rashidov, an alternate member of the Soviet Politburo, came to Havana late in May. He was the highest-ranking Soviet government official to visit Cuba since Mikoyan's trailblazing presence two years earlier. There must have been continuing secret talks during June because Castro disclosed in a subsequent speech that the negotiations for "the strengthening of our armed forces and the dispatch of strategic missiles to our country" occurred that month. They may have been conducted through Alexsiev, who had just arrived as the new ambassador, or through Carlos Olivares, the new Cuban ambassador in Moscow. But a secret channel is more likely.

  At this stage, Fidel turned once more to public drama. On June 15, he departed with great fanfare for the Sierra Maestra, wearing his battle fatigues and carrying his rifle, and he spent eight days there, reliving the glories of the guerrilla, and being ostentatiously absent from Havana. Castro's mountain meanderings were covered in detail in the press and on television, including his statement that "once more, I have raised the banner of rebellion." The symbolism must have been meant for Kennedy and Khrushchev as well as for Cubans who had to be prepared for a new crisis. On July 1, the Communist newspaper Hoy started publishing daily reports on U. S. "violations" of Cuban air space and territorial waters (though Revolución, still the regime's official organ, failed to do so).

  This sequence of events continued with a two-week visit to Moscow early in July by Raúl Cast
ro and a delegation of his officers. Official announcements reported that Mikoyan and Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the Soviet defense minister, received Raúl on July 3, but the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev writes that the military talks lasted a week. Medvedev, who always had access to official Soviet sources, also adds in his biography of Khrushchev that "he attended the talks on 3 and 8 July." And according to Medvedev, these discussions centered "on the provision of military aid to Cuba and the secondment of a number of Soviet military specialists," and "it was presumably during that week that the decision was taken to send to Cuba medium-range missiles with nuclear warheads and bombers capable of carrying atomic bombs." This is most likely accurate although there may have been followup conversations through secret channels between July and early September when the Soviets began secretly to ship the missiles to Cuba.

  There may also have been secret contacts before Raúl Castro's official visit to Moscow in July. Thus Fidel said to a visitor a year after the crisis that in June 1962, my brother Raúl and Che Guevara went to Moscow to discuss ways and means of installing the missiles." If Fidel's dates are correct—and despite his prodigious memory he occasionally has problems with precise dates when he talks about past events involving his activities or interests—Raúl and Che would have gone to Moscow secretly even as he was waving the rebellion banner in the Sierra Maestra.

  There is no known record of an actual Soviet-Cuban agreement on the missiles, and it is possible that nothing was ever put on paper in order to protect Khrushchev as well as Castro in the future. Raúl Castro mentioned in a little-noticed speech late in August that "Soviet troops" had begun to arrive in Cuba, but he offered no details, and it was unclear whether he referred to advisers, combat units, or rocket forces specialists who came to prepare missile sites. Simultaneously, MIG jet fighter-bombers began arriving for the Cuban air force. Che Guevara and Major Emilio Aragonés, who was very close to the Castro brothers, visited Khrushchev at his vacation dacha in the Crimea, but this was not announced. Guevara was in the Soviet Union for the ostensible purpose of signing an agreement on modernizing Cuban steel plants, and he may also have finalized the missile arrangements with the premier.

  A Soviet-Cuban military agreement on September 2 announced that as a result of "imperialist threats," Cuba had asked the Soviet government to "help by delivering armaments and sending technical specialists for training Cuban servicemen," and Moscow had responded affirmatively. However, this text had to have been designed to explain publicly the arrivals of Soviet military personnel and conventional equipment, and even possibly to allay any American fears over missiles. That same week, Anatoly Dobrynin, the new Soviet ambassador, conveyed to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy a message from Khrushchev to the President to the effect that no "offensive weapons" were among the equipment being sent to Cuba. On September 12, TASS issued a statement to stress that the Soviets had "no need" to deploy retaliatory "defensive weapons" in any other country, adding "Cuba, for instance." This was in reply to a Kennedy warning that the United States would not tolerate the installation of ground-to-ground missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev had now set in motion his incredible attempt to deceive the United States about nuclear weapons in the Caribbean.

  Twenty-five years after the Cuban missile crisis, it remains a matter of debate whether it was Khrushchev or Castro who first proposed the Soviet nuclear deployment on the island. There are also subtleties in various accounts concerning the fashion in which the two leaders decided on this risky course of action. However, Castro is still most anxious for his interpretation of the events of October and November 1962 to form the historical record. In the course of an all-night conversation in his office at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana, I touched on the missile crisis, and Castro said, "Are you interested in my opinion about that moment?" He then proceeded to narrate for hours the origins, the development, and the aftermath of the crisis in the context of his relationship with Khrushchev. For reasons of clear chronology, I have rearranged here the order in which Castro told me the story—it was a conversation with many questions and answers and backing and filling—but this account is based on a transcript of our taped Spanish-language talk.

  I asked Castro where and how the idea of deploying the Soviet missiles in Cuba had emerged, and he replied:

  "Look, I shall tell you with much precision how the idea arose. After Girón, the United States government indubitably was very irritated, very dissatisfied with what had happened, and the idea of solving through force, of liquidating through force, the Cuban Revolution was not abandoned. But it was not considered possible to go back and repeat the Girón experience, and the idea of a direct invasion of Cuba was being seriously considered and analyzed. And we, through various sources, had news of the plans being elaborated, and we had the certainty of this danger. "

  Castro said that at the meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev in Vienna in June—two months after the Bay of Pigs—the Cuban question was discussed, and "Kennedy spoke with much irritation there." Castro went on to say that "from the terms in which Kennedy expressed himself, it could be deduced that he considered he had the right to use the armed forces of the United States to destroy the Cuban Revolution. He referred to different historical events, [and] on that occasion made a reference to Hungary. Having received information about that conversation, we reached the conclusion, as did the Soviets, that the United States persisted in the idea of an invasion. "

  Evidently the Soviets were Castro's source for accounts of the Khrushchev-Kennedy sessions, and the suggestion has been made by many historians that they had set out to convince the Cubans that Kennedy was planning an invasion, although they knew it was not true, in order to provoke Castro into demanding far-reaching military protection. In another conversation, Castro has said that Kennedy had pointedly reminded Khrushchev that the United States remained neutral when the Soviets invaded Hungary—and that this should be considered a hint that, in terms of reciprocity, the Russians should not interfere if there were an American attack on Cuba. In his own memoirs, Khrushchev does not even mention Cuba in the chapter on the Vienna meeting with Kennedy, but this does not necessarily disprove the Castro version. What matters is that Fidel chose to accept Soviet reports on Vienna as confirmation of his own suspicions about a U. S. invasion, and he behaved accordingly. Finally, the decision on the missiles may have been triggered by Khrushchev's impression in Vienna that Kennedy was indecisive—he allowed himself, for example, to be defeated at the Bay of Pigs—and therefore would live with the accomplished fact of missiles in Cuba once they were emplaced.

  "We were then in discussions with the Soviets," continued Castro, narrating the 1962 events. "At that moment, the Soviets were already quite committed to us. They were giving us maximum help, they had responded with the purchase of Cuban sugar when [our] market in the United States was totally closed, they supplied petroleum when all the sources of petroleum supply were suspended, which would have annihilated the country. They, I say, had acquired a great degree of commitment toward us, and now we were discussing what measures should be taken. They asked our opinion, and we told them exactly—we did not speak of missiles—that it was necessary to make it clear to the United States that an invasion of Cuba would imply a war with the Soviet Union. We told them: It is necessary to take steps that would imply, in a clear manner, that an aggression against Cuba is an aggression against the Soviet Union. These were the statements we made . . . as a general concept. "

  "It was then," Fidel Castro told me, "that they proposed the missiles. As a result of all these discussions, our position was that steps were needed to demonstrate that an aggression against Cuba was equivalent to an aggression against the Soviet Union—it could be a military pact, it could just be that. And, then, among the measures that were analyzed, the installation of medium-range missiles was analyzed. We were thinking fundamentally about the political inconveniences this had. At that time we were not thinking so much of actual dangers because, you know, we had come
down from the mountains, we had come from a war, we were very irritated with all the things that had happened, all the aggressions of which we were the victims, and so we analyzed the political inconveniences we faced."

  Speaking of the missiles' deployment, Castro said, "We analyzed [the fact] that this, besides being convenient for us, could also be convenient to the Soviets from a military viewpoint. This is to say that we analyzed what advantages there were for us and what advantages for them . . . from the strategic viewpoint—we understood this. We reached the conclusion that this [the missiles] was mutually beneficial." Castro then explained at length that it would have been "morally incorrect" for Cuba to "expect for a country to support us, even to the point of going to war, but—for reasons of prestige or to avoid military-type commitments, or for strictly political reasons—for us to fail to do what could also be convenient for the other side." Therefore, he said, "it seemed to us to be really equitable, it seemed to us just, it seemed to us to be basically reciprocal to accept these measures that implied safety even though they also implied a cost from the political viewpoint—the political fact that these missiles would be installed here."