Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  I asked how long he was kept in the dark, and Castro replied that it was until he had gone to visit the Soviet Union in late April 1963. He said: "One day, Nikita is reading to me all the documents that had been exchanged between the United States and the Soviet Union. Then he says, 'In the American document they say they have made such and such commitments, and besides, we have made the commitment of withdrawing the missiles from Turkey.' And this was when I learned that the missiles in Turkey were in the agreement, and that they had actually been removed. But this was never discussed because the Americans had asked the Soviets not to make public this part of the compromise." Castro was right. The Jupiter missiles, which were obsolete, were removed from Turkey during late April 1963 without any public announcement. Over the years, the pullout became generally known, but the U. S. government did not declassify the pertinent documents until 1985—nearly two years after Castro told me the October story. The full exchange of documents with the Kremlin on the settlement of the crisis is expected to remain classified indefinitely.

  In the meantime, there is nothing on the public record to confirm the existence of an explicit commitment by Kennedy not to invade Cuba, although no subsequent U. S. administration has negated it in so many words. Castro insists that the commitment is "explicit, not implicit," and that the proof of its validity is that there never has been an invasion attempt against Cuba. Under the Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement, the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba was to be subject to U. S. inspection, but Castro furiously rejected this on the grounds it violated Cuban sovereignty. U Thant, the U. N. secretary general, was unable to budge Castro during a special trip to Havana, and, in the end, the inspection was carried out by U. S. aircraft from Guantánamo flying low over Soviet ships displaying the missiles on their decks. Castro's refusal to accept U. S. inspection led the Kennedy administration to become publicly vague on the noninvasion pledge; as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian of the Kennedy era, has written, "The guarantee never went into formal effect." After Khrushchev brought back home IL-28 bombers from Cuba in November (another source of anger for Castro), Kennedy stated that "if all offensive weapons are removed from Cuba and kept out of the hemisphere in the future, under adequate verification and safeguards, and if Cuba is not used for the export of aggressive Communist purposes, there will be peace in the Caribbean. "

  While the missiles were being shipped out of Cuba, Castro contrived to balance his private ire at Khrushchev with public assurances that all was well between the two countries. His economy was in appalling shape (there had even been antiregime demonstrations over food shortages in Matanzas earlier in 1962), he needed to raise very substantially the sugar production, and he had to have fresh resources for the first four-year economic plan that had just been launched with a commitment to invest $1 billion in industrial and farm development. Khrushchev's deal with Kennedy brought Castro unsolicited support from China, Cuba being portrayed as a victim of Soviet betrayal, but it was on Moscow that he depended for basic assistance. Therefore, Castro went before television cameras on November 1 to proclaim, "We are Marxist-Leninists. . . . There will be no breach between the Soviet Union and Cuba." But Anastas Mikoyan, who arrived in Havana on November 2 to pacify Castro, received the brunt of bitter recrimination from the Maximum Leader. Fidel greeted him at the airport but refused to see him for weeks, until the elderly deputy premier had to plead for a meeting so that he could return to Moscow for his wife's funeral. He stayed in Havana for over three weeks. And so unhappy was the whole mood that Ambassador Alexeiev, who considered himself Castro's friend, was said to have wept during conversations with him.

  Although the relationship with the Kremlin had to be the centerpiece of Castro's foreign policy, he never lost sight of the possibility of some form of accommodation with the United States—at some point and if no exaggerated conditions were placed at the start of an eventual negotiation. Castro has said that the settlement of the missile crisis could have included adjustments in Cuban-American relations, and indeed it may have been a lost opportunity. In our 1984 conversations, he remarked that "the removal of the missiles should have permitted Kennedy to make these small concessions to Cuba that would have eliminated the great obstacles that have remained in the way of relations between the United States and Cuba. "

  Speaking of the message from Kennedy brought to him by Jean Daniel on the day of the President's assassination, Castro told me, "Kennedy would not have received a rebuff from us. . . . I was meditating and thinking very much and I was considering giving him a constructive and positive answer. . . . At that moment, we could have perhaps begun a dialogue, an exchange of impressions. . . . After the 1962 crisis, Kennedy had the authority, he had the will . . . ." And Fidel's judgment was quite perceptive. The crisis led to the dismantling of Operation Mongoose (though the CIA went on for years attempting to assassinate Castro), and Kennedy maintained until his death a latent interest in a possible opening to Cuba. Even before Jean Daniel went to Havana, the President was considering sending a secret emissary of his own to see Castro, and the National Security Council staff was exploring possible "channels of communication with Castro." As Arthur Schlesinger has observed, in 1963, "the White House [was] drifting toward accommodation." But John Kennedy's death in November froze prospects for Cuban-American diplomacy for nearly fifteen years. Through an incredible irony; the CIA officer in charge of planning the latest attempt to kill Castro had met with the prospective murderer in Paris on the day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The President had never been apprised of the plot against Fidel.

  If the Soviet Union was vital for Cuba's economic survival, the Russians needed the Cubans politically—and even militarily, despite the October nuclear fiasco. In the light of the deepening ideological conflict with China and its impact on Soviet standing in the Third World, the Kremlin could not afford a break with revolutionary Cuba. The removal of the missiles had already caused the Russians considerable embarrassment internationally, and a reaffirmation of friendship with Cuba was now a top priority for Khrushchev. The marriage of convenience between Castro and Khrushchev had reached such extraordinary proportions that in the name of "internationalist and socialist solidarity" they staged an unprecedented spectacular around the Cuban leader's spring 1963 visit to the Soviet Union, a visit that lasted forty days, unquestionably a record in the annals of international travel by chiefs of governments.

  Left behind in charge of Cuba were Raúl Castro and the Revolutionary Armed Forces, now better trained and equipped than ever. A military consolation prize for the Cubans after the departure of the nuclear missiles was SAM batteries (enabling them to shoot down marauding U-2 spy planes, if they wished) to which the United States did not object because of their defensive character. What the United States did not know at first (and forgot afterward) was that a Soviet Army combat brigade remained on. the island following the repatriation of some twenty thousand troops who had accompanied the missiles. The brigade was meant as a symbol of continuing Soviet commitment to an active defense of Cuba, and Castro described it to a visiting American journalist in 1964 as "a solid Russian combat force. "

  Actually, this force oscillated between four thousand and five thousand men (in addition to military advisers, also in the thousands), and nobody seemed to pay much attention to it until the brigade was "discovered" by the Carter administration in 1979. This caused such disarray that the President grew nervous about submitting the new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) with the Soviets to the Senate for ratification. (It has never been submitted.) Cuba seemed to affect American policies in every imaginable way, and when I asked Castro about the brigade during one of our conversations in Havana in January 1984, he told me with a chuckle, "This is the same brigade the Russians left behind in 1962." It must have been the second or third generation of Soviet soldiers stationed in Cuba.

  To set the tone for Castro's first trip to the Soviet Union, Khrushchev delivered a speech in Moscow at the end of February decla
ring that an "imperialist" attack on Cuba or any other socialist country would mean the start of the Third World War. On April 26, Castro and a vast entourage boarded the giant Soviet TU-114 turboprop airliner for the nonstop flight from Havana to Murmansk, the northern Russian port. This was a regular Aeroflot route inaugurated in January, but this time Fidel almost did not make it. When the TU-114 reached the Murmansk area the following day, the fog was so dense that the airport had to be closed. There was not enough fuel left to look for alternate fields, and the pilot was forced to land in zero visibility with inadequate instrument-landing-system facilities at the Murmansk airport. But he did it perfectly, and, once more, Fidel Castro embarked on a new adventure in a dramatic fashion. Mikoyan, for whom Cuba and Castro had become practically a full-time occupation, was on hand to welcome the visitor—and Fidel, now wearing a fur hat, went directly from the plane to a mass rally downtown as the most natural thing in the world. The speech in Spanish was short—he said, "We've encountered temperatures to which we are not used: lots of cold outside, but plenty of warmth inside the heart!"—and the people of Murmansk naturally loved it.

  During his forty days in the Soviet Union, Castro visited fourteen cities, from Central Asia to Siberia, from the Ukraine to Georgia, and from Moscow to Leningrad; inspected the Northern Fleet and a strategic forces rocket base; delivered countless speeches at sports stadiums, factories, battlefields, and town squares; reviewed the May Day Parade from the top of the Kremlin Wall; received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, and the Gold Star; attended the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and an open-air concert; and spent scores of hours publicly and privately with Nikita Khrushchev. The two of them spoke at a special mass rally in Red Square, an unusual honor for a foreigner, but Castro also had the opportunity of quietly meeting other top Soviet leaders. At a dacha near Moscow, he joked and chatted with Leonid Brezhnev, the man who would oust and replace Khrushchev the following year—in part because of the Cuban missile humiliation. A photograph at the dacha shows Khrushchev and Brezhnev in stodgy suits and ties, with rows of medals on their lapels, and Castro in his usual olive-green battle fatigues.

  The tour was a fantastic success: No foreigner had been received in such grandiose fashion since the Great Patriotic War, the crowds and television audiences were fascinated by the romantic guerrilla fighter from the faraway Cuban mountains, and they all adored the spectacle. Khrushchev accompanied Castro to Murmansk for the flight home at the end of May. Fidel had never in his life enjoyed such attention and on such a scale, and as far as the world was concerned, it was a love feast between the Cubans and the Soviets. But Castro never lowered his political guard either, quietly conveying to his hosts his economic-aid requirements, insisting on his independence, and neatly keeping the revolutionary factions at home off balance. On the one hand, he had made sure that not a single "old" Communist accompanied him on the Soviet tour (not even the ever-mediating Carlos Rafael Rodríguez), as if to enhance the Fidelismo of the revolution. On the other hand, he launched a savage public attack on Revolución, the organ of the Fidelista movement, for the way it had reported his Soviet trip. He criticized it for an article comparing him to Lenin in terms reminiscent of the adulation he found in the Soviet Union, and for reporting "amusing" details that he thought detracted from the significance of the visit. Clearly, it was a warning to the remaining "moderates" of the revolution grouped around the newspaper, and his message was clear when Castro stated in all seriousness that Pravda was the best newspaper in the world. The following year, Revolución was merged with the Communist newspaper Hoy to become the regime's chief mouthpiece under the name of Granma and under hard-line Communist editors. Granma now rivals Pravda in quality, especially in the generous use of red ink on its pages.

  After five years of the revolution, Fidel Castro had established himself as the undisputed, powerful, ruthless, imaginative, and unpredictable leader of Cuba as the country now edged toward a Communist system of life and governance. He continued to command great national following—often national adoration—as he emerged supremely victorious from the Bay of Pigs confrontation with the United States and essentially undamaged from the October missile crisis. As at the time of the exiles' invasion, Cubans rallied around their country's flag—and their Maximum Leader—at the moment of danger in 1962, when American warplanes roared over the countryside and antiaircraft batteries fired their volleys.

  Above all, Castro knew to keep the nation's faith alive and engender hope in the midst of frightful hardship and sacrifice. When Hurricane Flora, one of the worst hurricanes of the century, flattened and flooded the island during 1963, Fidel Castro was everywhere, on the front lines as usual, directing rescue operations, taking chances, leading and inspiring. Despite massive Soviet aid, the economy was performing appallingly below standard, but what Castro made his people remember was that they were being educated, fed, housed, protected, and cared for by the revolution as Cubans had never been before in history. Therefore, they were in the main loyal to the revolution, grateful to the Commander in Chief, and ready to ferret out counterrevolutionary "worms," patrol the cities and the farms at night, and be indoctrinated to the point of numbness in the mysterious phrases of Marxism-Leninism.

  When, at the end of 1963, Castro told Cubans that not only would the economy be geared again to sugar production but that a 10-million-ton harvest was planned for 1970 (the 1963 production was 3. 8 million and the all-time record 6. 7 million), the people trusted his judgment. It would mean "voluntary" work on weekends for students and city dwellers to help their peasant brethren, but it would be for the good of the revolution, and therefore it was the proper thing. Besides, it was unwise to complain or shirk revolutionary duty: One's fellow revolutionaries had sharp eyes and keen ears.

  As the first quinquennium of the revolution drew to a close, Castro and Cuba were essentially set on a firm course. Fidel, now thirty-seven years old, knew precisely where he was leading the nation even though it was a hard, uphill march—as in the Sierra Maestra. Having survived the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, the revolutionary regime was as secure from external threat as any government in the world—or more so. Survival in the long run was, in effect, guaranteed by the Soviet Union because history and Fidel Castro left the Russians no political alternative in the rivalry-ridden world.

  His own life was still that of a guerrillero, restless, impatient, eager to conquer, unorthodox, sharp-shooting. Celia Sánchez was succeeding in making Fidel's activities somewhat more orderly, but not too much so because he despised schedules and hated administration. He was still hugely enjoying himself. Fidelito, at sixteen, was preparing for the university and then for studies in the Soviet Union. In August 1963, Fidel's mother, Lina Ruz de Castro, died at their family home in Birán, and the clan gathered for the funeral. Afterward Castro addressed a rally on Birán's main street.

  In the next two decades, Fidel Castro would maintain the rhythm of revolutionary life he had imposed on Cuba, but with few great surprises ahead in terms of his own behavior and attitudes—or in organizing the new society. He would strive to consolidate Cuba ideologically under the banner of a ruling Communist party that he would head. He would continue with reforms where anything was left to be reformed (the third agrarian reform in October 1963 limited individual holdings to 168 acres, with the state owning 70 percent of the land), he would practice "internationalism" throughout the Third World by helping revolutionaries everywhere and dispatching Cuban combat troops across the seas, and he would seek for himself the role of a world statesman. And he would lose Che Guevara.

  V

  THE MATURITY

  1964–1986

  CHAPTER

  1

  The death of Ernesto Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle on October 8, 1967, climaxing the destruction of his guerrilla movement there, was the central drama in the history of the Cuban revolution in the decade of the 1960s. Apart from the myriad mysteries, never resolved, surrounding Che's presence
and death in Bolivia, his ultimate disappearance had a profound impact on the evolution of Fidel Castro's domestic and international policies. It even helped Castro to settle his disputes with the Soviet Union, festering since the 1962 missile crisis, inasmuch as in the name of romantic revolutionary purity, Che had become a severe critic of the Russians for their "internationalist" timidity and their "imperialist" way of managing economic aid to the Third World. Finally, Che Guevara was the last totally independent mind and spirit in the increasingly rigid power structure built by and around Castro. He had vanished from Cuba in the early part of 1965, for reasons never adequately explained, and therefore did not participate in the final stages of formalizing the establishment of Communist rule in Cuba through the creation of the new party under Castro.

  There must be powerful reasons for Castro's refusal, even nearly twenty years after the fact, to throw any light on Che's presumably spontaneous decision to sever his ties with Cuba and therefore with Fidel himself. The only explanation—such as it is—is contained in Che Guevara's letter to him where he says, "other hills of the world demand the aid of my modest efforts" and in which he renounced all his positions in Cuba as well as his Cuban citizenship. This Castro read before a stunned assembly of "new" Communist leaders in Havana on October 3, 1965. The occasion was the presentation of the membership of the Central Committee of the freshly organized Cuban Communist party—the creation of the party had been announced only the day before—and there was an awkward silence after Fidel said that the only deserving name missing from the roster was Che's and proceeded to read the letter. In Cuban newsreels Castro seemed immensely ill at ease and clearly unhappy as he read; this was the last thing Fidel said publicly about Guevara's whereabouts until October 15, 1967—two years later—when he went on television to announce that the news of Che's death was "unfortunately true. "