Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  At the start of 1968, Fidel Castro's immediate concern was to prevent a serious breakdown in the Cuban economy because of Moscow's refusal to increase petroleum shipments. This was the first result of the Soviet decision to bring Castro politically and ideologically under control; when the Cuban foreign trade minister arrived in Moscow in October 1967 to open talks for a new commercial agreement, he was apprised that fuel deliveries would not be raised to match the 8 percent growth in the annual Cuban demand. Moreover, the Russians rejected the Cubans' proposal for extending the annual trade agreements into a three-year pact—Castro at that stage was keen on a longer Soviet aid commitment—and they became very vague about the date the 1968 agreement would be signed. Fidel reacted with an explosion of private fury at the news of the Soviet petroleum reprisal, and on January 2 he went on television to announce gasoline rationing and to order sugar mills to use alternative fuels. Cuba depended on the Soviet Union for 98 percent of its oil needs, but in his television statement on rationing, Castro said that there was only a "limited possibility" of increased Soviet deliveries, and that, in any event, the "dignity" of the revolution prevented Cuba from begging for more oil.

  Ten days later, Fidel showed the Russians that not only would he not be intimidated by them, but that he was determined to remain outspokenly critical about their policies and dogmatically independent. Addressing the closing session of a weeklong International Cultural Congress in Havana, a meeting organized to enhance Cuba's prestige and attended by five hundred intellectuals from seventy countries (including Jean-Paul Sartre, Lord Bertrand Russell, and Julio Cortázar, then the leading Argentine novelist), Fidel Castro was at his oratorial best, urging his guests to help him define how intellectuals can best serve the revolution. It was a most elegant appeal to world public opinion to understand the "real" value of the Cuban experiment, but Castro minced no words in saying what he thought about orthodox Communist parties that "remained completely removed from the struggle against imperialism." He alluded to the fact that at the time of the 1962 missile crisis, European Communist parties failed "to mobilize the masses" in Cuba's support, implying that they preferred to obey Soviet instructions rather than engage in "just combat." Finally, Fidel chastised "these groups" for not raising high "the banner of Che" after his death; they would "never be able to die like him," he said, "nor to be true revolutionaries like him. "

  On January 25, Castro lowered the boom on the so-called "microfaction" in the new Communist party who were the same old-line leaders whom he had purged for "sectarianism" six years earlier but had later reinstated. Again, going after the "old" Communists was a thinly disguised assault on the Russians because of the deep-rooted associations between the two. Aníbal Escalante, the alleged chief of the "sectarian" movement, was once more the main target of Castro's purge, but this time he and thirty-six others were arrested, tried on charges of "conspiracy" against the revolution, and given prison sentences; Escalante was sentenced to fifteen years. As sensitive as this whole matter of intramural Communist struggle was, the regime never spelled out fully in public what exactly the Escalante conspiracy represented. Nevertheless, word circulated immediately that the "microfaction" had taken it upon itself to convince Moscow to suspend all economic aid to Cuba to force Fidel's ouster and to put in power a "loyal" Communist regime. While it is impossible to ascertain precisely how valid these charges were—interpretation of attitudes is the key to Communist demonologies—Castro is not likely to have invented the entire episode. The Russians are not above staging coups d'état against their best allies if it suits their interests, and Castro was becoming almost intolerable in demanding both ideological independence and massive economic support.

  In his Revolutionary Offensive speech on March 13, 1968, Fidel said that the party's Central Committee had resolved not to publish the "microfaction" closed-door court proceedings for the time being (they were never published). However, he noted that although the Escalante group lacked significance as "a political force," its actions "were of a very serious nature . . . as a political intention and as a tendency within the revolutionary movement, a frankly reformist, reactionary, and conservative current." In presenting the case to the Central Committee, Fidel spoke from noon until midnight—his longest speech. Castro said later that in dealing with it, "the revolutionary courts were not as severe as some would have wished but . . . unnecessary severity has never been a characteristic of this Revolution." Unfortunately, this judgment is unlikely to be shared by hundreds of Cubans who were tried by these courts and, twenty or twenty-five years later, remain imprisoned on obscure charges. There are at least three hundred political prisoners—fewer than thirty were released in 1986—and by all accounts they are subjected to extremely harsh treatment. Freed prisoners have reported systematic torture up to the mid-Seventies, and Castro will never be able to erase from his revolution's history the shame of the irrational and capricious reign of terror in his "Gulag South" penal system in the quarter-century after victory.

  The only authoritative account of the Escalante affair that I know to exist despite the continuing official silence was given to me in Havana in 1985 by Fabio Grobart, now the chairman of the Historical Institute of the Marxist-Leninist Movement in Cuba. Grobart's account is important because he is close to Castro and because he reopened for me, as Fidel had done earlier, crucial aspects of the Cuban-Soviet disputes in the context of the missile crisis of 1962.

  The Escalante group, Grobart told me, "had its own discipline, its own purpose, and its own policy to struggle against the leadership of the party, which is the leadership of Fidel Castro. . . . It was a line that could have even led to the destruction of the Revolution, a division within the Revolution." Specifically, Grobart continued, Escalante's conspiracy "coincided with the problems we had at the time of the introduction in Cuba of nuclear weapons in October 1962.

  "At that time," he said, "the Soviet Union committed certain errors, withdrawing these missiles without consulting the Cuban government. And Escalante, as a saboteur, took advantage of [Cuban] disagreements with certain things in the methods of the Soviet Union to make himself appear as a friend of the Soviet Union, and to throw garbage and mud at the Revolution, saying, 'You know, they [Fidel Castro] are anti-Soviet,' and so on. . . . He tried to present himself as the true defender of the Soviet Union, which is what Fidel has never ceased to be. He attempted to gain supporters, to demoralize the party, to weaken the unlimited trust that the party and the people have in Fidel Castro. This was the error, this is the crime that Aníbal Escalante has committed." Escalante served part of his sentence, then died while working as a farm administrator.

  Having disposed of Escalante and his group, Castro proceeded to display further annoyance with the Soviet Union by refusing to send a Cuban delegation to the conference of world Communist parties that Brezhnev had organized in Bucharest in February to deal with the internal divisions caused by the split with China. This was a direct slap at the Soviets; in his March speech Castro mentioned the decision not to attend the Bucharest conclave, remarking, however, that "for the moment this is not a fundamental question." The Kremlin retaliated on March 22, 1968, by signing a relatively modest trade agreement with Cuba. Whereas the volume of trade (generally a euphemism for Soviet aid) had risen 23 percent from 1966 to 1967, the increase in 1968 was only 10 percent. Moreover, the accord provided for interest payments by Cuba on a $330 million Soviet credit that financed her adverse trade balance. To make matters worse, this debt would rise very soon, inasmuch as Cuba was committed to deliver 5 million tons of sugar to the Soviet Union during 1969, but its 1968 harvest was only 5.3 million (3 million below the target volume and 1 million less than in 1967), and Castro knew that the 1969 harvest would be below even 5 million tons. He also knew that without considerably increased Soviet assistance, all his ambitious economic development plans would have to be dropped. While the regime's official newspaper Granma had proudly asserted on February 2 that "no one can call us a satellite state
and that is the reason we are respected in the world," in the end Fidel Castro had little choice but to fall into line, abandoning for at least a time his exhortations for armed revolutionary struggle throughout the Third World.

  Relations between Havana and Moscow were very tense. A tough Soviet diplomat, Aleksandr A. Soldatov, was transferred from London to Havana to try to deal with Castro. In Moscow Pravda published an editorial denouncing "reactionaries who follow the writings of men who call for revolutionary changes in the entire social system," which seemed to be addressed as much to Fidel as to anybody else. But neither side could risk a complete break, and it was late August before a new rapport began to take shape between them.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Just before midnight on August 20, 1968, Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian military forces invaded Czechoslovakia to grant it "fraternal" assistance against the reformist Communist regime headed by Alexander Dubček. This was twelve years after Soviet armies drowned in blood an anti-Communist rebellion in Hungary, seven years after an American-organized exiles' brigade invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and three years after United States Marines and airborne troops landed in the Dominican Republic to intervene in the civil war there against an alleged Communist threat.

  Three days later, Fidel Castro—a disputatious ally and client of the Soviet Union and victim of an invasion engineered by the United States—went before television cameras in Havana to explain his and the Cuban revolution's reaction to the occupation of the territory of one socialist nation by the armies of fellow socialist states. He would discuss as well his views on the suddenly ended "Prague Spring," the Czechoslovakian Communist party's experiment with "Marxism with a Human Face"—liberal and nonrepressive Marxism.

  I happened to be in Prague on the invasion night, and given my journalistic coverage of the Bay of Pigs and the Dominican intervention—as well as my special interest in the Cuban revolution—I was immensely curious as to where Castro would situate himself in the rising dispute between pro- and anti-Soviet Communist parties around the world over the application of the "Brezhnev Doctrine." This doctrine murkily vested in the Soviet Union the right (actually because Brezhnev said so) to invade neighboring Communist countries if communism were in danger. For Cuba this loomed as a very uncomfortable doctrine if the United States chose to apply it in reverse to protect or assure representative democracy in its sphere of influence; theoretically, it could legitimize a new and more successful Bay of Pigs. Thus, Castro's reaction to the Prague invasion was extremely relevant to his own destiny—just as it was relevant to the Soviet Union that most certainly expected solidarity and understanding from its extraordinarily costly Caribbean ally. It was a superb intellectual challenge for Fidel, and he handled it superbly.

  Most artfully, he landed on all sides of the issue. Although Czechoslovakia's sovereignty and international law were unquestionably violated, Castro said, "we accept the bitter necessity that required the dispatch of these forces to Czechoslovakia, we do not condemn the socialist countries that took this decision" because it was "imperative to prevent at all costs" that Czechoslovakia move toward "capitalism and into the arms of imperialism." But, he went on, "as revolutionaries. . . we have the right to demand that a consistent position be adopted toward all the questions affecting the revolutionary movement in the world." In other words, Fidel remarked, if Warsaw Pact armies had acted to prevent the destruction of socialism in Czechoslovakia, "will Warsaw Pact divisions be sent to Cuba if Yankee imperialists attack our country, and if our country solicits it when it is threatened by an attack by Yankee imperialists?" In this manner, Castro demonstrated his solidarity with the Soviet Union and the principle of "socialist intervention" while recognizing that international law had been violated by the Russians. Moreover, he made his "acceptance" of the Prague invasion conditional on a new Soviet guarantee of military action to protect Cuba from the United States—on top of the guarantees he believes were made by President Kennedy to Khrushchev as part of the settlement of the missile crisis. The Kennedy-Khrushchev "understanding" on that point was never made explicit, but both governments have respected it for twenty-five years.

  In a way, Castro was the only real beneficiary of the destruction of the Prague Spring. By backing the Kremlin when scores of Communist parties condemned the invasion, he established a new claim on Soviet economic aid for Cuba, and used the crisis to end his own dispute with the Russians without losing face. Fidel was also helpful to Brezhnev by announcing that Cuba opposed "all these liberal economic reforms that were occurring in Czechoslovakia and that are also occurring in other countries of the socialist camp." In this area, however, he was quite sincere because of his dedication to the most rigid forms of Marxist economics and Stalinist planning. He went so far as to express the hope that the Soviet Union would reject the temptation to fall for market economy ideas. He delivered a savage attack on Yugoslavia for sponsoring "bourgeous liberal policies" and being an "imperialist tool" while pretending to be a Communist state. Castro denounced the Yugoslavs for refusing to sell Cuba arms in 1959, and this furious attitude led ultimately to ugly personal clashes between himself and Marshal Tito in the Nonaligned Movement.

  Castro's stand on Czechoslovakia notwithstanding, Soviet-Cuban relations did not return to normal overnight. He told me many years later that all the misunderstandings and resentments dating back to the October crisis were not finally resolved until late in 1968. There were still deep mutual suspicions, and the Soviets were still holding back on oil and other deliveries to Cuba, pending the solution of a variety of outstanding problems. In fact, so severe was the Soviet-induced fuel shortage in the autumn of 1968 that Raúl Castro had to array his tanks along beaches in stationary artillery positions because he lacked gasoline for them. Both in his Czechoslovakia speech and other pronouncements, Fidel went on criticizing Communist regimes and parties helping "reactionaries" in Latin America, and continued to talk about armed insurrection in the hemisphere—all of which continued to annoy the Soviets. But his revolutionary sword was now blunted: Che Guevara's death in Bolivia, the collapse of the leftist guerrilla movements that Cuba supported in Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala made his rhetoric less credible. And when reform-minded (but not Marxist) generals in Peru overthrew the civilian democratic government in mid-1968, in time both Castro and the Russians formed friendships with the Peruvian military. Moscow sold them tanks and aircraft, and Castro, overcoming in this case his distaste for military regimes, later dispatched his friend Captain Nuñez Jiménez as a superambassador to Lima—clearly with the notion that in the long run the Andes were promising revolutionary territory.

  Perhaps the last sticking point between Moscow and Havana was their dispute over Manuel Piñeiro Losada, the red-bearded deputy interior minister in charge of the State Security Department (the political secret police). During the investigations of the Escalante affair early in 1968, Piñeiro accidentally found Escalante himself in a secret meeting with an adviser from the KGB (the Soviet State Security Committee). A corps of KGB advisers was attached to the Cuban Interior Ministry, and its chief took umbrage over Piñeiro's failure to report the incident to him. Raúl Castro, who directed the overall "minifaction" investigation, told this astonishing story to the Central Committee, lifting a corner of the secrecy mantle over the relationship between the two undercover police organizations. Raúl said he had brought up the matter of Escalante's clandestine meeting with the Soviet adviser with Ambassador Soldatov and the chief KGB adviser and discovered that the latter was furious at Piñeiro: The Russians were naturally disturbed that their man had been spotted with Escalante. Raúl said to the chief adviser, "You are almost asking me to arrest Piñeiro because he failed to show you respect, and I don't propose to do it. So the chief replied, 'We are Piñeiro's bosses, not you . . . and how can you think that we would . . .," and I broke in to say, "We don't believe so, but if you did not think so obtusely, you would interpret this as a warning that for us
it would be rather painful to find here a Soviet official, diplomatic or not, involved in a matter of internal character." It is unclear how this dispute was settled, but Piñeiro soon ceased to be deputy interior minister, and became head of the Central Committee's Department of the Americas, one of the most powerful political positions—still closely tied to Cuban intelligence operations.

  Even so, relations were still cool in November. Pedro Miret went to Moscow for the Russian Revolution anniversary (Fidel, Raúl, and President Dorticós again would not go). Faustino Pérez, the least ideologically minded of Fidel's old companions, was picked to speak at the celebrations in Havana, and Raúl was the ranking Cuban guest at the Soviet embassy reception; his big brother was still sulking.

  Foremost on Fidel Castro's mind toward the end of 1968 was the centennial observation of the start of the first independence war, the present-day economy, and a new drive to tighten domestic political controls. The latter appeared to stem from a concern about possible contagion from the Prague Spring, and late in the year Raúl's Revolutionary Armed Forces Ministry initiated an attack on "bourgeois" intellectuals and "counterrevolutionary" literature. The word was that no "softening" in the revolutionary spirit would be tolerated, and in March 1969, the ministry organized a "National Forum on Internal Order" for its own officers, Interior Ministry specialists, party officials, and the Revolutionary Defense Committee.