Fidel: A Critical Portrait Read online

  FIDEL

  Tad Szulc

  Copyright © 1986 by Tad Szulc

  This book is for Marianne—again

  1. Havana

  2. Pinar del Río—large percentage of Moncada recruits came from here

  3. here Isle of Pines (now Isle of Youth), Castro and company imprisoned here, 1953–1955

  4. Bay of Pigs (or Playa Girón), April 17, 1961, exiles' invasion

  5. Santa Clara, capital of Las Villas province—conquest climaxes Che's campaign

  6. campaign Escambray Mountains—non-Castro guerrillas in 1958/site of anti-Castro guerrillas, 1960–1965

  7. Bayamo—simultaneous rebel attack on barracks, July 26, 1953

  8. Granma landing—Los Cayuelos, December 2, 1956

  9. Alegría de Pío battlefield—first Castro defeat

  10. La Plata—Fidel's headquarters atop Sierra Maestra

  11. Celia's home

  12. First rebel victory

  13. Birán—Fidel's birthplace

  14. Santiago—Moncada barracks attack, July 26, 1953

  15. Sierra Cristal—Raúl Castro's "second front"

  16. Guantánamo—U.S. naval base

  17. Tuxpan, Mexico—Granma departure point, November 25, 1955

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  THE MAN

  II

  THE YOUNG YEARS (1926–1952)

  III

  THE WAR (1952–1958)

  IV

  THE REVOLUTION (1959–1963)

  V

  THE MATURITY (1964–1986)

  NOTES

  CHAPTER NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  President Fidel Castro Ruz of Cuba asked me the following question as we stood in his office winding up a long conversation shortly after midnight on February 11, 1985:

  "Will your political and ideological viewpoint allow you to tell objectively my story and the revolution's story when the Cuban government and I make the necessary material available to you?" He added: "We would be taking a great risk with you."

  This was at the end of five lengthy, consecutive meetings I had with President Castro at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana as I prepared to write this "portrait," and we had touched on an immense variety of themes concerning him and his life story. My reply to President Castro's question was that I didn't think total objectivity existed, but that I would commit myself to approaching this project with the greatest possible honesty. I remarked that since we both were honorable men, his ideology and mine, differing in the most absolute fashion as they did, should not interfere with the writing of an honest book. President Castro said, "You may paint me as a devil so long as you remain objective and you let my voice be heard," and we warmly shook hands.

  I had my first conversations with Fidel Castro in 1959, shortly after his revolution triumphed, when I was in Havana as a correspondent for The New York Times. In 1961, I accompanied him on a tour of the Bay of Pigs battlefield. I returned to Cuba in January 1984 to interview President Castro for Parade magazine, and the idea of this book was born during a very long weekend we spent together in Havana and the countryside in endless discussions. I had reminded him that there was no serious biography of him or comprehensive study of the revolution, and that he owed it to history to remedy this lack.

  We went on exchanging messages through Cuban diplomats in Washington during the balance of 1984, and we immediately agreed that this should not be an official or authorized biography or portrait. Instead, it would be an independent project with collaborative support by President Castro and his associates as well as access to written materials of the revolution. I spent a month in Havana early in 1985, holding a series of meetings with President Castro, then my wife and I set up shop in a house we rented in Havana for six months between March and August (where we were visited by President Castro). Our understanding did not require that the manuscript be seen by President Castro prior to publication, and therefore it was not. I am certain that when he does read it, he will disagree with many of my opinions and conclusions but that he will find the pledge of honesty to have been met. He knows, of course, that others may see him differently than he sees himself, and for me to be critical is not a violation of his trust.

  Clearly, this is not a definitive biography, principally because President Castro is alive and has not completed his labors. Perhaps only the next generation of historians can attempt a full-fledged biography of this extraordinary personage. This "Critical Portrait," therefore, seeks to capture his personality and the story of his life as it is possible to reconstruct at this stage. It is not meant to be a history of the Cuban revolution, or of Cuban-American relations, and this is why I have avoided discussing in depth the achievements and the problems of the revolution. Nevertheless, Fidel Castro and his revolution are inseparable, and this portrait was sketched against the broader background of contemporary Cuban history.

  To write it, I interviewed scores of Fidel Castro's friends, associates, and comrades-in-arms, in addition to my conversations with him. I have listened to a great many Cubans who have insight into the very complex personality of Fidel Castro and into the process of the revolution. I was able to see President Castro in action on occasions ranging from receptions at the Palace of the Revolution to a tour of the prison on the Isle of Youth (formerly Isle of Pines), where he had spent nearly two years as a prisoner of the Batista regime. I revisited the Bay of Pigs, and my wife and I climbed the Sierra Maestra to Fidel Castro's wartime command post to gain a sense of the environment in which he fought; we inspected the landing spot of the Granma that brought him and his rebels from Mexico, and the nearby battlefield where Fidel Castro's revolution almost ended three days after it began.

  Among Cuban personalities I have interviewed and who have made this book possible because of the time they sacrificed were Vice-President of Cuba and Education Minister José Ramón Fernández Álvarez; Pedro Miret Prieto, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist party and one of President Castro's oldest associates; Vice-President Carlos Rafael Rodríguez; Culture Minister and Political Bureau member Armando Hart Dávalos; former Interior Minister and close comrade-in-arms Ramiro Valdés Menédez; Faustino Pérez and Universo Sánchez, who were with Fidel Castro at the moment of near disaster; Alfredo Guevara, whose friendship with Castro goes back to their university days and their first revolutionary experiences; former Political Bureau member and Transport Minister Guillermo García, who was the first Sierra Maestra peasant to join the Rebel Army; Blas Roca, former secretary general of the Communist party, and Fabio Grobart, one of its founders in 1925; Melba Hérnandez, who fought with Fidel in the Moncada attack and was among the first members of the revolutionary movement; Vilma Espín, president of the Cuban Women's Federation and member of the Political Bureau (and wife of Raúl Castro); and Conchita Fernández, who was Fidel Castro's personal secretary during the first years of the revolution.

  It is impossible to list here all the Cuban officials, friends, and acquaintances in political and cultural fields who were of immense assistance in my research. Foreign dioplomats served as important guides, and among them I wish to mention Clara Nieto Ponce de Léon, former ambassador of Colombia in Cuba and, during our stay, director of the UNESCO office. In the Sierra Maestra, peasants who knew Castro during the war provided remarkable accounts of those days. Finally, our research and interviews in Havana were coordinated by Alfredo Ramirez Otero and Walfredo Garciga of the Ministry of External Affairs.

  In the United States, conversations with Jorge Dominguez of Harvard University; Nelson Valdés of the University of New Mexico; Wayne S. Smith, who served as head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana; George Volsky, who is a jour
nalist in Miami and a leading expert on Cuba; and Max Lesnick, a university friend of Castro's and now a publisher in Miami were immensely useful. Numerous Cubans who knew Castro in boarding school and at the university, and are now exiled in the United States shared their recollections. My special gratitude is to The Hon. Ambler H. Moss, dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Miami, and to Dr. Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute of Inter-American Studies at the University of Miami, for superb research and intellectual support. Gabriela Rodríguez was a most intelligent and resourceful researcher. My wife, Marianne, lived through all of it: meetings with President Castro, entertaining Cuban friends in Havana, climbing Cuban mountains, organizing masses of material we brought back from Cuba, researching in Washington, and reading, improving and editing the manuscript.

  At William Morrow and Company, my publishers, Lisa Drew was an editor with whom it was a joy to work. Morton L. Janklow and Anne Sibbald, my literary agents, were marvelously imaginative and encouraging.

  Thank you all.

  —T.S.

  Washington, D. C.

  July 1986

  I

  THE MAN

  CHAPTER

  1

  Advancing on his elbows and knees so slowly that his great bulk hardly seemed to move at all, the sweaty man in a torn olive-green uniform, horn-rimmed glasses on his unshaven face, slid carefully into the low canefield until he was entirely covered by a thick layer of leaves. In his right hand, he clutched a telescopic-sight rifle, a Belgian-made .30–'06-caliber weapon, his only and most beloved possession.

  The tall rifleman was a thirty-year-old lawyer named Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, Cuba's fiercest apostle ever of a shattering social and political revolution, and now—at high noon on Thursday, December 6, 1956—he faced not only the imminent death of his dreams but his own as well.

  Cubans had known Castro for years as a loud and ineffectual plotter, a loser. To the outside world, and notably to the United States next door, he was, at most, just another Caribbean troublemaker of whose existence the Eisenhower administration was not even aware.

  This American ignorance reflected the traditional attitude toward Cuba, the nearest thing the United States had to a protectorate in the Western Hemisphere: Washington need not worry about Cuban politics and politicians because its proconsuls in Havana always kept them in line. The idea that within a few years Castro would establish the first Communist state in the Americas would have been dismissed as ridiculous had anyone suggested it in December of 1956.

  At that moment, in fact, Fidel Castro and his absurdly small rebel group—which had landed four days earlier on the southern coast of his native Cuban province of Oriente after an almost fatal voyage from Mexico—were completely surrounded by government troops. The exhausted and famished expeditionaries had been totally routed and dispersed the previous afternoon in their first battle ashore.

  The notion of surrendering to the soldiers of the dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar that he and the eighty-one rebels had arrived to overthrow never occurred to Castro, the son of a tough Spaniard. On the contrary, he had the inner certainty of triumph that only visionaries feel when the odds are impossibly and virtually mathematically arrayed against them.

  The last time I was in Havana to see Fidel Castro, he was nearing his sixtieth birthday, and I found him philosophizing a bit about life. Among other notions, he believed firmly that it was his natural destiny that well over a quarter-century ago, he had scaled the heights and reached the apex of power.

  The subject was part of a broad conversation about history and the human condition one late evening in his office at the Palace of the Revolution, and Castro was perfectly matter-of-fact in acknowledging that some leaders are destined to play crucial roles in the affairs of men, and that, yes, he was a case in point.

  He then turned to his favorite historical theme, that such leaders may affect "subjectively" the objective conditions in a country. To Fidel this is an absolutely vital point in the "correct" interpretation of the Cuban revolution inasmuch as he had succeeded in proving wrong the classical theories of the so-called "old" Cuban Communists. These Communists had insisted that a Castro-preached mass revolution in Cuba was impossible because the necessary "objective conditions," as defined by Karl Marx, did not prevail; accordingly, they turned their backs on the Fidelista insurrection until the closing months. Unprecedentedly, the Communists in Cuba were therefore co-opted and captured by Fidel Castro (who did not belong to the party) rather than the other way around. They had placed themselves in a situation where they had no option.

  Actually, in the early days the orthodox Communists could take even less Castro's ideological heresy (or, in their view, towering arrogance) of postulating that "a man's personality can become an objective factor" in a changing political situation. Naturally, Fidel always had himself in mind in this context. The traditional Cuban Marxist-Leninists, with their thirty years experience as a Moscow-directed party, with activities confined to the organization of protest labor strikes or "popular front" alliances with "bourgeois" politicians (including Batista in the 1940s), could not bring themselves to believe that a single man's personality could, in effect, trigger a national revolution. Only Castro and the most faithful Fidelistas could believe such a thing.

  It must be assumed that in 1956, the Cuban Communist party—known formally as the Popular Socialist Party and declared illegal by Batista after the coup on March 10, 1952—took its orders (and opinions) from the Kremlin. The Soviets, however, had evidently learned nothing from the Chinese civil war when Mao Zedong demonstrated that, contrary to Stalinist theory, communism could prevail only if it enjoyed full backing among the peasantry, the control of the cities was not enough.

  Castro wasn't proposing a peasant revolution in Cuba, but, as the centerpiece of his strategy, he did envisage guerrilla warfare expanding with peasant support from a mountain nucleus to engulf in time the whole island—a concept the ideology-minded Communists could not absorb. Consequently, the "old" party secretly sent an emissary to Mexico in November 1956 to dissuade him from his publicly announced plans to land in Cuba that year "to be free or martyrs." Communist attitudes toward Castro at that stage and afterward describe an immensely fascinating and complicated relationship, one constituting the political backbone of the Cuban revolution that has never before been fully disclosed.

  In a way that neither "old" Cuban Communists nor the United States was able to comprehend at the time—and Moscow and Washington may still not fully understand it even now—Fidel Castro built his revolution primarily on the sentiments of Cuban history. He tapped the deep roots of the mid-nineteenth-century insurrections against Spanish colonialism and its themes of nationalism, radicalism, and social-justice populism. Whatever the timing of his private allegiance to Marxism, Castro waited more than two years after victory to identify himself publicly with socialism; it may have been tactical, but it also represented a recognition of the feelings of the Cubans toward the revolution of the Sierra Maestra.

  The two most worshiped political deities in socialist Cuba are José Martí, the great hero of the independence wars and one of the most brilliant thinkers in Latin America, and Karl Marx. Their portraits appear together everywhere (sometimes along with Lenin's), and it is beyond question that Martí—the man who always warned against United States ambitions in Cuba and the Caribbean—was from the outset Castro's personal role model. And, too, it is Martí's, and not Marx's, bust that stands guard at every Cuban public school, notably at the tiny schools the revolutionary regime built in the most remote mountain areas. In his speeches Castro reminds his audiences that the Cuban sense of history and nationalism was as crucial as Marxism in giving birth to the great revolution. In 1978, twenty years after his victory, he reminded his fellow Cubans and the world that "we are not only Marxist-Leninists; we are also nationalists and patriots."

  With Castro ruling as the first secretary of the Cub
an Communist party since 1965 (it took nearly seven years after the advent of Fidelismo to fashion Cuba into a full-fledged Communist state), "objective" and "subjective" concepts have nowadays acquired a clear meaning for the island's Marxist-Leninists. Fidel himself considers that his approach to the revolutionary strategy provided a major practical contribution to scientific Marxism; notwithstanding his exceptional intellect, he has added little of note to Marxist thought or theory. For, above all, Castro is a man of action.

  At sixty, his beard and hair turning gray, Castro is searching for a new dimension of action. In the tradition of José Martí, he is taking on the mantle of the great continental leader, the elder statesman of Latin America. Presumably, Castro is looking toward new objectives because he is satisfied with his conceptual and institutional achievements as president of Cuba. If this is his judgment of his own record, history may find that it leaves much to be desired. The revolution bestowed on Cuba extraordinary gifts of social justice and equality, advances in public health and education, and an equitable distribution of the national wealth, and Fidel Castro deserves total credit for it. However, his compulsion to press ahead with new visions has left him with no patience with the day-to-day follow-up requirements of constructing a new society. His desire for absolute authority has withheld decision-making powers from his subordinates, and careful responsible management of the country and its economy remains Cuba's desperate need—to the point where the long-term success of the revolution is at issue.

  In the mid-1980s, Castro set out to devote an astonishing amount of his time, private and public, to the new visions, spending endless hours at special meetings dealing with the problems of the hemisphere and holding forth on these subjects in an avalanche of speeches and interviews. Official propaganda filled the Cubans' consciousness with the myth and memory of Simón Bolívar, the nineteenth-century "Liberator" of much of South America who failed to unify the newly independent nations, demonstrating how irresistibly Castro is attracted to Bolívarian vistas. In a 1985 Havana speech, he intoned Bolívar's cry "Unity, unity . . . or anarchy will devour you," and there were again echoes of Castro's profound conviction that some men of greatness have it in them to affect the course of history.