Fidel: A Critical Portrait Read online

  This conviction first surfaced in Fidel Castro that December day long ago in the canefield in Oriente province under air bombardment and a barrage of automatic gunfire. Many years later, Castro would admit to an American visitor that the days and nights he spent in hiding with two companions in that canefield in a desolate area mysteriously called Alegría de Pío (Pío's Joy) was incomparably the "worst moment" in his intensely violent life. He would remark that the trap the army had sprung on him was an even "more bitter" blow than his imprisonment in 1953 for assaulting with an ill-armed rebel band a Batista military headquarters; the canefield ambush was something "I wouldn't like to expand on." Castro is not a man who cares to expand on losing.

  In fact, he has never publicly discussed the Alegría de Pío incident in much detail beyond admitting "we were surprised and routed" by forces "vastly superior in numbers." Once, while we were having drinks before dinner in a hunting lodge in western Cuba, Castro drew a sketch of the Oriente coast where the rebel expedition had landed—he was explaining the awesome navigational problems they encountered, after describing the stunning inadequacy of their weapons training in Mexico—but he would not reminisce about the first days of the guerrillas ashore.

  Alegría de Pío, of course, was the real turning point in Castro's life and his revolution. Cuban and world history would have evolved differently had this single individual been less determined and, most important, less lucky. Fidel's luck is a recurrent theme of his existence.

  Yet, efforts to gain a sense of Fidel Castro as a human being are not easily rewarded. Castro's bearded face may be one of the best-known physiognomies in the contemporary world; his public views on every subject under the sun (he has opinions about everything from medicine to haute cuisine) have cascaded in the billions of words of thousands of his speeches over these long years. With the secrecy habit of a lifelong conspirator, he is a master at self-concealment, and he has discouraged systematic in-depth studies of his past and the history of the revolution—or, at least, its publication.

  A deeply moody introvert despite his external persona—and a man of surprising shyness in initial personal contacts—Castro clearly desired to swathe his past, especially his early youth, in a cocoon of oblivion. He is exceedingly selective about disclosing facts that, in his judgment, may negatively affect what he thinks should be his public image. He wishes to control the outline and the paintbrush strokes in any portrait of Fidel Castro—just as he personally controls everything else in Cuba. Castro, the student of the past and the virtuoso of politics, understands the strategic importance of controlling history.

  Recently Castro, Jesuit-educated, self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist, has been spending much time debating and dictating for publication an intellectual rationalization of the values shared, in his view, by Christianity and Marxism in implementing social justice. Since John Paul II's election to the papacy, Castro has praised him often for his concern with the poor in the Third World (Cuba and the Vatican never interrupted diplomatic relations, and Castro has attended private dinners with the apostolic pro-nuncio in Havana). A meeting between the two has been discussed, and the Cuban National Ecclesiastic Encounter was held in February 1986, with his attendance, the most important Roman Catholic church conference since the revolution.

  The idea of a synthesis between his brand of revolutionary socialism and Christian religion is very much on Castro's mind: intellectually when he speaks in praise of the "theology of liberation" (the powerful social justice movement in the modern Roman Catholic Church in Latin America), and mystically when he contemplates the nature of martyrdom. In lengthy conversations in 1985 with a Brazilian dominican friar, Fidel observed that "I am certain that upon the same pillars on which today reposes the sacrifice of a revolutionary, yesterday reposed the sacrifice of a martyr for his religious faith." He added that without "altruism," neither "a religious hero nor a political hero" can exist. Castro also said that "if there ever was a name more hated by reactionaries than that of a Communist, it was, in another time, the name of the Christian." Given the explosive political tensions in Latin America, and the new road taken by the young church there, Castro is engaging in more than a theoretical exercise. It fits into his strategic Bolívarian concepts, but it also brings out mysticism and a Jesuit-learned logic.

  Castro's sentiments about his son, Fidelito (who was five years old when his father divorced his mother), seem to have been unusually strong when one considers that from the moment the boy was born, Castro Senior was successively a plotter (while practicing law without charging his impoverished clients), a political prisoner, an exile a guerrillero, and a chief of state. Castro attempted to see Fidelito under the most difficult circumstances, including having him brought illegally to Mexico while the rebel force was being trained. A Soviet-educated physicist, Fidelito, now married and with two children (though it is difficult to think of Castro as grandfather), is increasingly in the public eye, shown on national television presiding over scientific meetings and attending ceremonial receptions at the Palace of the Revolution in his capacity of secretary-general of the Cuban Nuclear Commission. In his mid-thirties, he looks exactly the way his father did at his age. It is no secret in Havana that Castro has at least one other adult child (and a grandchild) from a romantic liaison.

  But Fidel Castro is a very private person, and Cubans normally do not discuss his personal life, mainly out of respect. He never remarried, and since Celia Sánchez, his absolutely devoted friend and guerrilla companion, died of cancer in 1980, nobody has replaced her in Fidel's trust and affection. Unquestionably Celia was the most important woman—and very likely the most important human being—in his life. No other woman has had her name linked publicly to Castro since Celia's death, and probably none ever will. Living among palace courtiers, Fidel seems a very lonely man.

  Fidel was the fifth of nine children of Ángel Castro y Argiz, a landowner from Spain; the first two children were born of his father's first wife. Fidel Castro and his younger brother, Raúl, his designated heir as head of state and government and first secretary of the Communist party, evidently have a unique and special personal and political relationship—they shared all the revolutionary experiences—but they choose to spend little of their free time together (Raúl has a wife and children, and he is very much a family man). They are said to have had violent disagreements in the past, now seemingly forgotten. Fidel's rapport with his older brother, Ramón, and his half-sister, Lidia, is pleasant though more limited. A half-brother and two sisters in Havana see him very seldom. One sister has long lived in Mexico, and another sister—Juana—is in self-exile in Miami, denouncing Fidel at every opportunity as a Communist dictator, though during the Sierra war she was his devoted supporter.

  During the guerrilla war, Castro had his family sugarcane lands set afire as an example of economic warfare against the rich of Cuba. Afterward the Castro lands were nationalized under the revolution's agrarian reform—his mother, brothers, and sisters turning their inherited land titles over to the government, although Señora de Castro was allowed to keep the large finca house until her death in 1963. (Fidel's father had died in 1956, and the children received inheritances.) Under the 1959 land-reform law, which established 960 acres as the maximum private holding, one half of the Castro family's wholly owned 1,920 acres were seized by the government along with the twenty-four thousand acres the Castros had been renting on a permanent basis from adjoining American-owned sugar estates. But soon thereafter they voluntarily gave up their remaining 960 acres.

  The fundamental question concerning Fidel Castro, the 1959 revolution, and Cuba's transformation into a Communist state is naturally whether this whole experience was logically dictated by Cuban history or represents an extraordinary political aberration primarily instigated by his overwhelming personality. Castro, who once called for "many Robespierres" in Cuba, insists on the historical inevitability of the events along with the subjective role played by him.

  Though the ultimate ans
wer is too complex to be reduced to one-dimensional explanations, Castro's personal role in launching and guiding the revolution is certainly impressive. Even if he had fought only to obtain personal power, which most emphatically is not the case, the fact remains that no modern revolutionary leader or chief of state has undertaken such astounding personal risks and has been so directly engaged in the rigors of conspiracy, rebellion, and open warfare. The expeditionaries' landing off the Oriente coast, the tangled swamp and mangrove they had to cross for over a mile to reach the actual shore, the Alegría de Pío battlefield, and the tortuous, high jungle paths of the Sierra Maestra provided the most nightmarish experiences a military leader could encounter. Castro so desperately wanted to win his incredible guerrilla war that he took it all in stride, creating an army as he battled ahead.

  No political leader in full possession of his mental faculties would have sailed to Cuba from Mexico the way Castro and his fanatically devoted followers did; their yacht, with eighty-two men aboard, was built for no more than a dozen persons, and not for transporting a military arsenal. No political leader without real military experience would have endured two years, often short of food, weapons, and ammunition, in the heart of the Sierra Maestra, constantly on the march with his growing band, up and down mud-packed and boulder-strewn paths through forest after forest. But less than six weeks after the Alegría de Pío disaster, Castro had the audacity to attack a Batista army detachment. This was the first victory.

  Lenin sat out the start of the Russian Revolution in Zurich, risking no combat. Stalin showed his mettle mainly in holding up banks and trains, and serving time in Siberian prisons. Mao Zedong controlled vast swaths of territory and led large armies during much of the Kuomintang and Japanese wars; neither in the initial period of building his Communist base nor during the 1934–1935 Long March did Mao undergo the constant personal hardships Castro would face in Cuba. Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito operated out of well-protected headquarters, later enjoying American and British military missions' support. Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh had been in prison, but when the anti-French uprising was launched, he was not called upon to lead troops in the battlefield.

  Fidel Castro's conditioning as a guerrillero is therefore an extremely significant element in understanding and defining his personality today. He cherishes the title of Commander in Chief and the laurel leaves of rank on his formal military uniform. The total militarization of the Cuban society is a concept stemming from his formative experiences. He learned the very hard way—in urban insurrection, Sierra war, creating from those siege conditions a siege mentality for this hostility-surrounded island where at least one half of the population is trained and organized today for defensive combat. He also learned that to survive, he must be absolutely and undeviatingly uncompromising.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Fidel Castro's overwhelming concern that chilly Thursday in December 1956 was how to break out of the encirclement and reassemble the survivors of his battered expedition for victorious combat. This required abiding faith that he could succeed in what was by any reasonable standards a monumentally demented enterprise. The Batista regime had at its disposal a fifty-thousand-man army with cannon and armor, an air force and a navy, and a murderously efficient uniformed and secret police.

  Besides, President Batista also enjoyed full United States support, including access to American arms. Tanks and artillery were shipped regularly to Cuba from U.S. ports, Batista aircraft could refuel and load explosives and napalm bombs at the U.S. naval station at Guantánamo on the coast of Oriente, and in Havana a U.S. military mission trained the Cuban armed forces. All of this was consistent with the fact that Cuba, in effect, had been an American fiefdom since Spam lost the island in the 1898 war, and that Washington discouraged any changes in the status quo.

  There was no reason the United States should have understood the Castro phenomenon in 1956, any more than it understood the final Cuban war of independence that erupted in 1895. As Louis A. Pérez, Jr., an anti-Communist Cuban historian, described that insurrection: "It was a guerrilla war of national liberation aspiring to the transformation of society . . . [it] contained elements of anti-imperialism, political radicalism, agrarian reform, racial equality, and social justice." Thus the Eisenhower administration was squarely behind Batista, Vice-President Richard Nixon having visited him in Havana just a short time before Castro's December landing in Oriente. But neither Batista's firepower nor American backing impressed Castro; to him, defeats really were victories in disguise, forging and honing men's spirits and courage.

  In the canefield, once he was safely concealed by the paja carpet of dry sugarcane leaves, only his face protruding, Fidel Castro whistled very softly. Another olive-green-clad figure slithered silently into the cane from a thicket across a narrow pathway; this was Universo Sánchez Álvarez, a big, tough peasant from the northern Matanzas province who had served as Castro's bodyguard during the clandestine invasion preparations in Mexico. Universo carried with him a telescopic-sight rifle (as Castro did), a distinct advantage in their present predicament, but he was barefoot, having lost his boots in the retreat from Alegría de Pío, and this was an awesome problem for a fighting man. Then the third fighter reached the haven of the thick cane-leaf blanket. He was Faustino Pérez Hernández, a Havana physician of slight build and one of the two Chiefs of Staff of the rebel expedition. Faustino wore combat boots, but he no longer had his weapon—a frightful minus as far as Castro was concerned. Both men were thirty-six, six years older than Fidel, but the average age in the rebel group was twenty-seven; most of them were reasonably mature individuals. As Castro remarked many years later, "There was a moment when I was Commander in Chief of myself and two others."

  The three men, burying themselves under the paja, lay on their backs next to each other so that they could communicate in whispers. Castro cleared his throat gently and murmured triumphantly: "We are winning . . . Victory will be ours!" Universo and Faustino said nothing. Fidel Castro, Universo Sánchez, and Faustino Pérez constituted at that juncture the entire Rebel Army, the fighting arm of Castro's anti-Batista 26th of July Movement. The Movement had been growing in the underground of Cuban cities since 1953, the time of the disastrous and bloody attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago, the capital of Oriente, conceived and led by Castro. He then spent twenty-one months in Batista prisons preparing himself for the next strike at the dictator. Now Castro had returned from the Mexican self-exile that followed his imprisonment to launch a guerrilla war against the regime in the rugged mountain chain of Sierra Maestra.

  Actually, this Rebel Army would remain limited to the three men and two rifles for thirteen days, counting from the afternoon of the Alegría de Pío catastrophe—including five nights and days under the canefields' paja—until at a Sierra peasant's house they encountered Raúl Castro, the chief of one of the expedition's three platoons, who had been marching elsewhere in the mountains with four companions.

  Raúl's group had five rifles and ammunition—and Fidel Castro became so excited at the growth of his "army" to eight men and seven weapons that he proclaimed in his most dramatic style that "now we have won the war . . . the days of tyranny are counted!" Four days later, seven more expeditionaries, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna, the Argentine-born hero of the Cuban revolution who was wounded at Alegría de Pío and would die in 1967 in a guerrilla war in Bolivia, rejoined the Castro force. Fidel was ecstatic.

  But on that first Thursday in Cuba, Fidel, Faustino, and Universo had concluded in a soft-whisper consultation that their safest course was to remain as long as necessary under the leafy canefield blanket. They had to elude the troopers of Squadron 12 and Squadron 13 of the Rural Guard, a heavily armed gendarmerie corps, including artillery, that had surprised and smashed the expeditionary force the previous day and was now hunting for survivors.

  Although the Batista government had already announced that Fidel and Raúl Castro had been killed along with forty other rebels
in combat on December 5 (a story instantly disseminated around the world by United Press International, a piece of journalism Castro never forgave the news agency), a confidential report from the Rural Guard squadron commanders to their Havana superiors that night admitted that "Dr. Fidel Castro" may have escaped. Batista obviously realized that Castro had to be located and killed no matter what: The dictatorship's political credibility—and its reputation for military effectiveness—were at stake.

  Consequently, aviation was summoned to assist the Guard in the search. By midmorning of Thursday, low-flying aircraft spotted three separated groups of rebels hiding under a thick tree growth on a hill just above the Alegría de Pío battlefield. One of these groups was Fidel Castro's, and they were bombed and strafed by twin-engine B-26 light bombers at the spot where they had spent the night.

  Universo Sánchez was the first to run into Fidel after the rout, and Faustino Pérez stumbled into them in the falling darkness, an hour or so later. They had heard him approach, and Fidel ordered Universo to shoot the figure in the shadows if it looked like an enemy soldier. Faustino identified himself just in the nick of time; otherwise the Rebel Army would have remained at two men. But Pérez brought the disheartening news that Che Guevara was probably dead, having been seriously wounded (actually Che's wound was minor).

  The planes had missed them on the first pass, and the three rebels saw that the nearby canefields were their only salvation: They could not be out in the open. Led by Fidel, they raced toward the nearest field while the aircraft regrouped in the sky. The fugitives repeated this maneuver several times until reaching a thicket across the dividing path from the canefield Fidel thought looked the safest. They slithered to it on their bellies, and installed themselves under the large dry leaves that lay on the ground.