Fidel: A Critical Portrait Read online

  Castro's theory was that the Rural Guard and the aircraft would end their search of the area by evening, moving on to the next grid. This, he thought, would allow him, Faustino, and Universo to leave the canefield that same night to begin marching toward the foothills of the Sierra Maestra to the east where he knew that friendly peasants and militants of the clandestine 26th of July Movement would protect and aid them. Faustino and Universo dissuaded Fidel, however, from making a run for it right away; when he insisted on going, Universo said, "Damn it, Fidel, democratically it's two against one, so we stay."

  In the meantime, from barely a few hundred yards away they could hear shouted military commands, the metallic sound of Thompson submachine guns being shifted from shoulder to hand by the soldiers, and occasional bursts of automatic gunfire. A canefield immediately to the south of the three rebels was set ablaze to flush out whoever might be concealed there, and thick, bluish smoke spread quickly over the flat land. They desperately held back their coughing, fearful that the troopers might hear it. A B-26 roared low over the burning field to strafe it.

  This was about as bad as things could get for Fidel and his companions. Apart from being trapped inside a canefield, they were parched and starving. They had lost most of their supplies and equipment, including food, when Granma, their yacht, was shipwrecked at dawn of December 2, several hundred yards from the coast. As the eighty-two expeditionaries advanced slowly inland, they contacted the area's few peasants and charcoalmen, who received them well, sharing simple food with the rebels. Castro and his men had their last hot meal on the evening of December 4—they were also allowed to buy sausage and biscuits from the locals before moving on toward Alegría de Pío.

  What gave them away to the Rural Guard was their hunger the following day. Having consumed their sausage-and-biscuit rations, the revolutionaries began breaking off sugarcane stalks as they marched, sucking them dry, then dropping the cane on the ground. Fidel did it, too, cane juice being a high-energy nutrient. But Rural Guard troopers, searching for the expeditionaries since they first landed (the Batista navy and aviation had immediately located the half-sunk Granma off Los Cayuelos), spotted the trail of discarded stalks, following and then surrounding the Castro force. This was the disastrous result of guerrilla inexperience in new terrain (Rural Guard soldiers, of course, instantly knew they had found their quarry), and it was a lesson Fidel would never forget.

  Now, he, Faustino, and Universo carefully reached for stalks near them to suck the sugar syrup for nourishment. But during the three days and nights they would stay in that canefield (and two more days and nights in one farther east) because the Batista forces would not go away, the rebels developed mouth sores from sucking the stalks, lacking knives to slash them open. Every dawn, to quench their thirst, they licked the dew from the leaves, but this also caused mouth and tongue infections because of the leaf roughness. Occasional night rain served only to soak the ground—and the three men.

  Just as exasperating, certainly for the ever-restless Fidel, was their immobility. He decided that they should remain on their backs day and night so that no movement in the canefield could be detected from the outside or from above. To relieve himself, a man urinated away from his body; by not eating, he could avoid bowel movements. And aside from vast physical discomfort, the nervous tension from the need to remain endlessly motionless gripped them.

  The first night in the canefield, Castro placed his rifle vertically atop his body: He fitted the barrel against his throat and lodged the butt against his feet. He released the safety catch, curling his fingers around the trigger. "I shall not—never—be taken alive by the soldiers of tyranny while I sleep!" he announced in a dramatic whisper. "If I am found, I'll just squeeze the trigger and die."

  His two companions looked at each other with incredulity. "Fidel, you are crazy," Universo Sánchez told him. "I don't want to get caught, either, but what you're doing is suicidal. There are lots of land crabs here, and a crab could trip the trigger, you know." Castro, who dislikes being contradicted, answered in a sulking murmur: "Fine. You do what you want. I am going to sleep like this." And that was the way he slept every night under the sugarcane paja, the rifle barrel at his throat. Universo settled in, sleeping with his rifle cradled in his arms. Faustino had no weapon.

  The only sacrifice of which Fidel Castro was not capable was absolute muteness. He simply was unable to refrain from talking. And it was not only his normal compulsiveness to hold forth on any subject (he is not a man of small talk, so he is serious almost every time he opens his mouth). Pinned down in the canefield, he was furiously and excitedly thinking ahead, planning their escape, organizing in his mind a guerrilla army, preparing the victory, and outlining revolutionary laws and measures. He spoke day and night in a controlled whisper, not really expecting answers or comments—it was like a monologue or a murmured speech. This is how Faustino Pérez, the liberal and sophisticated physician, remembers Fidel's speeches-under-the-leaves:

  "Discussing the modalities of continuing on to the Sierra Maestra, Fidel was already convinced that we would meet with our companions. We would go that same afternoon, he was saying, or the next day in the morning. Personally, I was thinking at that moment that perhaps it would be possible for us to arrange a truce, that is to say to get out of there, try to organize ourselves again, and try to return.

  "These were my personal thoughts that I was unable to articulate because Fidel had already begun to speak of reuniting the companions and proceeding. And it wasn't just a reunion in the days to come. He was already taking it for granted that there would be a reunion, and he was talking about the small combat actions in which we must engage in order to keep growing—not only with the participation of our expeditionaries that we would encounter, but also of peasants who would wish to join us. In other words, what would actually happen afterwards was already clearly seen by Fidel at a time when there were just the three of us, knowing nothing about the others.

  "To be able to speak, we had to put our heads together, to talk tonelessly in whispers, because we were certain that the army had surrounded us. And in this whisper, speaking with the enthusiasm that characterizes him, Fidel told us his future plans. But not only plans for the future. For the first time, I could hear him speak amply about other things, about the meaning of life, about our struggle, about history, about all these things. And I can say to you that it was there that my deepest understanding of Fidel and my absolute confidence in Fidel became crystallized. Because there, in the canefield, he spoke about what glory signified.

  "I remember that for the first time I heard him repeat the phrase of José Martí that 'all the glory of the world fits inside a kernel of corn,' I'd known the expression of Martí, but not in this context, not in the context in which Fidel now spoke of what the struggle means for a revolutionary, what meaning does the struggle have, what meaning does life have for a revolutionary, and how one may not fight for personal ambitions, not even for ambitions of glory. . . . He spoke of the necessity and the satisfaction, at the same time, that a revolutionary has in fighting for others, in fighting for his people, in fighting for the humble ones . . .

  "In the order of ideas, what I'm telling you is what struck me the most [in Fidel]. But there were many other things of which he spoke. About organizing the country, about the people of Cuba, the history of Cuba, the future of Cuba. And about the necessity of launching a revolution, a real revolution. We didn't speak of Marxism and communism in those days, but of a social revolution, of a true revolution, of the role of imperialism in our country.

  "I can tell you that a moment would come when one would say to oneself, 'But gentlemen, if there are only three of us, what sense does it all have, how can one talk about the struggle and a future victory? Fidel must have gone crazy!' Then, we would meditate, and Fidel with his explanations would make us think hard about the significance of it all.

  "You see, Fidel didn't really believe that our group—the eighty-two expeditionaries—
or even the entire Twenty-sixth of July Movement that was being organized throughout the country would lead the people to victory. Those who were going to conquer victory, those who Cubans needed, would be a group of the vanguard, a group that would be the shining path. And having a group that would show the way, give the example, the people would do what they had to do in order to win victory. This was the significance of Fidel discussing it among the three of us, wanting to gather ten more, and fifteen more, and fifty more fighters—this was what he wanted to do in the Sierra, giving this example, lighting this flame, because the nation would certainly respond with its own acts of struggle. It would be the decisive struggle, the popular struggle, the struggle of the masses. And this is the great lesson, the great lesson of faith and optimism—and at the same time of realism—that Fidel preached in those days.

  "In this sense, Fidel had absolute faith. Yet, how does one explain this faith, which is really more than faith, because there is idealist faith, blind faith, faith without any real basis—but he had faith and confidence with a base of reality."

  And this is how Universo Sánchez, the peasant from Matanzas who shifted his lifelong allegiance from the Communist party to the 26th of July Movement because he thought the Communists were not doing enough against Batista, recollects Fidel Castro's whispered oratory under the sugarcane paja:

  "At one point, Fidel starts discussing—apparently to give Faustino and me some courage—what will be the revolution and the future. He talked of the revolutionary program, he raised our spirits. And at no time did Fidel consider himself to be defeated. It was always his thing with him about regrouping our people. I began to believe at one stage that Fidel was crazy. I said, 'Shit, he's gone crazy.' You will see that my rifle has my name engraved on it with the tip of the bayonet because I thought that when they would kill me, my family would know it was I who was killed, that I didn't disappear. At that point, I didn't think I'd get out alive of the Sierra Maestra, so I put my name on my rifle. . . . I was thinking then that Fidel had to be crazy, how can he beat Batista with these few people? Fidel always predicted that the Sierra would some day fill up with people—with fighters—and that moment came. And I would say, 'Shit, look how Fidel predicted it.' And I had been thinking of dying, of how I would die."

  Fidel's loquacity is a legend, the episode in the canefield being a case in point. He holds forth anywhere, anytime. Once after an American television-interview taping session with his big brother at the Palace of the Revolution in Havana in 1985, Raúl Castro was asked whether he had watched the full five hours before the cameras.

  "Oh, my God, no, no . . .," Raúl, who has much more of a sense of humor than Fidel (the big brother does not laugh at himself unless he makes the joke), replied in mock annoyance. "I think I've heard Fidel talk enough to last me for the rest of my life. You know, when I was moved into Fidel's prison cell where he had been in isolation for about a year—this was at the Isle of Pines Presidio late in 1954, when we were serving our sentences for the Moncada barracks assault—he didn't let me sleep for weeks. Having been alone all that time, he just talked day and night, day and night . . ."

  Moreover, Fidel Castro demands undivided attention when he addresses a visitor on a one-to-one basis. He often prefers to stand rather than sit down during conversations—he also tends to pace rapidly when he is excited by an idea or an indignity he believes he has suffered in some context of world politics—and if the visitor is not riveted by his words, he might suffer a punch in the arm or the chest.

  Castro can also be a superb listener when he is interested in the subject or the speaker. And he is a great questioner, centering swiftly on the heart of the matter under discussion. One often does feel that he may be dying to speak out, but his courtesy and curiosity usually prevail—and Fidel will remain silent for very long minutes, fiddling with his cigar, lit or unlit (before he abruptly quit smoking late in 1985), or twisting his beard with his fingers between his chin and lower lip in a characteristic gesture of thoughtfulness.

  CHAPTER

  3

  That within just over two years of the canefield drama the Castro revolutionary war in the Sierra Maestra and the urban struggles by the 26th of July Movement and militant university student organizations would force the collapse of the Batista regime is a matter of history. It is similarly part of the history of the twentieth century that Fidel Castro, the uncompromising bearded guerrillero, has led Cuba through the greatest social revolution since Mao Zedong imposed communism on China a decade earlier, immeasurably improving the human condition of millions of Cubans—there were six million in 1959 and over ten million in 1986. As a belatedly self-anointed Marxist-Leninist, Castro has organized Cuba as the first (but thus far the only) Communist country in the Western Hemisphere, allying himself politically, economically, and militarily with the Soviet Union. He has pursued these policies and alliances in defiance of seven successive United States presidents (Ronald Reagan being the latest in this period of nearly three decades), defeating an American-supported invasion attempt and, in conspiracy with Nikita Khrushchev, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration in 1962.

  Fidel Castro has held power longer than any other important head of government except North Korea's Kim II Sung and Jordan's King Hussein (in Communist Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov has been in power since 1954), and remains a highly active and influential player in international affairs. His health appears excellent, and all the signs are that, barring assassination, he will be present in the world arena for a very long time as a senior statesman (he is five years older than the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev) whose actions must be considered with utmost seriousness in the context of changing conditions and policies. Though in the future he may turn over to his closest associates some of the real responsibilities for the day-to-day conduct of Cuban internal matters, he will never abandon his determination to retain a major impact on the battles and controversies over the fate of humanity.

  It has been said that Castro exaggerates his own importance, and it may be so, but he believes this is the only way a small nation can exact attention and respect from the superpowers as well as from other lesser countries. Evidently Castro's Cuba commands sufficient attention from the Soviet Union to receive around $4 billion annually in economic assistance. This is enormous for a population of ten million in terms of traditional foreign-aid programs of the superpowers. There is an additional half-billion dollars in sophisticated military hardware, from computerized control-and-command systems to MiG-23 jets. To the United States, which after twenty-five years is still committed to the idea that Castro must vanish, Cuba is a permanent nightmare as Washington worries about its influence in Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and even our "own" Puerto Rico.

  Castro knows how to play his adversaries and his allies. He has been negotiating some form of settlement with the United States on and off for over a quarter-century, and he has been feuding openly and covertly with the Soviet Union for just as long. Paradoxically, the United States cannot afford to settle with Castro because it might mean full-fledged acceptance of him, and the Soviet Union cannot afford to break with him because it would mean an awesome defeat in the contest with the United States and China for influence in the Third World.

  To much of the Third World, which made him chairman of the Non-aligned Movement for the 1979–1983 term, Fidel Castro is a hero, and not only because Cuban troops are in Angola and Ethiopia to defend them from "imperialism," and Cuban advisers are in Nicaragua for the same ostensible reason. The Third World perceives Castro as its advocate and at times its conscience. He thinks other peoples in the Third World deserve the kind of dignity as nations and individuals that the revolution has granted the Cubans. This is what he likes to talk about most, hour after hour, with foreign visitors.

  He insists that Cuban "internationalism" transcends the estimated forty thousand combat troops and advisers involved in wars from Angola and Ethiopia to nearby Nicaragua, because, in the Castro logic
, a much greater and more lasting impact is made by tens of thousands of Cuban doctors, nurses, teachers, and technicians assigned to countries on three continents. He says that some 1,500 Cuban physicians are assigned to Third World countries. Increasingly consumed by what he sees as Christian and Marxist parallels, he argues heatedly that "if the church has missionaries, we have the internationalists." Castro makes a point of recalling that the Christian-Marxist nexus he proposes is not a sudden inspiration, because in meetings with Chilean Christian leaders in 1971 and Jamaican churchmen in 1977, he had already urged a "strategic alliance" between the two forces "to achieve the necessary social changes in our countries." He is taken sufficiently seriously for a delegation of United States Roman Catholic bishops to have gone to meet with him in Havana early in 1985—Castro had a marvelous time dazzling the bishops with his familiarity with theology and liturgy—and to confer with the Cuban episcopate late that year, the first such meeting in the twenty-six years of the revolution.

  In sum, Fidel Castro is a fascinating phenomenon in our century's politics: to the increasingly gray and dull Western world, a man of panache, a romantic figure, an ever-defiant, dizzyingly imaginative, and unpredictable rebel, a marvelous actor, a spectacular teacher and preacher of the many credos he says he embraces. But Castro makes other impressions as well. Though his personal popularity in Cuba is immense, there is a segment of Cubans to whom Castro looms as a ruthless and cunning dictator, a cynical betrayer of liberal democracy in whose name he first rallied millions of Cubans to his cause and banner, a servile satellite of the Soviet Union, the idolized object of a personality cult he needs as he needs the air he breathes, and a cavalier creator and perpetrator of fundamental economic-policy errors at home.