Fidel: A Critical Portrait Read online

  Such are the complexity and the dimensions of Fidel Castro as a personality and a statesman that he may indeed be all of the above things—the hero of humble mankind and, at the same time, the repressive Communist dictator in the eyes of many Cubans. He himself does not mind appearing devious, or worse, if in his opinion this is "historically justifiable," the most spectacular example being Castro's proud public admission that he had deliberately concealed his Marxist-Leninist orientation during the guerrilla war to avoid antagonizing bourgeois and other potential supporters. What is the real and final truth about Fidel's Marxism may never be known—it is beyond prediction what he may say about it and himself in the future—but for a long time his Marxist performance had been ideologically vague, uncertain, and ill-formed. Castro doubtless realizes that people have short memories, and that in Cuba there is already a whole generation now moving into positions of power and responsibility, educated by and under the revolution, and to whom the past does not exist historically or intellectually—except as a time of shame and scorn. That is how, demonologically, Castro has defined the Cuban past, the political past in which he grew.

  In seeking to portray Fidel Castro precisely, an imprudent proposition under the best of conditions, a crucial element is that he thrives on contradiction and paradox. It is an alluring intellectual exercise for Castro to reconcile most logically, when challenged by events or by an interviewer's questions, whatever of a contradictory nature he may have said publicly over nearly three decades about Marxism, democracy, and Christianity, the Soviet Union and the United States, the future of sugar in the Cuban economy (produce less or produce more), the real-life progress of his Revolution (a word that is always capitalized in Cuba in print and in speech), and just about any subject springing from his fertile imagination and computerlike memory. With a mischievous sparkle in his brown eyes, he has engaged in virtuoso performances with American television correspondents whose homework on Castro left much to be desired. In most instances he has the upper hand, rhetorically and intellectually, and he takes advantage of it delightedly.

  Inasmuch as Castro conducts domestic government and Cuban world policies mainly by frequent public speeches or endless interviews (secret negotiations and decisions are reserved only for the most delicate situations), it is truly impossible to keep track of what he has said and when he said it. Even the historical department of the Council of State was unable to provide the precise number of public speeches Castro has delivered as "Maximum Leader" since January 1, 1959, the day he assumed effective power. An educated guess is that they exceed 2,500 (some of them running five hours or more, and the record being around nine hours in 1959), but not all of them have actually been transcribed by the Council of State's teams of stenographers, not all have been published, broadcast or telecast, and it is impossible to locate the text of every speech Castro has made. For example, between January 1, 1966, and October 1984, he delivered 130 very lengthy public addresses on his favorite topic of public health and medicine alone.

  Indeed, Fidel Castro's revolution—or, at least, the selling of this revolution to Cubans—might not have succeeded without the medium of television. From the first day, in fact, Castro has governed through television, the first such massive use of this technology in the craft of government as distinct from campaign politics. While he does have a natural rapport with his audiences and he used this symbiotic emotional relationship in the first years of his rule by addressing crowds as large as one million, television was vital in carrying the face, the voice, and the message beyond the meeting plaza to Cubans in their homes. Later, television became the regular channel of communication between Castro and the population.

  By Latin American and even United States standards, Cuban television was quite advanced technically early in 1959 when Castro forced Batista's ouster, and the number of sets in the country was relatively high, especially in the cities. But what mattered the most was that Castro, whose revolutionary concept was always built on communication with the masses, instantly understood that he and television were made for each other. Actually, Cuba had a tradition of the use of the radio in politics, and Fidel had been very effective with the microphone on the limited occasions when he was allowed to get near one. In the second and last year of the guerrilla war, Castro installed a radio station—Radio Rebelde—at his headquarters atop the Sierra Maestra, rapidly turning it into a superb instrument of propaganda and the dissemination of coded operational orders. He often addressed Cuba over Radio Rebelde.

  The switch to television was thus natural, and Castro's ideal on-camera presence and his rich dramatic gifts did the rest. The Cuban propaganda apparatus is so well honed that the nation may be treated to a Castro speech carried live (always in its entirety) as well as to a number of taped rebroadcasts over the two national channels, sometimes over a period of days. Additionally, every public appearance by Castro is either carried live in special reports or as part of the regular television news programs (the radio, of course, carries the Fidel sound as well).

  It may be difficult to believe that Castro, who seems to adore public speaking, actually fears it before the first words are out. He told the Cuban magazine Bohemia that "I confess . . . I suffer from stage fright when I speak in Revolution Square. . . . It is not at all easy for me." As a young man, he forced himself to deliver speeches in front of a mirror in his room until he was satisfied they were adequate to encourage him to pursue a career in law and politics. On most occasions, Fidel begins his speeches in a low, almost uncertain voice, talking quite slowly—until he has that sudden feeling of having established rapport with his audience. From there on, it is Fidel Castro, the great orator. Other famous orators never conquered the initial fear, among them Gladstone and Winston Churchill.

  Castro is fascinated by the art of public speech. He has reminisced that when he was a high-school student he became friendly during summer vacations with a well-educated Spaniard in Oriente who told him that in order to overcome his speech difficulties, Demosthenes used to place a pebble under his tongue. This led Fidel to recount that, still in high school, he began collecting speeches by other great classical orators, but that he subsequently concluded that he disliked their oratory because "it was too rhetorical and grandiloquent, depending too much on wordplay." Moreover, he says, today Demosthenes and Cicero would "have great problems if they had to face concrete realities and explain their society," Castro's point being that he ceased to admire Athens' democracy when he understood that it meant that a "tiny group of aristocrats met in public place to make decisions." Fidel's favorite speaker, it turns out, was Emilio Castelar, the brilliant Spanish statesman and thinker who headed Spain's short-lived First Republic in 1873, but as "marvelous" as Castelar's parliamentary speeches had been, "today he would have been a complete fiasco in any parliament." In the end, Castro decided to practice the exact opposite of what all the great orators in history had done, creating his own fiery yet chatty style. It is unlikely that there is another Communist ruler in the world nowadays who delights in dissecting classical oratory, or is capable of it.

  There have also been "secret" Castro speeches, unknown in number, delivered before Communist party or armed-forces leadership groups, and unpublished charlas (chats) at meetings of, say, the Cuban Women's Federation or the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. Additionally, all the top revolutionary leaders—Castroites and "old" and "new" Communists alike—engage in a permanent flood of oratory to keep rallying the nation behind Fidel, to demand new efforts, and confess past errors. It is like living in an echo chamber, and inevitably words lose meaning and coherence.

  But it is untrue that nowadays Castro's speeches turn the Cubans off. First, there still is a sense of fascination with him and his oratory; second, nobody in a society as tightly and rigidly organized ideologically as Cuba—it is more so than Eastern European Communist countries—can afford not to know what the President of the Republic is saying. Ideological indoctrination (Fidelismo, Cuban history, a
nd Marxism-Leninism skillfully blended together by Castro) is so important that soldiers, workers or students must study his speeches as promptly as possible after delivery, and be able to explain, preferably in his words and slogans, the views he holds on domestic and foreign problems.

  It would be difficult to imagine genuine indifference toward Fidel Castro—in Cuba or abroad. He may be loved or he may be hated, but there are no neutral sentiments about him, only strong emotions. This is why Castro seems to attract so magnetically every kind of admiring or pejorative adjective to his name.

  Naturally Castro, who is long on vanity, basks in this attention, and the only time I saw Fidel deeply disturbed and angered by criticism was early in 1985, when he read a description of himself as "cruel" in an article by a leading Spanish journalist who had recently interviewed him at great length. "How does he know I am cruel?" Castro fumed, furiously pacing up and down his office. "Has he ever seen me commit cruel acts? Has he ever heard me order an execution?" Fidel was deeply wounded on his personal scale of moral values, and would not drop the subject for long minutes. Actually he has ordered executions in the name of "revolutionary justice," but he resented the implication that it was done wantonly.

  Political criticism—or rivalry—is not welcome. After Peru's president-elect, Alan García (a thirty-six-year-old left-of-center politician of great personal appeal whom Fidel saw as a potential junior partner in Latin America), in July 1985 dared to question the Castro view of the world, the Cuban exploded in wrath. García opposed Fidel's notion that Latin American debtor countries should refuse to pay their huge debts to U.S. banks altogether, noting that while the Western financial institutions were "imperialist," so were the Communist Warsaw Pact military alliance and Comecon, the Communist common market, to which Cuba has belonged since 1972. On the day of García's inauguration, Fidel responded with an incredible message of formal congratulations, listing all the ills of Peru, from illiteracy to "misery of all types," and adding grandly that "if you really decide to struggle seriously, firmly and consistently against the Dantesque picture of social calamity and free your nation, as you have publicly promised, from the domination and dependence of imperialism, the only cause of that tragedy, you may count on the support of Cuba." It was a message probably unmatched in the annals of contemporary diplomatic insults, and it may not have been entirely irrelevant that García is the age of Fidel's son, Fidelito; no mature leader likes an upstart. Subsequently, the two governments established a degree of cordiality, but Castro avoids mentioning García publicly.

  Castro has a limitless capacity for indignation, anger, and fury, both real and contrived, and does not hesitate to display it privately or publicly. He would have a tantrum in the Sierra Maestra when a single bullet was wasted by a careless guerrilla (and he would threaten the man with direst punishments), and even as president of Cuba, he will throw a fit—complete with the foulest language imaginable in Spanish—when he learns of a bureaucratic stupidity, not an uncommon occurrence after more than a quarter-century of his great revolution. His most senior associates fear the "Fidel furies."

  On another level there is little doubt that Castro ordered the exodus from Mariel of over one hundred thousand Cubans to the United States in the spring of 1980, as a gesture of supreme personal rage against President Jimmy Carter for the encouraging attitude he had taken toward a wave of asylum-seekers in foreign embassies in Havana. Emotion remains a powerful factor in the Castro decision-making, and he suspended an immigration agreement that had been signed with the United States in 1985 because the Reagan administration put into operation a hostile radio station named "Radio Martí." Castro told friends that what he had resented was the use of the hallowed Martí name against the Cuban revolution; he did not care about the broadcasts themselves.

  Castro's rages (and his brooding, petulant moods—sometimes in lieu of rages) are part of his uncompromising personality, his unshakable sense of righteousness, his toughness, courage, risk-taking instincts, and pride. He demands instant response to his slightest whims, and his entourage is fully tuned to it. These whims, which are frequent, range from the sublime, requesting at once a rare literary opus, to the ridiculous, insisting that a top adviser in attendance provide his (Castro's) combat-boot size to a friend who had offered to find him a special pair in Texas.

  Although it is not generally known, Fidel Castro has been at the brink of death an incredible number of times. He nearly died of peritonitis at the age of ten (peritonitis followed appendicitis in those days before antibiotics and penicillin). As a university student in Havana in the mid-1940s, Castro, in the midst of the wave of political gangsterism of that period, was always carrying a gun and being shot at. He participated in an abortive invasion of the Dominican Republic (swimming to the Cuban coast from a vessel bringing back the expedition because he feared assassination), and less than a year later he found himself in the center of a bloody uprising in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, where he was helping organize an "anti-imperialist" student congress.

  On July 26, 1953, now a political leader, he led the assault on the Moncada barracks in Santiago, and miraculously escaped death on at least two occasions—when the army beat back the attack and when he was captured days later in the mountains. In the courtroom and prison, he daily defied the Batista authorities to the point where it was generally assumed that he would be quietly murdered. Amnestied two years later, he almost forced his assassination by the Batista police in Havana, before fleeing to Mexico, announcing that he would soon return to oust the dictator. In Mexico he was arrested by the federal police and nearly killed by Cuban agents (a spy penetrated his clandestine organization in Mexico City). The yacht Granma, carrying Fidel and his expeditionaries to Cuba, was so insanely overloaded it practically sank in a storm during the crossing (she reached the Oriente coast in the wrong spot in what Che Guevara described as a "shipwreck," not a landing).

  Castro's Sierra Maestra campaign began with the Alegría de Pío disaster, and until the final victory he insisted on personally leading every march and every attack. After the revolution there were thirty or more assassination plots against him—most engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency—and during the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro was on the battlefield with his forces until the attackers surrendered. Eighteen months after the invasion, he faced a full-fledged American assault at the time of the missile crisis. In 1963, Castro came close to death when the Soviet airliner bringing him on his first visit to Russia was within seconds of crashing as it landed in a thick fog in Murmansk (an occurrence that was not publicized at the time).

  It seems, in truth, that Castro tends to court death. In 1981 he decided to sail to the Mexican port of Cozúmel aboard a high-speed launch, rather than fly to a secret meeting with the president of Mexico, in order to test personally the degree of vigilance of the U.S. Navy in the Yucatán Channel. The navy was patrolling the Gulf of Mexico to determine whether the Cubans were shipping arms to Nicaragua, and Fidel's idea of fun was to see whether it would catch him. He then flew home, having made his point, though this incident was not mentioned in the Cuban media. It is an intriguing thought what a U.S. Navy destroyer skipper would have done if he had discovered Fidel Castro aboard a heavily armed craft, escorted by two missile-carrying patrol boats, in international waters between western Cuba's San Antonio Cape and Cozúmel. The guerrillero laughs about it.

  Moreover, Castro's absorbing hobby is undersea fishing: Weighed down with two pounds of lead at the belt, he stays deep under water for more than two minutes (which is long without oxygen tanks) off a Caribbean key, aiming his spear gun at pargo fish and lobster. He frequently flies aboard his personal, Soviet-built executive helicopter, even at night, and, on at least one occasion, he lost his bearings while piloting a twin-engine launch in a powerful storm off the Oriente coast.

  Ernesto Guevara Lynch, the octogenarian father of Che Guevara, once remarked to me at his house in Havana that "Fidel must have a pact with God or the de
vil" because there can be no other explanation for his charmed life. Don Ernesto may be near some sort of truth.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Fidel Castro's success in war and peace, apart from his qualities of leadership and iron determination, is due in great measure to the supreme loyalty he has always been able to command among his fellow revolutionaries, relatives, and friends as well as among the Cuban people after the victory. Three decades later, the loyalty of the first companions of the Fidelista revolution remains as absolute as it was in the youthful ardent days of these men and women. In this, the old Fidelistas resemble a medieval religious and military order, like the Knights Templars in the time of the Crusades. Inevitably many have grown apart from each other, and ideological differences—sometimes very deep ones over the issue of communism—have developed among others. Still, they share a seemingly unbreakable bond of loyalty to Castro as their historical leader. To them, Fidel can do no wrong. But why is this so?

  There is a character in the play Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, the German Communist playwright, who declares, "Unhappy the land that has no heroes," to which Galileo replies, "Unhappy the land that has need of heroes." In Cuba's case both reflections are true: The country never had a triumphant hero (José Martí was killed before independence was attained), and its depressing history made it hunger for one. Clearly, Castro was the answer.

  And like Maximilien Robespierre, the "Incorruptible," Fidel Castro speaks the language of The Revolution, he is the voice of the deepest revolutionary principles of his time. His proven commitment to live up to these ideals assured him of his following. In a corrupt nation under the Batista dictatorship, Fidel represented the values of honesty, political legality, and social justice—and he was believed because of his impressive oratory and his willingness to challenge the system at great personal risk.