Fidel: A Critical Portrait Read online

  Aside from pure politics, Castro inspires widespread loyalty on the basis of human chemistry. An immensely attractive and contagiously energetic man, he is an unmatched persuader. He can and has convinced scores of men and women of varying backgrounds and temperaments to participate in military actions about which they are told nothing specific until the last moment (the assault on Moncada and the voyage of the Granma are cases in point). The army lieutenant who captured him in the mountains after Moncada was convinced by Castro's courage to spare his life, and years later he joined Castro's victorious army. Cubans and foreigners without number have found it impossible to say no to Fidel.

  Another inspiring trait has been Castro's personal heroism. His courage is so great that it borders on the insane. At one point in the Sierra Maestra, all his officers signed a petition asking him to stop exposing himself to hostile fire by insisting on being in the front line in every skirmish and battle.

  Most vitally, Castro was always concerned by the welfare of his people. He refused to take men who had wives and children (though he himself already was a husband and father) on the Moncada attack and endlessly inquired about the personal problems of his Sierra fighters and their families, meticulously supervised food allocations to assure that all shared equally (once he berated Universo Sánchez for being unable to account for every piece of hard candy with which he was entrusted), and established an iron rule that the guerrilleros must pay the peasants in cash for every ounce of rice and every chicken they took.

  The peasants' loyalty to Castro had made his survival possible during this revolution—there was a $100,000 prize on his head for informing the army of his whereabouts—and this loyalty grew even more when the rebels helped with the harvest and started rudimentary schools and clinics for Sierra children. A priest who joined the guerrillas as a self-appointed chaplain, Father Guillermo Sardiñas, spent much of his time christening children of peasant families in the Sierra, a greatly appreciated gesture inasmuch as, according to Castro, there were neither churches nor priests in the mountains. As a result, Fidel recalls that numerous families "wanted me to be godfather of their children, and Father Sardiñas christened there scores and scores of peasant kids . . . which in Cuba is like being a second father." He says that "I have masses of godchildren in the Sierra Maestra, and many of them perhaps already are army officers or university graduates."

  Castro believes that the presence of Father Sardiñas in the Sierra and the christening of children served "more to link the families with the Revolution, the families with the guerrillas, and to make even strong ties between these populations and the guerrilla leadership." He thinks that the priest, even though he supported the revolution, refrained from political preaching, and his work among the peasants was "more of a religious kind." Still, Castro recognizes that "indirectly" this helped the revolution. Fidel told a Brazilian friar that he wore a cross on a chain around his neck during part of the war because a little girl had sent it to him from Santiago with a "tender message"; he said: "If you ask me whether this was a question of faith, I'd tell you, 'no,' it wouldn't be honest if I told you it was a question of faith; it was a gesture toward that girl."

  Evidently Fidel understood how politically essential the peasant support was, but the very poor people of the Sierra Maestra, as they retell their war stories twenty-five years later, always choose to regard the guerrillas as friends and heroes, not as men simply in quest for political power. This loyalty to Fidel Castro has stood the test of time, in truth, growing with it. After the 1983 United States invasion of Grenada, for example, Castro made a point of visiting almost daily at a Havana hospital the Cuban soldiers and construction workers who were wounded in combat on the tiny Caribbean island. He brought them books (among them, Tolstoy's War and Peace in a handsome Spanish edition), videocassettes, and plenty of conversation. These visits were not publicized, but the word got around that the Commander in Chief cares about his men.

  Armando Hart Dávalos, one of the first organizers of the 26th of July Movement after the Moncada attack, says that of the group with which Castro met secretly in Havana four weeks before leaving for Mexico in mid-1955 to prepare the invasion, "every single person either remains with the Revolution today or is a martyr of the Revolution." This meeting had been called in the harbor district home of two elderly ladies to select the Movement's National Directorate, which would head the underground struggle in Cuban cities in support of the planned Sierra guerrilla war, but Hart himself was soon caught by the Batista police and remained imprisoned until the revolution's triumph. Castro immediately named him education minister (Hart was twenty-nine years old at the time, four years younger than Fidel), and over the decades he has been one of the Maximum Leader's most trusted advisers.

  Coming from the moderate political background that characterized the urban 26th of July organization, Armando Hart (who earlier had belonged to a right-of-center nationalist group) unhesitatingly followed Castro in the shift to communism, and is currently a member of the party's ruling Political Bureau as well as minister of culture. Most likely he would again change ideological allegiances if Fidel so ordered.

  Faustino Pérez, Fidel's canefield companion of Alegría de Pío, represents another dimension of Castroist loyalty. He had joined the Movement after Moncada (about the same time as Hart, proceeding from the same moderate anti-Batista faction), and he, too, had attended the clandestine Havana meeting prior to Castro's departure. He then followed him to Mexico, landed from the Granma as a deputy military commander, survived with Fidel the first month in the Sierra, and was dispatched to Havana to establish the contacts between the guerrillas and the urban 26th of July Movement.

  As a top city underground leader, Faustino Pérez participated in planning the bitterly disastrous general strike in April 1958, a milestone event that triggered the fundamental break between pro-Communists and anti-Communists (and various intermediate factions) within the revolutionary movement. The revolution never fully recovered from it, protestations of total unity notwithstanding.

  The strike was opposed by the orthodox Communists, still very much at arm's length from Castro, and it was chiefly advocated by the liberal-minded groups in the 26th of July Movement that thought it would quicken Batista's fall. Fidel himself had first publicly supported the general strike (though grudgingly) before siding with Che Guevara, who was with him in the Sierra, and with the Communists in the cities to denounce the failed stoppage. Guevara, ideologically the most radical rebel commander, was from the outset the chief foe of the liberal wing of the Movement, and an excitable leader in the internal revolutionary struggles. The Communists, who traditionally favored political strike strategy, were against the April stoppage because they were being almost entirely left out of it, and they feared the adverse effects on their future influence in Cuba. Allegations of actual Communist sabotage of the strike cannot be proved.

  In the Florentine climate of intrigues rising within the revolution, Castro chose to turn against the stoppage organizers, but only after the strike had run its course. He had come to believe that the urban wing of the 26th of July Movement—known as the llano, which means lowlands—had been withholding arms and money from the Sierra Maestra guerrillas seeking to use the general strike to capture the overall control of the revolution. Fidel, who still becomes agitated discussing these events despite the passage of so many years, further believed (and probably accurately) that the urban organizations, with their "bourgeois" origins, would try to block the profound social revolution he was planning for after the victory, and that they would settle on Batista's overthrow without allowing the overhaul of the entire Cuban system.

  That Castro was planning from the beginning to dismantle the old social order, established by the Spaniards and continued under United States supervision after Cuban independence in 1902, was not made clear to most people on the island (and beyond it) when he was organizing and fighting in the Sierra. Ex post facto, certain historians and commentators claim that Castro
's real intentions—the implantation of "secular salvation" for the downtrodden—were expressed in his brief at his trial after the Moncada assault, and were quite deliberately concealed until he took power. Later, Fidel had no compunctions about admitting this publicly, explaining that the people simply were not yet ready for the "real" revolution. The American historian James H. Billington, who has written extensively about revolutionary phenomena, uses the Castro enterprise as the latest example of modern revolutions that were not understood at the time. He writes that "previous political upheavals—even when called revolutions—generally sought a new leader rather than a new order." Billington suggests that "the norm was revolt rather than revolution," and that, in effect, Castro was inspired by the French Revolution in the sense that "never before was the word revolution related to the creation of a totally new and entirely man-made order."

  To effect this transformation Fidel Castro required trustworthy and experienced allies, and the Communists entered the picture during the last months of the national insurrection because of the convergence of a series of political situations.

  To the extent that it is possible to reconstruct precisely the revolution's internal battles, it is certain that Castro's growing suspicions of the 26th of July Movement in the cities, encouraged by Che Guevara as his Sierra letters to Fidel make clear, led him to form an alliance with the old Communists and to create his own new Communists. It is Castro who would later first use the expression "new Communists" publicly. By the same token, Castro is known to have concluded that among his most loyal Sierra fighters there were few with any sound political or administrative background or experience, required to operate a future government or handle the politics of the revolution. And since Castro had decided not to rely on liberal "bourgeois" managers in the conduct of civilian affairs, except in the initial transition period, he was determined to build a brand-new Cuban revolutionary army from the barbudos (bearded ones) of the rebel contingents, a great many of them illiterate. It became a matter of revolutionary principle that the Batista armed forces be entirely destroyed (though preserving a handful of professional officers ready to join the cause), and he was proved right when, within hours of the dictator's escape from Cuba on January 1, 1959, an attempt was made in Havana to create a military junta that would have effectively barred Castro from power. His theory was that the destruction of the old army was a precondition for the establishment of a new national order.

  Cuba's "old" Communists had been running labor unions, sitting in parliament, infiltrating the university, and publishing newspapers for nearly forty years, providing a pool of both dependability and experience for Castro to draw on. Castro was especially attracted by the Communists' sense of discipline and their organization skills. Although he had never belonged to the "old" Communist party, some of his closest university friends did, and this may have influenced Fidel's thinking during his time in the Sierra. Further, he felt that the new revolutionary armed forces must from the outset be controlled by these "old" Communists, and transformed into the principal "new Communist" power base in the revolution. Castro later claimed, presumably for the benefit of public opinion at home and abroad, that he had had no practical alternative to the absorption of Communists in his victorious Movement, though he omitted to explain how he used them to take over the Rebel Army.

  Considering that the Communists had opposed and vilified him as an "adventurer" after Moncada and even when he set foot in the mountains, it remains astonishing that Castro would suddenly regard them as dependable partners and mentors. Being Fidel, he doubtless assumed he could control them. The Communist "sectarian" conspiracy against him in 1962, four years after they made their deal, would later come as a shock. Moreover, the professional quality of the Communists mobilized by the revolution to run Cuba was generally abominable, and whether this also came as a surprise raises questions about Castro's administrative judgment.

  The overall conclusion to be drawn from all these events is that the historical decision that the revolution should lead to the establishment of socialism and then communism in Cuba was reached by Castro alone with utter finality in the late spring of 1958—probably following the series of crucial political meetings held in the Sierra during May and June.

  Numerous Cuba scholars and specialists abroad have argued that Fidel Castro was a secret Communist since Moncada or earlier; or, obversely, that a year or two after he won power, he had been pushed into communism by the hostility of the United States. Both views appear invalid in the light of careful analysis of existing materials as well as in-depth discussion with key Cuban personalities who participated directly in the entire revolutionary process. Fidel always knew where he was going, adjusting strategy and tactics according to changing political situations; he dreamed of a sweeping revolution, but not of a Communist revolution as defined by the Cuban Communist party.

  Castro's bitterness toward the United States, dating back to his student days when he was active in a variety of "anti-imperialist" organizations in Havana, and aggravated by American deliveries of bombs and ammunition to the Batista aircraft at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo, just below the Sierra, must have been an extremely important factor in his decision to go the Communist route to fulfill his broad revolutionary program. He must also have understood from the outset that this course would assuredly antagonize Washington to an infinite degree, and that, sooner or later, he would be forced to obtain Soviet assistance and support for his revolution to survive. He had calculated correctly that the Russians, facing at the time the split with China, would help. In this manner, Castro was able to define beforehand—from the Sierra—the relationships that would involve Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union before either superpower suspected what this Caribbean rebel had in mind.

  There are those who believe that Castro has always held love-and-hate sentiments toward the United States, secretly hoping for the Americans' approval of him, and this may be true in a highly subjective way. His avidity for personal contacts with Americans of every description—from congressmen and journalists to marine biologists, churchmen, and musicians like the trumpet virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie—may support this idea. But it does not alter Fidel's basic political attitude, best expressed in a private message to Celia Sánchez, his closest Sierra companion, on June 5, 1958, right after Batista aircraft had hit the rebels with U.S.-supplied bombs:

  "I have sworn that the Americans will pay very dearly for what they are doing. When this war has ended, a much bigger and greater war will start for me, a war I shall launch against them. I realize that this will be my true destiny." Castro's insights, of course, proved to be entirely correct, though not even he could have suspected that as early as March 10, 1959, only two months after he entered Havana, the National Security Council (NSC) in Eisenhower's administration had already reviewed modalities for bringing "another government to power in Cuba." The record of this review exists in the classified NSC archives, a generally unknown—but fundamental—element in the broad Cuban-American tragedy.

  Meanwhile, the immediate upshot of the April general-strike fiasco was that Castro was able to establish undisputed sway over all the revolutionary factions in Cuba, and—most specifically—to subordinate the National Directorate of the 26th of July Movement to his political and operational control. In this sense, the final phase of the Sierra war did for Castro what the Long March in China in 1935 did for Mao Zedong: It proclaimed his absolute primacy among his country's revolutionary leaders. Inevitably Fidel's relationships with his fellow revolutionaries began to change.

  Thus Faustino Pérez, who would tell friends many years later that "rightly or wrongly, I was considered to be part of the right wing of the Twenty-sixth of July Movement," was replaced in Havana by a commander picked by Castro, and recalled to the mountains. But Fidel was not about to ditch Faustino. Disregarding Che Guevara's violent criticism of Pérez (the two finally had a savage confrontation at a meeting organized by Castro in the Sierra), Fidel named him chie
f of civil administration in the liberated territories. Faustino's office shack was inside the rebel headquarters compound high up at La Plata, a few hundred feet from the tree-hidden, ramshackle command-post structure that Castro shared with Celia Sánchez, and the two men were in permanent contact.

  Castro has a strong sense of loyalty toward old companions when, even in disagreement with him, they are careful not to engage in what he considers betrayal. He also has his own concepts of loyalty, betrayal, and justice: He is merciless if he thinks he is being betrayed by those he trusts, yet often he goes out of his way to try to salvage a friendship and a relationship, and to convince himself that there had been no real breach of loyalty to him.

  In the case of Faustino Pérez, a strange minuet developed between him and Castro. When the revolution triumphed, Pérez, along with Armando Hart and many other figures then perceived as moderates, was named to the first revolutionary government as minister for the recovery of stolen property. He was never invited, however, to join the inner circle, where Fidel was secretly preparing to assume total power in Cuba and veer leftward. This was during the brief period in 1959 when Cuba lived under an "official" government headed by President Manuel Urrutia Lleó (whom Castro, still in the Sierra Maestra, had designated to the presidency) and Fidel's hidden but de facto government, secretly negotiating with the "old" Communists for the joint takeover of the republic in the name of the "real" revolution.

  After the first open crisis over the issue of communism in the revolutionary regime erupted in 1959, and after Castro ordered on October 21 the arrest on charges of treason of Major Huber Matos, a highly popular but outspokenly anti-Communist guerrilla commander, two of the moderate ministers resigned at a stormy cabinet meeting with Fidel on November 26. One of them was Public Works Minister Manuel Ray, an engineer and urban underground leader in Havana (but not a Castro "companion"), who soon thereafter began conspiring against Castro and presently fled Cuba. (Ironically, Ray was regarded as too "liberal" by the CIA to allow his anti-Castro movement to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.) The second minister was Faustino Pérez, but he did so without audible protest, publicly denying that he was leaving over the Matos affair. Castro responded by personally guaranteeing his safety, as a demonstration of loyalty to a comrade-in-arms. In the ensuing years, Pérez fought alongside Castro at the Bay of Pigs, worked in obscure government posts (in 1969 he supervised the construction of a hydroelectrical power plant in the Stalinist tradition of relegating undesirable politicians to obscurity), and notwithstanding his distaste for communism, he joined the party when Castro organized it as the "highest leading force of the society and of the state."