Fidel: A Critical Portrait Page 6

  In 1980, Faustino Pérez was a member of the party's Central Committee, the chairman of a National Assembly committee, and coordinator of a mass-membership organization in Cuba's local self-government system. He was relaxed and philosophical as he recounted the crises of revolutionary ideologies, neither repentant nor accusatory, and it was quietly evident that Faustino Pérez retains sincere admiration and loyalty for Fidel Castro. Without being hailed as a "hero of the revolution" by the official propaganda, Pérez is a highly respected figure in Cuba.

  In July 1960 came the resignation of Communications Minister Enrique Oltuski, an engineer, a former provincial coordinator of the 26th of July Movement, and the youngest member of the cabinet. He was the last moderate to go, criticizing Communist inroads in the revolution (the overwhelming majority in the first cabinet were highly experienced, talented, and motivated men and women, all of whom had fought against Batista, but to Fidel their political moderation was their fatal flaw). Castro had Oltuski arrested on vague charges, and he spent several years in prison. Having undergone ideological "re-education," he reappeared in the government in the early 1980s as a deputy minister of fisheries, obviously chosen by Fidel, who prefers to preserve talent, if at all possible.

  Finally, Universo Sánchez, the other member of the Alegría de Pío canefield trio, faced no ideological soul-searching when the revolution acquired its Communist identity. Finishing the war with the rank of commandante (major), then the highest in the Rebel Army, Universo faithfully performed over the years a variety of military and civilian tasks. Though never qualifying personally for Castro's hard-core political circle, he wound up his revolutionary career in his late sixties as head of environment-protection programs. He resumed his membership in the Communist party when Castro reorganized it, presumably because all of Fidel's followers who wished to stay with the revolution were expected to be members. However, unlike many others, Universo Sánchez invariably makes a point of telling visitors that the "old" Communist party did not fight Batista the way it should.

  Loyalty, of course, is as elusive a political notion as treason, and Fidel Castro reserves for himself the right of defining both, naturally quite subjectively in terms of the persons involved. Castro, his face and voice exploding in fury, delivered an incredible seven-hour prosecutorial summation before the revolutionary court in the trial of Major Huber Matos, claiming Matos had committed treason because he had "conspired" with some of his officers in the Camaguey province command to resign in protest against Communist infiltration. Matos, one of the best Sierra commanders, was sentenced to twenty years in prison. That first he had written Castro a private letter, loyally beseeching him to act against communism in order to protect democracy in Cuba, was not an attenuating circumstance. In Fidel's eyes Matos's actions constituted a treasonable conspiracy because they threatened to split wide open his revolutionary regime and armed forces, playing into the hands of the United States and other enemies of the revolution. In this sense, Castro's definition of loyalty versus treason was purely practical and political on the grounds that the defense of his revolution overshadowed all other considerations. It is impossible to say fairly whether Matos would have been treated mote leniently had he been an old companion since the days of Moncada—he joined Castro only in the Sierra, bringing a planeload of desperately needed arms from Costa Rica—but, conversely, Castro could have demanded the death penalty for him. Thus, while Castro argued publicly at the time that political resignations were vicious blows at the revolution, he chose not to apply this condemnatory standard to Faustino Pérez and many others on lower levels who behaved discreetly.

  As noted earlier, Fidel is merciless with those he considers traitors, and to him any "counterrevolutionary" is a traitor, an appallingly broad definition. Thus in the mid-1960s, there were at least fifteen thousand so-called counterrevolutionaries serving terms in Cuban prisons by Castro's own admission, a figure reduced to three thousand in 1977, and to around five hundred in 1985, some of them resentenced for unclear reasons. In conversations with foreign visitors Castro defines counterrevolutionaries as those who have in some fashion risen against the revolution, but the regime includes even potential cultural and political dissenters in this category. He says that there are no "prisoners of conscience" in Cuba, but international organizations attempting to monitor the observance of human rights there report, with names, that a number of persons are imprisoned under an article of the Cuban penal code which punishes those who "incite against the social order, international solidarity or the socialist State by means of oral or written propaganda, or any other form, make, distribute, or possess propaganda of the character mentioned in (this) clause "

  Incitement by "oral . . . propaganda" is such an incredibly arbitrary concept that its rigorous (or capricious) application in Cuba nearly guarantees the absence of organized dissent in the Eastern European or even Soviet sense. And, indeed, no such dissent exists in Cuba as far as it can be ascertained on the island. Castro occasionally releases political prisoners as goodwill gestures toward foreign governments, groups or individuals (such as the group released in 1984 to the Reverend Jesse Jackson), but he has never defined the criteria under which he selects persons to be freed. Final decisions concerning crime and punishment in Cuba are Fidel Castro's personal province.

  Strangely, for example, Castro has sought on at least two occasions to give a last chance to men who conspired to kill him—perhaps out of a sense of loyalty to former guerrilla fighters who played important roles in the war, or out of his private notion of justice. Castro very seldom explains the motivations for his actions or makes them public unless it is absolutely necessary. These two stories have never before been told.

  The first one concerns Comandante Humberto Sori-Marín, a lawyer who was Castro's judge advocate at the Sierra headquarters and, simultaneously, was in charge of economic planning for the future. Sori helped to draft the revolution's first agrarian-reform law, signed by Castro in the mountains on October 10, 1958, while the fighting was still going on, and he became agriculture minister after the victory. Along with Universo Sánchez, Sori was a member of the revolutionary tribunal that sentenced to death Jesús Sosa Blanco, a Batista officer charged with multiple murders, at the first great "war criminals" trials at Havana's sports stadium. Sori was not invited to participate in the drafting of a more radical agrarian-reform law promulgated by Castro on May 17, 1959, and immediately came into conflict with Che Guevara, who accused the agriculture minister of being exceedingly moderate. This was part of the early power and ideological struggles within the revolution, and, rather than battle the unbending Che, Sori submitted his resignation from the cabinet. Castro tried hard to dissuade him (though he would not promise to keep Che off his back), but the lawyer left on June 14, 1959.

  During the summer, Sori began to plot against the regime and fled to the United States. In 1960 he returned clandestinely, apparently with the aid of the CIA, to link up with anti-Castro armed groups in the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba and to try to assassinate Fidel. Sori was captured, suffering a bullet wound in a shoot-out with state security agents, but his brothers Raúl and Mariano (Raúl had stayed in Cuba as a supporter of the revolution, and Mariano, who had left, returned from his Miami exile) succeeded in arranging a meeting with Castro to plea for Humberto's life. Castro proposed that Mariano accompany him at a prison encounter with Humberto (Raúl would have been regarded with suspicion by Humberto), but the Miami brother refused, fearing a violent confrontation. His fears proved right.

  As Mariano Sori-Marin would learn from a witness later, Castro went to see Humberto in prison and told him, "Humberto, you have betrayed us, and anyone but you would pay with his life." This was meant as encouragement to Humberto to ask Fidel for clemency that he was prepared to grant, wanting to be asked. Sori, however, reacted violently, insulting Castro and telling him, "You are the traitor of the revolution!" Fidel departed, and presently Sori was sentenced to be shot. He was executed on April 20,
1961, while Castro was leading his militias in defeating the invaders at the Bay of Pigs.

  The other story was that of Rolando Cubela Secades, a physician who led the Students' Revolutionary Directorate guerrilla forces in the mountains of central Cuba in the war against Batista. But Cubela was recruited by the CIA in 1963 under the top-secret AM/LASH project (which was even kept secret from President Kennedy) to assassinate Castro and overthrow the regime. Cubela enjoyed Castro's confidence (despite a confrontation between Castro and the directorate that nearly led to an armed clash the first week after victory), and in the mid-1960s was named envoy to UNESCO in Paris.

  Late in 1963, Cubela was contacted by the CIA in Paris and Madrid and advised that special weapons had been smuggled to him in Havana to assassinate Castro, which he had earlier agreed to do. But the Cuban secret service, one of the best in the world, learned of the plot. When Cubela arrived in Havana on a routine trip from Paris, Castro summoned him to a meeting at the Palace. According to witnesses, Fidel asked Cubela: "Is there anything special that you want to tell me?" but the doctor replied in the negative. He was arrested as he was leaving the Palace, and he testified at his trial that he had planned to "shoot Premier Castro with a high-powered telescopic rifle and later share in top posts of a counterrevolutionary regime." Had Cubela confessed the plot to Castro, the trial might have been averted. As it was, Cubela was sentenced to fifteen years in prison—a relatively mild sentence by Cuban revolutionary justice standards, which often led to executions, and even that sentence was reduced. Cubela now lives in Spain. Why did he receive such leniency?

  Apart from questions of betrayal and counterrevolution, Castro quietly practices personal loyalty toward old companions, making sure they live comfortably. In a great many instances, nice-sounding jobs were created for aging or less than highly qualified individuals because Fidel felt they must be given a sense of self-respect and of knowing that the revolution was eternally grateful for their deeds. This has caused no resentments: Most Cubans understand it. In many cases, on the other hand, Castro allowed his judgment to be clouded, naming old companions, for example, to ambassadorial posts where they wound up embarrassing Cuba before being recalled.

  On one occasion, Fidel demoted an "old" Communist from an important industrial post for revealing that the general manager of the establishment, who was a friend of Castro's from the days of Moncada, was "sleeping at his office, drunk as usual." Castro knew that the friend was an alcoholic who had to be gently removed from higher positions, and he had stopped by at the man's office to see how he was coming along. Hence his violent anger at the Communist, not an anti-Batista fighter, for his contemptuous slur on the old revolutionary.

  Even within the Castro brotherhood there are profound nuances among the knights, flowing from the length of their service, and, very humanly, from the nature of their direct relationship with Fidel and their own personalities. These factors define the present power constellation in revolutionary Cuba as they would elsewhere, except that among Cubans the personal element is particularly significant.

  As Armando Hart had emphasized, none of the Fidelista knights who gathered around Castro before his departure for Mexico in 1955 ever abandoned the faith. Those who survived the war stood by him when the new revolutionary socialist society was being given birth. But, as it happens, Hart is the only member of that first post-Batista cabinet—the "visible" government of the first year that drafted a short-lived "democratic" constitution for Cuba in February 1959—to remain in a ministerial position in the regime and be close to Castro. Most of the other ministers have fled the country and some have died.

  Aside from Fidel Castro, the revolutionary names best known outside of Cuba are Che Guevara and Raúl Castro. Guevara was killed in 1967, leading his own guerrilla force in Bolivia, and even before he embarked on this unwinnable enterprise, he had severed—apparently voluntarily—all his ties to Castro and Cuba. The eternal critic and ideological maximalist, Guevara really had no place in Castro's scheme to institutionalize the Cuban revolution in full collaboration with the Soviet Union, which Che increasingly regarded equally as rapacious as the "capitalists" in dealing with the Third World. In fact, Che's last public speech, delivered in Algiers in February 1965, bitterly accused the Soviets for imposing unjust trade relations on underdeveloped nations.

  Sadly but cynically, it seems that today the romantic and oddly attractive Che has more political value to Cuba and world revolutionary causes as a dead martyr than as an aging rebel with nothing but his "heroic guerrillero" past to live on. As Guevara's father tells it to friends, Che and Fidel were entirely different human beings, though intellectually and politically they complemented each other. Che was one of the very few people in Cuba capable of stimulating Castro's intellect, and it is a grievous loss that no record of their wartime conversations exists (there are only the Sierra letters and messages). Fidel does not talk about it. In any event, Che's face stares down at Havana's Revolution Plaza from an immense billboard opposite the statue of José Martí and Castro's massive Palace of the Revolution beyond it.

  The present power structure under Castro and the relative importance of the figures in it are generally little known and understood, even in Cuba. First come the old companions. Among them, Raúl Castro is number one, having been at his older brother's side since before Moncada. His special responsibility is the armed forces. He is general of the army and defense minister in addition to all his titles as Fidel's deputy for everything—and he is his designated successor and second secretary of the Communist party. He conducts much of the day-to-day business of governing Cuba as his brother devotes more time to his global and ideological concerns. With a clipped mustache and a roundish face, Raúl resembles a self-satisfied Spanish grocer, but he is most respected for his toughness and his skills. The few foreigners from the non-Communist world who meet Raúl generally find him quite charming and interesting.

  Raúl divides his government leadership functions (he is first vice-president of the Council of Ministers) with Osmany Cienfuegos Gorriarán, a member since 1986 of the party's Politburo, long a vice-president of the council and secretary of its Executive Committee, who has gradually become one of Cuba's most powerful though little-known men. An architect by training, the mustachioed, bespectacled Osmany Cienfuegos is not a knight of the Castro companions order; he participated in no revolutionary combat in Cuba, but chose to sit out the Sierra war with a Communist group in Mexico. However, he was the elder brother of the wildly popular Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos, an old companion whom Castro named Chief of Staff of the Rebel Army early in 1959. Camilo Cienfuegos disappeared in a mysterious aircraft accident in October of that year, days after he had gone to Camaguey on Fidel's orders to arrest Huber Matos. A month later, Osmany Cienfuegos was appointed public works minister in the place of Manuel Ray who had resigned over the Matos case, while Camilo was entering the pantheon of martyred revolutionary heroes.

  As a university student, Osmany belonged to the Youth of the Popular Socialist party (as did Raúl Castro), which now is called simply Communist Youth, and he is a hard-line Communist. Not well liked in Cuba, Osmany appears very rarely in public; he is the classic quiet, gray "inside man," and he is an example of the fact that it is no longer absolutely necessary to be a Fidelista knight to wield power on the island. Still he does not enjoy personal closeness to Castro or easy camaraderie.

  Until 1986 the next most powerful man was Comandante Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, who until then had served as interior minister and was a member of the party's Political Bureau, and vice-president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers. His departure from the ministry (he had served twice in that post) and the Politburo was a major surprise. Castro offered no explanation during the Communist party's Third Congress in February 1986 except that the Politburo had to be "rejuvenated." But it seems that Valdés, who was kept on the party's Central Committee and given a vague technical assignment, lost a power struggle with Raúl Castro, who
would not tolerate a rival power center in the police-intelligence area of the regime. Valdés was the only top leader besides Fidel Castro to customarily wear the olive-green uniform, and he has kept his Sierra pointed beard, giving him a slightly satanic countenance. Raúl Castro often appears in casual clothes, such as a black leather jacket over shirt and necktie. The ex-interior minister is one of three revolutionary veterans to carry the title of Comandante de la Revolución, a great distinction that even Raúl Castro does not possess; the others are Juan Almeida Bosque, the black army Chief of Staff, and Guillermo García Frías, the first Sierra peasant to join the rebels, though neither has much political clout (García also lost his Politburo seat and his post as transport minister, mainly because he was incompetent.)