Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  3

  The Young Revolutionary

  Storm and stress: Moncada

  Chibás, Castro’s first political teacher, mentor and model, the catalyzer of his radical energies, was dead. President Prío had pocketed some 90 million dollars from the state coffers and gone into exile in the United States.1 Cuba was again in the hands of gangsters’ pal Batista, whose coup had received Washington’s seal of zealous diplomacy as well as the ecclesiastical seal of absolution from the Archbishop of Havana, Manuel Arteaga y Betancourt,2 and on that date of March 10, a hastily organized parade of the oligarchy in front of the presidential palace rendered due homage to the new ruler and distributor of sinecures.3 All that remained to Fidel Castro were the ideas bequeathed by Martí and Chibás and a mysterious doorkey that was delivered to him on the very day of the coup. It fitted the lock of a luxury flat, so that he could use it as a hiding-place in an emergency.

  The flat belonged to one of the most beautiful women in Havana: Natalia Revuelta. She was tall, fair, prosperous and well-educated, having been brought up in the United States and France and married to the well-known Cuban heart surgeon Orlando Fernández-Ferrer. For a long time she had been a secret admirer of the attractive rising star of politics; now they got to know each other better and fell in love. “Naty” Revuelta, with her upper-class façade, also played an important role in Castro’s early plans for underground opposition to the dictatorship. She gave him money, even selling some of her jewelry and books, and she allowed a secret store of weapons to be kept in her house.

  A few days after the coup, at a gathering of the Ortodoxos at the grave of party founder Chibás, Castro furiously declared war on the dictator: “If Batista grabbed power by force, he must be thrown out by force!”4 Before the Supreme Court, he instituted proceedings against the coup that Batista was shamelessly calling a revolution. He accused the dictator of violating the very Constitution that he had issued in 1940 together with Communist members of his government, and which was now the first item he had revoked. Although for 12 years it had been more abused than really applied, it was still considered the most progressive Constitution in the continent.

  It is worth noting the arguments Castro used to challenge Batista’s legal justification for his takeover. Batista and his men claimed that, because their coup d’état was a revolution, it automatically canceled the previous system of laws and instituted a new legality; the “revolution” could not therefore be condemned as illegal. Castro retorted: “Instead of revolution, there is restoration; instead of progress and order, there is barbarism and brute force.… Without a new conception of the state, of society, of the judicial order based on profound historical and philosophical principles, there will be no revolution that generates laws.”5 This line of argument – which would later play an important role in establishing his own moral credentials – implied that, in circumstances when it served social progress, enjoyed popular support and was more than just a military seizure of power, a revolution might be thoroughly justified. The theoretical basis for the legitimacy of a revolution had been provided by the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as by Marxism and the writings of Martí.

  Castro immediately got down to the job of building his revolutionary movement.

  I began to organize the first combatants, the first fighters – the first cells – within a few weeks. First, I tried to set up a small, mimeographed newspaper and some underground radio stations.… We became true conspirators.… At the beginning, that movement had one professional cadre: me.… We organized that movement in just 14 months, and it came to have 1,200 men.… All that effort was devoted to the organization, training and equipping of the Movement. How many times I met with the future fighters, shared my ideas with them and gave them instructions!6

  The core recruits came from the radical wing of the Orthodox Party. As to the Communists, then operating under the name of the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), Castro showed that his attitude had not changed since the days of the bogotazo in Colombia.

  It wasn’t that I had any prejudices against the Communist Party; rather, I realized that the Communist Party was very isolated and that it would be very difficult to carry out my revolutionary plan from within its ranks. That’s why I had to choose: to become a disciplined member of the Communist Party or to create a revolutionary organization that could act under Cuban conditions.7

  He was also distrustful of them, since the period between 1940 and 1944 when they had had two ministers in Batista’s government.

  The Communists were no less distrustful: Castro was, in their view, a hothead and adventurer who did not fit their strict cadre system; he treated the pure doctrine of Marxism-Leninism not as an absolute, but only as a building block for his own fidelista conception of social revolution. For the Communists, then, there was no future in Castro and his plans. Nevertheless, some of the closest comrades in his movement were either young Communists or people influenced by Communism; indeed, his own brother Raúl became a member of the Communist Youth in 1953. Melba Hernández, who in those days had been part of Castro’s inner circle, later told Tad Szulc:

  In our ranks in that period there was never talk about Communism, socialism or Marxism-Leninism as an ideology, but we did speak of the day when the revolution would come to power, that all the estates of the aristocracy must then be handed over to the people and must be used by the children for whom we are fighting.8

  With a group of handpicked comrades, Castro spent months carefully preparing his action against Batista; they also eventually composed a victory anthem and drew up a manifesto. His plan was to capture the massive Moncada fortress in Santiago de Cuba, to break open its arsenal of weapons, and to spark a popular uprising in the east of Cuba that would spread to the whole country and bring the regime crashing down. Only his closest associates were in the know – one of these being Naty Revuelta, who, in the event of success at Moncada, had the task of broadcasting the news over the radio.

  On July 24, 1953, the 162 people selected for the attack were sent in small groups from Havana to the rented “El Siboney” chicken farm a couple of miles east of Santiago. When Castro disclosed the plan there, some of them recoiled in horror: 10 wanted to pull out and were placed in detention. The weapons at their disposal for the dangerous undertaking were relatively modest. Juan Almeida – a mulatto bricklayer from Oriente Province who, half a century later, was still said to be Castro’s most loyal and influential follower – recalled: “I waited for my rifle like the Messiah. When I saw that the one they gave me was a .22-calibre [hunting rifle] I froze up.”9

  In histories of Cuba published under Castro, Sunday, July 26, 1953, marks the official beginning of his revolution. At 5:15 a.m., 111 men and two women (Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría) in ill-fitting uniforms set off in 26 American limousines on the road to the Moncada Barracks, which on that day were occupied by some 700 troops. At the same time, a second group of 27 men were preparing an attack on the Bayamó Barracks further to the west, in order to close there the narrow road that carried military supplies between the west and east of the island. As it was carnival time, Castro reckoned that many soldiers would either be on leave or be lying drunk in bed.

  Although an advance guard managed to penetrate the barracks and briefly to pin down a dormitory full of dazed, scantily clad soldiers, both attacks soon broke down under withering fire from the defenders. Castro recalled:

  By a terrible mistake, the best-armed half of our troops was delayed at the city gates and so was not present at the vital moment.… My car ran into a military patrol armed with machine guns, and the struggle began. Our reserve division, which had almost all our heavy weapons, … made a wrong turn, and completely lost its way in a city that was unfamiliar to them.10

  Fidel himself, in the front rank, tried to cover his comrades by shooting wildly at the soldiers but miraculously came through unscathed, whereas some other men fell around him. Finally, he accepte
d failure and ordered a retreat. There was no greater success at Bayamó, where shying horses and a barking guard-dog sounded the alarm and roused the troops in the barracks to reach for their weapons. The rebels made a mad dash to escape their pursuers, but many of them were captured shortly afterwards. Castro, together with Juan Almeida and a few others, managed to flee to the Sierra Maestra. “Naty” Revuelta, with a group of fellow-conspirators, seized a radio station in Havana, read out a revolutionary manifesto invoking the name of Martí, played Beethoven’s Eroica symphony in celebration of the day, and then just had time to go underground and escape detection.

  During the attacks on the barracks, 19 soldiers were killed and 27 wounded – against eight killed on Castro’s side. But 61 more rebels were horrifically tortured and murdered after their capture, eyes gouged out and genitals or other body parts ripped off. Haydée Santamaría lost her fiancé as well as her brother Abel, who had been Castro’s deputy during the action. The order to kill the detainees had come down indirectly from Batista and his chief of staff Francisco Tabernilla, who had thereby disregarded all the provisions of the law that held jailers responsible for the physical integrity of their prisoners. Secret photographs of the corpses, published in the magazine Bohemia, shocked the whole country and unleashed a wave of sympathy for the rebels.

  Five days after the failed attacks, a 12-man army patrol surprised Castro’s own little band as they were sleeping. Once again, Castro was within a hair’s breadth of death, but the black officer in charge of the patrol, Lieutenant Pedro Manuel Sarría, stopped his men from executing the revolutionary on the spot. “We were convinced they were really going to kill us.… [But Sarría] put pressure on the soldiers, and then, more quietly, he repeated, ‘Don’t shoot. You can’t kill ideas; you can’t kill ideas.’ … He repeated this around three times: ‘You can’t kill ideas.’”11 Together with Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes, the officer ensured that Castro and his companions escaped the blood lust of Moncada commander Alberto del Río Chaviano and reached prison in one piece.12

  A total of 29 rebels came up for trial in Santiago between September 21 and October 16, 1953: four (including Fidel’s brother Raúl) were sentenced to 13 years in prison, 20 to 10 years, three to three years, and the two women to seven months. Fidel Castro received a term of 15 years, following an extempore speech lasting four hours, “History Will Absolve Me,” which he wrote up in prison and smuggled out in matchboxes for publication. It soon became famous as the authoritative political manifesto of “Castroism.”

  The main points in this reformist rather than revolutionary program call for redistribution of land to small farmers, workers’ participation in company profits, confiscation of illicit gains, economic conversion of Cuba from a supplier of raw materials to a producer of industrial goods, and reintroduction of the 1940 Constitution revoked by Batista. Castro ended his speech on October 16 with the words: “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me!”13

  The next day, Castro was flown to the prison island of Isla de Pinos, where he joined his 24 comrades as Prisoner No. 3859. They made him their leader, and he immediately began preparations to rebuild his revolutionary movement. “I would honestly love to revolutionize this country from one end to the other!” he wrote on April 15, 1954. “I would not be stopped by the hatred and ill will of a few thousand people, including some of my relatives, half the people I know, two-thirds of my fellow professionals, and four-fifths of my ex-schoolmates.”14 Fidel sent long letters to his friends – especially the radio journalist Luís Conte Agüero, his most important contact in Havana, and his half-sister Lidia. His sure sense that public relations are often as important as the operation itself was immediately apparent. On April 17, 1954, he wrote to Melba Hernández, after her early release: “Our propaganda must not let up for one minute, because it is the heart of the struggle.”15

  Quite a different Castro is revealed in a series of letters to “Beloved Naty,” which were published only four decades later.16 “If you have suffered in many ways on account of me, think that I would gladly lay down my life for your honor and your happiness.… Despite the wretchedness of this existence, there are certain enduring things, eternal things, such as my feelings for you, which will accompany me indelibly into the grave,” he wrote on November 7, 1953. And on January 5, 1954, he confessed: “Whenever I read your letters, they confirm my belief that nature has been extraordinarily generous with you in terms of your soul and your intelligence – which is not to forget for a moment other, non-mental forms.” On January 31 he again went into raptures:

  All your letters have a good effect on me and hold my interest; they are a pleasure that never subsides. The forms are as diverse as the stars.… What distinguishes one ray of light from another ray of light? Nothing. And yet, there is always a different color shining in them. One kiss is like another, but lovers never grow weary. There is a honey that never hardens. That is the secret of your letters.… It matters not that it will be a little longer before I can hold you tight in my arms, so tight that I will squeeze you like a flower between my hands. Nor did I have to see you to love you even more than months ago, just because of the fine charm of your letters and the ardent affection that speaks in them.

  By no means, however, did they exchange only whispers of love. Castro’s epistolary discourses on philosophical and historical themes testify to very wide reading on his part.

  Only one letter from Natalia Revuelta to Castro has so far been published – in the bitter memoirs of the daughter they later had together, Alina. But this is enough to show how captivated she was by him.

  I feel so tiny beside your immeasurable knowledge, your philosophy and your tenderness. You know so much, but what impresses me even more is the flattering and generous way in which you let me share in everything you achieve so naturally. You take me by the hand and lead me through the history of mankind, philosophy and literature; … you open up to me new, unexplored and surprising horizons.… No, Fidel, all this wealth is inside you … ; you were born with it, and it will die with you.… It would be very dishonest of me not to say that it makes me very happy that you are the way you are, and that it would fill me with pride if you never changed. As always, your Naty.17

  A radio broadcast that Castro heard in his cell on the morning of July 5, 1953, started a process that would soon result in the end of his marriage. The report stated that the ministry of internal affairs had “sacked” Mrs Mirta Díaz-Balart. He was stunned: he had no idea that his wife was supposed to have worked behind his back for the Batista regime, along with her brother, Castro’s student friend Rafael Díaz-Balart, who had risen to become deputy to Interior Minister Ramón Hermida. At first Castro explained the whole thing as one of Hermida’s little intrigues, and in a letter to Luís Conte Agüero he attacked the interior minister for his homosexuality. In the end, Hermida had a private meeting with Castro in prison and claimed that his brother-in-law “Rafaelito,” who was “always acting like a spoiled brat,” was the only one behind it.18 Rafael took his revenge by publicly disclosing his superior’s visit to the prisoner, but all this meant was that both minister and deputy minister lost their jobs.

  The marriage ended in divorce in the spring of 1955, and a year later Mirta married a politician in the Orthodox Party.19 The struggle for custody of their son Fidelito – temporarily “kidnapped” by one side or the other to the United States, Mexico, or elsewhere – would last for many years before Fidel came out on top.

  On May 15, 1955, after one year and seven months in jail, public pressure and the mediation of Archbishop Pérez Serantes (who apparently argued that they no longer posed any danger) secured the release of Castro and his associates as part of a wider amnesty.20 Already at the prison gates, Castro declared that he intended to remain in Cuba and to continue his struggle there. Condemning the bomb attacks that had been shaking Havana for some time, he expressed a suspicion that the government itself was mounting them in order to justify further repression
. For: “No one with any sense can think that setting off a bomb in any old doorway can cause the fall of a government.”21

  First, as he had promised, Castro took “Naty” in his arms; they met in a secretly rented apartment, and their daughter Alina was born the following year, on March 19, 1956.22 Natalia’s husband was bitter about the liaison, but to keep up the bourgeois façade he initially accepted the child and agreed that it should bear the family name. Anyway, by then Castro had long been living abroad.

  On June 12, 1955, Fidel Castro, still a member of the Orthodox Party, founded his own political organization in the shape of the 26th of July Movement. The chairman: Fidel Castro. It was done without any public announcement, but he and his friends must have realized that they were no longer safe in Cuba, as Batista had openly threatened violence: “The governing parties have brains, ears, and also hands.”23 By chance Castro heard that a car had already been riddled with bullets, so that his corpse could be placed there to make it look as if he had been killed in a shoot-out with the police. He decided to go into exile.24 On July 7, the day he left Havana to join Raúl in Mexico, he wrote a letter to his comrade Carlos Franqui which the latter published in the popular magazine Bohemia:

  I am packing for my departure from Cuba, but I have had to borrow money even to pay for my passport.… All doors to a peaceful political struggle have been closed to me. Like Martí, I think the time has come to seize our rights instead of asking for them, to grab instead of beg for them. Cuban patience has its limits. I will live somewhere in the Caribbean. There is no going back possible on this kind of journey, and if I return, it will be with tyranny beheaded at my feet.25

  “Che,” the Argentinean

  Soon after his arrival in Mexico, Castro met a well-known fellow-Cuban, the one-eyed Alberto Bayo Giroud. This 65-year-old, famous (or notorious) as an old warhorse and expert in guerrilla warfare, had fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s armies and in Nicaragua against Anastasio Somoza. Bayo later recalled of Castro: