Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  The path to victory had been made easier by the political vacuum that had enveloped all the institutions. After Batista’s coup in 1952, many Cubans had been prepared to put up with him, so long as he offered an end to political and criminal violence on the streets. But things only grew worse: the corruption and mob rule reached new peaks, while the people’s living standards, previously among the highest in Latin America, went into decline. Windfall profits due to a rise in world sugar prices provided some relief, but then unemployment rose in the course of 1958 from 8.9 to 18 percent; the poor became poorer, and the relative prosperity of the middle layers was eroded by inflation and falling sugar prices. Already in the first two years following Batista’s coup, income per head of the population had fallen 18 percent; in 1958 it fell back to the level of 1947, and just between 1956 and 1957 prices for staple foods shot up 40 percent. The US economy, dominating Cuba in the same old free-and-easy manner, made even sections of the middle and upper classes susceptible to Castro’s struggle for national independence.93 Soon the “voluntary” payment of taxes to the revolution was running so high that the rebels often had more money than ammunition, and Castro could even instruct his Comandante Almeida to pay, if necessary, one dollar for a single rifle bullet.94

  Batista, the mulatto son of a construction worker from Oriente, had not seized power as the representative of a particular social layer, but had supported himself on army officers who had risen alongside him in the 1930s; socially and politically he had no fatherland. The officer elite recruited from the middle and upper classes – the elite to which the Cienfuegos naval mutineers belonged - had many reservations vis-à-vis this power cartel.95 Lacking stable roots, Batista could survive only so long as he maintained a social balance, if necessary through terror, and used his authority to safeguard the interests of economically powerful groups in Cuba and the United States. Besides, there was no civilian political alternative. The parties or political groupings, internally divided, discredited by corruption and gangsterism, were incapable of renewing themselves. Admittedly, after the bloody crushing of the revolt at Cienfuegos, there were officers with links to the Americans who considered the possibility of another military putsch. But the indulgence of Batista by conservative Washington, and by the US ambassador in Havana, Earl T. Smith, frustrated such plans until it was too late. In the end there was no real alternative to Castro, especially as he had let every other player know that he would simply go on fighting if an attempt was made to deny the revolution its victory.

  4

  The Young Victor

  Communists and “barbudos”

  “Night falls as we, the barbudos, come down from the mountains looking like the saints of old,” writes Carlos Franqui in his reminiscences. “People rush out to meet us. They are wild; they touch us, kiss our filthy beards.”1 Before them lay the glittering lights of Santiago de Cuba. Five years, five months and five days after the abortive attack on the Moncada Barracks, they had attained their goal. “This was a real New Year’s party, and a charge of collective joy ran through the rebels. One of them, though, felt nostalgic, as if he had left the one thing that mattered most to him back in the Sierra: Fidel Castro. It may be that peace is more frightening to a fighting man than war.” For Castro, the revolution had by no means ended when the guns fell silent. On that night of January 2, just as Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos were entering Havana, he made a speech before a crowd of 200,000 in Santiago. Flanked by the new president, Urrutia, and Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes, the man who had baptized him and once saved his life, he declared:

  The Revolution begins now.… This time, luckily for Cuba, the Revolution will truly come into power. It will not be like 1898, when the North Americans came and made themselves masters of our country.… Neither thieves nor traitors, nor meddlers; this time, it will really be the Revolution.… I am sure … that for the first time the republic will really be entirely free.2

  If Castro stressed that “this war has been won by the people,” it was by no means a rhetorical device to ingratiate himself with his audience. Without the determination of the majority of the population, his revolution could scarcely have emerged from the forests of the Sierra Maestra. Numerically and in terms of weapons, the rebel forces had always been inferior to the US-armed troops of Batista, although by December 1959, towards the end of the war, they had grown to a total of 7,250 fighters.3

  The number of casualties is even today uncertain. According to Castro 6,000 people lost their lives during seven years of Batista’s dictatorship up to August 1958, while the paper Revolución referred on January 2, 1959, to 10,000 dead, and a special edition of Bohemia even spoke on January 11, 1959, of a total of 20,000.4

  On January 3 Castro started out on his 600-mile victory parade across the island, by open jeep, helicopter, or on top of a captured tank. Surrounded by fellow-combatants, in an olive-green uniform with an amulet of Our Lady of Mercy around his neck, he always seemed to have a cigar between his teeth and his American semiautomatic M-2 rifle with telescopic sights slung casually on his shoulder. For the last part of the journey, his nine-year-old son Fidelito was able to join him from New York; then, on January 8, 1959, the column finally entered Havana to the sound of church bells and factory and ship sirens. When Castro saw his old Granma lying in the harbor, he stopped for a moment lost in emotional recollection.

  Enthusiastic crowds filled the streets and greeted him as a savior. His suggestive capacity was on display as never before, as he captivated hundreds of thousands for the several hours of a speech freely delivered from the balcony of the presidential palace. For the British Ambassador of the time, he was “a mixture of José Martí, Robin Hood, Garibaldi and Jesus Christ.”5 New York Times correspondent Ruby Hart Philips noted: “As I watched Castro I realized the magic of his personality.… He seemed to weave a hypnotic net over his listeners, making them believe in his own concept of the functions of government and the destiny of Cuba.”6

  The taking of the capital had gone quite smoothly, with no orgy of bloodletting. For just a few hours before Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos entered with their men, there was some shooting and looting, as well as attacks on unknown torturers who had served Batista; a residual group from the Directorio Revolucionario briefly occupied the presidential palace and the university. What were objects of blind violence, however, were the parking meters and casinos, whose receipts had gone straight into the pockets of Batista and his friends. The British journalist Edwin Tetlow reported that Castro’s soldiers were “one of the best behaved armies you could imagine.… To a man they behaved impeccably.”7 “So that no one will one day be able to make dishonorable accusations against our revolution,” Castro had already warned his people in November to observe the strictest discipline during the transfer of power. No doubt he had the street disorders of 1948 in Bogotá still before him. There was to be no “looting, destruction of property, unnecessary bloodshed. No one should take revenge on anyone else. The spies and the elements known for their inhuman acts against the people should be arrested and interned in prisons to be later judged by revolutionary tribunals.”8

  Tad Szulc, the former New York Times reporter who personally knew Castro and had the privilege of observing him closely over a long period, wrote in his biography:

  In peace, as in war, Castro was a master both of strategy and of timing.… He knew exactly what he was doing, … his apparent improvisations had been carefully thought out, … nothing was left to chance.… Castro understood above all else that his own personality was, as a purely practical proposition, the key to the success of his entire enterprise. Having always insisted that propaganda was vital in mobilizing the masses for a revolution, Castro immediately seized on television, which was already quite well-developed in Cuba in 1959 [there were some 400,000 sets on the island].… He was a natural television personality and, literally, he sold the revolution on TV.9

  Hugh Thomas agrees: “The Cuban civil war had been really a political campa
ign in a tyranny, with the campaigner being defended by armed men.”10 For Cuba, January 1, 1959 represented the first real turning point of the century. Under Batista the rule of law had finally broken down: the corrupt system had been able to maintain itself only with the backing of a “clean-handed” United States, which had refused to acknowledge that the state system there was dissolving before its eyes. Now, 90 years after the beginning of the struggle for independence, 64 years after the death of Martí, Cubans had their goal in sight.

  The young Castro stood for a radical Cuban nationalism interspersed with elements of utopian socialism – what Hugh Thomas called “Garibaldian romanticism.” The primary goals of the revolution included a drive to achieve literacy for the whole population, a solid and free public health service, and an immediate land reform. Castro’s admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt had lasted beyond his school years. Indeed, while he was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines, he declared himself to be a supporter of the New Deal of the thirties, and in the Sierra Maestra he is even said to have carried with him a photograph of the former American president. “I want to find out as much as I can about Roosevelt and his policies: in the agricultural sector … , in the area of social programs … , restructuring industry … , and the general economy,” he wrote from prison to friends on April 15, 1954. “The US economy was stagnant and on the brink of collapse when Roosevelt gave it a shot in the arm … , reducing certain privileges and attacking powerful interests.… Roosevelt actually did some wonderful things, and some of his countrymen have never forgiven him for doing them.”11 If Castro had been dealing with a similar-minded president to the north, before and after January 1959, the history of relations between Cuba and the United States might have been in many respects different. But no “new deal” was possible with Eisenhower’s Republican administration, still marked by the witch-hunting of the McCarthy years, or with an economic elite still trapped in a colonial mindset.

  Even so, a Communist regime did not yet appear to be on the cards in Cuba. In Bohemia, whose special edition of a million copies was the most widely read paper of the times, an editorial of January 11 under the heading “Against Communism” acclaimed Castro not only for his statement that “the new government will decline any relations with dictatorial states,” but also because in this connection he named “first of all the Soviet Union.” The editorial went on:

  There cannot be the slightest agreement between those who have begun to emancipate their people and those who suppress the freedoms of a dozen European states, who shot down the unarmed Hungarian people [in the uprising of 1956] and who have built the worst example of despotism anywhere in the world.… As it marches surely on, the Revolution is Cuban and democratic in its core and in its conceptions.12

  The first government under President Manuel Urrutia – the judge already selected by Castro in the Sierra Maestra – was made up almost entirely of representatives from the bourgeoisliberal camp. The prime minister was José Miró Cardona, the first chairman of the Havana-based Bar Association and Castro’s former professor at university; while the foreign minister was Roberto Agramonte, successor to “Eddy” Chibás as chairman and presidential candidate of the Orthodox Party. In Rufo López-Fresquet as finance minister and Felipe Pazos (a signatory of the Miami Pact) as head of the national bank, the new government had two economic experts with a solid international reputation, especially in Washington. The 26th of July Movement was represented in the 15-man cabinet by no more than four members of its moderate wing: Education Minister Armando Hart, and three of Castro’s comrades from the Sierra. Faustino Pérez, the doctor who had survived those days in the cane field by Castro’s side, became minister for the recovery of misappropriated state property; Augustino Martínez Sánchez became defense minister; and Humberto Sorí-Marín, who had drafted the law on land reform for the “liberated territories” in the Sierra, took the post of agriculture minister. The only cabinet member whose past showed some Communist slant was Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado from Cienfuegos, who, like Miró Cardona, was a former chairman of the Bar Association and was now made the minister responsible for revolutionary legislation. The Communist PSP remained outside.

  Fidel Castro himself remained without ministerial responsibilities, officially content with the position of supreme commander of the armed forces, and he also kept his three closest collaborators (Raúl, Che, and Camilo Cienfuegos) in the background. They had enough to do consolidating the victory of the revolution at both military and civil levels. Castro needed no government office, for in reality he was the government. This is how Franqui summed it up: “We all knew what Fidel was – the undisputed caudillo of the revolution. What Fidel was thinking no one knew.… As far as ideology was concerned, nothing was clear, and Fidel was the greatest enigma of all.… Now in Cuba power was concentrated in Fidel’s hands. Urrutia was president of a government that didn’t govern.”13

  Behind the scenes, the country’s future direction was the object of intense battles – but not for long. According to Franqui, there were four main currents: “One was radically anti-imperialist, one was democratic-reformist, one was conservative and pro-United States, and one was Marxist and pro-Soviet Union.” It was the fourth of these, including Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ramiro Valdés, which emerged victorious. Valdés had been Raúl Castro’s second-in-command on the second front in the Sierra Maestra and, like him, was a member of the still officially scorned PSP. “The Granma group … was the real new power in the nation.”14 And, under the name “Bureau for Revolutionary Planning and Coordination,” it established a kind of parallel government for Castro, to which his friend from the bogotazo days in Colombia, Alfredo Guevara, as well as Vilma Espín (now Raúl’s wife) also belonged. At first they used to meet regularly in Castro’s penthouse suite on the twenty-third floor of the Habana Libre hotel (which had originally come into operation in 1958 as the Havana Hilton), but from March 1959 a former Orthodox Party politician also made available to Castro a more securely screened villa in the nearby fishing port of Cojímar, where Hemingway had once found the model for the hero of The Old Man and the Sea. Castro had another office in the Havana district of Miramar, close to the Chaplin Theater. But most important of all was the modest “office-apartment” he shared with Celia Sánchez on 11th Street in Velado, which was also the location of his secret military command.

  Castro’s style of work and leadership was as chaotic as his living arrangements. “He never calls meetings to discuss what is to be done,” Franqui observed. “He improvises and never shares power.… He never told us what he was thinking, but he didn’t have to because he knew that he was the power and that any government was, therefore, meaningless.”15

  Celia, the doctor’s daughter from Manzanillo, had been his closest companion and partner in the Sierra Maestra, and despite his numerous affairs she remained this until her death from cancer in 1980. He too evidently had many an amorous interest after the victory of the revolution. The relationship with Naty Revuelta, whose husband had meanwhile left her and who was living in Vedado with their daughter Alina, also warmed up again – although, watched suspiciously by Celia, he kept it on the back burner, and had only sporadic contact with the ever more unruly Alina.

  Naturally there was another reason for the distance: the stunningly beautiful Marita Lorenz from Bremen, 19-year-old daughter of the captain of the MS Berlin. When the cruise ship put into Havana Harbor on February 23, 1959, one visit on board was enough for Castro to fall in love. Using all his powers of persuasion, he got her to move down from New York – officially as a translator – and to live close to him in the Habana Libre.

  Marita Lorenz has written that, in the middle of October 1959, when she was six months pregnant, she was given a laced drink in her hotel suite, taken to an unknown place and subjected to an abortion – although she is not sure that this was on Castro’s orders and does not exclude the possibility that it was a CIA operation, as the agency seems to have had her under obse
rvation for some time because of her proximity to the Cuban leader. In September 2000, shortly before his death, Castro’s long-time assistant Jesús Yáñez Pelletier (who had since fallen out of favor) thought that Marita Lorenz had herself decided on the operation against Castro’s wishes, and that it had been performed by a doctor friendly both to Castro and himself. In any event, the abortion brought the affair to an end after eight-and-a-half months; Marita Lorenz found herself stranded in Miami, where the CIA began to involve her in its plots against Castro.

  Che Guevara, too, fell in love again – with Aleida March, a pretty 22-year-old teacher from an upper-class background, who had joined the guerrilla forces during their advance on Santa Clara. Guevara’s first wife, the Peruvian Hilda Gadea, and their daughter had initially remained in Mexico and then returned to Peru, but in February she came to Havana, to be confronted with the end of the relationship. Guevara and Aleida March, who were later to marry, had moved into a house by the sea in Tarará, miles west of Havana, where the family of Castro’s ex-wife Mirta had its summer residence. Health factors (asthma attacks brought on by psychological stress) and a need for discretion during preparations for the new political course had led him to withdraw there for the time being. Meanwhile, a Council of Ministers decree had, with him in mind, retroactively conferred Cuban citizenship on all foreigners who had fought for the revolution during a period of at least two years – a provision which enabled him to continue speaking and acting for the revolution. It was thus under his direction that the “Granma group” prepared in Tarará many of the revolutionary laws that would be issued over the coming months, including the most important one on land reform.