Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  It did not escape Castro’s notice that from autumn 1960 the CIA was engaged in extensive operations to bring down the revolutionary government. On October 20, 1960, Ambassador Bonsal was summoned to Washington for “consultations,” and in the closing months of his presidency Eisenhower imposed the first embargo on Cuban exports, with exceptions only on humanitarian grounds. In December the contract for the purchase of Cuba’s 1961 sugar crop was suspended. On January 3, 1961, two years after the revolution and two and a half weeks before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as president, Eisenhower finally broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba.

  Decades later Kennedy’s special adviser, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, noted that “the assassination project was initially an integral part of the invasion scheme.”29 He quoted Dulles’s deputy director at the CIA, Richard Bissell, the man directly responsible for the invasion, as having said: “The assassination was intended to reinforce the plan.… Later, the Mafia became associated with the plan when [the CIA’s link to the Mafia, Robert] Maheu brought in Mafia bosses [Salvatore ‘Momo’] Giancana and [Johnny] Roselli.”30 Roselli was head of the Mafia in Las Vegas, the city built up as a gambler’s paradise after the loss of Cuba. Giancana ran the show in Chicago, and it was later claimed that he had shared a mistress with President Kennedy: Judith Exner. Santos Trafficante, who had meanwhile become Mafia boss in Miami, was also included in the plans.

  In August 1960, with Dulles’s approval, Bissell approached Colonel Sheffield Edwards with a view to establishing contact with the Mafia.31 Four days before Castro’s September trip to the UN General Assembly one of Edwards’s men, Jim O’Connell, met Maheu at the Hilton Plaza Hotel in New York and let him in on the assassination plan. Maheu arranged a number of further meetings with O’Connell, Roselli, Giancana, and Trafficante, both in New York and in Miami.32 Bissell informed Dulles that “contact had been made with the Mafia.”33 A sum of 200,000 was set aside within the invasion budget for the murder operation.34

  On October 18, 1960, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI surprised Bissell with a memorandum showing that he knew of Giancana’s involvement in the CIA plot to assassinate Castro:

  During recent conversation with several friends, Giancana stated that Fidel Castro was to be done away with very shortly.… He allegedly indicated that he had already met with the assassin-to-be on three occasions.… Giancana claimed that everything had been perfected for the killing of Castro, and that the “assassin” had arranged with a girl … to drop a “pill” in some drink or food of Castro’s.35

  The girl in question was Marita Lorenz, Castro’s former German girlfriend. She claimed that one day a CIA agent had shown her a photo of her aborted fetus in the Habana Libre suite and told her in reference to Castro: “He did that to you!” Suffering from shock, and disappointed at the course of their affair, she then allowed herself to be drawn into the CIA-Mafia plans to assassinate the Cuban leader.36 Agent Frank Sturgis talked her into visiting Castro in Havana, to kill him with an almost untraceable pill specially prepared from shellfish toxin by the CIA’s Technical Services Division. “I got the order to recruit her,” Sturgis later recalled. “From a secret service point of view she was pure gold. And I cultivated her until she was ready to poison Castro.”37 She is supposed to have been promised 2 million, then 6 million dollars, for her part in the operation.

  Robert Maheu claims that on March 11, 1961, at a meeting in the Hilton-Fontainebleau Hotel at Miami Beach with Mafia bosses Trafficante and Giancana, he handed over the poison and 10,000 dollars in cash to the Cuban exiles’ link-man to the Mafia, Manuel Antonio Varona. Marita Lorenz says that she eventually received the pills from Frank Sturgis, concealed them in her make-up box, and set off for Havana. Shortly afterwards, when she met Castro again at his Habana Libre penthouse for which she still had a key, she was overcome with emotion and lost the heart to go ahead. “Love proved stronger,” as she later put it.38 She threw the deadly poison into the bidet and flushed it away. Immediately afterwards, Castro is supposed to have said: “Did they send you to kill me?”, and in a challenging gesture he threw his personal revolver onto the bed beside her.39 “I was kind of stunned that he should ask me that,” she recalled. “You can’t lie to him. He said: ‘Nobody can kill me.’” Then they made love again and said goodbye.40

  To a CIA agent in the hotel lobby, she nodded an agreed signal to make him believe that the order had been carried out. Completely disheartened, but without any obstruction from Castro or his people, she then returned to Miami. Castro himself never said anything in public about the affair, while shortly afterwards Marita Lorenz became the mistress of former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez and had a daughter by him. With his short rotund figure, quite unlike that of the large bearded revolutionary, he served as the model for the dictator in Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch. She got to know him when she was collecting several hundred thousand dollars for the anti-Castro operations of her exiled Cuban friends in Florida.

  Two years later, a barman with the evocative name of Santos de la Caridad (Saints of Charity) very nearly executed another assassination attempt at the Habana Libre when Castro ordered a milkshake late one night. But the botulism pills had become stuck to the inside of the hotel’s freezer, and he was unable to remove them in one piece. Castro’s security service learned of this only in late 1964, after the hotel employee was arrested as a member of an underground anti-revolutionary cell and made a confession. They also realized that he must have had the poison pills for nearly a year before the opportunity suddenly arose to take advantage of Castro’s nocturnal thirst. After many years in jail, he was eventually shipped off to Miami.41

  Further assassination attempts ended in failure or were rejected as impracticable. One plan was to give Castro a box of poisoned cigars, another to contaminate his diving-suit with highly infectious tuberculosis bacteria, yet another to lace his goggles with a substance that would cause all his hair and beard to fall out and make him look ridiculous. More seriously, a Havana-based agent with the code name NOTLOX planned to kill Castro with a bazooka round at a boxing match that he was due to attend at the Sports Palace in the capital on April 9, 1961, just a few days before the Bay of Pigs landing, but the scheme was eventually called off because of rivalry between different anti-Castro groups. In a speech on the day before the scheduled assassination, Castro characteristically poked fun at the CIA: “We believe that the Central Intelligence Agency has absolutely no intelligence at all.… Really, none of them, the Central Intelligence Agents, are intelligent. They should be called the Central Agency of Yankee Cretins.” Castro knew: “For months the Central Agency of Yankee Cretins has been preparing on the soil of Guatemala and the soil of other countries ruled by puppets of imperialism, military bases and armies of mercenaries to attack our country.” And he threatened: “When they place a foot here, … they will learn the fury of the people who will fall upon them.”42

  Castro was therefore informed of what was brewing. Besides, the New York Times had reported it on the same day. Already in November 1960 the Cuban secret service had discovered the training camp in Guatemala, and early in April 1961, a few days before Castro’s speech, the CIA picked up a report from the Soviet embassy in Mexico that April 17 had been set as the date for the landing of an invasion force. The new president, John F. Kennedy, who had inherited the plan from his predecessor and allowed it to go ahead only with considerable unease, angrily remarked that Castro “doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers.”43 On April 12 Kennedy declared at a press conference “that there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces, and this government will do everything it possibly can … to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba.” Referring to the recent indictment of a US citizen for “plotting an invasion of Cuba … to establish a Batista-like regime,” he maintained that this “should indicate the feelings of this country towards those who wish
to reestablish that kind of administration inside Cuba.” A final point, which became especially significant over the coming days, allowed him to wash his hands of the invasion in the event of failure: “The basic issue in Cuba,” he asserted, “is not one between the United States and Cuba; it is between the Cubans themselves.”44

  The CIA and State Department had considered several possible landing sites before deciding on the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), on a stretch of coast some 30 miles long between Playa Larga and Playa Girón, just in front of the Zapata swamps. For this reason it was to be known as Operation Zapata. In Washington no one suspected that Castro knew this lonely and deserted region better than almost any other on the 2,500 miles of Cuba’s coastline, for it was planned to become a major rice-growing area and he had often been there on official visits.

  Two days before the target date there was a crucial “softening-up operation.” Castro recalled in conversation with Frei Betto:

  A surprise attack was made on all our air bases at dawn on April 15, 1961, to destroy the few airplanes we had. I stayed up the whole night at the command post [in a house in the Vedado area of Havana], because there were reports that an enemy force that had been detected just off the coast of Oriente Province was going to land. Raúl was in Oriente.… Almeida was sent to the central part of the island; Che was sent to the western part; and I stayed in Havana. Every time it seemed the United States was going to invade Cuba, we divided up the country.45

  The raids on the airfields at Havana (Campo Libertad), Cienfuegos (San Antonio de los Baños) and Santiago de Cuba were flown from Nicaragua. And it was also in Nicaragua, in the jungle-cleared town of Puerto Cabezas on the Caribbean coast, that the invasion force of Cuban exiles assembled after its year of CIA training in Guatemala.

  The bombers that carried out the attacks were American B-26s, painted with Cuban national emblems to create the appearance of a military revolt. So that the rest of the world should believe this, an aircraft specially filled with bullet-holes in Nicaragua made an “emergency landing” in Miami, where the pilot astounded reporters with a story that he and others had flown through a hail of bullets to wipe out the entire Cuban air force. This immediately fell flat, however, when a journalist with expert knowledge identified it as a US aircraft by its metal nose (Cuban B-26s had perspex noses) and made the deception public. Even more embarrassing was the fact that the truth came out just as the US ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, was lying that the United States had had nothing to do with the attacks. The claim that Castro’s entire air force had been destroyed was also false. “We still had more airplanes than pilots: eight planes and seven pilots,” Castro recalled.46

  Castro may have already suspected where the landing would occur. Early in April, during what seemed to be a random trip to the Zapata swamps, he suddenly turned to one of the journalists accompanying him and said: “You know, we should place a .50-calibre heavy machine gun there, just in case.”47 And on April 16, the day after the bombing attacks, the district commander Juan Almeida duly played safe by stationing a militia company along the Playa Girón.

  Invasion Brigade 2506, so named after the identity number of Carlos Rodríguez Santana (a volunteer killed on September 8, 1960, during a training exercise in Guatemala), was then putting to sea off Puerto Cabezas over a period of three days. The fleet consisted of eight cargo ships chartered from an exiled Cuban shipowner and the United Fruit Company, plus six escort vessels. Their “host,” Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, turned up in person to see them off and asked them to bring him back a lock of Castro’s beard. The force numbered 1,511 men. A unit of 117 airborne troops was kept in readiness, together with 11 B-26s awaiting orders to provide air support.48

  A new moon was up as the ships rendezvoused before the Bay of Pigs. A CIA radio station on Swan Island off Honduras (actually inhabited mainly by lizards) finally gave the signal in the form of a cryptic news report, which Bissell’s political coordinator, CIA agent and amateur author of spy thrillers Howard Hunt, had composed to throw Castro’s secret service off the scent, as well as to place on standby the counter-revolutionary groups supposedly ready for action in Cuba. “Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The first will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red.”49 Shortly before one a.m. on April 17, 1961, Operation Zapata finally got under way – commanded by the two CIA agents Grayston Lynch and William Robertson. By daybreak the invaders had managed to establish themselves on the beach.

  Just before the landing began, one of Almeida’s motorized patrols had noticed lights flashing out at sea and initially assumed that a boat was in distress. But when they came under heavy fire from divers and a landing boat, sustaining a number of casualties before they were forced to retreat, there could no longer be any doubt that an invasion was under way. An hour later the survivors reached the nearest town, Jagüey Grande, in their jeep – and around 2.30 they made contact with Fidel Castro at his “Punto Uno” headquarters in Havana.

  The commander-in-chief, who at that time had more than 25,000 well-equipped troops and 200,000 lightly armed militia at his disposal, immediately sent to the area artillery and armored units as well as an elite militia battalion of 870 men. At 4.00 he rang one of his last remaining pilots, air force veteran Enrique Carreras, who since the raid on San Antonio de los Baños near Cienfuegos had been sitting in his one-seater Sea Fury complete with missiles. Castro tersely described the situation and ordered: “I want you to sink those ships! Don’t let those ships go!”50 At first light two Sea Furys and one B-26 bomber soared up and attacked the fleet lying off the Bay of Pigs. At 6.30 Carreras scuttled the largest ship, the Houston, with its load of ammunition, fuel, and 150 men from the 8th Battalion. A second ship, the landing-craft Barbara containing the CIA command staff, was badly damaged and fled full of holes back out to sea. Then, at 9.30, Carreras sank the freighter Río Escondido, which had been carrying a 10-day reserve of food and ammunition, as well as medical supplies and telecommunications equipment. “God Almighty!” radioed William Robertson from the Blue Beach, “What was that? Fidel got the A-bomb?” – “Naw,” replied his CIA colleague Grayston Lynch, “that was the damned Río Escondido that blew.”51 All the other ships in the invasion force now kept their distance, leaving some 1,350 men from the “2506 Brigade” to fend for themselves ashore.

  In subsequent dog-fights, four of the exiles’ 11 B-26 bombers were shot down. Castro also lost four planes from the tiny “air force” that had survived the initial raids, although the one belonging to “Grandad” Carreras (as his comrades called him) escaped intact. Castro was thus left with just two Sea Furys and three T-33 fighters, whereas the invasion force requested, and soon received, new aircraft from the United States for use by Cuban crews. On April 18, when things were looking grim for the invaders, they were again able to deploy some 20 bombers; four of these were now flown by American crews, but two were soon shot down and four members of the Alabama Air National Guard lost their lives. Castro later displayed their bodies as proof of US involvement in the invasion.

  Meanwhile, Castro’s ground troops sustained heavy losses in an assault on the well-armed beachhead. Carlos Franqui, who at the time had been chief editor of Revolución, recalled:

  We lost a lot of men.… But the real factor in our favor… was the militias: Amejeiras’s column embarked on a suicide mission. They were massacred, but they reached the beach.… This frontal attack of men against machines (the enemy tanks) had nothing to do with guerrilla war; in fact, it was a Russian tactic, probably the idea of two Soviet generals, both of Spanish origin.… One of them, … a fox named Ciutat, … was sent by the Red Army and the Party as an adviser and was the father of the new Cuban army.52

  Two weeks after the failure of the invasion, the CIA’s paramilitary operations chief, Colonel Hawkins, wrote in a 48
-page report of a highly successful sortie with six bombers, “two flown by Americans,” against a column of Cuban troops stretching nearly 20 miles. He claimed that many tanks and more than 20 lorries full of soldiers were destroyed by napalm, bombs, missiles, and machine-gun fire, and – on the basis of intercepted radio messages – that the Cuban side had at that point suffered 1,800 casualties, mostly from air attacks.53 Afterwards, the Cubans officially reported losses of just 176 dead and 300 wounded.54

  In any event, the fighting was over after just 65 hours, when the invasion force ran out of ammunition. In the early morning hours of April 19, cut off from any supplies and encircled by some 20,000 Cuban troops, Brigade 2506 surrendered. A total of 114 had fallen or drowned, and a further 1,189 were marched off to prison.55 The rest managed to escape on board the fleeing ships, in rubber dinghies, or on foot through the swamps.

  The captives included a number of wanted killers from the days of the Batista regime, whose job, if the invasion had been successful, had been to ensure that Somoza got his lock of Castro’s beard – or, in other words, to wipe out the leadership around Castro. Fourteen of them were tried for their activity under Batista: five were executed, and nine sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment.

  None of the nearly 1,200 prisoners was initially charged with participation in the invasion, as Castro was again eager to convert his military victory into a major propaganda coup on the world arena. In a spectacular event that became known as the “Havana interrogation,” Castro personally discussed with the prisoners in front of TV cameras both the invasion and his revolution. Castro asked in a speech on May 1: