As after Camarioca, the Mariel period also led to negotiations between the United States and Cuba to put the refugee problem on a stable footing. But it was not until four years later, in December 1984, that an agreement was finally reached whereby Cuba undertook to allow 3,000 political prisoners to leave for the USA and to take back 2,746 “chicken thieves” and “lumpens;” new visa regulations would in future enable up to 20,000 Cubans a year to travel to the USA. The agreement, which Cuban exiles saw as raising the Castro government to the status of a negotiating partner with the same rights as Washington, was nevertheless suspended by Castro just a few months later. This came in response to a new tightening of economic sanctions by the Reagan administration, which suddenly clamped down on tourist trips to Cuba after the number of US tourists traveling to the island had risen to 40,000 a year; the only exceptions would be for diplomats, journalists and scientists, and private individuals on urgent family business. At the same time, the amount of money that Cuban exiles were permitted to transfer to family members in Cuba was limited to $1,200 a year. The measures culminated in the approval of a broadcasting license for Radio Martí, a government-funded propaganda station set up by the US authorities at the instigation of the militant Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). Castro felt he had been cheated.
In November 1987 the “migration agreement” was reactivated, even though Castro had been unable to secure an end to the Radio Martí broadcasts. But since the United States, in the following years, handled the issuing of visas in a very dilatory manner, fewer than a third of the maximum of 20,000 Cubans a year actually received permission to leave. The evident aim of this was to raise indirectly the pressure inside Cuba. There were further occupations of diplomatic premises in 1990, including those of the Federal Republic of Germany, and more and more people chose the sea route to get away from the drabness of life at home. The next great exodus began in the summer of 1994, when the collapse of the Soviet bloc and a further tightening (since 1992) of the US embargo brought the economy to the brink of ruin. Between July and the end of September, nearly 35,000 panic-stricken Cubans made off on small boats, rafts, or rubber tyres. There are no reliable figures about the number who lost their lives at sea.
It has been estimated that, between Castro’s victory and the end of the millennium, a total of more than a million Cubans left the island – that is, 10 to 15 percent of its present-day population. The majority of these settled down in the United States, especially Florida. In fact, the state is today politically controlled by Cuban exiles and their mostly Republican friends, who have family roots in Cuba. Miami has come to be known as “Havana North,” while the name “Little Havana” remains more widely used for the area around Eighth Street, Calle Ocho. For generations a large number of Cuban exiles have lived there. Originally they came in the belief that Castro would fall within a few months and they would be able to return; but then that generation started dying off – often extremely embittered – while others assimilated and gradually turned into a second and third generation. Many young people no longer travel to the land of their parents and grandparents, especially if they have built a life for themselves in the United States and entered into family ties. Apparently only a half of their elders would now like to return to Cuba, and such a move becomes harder, the longer Castro holds out. The exiles have long since become an immigrant community.
What unites people in “Havana North” is the adversary in “Havana South.” But there is no agreement among them about how he should be removed and what should come next. Still today, in the area around Calle Ocho, the only people who are welcome are those who express undying hatred of Castro, support the economic embargo and oppose any talks with the regime in Havana. Less militant opponents, who are prepared to consider some dialogue, do not have an easy time of it in these circles.
There have been repeated attempts to create some kind of a united front. Three days after the occupation of the Peruvian embassy in Havana, a National Convention took place between April 4 and 6, 1980, at Bayfront Park in Miami, attended by 400 delegates and 100 guests from various Cuban exile organizations. It set up a “Cuban Patriotic Council” that was supposed to unify the whole of the anti-Castro opposition, with Manuel Antonio Varona as its president. He had been involved in preparing the Bay of Pigs invasion, and belonged to the José Miró Cardona government set up by the CIA to replace Castro in the event of its success. In March 1961, acting as the CIA link to the American Mafia, he had taken delivery of the pills intended to kill off the Cuban revolutionary leader. But in the early eighties, when the multi-millionaire building contractor Jorge Mas Canosa founded his Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), he soon replaced the less presentable Tony Varona as Cuban “president in waiting.” Later, the CANF too came under suspicion of involvement in terrorist operations against Cuba.
Since 1959 Miami had also been the center of subversion against the Castro regime. Here Cuban exiles worked intensively with the CIA, sometimes also with Mafiosi who had a score to settle with Castro for the loss of their cushy positions in Cuba. It has been estimated that the CIA hired as many as 12,000 agents among the Cuban exiles for covert operations against Castro’s Cuba.12 They composed the best-known terrorist outfits, with imaginative, martial-sounding names such as Alpha 66, Omega 7, Abdala, Command Zero, El Condor, Cuban Power 76, Scorpion, and (an association of Bay of Pigs veterans) Brigade 2506, responsible for nearly all the assassination attempts and sabotage actions inside Cuba or against Cuban interests abroad. In July 1980, for instance, a background paper of the GDR ministry for state security drew up a long list of bomb attacks carried out by these organizations against Cuban offices in New York as well as in Europe.13
Whether in the circles around Lee Harvey Oswald (Kennedy’s ostensible assassin) and his own killer, Jack Ruby, or in connection with the break-in at the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters during the 1972 election campaign, or after the bomb attack that killed 73 people on a Cuban commercial aircraft soon after take-off from Barbados in October 1976, or in a series of other bombings, murders and attempted murders, we again and again come across the same Cuban exiles and CIA agents acting in one way or another as wire-pullers or actual operators. The list includes the former Cuban paediatrician Orlando Bosch; CIA agent Frank Sturgis (who fought under cover in the Sierra Maestra and was later Marita Lorenz’s “control”); the Cuban exiles’ former link to the Mafia, Tony Varona; the CIA’s coordinator of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Howard Hunt; the head of the CIA’s “Task Force W,” William Harvey, responsible for attempts to assassinate Castro; and a number of others.
A situation report drawn up by the GDR ministry for state security “on the counter-revolutionary anti-Cuban terror scene, with special reference to the ‘Alpha 66’ terror organization” reached the following conclusion in May 1982: “Analysis of the individuals comprising ‘Alpha 66’ reveals close collaboration with the CIA. According to information from fraternal Cuban bodies, as well as to reports in the Western press, individual members have been recruited as CIA agents.” In connection with the murder in Washington in September 1976 of Salvador Allende’s former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, the situation report further claimed that Alpha 66 “and other counter-revolutionary anti- Cuban organizations had planned and executed the operation in close collaboration with the DINA (the Chilean secret police).” The president of Alpha 66 had “close links with the Chilean junta” and received “funding from there.” The organization also had at its disposal “a wide network of safe houses in the United States, Latin and South America, and to some extent also in Europe. . . . It was known to have collaborated closely with the neofascist ‘Fuerza Nueva’ group in Spain.”14
A founder member of Alpha 66, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, had once been a guerrilla companion of Castro’s and Guevara’s. When Communist influence over political developments increased after the victory of the revolution, however, he broke with his old comrades and recruited the “Second National
Front” in the Escambray region in central Cuba. Until the middle of the sixties, this counter-revolutionary guerrilla band managed to keep Castro’s revolutionary armed forces busy. But Gutiérrez Menoyo himself was captured in 1964 and spent the next 22 years in jail. In the mid-eighties, when Castro eventually allowed the physically broken man to go into exile, Gutiérrez Menoyo did not join any of the radical anti-Castro groups – as he had every reason to do – but founded as a counterweight to the CANF a moderate group called “Cambio Cubano” (Cuban Change), which called for an end to confrontation and a dialogue with Havana.
Rectificación and perestroika
On January 11, 1980, Celia Sánchez, the woman at Castro’s side since the days in the Sierra Maestra, died of lung cancer at the age of 59. The doctor’s daughter from the little town of Manzanillo, in Castro’s home province of Oriente, was five years older than Castro and from 1959 until her death was thought of as “mother of the nation.” But she was more than that. After Castro, in 1957, took her from the plains to be with him in the mountains, she became (and would remain) the most important person in his life, forming together with his Alsatian dog “Guardién" a kind of family. In 1959 her small flat on Calle 11 in Miramar became his place of study and refuge, at times when he needed to flee his headquarters on the top floor of the Habana Libre (the rebaptized Hilton hotel) or the monstrous Palace of the Revolution that had been built as a ministry in Batista’s time.
Throughout, she organized Castro’s everyday life behind the scenes. She had more influence than anyone else in his milieu on political life and the decisions he made; and she screened him so effectively that, after his mother’s death in August 1963, he virtually ceased to be a private individual for the outside world. Whether the source was a secret service or someone wanting to appear important, all the stories about his occasional affairs, a legitimate son, seven illegitimate children and innumerable grandchildren, good or bad relations with his siblings, as well as various personal habits, preferences, hobbies and disorders, usually were and remained nothing more than rumor. What has been authenticated is that relations broke down with his younger sister Juana (who left the country in 1964), as they did with his daughter Alina. Juana Castro has pulled her brother to pieces in all her various public statements, describing him as nothing other than a “despot.” Nor has Alina had many good words to say about him; it emerges from the bitter memoirs of this former model, several times married and several times divorced, that she never came to terms personally or socially with her role as daughter of the Máximo Líder, who for his part did not exactly prove a caring father. In 1998 she went to live in Spain.
No outsider knows whether Celia Sánchez was more than a rigorous companion and a loyal comrade. She knew of Castro’s love affairs, and many a woman learned to fear her power. But Naty Revuelta, Alina’s mother whom Celia Sánchez kept on the sidelines and Castro sent off to Paris for a time in 1964, survived her into the new millennium, living in her house in Havana and sticking by Castro and his embattled revolution. Celia Sánchez may have been Cuba’s and Castro’s “First Lady,” but after divorcing Mirta Díaz-Balart he appeared to be married only to the revolution. On the other hand, he had free and steady relationships with women, such as the eight-month romance with German captain’s daughter Marita Lorenz or, immediately afterwards, with the “dark rose of Bogota,” Gloria Gaitán, daughter of Colombian opposition leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whom Castro much admired and who was murdered soon after they met in 1948. It was, as she later said, a “romantic friendship.”
At roughly the same time, the Argentinean child psychiatrist Lidia Vexel-Robertson claims to have had “an intense but proper romance in the Hispanic tradition” with Castro, which lasted for a number of months.15 An attractive woman, who worked at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, she first met Castro in 1959 at an embassy reception during his trip to the USA, where he was accompanied by Marita Lorenz (though he presented her as the girlfriend of his bodyguard Jesús Yáñez Pelletier). When rumors of a marriage began to circulate, Celia Sánchez is supposed to have put an end to the relationship by threatening “drastic measures” – at least that is the version that Bourne attributes to Vexel-Robertson. There is also a suspicion, however, that Castro set Celia up to do this, because he felt under too much pressure. Vexel-Robertson later married another barbudo and returned to live with him in the United States.16
Apart from Naty Revuelta, with whom he took up again for a while and never completely broke contact, the years following the revolution also saw Castro begin a steady relationship with Dalia Soto del Valle from Trinidad, an old colonial city on the south coast of Cuba. She too was a beauty from the former upper classes, and it is said that Castro had five sons with her. Alina claims that long before the revolution, in 1948 or thereabouts when he was still together with Mirta Díaz-Balart, he fathered another son with a passing acquaintance called Amparo, during a trip to the East. This child, Jorge Ángel, would thus have come into the world at more or less the same time as Fidelito.
In later years, people in Havana also heard of a relationship with a dancer from Tropicana or a beautiful dark-haired interpreter. And, even in the fortieth year of the revolution, when stories were circulating in the foreign press that he was infirm, a conversation partner in Havana was able to report that Castro was seeing a mulatto girl who was as pretty as a picture. People like such stories, but no one knows what is true and what is invention. “Really, the only thing I keep to myself is my private life,” he said at the age of 65 in a conversation with Tomás Borge. “I don’t have anything more, and it’s something. I think that a person’s private life shouldn’t be used for publicity or politics – as is so commonly done in that capitalist world. . . – I’ve maintained these views throughout my life.”17
Earlier in life, he was a passionate skin-diver and deep-sea fisherman: once, at the beginning of the revolution, he won a cup for the largest catch together with Ernest Hemingway, who owned a house near Havana (now a museum) similar to the one in Key West. It is known that Castro likes to cook, which does not exactly fit the picture one has of him. “The best thing is not to boil either shrimp or lobster,” he told Frei Betto, “because boiling water reduces the substance and the taste and toughens the flesh. . . . Five minutes of broiling is enough for shrimp. Lobster takes eleven minutes to bake or six minutes on a skewer over hot coals. Baste only with butter, garlic and lemon. Good food is simple food.”18
A meal for him always included good wine and then a cigar, his favorite being the Corona Especial with the brand name “Cohiba” that he himself introduced after the revolution. For a long time this was available only to a privileged circle of smokers, and many politicians would receive a box from him for Christmas. Nowadays “Cohiba” is freely obtainable: it counts alongside “Trinidad” and “Robaina,” both also Cuban, as one of the best and most expensive brands in the world. He told the New York magazine Cigar Aficionado, in an interview in summer 1994:
I should explain that. I got used to smoking in my early years. My father was a cigar smoker, and he really appreciated a fine cigar. . . . I remember when I was a teenager in high school. I was about 15 years old. I had lunch with my father when he presented me with a cigar. So he introduced me to cigars and he also taught me to drink wine. . . . He liked wines from Rioja. I always smoked cigars and, on very few occasions, cigarettes. But I … was always a cigar smoker … until I was about 59 years old.19
He enjoyed smoking cigars for 44 years – except up in the Sierra Maestra, although even there he could not do without tobacco altogether. In May 1958, when the rebels were surrounded during Batista’s great offensive, he wrote desperately from his headquarters to Celia Sánchez: “I have no tobacco, I have no wine, I have nothing. A bottle of rosé wine, sweet and Spanish, was left in Bismarck’s house, in the refrigerator. Where is it?”20 He finally gave up on August 26, 1985, during an anti-smoking campaign for which he wanted to serve as a model. Since then, he is said not
to have smoked even in secret. His love of cigars no longer goes beyond occasional sniffing or finger-rolling.
Castro likes to spend weekends in a simple beach house, together with friends such as Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. It is not known whether he also sometimes unwinds at the farm in Birán where he was born. The remote property, set in an idyllic landscape, is well maintained and watched over by men in uniform, who politely but firmly send foreign visitors on their way. Castro is said to have kept his old habit of spending the night in different places, either in Havana or elsewhere on the island. Before the Pope’s visit to Cuba, a bon mot was doing the rounds in answer to the question of where he slept at night: “Everywhere – like Jesus Christ!” But usually at night, when a column of three old bullet-proof Mercedes limousines with heavily armed guards drive him home through empty streets, the destination is a complex of government houses screened off from the outside world in the diplomatic area of Siboney, in West Havana. García Márquez has a similar “guesthouse” at his disposal nearby, for when he is in the country, and Castro likes to drop in and discuss matters with him until the early hours of the morning. The writer is one of the few personal friends who have remained, as well as being one of those whose opinion Castro values. His influence is so great that he often plays a mediating role in relation to political prisoners, as he did at the time of the Padilla affair.
Fidel Castro Page 29