Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Crowds have never said no to Castro, and this technique of popular "consultation" was refined by Fidel at the outset of his rule. He says it is "direct democracy," preferable to old-fashioned elections, and it remains his most powerful political weapon in any crisis—the recourse to the masses. Chants of "Fidel, Fidel!" punctuate the mass rallies as he whips the audiences into a frenzy of enthusiasm.

  Mass-circulation newspapers and magazines—as well as specially printed booklets of interviews granted by Castro to foreign radio and television networks and publications—are another facet of government-by-verbiage. After Playboy printed a long, boring Castro interview in August 1985, an expanded text in Spanish was published as a special pullout section in Granma, but it carefully avoided any reference to Playboy as the magazine in which it had appeared. Instead, Granma provided only the names of the two American interviewers. Fidel Castro is still prudish, at least concerning his image at home, and image is what counts the most.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Fidel Castro's personal life and activities are normally kept well out of public view in Cuba for reasons of privacy as well as security. Only his very frequent official performances are reported in the press and on the radio and television, and most Cubans are not even aware of how Castro works or of whom his immediate entourage is composed.

  Extraordinarily busy as he is at the Palace of the Revolution and elsewhere, with occasional around-the-clock schedules, nearly always surrounded by people, Castro nevertheless projects an overwhelming impression of loneliness. A bachelor for the thirty years since his divorce, with many of his closest friends and companions dead or simply no longer around, Fidel does not appear to have anyone near him to whom he can turn in full trust and with whom he can share great and small victories and defeats. Not even his brother Raúl qualifies for such intimacy. His ex-wife, Mirta, had tried to be a friend and companion, but Fidel never included her in his plans and ambitions. They are said to have been in love. She visited him in prison immediately after Moncada, and then they briefly exchanged letters. But in 1954 he decided to divorce her for political reasons: Her parents and brother were too close to Batista, and she was on the official payroll.

  By nature, Castro is secretive and tends to keep his counsel, but a few human beings in the past were extremely close to him. The most important of them, as every Cuban does know, was Celia Sánchez, the doctor's daughter from an Oriente sugar mill who for twenty-three years until her death from cancer was Fidel's unconditionally devoted helper and adviser in war and peace—in fact, his conscience and alter ego. She also held great power.

  Celia lived in a cramped and shabby apartment, at number 1007, a small building on a short block of Eleventh Street in a middle-class section of Havana's residential district of Vedado. It was the center of Fidel's and her life and work; he frequently slept in the untidy apartment and Celia worked there, as his chief aide as well as preparing hot meals in the minuscule kitchen to be sent to him wherever he happened to be in Havana during the lunch or dinner hours. Even after she died in 1980, the apartment with chromos on the walls is still home to him. The street block continues to be cordoned off with iron chains and guarded by armed State Security troopers in olive-green.

  Celia, who was Fidel's senior by five years, never married. With Castro, she was the "first lady" of Cuba, quite beloved and respected on the island. Since her death, she has been virtually canonized by the revolution, with hospitals and schools named after her. While she was the very warm, very human, and very Cuban symbol of the revolution, she was also the firm compañera who protected Castro from too much outside pressure and from himself. She was probably the only one in Cuba to tell him to his face that he was making a bad decision, although she told others that "Fidel is always right." Celia kept Fidel's days and nights from turning into total chaos, found time to help other Cubans with problems that could only be solved at the top of the government, designed a spectacular public recreation park and restaurant in suburban Havana (Lenin Park), preserved antiques and museums, and organized an oral-history project of the revolution up to victory in 1959.

  At her death, Celia was secretary of the Council of State, with ministerial rank, and a member of the party's Central Committee. Strikingly, a large number of outstanding Cuban women of various backgrounds, including some from the highest circles of prerevolutionary Havana society, came forth to play invaluable roles in helping and supporting Fidel from the very outset. Many risked their lives for his cause and to this day are fiercely protective of Fidel and his good name, even if they have not seen him in years.

  Then there was Dr. René Vallejo, a distinguished surgeon who had served with the American Army in Europe in World War II, who joined Castro in the Sierra, remaining with him afterward as personal physician, aide-de-camp, and around-the-clock friend and companion. Vallejo, one of the most simpático early figures of the revolution, died at forty-nine from a sudden illness in 1969, leaving behind a crushed Fidel Castro. Like Celia, Dr. Vallejo could never quite be replaced in Castro's life.

  In a very special fashion, there was Castro's friendship with Che Guevara, two years his junior, an unmatched relationship. Though Guevara, whom Fidel first met in Mexico during the conspiratorial period, came on the Granma expedition as a physician (he was listed on the roster as "Lieutenant Ernesto Guevara, Chief of Health"), he quickly turned into one of the principal guerrilla commanders. In the absence of radio or telephone links during most of the mountain war, Castro and his officers communicated through written messages, carried by couriers (often women). From these papers, most of them preserved, it appears that apart from communications with Celia, the single greatest volume of exchanges was between Fidel and Che.

  The two men were the only intellectual equals in the Sierra, and in addition to operational orders and reports, they wrote each other long political letters that illustrated the ideological evolution in the guerrilla, with Che emphasizing his radical leanings, and Fidel being more practical and pragmatic about the politics of the war. there were also personal touches. As the Batista offensive began in May 1958, Fidel wrote Che: "It's been too many days since we've talked, and that's a matter of necessity between us." On another occasion, complaining that he was not receiving promised ammunition from the cities, he opened a letter by saying, "This is a complete fuck-up." Admitting that Castro had been correct in warning him about an enemy attack, Che wrote: "As so many other times, your excellency (isn't there a junior lieutenant colonel rank?) was right and the army got as far as our beards."

  In the first years of the revolution, Castro and Guevara were inseparable, not only as the top leaders in Havana engaged secretly in moving Cuba toward socialism, but also as friends continuing to need each other. Conchita Fernández, who was Castro's personal secretary, aiding Celia Sánchez during the initial period, recalls that Fidel and Che lunched together alone almost every day, sharing the hot meal sent by Celia Sánchez from the apartment.

  It will probably never be known what exactly caused Che Guevara's mysterious leavetaking of Cuba in 1965; was there, for example, a deep personal break between them, as some mutual friends think? In any event, no one has taken the mystical Argentine's place as Castro's intellectual partner. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez comes the closest to it in the present power structure, but they share no experiences of conspiracy, war, and danger as Fidel and Che had.

  Castro once told a visitor that "I detest loneliness, total loneliness, maybe because of the need man has for company." He added: "Aristotle said that man was a social being, and it seems I belong to that species," remarking in a reminiscence about the months spent in solitary confinement in the Batista prison that "the fact that I detest loneliness does not mean that I am not capable of standing it." In the absolute sense of physical loneliness, Castro clearly does detest it because he is so seldom alone—the acolytes are always on hand. But of course the company he keeps nowadays tells a lot about the quality of his daily life, particularly his personal life.


  First there is the palace entourage, the court over which Fidel Castro presides in a manner sometimes bordering on the royal, being in demeanor something of a Spanish royal personage himself, Marxism-Leninism and olive-green military garb notwithstanding. Castro is much more of an imposing and electrifying personality than Communist leaders elsewhere in the world, certainly more so than the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev.

  The entourage at the Palace of the Revolution, a sprawling structure with a broad front staircase built by Batista for the Cuban Supreme Court, is rather undistinguished though blindly loyal to the Commander in Chief. Basically, the staff is composed of officials attached to the Council of State, which functions as Cuba's principal government organ. Castro is president of Cuba because he is chairman of the Council of State, and all his and his staff's offices are in the Palace of the Revolution, located in the center of a closely guarded and well-landscaped government complex on the Plaza de la Revolución. The palace adjoins the building of the Central Committee of the Communist party. Raúl Castro's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) Ministry, the Interior Ministry (MININT), and the party newspaper, Granma, are nearby.

  The man who has taken over Celia Sánchez's responsibilities as the council's secretary is Dr. José M. Miyar Barrueco, commonly known by his nickname, "Chomy," and he must be the most overworked individual in Cuba. A physician who met Castro in the Sierra, Chomy was chancellor of the University of Havana for a time after the revolution, then he was summoned to the palace to replace Celia; he later became a member of the Communist party's Central Committee.

  Chomy has his own office on the ground floor of the palace, but he is at Castro's beck and call night and day, attending most of the official meetings as well as sessions with foreign visitors that often stretch into the dawn. Every time Fidel has a fresh idea, a question or a request—which is all the time—Chomy writes it down, then passes on pertinent instructions to appropriate officials. Only when Castro goes to sleep is Chomy—who has only a six-person staff—free to attend to his paperwork. He is responsible for organizing and reorganizing the schedule of the Jefe, and the direction of the council's historical division. He is also the most opposed personally to the publication of serious historical material about Castro and the revolution, and he is a most effective watchdog of the archives. A harried, superficially affable man who is obsessed with photographing Fidel all the time with everybody, Chomy has limited intellectual and political input, but he wields the power of the doorkeeper.

  Heading Castro's personal "Coordination and Support Group" at the palace is Government Minister José A. Naranjo Morales, known as "Pepín," who fought with the Student Revolutionary Directorate guerrillas and later became governor of Havana province. Naranjo is a bureaucratic jack-of-all-trades, running political errands for Fidel and coordinating the preparation of background studies and information for him on all imaginable subjects. This support group—ten men and ten women, all carefully picked, free to cross all bureaucratic lines in the party and government, and equipped with up-to-date computers—is informally called the "Fidel staff," and its relatively young members are groomed for promotion later to important administration positions. The new head of the state radio and television network was recruited from the Fidel staff when Castro strongly (and deservedly) criticized the quality of Cuban television in an off-the-record chat with leaders of the Women's Federation early in 1985.

  The most interesting men around Castro, however, are the less visible ones, and all come from State Security Services. General José Abrahantes Fernández, who replaced Ramiro Valdés in December 1985 as interior minister, is still directly responsible for Castro's security, his Special Forces of State Security being the Praetorian Guard handpicked to defend Fidel and the regime in the direst of dangers. The Special Forces detachments are organized along the lines of the Soviet KGB's uniformed security forces. Whereas Abrahantes, even as minister, plays a limited political role, two Security-linked figures in particular were long exceedingly important in the foreign-policy field.

  One was José Luis Padrón González, whose title was president of the national Tourism Institute (which operates all the Cuban hotels), but who served Castro extensively as a discreet international emissary and negotiator, bypassing the Foreign Ministry. A former colonel in State Security (there are more Security-linked officials in Cuba than meet the eye), Padrón was part of the new revolutionary generation, seemingly being groomed for high leadership. Padrón first impressed Castro in helping to set in motion the Cuban military intervention in Angola in 1975—he was rushed to Luanda by State Security to prevent the collapse of the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the civil war that followed independence from Portuguese colonial rule—and he has been an important "inside" player ever since.

  Over the years, Padrón (assisted by Tony de la Guardia, another Security colonel at the palace) had met secretly with senior United States Department of State officials in Miami, New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Cuernavaca, Mexico, to explore the possibilities of agreements between the two countries. The 1979 accord on the American acceptance of thousands of Cuban political prisoners and on Cuban exiles' visits home from the United States was worked out by Padrón, who reported only to Castro during the long and secret negotiations. Early in 1986, however, Padrón mysteriously vanished from sight, losing his job and palace access, becoming a nonperson. It happens in Fidel's Cuba.

  A notable Security figure at the palace is Comandante Manuel Piñeiro Losada, long known in Cuba as "Barba Roja" (for his red beard, now white). Piñeiro, a member of the Communist party's Central Committee, is head of its American Department, and, as such, he is the chief coordinator of all Cuban operations in the hemisphere, from Nicaragua and El Salvador to Panama, Peru, Argentina, and the United States.

  Given Castro's ambitions for Latin American leadership, Piñeiro's position is extremely important. His article in the Autumn 1982 issue of the Communist party's theoretical journal Cuba Socialista on "The Present Crisis of Imperialism and Revolutionary Processes in Latin America and the Caribbean" offers thoughtful proposals for the launching of "democratic, popular and anti-imperialist revolutions," insisting on the unit of Communists with other political parties and leftist organizations. This is, of course, the lesson of the Cuban revolution as conducted by Castro and his close collaborators, among whom Piñeiro was a most active one.

  Piñeiro acquired his anti-Americanism (and his first wife, an American) when he studied at Columbia University in New York in the early 1950s, and was humbled and "radicalized" by his defeat by a "rich South American kid" in the elections for president of a student association. He was in the anti-Batista underground back in Havana, where his apartment was an arms depository before the failed and horribly bloody attack on the presidential palace by young revolutionaries in 1957, before joining Raúl Castro's command in the Sierra. He wound up as military governor in Santiago.

  When Ramiro Valdés, Che Guevara's deputy, became chief of the Rebel Army's G-2 Section (security and intelligence), Piñeiro was named number two. He presided over the revolutionary tribunal that sentenced Batista aviators to severe prison terms in 1959 after they had been acquitted under another judge, then retried on Castro's orders. He subsequently took over as head of G-2. He was Cuba's top political policeman under Valdés until 1968, when a Soviet-imposed reorganization of the Security Services forced him out—and Castro put him in charge of Latin American affairs.

  When Castro toured Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union for over two months in 1972, Piñeiro was a senior member of the entourage, his name appearing near the top of the Cuban list in all the joint communiques with foreign governments. It is rare for Piñeiro not to be present at social functions at the Palace of the Revolution (usually standing near Castro with a small group of the top leadership), and it is not uncommon to find him in the middle of the night having a milkshake with friends at Chomy's downstairs office. Naturally, he has permanent ac
cess to Castro's third-floor office.

  Dr. Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, a geographer, explorer, historian, ardent Communist, and vice-minister of culture also has full access to Castro, whose story he is slowly writing in multiple volumes. Nuñez Jiménez (whose daughter is married to José Luis Padrón, the ex-Security colonel turned nonperson) is regarded primarily as a personal companion—he accompanies Fidel on most of his trips around Cuba and shares vacations with him, but he does not fit (nor chooses to fit) into the palace entourage. Finally, there is Jorge Enrique Mendoza, the editor of Granma, a close ideological and propaganda adviser; he is an unpleasant, irascible, hardline, dogmatic Communist who knew Castro in the Sierra, serving as the Rebel Radio announcer in the final phase of the war.

  Castro enjoys the friendship of many people who are personally and even ideologically attuned to him but exercise no political influence. Foremost among them is Gabriel García Márquez, the mustachioed Colombian Nobel Prize laureate in literature. Currently the greatest Latin American novelist, his worship of Castro is evident in an early brief portrait he wrote titled "My Brother Fidel," based on conversations with Castro's sister Emma. Castro's and García Márquez's friendship is so close that when the Colombian comes on one of his visits, the two men often converse continuously for eight or ten hours, then repeat it over several days and nights. Former Colombian President Alfonso López Michelsen, who was brought to Castro's island by García Márquez in 1984 and was with them much of the time, says that, among other things, the novelist "recommends books" to Fidel. López Michelsen says that "Fidel is a reader of extraordinary avidity. . . . Gabito [García Márquez's first-name diminutive] brings him five books and he stays for ten days, and the day he leaves, Fidel comments on the books one by one. They are not necessarily serious books, they are agreeable books that statesmen use to rest."