Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  The Commander in Chief takes pleasure in the company of creative individuals who usually reciprocate his feelings; he fascinates the intelligentsia. Among Castro's visitors of this type—and there have been hundreds, ranging from great thinkers to a Brazilian soap-opera celebrity—were the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the British novelist Graham Greene, the British actor Alec Guinness, who along with Noel Coward had gone to Cuba a few weeks after the victory in 1959 to film Our Man in Havana, and the American actor Jack Lemmon.

  Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko met Castro in Havana in the early days of the revolution (he had actually made a point of learning Spanish beforehand), and his political impressions of revolutionary Cuba were most vivid. In his autobiography Yevtushenko tells the story of two Cuban plotters, one of them a realist and the other an abstract artist, who argued furiously while waiting for orders to attack the Batista palace, then "went to fight for the future of their country, and both were killed." Yevtushenko added: "I very much wish this story were known to those dogmatists who write off all modern artists as lackeys of bourgeois ideology. One must be more patient and more discriminating." This was, of course, during the relative liberalization in the Soviet Union that accompanied the de-Stalinization process, and Yevtushenko found it useful to cite revolutionary Cuba as an example of new freedoms.

  Elsewhere in the autobiography, he writes that it was the same evening in Moscow that he spoke publicly about Cuba and read for the first time his famous poem "Babi Yar" about the place where the Nazis had massacred thousands of Jews during the war. Then Yevtushenko reported intriguingly that a white-haired old man, leaning on a stick, came up to him afterward to say: "What you've said about Cuba and what you've written about Babi Yar are one and the same. Both are the Revolution. The Revolution we once made, and which was afterward so betrayed, yet which still lives and will live on. I spent fifteen years in one of Stalin's concentration camps, but I am happy that our cause, I mean the cause of the Bolsheviks, is still alive." Yevtushenko has neither returned nor written about Cuba since those early days.

  Contacts with artists and intellectuals are among Castro's great pleasures and stimulations. But on another level, he has also expressed interest in meeting Henry Kissinger (who has his own curiosity about Fidel) as well as David Rockefeller, and in 1982 he greatly enjoyed a secret conference with Lieutenant General Vernon A. Walters, a former Central Intelligence Agency deputy director and an ambassador-at-large when President Reagan sent him to Havana.

  Perhaps the greatest danger facing Fidel Castro after all these years in power is precisely the intellectual and political isolation of the environment in which he lives. In this sense, the deaths of Che Guevara and Celia Sánchez were terrible blows to Castro (for one thing, now nobody dares to contradict him). This is harshly demonstrated by the caliber of today's immediate entourage, essentially fawning and sycophantic, and the debatable quality of most of his top advisers in the government (no more than three or four are first-rate).

  The personality cult around Castro not only does not abate, but it is continually enhanced. This is a very touchy subject with him, and Fidel angrily denies that such a cult even exists, stressing that the first decision made by the revolutionary government was to forbid the naming of localities of streets after living leaders or to erect monuments to them.

  This, of course, is true in the strict sense inasmuch as only the names of dead heroes—Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia Sánchez or others—are given to schools, hospitals, factories, and so on. In practice, however, Fidel Castro lives bathed in the absolute adulation orchestrated by the propaganda organs of the regime. There are very few huge posters or billboards with Castro's face adorning Cuba's streets and highways, but his portraits are in every government office (as portraits of democratic leaders appear in government offices in their countries) and in a great many homes—sometimes in shrinelike fashion.

  The adulation is expressed through the use of all his titles—Commander in Chief, president of the Councils of State and Ministers, and first secretary of the Communist party—in every single printed or broadcast reference to him, sometimes every few paragraphs. Editorials and speeches invariably speak of his wisdom and genius as "the guide of Cuba," and the 1976 Cuban constitution proclaims the decision "to carry forward the triumphant Revolution . . . under the leadership of Fidel Castro." Quotations from Fidel are printed everywhere, including at the bottom of every page in the Havana telephone directory.

  Every public act by Castro, no matter how routine, is printed on the first pages of newspapers and is the lead item on the evening television news. A shot of Fidel waving benignly from a balcony is part of the introduction to the news. Virtually every speech he delivers is published in full, sometimes as a special supplement. Books and articles about the history of the revolution are adoring in every mention of Fidel. The first volume of Antonio Nuñez Jiménez's planned history of the revolution is a hymn to Fidel Castro. He is usually called Comandante-en-Jefe in normal conversation, and nobody in his right mind, even in private, dares to criticize him. It is hard to believe that a man of Castro's immense intelligence does not realize that he is surrounded by such an incredible cult of personality. (The Castro cult is in interesting contrast with the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, who has forcefully banned even the kind of veneration given Leonid Brezhnev, one of his recent predecessors. Gorbachev has ordered editors to use his name as little as possible, and has forbidden public praise.)

  It has been remarked that Napoleon succeeded in ruling France because he kept intact his group of outspoken but loyal marshals. Death, naturally, took away many of Fidel's great old companions, but for political reasons he has rid himself of others—the nonpersons or nearly nonpersons of contemporary Cuba—who were valuable and honest revolutionaries.

  What has developed therefore is government by courtiers, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, and yes men who tend to tell Castro what he wants to hear but which is not always the truth. A man who knows him well says that Fidel is a polemicist and needs to be contradicted, but cannot tolerate it. Constructive discussion is therefore often ruled out, and notwithstanding Castro's protestations about collective leadership, he makes command decisions all the time.

  The progressive militarization of Cuban society which resumed in earnest in the early 1980s emphasizes even more Castro's role as Commander in Chief, and the slogans, painted on walls and repeated in countless public pronouncements every day in speeches and on radio and television, are "Commander in Chief! Give the Orders!" and "Commander in Chief! The Rearguard is Secured!" The slogan of "Nobody Surrenders Here!," taken from the defiant cry by Juan Almeida Bosque at the Alegría de Pío disaster, is being revived.

  Not surprisingly, Cubans regard themselves as a besieged society, constantly under the threat of an armed attack by the United States. The Bay of Pigs, the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, the Grenada invasion in 1983, the CIA's "contra" operations against Nicaragua, and the steady flow of warnings by the Reagan administration that it will go to "the source" of all Central American affrays—i.e., Cuba—have given Castro sufficient reason to emphasize defense as the nation's first task. Inevitably, however, this phenomenon leads to a permanent situation of national emergency in which the military leader of the ten million Cubans must be supreme. And being supreme, he cannot tolerate being contradicted.

  When contradicted, Castro may explode in anger or just pout. Even small things matter. Being as genuinely generous (another strong character trait) as he can be vindictive, he once sent lamb chops and legs of lamb from his suburban weekend home, where he also has a vegetable garden, to a couple of American friends spending some time in Havana. Visiting their house one afternoon, Fidel instructed the friends to bread the thin lamb slices and then fry them in oil, and grew quite annoyed when the wife gently suggested that lamb can also be good broiled. Saying brusquely, "So make them ho
wever you want," Fidel strode out of the kitchen.

  Castro has immense access to all forms of data and information, but in the absence of useful interlocutors, he lacks the opportunity to discuss or analyze them seriously with anyone else. When he draws correct conclusions, it is because of his superb political instincts. Castro's favorite expression is "Let us analyze it," and he engages aloud in the analytical process on a given subject, sometimes for hours, in front of a visitor or his staff. If Fidel comes up with a strong opinion, even foreign visitors refrain from expressing disagreement, out of courtesy to the president of Cuba and because he is intimidating in dialogue.

  Castro's hunger for information is gargantuan. He carefully reads Cuban newspapers and magazines daily, and he receives around-the-clock copy from U.S. and European news agencies tickers as well as from Cuba's own Prensa Latina, perusing it quickly, and setting aside what interests him. Dish antennas at the palace pick up U.S. radio and television news broadcasts from the United States day and night; and in 1985, for a half-million dollars annually, the government purchased the extensive computerized financial service of the Reuters news agency of Britain (U.S. restrictions on any commercial dealings with Cuba prevented buying a similar American service).

  Castro also goes over the daily dispatches from Cuban embassies abroad and reports from what he calls with a wink, "our special services." From overseas he receives a steady stream of clippings, special publications, reports, and books. Some are translated or summarized for him, others he reads in full (Castro has a good command of written English but hesitates to speak it). In the summer of 1985, he read and virtually memorized a study of U.S. protectionist trade practices, prepared by the Japanese chamber of commerce. His interests are so wide and intense that almost any topic can fascinate and inspire him to learn more about it, especially if it deals with economic development, agriculture, public health or education.

  (Castro amuses himself extrapolating startling conclusions from data available to him, mainly to make a dramatic debating point. Talking about Latin America's huge external debt on one occasion, he informed his audience that he had figured out "with pencil and paper" not only what citizens in a region owe per capita, but also how much of the debt corresponds to an acre of arable land. Such unusual statistics tend to impress his listeners, and Castro has also worked out how many pounds of sugar a Caribbean nation has to export to import a tractor from the "capitalists," emphasizing that the cost of the tractor in terms of sugar exports keeps growing astronomically. This is the sort of language that Latin Americans understand inasmuch as balance-of-payment statistics are abstractions to the hemisphere's millions of poor people, and it is very effective foreign policy for Cuba.)

  When Castro is away from Havana, which is frequently, helicopters deliver to him twice a day batches of publications, news agency cables, diplomatic reports, and everything else required to keep him fully informed at all times. Even when he spends a few days at his fishing hideaway in the Caribbean, he religiously follows the routine of absorbing all these materials.

  Conversing with a friend from Washington, Castro showed curiosity about the briefing practices at the White House, inquiring how much information President Reagan was being given and how often. He offered no comment upon being told that American presidents usually have only one daily, and relatively short, foreign-policy and intelligence briefing, but he seemed surprised by this.

  Visitors from abroad (and chiefly from the United States), whom Castro sees in astounding numbers and at astounding lengths, often find themselves under third-degree interrogation. When a Texas oilman and self-made millionaire was brought by a Texas congressman, who is a friend of Castro's, to dine at Fidel's tiny fishing retreat on a key directly south of the Bay of Pigs, he was questioned in detail about his Horatio Alger-like history—and about offshore drilling. A wealthy rice broker from Arkansas, accompanying an Arkansas congressman, was debriefed about planting techniques, Cuba still being a rice importer and hoping to augment domestic production. Another American was quizzed about Reagan's tax policies (and told by Castro that sales taxes would be more acceptable to Americans than higher income taxes). A newswoman who had just visited Mexico was asked about Mexican poppy-plant eradication (Cuba forbids all drugs, but Castro admits that during the war he tolerated the planting of marijuana by some Sierra peasants because it was their only cash crop; now it is prohibited). A Texas pilot was asked to advise Fidel on the best private jet aircraft.

  Castro's informality can startle Americans. When the Texas oilman (who has a beard) alighted on the fishing key from the Cuban air-force helicopter late at night, he almost collided with a tall bearded figure all in dark blue: sweatsuit, windbreaker, sailing cap, and sneakers. The man in blue said, "Bienvenido to Cayo Piedra," and when the congressman began to introduce the oilman, Fidel broke in, saying, "We've just met, we had a collision softened by our beards."

  Fidel's curiosity about people, especially Americans, is so boundless that during a recent six-month period he met with a delegation of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, a score of congressmen, the daughters (on separate occasions) of Robert F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, a half-dozen book publishers, two television network correspondents (and crews), interviewers from a leading U.S. newspaper and from a men's mass-circulation magazine (in the latter case for some thirty hours of taped conversation), a middle-level and pronouncedly hostile State Department official (who did not expect to be received by Castro during his business visit), a famous jazz musician, a number of businessmen, and several marine biologists.

  In the same period he received the presidents of Algeria and Ecuador; the secretary-general of the United Nations; numerous cabinet ministers from all over the world; leaders of Latin American political, labor, press, and journalism organizations (these groups came to Havana to attend conferences on hemisphere economies, with Castro present at the daylong sessions); and Japanese and Mexican businessmen interested in trade with Cuba. At one point, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez said to a visitor, "You know, this is Fidel reborn, this is the crusading Fidel of the Nineteen-Sixties."

  With his prodigious memory, Castro appears to absorb and remember everything he has read, heard, and seen in the past half-century. It is more than memoria technica, as the Romans called the memorizing technique of ancient orators, because he can play infinite variations on his themes before his audiences, never forgetting facts and figures. As a law-school student, Castro completed the last two years in one year, studying day and night, and when it came to memorizing he would destroy all the materials he had learned by heart so that he was forced to depend on his memory.

  A voracious reader whose chief occupation during the nearly two years he spent in prison was reading books, Fidel has accumulated knowledge and erudition that are stunning. In relaxed conversation or improvised speeches, he ranges easily from references to obscure Roman laws on debt moratoria to Victor Hugo's critique of Louis Bonaparte, the "Little Napoleon," from tales of the Spanish conquest to quotations from Abraham Lincoln and José Martí, from a forgotten passage from Lenin to a line from Curzio Malaparte. In a written battlefield order in the Sierra, he once lapsed into Latin to urge a manu militari solution in a tight spot.

  Presently, Castro maintains his furious pace although he talks about relaxing it. Asked by American interviewers why he had failed to attend the funeral of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko in Moscow early in 1985, Castro replied that on the day of Chernenko's death he had worked "for forty-two consecutive hours . . . no rest or sleep," and, in effect, was too exhausted to fly the great distance. But the word in Havana was that a petulant Castro did not wish to spend days in Moscow waiting his turn to be received by a new Kremlin leader for the third time in a year (he had attended the funerals of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, and he already knew Mikhail Gorbachev). However, Castro shone at the Soviet Communist Party Congress in February 1986—Gorbachev's first congress—at a time when Cuba's economic dependence on Moscow was again desperate.
Then, restlessly, he went to North Korea, probably the world's toughest Communist dictatorship.

  At home or abroad, Castro keeps incredible hours. The punishment is self-inflicted, but he is so compulsive that he thrives on unpredictable schedules. His only concession to orderly behavior is public punctuality, which he recently and surprisingly began to practice with his characteristic obsessiveness. Whereas in the past he would be hours late arriving at a meeting, rally or reception—or delivering a scheduled speech—he is now shockingly and exactly on time. At the Communist Party Congress in February 1986, Castro berated delegates for being a few minutes late for a 9:00 A.M. session, charging that if Communists are unable to get to a conference on time, they are probably incapable of running the country well. The delegates hung their heads in shame, like chastized children before the schoolmaster.

  Castro seems to get by on very little sleep. Even under the best of circumstances he does not go to sleep before three or four o'clock in the morning, yet he looks fresh and rested at nine o'clock that same morning at an international conference or another public function. When in Havana, Fidel may sleep at the Eleventh Street apartment (at dawn or for a daytime nap), in the small bedroom behind his office on the third floor of the Palace of the Revolution, at his new and very private villa in the suburbs west of Havana (he experiments with enormous hydroponic tomatoes in the garden there), or at almost any location, such as a friend's home.

  In the first year of the revolution, Castro used the twenty-third floor of the Habana Libre Hotel (formerly the Havana Hilton) as home and office in addition to the apartment, kept by Celia Sánchez on Eleventh Street, a spacious house overlooking the sea on a hill in the fishing village of Cojímar, five miles east of the city, which a rich prerevolution politician lent him, and a house next to the old Charlie Chaplin (now the Carlos Marx) theater in the Miramar residential section. This was why it was so hard for everybody, sometimes even for Celia Sánchez, to locate Fidel in those days. Then the established offices at the building of INRA, the National Agrarian Reform Institute. Conchita Fernández, his former secretary, recalls that he raced all the time from one place to another in Havana and beyond in his motorcade of Oldsmobiles (the black Mercedes-Benzes came later) with gun-toting barbudo guards, carrying with him in the car papers, reports, and notes in a briefcase. He usually worked while being driven around, reading or dictating memoranda or ideas to Conchita, who came along. "He never rested, not in the car, not anywhere else," she recalls.