Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Conchita also remembers days when Castro would arrive at his INRA office at eight o'clock in the morning on some occasions, "and he would leave only three or four days later . . . not stopping in the morning, not in the afternoon, not at night, not at dawn. . . . At best, he'd say, 'I'll rest on the couch for three or four hours, and you wake me up at such and such a time,' and ten minutes later he was back in my office to read the correspondence."

  Twenty-five years later, Castro's life is more orderly and more elegant, but he has not changed very much in behavior and attitudes. He has de luxe Soviet helicopters with inside wood paneling at his disposal as well as a fleet of Mercedes-Benz limousines (he usually travels in a three-limousine motorcade, two of them carrying security guards), but he still has a weakness for jeeplike vehicles. He himself enjoys driving the Soviet Gazik vehicles during countryside outings, and to be driven in them in Havana suburbs; the drives remind him of the Sierra, which he often describes as the "happiest time" of his life. Occasionally, he switches from Gazik to limousine or the other way around (all the cars move in an armed convoy). On these drives he does not seem overly concerned for his security; occasionally he even stops at red lights.

  As head of state, Castro enjoys a degree of luxury and privilege, yet on a modest scale compared with rulers elsewhere, including Communist countries. The most spectacular display of luxury is the receptions he offers for visiting dignitaries on the ground floor of the palace, where as many as a thousand guests are invited to eat and drink in a huge area decorated with living green plants and rare ferns from the Sierra Maestra. As a rule, Castro strolls with the guest of honor, introducing him or her to his friends. The best meats, fish, and lobster are served along with aged Cuban rum (Isla de Tesoro) and occasionally Chivas Regal scotch whiskey is available. All of this is a great treat in a country still plagued with food shortages, particularly quality food. But these are not caviar-and-champagne feasts, they end early without drunkenness, and Cubans do not seem to begrudge their Maximum Leader this form of official entertainment (the press reports the holding of these receptions).

  On such occasions, as well as at major conferences or National Assembly sessions, the fastidious Castro wears the brown formal uniform of Commander in Chief, with his single-star-on-a-black-and-red-diamond rank insignia and laurel leaves. The shirt is white and the tie is black. The rest of the time, he prefers his perfectly tailored whipcord olive-green campaign uniform. Though open-necked, the uniform is quite heavy, and Castro wears an undershirt under the front-zippered tunic. To feel comfortable in this attire, he has the palace air-conditioning system turned up to the point where his aides, in guayaberas, or sports shirts in the Cuban style, seem to be freezing.

  Sometimes Castro chooses to wear olive-green fatigues, keeping his cap on over well-trimmed hair even when sitting in his own office or at a friend's house. He always wears black combat boots, and army orderlies on duty rush over to tuck the trousers inside the boots if they slip out, an instance of Castro's royal behavior with his staff. The orderlies also clean mud or dirt from the boots when he returns to the office.

  Because of the Sierra Maestra legend and his dedication to olive-green uniforms, Fidel's image is still that of the guerrillero, careless about dress. But he had always been extremely conscious of his appearance: As a university student leader and budding politician running for elective office, Castro preferred dark suits and ties to the guayaberas worn by most Cuban men, and it was in a good suit that he returned from prison to Havana, left for exile in Mexico, and planned the voyage of the Granma. Photographs of the period show Castro looking quite tall and elegant, a kerchief in his jacket pocket, wearing a pencil-line moustache. He looked for all the world like the scion of a Cuban millionaire family (even when, after prison, he owned only one suit), knowing that it had more dramatic political effect than being one more youth in a casual shirt. A picture taken with his son, Fidelito, a few hours before leaving for the Moncada assault in 1953, shows him looking dapper and fashionable. The tailored campaign uniforms of today are consistent with Castro's prerevolutionary dress code.

  Fidel is quite nearsighted, but his vanity does not keep him from wearing horn-rimmed glasses when he wants to see well. He wore them in the Sierra and at the Bay of Pigs, and one of the few billboard pictures of Fidel portrays him during the battle wearing a brown beret and his glasses. A superb marksman, Castro wears his glasses when shooting, having devised a system allowing him to aim with both eyes open, instead of just one as most marksmen do because he was more accurate using the glasses.

  Fidel Castro is a curious combination of hidalgo courtliness and innate beautiful manners, especially toward women, and of outright rudeness and peremptory treatment of subordinates. He may spit on the floor and use astoundingly filthy language when only men are present. He swears easily, when playing chess or dominoes, being a master at both. He has a regal carriage, but he allows morsels of food to be caught in his beard when he eats, damaging the great image.

  Castro is a perfectionist to the point of pedantry. He spends hours correcting and editing his speeches and other writings to achieve stylistic excellence in the Spanish language he so beautifully and elegantly deploys his pages are a labyrinth of inserts, arrows, interlines, and squiggles in tiny script. Sometimes he does his editing in a fast-moving car, which drives his secretaries to sheer despair, much as they are used to his handwriting. Gallego Fernández, the vice-president, recalls the occasion when Fidel began drafting in his limousine a letter to a foreign head of state, and had the driver go around in circles for four hours until he finished his meticulous missive, as he did not wish to have his concentration broken by stopping to go up to his office.

  Fidel still improvises many of his speeches, but he admits that now he writes the ones he considers the most important—for example, before the United Nations in New York in 1979 and at the Nonaligned Movement's summit in New Delhi in 1983. Unquestionably his ad-libbed discourses are far better, but his sense of perfection must prevail in all he does. Having a drink one afternoon at a friend's house in Havana, Castro was visibly uncomfortable until he finally reached for the whiskey bottle to screw on the top properly; the host had left it a bit askew.

  The rare times Castro really appears to relax is with a few companions or visitors at Cayo Piedra, a small volcanic key in the Caribbean, ten miles south of the Cuban coast, where he flies in his helicopter to engage in his favorite sport of underwater fishing. The key, once the site of a lighthouse, has a four-room rustic caretaker's house with a veranda and a pergola, and this is Fidel's real home. Visitors are put up in a modern guesthouse on the other side of the key (there is a collection of José Martí's works, but no Marx or Lenin, at the guesthouse), and all the meals are served aboard a barge tied to the wharf. Cayo Piedra has a pool where Castro swims every morning against the clock. A helicopter pad is an essential facility.

  Most of the day is spent fishing off one of the two large powerboats (always escorted by two naval missile launches), with Fidel in his wet suit diving deep with his spear gun. A champion diver, he invited Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the famous explorer, to join him off Cayo Piedra during the Frenchman's stay in Cuba to study marine life. After his dives, Fidel is given eyedrops and nosedrops by his physician. At dinner fresh turtle soup (from turtles bred off the key) is served before the baked red snapper and lobster speared personally by Castro.

  Meals with Castro usually follow the same pattern—at Cayo Piedra, at the seaside house on the Isle of Youth where he sometimes fishes, or at a military reservation in western Cuba where, wearing a camouflage suit (he calls it a "mercenary" uniform), he hunts wild ducks on a vast lagoon partly covered with forest and mangrove. First, there is a long cocktail hour with light banter—usually about the day's fishing or hunting—and occasional serious conversation, then dinner in a very small group, lasting sometimes until long after midnight. That is one of Fidel's favorite settings for a good discussion, at which he most brilliantly explains re
volutionary Cuba to foreign visitors, dazzling even right-wing Republican congressmen from the mainland. He tends to grant interviews in his office, a relatively sparse L-shaped room with bookcases behind his desk, and he usually sits on a sofa under a modern Cuban mural while conversing. Camilo Cienfuegos looks down from a portrait on another wall. Fidel's reasonably orderly desk includes a large transistor radio (telephones are on an adjoining small table), cassette tapes, piles of documents, a jar containing his favorite hard candy, and until late 1985, boxes with long and short cigars. He increasingly favored the short ones until he suddenly decided to quit smoking sometime in October of 1985. Castro announced this event in a pre-Christmas interview on Brazilian television, and evidently such remains the fascination with him that the story made TV newscasts from the United States to Japan, and was printed prominently in newspapers and magazines worldwide. In his announcement he said that "I reached the conclusion long ago that the one last sacrifice I must make for public health is to stop smoking; I haven't really missed it that much." Given his proven willpower—and given his dedication to physical fitness—chances are that Castro, who began smoking at the age of fifteen when he was in high school, will stick to his decision. He explained that "if someone had forced me to quit, I would have suffered . . . but since I forced myself to halt smoking, without making any solemn promise, it worked."

  Years before, Castro had launched a vast antismoking campaign to persuade Cubans that tobacco, which made the island so famous, was a danger to their health. Television, radio, billboards, magazines, and newspapers were mobilized for the campaign (for example, pregnant women were shown on televised sketches, indicating how smoking can affect the fetus), and the price of cigarettes was raised to nearly two dollars per pack. Anyone returning to Cuba after a long absence is immediately struck by the extent to which Cubans ceased to be a nation of chain-smokers. Castro's own "last sacrifice" was the ultimate weapon in the campaign, adding the virtue that he now practices what he preaches.

  If Fidel did away with his personal trademark of the cigar, he made it absolutely clear that the other symbol—the beard—stays on. He explained, as he had done in the past, that he and his companions grew their beards in the Sierra simply because shaving was too much trouble. Subsequently the barbudo cult grew, and Castro acknowledged that "the beard became a symbol of the guerrilla." But typically he also noted that beards "have a practical advantage" because "if you calculate fifteen minutes a day to shave, that is five thousand minutes a year spent shaving," and the time can be spent better reading or exercising. While the notion of a beardless Fidel is naturally politically absurd thirty years later, he has strongly discouraged other Cubans, even in the highest ranks, from wearing guerrilla beards. It is really his personal mark of distinction.

  Occasionally, Castro will talk about his foreign travels and the people he has met on every continent. The United States is the country he knows best. He went there three times as a young man: on his honeymoon in 1948, the second time a year later to escape political gangsters' death threats in Havana, and in 1955, to collect funds for the revolution he was planning to launch in Cuba from Mexico. He went back in April 1959, as the chief of the victorious rebellion (he met Vice-President Richard Nixon, and charmed guests at the Cuban embassy in Washington, asking them to "help me to help my country"), and twice more to give angry speeches before the United Nations.

  Castro toured Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela as a student leader, and most of South America as the Maximum Leader immediately after the revolution. In 1971 he visited his friend, Chile's elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende Gossens, advising him not to antagonize the United States. In the 1980s he made trips to revolutionary Nicaragua, imposing advice on the Sandinistas he helped win and now supports.

  He visited the Soviet Union nearly a dozen times (not all his trips are necessarily publicized), Eastern Europe twice, and Vietnam once. He stayed away from China mainly because Cuba was firmly on the Soviet side in the Sino-Soviet feud, and he acquired deep contempt for Mao Zedong, whom he never met (he criticizes Mao for having allowed himself "to become a God," but of the Soviet Union he says only that "during Stalin's time, a personality cult developed and abuses of power did take place").

  Fidel, the best-traveled Communist chief of state in the world, has been to Africa several times, mainly to Algeria, whose independence the Cubans championed after their revolution, and to Angola and Ethiopia, where Castro dispatched combat troops in the mid-1970s—and where they remain a decade later. He has been to India, but the only time he touched the ground in Western Europe was during a one-hour stopover at the Madrid airport.

  With all his responsibilities and obligations, Castro still tries to be a free soul, to act on the spur of the moment, to do the unexpected. His decision to attend the inauguration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, his revolutionary protégé, in January 1985 was taken at the last moment when he discovered that no other head of government would be present (he took along Gabo García Márquez, telling him aboard the plane that they were flying to Santiago in Oriente). In Managua Fidel inevitably upstaged the short and uncharismatic Ortega, but he meant well. When a Cuban youth delegation sailed to the Soviet Union in 1985, Castro brought the entire 399-member National Assembly to the Havana dockside (the assembly was having its biannual session that week) to see the youngsters off.

  The Commander in Chief as a rule no longer attends diplomatic receptions (except at the Soviet embassy, now a huge modernistic compound on the sea in uptown Havana), but he may suddenly turn up at dinner at an ambassador's residence, invited or self-invited. The first embassy Fidel ever visited was that of Brazil in 1959, and he was still carrying his rifle (he checked it at the door) wherever he went.

  Appearing unexpectedly one night at the French embassy and staying until four o'clock in the morning in conversation with visiting parliamentarians, Fidel sent over the next day a case of Cuban scotch-type whiskey, which is not the greatest contribution to the pleasures of drinking. However, Castro also plans to produce a Camembert-type cheese and pâté de fois gras in Cuba, and the enthusiastic chef has already become a theoretical expert on force-feeding geese. He is the dilettante extraordinare in all esoteric pursuits.

  A revolutionary and a guerrillero, Castro is far from an ascetic as his liking for Chivas Regal and his pâté interests indicate. He had always been partial to good food and cooking; and in May 1958, as the great Batista offensive was opening, he dispatched a desperate note to Celia Sánchez in the Sierra headquarters, reporting that "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?" In Mexican exile he and a friend decided to splurge on caviar on a day the churchmouse-poor revolutionaries received an unexpected donation from abroad.

  Cuisine in many forms has preoccupied Fidel since youth, and, curiously, spaghetti was always among his favorite dishes. Manuel Moreno Frajinals, Cuba's leading historian who befriended the young Fidel in the late 1940s while he was still at the university, remembers his frequent visits at the family's apartment to discuss politics and grab a meal. On one occasion, Castro arrived just as the maid was frying plantains. Smelling the aroma, he rushed to the kitchen, telling the girl, "Let me show you how to fry them properly." When Moreno Frajinals's wife, who is an architect, asked, "Do you think you know everything?" Fidel replied, "Almost everything."

  In prison on the Isle of Pines (called the Isle of Youth after the revolution), Fidel continually attempted to cook spaghetti on a small electric plate in his solitary cell; guiding visitors through the prison, which he does occasionally, he never fails to recount how many hours it took for the spaghetti to be ready. His sister Emma says he went on cooking spaghetti in the Sierra for his fellow fighters. Conchita Fernández tells that Castro often dined in the kitchen of the Habana Libre Hotel (where he also granted all-night interviews), and that he frequently tried to show the cooks how to prepare the
red snapper properly. As mentioned earlier, he has definite views on preparing lamb chops. He believes that the confit ofduck should be made in a bain-marie, and he is partial to grilled fish and lean meat. At a casual dinner in the countryside with close friends, he will settle for fish, chicken, and salad, often with a Bulgarian white wine and an Algerian red.

  Castro also holds powerful opinions on intellectual aspects of sports: Having played both basketball and baseball of almost professional quality, he once provided a visitor with a learned explanation of why basketball is the thinking man's game (There is no telling where a conversation with Fidel may lead). His theory is that whereas basketball requires strategic and tactical planning as well as speed and agility—thus preparing a man for guerrilla war—baseball poses no such needs (the subject came up when Castro forcefully denied a rumor then circulating abroad that he had once hoped to play for the majors in mainland baseball).

  It is probably inevitable that comparisons are made between spectacular figures of our age, notably between great guerrilleros, and a comparison between Castro and Yugoslavia's late Marshal Josip Broz, Tito, instantly comes to mind. Both were guerrilla chiefs, both fought forms of Fascism, both seemingly became Marxists in the name of social justice, and both had world-arena aspirations. Yet, there are more differences than similarities between them. Tito was an avowed Communist, under Comintern discipline, long before the German invasion and the creation of his partisans' guerrilla army—whereas Fidel (whatever his real inner thoughts might have been when he launched his insurrections) certainly did not start out as a loyal member of the Moscow-oriented Communist movement. And though neither man has made fresh contributions to Marxist thought, Castro has much more intellectual depth than Tito had—the point is made in Fidel's writings and speeches before and after the revolution. It is idle to compare Tito's courage in the face of the Nazis and then Stalin with Castro's courage in the face of Batista and the United States; the circumstances are extremely different. The two leaders dealt with distinct and separate problems in modernizing their nations. Tito succumbed to the temptation of great vanity, making himself a marshal in a white gold-braided uniform, sailing in his private yacht, and taking refuge in the luxury of Brioni Island. Castro, with his own bent of indulgence, has basically remained a guerrilla leader at sixty years of age.