by Tad Szulc
To be sure, the two men hated and despised each other, precisely because of the surface similarities and the contrasts; there was a long rivalry between them. They fought bitterly in Tito's final years of life for the control of the Nonaligned Movement (Castro having succeeded Tito as chairman in 1979), and the old marshal battled the Cuban's attempts at the Havana summit conference to bring the Nonaligned Movement too close to the Soviet Union.
Here, perhaps, Tito had tried to teach Castro a useful lesson: Once the Kremlin's devoted wartime ally, the Yugoslav broke with the Russians over their determination to dictate his country's future, preferring to become a "neutral" Communist state. Castro, despite many painful experiences with Moscow, went on faithfully espousing in public every Soviet foreign-policy position; Tito seemed to be warning the younger guerrillero not to mortgage away his independence forever.
The complexities of Fidel Castro's personality are immense, and therefore no future change of course by him can ever be ruled out if he becomes convinced that it is in the interest of Cuba, the revolution, and his own. Naturally, these three sets of interests blend and overlap as long as Castro dominates the Cuban scene. And one is tempted to think that his personal destiny was to achieve this domination.
II
THE YOUNG YEARS
(1926–1952)
CHAPTER
1
Slightly more than thirty years after José Martí, the "Apostle" of Cuban independence, was killed in combat with Spanish troops in 1895, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born at a finca in the province of Oriente, barely twenty-five miles from the Dos Ríos battlefield. In terms of history, three decades are a short segment—it already roughly equals the span of Castro's own revolution—and in this sense, his life has been intertwined from the outset with the struggles and symbolisms of Cuba's past.
As the island's greatest thinker and patriotic hero, Martí was always Castro's role model, and in landing with his rebels on the shores of Cuba to dislodge tyranny, Fidel was fulfilling the Martían code. Martí, the leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, had launched the final war of independence with a proclamation from his New York headquarters on January 29, 1895, and came ashore in a rowboat on the Oriente coast two months later to join the guerrillas fighting the Spaniards. The Apostle was killed on May 19, astride a white horse, weeks after coming home to Cuba from exile. He was only forty-two, a slim, sad-faced man with a bushy, pointed moustache and a half goatee under his lower lip, and almost constantly in poor health.
It was therefore only natural for Fidel Castro to seek the most complete personal identification with Martí's martyrdom, and, quite predictably, soon after the victorious revolution, he made a pilgrimage to Playitas, the beach where the historic landing occurred on April 2, 1895. The pilgrimage produced an hour-long color documentary, exhibited in movie theaters and on television, showing Castro in battledress standing dramatically alone on the small horseshoe-shaped stretch of white sand, narrating the tale of Martí's sacrifice. Then, the cameras followed him to a nearby shack where Fidel interrogated the only surviving witness, a spry nonagenarian, about all he could remember of that stirring event.
The parallels between 1895 and 1956 are many, and they have their provenance in the many emotional, intellectual, and political traits shared by Castro and Martí . . . Martí after countless attempts to overthrow Spanish rule, concluded that a revolution in Cuba could only succeed from an expanding guerrilla warfare; Castro came to the same conclusion after the failure of his assault on the Moncada army barracks in 1953. Martí likewise understood the immense personal risks involved in leading a revolution, writing a friend on the eve of his death that "every day I am in danger of giving my life for my country and for my duty"; Castro would pledge before embarking on his invasion that "we shall be free or martyrs." Both men had quite early formative political experiences. Martí was imprisoned by the Spaniards at the age of seventeen for opposing colonial rule, sentenced to hard labor, and exiled. Castro's own political rebellion took shape at Havana University before he was twenty-one. Fundamental principles motivated both men, and Fidel would remark many years later that "the sense of personal honor is held by almost every Spaniard." This was the heritage of the rebel sons of Spain.
The tragic poet was convinced that even if he died, the liberating revolution would triumph (some biographers insist that Martí deliberately sought death to create an aura of martyrdom in the war of independence), and events proved him right—up to a point. Castro had demonstrated on numerous occasions—notably at Moncada and Alegría de Pío—that he was ready to die for his cause, but his bravura stemmed principally from his temperament as well as his belief that revolutionary chiefs must lead their men. Sons of Spaniards, both Martí and Castro represent a very special strain of Iberian mysticism and romanticism combined with a powerful dose of New World nationalism. Moreover, the real Cuban issue to both Martí and Castro was a revolution in depth, a social revolution and not just changes in the political status quo. Familiar with his own country and with much of Latin America's poverty, Martí advocated the grant of land to its tillers (but without taking it away from others) and a better distribution of national wealth: "The nation where there are a few rich men is not rich: it [is] rich where everyone has a little of the wealth."
Martí wrote that the government has the duty of providing needed education to the people because "to read is to walk." One of Castro's first major revolutionary undertakings after 1959 would be an islandwide crash literacy campaign. The Cuban philosopher opposed, however, Marxist radical social transformations. His biographer, M. Isidoro Méndez, a prerevolutionary historian, found Martí to be a "social republican," believing in "prudent socialism" without extremism.
Appearing decades later on the Cuban political scene and in a totally changed world, Castro's extremism in social change, his rejection of direct-vote elections as the keystone of political life that Martí had urged in the nineteenth century seem a stark and telling indication of the difference in their political platforms for revolution. This ideological difference surely stems from their distinct temperamental and psychological makeups. Martí, the classical democrat, essayist in three languages, and lyrical patriotic poet, believed in civilian government with the consent of the governed. Castro is the quintessential Spanish military caudillo, wrapped today in a Marxist-Leninist mantle of convenience, offering the intellectual rationalization that "real" revolution is impossible under an elective system, and that Communist authoritarianism is the necessary instrument for its implementation. He is thereby proving the sad theorem that "without power, ideals cannot be realized; with power, they seldom survive."
In a speech in the mid-1960s, when his regime was caught up in complex internal ideological struggles, Castro went a historically curious step further to identify his revolution with the Cuban "fathers of independence." He proclaimed that Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a wealthy landowner who led the first patriotic insurrection in 1868, and José Martí were not Marxist-Leninists simply "because in the epoch in which they lived and in the historical conditions in which their magnificent struggles developed, they could not be." He then added in a phrase instantly made into an official slogan: "Then, we would have been like them—today, they would have been like us!" Castro understood that without an independent and Martían foundation, a Marxist system would be unacceptable to Cubans.
While Martí and Castro would disagree on the means of achieving their ends, Castro is truly Martí's direct philosophical and political heir in his views on radicalism, agrarian reform, racial equality, and social justice. Castro and Martí also share fears and suspicions of the United States and its intentions toward Cuba. North American aspirations to annex or even buy Cuba (as Louisiana was purchased) go back to the early days of the last century. The American consul in Havana wrote in 1833 that "in the fullness of time, when Cuba and Spain and we should all be of one mind—without discussion, or revolution, or war—Cuba would doubtless be added to the Union."<
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Martí, having spent long years in the United States in forced exile from Spanish Cuba, had nightmares over an American grab of his island from Spain as the outcome of the independence war then under way. In the letter he penned the day before he died, Martí said that he was battling the Spaniards for Cuban independence in order to impede "the extension of the United States through the Antilles." He wrote that in the United States he had lived "inside the entrails of the monster," and he was concerned with American "economic imperialism," remarking that "the disdain of a formidable neighbor who does not really know us is the worst danger to our America."
Fidel Castro had, of course, absorbed all these sentiments long before his own experiences and confrontations with the "formidable neighbor."
José Martí's days coincided with the time of America's Manifest Destiny. Even twenty years before the independence war, the United States economic presence in Cuba was already weighty. Cuban trade with the United States was six times larger than with Spain and, as Martí saw it, there seemed an economic and geographic inevitability about the island coming under complete American political domination.
José Antonio Saco, a philosopher and one of the first great Cuban patriots, warned in 1847 that Cuba "is so important that her possession is well worth a war . . . her possession would give the United States power so immense that England and France not only would see the existence of their colonies in America threatened, but would also experience the weakening of the powerful influence they exercise in other parts of the world."
No annexation of Cuba ever occurred formally, yet the fears of the nineteenth-century patriots were fully realized when the United States declared war on Spain in 1898 after the battleship Maine blew up in the Havana harbor from unknown causes. This conveniently provided the casus belli for an open conflict with Madrid—for which Americans were spoiling anyway. As Theodore Roosevelt and his Rangers charged up San Juan Hill in Santiago and other American forces were landing elsewhere along the Cuban coasts, the exhausted Spaniards were quickly defeated (they had been fighting the merciless Cuban guerrillas for three years). Later that same year, the United States and Spain signed the Paris peace treaty, transferring control over Cuba to Washington. At the same time, the United States also acquired Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam.
The Cubans had begun struggling for their independence in 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the Oriente landowner with a doctorate of law from the University of Madrid, sounded his Grito de Yara (the call to freedom issued from the town of Yara his rebels had seized) to proclaim the revolutionary war against Spain's "decrepit and worm-eaten" power. A revolutionary junta, then a provisional government were formed, a constitution was drafted, and a congress established with veto powers over presidential decisions. But the rebels, led by President Céspedes, the congressional leader Ignacio Agramonte, and the military chiefs General Maximo Gómez and General Antonio Maceo, could not dislodge the Spaniards from the island. As much as anything else, the Cubans were too deeply divided among themselves to plan and conduct a successful liberation war: Céspedes fired the Dominican-born General Gómez, then was deposed in turn, finally being killed by Spanish troops in 1874. Gómez was brought back, then removed again. In the end the first independence war was terminated ten years after it began when the two sides signed the Peace of Zanjón. Maceo, the black general, kept fighting for another year. Shortly thereafter, Maceo and General Calixto García launched what became known as "The Little War," lasting through 1880, again with a Cuban defeat. The final independence war came with Martí and General Gómez in 1895—and the American intervention and Spain's expulsion from the New World in 1898. For Fidel Castro the history student, the divisions caused by the independence wars emphasized the need for revolutionary unity concentrated in the hands of one leader, and for freedom from Yankee control.
When Cuba came under outright United States military occupation, the island had been ravaged by thirty years of continuing warfare. The independence wars seemed in vain as the Cuban economy was made wholly dependent on the northern neighbor, and even the educational system was thoroughly Americanized in flagrant ignorance of the local culture and language. As with the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the idea was to prepare Cubans to become good Americans someday. Inevitably, the four-year occupation established the foundations for turning Cuba into at least a de facto United States protectorate in the Caribbean for the next sixty years.
This protectorate status was engineered through the forcible insertion of the so-called Platt Amendment in the Cuban constitution, drafted with American blessings as a prelude to the grant of independence, as well as through the enforcement of trade and investment arrangements allowing United States interests a completely free run of Cuba. The amendment, devised by Senator Orville H. Platt as part of a United States Army appropriations bill, authorized the president to "leave the government" of Cuba to its own people, with the proviso that the Cuban constitution recognizes that "the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty . . ." The Cubans, given the choice of accepting the Platt Amendment in their new constitution or possibly remaining forever under military occupation, engaged in fervent debate before capitulating.
On May 20, 1902, Cuba was proclaimed an independent republic, the last colony in the Americas to achieve such status. Even this independence was farce and fiction; Leonard Wood, the last governor-general, wrote President William McKinley that "there is, of course, little or no independence left in Cuba under the Platt Amendment." A year later, Senator Chauncey Depew declared that "the day is not far distant when Cuba, resembling the United States in its constitution, laws and liberties . . . will have from five to six million people who are educated upon American lines and worthy of all the rights of American citizenship. Then, with the initiative from Cuba, we can welcome another star to our flag."
No such initiative ever came; instead, continuous internal political unrest resulted in a second United States military occupation lasting from 1906 to 1909, the landing of U.S. Marines to protect American interests and citizens in 1910, and another landing in 1917 to persuade Cuba to enter World War I, given the island's strategic importance astride the sealanes. To protect American properties in Oriente from labor unrest and sabotage, the marines remained in Cuba until 1923—three years before the birth of Fidel Castro. Throughout this period it was apparent that the American government held Cubans in deep disdain. Small wonder then that the young republic grew up with a paralyzing inferiority complex, and an anti-American sentiment to which Castro and his generation became heirs. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes would sum up the American attitudes toward Latin America a half-century later, writing that the destiny of the U.S. was "to be strong with the weak."
Though the Platt Amendment was removed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, under the new Good Neighbor policy for Latin America, the United States' political and economic stranglehold over Cuba would not vanish until the great Castro revolution. The ouster of the Batista dictatorship in 1959 would allow Fidel and his barbudos the true achievement of Cuban independence, independence for which José Martí had died sixty-four years earlier, and which was refused Cuba by the Americans in 1898 and 1902. This historical dimension of the revolution would elude the United States, however, along with the comprehension that Cubans had lived all these years in the shame of being, as Castro called it, a "pseudo-republic."
A large sugarcane and cattle estate, the Manacas finca is located in the municipality of Birán in the Mayarí region of the northern Oriente coast. It is about twenty-five miles south of the Bay of Nipe and roughly the same distance east of dos Ríos, the spot where José Martí was killed in a Spanish ambush in 1895.
It was at Manacas that Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926, and by the time he was ready to attend the local elementary school, he was already imbued with the Martí l
egend. This was part of every Cuban childhood, especially in the proud and ever-rebellious Oriente province. The revolutionary tradition touching the area of Fidel's birth would again be emphasized when his brother Raúl Castro, leading his Rebel Army column from the Sierra Maestra to the Sierra Cristal in the northeast to establish the guerrilla war's Second Front, marched past the Birán house in April 1958. Raúl would make a point of mentioning this fact in his lengthy report to Fidel on the progress of his operations in the Mayarí region. The youngest brother was probably the most family-minded member of the vast Castro clan.
The head of this clan was Ángel Castro y Argiz, an émigré to Cuba from his native village of Áncara, near the town of Lugo in the northwestern Galicia region of Spain. He was a destitute thirteen-year-old orphan when he arrived in Cuba. Born around 1874, as a child he had lived with an uncle in the Galicia pueblo in Spain's poorest and bleakest corner. Seven or eight years before the last Cuban war of independence, Ángel, increasingly maltreated at home, left Spain to join another uncle, one who had settled on the faraway Caribbean island. Castro has claimed on at least one occasion that his father had been sent to Cuba to fight as a Spanish soldier when the independence war erupted in 1895, that he was repatriated after the war but, having liked the island, came back as a penniless emigrant in the first years of this century. This account is vague, and probably inaccurate; at least two of Fidel's sisters admit they have never heard about Ángel Castro's military experiences.