Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  The new president was Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, a professor of physiology and an idol of the students after the Machado regime arrested him along with other university professors in 1931; they had been charged with sedition. Grau lacked political and administrative experience, but he was fully in tune with the rising wave of nationalism and radicalism among the Cuban youth. As Jaime Suchlicki, an exiled Cuban historian, wrote about those intoxicating days, "With Grau, the Generation of 1930 was catapulted into power" and the "students held Cuba's destiny in their hands." The guiding spirit in this revolution was Antonio Guiteras, the twenty-five-year-old interior minister, who pushed for social and economic reform, and the abrogation of the Platt Amendment. While the Communist party now backed the government, it did not dominate it in any significant way, and neither Grau nor Guiteras approved of the establishment of soviets in the sugar mills by Communist workers.

  Nevertheless, this was an overall situation the United States would not tolerate, and the Cubans were reminded once more that they were victims of "historical fatalism," in Martí's words, which meant that nothing could be set in motion on the island without American blessings. This went for the Grau reforms. In discreet contact with Fulgencio Batista and his military commanders, the United States pushed for Grau's overthrow. Washington had never recognized the Grau regime, and early in January 1934, thirty navy warships encircled Cuba, sending a clear signal that no more Cuban nonsense would be permitted—and that the marines were ready to land. On January 14, Batista's army ousted Grau, and Carlos Mendieta became the provisional president, instantly recognized by the United States. The Grau revolution lived for one hundred days, and from then on, Cuba was run by a succession of five stooge presidents manipulated by Batista—until he was ready to run for president in 1940. Two years after Grau's fall, Antonio Guiteras was killed by the police when he attempted to flee Cuba after failing to launch a fresh revolutionary movement. Together with the Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella, Guiteras came to symbolize the Generation of 1930 for the generation of Fidel Castro. And Batista symbolized the evils of the past.

  Batista's presidency was a crucial period for Cuba, but Fidel was a totally apolitical student up to the time of his graduation from Belén shortly before his nineteenth birthday. As a teenager, he had written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt congratulating him on his 1940 reelection, declaring his support for democracy and his opposition to Nazism, and asking for a twenty-dollar bill. Fidel may have simply hoped for a signed reply from FDR, but all he received was a note of thanks from the Department of State and an expression of regret that the money could not be sent.

  Castro has said repeatedly that his social-justice sentiments were awakened during his youth among the poor peasantry of Birán, but there was nothing in the environment of his Jesuit college to strengthen them. In fact, Belén was more an intellectual center for the preparation of Cuba's future right-wing leaders. Most of the teachers were Spanish priests of extreme rightist persuasion, having come to Cuba after the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and the victory of the Franco nationalists. Often they represented the strain of Spanish anti-American nationalism that neither forgave nor forgot that the United States had wrested the island away from Spain in 1898. And, of course, right-wing and left-wing nationalisms and populisms tend to blur.

  By far the most militant in these views was Father Alberto de Castro, a young Spaniard who taught sociology and history, and certainly the most influential teacher at Belén. Father de Castro propounded the thesis of Hispanidad, which attributes historical superiority to the political and cultural influence of Spain and Spanish thought, and he harangued his pupils with the notion that Latin America's independence had been frustrated because there had been no social reforms and because Anglo-Saxon values had dislodged the Spanish cultural impact. He had formed a small student association, called Convivio, to propagate his ideas, but it made no headway.

  Juan Rovira remembers Father de Castro predicting that the Americas would be the future scene of world wars, that a war between the United States and Latin America was inevitable, and that all the small nations of Central America and the Caribbean should unite with South America to face the threat from the north. Rovira says the priest had "a very expressive face" and was a "fantastic orator."

  It is unclear if Father de Castro's preachings had much—or any—direct influence on Fidel Castro, but, coincidentally or not, Fidel does share the Jesuit's opinions on the fundamental incompatibility between the United States and Latin America as well as the conclusion that liberal democracy is "decadent." Many of Fidel's companions at the university say they remember his intense interest in the writings of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Fascist Falange party in Spain prior to the civil war (and the son of a dictatorial Spanish military prime minister). Still, it would be unjustified to ascribe fascistic tendencies to Castro. In Mediterranean philosophical climates, rightist and leftist extremes meet easier than elsewhere, having both social populist characteristics. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome as a socialist before seizing ultimate power as a Fascist.

  Castro himself has little to say about the Belén faculty politically apart from observing that without exception the teachers' ideology was "rightist, Francoist, reactionary," and that at that time there were no "leftist" Jesuits in Cuba. He remembers that at Belén communism was considered "a very bad thing," but still, his political activities were nil. Castro has told Frei Betto that he "observed" the rightist philosophy of his professors, though "I didn't question it much; I was in sports . . . I tried to advance my studies."

  Coexisting with rigidly rightist Spanish Jesuit teachings at Belén were ideologies of groups favoring liberal Christian social trends in Cuban politics (now they would be described as Christian Democrats), and serious efforts were made to attract the apolitical Fidel Castro. José Ignácio Rasco, who launched a full-fledged Christian Democratic movement in Cuba in the 1950s, continues to believe that while Fidel stayed away from such groups he still harbored his Roman Catholic faith. He thinks Castro lost his faith suddenly at the university and became an atheist.

  Rasco's version is naïve, and Fidel must be believed when he says that he never had religious faith and that at school "they were unable to inculcate such values in me." By the same token, it is fully credible when Castro declares that "later, I had another type of values: a political belief, a political faith that I had to forge alone through my experiences, my reasoning and my sentiments." But it sounds more like self-aggrandizement when he says that "unhappily, I had to be my own preceptor all my life" and says also that he would have been grateful for a mentor in politics and "revolutionary ideas" when he was in his teens.

  Castro's Belén schoolmates who remember him the best are convinced that from the outset the Jesuits had an eye on him as a leader they could form to have a great destiny in Cuban politics. Father Rubinos, the head of the oratory academy who was regarded as the "ideologue" of Belén, centered his attention on Fidel as the most intelligent student in the college, the best athlete, and the leading outdoorsman. In the end the Jesuits failed to mold him; Castro is grateful for their intellectual influence but contemptuous of their efforts to bring him into the fold.

  Twenty years earlier, the Jesuits had the same plans for Eduardo "Eddy" Chibás, the son of an Oriente millionaire, and a Dolores and Belén student of extraordinary promise. Instead, Chibás took a revolutionary role in Cuban politics, first against the Machado dictatorship, then against the corrupt Batista-manipulated puppet presidents of the 1930s and Cuba's quasi-colonial status. By the time Fidel Castro reached Belén, Eddy Chibás had become a famous opposition politician and the nearest figure in the young Cuban history to the incorruptible José Martí. In the years to come, Chibás would be Castro's political mentor and protector—and Castro his worthy successor. In its own fashion, Belén was the school of great Cuban leaders.

  Though Cuba enjoyed the first period of full-fledged representative democr
acy in its history, vested economic interests and corruption continued to exist, and the country still could not risk to antagonize the United States and American investors. The Platt Amendment had been abridged after the fall of the Grau regime in 1934, but the "empire," as Martí called it, had not relinquished its decisive voice in Cuban affairs.

  In any case, Fulgencio Batista was a constitutional president, governing with the backing of the armed forces, the conservatives, and the Communists, an unprecedented coalition. There was an elected congress where all voices could be heard, and there was a free press. In 1940 elections were entirely clean, and Cubans hoped that finally a new era had dawned. It was Batista himself who proposed the free elections, preferring to be president in name as well as in fact after seven years of ruling Cuba from behind the scenes in Camp Columbia, the Havana military headquarters. Unquestionably, the struggle for the survival of democracy in the world, even though the United States was not yet formally in the war, played a crucial role in Batista's decision to act in a democratic fashion.

  To win the presidency, Batista defeated Ramón Grau San Martín whom he had overthrown in 1934. But this time there was a reversal of roles. Grau was no longer the radical professor of the past, reverting instead to the classical model of Cuban presidents and politicians whose overwhelming interest was pomp and wealth. Batista, on the other hand, chose to present himself as a candidate with advanced social and economic ideas, earning the leftist support Grau once had. In the meantime, the former sergeant quietly succeeded in becoming a very rich man..

  Batista's election to the presidency followed the drafting of a new Cuban constitution early in 1940. The constituent assembly that produced it had been freely chosen in probably the first such exercise of the vote in the history of the republic. This constitution was remarkably progressive by Cuban and Latin American standards of the day, including clauses proscribing latifundia and thus opening doors to agrarian reform (which Fidel Castro would institute twenty years later according to this model), establishing new social-welfare provisions, and limiting the presidency based on democratic elections to a single four-year term.

  The behavior of the Communist party at this juncture is extremely important not only historically, but with respect to future revolutionary developments in Cuba and Fidel Castro's complex relations with the Communists. In fact, the seeds of Communist Cuba were planted in 1940 when Castro was still at Dolores in Santiago, and the men with whom he would form his alliance after the 1959 revolution were already seasoned organizers and politicians.

  Cuban communism has deep roots. A Communist Republic of Cuban Soviets was formed in Havana on August 1920 by a handful of admirers of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but obviously it was no more than a gesture. In 1922 a Communist Association was organized in Havana by Carlos Baliño, then seventy-four years old and a remarkable figure in Cuban history. Baliño, who had been an associate of José Martí in the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York (he lived as a worker in the United States much of his life), was the founder of the Socialist Workers' Party in 1904, and was probably the first serious Cuban Communist militant.

  Other "Communist Associations" appeared throughout Cuba, and in August 1925, Baliño and several fellow believers called a congress to give birth to the Cuban Communist party. The party was founded by the seventeen delegates attending the congress, including Baliño, Julio Antonio Mella (a student leader), and Fábio (Abraham) Grobart, a Polish-born apprentice tailor in his early twenties who had arrived in Cuba three years earlier—speaking only Yiddish—to escape the persecution of Communists in his homeland. In 1986, Grobart, well in his eighties, was the only surviving founder of the party, a superbly lucid politician and a treasure trove of Cuban Communist lore. He had tears in his eyes when Fidel Castro awarded him a medal on the sixtieth anniversary of the party's foundation; at the party's Third Congress in February 1986, it was Grobart who introduced Castro to the delegates.

  Though illegal, the Cuban Communist party functioned in a brilliant and disciplined fashion, its influence vastly exceeding its numbers. Intellectuals, artists, and labor leaders formed the backbone of the party, making it possible for the Communists to occupy key positions in national life. Rubén Martínez Villena, one of the leading Cuban poets of this century, was an early party leader; there was widespread mourning when he died after an illness while still young. Among party militants and sympathizers was the outstanding painter, the late Wilfredo Lam; poets and writers Nicolás Guillén (in 1986 still president of the official Writers' Union though in his eighties), Alejo Carpentier (a distinguished Cuban novelist who died after the revolution), Juan Marinello (the party's president in the 1940s and a member of Castro's Politburo in the 1970s), Raúl Roa García (who until his death served as Castro's fire-breathing foreign minister), Pablo de la Torriente Brau (Castro's university friend), Emilio Roig de Leushenring; and the leading Cuban economists Jacinto Torras and Raúl Cepero Bonilla. In truth, there were few creative personalities in Cuba since the 1930s who were not of the left, or the extreme left.

  Communist leaders, not always confessing their political persuasion, had dominated the powerful Cuban labor unions since the early 1930s, organizing political strikes and exercising a considerable influence on the economy. Following the directive issued in Moscow by the Seventh Conference of the Communist International (Comintern) the Cuban party adopted the policy of cooperation with non-Communist parties in organizing "popular fronts." In Cuba this meant collaboration with Fulgencio Batista.

  In a move that Fidel Castro may have found inspiring many years later, early in 1938 the Communists first created the Revolutionary Union Party (PUR) to serve as a legal vehicle for some of their activities while the illegal party continued its own operations. The PUR then helped organize the Popular Revolutionary Block (BRP) with other opposition parties arrayed against the candidacy of ex-President Grau, promising their support to Batista in the 1940 elections. Straight-faced, the Communist party's Central Committee announced in mid-July of 1938 that Batista was no longer "the center of reaction" and that all efforts should be made to force him to keep "progressive" promises.

  This was a neat piece of political footwork, and the government of President Federico Laredo Brú (a Batista puppet), aware of the Communist strength in the labor unions, rushed to nail down the party's support by legalizing it in September 1938, thereby ending its thirteen years of ostensibly illegal existence. The Communists stayed with Batista, continuing to build up their power. In January 1939 they merged the PUR with the real Communist party to produce the Communist Revolutionary Union Party (PURC), and launched the Cuban Workers' Confederation, representing a half-million workers, under Communist leadership. In 1959 and 1960, Fidel Castro, working with the same Communist leaders, imitated this twin maneuver when he proceeded to unite all the revolutionary groups and to join with the Communists in controlling the labor confederation.

  When Cubans voted for the Constituent Assembly in 1940, the Communist party had only ninety thousand members, and was able to win only six seats. The six Communist constituents succeeded, however, in attracting an extravagant amount of attention by submitting their own draft constitution emphasizing the "anti-imperialist" struggle for propaganda purposes, though never expecting their proposals to be adopted, and by persuading the assembly to allow radio broadcasts of their sessions. Thus, Communists won access to a nationwide audience, another lesson that would not be lost on Fidel Castro.

  In the presidential elections, the Communists basked in Batista's triumph, and celebrated their own victories in winning ten seats in the Chamber of Deputies, eighty municipal assemblymen throughout the island, and the mayoralty of the town of Manzanillo m Oriente—the first time Cuba had a Communist mayor. The party justified its support for Batista by stressing the importance of his commitment to a liberal constitution and his program of building schools, hospitals, and roads. But old-line Communist leaders acknowledge privately even today that the toughest test they had faced wi
th the party membership was the effort to explain Stalin's wisdom in signing the nonaggression pact with Hitler's Germany in 1939. Still, party discipline prevailed—as it would prevail again and again in the future.

  Batista naturally welcomed Communist support because of the party's power in organized labor, and this alliance became even smoother after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and the Russians became the allies of the Western democracies. Batista established diplomatic relations with Moscow and gave Juan Marinello, the party president, a seat in the cabinet; subsequently Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the party's chief intellectual and now Fidel Castro's closest adviser, took that cabinet seat.

  Marinello's and Rodríguez's membership in the Batista cabinet does not appear in official postrevolutionary histories of the Communist party (though Fábio Grobart, the octogenarian party founder and a man of great intellectual honesty, mentions it in a monograph on Marinello). Fidel Castro says in one of his accounts of contemporary Cuban history only that the Communist party "had a certain influence" in the Batista government. Cuban political memories are indeed selective when it comes to the Communist trajectory. Both the party's pro-Batista phase or its role in the revolution when it refused for a very long time to go along with the Fidelista vision of history are very lightly passed over.

  Acting on Moscow instructions in 1944, the Communists engaged in still another "tactical maneuver." With the end of the Batista term and the rise in anti-Communist sentiment, the party changed its name to the Popular Socialist Party (PSP), doing away with the uncomfortable word "Communist." Although the PSP delivered twice as many votes in 1944 as in 1940, it could not prevent Ramón Grau's election. Marinello, however, was elected to the Senate and the party retained its hold on the labor confederation through the presidency of Lázaro Peña, a member of the PSP leadership. Generally, however, Cuban workers elected Communists as their leaders not because of Peña's and the others' ideology, but because of the high quality of their unionist performance. But after 1944 in general Communists came under growing pressures in Cuba.