Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  A strong friendship developed between Guevara and Castro, and they took part together in a series of political confrontations at the university. In 1959, Alfredo Guevara was part of a secret task force that allowed Fidel Castro to assume full control of the new revolutionary government, still filled with independents, and then to move Cuba toward communism (he also ran the cinema industry and served as vice-minister of culture). Despite their close relationship, it does not follow that Guevara was necessarily responsible—and this is true of other leading Communists who knew Fidel well at the university—for Castro's conversion to Marxism.

  Having succeeded in controlling the Communists after the revolution's victory in 1959, instead of being controlled by them (a powerful party faction would attempt again to impose itself in 1962 and 1968 before being smashed), Castro made full use of his Communist university friends. Although none of them participated in any of the great Fidelista revolutionary actions—the party did not believe in them at the time—afterward they were given important assignments.

  Knowing his Communist friends had no other place to go after 1959, and believing in their organizational skills, Castro recruited those at the university to set in motion, at first secretly, Cuba's transition to communism once he made the basic decision to do so for overwhelming strategic reasons. Before the revolution he had had virtually no contact with the top party leadership, and these older men were brought into the 1959 political picture in a different fashion and in a different power context. With a few exceptions, they were merely decorative.

  Meanwhile, Alfredo Guevara instantly entered the most intimate circle, and he remains there. Lionel Soto, Raúl Valdés Vivó, and Flavio Bravo organized in Havana the first Marxist instruction school for the new Communist leadership emerging from the revolution, a vital mechanism in the transition. In 1986, Lionel Soto became a member of the Communist party's Secretariat, a key policy post, Flavio Bravo Pardo was chairman of the National Assembly and a member of the Council of State, and Valdés Vivó was a member of the party's Central Committee. Alfredo Guevara commutes between Havana and Paris, enjoying full access to Fidel and Raúl Castro. None of these men, however, is the regime's ideologue: This is Fidel's domain.

  To the extent that it can ever be fully proved, available evidence indicates strongly that Castro became a convert to Marxism in his own way and in his own good time. Castro says that he became familiar with the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in his third year at the university, which would have been in 1948 or 1949, having first been a "utopian Communist."

  Since the rate of ideological evolution cannot be measured or defined scientifically, there is no reason to doubt his version of his Marxist catechism progress or his phrase that "if Ulysses was captivated by the songs of the siren, I was captivated by the incontestible verities of the Marxist literature." He acknowledges that he patronized the Communist party's bookstore on Havana's Carlos III Street (today Avenida Salvador Allende), and it is probably true that he read or borrowed Marxist texts at Alfredo Guevara's house in Old Havana.

  Much more important is how Castro's Marxism and socialism evolved in his full-fledged revolutionary period and when he assumed power. At the university he carefully refrained from even using words like "Marxism" or "socialism" in public speeches; conversely, he never attacked socialism or communism in his political pronouncements—though over the years he has strongly criticized the "old" Communist party.

  Alfredo Guevara is right in emphasizing that Castro is a man of action, and there was plenty of it for Fidel outside the confines of the highly structured university politics. Despite his efforts at the university, Fidel wound up as a political loner, a role much more compatible with his personality and which would become his hallmark, and his strength in the greater political arena of Cuban politics.

  The lethal realities of Havana politics, in and out of the university, were two large powerful gangster groups whose origins were in the violence surrounding the Machado dictatorship in the early 1930s. One was the Socialist Revolutionary Movement (MSR), founded in 1945 by Rolando Masferrer. Masferrer, a Spanish civil war veteran on the Republican side, had broken away with several friends from the Cuban Communist party. The other was the Insurrectional Revolutionary Union (UIR), headed by Emilio Tró, a veteran of both the Spanish war (where he fought alongside the anarchists) and World War II, during which he served with the U.S. Army in the Pacific, participating in the Guadalcanal campaign. Because the only thing the MSR and the UIR had in common was greed for power and political (and economic) influence, they were natural enemies, permanently involved in mutual killings. They each opposed the government of President Grau because it was the popular position of the day, and Grau—unwilling or unable to put an end to this political gangsterism—preferred to temporize and attempted at times to buy off the two organizations. Obviously it did not work.

  The MSR claimed it stood for an anti-Communist "revolutionary socialism," whatever that meant, which would also oppose United States "imperialism" and Grau's Auténtico party. Its other stated objective was the overthrow of the bloody dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic (a 1930 creature of the United States and of the marines who who were occupying the country at the time). The anti-Trujillo stance gave the MSR a certain respectability, attracting to its leadership such men as the exiled writer Juan Bosch who was later elected president of the Dominican Republic in 1926 after Trujillo's assassination. Basically, however, the MSR was an association of gunmen, and much of its power was concentrated at the university where Manolo Castro, an engineering student and an associate of Masferrer, was FEU president for five years. The UIR's official objective was to rid Havana's streets of "assassins," presumably meaning the MSR

  The great conflict between the two organizations erupted early in 1947 when President Grau committed the folly of naming the UIR's Emilio Tró and the MSR's Mario Salabarría as majors in the National Police, a desperate effort to neutralize the gangs. Tró was also made chief of the National Police Academy, and Salabarría was appointed head of the Investigations Department of the National Police. Thus Grau managed to instigate a war within the police apparatus as well. Grau's other idea was to name Manolo Castro to be the national sports director. This post prevented Manolo Castro from running for reelection as FEU president in 1947, opening the federation to a succession struggle (won by Enrique Ovares and lost by the slate that included Fidel Castro) in which the MSR and the UIR were naturally deeply involved.

  The war between the MSR and the UIR directly affected Fidel Castro's political interests and destiny because in order to survive, politically as well as physically, he had to maneuver skillfully between the two gangster organizations. This was his first taste of real infighting, and Fidel instantly demonstrated his talent for concealing his true positions and playing both sides of the street, a practice known by his subsequent admirers as the exercise of "political genius."

  Even today it is impossible to determine accurately Castro's relationships with the MSR and the UIR, possibly because they were of such shifting nature, especially in terms of personal ties with leaders on both sides. Fidel is known to have developed a good relationship with MSR's Manolo Castro when the latter was winding up his presidency of the Students' Federation, but he was never seriously identified with that movement. In 1946, Fidel was accused, but without proof, by some political leaders of wounding with a gunshot an obscure UIR student activist named Lionel Gómez to please Manolo Castro.

  According to contemporary accounts, Castro aligned himself with the UIR while completing his first year at the law school in the spring of 1946, but it is not certain whether he actually joined it. Jesús Diegues, a UIR leader, told an exiled Cuban historian in a letter many years later that Castro "used us for his own political battles within the university without ever really identifying [publicly] with UIR." This would be par for the course for Fidel, although the reverse may also be true. The slate on which he would run in the July 1947
FEU elections was supported by the UIR, while Ovares and his Communist allies had the MSR's backing. It has also been said that Fidel went to the UIR when the MSR rebuffed him. A published report claims that Fidel Castro was present when President Grau swore in Emilio Tró, the UIR chief, as director of the National Police Academy, but there is no further corroboration. In the end, it is virtually impossible to ascertain the truth.

  Meanwhile, Fidel's first outside political performance came in the spring of 1946, before he had turned twenty. The occasion was a meeting at the home of Carlos Miguel de Céspedes, a rightist politician and grandson of the 1868 independence leader, running for mayor of Havana with ties to the Machado dictatorship and hoping for the support of the Students' Federation. He invited Manolo Castro, then FEU president, to negotiate student backing, but Manolo Castro insisted on bringing along three colleagues from the university, including Fidel Castro, who in previous weeks had led law-school students in a violent attack on a group of youths, described as "Nazi-Fascists," trying to hold a meeting on the campus.

  Céspedes, according to an article published in Bohemia magazine in June 1946, outlined his campaign plans and asked for comments. When Fidel's turn came, he started out by saying that he would support the candidate—and here the hosts broke out in smiles—but on three conditions. He made the classical Fidel pause, and said that the first condition was for all the young revolutionary leaders killed by rightist regimes, including Communist party cofounder Julio Antonio Mella, to be brought back to life, that Céspedes and his friends return to the national treasury all the money they had "stolen from the people," and that history be set back a century. Dramatically, Fidel announced that "if these three conditions are met, I shall immediately sell myself as a slave to the colony into which you want to turn Cuba." Presently, he rose and marched out of the mansion. This little-known episode is a milestone of sorts in Castro's ideological history: The powerful Cuban nationalism and his sense of betrayal of Cuba by one and all since the wars of independence, and the thundering protest against the "exploitation" of the poor by the rich continue to be Fidel's fundamental themes forty years later.

  At the university Castro joined the newly formed Anti-Imperialist League and the FEU's Committee for the Independence of Puerto Rico as a great many other students did. Given the deep nationalist sentiments surfacing among young Cubans during and after the war, and the concurrent exacerbation of resentments against the United States for the role it had played in Cuba since 1898, it was not particularly surprising that a man like Fidel would have become a member of such organizations. It did not at all define him as a Marxist. When it comes to "anti-imperialism," he has been consistent in this attitude from his student days as a Cuban perhaps more than as a Marxist, which is a subtle point not often appreciated in the United States.

  Fidel crowned the first full year at the university with his debut as a public speaker on November 27, 1946. He was in his second year at law school (academic years straddle calendar years), he had just turned twenty, and was already sufficiently well known to rate front-page treatment in the next day's newspapers. The patriotic occasion was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the execution of eight medical students by Spanish colonial authorities as punishment for their pro-independence activities. Traditionally, the ceremony was organized by Havana University and held before the martyrs' pantheon in the sprawling Colón cemetery in the Nuevo Vedado district.

  Castro naturally paid tribute to the memory of the medical students, but instantly launched into a tirade against the Grau government, denouncing the president's unconstitutional plans to try for reelection in 1948, accusing the regime of exploitation, and appealing to Cubans to abandon their apathy and rise against those who allowed them to starve to death.

  This was the speech Fidel had so carefully rehearsed at the home of his fellow student, José Ignácio Rasco, and it evidently made a great impression, especially when he attacked "the presidential tolerance for some ministers who steal public funds and for the gangs that invade the inner circles of the government." In rhetoric that would become familiar to Cubans in the years and decades to come, Fidel proclaimed that "if Machado and Batista assassinated and persecuted decent persons and honorable revolutionaries, Doctor Grau has killed all hopes of the Cuban people, transforming himself into a stigma for the nation."

  Castro had hit on the great populist formula of Cuban speechmaking, and he would never really deviate from it. Though he was the last speaker at the lengthy ceremony, he was quoted in the newspaper El Mundo in the fourth paragraph of its lead article on page one, ahead of much better-known political speakers. The newspapers, referring to him as Fidel de Castro, failed to explain on whose behalf he had spoken—it may have been in the name of the law school—but it did not truly matter because for all practical purposes a new star had ascended the firmament of the contentious Cuban politics. And he was not yet legally of age.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Nineteen forty-seven was for Fidel Castro the year of definitive political commitment, the year he launched his political career in earnest, and the year of great romantic political adventure and immense personal peril. Following up on his cemetery speech the previous November, Castro was one of thirty-four signers of a declaration against President Grau's reelection by the central committee of the FEU, which he helped draft as a delegate of the law school. Among other signers was the federation president, Enrique Ovares, the law-school president, Baudilio Castellanos (Fidel's childhood friend), and his future brother-in-law, Rafael Díaz-Balart.

  The declaration, issued on January 20, 1947, had a Fidelista ring to it (though his companions had a similar penchant for magniloquent oratory), affirming that "the ideas of reelection, extension of the period in power, or even the imposition of candidates can be found only in the sick minds of traitors, opportunists, and the constantly insincere." It pledged "to fight Grau's reelection even if the price we have to pay in the struggle is our own death—it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." As Cuban scholars have noted, Castro would often use this slogan about life and death, a phrase appropriated from Mexico's revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.

  Now a believer in maximal public exposure and confrontation, and full of ideas, Fidel shortly thereafter organized a trip by law students to the Isle of Pines to inspect a new prison. Built according to blueprints for a high-security prison in Illinois, it became known in Cuba as "the model penitentiary," but Castro found there execrable food and brutal treatment of inmates, and nearly started a free-for-all with the guards. Returning to Havana, he publicly chastised the prison administration, and, of course, made the newspapers. Ironically, it was the "model penitentiary" at the Isle of Pines where Batista would incarcerate Fidel and his rebel companions seven years later.

  Castro realized from the very beginning of his political life that in order to succeed he had to operate on a variety of levels, often simultaneously. He had already become visible in politics in and out around the university—from the FEU to the "revolutionary" gangs—and he had learned the value of well-managed confrontation. In the spring of 1947, he decided to penetrate the world of traditional politics as well.

  The opportunity to do so came when Senator Eduardo "Eddy" Chibás, the voice of anti-Grau opposition and the immensely popular champion of the Cuban common man against governmental corruption and exploitation by the rich, moved to form his own political party. Chibás, whose battle cry was his famous slogan "Shame of Money," was regarded as a future president and as the most honest and idealistic Cuban leader since José Martí. He was elected to the Senate at the age of thirty-seven, and now, as he was launching his Cuban Peoples' Party (PPC), he was just forty years old. Grau's determination to seek reelection, which Castro denounced in his January speech, triggered Chibás into leaving the official Auténtico party.

  Fidel, who knew the Chibás legend from Belén College, was a sufficiently important "name" in Cuban politics to be among one hundred or so o
utstanding citizens who were invited to the historic gathering on May 15, 1947, when the PPC was officially born. The record shows that this meeting was attended by six senators, ten congressmen, numerous mayors, experienced politicians, academics, and businessmen and industrialists.

  Fidel Castro, not yet twenty-one years old, was the only university student leader asked to come that afternoon to the headquarters of the Youth Section of the Auténtico party from which Chibás was breaking away. It is an exaggeration to say that Castro was a founder of the PPC, but he certainly was present at the creation, and his association with Chibás would be invaluable in the years to come. The PPC quickly became known to the public as the Ortodoxo party because it claimed to stand for orthodoxy in its loyalty to the principles of Martí, a notion that fitted perfectly with Castro's own sense of Cuba and personal destiny.

  What Castro achieved by joining the Ortodoxo party was to give himself the option of pursuing his long-term political ambitions through establishment politics, and to position himself to take the best advantage of it. Being an Ortodoxo and dedicating much time to the Ortodoxo Youth Section, Fidel committed himself full time to a political life and involved himself in its chaos and violence.

  There is no real contradiction between Castro's very practical decision to play politics from the inside through the new party, and what he has described as his revolutionary instincts and his evolution toward Marxism. Even at this young age, Fidel had enough sense and political radar to know that revolutions are not accomplished overnight and that the proper climate must exist for them to occur (his intense study of the French Revolution and his readings of Marx surely helped him to understand this). Obviously he was unable to imagine and predict that Fulgencio Batista would launch a coup d'état five years later and thereby create a revolutionary climate. At this time Castro had the notion that he could propagate the ideas of a social revolution through the media (whose darling he was becoming) and through a seat in the congress to which he already aspired. Should some kind of revolutionary conditions develop, however, as was always possible in Cuba, Fidel says that he would have instantly shifted to the vanguard of a revolution.