by Tad Szulc
Moreover, Castro was not compromising his image and principles by joining the Ortodoxos. Chibás and the new party were not only the most powerful opposition instrument in Cuba, but they projected liberal and socially "progressive" views, far to the left of President Grau's ossified Auténtico politicians. Chibás himself was a romantic figure, full of panache and excitement, a man who challenged political opponents to sword duels when he felt aggrieved. Most of Cuba came to a standstill on Sunday afternoon when Eddy Chibás made his fiery weekly radio broadcast.
It suited young Castro in 1947 to give the deliberate impression, still persisting among many Cubans, that he was Chibás's favorite disciple, and, in time, his political successor. He campaigned hard for Chibás in the senator's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1948, and it is to Fidel's credit that he publicly warned him that the young people would abandon him if he continued to seek alliances (which he did) with rich landowners in Oriente. Castro was important enough for Chibás to answer from the rostrum in Santiago that "No, Compañero Fidel Castro, you may dissipate your doubts . . . Chibás would be incapable to defraud the devotion of the masses. . . . The day Chibás senses an extinction in the citizens' love, he will shoot himself in the heart."
Privately, as fresh evidence from interviews and written materials shows, Chibás and Castro rather resented each other; the former feared Fidel's ultimate rivalry, and the latter saw the senator as an obstacle to his future advancement. Raúl Chibás, Eddy's brother, who briefly replaced him as the Ortodoxo chief when Eddy committed suicide in 1951, says that "I do not recall my brother ever talking to me about Fidel" and that at the outset there were people in the new party who did not wish Fidel to join it "because they considered him a negative element . . . he was a fourth-rate figure." Raúl Chibás was in the Sierra with Castro and joined him in drafting the first guerrilla manifesto to the nation, making him a credible witness and not a Fidel detractor (though he is now in exile in the United States).
By the same token, it suited Castro in that early period to recognize Chibás as his guide and mentor, particularly when Fidel decided to run for congress in 1952; identity with Eddy enhanced his public standing. As for Chibás, he quickly recognized Fidel's political value, so long as he could be kept in check. But Raúl Chibás's revelations, and the fact that Castro stopped mentioning Eddy after the victory of the revolution, suggest strongly that the two men simply used each other, with no love lost between them. Fidel would use Eddy most spectacularly in the aftermath of the senator's self-inflicted death.
To Castro, the association with Chibás and the Ortodoxos must have been exceedingly important, and except for the clash during the 1948 presidential campaign, he accepted the senator's leadership. The Ortodoxos was the only political party Fidel joined before the revolution. The explanation for his never contemplating membership in the PSP—the Popular Socialist Party, as the Communists were known then—is that he simply saw no future for himself in submission to party discipline. Besides, the Communists were at their lowest point in national influence, except in the university and some labor unions, and Castro has never believed in alliances with losers.
Fidel's pragmatic disposition is further demonstrated in that despite his personal friendship with Communists at the university and his growing attraction to Marxism-Leninism, he did not let Eddy Chibás's strong anticommunism and refusal to enter into an electoral coalition with the PSP affect his alignment with the Ortodoxos. Castro remained a member of this party until 1956, just before the yacht Granma's voyage to Cuba to initiate the guerrilla war. By then, he already had his own 26th of July Movement.
In an extremely candid conversation in 1981 with a Colombian writer, Castro said that even when he acquired "my Marxist-Leninist formation," he did not enroll in the Communist party, preferring to work within his own organization. This was not because "I had prejudices against the Communist party," he said, "but because I understood that the Communist party was very isolated and that it was very difficult to forge ahead from the ranks of the Communist party with the revolutionary plan I had conceived. . . . I had to opt between turning into a disciplined Communist militant or building a revolutionary organization that could act under Cuban conditions."
By the spring of 1947, Fidel Castro had become a full-fledged politician, operating on every possible level, and on the threshold of astounding adventures.
So completely was Fidel Castro engaged in his political and revolutionary endeavors in 1947 that he simply had no time to study at the law school or to enjoy even a modicum of social life that glittering Havana, with its bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, theaters, cinemas, nightclubs, brothels, beaches, and swimming pools, offered its student population.
Castro passed his exams at the end of his first year of law school with little problem in the spring of 1946, but by 1947 he was so involved in so many extracurricular activities that he did not even present himself for exams after the second year. As he tells it, he audited third- and fourth-year courses without being a regular student, which complicated his standing as a law-school delegate in the FFU.
Fidel's single-mindedness about politics affected his social and personal life as well. He simply never went out evenings or weekends except to attend political meetings or visit fellow students or other young people he wanted to convince of his ideas. No sooner had he joined the Ortodoxo party than he began to build a personal following within the Youth Section through a group called Orthodox Radical Action (ARO), which, under Fidel's influence, preferred to seek power through revolutionary rather than electoral means. ARO and Castro published a mimeographed pamphlet, Acción Universitaria, with a rather limited impact. But ARO and Castro's network of young political friend would be the embryo of the Fidelista movement: Castro was always planning ahead for all conceivable contingencies.
As for his social life, it was also a question of time and interest, certainly not of money (he received enough from home for recreation) or of social standing. Max Lesnick, who was head of the Ortodoxo Youth Section and a friend of Castro's at the university (he is now exiled in Miami but has not lost contact with Havana), says that he never saw Fidel at any of the dancing and drinking spots patronized by students in the capital. "I've never seen Fidel dance, and I don't know anybody who has seen him dance," Lesnick says, adding this was very unusual in Havana where young people in the 1940s were as devoted to dance and music as they were to politics. "The idea of Fidel dancing is inconceivable." Lesnick also recalls Fidel's awkwardness and timidity with women. On one occasion, he says, he and Fidel were at the Ortodoxo party headquarters on Prado Avenue in Havana when three "very pretty, very well-dressed young women" walked in to ask a question. According to Lesnick, Castro was most popular among women students, yet "behaved with incredible shyness." Lesnick says that "the man who was capable of discussion with a youth, an old man, a politician or a student, froze in front of these girls."
At the university, Lesnick says, Fidel had no girl friends, except for Mirta Díaz-Balart, a philosophy student whom he knew from Oriente and whom he married in 1948. Lesnick remembers that "at that time, politics were Fidel's obsession, and he would never miss a meeting to take a girl out or to go to a dance." But, his friends say, he was not practicing chastity either.
Fidel shared meals and evening conversations with young political friends at their homes and even at boardinghouses. In 1947 one such favorite spot was a boardinghouse on "I" Street in Vedado, near the university, where several students lived. It was run by La Gallega, a Republican woman refugee from the Spanish civil war, who was married to a Cuban architect and, in the words of a former boarder, was "the political brain behind the Students' Federation."
Castro often came to the boardinghouse with his friend Alfredo Guevara, and they sat until late at night at a dining room table, talking about politics, laughing and bantering. Fidel, invariably wearing his dark suit though with the necktie loosened, puffed on a cigar and sometimes played with the revolver he usually carr
ied. One evening, he amused himself charging and recharging the chamber with the gun pointing up. When a boarder who had served in the Royal Air Force during the war told him sharply that a gun should always be pointed down while being charged to avoid an accident ("In the army, you would've gone to the brig," the ex-RAF man said to him), Fidel put it back in his pocket without a word. His real experiences with weapons would come soon.
Violence went on rising in Havana in the spring and early summer of 1947; on May 26, for example, an MSR leader named Orlando León Lemus was wounded by a gunshot, and rumors spread that he would be "finished off" for using his alleged "revolutionary" credentials for personal gain, which was true of most of the gang pistoleros. The MSR's action squad responded by machine-gunning members of the rival UIR organization in the streets.
In July Enrique Ovares, backed by the MSR and the Communists, was elected FEU president (to replace Manolo Castro, the new national sports director), beating the slate on which Fidel ran for federation secretary-general. As it happened, the UIR was supporting this ticket, leading the MSR leadership to conclude that Castro was beyond any doubt identified with their enemy. From that moment on, Fidel was persuaded that the MSR was out to murder him, and he compounded this risk by public attacks on political gangsters.
He wrote denunciatory antigang articles in the student newspaper, Saeta (The Arrow), he helped to launch with Communists friends in 1946. This was the first regular publication to print Castro's editorials. He kept up his attacks as one of the principal speakers at the inaugural session of the University Constituent Assembly on July 16. Castro was among the main movers behind the effort to provide Havana University with a charter guaranteeing its freedoms and modernizing its educational methods, and he was at the end of the speakers' table in the university's auditorium in the company of the chancellor, several deans, and the FEU president to address the 891 delegates. This was Fidel's first full-fledged political speech (longer and more formal than at his cemetery appearance the past November). Also it is believed to have been the first time his photograph appeared in Havana newspapers and he was identified in the caption.
The text of this Castro speech has vanished (as have so many Cuban historical materials), but his unmistakable tone emerges clearly from excerpts published in Cuban newspapers in which he is still called "Fidel de Castro." Fidel started by paying tribute to the "pleiad" (classical education and allusions were a must in Cuban political speechmaking) of student martyrs, such as Communist party cofounder Julio Antonio Mella, murdered in the defense of a "progressist university movement." Praising dead heroes, Castro knew then as he knows now, is the best way to strike the emotional chord in the audience, preparing it for the real message the speaker wishes to convey.
He charged that "false leaders"—he had Fulgencio Batista and President Grau in mind—had been leading students in recent years toward "indifference and pessimism." The university, Castro said, must not be a place where "ideas are traded as if they were merchandise," and "a shameful environment of collective cowardice." He took on the gangs, especially the MSR, when he urged students to "unmask the merchants who profit from the blood of martyrs," and he was inviting even more hostility by describing the Grau government "as a tyranny that has descended over our nation." This was the classic structure of a Castro speech, manipulating and shifting audience moods, awing the crowd with flashy oratorial imagery, and establishing absolute authority of the speaker whose words and thoughts must be obeyed and followed. Fidel has not altered this basic technique over the decades, obviously because it works. In the university auditorium, he received tremendous applause after his speech, and his credentials as an orator were now firmly set. He spoke to students and politicians whenever and wherever he could find them—Max Lesnick says that "Fidel was the only one who could instantly mobilize fifty persons to follow him, and when he could not get students, he went out to chase followers in the street."
Castro had drafted Martí as a historical and inspirational ally from his first days as a campus politician, and he never again let go of the Apostle. As a university student, Castro recorded Martí speeches on wire, and listened to them to hone his own style. He has a rhetorical monopoly on Martí quotations, which are so numerous (Martí's collected works in a current Cuban edition run to nineteen volumes) that he must be the only one to remember them—and to know when a Martí phrase fits the best. In today's Cuba, Martí is regarded as a prophet whose words are sacred, and Castro is gaining a similar prophet status through the massive dissemination of his every public (or written) expression.
In the meantime, the Grau government and the MSR reached the conclusion that they had had enough of Fidel Castro, now the most outspoken and increasingly popular critic of the regime and its friends. Since he could be neither co-opted nor corrupted, he was given an ultimatum: to abandon his antigovernment and antigangster stance or to leave the university altogether. The warning was sent by Mario Salabarría, the top associate of MSR's founder Rolando Masferrer, who had been named secret police chief by Grau earlier in 1947. Salabarría had an assassin's reputation, and Castro, who referred to him as the "owner of the capital," feared that reprisals against him would go beyond being removed from the university.
Fidel decided to go away alone to a beach near Havana to ponder his situation, and to make up his mind what to do in the light of the threats. As he recalled it later, "This was the moment of great decision. The conflict hit me like a cyclone. Alone, on the beach, facing the sea, I examined the situation. If I returned to the university, I would face personal danger, physical risk. . . . But not to return would be to give in to the threats, to admit my defeat by some killer, to abandon my own ideals and aspirations. I decided to return, and I returned—armed."
This was one of the first significant turning points in Castro's life. He knew that if he capitulated, his career as a politician and the revolutionary leader he was determined to be would be instantly finished. In a country where masculine qualities like physical courage have an exaggerated weight, a coward had no place as a leadership figure. It was in Fidel's nature, as his entire life demonstrates, to accept challenges and take high risks in the name of principle. But it was also in his introvert's nature to isolate himself at the start of a crisis and to make the great decisions in solitude. He would do it on many future occasions, and emerge renewed and strengthened from these retreats, ready to do battle. Moreover, Fidel would discover that disappearances from public view also had the value of keeping his foes off balance, wondering where he was and what he would do.
Fidel Castro could never leave well enough alone, and as soon as he emerged from the Salabarría confrontation, he volunteered for the next adventure, an invasion of the Dominican Republic to oust the Trujillo dictatorship. The expedition was being organized by a group of Dominican exiles led by Juan Rodríguez García, a millionaire, and the writer Juan Bosch, the future Dominican president, supported and financed by both the Grau government's top officials and Masferrer's and Salabarría's MSR. All in all, it was a blend of political and economic greed and opportunism, touched by a very respectable idealism, that was recurrent in the Caribbean in those days.
To recruit Cuban idealists for the invasion, the planners had to turn to Havana University where the MSR, always seeking an idealistic and revolutionary image, held sway. In practice, this meant that Masferrer, Salabarría, and Manolo Castro controlled the recruitment. If Fidel were to join the Dominican adventure, he would have to be accepted by the MSR chiefs and be given guarantees that their gunmen would not assassinate him in the training camps. He remained convinced that the MSR was out to get him. Therefore, he needed a truce, or a deal, with his enemies.
Fidel was so anxious to participate in the invasion because it was both a matter of revolutionary honor, as he saw it, and of political limelight, which he craved. To help overthrow the hated Trujillo would have been a badge of honor for a young leader like Fidel. Contemporaries like Max Lesnick confirm that most students of tha
t generation were powerfully motivated against Trujillo, and that it was "normal" for Castro to volunteer.
Early in July, Castro still had to complete several exams to graduate from the third year of law school, but when he learned of the Dominican project, he says, "I considered that my first duty . . . was to enroll as a soldier in the expedition and I did so." The implication is that this was the reason he failed to take the exams and thus lost both his standing as a regular student along with his freshly gained position as president of the law school. This is one of the many convoluted episodes in Castro's history. He explains that while someone else had been elected earlier in 1947 to the presidency of the law school—it was a student named Aramís Taboada (who fought at Moncada and was imprisoned in the early 1980s in Cuba for allegedly defending a counterrevolutionary at a trial)—the student majority rejected this president and named Castro instead. This version is not borne out elsewhere, but at least one Havana newspaper late in 1947 referred to Fidel as the law-school president.
Fidel recounts that at the time he was chairman of the university's Committee for Democracy in the Dominican Republic, and while he was not among the organizers of the expedition, he was close to exiled Dominican leaders and was duty-bound to sail with them. He does not tell, however, the troubles he had in being permitted to join the anti-Trujillo force.