Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Enrique Ovares, the new FEU president and an organizer of the invasion with the rank of comandante, says that he negotiated Castro's participation with the MSR chieftains. Ovares and Castro had friendly relations from high school days, their university political differences notwithstanding. "Fidel came one day to my house in Vedado, and we sat in the garden. 'It's not possible that they will deny me the opportunity of offering my life to do away with the Trujillo dictatorship. . . . But I cannot go because they will kill me there, because you know that Masferrer will kill me,' he said. So I asked Fidel if I, as president of the FEU, all of whose students must be accepted [in the expedition], insist that he goes, would he go? Fidel said: 'If you guarantee my life, I shall go.' So I went to see Manolo Castro [the outgoing FEU president and MSR leader], who was a friend of mine, and I told him there was a problem with Fidel Castro. Manolo Castro replied: 'Fidel is a shit, but he is right. I am going to speak to all these people and Fidel will go to the camps.' "

  Because Manolo Castro was one of the chief advocates of the invasion, along with the incomparably corrupt education minister, José M. Alemán, and the Army Chief of Staff, General Genovevo Pérez Dámera (the latter two saw profit and power in the Dominican Republic after Trujillo was overthrown), Fidel received his guarantees. Late in July, he was sent to Holguín in the north of Oriente province to receive his first experience of basic military training at the local polytechnic institute. On July 29, Fidel and his companions were driven to the port of Antilla in Nipe Bay (near the Birán family home), and placed aboard four vessels to sail to Cayo Confites, an islet north of the coast of Camagüey province, adjacent to Oriente.

  The expeditionary force totaled around 1,200 men who spent fifty-nine days on Cayo Confites under a blistering sun and a permanent mosquito assault, undergoing additional military training, but basically doing nothing because the invasion leaders could not make up their minds to proceed with it. Fidel says that he was named lieutenant in charge of a squad, then promoted to company commander when word was received from Havana late in September that the whole campaign was being called off. It is not entirely clear why this happened. Castro says simply that "contradictions between the civilian government and the army" forced the cancellation. But there is evidence that Cuban and international politics intervened to dismantle the expedition.

  Soon thereafter, Emilio Tró Rivera, the head of the UIR, the political-action group with which Fidel had strong ties, was assassinated in Havana on September 15 by MSR hit men as a new wave of violence swept the capital. Tró also had been the director of the National Police Academy, and police agents under the secret-police chief, Salabarría, had failed to kill him in a previous attempt on September 2. UIR gunmen murdered a MSR-connected policeman on September 12, and Salabarría ordered Tró's arrest. Three days later, Salabarría's men located Tró dining at the home of a suburban police chief. At the end of a three-hour fusillade during which several bystanders were killed, Tró was dead, riddled by bullets. The Cuban press reported that there were sixty-four political assassinations and one hundred assassination attempts in Cuba during Grau's 1944–1948 term.

  The Grau government's official version links, not very credibly, Tró's murder and the liquidation of the Cayo Confites expedition. In a press briefing on September 29, the army spokesman explained that while investigating Tró's death, military investigators found clues that led them to the América ranch near Havana, belonging to Education Minister Alemán, where "fantastic quantities" of arms and ammunition were discovered along with documents concerning plans for the Dominican invasion. The army then learned that the expedition's headquarters were at the Hotel Sevilla on Havana's Prado Avenue, close to the presidential palace. With this knowledge in hand, the army acted to prevent the invasion.

  As the invasion preparations were widely known from the outset, with the education minister and the army Chief of Staff behind it, this connection seems unlikely. The truth appears to be that Trujillo complained to Washington that he was about to be invaded, and the United States quietly convinced the Grau regime to halt the invasion. In those days, Washington exercised this sort of influence in the Caribbean. After the Cuban army and navy rounded up most of the expeditionaries (General Pérez Dámera now being committed to regional law and order), the State Department expressed its satisfaction that a "threat to peace" had been removed.

  Castro was on Cayo Confites when Tró was killed, though he was probably then unaware of it. He says that when orders came to cancel the invasion, some men deserted, but his battalion sailed anyway. They were twenty-four hours away from landing, he recalls, when "we were intercepted and everybody was arrested."

  Most likely, the vessel was boarded by a Cuban navy unit and ordered to turn back (other expeditionaries were arrested by the army on Cayo Confites), but Fidel escaped detention. "I did not let myself be arrested, more than anything else, for a question of honor: It shamed me that this expedition ended by being arrested." Therefore, when the small coastal freighter Caridad, which the men nicknamed Fantasma (Ghost), sailed back west, Fidel jumped from the deck in front of the Oriente fishing port of Gibara, and swam southwest along the coast for eight or nine miles, in waters supposedly full of sharks, to reach Saetía at the mouth of Nipe Bay. According to one published version, Fidel actually went in a small boat that he lowered in the night from the ship, but he says flatly that he swam all the way, and there is no reason to doubt it.

  Enrique Ovares is certain that Fidel swam ashore—"you can never say Fidel was a coward"—but he suggests another reason for it. Masferrer and his men were aboard the vessel with Castro who, according to Ovares, now Feared that they would try to kill him and decided that he could best save his life by swimming to shore. Ovares says that he thought Fidel was right: "I could guarantee his life while he was in the camps, but not after the invasion was aborted."

  From Saetía Castro went on to Havana (it is not known whether he stopped at home in Birán to rest and change clothes) in an immense hurry to return to his political battles and the university. He says he wasted August, September, and October on Cayo Confites, again missing his law-school exams. Once back in the capital, Fidel went to the apartment of his sister Juana—he had no other place to stay—and instantly plunged into the Havana infighting. He had reached maturity, turning twenty-one, on that desolate and frustrating Caribbean key, and now he craved action.

  Castro wasted no time. He swam from the ship to Saetía at dawn of September 28, and on September 30 he was already delivering an anti-government speech at the university. The occasion was the anniversary of the killing of a student during the Machado dictatorship, but Fidel used it to blame the Grau government for having betrayed the cause of Dominican liberation and to urge, once more, the resignation of the president. As a child, Fidel had learned that permanent attack is the only route toward victory—even if he had not yet defined his ultimate objective—and he now adopted the principle of one of his French Revolution heroes, Danton, acting "with audacity, always audacity . . ." Audacity has been Fidel Castro's most overwhelming and distinctive trait.

  His intense political involvement interfered with systematic studies, and he chose not to enroll officially for the continuation of the third year of law school because he wanted to avoid failing his exams. Instead, he signed up to audit third- and fourth-year classes. Despite the change in his student and political status, Castro claims that "at a certain moment, without seeking it, I became the center of that struggle against the Grau government."

  Fresh from the Cayo Confites experience, Castro used every opportunity to harass the regime and its principal figures, and Havana was turning into a permanent battlefield in the closing months of 1947. At the September 30 demonstration, Fidel's principal target was Education Minister Alemán for his role in the Cayo Confites episode as well as for his corrupt practices and private corps of armed thugs. In the Senate the opposition submitted a censure motion against him. Alemán's response was the unhappy idea of having his
followers organize a public manifestation of "adhesion" on October 9, but a scuffle developed in the crowd, and a high-school student named Carlos Martínez Junco was shot dead by one of the education minister's bodyguards.

  The boy's death triggered a near-revolt, particularly when Alemán proceeded with his plans to hold the self-congratulatory meeting in front of the presidential palace where Grau was foolish enough to come out on the balcony to praise his education minister. Within hours, thousands of students, carrying the coffin of Carlos Martínez Junco, marched on the palace, shouting demands for Grau's and Alemán's resignations, shaking their fists at the balcony as they filed past. Fidel Castro was in the first row of the demonstrating students.

  When the student mass reached the escalinata, the vast stretch of stairs on the university campus, Castro addressed them in an outpouring of emotion. He blamed Grau for the boy's death, saying that "there is no culprit of these tears and this grief other than President Grau." Noting that the following day, October 10, Cuba would be commemorating the anniversary of the first independence war in 1868, the history-conscious Castro accused Grau of celebrating it "with the criminals of this government . . . as a feast of joy with lights and champagne while the students cannot commemorate this date because we must bring here, to bury him, the cadaver of one of ours, of a student assassinated by the new thugs . . ."

  A forty-eight-hour general strike by students, supported by labor unions, followed to demand Alemán's resignation, and demonstrations, went on for several weeks with Fidel Castro always present, always visible, always audible, and always in charge. Senator Chibás, the chief of the Ortodoxo party, chose to leave the street demonstrations to Fidel, his youth leader, himself working in the Senate for the approval of the anti-Alemán motion. In his weekly radio address on October 12, he lashed out at the regime's murderers. Now there was no question that Chibás and the twenty-one-year-old Castro were Cuba's most important opposition leaders, each concentrating on his public.

  Inevitably, the MSR and the regime's police were out gunning for Castro. Salabarría had been arrested by the army after the Cayo Confites fiasco (ten $1,000 bills were found inside his shoes), but Rolando Masferrer remained firmly in control of his gangsters. Numerous attempts to ambush Fidel were made at the university, but each time he escaped. One day, Evaristo Venéreo, a lieutenant of the campus police, tried to disarm him. Castro pointed his gun at the policeman, saying coldly, "If you want it, try to grab it by the barrel." Venéreo surprised Fidel by challenging him to a pistol duel in a deserted corner of the university sports stadium. Castro accepted at once, his honor being at stake, but he took the precaution of bringing along a group of armed friends. This was fortunate because the lieutenant had posted policemen in the bleachers to ambush Fidel; they were spotted and fled together with Venéreo as the students shouted insults. Castro said later, "It was a miracle I came out from that alive."

  A feverish imagination was part of Fidel Castro's political arsenal—as he would demonstrate to the nation in the first days of November with the October disturbances barely over. He had devised a plan he thought could lead to a mass popular uprising and Grau's overthrow, a premature expectation perhaps but one that was successful in creating a national scandal of vast proportions. In this, again Fidel had a genius for summoning Cuban history to inspire the masses as he attempted to stage his coup. His chosen instrument in this case was the La Demajagua bell, the Cuban equivalent of the U.S. Liberty Bell, which Carlos Manuel de Céspedes rang at his estate called Demajagua, near the Oriente port of Manzanillo to mark the opening shot in the 1868 independence war. For many decades, the bell had been entrusted to Manzanillo as part of a national shrine.

  Actually, it was the Grau government that first became interested in the bell for a mixture of historical and political reasons, a common Cuban phenomenon. Grau's idea was to bring the Demajagua bell to Havana to make it ring at the next year's anniversary commemorations as it had done eighty years earlier; Grau was still thinking about reelection in 1948, and it struck him the bell would toll well for him.

  Unexpectedly, however, the Manzanillo municipal council not only refused to let the bell go to Havana, but virtually expelled Grau's emissary. Most likely the reason was that Manzanillo had a radical political tradition based on the sugar-mill workers in the area and industrial workers in town, and that it was a center of opposition to Grau. Moreover, Manzanillo had Cuba's first Communist mayor in history in the person of Francisco "Paquito" Rosales, elected in 1940. Batista's agents murdered him in 1958.

  Hearing that Manzanillo had turned Grau down on the bell, the ever-inventive Fidel Castro conceived the idea of having Havana University students bring the bell to the capital—he knew that the municipal council would agree to this—and organize a mass gathering at which the bell would be rung, after which crowds would descend on the presidential palace to demand Grau's resignation.

  Fidel, outlining his concept to his Communist friend Alfredo Guevara, was fully confident that it would work and that Grau's overthrow would be achieved. The next person brought into the scheme was Lionel Soto, also a Communist at the university, and a friend of both Guevara and Castro. Finally, FEU President Enrique Ovares was informed (it was necessary because of the role the university was to play in Fidel's scenario), and he, too, liked the idea.

  Ovares confirmed that the plan, presented to him by Fidel and Alfredo Guevara, aimed at a confrontation with the government. He says that he agreed to accompany them to Manzanillo, but the plotters decided that Lional Soto would go instead of Guevara. Max Lesnick recalls that several party leaders, including Senator Chibás, contributed around $300 to cover the expenses of the Manzanillo trip.

  While Fidel, Lionel Soto, and Enrique Ovares traveled by train to Manzanillo on November 1, Alfredo Guevara in Havana had the task of procuring arms with which the rebel students would presumably face government forces. He remembers that his first contact was a gang leader named Jesús Gonzáles Cartas, known as El Extraño (The Strange One), who received him sitting on a throne, surrounded by flags, and bathed in indirect lighting. El Extraño promised to sell Guevara arms but never did; the students, Guevara says, obtained them through other channels. In Havana in the Forties, it was not too hard to buy arms if one had the right contacts.

  To extract maximum political effect from their enterprise, Fidel and his companions spread the word that they were bringing the venerable bell, and thousands of students awaited the train's arrival in Havana on November 5 (two Manzanillo citizens came along to keep an eye on their treasure). A large convertible car carried the 300-pound bell from the railroad station to the university in a triumphal parade lasting over two and a half hours. There is a contemporary photograph of a very youthful-looking Fidel Castro in his dark striped suit and a flowery necktie, his right arm around the bell, and his left hand clutching a ceremonial candle holder.

  At the university Castro addressed the cheering crowd from the convertible, declaring that Manzanillo patriots had refused to surrender the symbol of Cuban independence to "puppets at the orders of foreigners." But, he said, "the liberators of yesterday have faith in the student youth of today to continue their labor of independence." The bell was placed in the Gallery of Martyrs next to the office of the chancellor of Havana University for safekeeping while the students spent much of the night on the campus, planning the great anti-Grau demonstration the next day. The following morning, when the chancellor's office was opened, the students discovered that the bell had been mysteriously removed. The police, which had surrounded the campus all night (together with a hundred MSR gunmen), denied any knowledge of the theft.

  Enrique Ovares recalls that Fidel, Alfredo Guevara, and several other student leaders appeared at his house early in the morning to apprise him that the bell was gone. Ovares said that as FEU president he would deliver a written accusation to the university chancellor on the grounds that he was responsible for the Demajagua relic (the elderly chancellor later challenged Ovares
to a duel because he felt insulted). Fidel rushed to a radio station to charge the regime with stealing the bell while thousands of students began gathering at the university. Around noon, Castro was on the campus, grabbing the microphone to shout, "Let the rats stay here; we are going to denounce this robbery," and to lead thousands of students to the nearest police station to make a formal complaint.

  In the early afternoon, Fidel returned to Ovares's house, but several police officers he had named as culpable in his broadcast followed him, brandishing their guns. Ovares and his mother convinced the policemen to leave. Fidel was subsequently accused of cowardice for hiding in the house, but Ovares says that "Fidel is an intelligent man; why would he want to get out of the house? To commit suicide? . . . Fidel always did it that way. In the Sierra as well. He would not come down from the mountains to get himself killed. He had to preserve himself for the end."

  At night a mass rally was held at the campus (though the chancellor had decreed a seventy-two-hour suspension of classes to prevent disorders), and Fidel wasted no time in delivering a slashing attack on President Grau. He accused him of breaking his promises to look after the restoration of "national dignity," after the neglected peasants and the hungry children, saying that "the faith has been lost." Castro warned Grau that the students for whom "the deception was the most terrible" were there to proclaim that "a young nation can never say, 'We surrender.' "

  In a passage that would become a Castro theme in the years to come, he spoke of a "betrayed revolution," the nationalist revolution Grau had promised Cuba, with peasants still without land, and "the country's wealth in foreign hands." Then he moved on to what would be another Fidelista rhetorical discovery and weapon: the power of statistics. He had already mastered the need for homework, his prodigious memory providing the means for conveying his knowledge comprehensively to his audiences. In this instance, Fidel was able to inform his listeners that in the three years or so that Grau had been in power, his government had been given 256 million pesos (the peso being equal to the dollar), but public health was awarded only 14 million pesos and public works 112 million pesos, while defense—meaning the armed forces—were given 116 million pesos. Castro was always obsessed with the need for huge investments in public health, which he was able to assign when he obtained power, but this was the first time he raised the issue publicly.