by Tad Szulc
The threat of "militarism" was another Castro concern, and he warned his university audience of the growing power of the military—more than five years before Batista's coup. One of Fidel's special gifts has been his ability, both instinctive and analytically intellectual, to predict the future moves of his adversaries. He displayed it that November evening in 1947. Meanwhile, he urged students to become militant in the battle for national unity of the people "to obtain its true independence, its economic liberation, its political sovereignty, its political liberties . . . the definitive emancipation of our nation."
Some scholars of the Castro revolution consider the November 6, 1947, speech at the university as Fidel's moment of maturity as a political thinker, and as his first coherent attack on the status quo from a leftist perspective. This is debatable inasmuch as Castro himself concedes that at that time his process of evolution toward Marxism was still developing. There is no question, however, that at this juncture Fidel had created the distinctive political style that he would nurture for the rest of his life.
As to whether Castro was alone on that occasion in expressing leftist and nationalist views, the centrist newspaper El Mundo reported in its front-page article on the university rally that this was not so at all. Practically all the student speakers, it said, "made special references to 'Yankee Imperialism.' " This is an important point: In 1959 the American government and public opinion were, by and large, under the impression that Cuban nationalism and anti-Yankee sentiment were essentially Castro inventions when he captured power. When it came to Cuba, the island always taken for granted by the United States, almost nobody paid attention or did his homework. Hence the surprise of the true meaning of the Fidelista revolution when it finally came.
Several days after the Havana disturbances, the Demajagua bell was delivered to President Grau by parties unknown, and immediately sent back to Manzanillo. It marked the end of this particular incident, but young Fidel Castro had achieved new fame as Cuba's most promising rising political star whose increasingly controversial ascent would continue in the new year.
CHAPTER
6
For Fidel Castro, 1948 was a breathless year, politically and personally. He was asserting his political identity, engaging in immense activity, and acquiring new responsibilities.
Around him, Cuba was disintegrating and decomposing socially and politically. The Cuban society was more and more polarized, the island having lived in a revolutionary environment since the eruption of the insurrection against the Machado dictatorship in September 1930.
Cuba had the outward trappings of a democracy, advanced social legislation, and a progressive social and political instrument in the form of the 1940 constitution. In reality, the frustrations of a nation sharply divided between the huge wealth of a minority and the quite abysmal poverty of the majority—peasants and urban and rural salaried workers—had created a state of affairs in which the country was essentially ungovernable. The urban middle class was too small and divided to provide a solid political center.
Tolerating political violence and corruption on a grand scale, President Grau had abdicated not only national leadership, but his elementary responsibilities for the maintenance of day-to-day law and order. He compounded all the resentments and divisions by his unconstitutional decision to seek reelection to a second term in 1948. The advent of a new generation, represented by the leadership and the rank-and-file in the University of Havana (and even in secondary-education schools), was a direct challenge to the putrid status quo, and the conditions were perfect for the emergence of a challenger like Fidel Castro, a believer in a "true" Cuban revolution.
Elsewhere in postwar Latin America, similar pressures were gathering. In Argentina Juan D. Perón had seized power in 1945 to launch a populist nationalist movement in the name of social justice, producing a militaristic and fascistic dictatorship while remaining a hero of the masses. Peronism was a phenomenon in which Fidel Castro at the northern end of Latin America was developing a special interest. In 1948 in Peru, the army had smashed a revolt by the nationalist and socially committed APRA movement, one of the few wholly original revolutionary movements in Latin America, eschewing classical socialism and Marxism. During the same year in Venezuela, a nation belonging emotionally as much to the Caribbean as to South America, a tyranny had fallen and been replaced by a democratic and socially radical government. And next door in Colombia, a vicious civil war with deep social undertones was in progress.
In Cuba the political and social tensions of the era were accentuated and magnified by the island's physical smallness, and revolution as a way out of the fundamental national crisis was the talk in 1948. The unhealthy and disturbing relationship with the United States was an added dimension in the bitter Cuban search for identity.
For years, unbridled political gangsterism flourished in the guise of "revolutionary" movements and organizations, rendering the word "revolution" meaningless. By 1948, however, the whole question of the unfinished Cuban revolution, its partial independence, became the subject of most serious public debate by spokesmen of mainstream political and ideological currents.
The rightist Diario de la Marina in Havana agreed editorially that Cuban youth must find ways to channel its demands, but protested against attempts to bring together "workers, peasants, and students" because it smelled of "Communist" inspiration. Summing up the ruling establishment's total incomprehension of the new realities, the editorial remarked that "among student, proletarian, and agrarian youth there is not necessarily any community of origins and interests." Francisco Ichaso, a well-known rightist polemicist, wrote that a "minority" in Cuba had convinced itself that one of the safest and most profitable endeavors is "what they call revolution," using the youth to activate it.
On the other end of the spectrum, Raúl Roa García, a professor at Havana University (who would become Fidel Castro's ideologically radical foreign minister and relatively elderly adviser in 1959), argued that it was wrong to claim, as the rightists did, that the 1940 constitution "had concluded the revolution" in Cuba. Though the "colonial structure" had been removed, Roa wrote, the constitution was "a road, not a goal." Rafael García Barcena, also a university professor and later an anti-Batista revolutionary leader, put it best, saying that "a nation that enters into revolution, as José Martí said it, does not leave it until its extinction or until it crowns the revolution" with victory.
As for Fidel Castro, he was now obsessed by revolution. Manuel Moreno Frajinals, a noted Marxist historian who befriended young Fidel at the university that year, recalls that every conversation with him dealt with "deep revolution." Castro frequently visited the Moreno Frajinals household, and the historian says, "Even then, Fidel was determined to carry out a revolution, he was convinced it would happen, and all he did was in preparation for it. . . . He talked incessantly about the revolution." Castro, he says, realized early that access, if not control, of the communications media was vital, and while still at the university, he concentrated on those media—newspapers, magazines, and the radio—that were highly developed in Cuba. In fact, Fidel lost no opportunity to be as visible as possible.
On January 22, 1948, Jesús Menéndez Larrondo, a black union leader of sugar workers, a Communist, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies was shot to death by an army captain in Manzanillo, the Communist labor stronghold in Oriente province. Invoking his parliamentary, he had refused to submit to arrest and was summarily shot. Menéndez had been briefly arrested the previous October along with hundreds of leftist labor leaders as part of the campaign by Labor Minister Carlos Prío Socarrás to rid the unions of Communist control. But this time Menéndez had been warned that he was on the death list.
General Pérez Dámera, the army Chief of Staff, publicly commended the captain for his actions as a model example to the army, "so that every time a similar situation occurs, action be taken in identical form." The Grau government evidently no longer had any contact with political reality, as the Mené
ndez assassination came as a tremendous shock to the public opinion. The labor leader had been very popular, and his casket was placed on display at the National Capitol; tens of thousands of Cubans filed past the bier to pay him homage.
Among the mourners was Fidel Castro. Mario Kuchilán, a noted Cuban journalist, recorded in his memoirs that Fidel, who stood next to him at the cemetery, suddenly asked angrily, "What would you say if I climbed on a tomb to summon the people to march on the presidential palace?"
Two weeks later, Castro was back in the limelight. On February 11 a student demonstration was held in the center of Havana to protest police brutality toward students in Guantánamo in Oriente, and a streetcar was burned during the riot. The police charged the students, chasing them back to the university, but Commander José Caramés, the police chief of the university district, personally raced up the escalinata, pistol in hand. Before his men convinced him to leave the campus, he pistol-whipped a student who had a limp, and a serious confrontation was narrowly averted with the armed students.
Nevertheless, a violation of the university's autonomy had occurred when the police entered the grounds, and Fidel Castro called for a peaceful protest demonstration the following day, February 12. In Havana, however, there was no such thing as a peaceful protest. While a group of students deployed a 50-caliber machine gun atop the escalinata in the event of a new police invasion, Fidel and a fellow student led a march into town, carrying a huge Cuban flag and signs proclaiming "We Protest the Violation of University Autonomy!" Singing the national anthem, the students reached police barricades at an intersection, where they began shouting, "Out with Caramés, down with Grau—the assassins!"
Riot policemen moved on the crowd with clubs in their hands, and Fidel was among the first to be hit. Headlines in the next day's newspapers announced that he had been "injured" (this was the first time he made the headlines), and the news stories said he had "suffered a grave contusion" on the head and was taken to the Calixto García Hospital to be X-rayed. Castro's injury turned out to be superficial and he refused to remain at the hospital. Nonetheless, he had shed his first blood for the revolution, and that was all that counted, that and the publicity. Besides, the police released students who had been arrested, and Caramés was suspended pending an investigation. It was a most successful day for Castro and his cause.
An event of extraordinary gravity was the assassination in Havana on February 22, ten days after the university riots, of Manolo Castro, the national sports director and a founder of the MSR organization. Castro was shot in front of a cinema, of which he was a co-owner, by unknown assailants after being called out to the street under some pretext.
The first assumption was that Manolo Castro was killed in retribution for the death in September 1947 of Emilio Tró Rivera, chief of the rival UIR political gang and head of the National Police Academy, but the real assassins were never found. Manolo Castro was a very important politician, and he had received numerous death threats in the previous weeks and months. He was uncertain who exactly wanted him dead, and he went to the extreme of asking help from his former Communist friends from the university days. There was nothing they could do for him.
It was Fidel Castro, however, who was immediately accused by the MSR of murdering Manolo Castro, possibly because of Fidel's early ties with the UIR. He had ended them when he joined the new Ortodoxo party, but the MSR group under Rolando Masferrer (from whom Manolo Castro had protected Fidel on Cayo Confites) was obviously determined to do away with Fidel as his most dangerous political rival.
A few weeks before the Manolo Castro death, Tiempo en Cuba, a publication belonging to Masferrer, happened to have printed an article seeking to link Fidel with university gangsters. The day of the assassination, a nephew of Masferrer publicly charged Fidel. Within three days, on February 25, Fidel and three fellow student leaders were arrested in a car on the Havana seaside boulevard at 11:00 P.M. by policemen in a cruiser. The reason given was the investigation of the Manolo Castro death. Fidel was formerly identified as the law-school president.
The four student leaders indignantly denied any involvement with the murder. They produced the Tiempo en Cuba article about their alleged contacts with campus gangsters, and Fidel testified that he had spent the afternoon of the assassination day at the El Dorado café with friends, whom he named, and that he had spent the night at the Plaza Hotel. He told the investigating judge that when he saw his name the next day in the newspapers mentioned in connection with Manolo Castro, he went instantly to the nearest police station to offer testimony, but the officer in charge requested him to leave because there were no orders for his arrest.
The latter is an important point because over the years numerous published reports had created the impression that Cuban authorities actually issued a detention order against him, and the myth has survived. The arrest on the evening of February 25 was on the initiative of one of the officers in the police cruiser. The four men were submitted that night to a paraffin test to determine whether any of them had recently fired a weapon, and the investigating judge ordered them released on "conditional liberty" at 2:00 A.M.—whereupon Fidel immediately held a press conference at the police station.
He charged that Masferrer "wants to take over the leadership of the university to make it serve his personal interests," but "we have not allowed him to do so, in spite of the coercion and violence practiced against us for quite some time." Fidel said that Masferrer "wishes to incite action against us, using Manolo Castro as a pretext; in other words, he wishes to profit from the death of a friend. . . . If we had known beforehand what was going to happen, we would have prevented it." Fidel Castro's reputation in this context is also defended by the FEU ex-president, Enrique Ovares, now in exile in Miami. Ovares says that "Fidel had absolutely nothing to do with the Manolo Castro thing," and "I have no reason to lie to you." He adds: "If you have to attack Fidel, attack him with the truth. Fidel has done terrible things. But why is it necessary to invent? This is the problem that bothers me about people who write [about Fidel]. If there is sufficient truth, why should one lie?"
Fidel's innocence in this crime was no guarantee, however, that Masferrer or others would not try to kill him, and so he decided it would be wise to vanish from sight for a time. His sister Lidia, Alfredo Guevara, and Mario García Inchaústegui helped him to hide and lead a semiclandestine life. But, as usual, a new project suddenly materialized to capture Castro's attention and, most conveniently, provide him with an opportunity to leave Cuba for a time. It would quickly turn into Fidel's greatest adventure to date.
The new project was an "anti-imperialist" association of Latin American students, a concept that was initially proposed and prompted by the Perón regime in Argentina. Castro embraced it with total enthusiasm. The group was designed to organize a Latin American students' association, heavy on nationalism and anti-Yankeeism, and a preparatory session of hemisphere student leaders was to be held in the Colombian capital of Bogotá early in April.
As happens so frequently with events in the life of Fidel Castro, there are contradictory versions concerning his exact role in the preparations for the Bogotá meeting and the entire background of the effort to create the Latin American student organization. Specifically, it is unclear where and how the idea of the "anti-imperialist" association was really hatched and developed: by the Peronists aided by Fidel Castro, or by Fidel Castro aided by the Peronists?
It is a matter of record that Perón had been actively seeking to spread the influence of Argentina under the guise of his Justicialismo (social justice) politics throughout Latin America. Usually covertly, Peronist funds flowed to labor unions, journalists and publications, and student groups to convert them to pro-Argentine sentiments and to the Perón doctrine: The general saw himself as a continental and world figure and his movement as a "Third Force" in international affairs.
This effort had been much less than successful, but in 1948 the Argentines were still investing in it. The noti
on of an "anti-imperialist" students' association was probably born in Buenos Aires, but it is unknown why the Peronists turned almost exclusively to Cuban students to set the operation in motion. Senator Diego Molinari, who was chairman of the Argentine Senate's foreign-affairs committee, at least one cabinet minister, and several lesser lights appeared in Havana at the start of 1948 to meet with Cuban student leaders and persuade them to help organize the association. By most accounts, Argentina agreed to pay all the expenses.
The Argentine proposal was well received in Havana by all student segments: the FEU president, Enrique Ovares, was for it as was Fidel Castro, the leaders of most of the Havana University schools, and militants of the Socialist Youth branch of the Communist party. In retrospect, this positive response makes sense: The Cuban resentment against the United States and "Yankee imperialism" was a fact of political life for the new generation—and Perón seemed to offer them a way out of isolation and into a community of nationalist solidarity. That Perón had nationalized British and American utilities, that he was at sword's point with the United States (which had futilely tried to undermine and oust him), and that he was portraying Argentina as a victim of British colonialism for retaining the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic served to enhance his prestige. Young Cubans were prepared to overlook that Perón was a military dictator, and the Socialist Youth studiously ignored the anti-Communist aspects of Justicialismo. Nationalism and anti-Americanism were the common denominators. Just as the law student from Havana, Fidel Castro, was coordinating plans for the congress with Perón's envoys, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, later the "Che" of the Cuban revolution, a nineteen-year-old second-year student at the medical school of Buenos Aires University in 1948, was already a Perón supporter.