by Tad Szulc
Discussing the Latin American situation prevailing then, Fidel Castro explained in a 1981 interview what he and other young Cubans saw at that juncture: "There already existed strong contradictions between Perón and the United States. Our position in this [Latin American] movement was confined to these points: democracy in the Dominican Republic, the struggle against Trujillo, the independence of Puerto Rico, the devolution of the Panama Canal, the disappearance of colonies surviving in Latin America. These were four fundamental points, leading us to establish certain contacts, let us say tactical, with the Peronists who were also interested in their struggle against the United States . . . and demanding the Malvinas."
Castro went on to say that Peronists were busy sending delegations to various countries, meeting with students, "and from this convergence between the Peronists and us emerged a tactical approachment with them." He said that the Argentine student delegation came to Havana to coordinate with the Cubans how each of them would work in different areas "so that the forces of the Left in Latin America would organize this congress of Latin American students." Castro still regards Perón as something of a Latin American hero because of his commitment to social justice. Castro has indicated his contempt for the Argentine military who overthrew Perón in 1955, ushering seven years of democratic government, then restoring the dictatorship of the armed forces until the aging general was reelected to the presidency in the middle 1970s. The Cubans supplied arms and funds to the Montoneros, the radical leftist guerrillas who spun off from the Peronist movement during the "dirty war" with the Argentine military between 1976 and 1983. And in 1985, Castro went out of his way to receive in Havana Peronist senators and labor leaders who opposed the newly elected government of President Raúl Alfonsín.
As a student leader, Castro said, he took it upon himself to represent Cuban students despite his "conflicts" with the leadership of the FEU and the fact that not being officially enrolled in the university at that stage, he could not act as a federation official. In this Castro version, he became the central figure in setting up the congress because "I represented the great majority of the students who followed me regarding me as the leader." He said that "the idea of organizing the congress was mine," and that "I conceived the idea" that this congress be held in Bogotá simultaneously with the planned conference of Western Hemisphere foreign ministers, "called by the United States to consolidate its system of domination here in Latin America." The students were to meet, he explained, on the basis of anti-imperialist principles.
In this fashion, Fidel Castro planned to create an open confrontation with the United States and the Organization of American States in a Latin American capital, an astoundingly ambitious undertaking on the part of a twenty-one-year-old Caribbean revolutionary unknown beyond the confines of Cuba. Fidel never considered any of his ideas to be unattainable, though in this instance he could not possibly have foreseen that Bogotá would turn into a catastrophic explosion for reasons that were purely coincidental with his purposes. Still, Castro's political career is built from historical coincidences—events which cleared the way for his success and advancement.
The way Fidel tells the story, both the Peronists and the FEU were almost marginal in the preparation of the Bogotá congress, with him looming as the main inspirational and organizational presence. Fidel does tend to interpret history in this manner, never one to show modesty over his role in the continuing process of myth-making. Some of his companions, however, have slightly different recollections. Enrique Ovares was one of the four Cuban student leaders who went to Bogotá for the congress; others were Alfredo Guevara, the FEU's Communist secretary-general and Fidel's friend; Rafael del Pino, also his friend; and Fidel himself. While Castro claims that he paid for his travel to Venezuela, Panama, and then Colombia, maintaining that "we had very little money, just for the tickets"—Ovares says that Miguel Ángel Quevedo, the publisher of the Havana weekly magazine Bohemia, had given Fidel $500 for the trip to Caracas on the first leg of his precongress trip, and introduction letters to Venezuela's new democratic leaders. Castro was traveling with Rafael del Pino, and, according to Ovares, the "FEU sent plenty of its money to Caracas" for Fidel and his companion. Contradicting Castro's claim that he was the chief Cuban student representative, Ovares says that he sent FEU credentials for Fidel and Rafael del Pino in Caracas before they flew to Panama and then Bogotá. Ovares and Alfredo Guevara then went directly to Bogotá where they met the two others. Guevara, a slim young man who always wore dark glasses, was a bit on the spot: He was both Fidel's closest Communist friend and Ovares's deputy.
While Castro may overstate his personal commanding role in preparing the congress—the Cuban organizing committee had nine members, including himself, Ovares, Guevara, and Del Pino—but he was unquestionably its spokesman. On March 15, three weeks after the problems resulting from Manolo Castro's assassination, Fidel issued a declaration from his hiding place in Havana outlining the plans for the congress.
"We hope that this act will initiate a movement of major proportions that will find support in all Latin America, especially among university students, united under the banner of anti-imperialist struggle," he said. Castro announced that preparatory sessions for the congress would be held in Bogotá early in April, during the inter-American ministerial conference, "in order to support accusations against colonialism that various Latin American countries will present." Always the strategist, Fidel noted that "it will be easier to make such accusations if we launch a wave of protests."
On March 19, Castro drove to Havana's Rancho Boyeros (today José Martí) Airport to catch a plane for Caracas, his first stop en route to Colombia. But the police detained him before boarding on the grounds that he was attempting to violate the "conditional liberty" on which he had been released four weeks earlier during the murder investigation and he was taken before a judge. Ready to capitalize on the incident, Fidel informed the judge that he was carrying out a mission designed to "strengthen the bonds of friendship" among Latin American students. Taking the offensive, he demanded that the authorities issue a public statement concerning plans by armed thugs in Havana to assassinate him. The judge promptly let Castro go, erasing all charges, but Fidel first told newsmen that he had been victimized by those determined to "obstruct" his student activities and "to create for me an unfavorable situation before the public opinion." He left for Venezuela the next day, full of indignation and surrounded by fresh publicity.
This was Castro's first voyage abroad, and inevitably it started with a touch of adventure. Fidel recalls that his plane stopped in Santo Domingo, and that he committed the "imprudence" of getting off and risking being recognized by Dominican officials as having been a Cayo Confites expeditionary the year before. But he says, "With luck . . . I got back on the plane and nothing happened."
In Caracas, Castro and Rafael del Pino met with university students, who agreed to send a delegation to the Bogotá congress, visited the editors of the government newspaper, and made a courtesy call on the home of Venezuela's president-elect Rómulo Gallegos, a noted poet and novelist. The military dictatorship had been overthrown by a revolution led by young intellectuals and officers of a left-of-center persuasion. From there, the two Cubans arrived in Panama in the wake of demonstrations against United States control of the Canal Zone, and Castro remembers visiting a Panamanian student who had suffered a permanent injury as a result of the riot. Students in Panama similarly agreed to send representatives to Bogotá.
Even from afar, he kept an eye on political developments in Cuba. Presidential elections were to be held on June 1, and Castro, as a member of the oppositionist Ortodoxo party, supported the candidacy of Senator Eddy Chibás. But he disagreed with Chibás over a pact with the Communists. Although the Popular Socialist Party, the Communist organization's current name, had its own candidate in Juan Marinello (a former Batista cabinet minister), it offered to throw its backing to Chibás to help prevent a government victory. On March 31, Castro issued a sta
tement to the Cuban press approving this move by the Communists perhaps as a means of bolstering Chibás's chances, as he was then last in the polls. Chibás, however, rejected any alliance with the Communists, even in congressional races.
Castro's public support for a pact with the Communists raises again the eternal question of when he actually became a Marxist or a Communist—and if his membership in the Ortodoxo party was a cover. There is no absolute proof one way or another, but even the anti-Communists among his fellow university students reject the notion that Fidel was a "hidden" Communist. Speaking in 1981 about his political stance when he went to Bogotá, Castro described it this way: "I had already entered into contact with Marxist literature. . . . I felt attracted by the fundamental ideas of Marxism, and I was acquiring a socialist conscience. . . . At that time, there were some Communist students at the University of Havana and I had friendly relations with them, but I was not in the Socialist Youth, I was not a militant in the Communist party. My activities had absolutely nothing to do with the Communist party of that period. . . . Neither the Communist party of Cuba nor the Communist youth [organization] had absolutely anything to do with the organization of that Bogotá congress. . . . I was then acquiring a revolutionary conscience, I was active, I struggled, but let us say I was an independent fighter."
During the events of Bogotá and subsequently, Castro was widely charged with being part of a Communist conspiracy designed to torpedo the foreign ministers' conference. Fidel would be deeply involved in the violence that surged in Bogotá, but this was more a display of adventuresome youthful nationalism than proof of any Communist militancy. Again it is Ovares who rises in Castro's defense, insisting that "I was there and I have not the slightest notion that he was a Communist."
"These are lies," Ovares says about reports that Castro had met with Communists and had received at the time a letter from the Cuban Communist leader Blás Roca Calderío. "The Communist is the one who was with me, and this was Alfredo Guevara." At a meeting with Colombian students immediately after his arrival in Bogotá, Fidel was interrupted by Jesús Villegas, a Colombian Communist party leader, who demanded that the Cuban display his credentials because "provocateurs frequently use revolutionary phraseology." This episode was reported in the Cuban press many years after the 1959 revolution when Castro no longer had interest in concealing his Marxist persuasion, though insisting that his conversion to communism was evolutionary, not having yet fully occurred at the time of Bogotá.
In the bizarre manner in which Fidelista politics operate, the official emphasis today, including by Castro himself, is to establish as a matter of history that he was a convinced Marxist by the time he reached his third year at Havana University in 1948—mainly, he says, because the Communist Manifesto had a "tremendous impact" on him—whereas, until 1961, it was considered reactionary and counterrevolutionary even to suggest that Fidel had any such ideological stirrings.
Castro arrived in Bogotá with Rafael del Pino on March 31, staying at the small, three-story Claridge Hotel downtown. Enrique Ovares and Alfredo Guevara flew in from Havana the next day, going to the San José boardinghouse, near the Claridge, because it was even cheaper. On April 1 the Cuban group met with Colombian and foreign student delegates at the university to organize the work of their congress. But there is a dispute as to who presided over the meetings. Ovares insists that he was named chairman because he was the president of the Cuban FEU, which was the organizer of the Bogotá congress. The meeting was very small because the Argentines never came, and there was only a scattering of Venezuelans, Colombians, a few Mexicans, and a Guatemalan. Ovares says that to "tranquilize him," Fidel was named emissary to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the immensely popular leader of the "progressive" wing of the Colombian Liberal party, to invite him to attend the student congress.
Castro has a diametrically different version of this, although the chance to meet the fifty-year-old Gaitán was a stroke of luck. He says with considerable exaggeration that "different progressive and leftist forces of Latin America" were present at the student sessions and that "the congress was organized" because of steps taken by him. He recognizes that he could not officially represent Cuban students because he was no longer a FEU leader, "but I spoke with considerable vehemence, I explained all that I had done, how I had done it, and why . . . I must say that in a practically unanimous manner the students supported me, after I made my presentation, a bit passionately as was to be expected at that time and at that age." Fidel went on to explain: "I was presiding over that meeting. I said that . . . what interested me were the struggle and the objectives of this struggle. . . . The students applauded very much when I spoke, and they supported the idea that I remain the organizer of this event." The students then passed a resolution condemning the conference of American foreign ministers that was being inaugurated in Bogotá on April 3.
This was the Ninth Inter-American Conference, and the United States delegation was headed by Secretary of State George C. Marshall, underscoring the importance of the occasion for Washington. The previous year the foreign ministers had drafted the so-called Rio Pact (they had met near Rio de Janeiro in Brazil) of mutual defense; now in Bogotá they were to debate and sign the charter of the Organization of American States, meant to replace the old Pan-American Union as the hemispheric instrument of collective policies.
The Cold War was already well under way—President Truman had already proclaimed his "doctrine" to defend Greece and Turkey from communism, and the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Western Europe had been launched in 1947. To young Latin Americans, the Inter-American Conference loomed as a United States scheme to assert its total domination over the region. There was little awareness that the previous month, March 1948, Communists had liquidated representative democracy in Czechoslovakia through a bloodless political coup d'état.
In Bogotá the students set out to harass the foreign ministers, and soon Fidel Castro found himself arrested by the Colombian police. One evening, Fidel, a Cuban companion he does not identify, and a Colombian student scattered "anti-imperialist" leaflets at a Bogotá theater during a gala performance for the visiting dignitaries. Castro says that "we were a little immature," and that they did not realize they were violating laws in propagandizing their congress; anyway, he remarks, "this was not an infraction against the Colombian state, but against the United States.
A pervasive anti-American sentiment comes across in most of Castro's statements, declarations, interviews, and speeches from the earliest days of his political life to the present time, particularly in his retrospective musings. It is as if he must analyze every situation affecting Cuba, and even the world, through the prism of anti-Americanism. This personal distortion may be the most tragic heritage the United States left behind among so many Cubans.
Castro suggests that his arrest by the Colombian secret police had resulted from their surveillance of the student group; they "knew something about our activities" in organizing the congress. Fidel recalls that they were arrested at their hotel, taken to "tenebrous" offices in "sordid" buildings, and interrogated by detectives. Evidently he was able to talk their way out of this new predicament, his talent for persuasion already being well developed, because they were released within a few hours. Castro says that he explained the ideas and ideals of the proposed "anti-imperialist" congress, and that he must be right in concluding that "I gained the impression that whoever was in charge there, did like what we were expounding. . . . We had been persuasive with them." Talking himself out of tight spots, including situations when his life was at stake, is an art Fidel had mastered from childhood.
On April 7, Castro visited Jorge Gaitán with Rafael del Pino, being taken to his office by Colombian "Liberal (party) students." At that stage, Colombia for over two years had been immersed in a savage civil war between the traditionally rival Conservative and Liberal parties, with thousands of dead in cities, towns, and villages. In 1948 Colombia's president was Mariano Ospina Pérez of the Conservative party
, and the country was on the brink of a complete fratricidal catastrophe with political factions only able to squabble among themselves.
A few days before the conference of the foreign ministers whom the Colombian government had so imprudently invited to its tinderbox capital (and before the arrival of the Cuban students), Gaitán had led 100,000 persons in a March of Silence to protest police violence and brutality and delivered a "Speech in Favor of Peace." Receiving the Cubans, Gaitán gave them the text of the speech, explained the Colombian political crisis to them, and, according to Castro, agreed to close the student congress with a mass rally and an address by him to the delegates.
The next day, Castro went to a Bogotá court to observe Gaitán in action as a lawyer, defending a police lieutenant charged with killing a conservative politician. This was a major cause célèbre in Colombia, and the proceedings were broadcast over a radio network. Fidel found Gaitán was "brilliant" in the courtroom. He says he had "a really good impression of Gaitán . . . because he was a virtuoso orator, precise in language and eloquent . . . because he was identified with the most progressive positions in the country against the conservative government." Gaitán invited Castro to meet with him again on Friday, April 9. In terms of Fidel's political maturation, knowing Gaitán was crucial for him; again, events favored him.
Meanwhile, Fidel had another curious encounter in Bogotá. Alfredo Guevara recalls that at a meeting with students at the National University, he and Castro were introduced to a youth whose name was Camilo Torres. At the time, Torres meant nothing to the Cubans. But this was the young Colombian revolutionary who first became a Roman Catholic priest and then the famous chief of a guerrilla force that for years fought the army in the Andes. Father Torres was killed in the 1960s, and he now belongs to the pantheon of Latin American revolutionary martyrs and heroes. The ever-loyal Alfredo Guevara says that "it is sad to think that human beings do not carry a star on the forehead because one would have understood at that moment that it was the Fidel Castro and the Camilo Torres who stood there."