by Tad Szulc
Fidel's appointment with Gaitán on April 9 was for two o'clock in the afternoon. He says he had lunch at the hotel, then went out on the street to take the short walk to Gaitán's office. But, Castro says, suddenly "there appeared people, running frantically in all directions . . . people who seemed crazed. . . . People shouting, 'They killed Gaitán!' 'They killed Gaitán!' . . . Angry people, indignant people, people reflecting a dramatic situation . . . telling what had happened, word that began to spread like gunpowder."
Gaitán had just been shot and killed on the sidewalk in front of his office building, and although his assassin, identified only as one Juan Roa, was instantly lynched by the crowd, Bogotá and Colombia blew up like a revolutionary volcano. The presence of the American foreign ministers' conference at that moment fueled suspicions that the assassination was planned to trigger a revolution and deal a terrible blow to the Organization of American States, but nothing was ever uncovered to corroborate it. Castro, who witnessed and participated in the Bogotá street battles says flatly that "nobody organized [the events of] April 9. . . . I can assure you that it was a completely spontaneous explosion that nobody had or could have organized. . . . What April 9 lacked was organization . . ."
The Bogotázo, as that urban revolt is now known, became Fidel Castro's real baptism as a revolutionary, and had an enormous impact on him, his thinking, and his future planning. It was the most important single event of his life up until then, and unquestionably one of his major experiences, providing him with a unique opportunity to observe an unfolding revolution—and to learn from it.
His own account of his activities during the five days of the Bogotázo is the most accurate and complete in existence, and those who were then in contact with Castro accept it as such. Fidel told his Bogotá story over long hours of conversation with the Colombian journalist Arturo Alape in 1981, cautioning him that after thirty-three years, he might have forgotten certain details. Still, his memory is so fabulous that the transcript of the interview reads like a marvelously vivid adventure tale.
The first thing Castro recalled after the news of Gaitán's death fired up the city was the sight of a man in a little downtown park trying to smash with his hands a typewriter he had somehow obtained, but having a terrible time of it. Fidel says he told the man, "Hey, give it to me," and "I helped him, grabbed the typewriter, threw it up in the air, and let it fall. Seeing this desperate man, nothing else occurred to me."
Castro decided to go to the National Capitol, where the ministerial conference was being held, but increasingly he came across people smashing "windows and things." This, he said, "began to preoccupy me because even then I had very clear and precise ideas of what is a revolution and what things should not happen. . . . I began to see manifestations of anarchy, to tell the truth . . . and I wondered what Liberal party leaders were doing."
He saw the congress building invaded by a furious crowd, some people carrying clubs, others with weapons, and watched office furniture being hurled out of the windows into the square. Castro, who was with Rafael del Pino, then went to the boardinghouse, where they found Ovares and Guevara. From there, Fidel saw a huge crowd rushing down one of the main avenues in the direction of a police station. It was at this instant that Castro, a round-faced young man improbably attired in light trousers, shirt and tie, and a leather jacket, made up his mind to join the revolution in Colombia.
"I join the first ranks of this crowd," he said. "I see there is a revolution erupting, and I decide to be part of it as one more person. . . . I had no doubt that the people were oppressed, that the people who were rising were right, and that the death of Gaitán was a great crime." At the police station, policemen were aiming their rifles at the crowd but not firing, and Castro says that many of them were joining the rebel throng. After entering the police station, the only weapon Fidel could still find there was a tear-gas shotgun, so he grabbed it along with twenty or thirty gas cartridges.
"I didn't have a rifle," Castro continued, "but I had something that at least can fire, the shotgun with the big barrel. But here I am in a suit, not dressed for a war. I find a cap without a visor, and I put it on. And my street shoes are not fit for a war. . . . I climb to the second floor, and enter the officers' room. There I start looking for clothes, and more weapons, and I start putting on a pair of boots. An officer runs in, and, I'll never forget it, in the middle of all this chaos, he wails, 'Oh, not my boots, not my boots . . .' "
In the courtyard Castro came upon an officer trying to organize a police squad, and he swapped his tear-gas shotgun for the officer's regular rifle and bullets. He replaced his cap with a beret and put on a policeman's jacket: "This was my uniform." Now the armed crowd, with policemen and soldiers in its midst, rushed like a raging torrent in another direction with Castro in the vanguard. Several cars with students he knew from the university drove by, and Fidel learned that a student group had taken over a radio station in the city. Hearing that the radio station was being attacked, Castro led a group to the aid of the besieged students, but the confusion, the firing, and the rioting were so overwhelming that he no longer knew what to do. And, Fidel remarked critically, "there were people who had been drinking, arriving with bottles of rum. "
Castro said that it was unclear at that stage whether the army, like much of the police, had joined the uprising, but he suddenly came across a battalion in front of the War Ministry. "Possessed by revolutionary fever myself," Fidel recalled, "and trying to attract the greatest number of people to the revolutionary movement, I jump on a bench to harangue the soldiers there to join the revolution. Everybody listens, nobody does anything, and there I am on the bench with my rifle, delivering my harangue."
From the War Ministry, Castro and several companions resumed their walk to the radio station (he remembers that his wallet with all the money he had was stolen from him at that moment), but suddenly they came under heavy rifle fire, barely managing to hide behind some benches; Fidel said that "miraculously, they didn't kill us all." Unable to reach the radio station or the National University, he resolved to take over a nearby police station with his fellow students.
"It was assumed that I was the one to take the police station because I was the only one who had a rifle," Castro recounted. "This really was suicidal. . . . But luckily that station had already been taken in a [police] uprising . . . and they received us in a friendly fashion." He sought out the police-station commander, who also was the leader of the rebel policemen, and explained that he was a Cuban student organizing a congress here. Thereupon, Fidel says, "the police commander names me as his aide."
The two of them got into a jeep to go to the headquarters of the Liberal party, and Castro said that he was delighted because he had been concerned all day over the chaos and the lack of any organization. He added that "everything I'm telling you is rigorously exact about the incredible things that happened that day." At the party headquarters, the police chief procured a second jeep, and they returned to their station. At night Fidel and the police chief drove again to the party headquarters, each in his jeep, but the officer's vehicle broke down, and "I carried out the quixotic act" of giving him "my own jeep." Castro and a few students were left behind in the street, finally meeting a squad of rebel policemen with submachine guns and making their way to another police station now in revolutionary hands. But, he said, he did not have a cent for a cup of coffee.
This was the Fifth Police Division station, and Castro says it had some four hundred armed policemen and civilians. However, there was enormous confusion in organizing the station's defenses, and he was assigned a post on the second floor. What bothered Fidel the most that night was the looting in Bogotá streets, with "people resembling ants and carrying on their backs a refrigerator, or a piano," and he says that "unhappily, because of lack of organization, because of a problem of culture, because of a great situation of poverty . . . many people carried away all they could. . . . Through lack of political preparation and other factors, the city w
as looted. . . . I was very preoccupied that instead of seeking a political solution, many people chose to loot."
Seeing the rebel force was being kept inside the police station, Castro took it upon himself to tell the division chief and his officers that "the entire historical experience demonstrates that a force that remains in its barracks is lost." He cited Cuban military experiences to urge the police chiefs to dispatch their forces into the streets, assigning them an attack mission against government positions. Fidel was heard out amiably, but no decisions were made, although he kept insisting that "a revolutionary force kept inside is lost."
"I had some military ideas that emerged from my studies of the history of revolutionary situations," Castro said, "including of the movements that occurred during the French Revolution, the taking of the Bastille, of the Cuban experience—and I saw with full clarity that this was an insanity. . . . They were waiting for an attack by government forces." Castro also criticized the rebel policemen for beating up progovernment policemen they had captured: "This disgusted me."
It had occurred to him, Fidel said, that he did not really know what he was doing there alone "in a mousetrap," foolishly awaiting an attack instead of going out to strike the enemy. He wondered whether he should stay at the police station, but decided to remain "because then I had an internationalist thought, and I reasoned that, well, the people here are just like the people in Cuba, people are the same everywhere, and this is an oppressed, exploited people. I had to convince myself: They had their principal leader assassinated, this uprising is absolutely just, I am going to die here, but I am staying."
Castro finally persuaded the police chief to assign seven or eight men to him to patrol the hill behind the station from where the army could attack them. At one point, the patrol ordered a civilian car near the station to stop, suspecting that it was driven by a government spy. But, as the prudish Fidel Castro said with immense indignation, the man was with two prostitutes, taking them to have sex. "Can you imagine," he asked, "the city burning, the war erupting, and this man driving around Bogotá with two prostitutes?"
On the morning of April 11, a Sunday, word circulated that an agreement was being reached between the government and the Liberal opposition. Fidel recalls that he still had on his improvised uniform with a beret, his rifle with nine bullets, and a saber. Within hours, an accord was announced, and the rebels were asked to surrender their weapons. Castro had wanted to keep the saber, but he was not allowed. He believed that the peace agreement was a "betrayal" (one of his favorite words) of the people because after the rebels gave up their arms, government forces "began to hunt the revolutionaries all over the city."
Fidel returned downtown, finding Ovares and Guevara at the boardinghouse where they had sat out the rebellion. But the owner was a Conservative, and he started saying "horrors" about Gaitán and the Liberals. Castro said he lost his patience, became "exalted," and contradicted the man by defending the Liberals. This was a half hour before the 6:00 P.M. curfew, and the owner threw the Cubans out. They reached the safety of a downtown hotel with five minutes to spare. And Fidel added, "It was immature to commit the error of engaging in polemics with the owner at twenty-five minutes before six o'clock." No lesson is ever lost on Castro.
At the hotel the Cubans ran into an Argentine diplomat they knew and persuaded him to drive them to the Cuban embassy (diplomatic cars being exempt from the curfew). Fidel recalls that they were very well received at the embassy "because we were already famous and everybody was looking for the Cubans." The Cuban students remained at the embassy until April 13, when they were flown home to Havana aboard a Cuban aircraft that had come to Bogotá to fetch bulls. Castro thought it was pleasantly ironic that they were saved by the Cuban government they so strenuously opposed.
Summing up his Bogotá experience, Castro says that "the opportunity of seeing the spectacle of an absolutely spontaneous popular revolution had to have exercised a great influence on me," and that it was part of the ensemble of experiences he had acquired before engaging in the Cuban revolutionary struggle. And he said, "Remember that I was twenty-one years old then, and I think what I did there was really noble . . . I am proud of what I did . . . I think that my decision to stay there that night, when I was alone and it all seemed like a great tactical error, was a great proof of idealism, a great proof of quixotism in the best sense. I was loyal until the last moment . . . I was disciplined and I stayed although I knew it was suicidal . . . I behaved with principle, with correct morality, with dignity, with honor, with incredible altruism . . ."
Castro claimed that the Bogotá experience led him to "extraordinary efforts to create a conscience, a political education in Cuba . . . to assure that at the triumph of the Revolution there would be no anarchy, no looting, no disorders . . . that people would not take justice into their own hands. . . . The greatest influence was in the Cuban revolutionary strategy, in the idea of educating the people during our struggle."
Nevertheless, Fidel admitted, "my presence there was accidental, and our congress had nothing to do with what happened." In fact, the Bogotázo ruined the organization of the congress. The plan was never revived by the Cubans or the Argentines.
The return of Fidel Castro and his Cuban associates from Bogotá made the front pages of Havana newspapers. Despite contradictory reports about his activities in Colombia and charges that he was part of a Communist conspiracy, Fidel's image at home gained considerably. At twenty-one, he was now an international as well as a national political figure in the eyes of many Cubans. True to his life pattern, he had lucked out once more; as he said himself, he materialized "accidentally" in the midst of the Colombian civil war.
Back in Cuba, Castro immediately threw himself into the presidential electoral campaign, now in its closing phase. Though he was veering toward Marxism, he maintained his strong support for the candidacy of Senator Chibás—presumably because he felt that the Ortodoxo party offered the best solutions for the Cuban crisis, and because he was not ready to break with the traditional political process. His revolutionary propensities notwithstanding, he was also a practical politician, and he saw no advantage whatsoever in becoming formally identified with the weak (if loud) Communist party.
Fidel spent several weeks in May campaigning with Chibás, chiefly in their native Oriente province, and national newspapers duly reported his presence along with Ortodoxo congressmen and mayors. Campaigning for Chibás, however, Castro was careful to preserve his personal reputation for independence, often being more outspoken than the candidate on social issues and even being publicly critical of the senator over his friendship with very wealthy landowners. It was one more major political experience for the young Castro.
On May 31, the eve of the elections, Fidel described the contest as "a decisive battle" between Chibás's "idealism" and the "vested interests" of the candidates of the Grau government. He noted that while the Communists had their own candidate, they preferred Chibás to all the others. Eddy Chibás may have been the conscience of young Cuba, but on June 1 he was demolished at the polls by Grau's labor minister, Carlos Prío Socarrás, with the Liberal party's Ricardo Nuñez Portuondo, a conservative, coming in second. Chibás beat only the Communists' Juan Marinello.
After this defeat, Castro turned to his long-range political interests, including his radical ARO group within the Ortodoxo party, driving all over Havana behind the wheel of his green second-hand Buick. But in Fidel's life the unpredictable is the normal, and less than a week after the elections he was embroiled in a new problem.
A university police sergeant named Oscar Fernández Caral was shot in front of his own house on June 6; before dying he supposedly identified Castro as his assassin, and an unnamed witness corroborated it. In this instance Fidel learned of these charges from the newspapers and proceeded to hide again, believing that once more the campus gangsters and their friends in the police were out to kill him. After Fidel's protests, the witness retracted the accusation, telling newsmen t
hat he had been bribed by the police to name Castro. But early in July, an effort was made to reopen the case, and Fidel fired one of his broadsides at the judge, informing him that he had no intention of appearing in court "to aid in the unforgivable attempt of implicating myself in something of which I am completely innocent." Always determined to have the last word, Castro told the judge that if his arrest were ordered, "some police agents" might take advantage of the opportunity to assassinate him. Predictably, nothing further happened.
He spent a short vacation in Birán, saw his parents, and returned to Havana early in September to resume his law studies, still on an auditing basis. Simultaneously, he engaged in new research into Marxism and socialism. But on September 8, Grau's outgoing government authorized the Havana bus company to increase fares, and the next day Communist labor and student leaders were the first to protest through street rallies and speeches.
By the afternoon of September 9, the FEU and university students joined the fray, capturing eight buses, decorating them with Cuban flags, and driving them to the campus. Castro could not, of course, stay away from the latest confrontation, and joined Alfredo Guevara and Lionel Soto in warnings that serious clashes would occur if the people violated the autonomy of the university. The buses, however, vanished overnight from the campus, and this particular incident ended abruptly. The fare increases were canceled.