by Tad Szulc
Fidel's financial insouciance continually victimized Mirta. One day, when Castro was out of Havana, she telephoned Jorge Aspiazo in tears, begging him to come over immediately. At the apartment, Aspiazo found all the furniture gone, and Mirta weeping on the floor with Fidelito in her arms. The store, she told him, had repossessed all their furnishings, including the baby's crib, because Castro had failed to make the installment payments. Aspiazo somehow obtained enough cash for a down payment on new furniture; when Fidel returned the next day and looked around the apartment, he remarked in surprise, "Christ, this is not my furniture. . . ." He took it for granted that Aspiazo resolved the problem.
Very soon, Castro had the first opportunity to act as his own attorney in court, an experience and an idea that would be vital in his revolutionary career before too long. This performance came as a consequence of his arrest on November 12, 1950, in the southern port city of Cienfuegos for participating in an antigovernment student demonstration. After a year-long hiatus, Castro was back in the public view.
Although he was already practicing law, Castro had retained his ties with the university, auditing certain courses that interested him and maintaining his contacts with the FEU. In fact, the Cienfuegos authorities incorrectly identified him after his arrest as president of the social sciences school at Havana University. The reason Fidel became involved in this particular confrontation with the Prío government was that he needed solid political exposure—and his name again in the newspapers.
Castro was not forgotten. Alfredo Guevara recalls that even strangers asked him in Havana, "How is Fidel?" and word of his "public defender" reputation was spreading. Still, he needed what he regarded as a national event, and Cienfuegos seemed to fill the requirement. High-school students there had called a "permanent strike" to protest the ban on their organizations and associations by Education Minister Aureliano Sánchez Arango and Interior Minister Lomberto Díaz, and to Fidel this was a matter of principle worth a good fight.
Castro and a law student from Havana named Enrique Benavides Santos were arrested by soldiers before he could begin speaking to the student rally, and they were taken to jail and hit with rifle butts. For the next four hours, the students and the army and the police fought in the streets, and as an account of the Cienfuegos events published after the revolution put it quite accurately, "The objective that brought Fidel . . . had been reached; the protests of the people against the regime were much more violent than if the meeting had been peaceful."
From Cienfuegos, Castro, and Benavides were taken during the night to the provincial capital of Santa Clara and locked up in the prison there, but Senator Chibás had gone on nationwide radio to denounce the arrests, and a demonstration erupted in front of the prison during the morning. The two men were released "conditionally," but before returning to Havana, Fidel issued a thundering denunciation of "the executioners of the people," printed in full in Cuban newspapers.
In mid-December, Castro and Benavides returned to Santa Clara to be tried for inciting the Cienfuegos disorders, and Fidel stunned the court by informing it that he was a lawyer and intended to conduct his own defense. When it developed that he needed an attorney's black robe and black cap to be allowed to address the judge—as well as five pesos in fees—a collection was taken up at once among the audience, and Castro rose to speak. Always believing that offense is the best defense, he delivered a roaring accusation of the government for "strangling the liberties" of Cuba, claiming that the regime and the army should be judged at the trial—not him and Benavides.. The presiding judge heard Fidel out, and pronounced his verdict: acquittal. It was a victory that Castro never forgot and one that he still often and fondly recalls.
Increasingly, Castro was gaining access to public opinion through the press and radio. Ramón Vasconcelos, the editor of the outspoken daily Alerta (and a former Prío cabinet minister), had become a friend, opening his newspaper's pages to Fidel's fiery articles. In June 1951, for example, Castro published a lengthy defense of workers' rights, citing the cases of nine hundred employees illegally dismissed by a canning company and of peasants deprived of land. He concluded by stating that "justice for Cuban workers and peasants" must be the nation's principal goal. He also had frequent access to the Voice of the Antilles radio station, constantly hitting the Prío government on issues of corruption and denial of justice in the Cuban society.
In 1951 the Korean War had become a major issue in Cuba because President Prío was believed to be ready to succumb to United States entreaties and send an army unit to fight in Korea. This was not a popular notion, and even as anti-Communist a figure as Senator Chibás went on the air to demand that the country be consulted before such a decision was taken. Actually, an army battalion was being trained for Korean duty at the Managua camp south of Havana, notwithstanding the quiet opposition of many officers there. One of them was Lieutenant "Gallego" Fernández, now Cuba's vice-president under Castro. (Prío eventually let the idea die.)
Fidel had already signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal, and now, in Saeta, the campus Communist publication, his younger brother, Raúl (a member of its editorial board since entering the university late in 1950), published an anti-American broadside over the Korean War. Raúl would say many years later that it was Fidel who first acquainted him with Marxist thoughts and texts. This is most likely true, though there is a widespread idea that it was Raúl who pushed Fidel into communism. At this stage the older brother had no compunctions about writing for Saeta himself. In Castro's case it was consistent with his own description of his evolution toward Marxism-Leninism (this was now three years after Bogotá), and his attempt to preserve a balancing act between the Chibás Ortodoxos, whom he still needed, and the Communists to whom he was ideologically attracted.
Thus Fidel signed a declaration in favor of "Democratic Rights and Freedoms," drafted by a campus committee and published in Saeta; it was an accusation against the Prío government over the "repression" of students and the "violation" of the freedom of the press. Although Prío was a freely elected president and Cuba was a democracy in the formal sense (the press certainly was free), his government was immensely corrupt and high-handed, and such disparate groups as the Ortodoxo party and the Communists could join in attacking it. This made Fidel's maneuvering easier, and he kept writing in Saeta on such subjects as the need for university students to "define themselves on the side of just and revolutionary [causes]" and university reform while at the same time cultivating the Ortodoxo electorate. In Cuban politics Chibás and Castro were on the same wavelength.
On the evening of Sunday, August 5, 1951, Senator Eduardo Chibás shot himself in the abdomen during his weekly radio program, attempting to commit public suicide and changing the course of Cuban history when he died eleven days later.
The reasons for Chibás's suicide at the age of forty-three have never been fully understood. He shot himself with a .38 Colt Special revolver, a powerful weapon, at the end of a speech urging Cubans to "awaken" in the name of "economic independence, political liberty, and social justice." En route to the hospital, he whispered, "I am dying for the revolution . . . I am dying for Cuba . . ."
But this does not explain it. The senator was a passionate and popular figure, the leading candidate for the presidency in the 1952 elections, and a man seemingly happy in his personal and family life. His brother, Raúl, who was also his closest political associate, says thirty-four years later that "I still do not find an answer. . . . I think that in part it was disillusion because it is very easy to become disillusioned in politics if things are not going well, if people turn their backs on one. . . . He must have felt a little lonely, and that many people who should have helped him did not help him. They were not cooperating. . . . Possibly he felt he was no longer useful, and that he could be more useful making an example of himself . . ."
Raúl Chibás was unquestionably referring to the awesome dilemma his brother was facing that Sunday when he was unable to produce the promised proof o
f his longstanding allegations that Education Minister Aureliano Sánchez Arango was guilty of corruption and self-enrichment on a colossal scale. The senator's accusations for more than a month over the radio were Cuba's greatest political sensation, and on the appointed day the nation breathlessly awaited Chibás's documentation. But, surprisingly, he failed to mention the subject, shooting himself as the climax of his appearance. It is generally believed that a group of congressmen who held the documents of proof against the minister, and had promised them to Chibás, betrayed him at the last moment for reasons of politics or subornation. Having spent his political life preaching honesty and truth, Chibás could not face the fact that he would break his word to his people. This assessment is privately shared by Fidel Castro.
In any event, Chibás's death completely altered the Cuban political scene, removing not only a powerful candidate for the presidency but also a man who was the nearest thing to Cuba's conscience. Most important, perhaps, the Chibás suicide paved the way for Batista's coup d'état the following year; Raúl Chibás and many other Cubans are convinced that Batista would not have risked the coup if Eddy were alive because the senator would have instantly become the chief of a powerful opposition movement that might have done away with the dictatorship. Batista, who was another candidate in the 1952 elections, was under constant assault by Chibás, worrying him much more than the attacks by the considerably less important Fidel Castro.
For Fidel the death of Chibás had many meanings. He could not yet foresee the Batista coup in the vacuum that had been created, but he understood better than any other politician in Cuba that the whole equation had changed, that the atmosphere was now filled with uncertainties that could bring together the revolutionary climate Castro so earnestly desired.
In terms of Ortodoxo party politics, Fidel was too young to aspire to replace Chibás as the top leader, and this never entered his calculations. He did perceive, however, that without Chibás dictating policy, younger and more independent-minded Ortodoxos could be attracted to his revolutionary line. There were no commanding personalities in the party who could replace the senator when it came to influence over the youth. At the same time, Fidel spared no effort to show himself as an absolutely loyal and heartbroken disciple of the dead leader. It would be unjust' to portray Castro as simply a cynic and an opportunist, because he must have had some liking and admiration for Chibás even if they disagreed on much in politics, and even if today the Castro regime has erased his memory. Whatever the reason, however, Fidel was ever present after the fatal pistol shot at radio station CMQ.
As Chibás lay dying eleven days, Castro was near the door of suite 321 at Havana's Medical Surgical Center around the clock. When Chibás's body lay in state at the university's Aula Magna (Hall of Honor), Fidel stood by the bier as part of the honor guard for twenty-four hours preceding the funeral. A photograph published in Cuban newspapers and magazines shows him standing in the front row, the fourth from the casket, staring at the floor. He wears a gray suit and a tie; most of the other politicians there are in guayaberas (this is also the first photograph showing Castro with a pencil-line moustache).
Raúl Chibás and Castro led the victorious fight to place Chibás's body on display at the university instead of at the National Capitol because of his senatorial rank. They argued that his political career had begun at the university, whereas the capitol was seen as the symbol of the corruption the senator had always denounced. When the decision was made to move the body to the campus, Fidel told newsmen that "it is better if we have him there because degenerates cannot go to the university to desecrate the memory of Chibás."
The senator was to be buried the following day, August 17, at Havana's Colón cemetery, at the end of a funeral cortege led from the university by the military. According to his friend Max Lesnick, Fidel conceived the idea of diverting the procession to the presidential palace, where Chibás's body would be placed in the presidential chair and be symbolically proclaimed Cuba's president before the burial. Lesnick says that Castro had learned from a friend, Rosa Rávelo, that her father, who was an army captain with ties to the Ortodoxo party, would command the escort of the gun carriage transporting the body. He neatly convinced Captain Rávelo to take the procession to the palace, but in the end reason prevailed, with the officer realizing that he could trigger a mass uprising—which was presumably what Fidel had in mind. He never lacked ideas.
His next one, less than a month after Chibás's death, was to charge two National Police officers formally with the death of a worker, a member of the Ortodoxo party, during a riot on Sunday, February 18, when crowds had fought to guarantee that Chibás would reach the radio station. There had been a government-inspired attempt to prevent him from arriving at CMQ, and the riot ensued. In his attorney's capacity, Castro presented the charges against Major Rafael Casals Fernández and Lieutenant Rafael Salas Cañizares before a Havana criminal court. The latter was also involved in violence against students during the Martí statue incident in 1949. The case attracted wide attention, and the government tried futilely to move it to military jurisdiction. In the end, the officers were placed on "conditional liberty" under 5,000-peso bail, but not acquitted (the case was dropped after the Batista coup, and Castro would have to contend again with Salas Cañizares).
A curious political episode involving Fidel Castro and Fulgencio Batista appears to have occurred sometime after Chibás's death. Batista, who ended his elected presidential term in 1944, returned to Cuba from his Florida home in 1950 to reenter politics—hoping to be president again. He founded the Unitary Action Party (PAU), whose principal ideological aim was to restore him to the presidency, and began to gather and buy support. Before dying, Chibás claimed that the Communists were supporting Batista on the theory that the Ortodoxos would steal the social-justice thunder from them, and that they could resume the pleasant cooperation they had had with Batista in 1940–1944 when a Communist served in the cabinet.
This is quite plausible, and it was probably because of this situation that Batista supposedly expressed his interest in meeting Castro, about whom he had been hearing a great deal—including Fidel's attacks on him. According to at least three separate and credible versions, the meeting was arranged through Fidel's brother-in-law, Rafael Díaz-Balart, and a mutual friend named Armando Vallibrende who had known Castro through the UIR political gang in the Forties. Díaz-Balart headed Batista's youth organization in PAU. Fidel was taken to Batista's luxurious Kuquine estate, not far from Havana, and received by the general in baronial splendor. In his private office, there was a large painting of Batista as sergeant along with busts of famous historical personages, a solid-gold telephone, the telescope Napoleon used on Saint Helena, and the two pistols the emperor had at Austerlitz.
According to one version, Batista confined the meeting to general conversation, taking measure of Castro and avoiding politics. Another version has it that they did discuss politics, and that Fidel told Batista that he would support him if he ousted Prío in a coup d'état. If this was the case, then Castro was testing the older man, and Batista became afraid that Fidel had somehow learned of his secret plans for a coup the following year and was acting as agent provocateur. To Fidel's extremely logical mind, it made perfect sense that Batista would try a coup, particularly with the crumbling Prío regime and Chibás's death, and he was simply seeking a confirmation. Batista, however, terminated the meeting abruptly—never suspecting the grief the young man would cause him in the future.
Castro's line was to step up his attacks on both Prío and Batista as he increased his efforts to run as an Ortodoxo for the Chamber of Deputies from Havana province in the June 1952 elections. Roberto Agramonte, a traditional Cuban politician from a famous family, replaced Chibás as the Ortodoxo presidential candidate, inheriting the senator's one-hour Sunday radio spot on CMQ. Fidel thought, however, that the party's youth (represented by himself) should share in the CMQ time, and managed to obtain ten minutes' air time from Agramonte fo
r his own pronouncements. Moreno Frajinals says that on CMQ Fidel used a text so as to remain within the time Agramonte had allotted him, but he was very relaxed on the air. Castro was also given time on Radio Álvarez, another Havana station, and Alerta went on publishing his occasional articles.
Toward the end of 1951, Fidel was managing three separate but related political enterprises: He was representing thousands of poor Havana urban dwellers whose homes the Prío government was planning to raze to build a huge civic square in the center of the city, he was investigating Prío's personal misdeeds as president, and he was campaigning intensely to represent a Havana district in the congressional elections. But nobody seems to recollect anything about Castro's family life at that time. He did see his brother Raúl quite often, mainly because he was at the university and increasingly active in politics; Raúl had not yet formally joined the Communist party's Socialist Youth, but he was very close to the party.
The area that the government wanted to level in midtown Havana was a forty-eight-acre district known as La Pelusa, a miserable slum. To protect the residents, Fidel convinced them that their rights would not be ignored, instructed them at street rallies what to say to government inspectors, and went to court to demand that the Public Works Ministry indemnify each homeowner (or shack owner) for the property to be razed. The ministry finally agreed to pay a fifty-peso compensation in each case, which was not unreasonable, but the payments were never made because Batista soon ousted Prío and canceled the agreement. Batista then expelled the area's dwellers to proceed with the civic square. Today it is Castro's Revolution Square.
To investigate Prío in depth, Fidel mobilized not only his law-firm partners but friends from the Ortodoxo party's Youth Section as well, notably a young man named Pedro Trigo from Havana province's rural area. Between September 1951 and January 1952, Castro and his investigators came up with impressive evidence against the president. Fidel had learned the Chibás lesson that accusations without proof are worthless and self-defeating. On January 28, 1952, stressing that the date marked the anniversary of José Martí's birth, Castro presented the indictment of Prío to the Court of Accounts (a federal administrative tribunal), summing it up in five specific charges. Each one began with the words "I ACCUSE the President of the Republic." The charges specified that Prío had committed bribery by granting amnesty to a friend serving a prison term for child molestation, and appointing him nominal owner of presidential farms; violated labor laws by forcing workers into twelve-hour labor shifts under military foremen; insulted the armed forces "by turning soldiers into laborers and peons and forcing them into slave labor"; contributed to unemployment "through the substitution of paid workers by obligatory labor from soldiers"; and betrayed national interest by selling farm products at prices below the market.