Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  In any event, Fidel Castro was selected by the Havana weekly Bohemia as one of the twelve most outstanding world figures of 1953, along with such personalities as the shah of Iran (overthrown that year and restored to the throne by the CIA), the pugilist Kid Gavilan, Costa Rican President José Figueres, England's Queen Elizabeth (crowned in 1953), and Soviet KGB chief Lavrenti Beria (shot after Stalin's death). This was very heady company for an imprisoned twenty-seven-year-old Cuban revolutionary, but Fidel had no doubt that he belonged there. Even before he was flown from Santiago to the prison on the Isle of Pines, he was deep in planning tomorrow's actions against Batista. It had never crossed his mind that he might actually spend fifteen years behind bars.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Fidel Castro's Rebel Army was born in the men's prison on the Isle of Pines where he and twenty-five companions were confined by the Batista regime for one. year and seven months. Of this group, fourteen men (including Fidel) were aboard the yacht Granma when she sailed from Mexico to Oriente at the end of 1956, to launch the war in the Sierra Maestra; seven were officers in the invading force. In 1986 three of the Isle of Pines prisoners, headed by Raúl Castro, were still among Fidel's closest associates. One of them is Commandante de la Revolución, a title bestowed on only three Sierra commanders.

  For Castro's Movement, the Moncada and Bayamo attacks were baptisms by fire for a contingent of militarily inexperienced idealists with inadequate weapons and flawed information about the enemy. Politically and ideologically, the 26th of July rebels were immature and essentially vague about their long-range objectives. This assessment includes Fidel and his principal collaborators, even though he spoke at his trial of the Movement's plans for "revolutionary laws" to be implemented by a new government he had hoped would result from a national rebellion triggered by a Moncada victory. There was much naïveté in that first, brave enterprise, and Castro's Marxist stirrings or motivations had little relevance to the cause when the barracks were stormed. Above all, the Movement had been virtually unknown in Cuba up to that time.

  The Moncada trial, with the wide public recognition it gave Castro and the Fidelistas (press censorship mattered little on this island where the word of mouth disseminates news with lightning speed), and the experience of the imprisonment represented the great turning point in the history of the revolution. On one level, the fate of the Isle of Pines prisoners became a national issue—they were the object of outpourings of sympathy as the Batista regime, for its part, was held in increasingly low esteem—and Castro knew how to take advantage of this situation by creating a political organization from his prison cell. He understood the absolute necessity of central and unquestioned authority in the leadership of the Movement, which he reserved for himself, and of the importance of skilled propaganda to help the organization grow. As he wrote a friend from the Isle of Pines, "The propaganda and organization apparatus must be so powerful that it will unmercifully destroy all those who try to create trends, cliques, and splits or rise up against the movement." Castro remained faithful to this principle in prison, in exile, in the Sierra war, in the hour of revolutionary victory, and later, in beating down a challenge by old-line Communists.

  But Fidel also knew the value of the moral imperative in politics. His approach to the creation of the great revolutionary instrument was inspired by the philosophy of the Prussian military genius, Karl von Clausewitz; in warfare "the physical seems little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade." In prison Castro was an attentive student of von Clausewitz's writings as part of his immense program of reading and study in preparation for future phases in his revolution. Specifically, Fidel's objective was to endow his Movement with such moral strength, combined with the natural Cuban penchant for patriotism, history, and nationalism, that in time it would overcome the physical and economic power at Batista's command.

  As a corollary to his moral ambitions, the trial and prison became the crucible in which Castro could perfect himself and his men. Under him, they would be the hard core of revolutionary leadership, what he called the "vanguard" of the Movement. This called for political education and discipline, and, paradoxically, the Batista prison provided ideal conditions for the honing of the future Rebel Army. And a rebel army was exactly what Castro had in mind. He had concluded that in order to succeed, a revolution requires its own army, one that yearns for a revolution. By this time, he had come to reject the idea of a political solution for Cuba that would seek to change the government with the support of the existing military establishment. Before the Batista coup, he had been willing to try the parliamentary route. Fidel now realized that the moment he became allied with any military faction, no matter how democratic and progressive-minded, he would inevitably be subordinated to it because he would lack control over firepower. In a sense, he shared the Communists' distaste for the "putsch" strategy, albeit for different reasons. Castro's ultimate plan was to destroy the Cuban armed forces and replace them with his Rebel Army, and this constituted his foremost concern as he read, wrote, and meditated in his prison cell—and as he directed the preparation of his leadership "vanguard." In retrospect, he agrees that harsh and frustrating as his imprisonment was, it offered him and the Movement an opportunity to create the revolutionary framework. Without the prison experience, the Fidelista revolution might never have soared.

  The Provisional Tribunal in Santiago sentenced the rebels to imprisonment in Havana, but for reasons that were not made clear, the regime sent them to the Isle of Pines. This was providential for Fidel Castro because it provided him with still more useful symbolism. The Isle of Pines was José Martí's first place of exile from Havana when, at the age of seventeen, he was sentenced to six years in prison for anti-Spanish activities. Martí had first worked in chains in a stone quarry near Havana in 1870, but after a year he was transferred to work on an estate on the Isle of Pines prior to being deported to Spain. Moreover, the Isle of Pines bitterly reminded the Cubans of the worst aspects of American "imperialism." Under the 1901 Platt Amendment, which had defined the terms of Cuban independence after the Spanish-American war, the Isle of Pines was "omitted from the proposed constitutional boundaries of Cuba, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty." Both the United States government and American businessmen therefore treated the Isle of Pines as a colony; only in 1926 (the year of Fidel's birth) did the United States cede sovereignty over it to Cuba under the Hay-Quesada Treaty.

  Twenty-four rebel prisoners landed at the Isle of Pines' Nueva Gerona Airport on October 13, a week after their sentencing in Santiago, to begin serving their terms at the model penitentiary. Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría continued on the same plane to Havana en route to the women's prison on the mainland. Fidel Castro was still awaiting his trial. Actually, there are published discrepancies concerning the number of rebels brought to the Isle of Pines. Twenty-nine, including Melba and Haydée, were sentenced on October 6, which left twenty-seven men in that group to be transported to prison. But Mario Mencía, the revolution's chronicler, lists only twenty-six prisoners on the Isle of Pines, including Fidel Castro and Abelardo Crespo (the wounded prisoner who was tried together with Fidel in the hospital), in his authoritative account on the confinement of the rebels. While Fidel and Crespo arrived in Nueva Gerona four days after the group, three men sentenced in Santiago with the others never appeared on the Isle of Pines for unknown reasons, although their names are included in the warden's report on those arriving on October 13. It appears that twenty-four is therefore the correct number. The only one of them familiar with the Isle of Pines was Jesús Montané, a member of the Movement's civilian committee, who was born there; his parents still lived in Nueva Gerona.

  The Isle of Pines is roundish, just over two hundred miles in circumference, and lies some fifty miles south of the coast of Havana province. Farming is its chief economic activity, but the model penitentiary rivaled it in econom
ic activity when it was built by the Machado dictatorship in 1931. With a total capacity of five thousand inmates, it was a Cuban tropical Siberia for political prisoners. The prison consists of four huge five-story circular structures, each designed to hold 930 prisoners, and a half-dozen other large buildings. One of them is a hospital, and the Movement prisoners were installed in its southern ward, known as Building 1. They were all housed in a rectangular hall with metal beds set in two rows; the ward had three showers, two toilets, and a sink for the twenty-six men. A barred door led to a cement-floored inner patio where the prisoners could exercise. They had access to volleyball, Ping-Pong, and chess. The advantage over Boniato was that they were all together in the hospital ward; had they been put in the circular structures, they would have been kept in two-man cells. Thus, their conditions were not the worst possible, most likely because the Batista regime wished a minimum of adverse publicity.

  When the rebels reached the model penitentiary, they had no news about Fidel and feared that he had been killed or sent to another prison. Nonetheless, their spirits remained high. Pedro Miret, the weapons expert, became the acting chief of the group, assisted by Israel Tápanes and Raúl Castro, and they wasted no time getting organized. All available books were assembled in a ward library named after Raúl Gómez García, the young poet killed at Moncada; there was a bookcase in their ward. One prisoner was assigned to conduct outside purchases for the group and keep track of individual accounts, and another man was in charge of distributing supplies from the cooperative the men had formed. Then, there were regular meetings chaired by Miret, and the beginning of the rebels' prison school. A ten-article list of regulations set forth the system of the meetings, including these provisions: "Wounding expressions may not be used in the debate, and it is absolutely prohibited to justify mistakes by claiming that the critic would have made the same, a similar or some other kind of mistake"; "The chairman is empowered to take the floor away from a comrade he considers to be obstructing the progress of the assembly"; and "The chairman is also invested with absolute power to conduct the assembly so that it will progress as he deems best."

  Recalling the prison days, Pedro Miret says that the prisoners immediately decided to establish a more rigid daily discipline than the penitentiary's schedule. "If we were ordered to get up at six A.M., we would get up at five-thirty A.M., very well organized," he says. "By being stricter than the prison regulations, we were able to do there whatever we wanted. To the authorities, we seemed like very quiet prisoners, so they left us alone. They were so ignorant that they never realized what we were doing with education. And they respected us, they located us away from the main area so that nobody else could see us."

  Fidel Castro joined his companions on the Isle of Pines on October 17, hugging and embracing them in the ward. In the evening, he sat on his bed in the first row, almost at the entrance to the bathroom, to bring the men up to date on the final events in Santiago, including his hospital trial and his "History" discourse. Fidel's prison file—now he was Prisoner 3859—contained photographs showing his well-trimmed moustache, and noting that he "had education," and that he had a long scar, apparently from appendicitis surgery, on his abdomen and a scar on his left thigh.

  With Fidel back with his companions, he was at once elected chief of the group, and prison life picked up in activity. In addition to the library, which grew to over five hundred volumes (including one hundred belonging to Fidel), the men organized the Abel Santamaría Ideological Academy as a prison "university" to teach philosophy, world history, political economy, mathematics, and languages as well as Spanish-language classics. The academy functioned in the patio, where the men sat at the wooden tables where they normally ate. They had a small blackboard. There were nearly five hours of classes a day—morning, afternoon, and evening—with Fidel teaching philosophy and world history on alternate days and public speaking twice a week, Pedro Miret lecturing on ancient history (he remarked later that they were amnestied in the midst of the medieval period), and Montané instructing in English. Montané wrote later that "from the outset, Fidel told us that our imprisonment should be combative, and we should acquire rich experience from it, experience that would help in the continuation of the struggle once we are freed."

  Castro also read to the group (everything from Napoleon Bonaparte's infantry attack on Hugomont to José Martí's pleas to the Spanish Republic for freedom for Cuba), then stayed up past eleven o'clock at night "when sleep catches me reading Marx or [Romain] Rolland." Castro and Miret wrote friends and relatives for books: They asked Havana University Rector Clemente Inclán y Costa, University Secretary Raúl Roa García, and just about everyone who could satisfy their literary hunger. Roa helped them further by publishing in the weekly Bohemia a letter from Miret requesting books; censorship had just been lifted, and this called additional political attention to the prisoners. Miret believes that their library had four volumes of José Martí, most of the important works on the French Revolution, including all the Girondins' volumes, and a complete collection of Lenin, Marx, and Engels—suggesting that the education of the Fidelistas now was taking a pronounced ideological direction. And Fidel wrote to a friend: "What a formidable school this prison is . . . from here, I can finish forging my vision of the world and the sense of my life."

  In his first letter from the Isle of Pines to his brother Ramón, Fidel informed him that the prison censors had refused to deliver to him a registered letter from Ramón "because it touched on subjects not permitted by censorship . . . which greatly surprises me." But he urged his brother not to form a negative impression from it because "the persons running this prison are much more decent and prepared than those in Boniato." He wrote that prisoners were not robbed or exploited, and that "men here are much more serious . . . there is discipline, but there is no hypocrisy. . . . I don't want to tell you, brother, that we are in a paradise here; there still are many deserved things to be obtained by us, but it seems there is good will on the part of the authorities, and everything will work." Fidel was being a bit optimistic. The prisoners were allowed to receive visits once a month, and Castro's letter to Ramón indicated that Mirta was planning to fly from Havana to see him at the prison. He urged his brother to come along.

  By December, Fidel Castro was again on the offensive. In an immensely long letter to his friend Luis Conte Agüero, the radio commentator, Castro retold the massacres suffered by his rebels at Moncada and asked, "Why have the barbaric and insane mass tortures and murders . . . not been courageously denounced? That is the inescapable duty of the living and to fail to do so is a stain that will never be erased." But Castro also informed Conte Agüero that as a result of the denunciations he made during the Santiago trial, the court there had accepted three lawsuits by him against Batista and three of his top commanders "as the men who ordered the killing of prisoners." He added that the court in Nueva Gerona on the Isle of Pines, the jurisdiction to which he now belonged, had also accepted the lawsuits. In the strange world of Cuba, a rebel chief serving a prison term for insurrection against the regime was able to sue for murder the head of state whom he undertook to overthrow. And just as curiously, various Cuban courts went on hearing depositions in these cases until almost the time of Castro's amnesty.

  Fidel then quoted Martí: "When there are many men without honor, there are always some who have within themselves the dignity of many men. Those are the ones who revolt with terrible force against those who steal the people's freedom, which is to steal men's honor." This was Castro's latest challenge to Batista, and the letter went on to say that triumph at Moncada would have meant the transfer of power to the Ortodoxo party in the spirit of the "true ideas of Chibás," the first and the only time he had proposed such a course. He repeated from the "History" discourse the revolutionary laws the new government would have promulgated, but now there was not the slightest whiff of Marxist thinking in Castro's letter. Fidel clearly sought Ortodoxo support as he prepared his Rebel Army. Moreover, he wanted
the letter to be issued by Conte Agüero as "The Manifesto of the Nation," with a subtitle taken from Martí, "Message to a Suffering Cuba." He also asked that this manifesto be handed to his wife, Mirta, for publication in the Havana Univeristy publication Alma Mater. Interestingly, Fidel was increasingly seeking Mirta's help in his political endeavors, and she tried to do all she could. But the manifesto was published only much later as a small pamphlet.

  The holidays were approaching, but Fidel told Conte Agüero that "needless to say, we shall not celebrate Christmas, we shall not even drink water, to show our mourning . . . make this known as such, because I believe in that way the objective will be more noble and humane." Meanwhile, he continued his dizzying voyage of intellectual discovery, tailoring it to his needs. He became fascinated with Napoleon III (the despised "Little Napoleon"), reading both Victor Hugo and Karl Marx on this topic. He wrote a friend in Havana that much as Hugo's Les Misérables had stimulated him, "I grow a little tired of his excessive romanticism, his verbosity, and the sometimes tedious and exaggerated heaviness of his erudition." But he found that "on the same topic of Napoleon III, Karl Marx wrote a wonderful work entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. . . . Where Hugo sees no more than a lucky adventurer, Marx sees the inevitable result of social contradictions and the conflict of the prevailing interests of the time. For one, history is luck. For the other, it is a process governed by laws." Again, there was relevancy to it in terms of Castro's current interests: Napoleon III had seized power through a coup (or putsch in modern language), and Fidel saw it as an evil act in the context of his own Cuban perceptions.