by Tad Szulc
Castro's reading list at the end of 1953 did seem to confirm that prison was a fantastic university and that his own tastes defied definition: Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Ivan Turgenev's Home of the Gentry, a biography of the Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes who had led a "long march" of sorts through his vast nation, the Dean of Canterbury's The Secret of Soviet Strength, a modern Russian novel by a young revolutionary, A. J. Cronin's The Citadel, Marx's Capital, Somerset Maugham's The. Razor's Edge, four volumes of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, and seven Dostoevski novels, including Crime and Punishment. Castro's readings led him to the conclusion that Julius Caesar was a "real revolutionary" in the context of Rome's "intense class struggle." Perusing Fidel's comments on his studies of history, literature, science, and politics, one sees how his superbly methodical mind subordinates all texts to his private interpretation (or prejudice) to confirm what he had already decided was the irreversible and irrefutable course of history. With this type of intellectual assurance about past history, it may be easier to understand Castro's absolute assurance about future history and the role he sees foreordained for him to play.
Pending the great swings of history, however, he had to cope with the immediate reality of Cuban politics as represented by Ramón Grau San Martín's announcement in January 1954 that he would run against Batista in the promised presidential elections in November. This annoyed Castro immensely: He felt that no responsible politician should dignify Batista's elections with his candidacy (besides, Batista would surely rig them to win), and he personally despised Grau for his gangster politics during the 1944–1948 term. Most disconcerting of all was the decision of the illegal Communist party to support Grau (who persecuted the Communists during his last presidency) against Batista (whom the Communists supported in 1940, but then were outlawed by him in 1952). It seemed to make no sense for the Communists to play any part whatever in the Batista electoral rodomontade, but the Popular Socialist Party now had a solid track record for entirely irrational and unrealistic policy decisions. Castro refrained from open cricitism of the Communists, who six months earlier had called him an adventurer.
At the prison, Fidel fell afoul of Batista with the most disagreeable consequences. On Saturday, February 12, 1954, the general came to the prison to inaugurate a new power plant, about sixty yards from the hospital ward. As soon as Castro became aware of his archfoe's presence, he gathered the men and proposed that they sing together and as loudly as possible the Movement's revolutionary hymn. Written shortly before the attacks on the army barracks by Agustín Díaz Cartaya, a young black self-taught composer who belonged to a clandestine movement cell in Havana, the piece was first called the "Freedom March." Castro, always on the alert for great propaganda possibilities, had commissioned the hymn, and what Díaz Cartaya wrote turned out to be one of the great battle songs, certainly Cuba's best. Its stanzas urged "Forward, all Cubans, may Cuba ever prize our heroism; we're soldiers united, fighting so our country may be free," damned "cruel and insatiable tyrants," and ended on the triumphant note of "Viva la Revolución!" Over the revolutionary years, the hymn became one of the powerful emotional weapons in the Fidelista arsenal, and Castro certainly understood it. After the assault, Díaz Cartaya (who was captured in Havana after escaping from the Bayamo attack) was asked to add a stanza about the death of "our comrades in Oriente," and the song was renamed "The 26th of July March." It is played to this day at great revolutionary rallies, and it is the musical theme of Radio Havana's short-wave world service.
Now, Fidel could not resist the temptation of baiting Batista, and the twenty-six men under the window of the hospital ward burst into song. At first, the general thought the march was a tribute by prison inmates, but as soon as he made out the lyrics, he exploded in fury and left the prison. The next morning, guards removed four Fidelista leaders from the ward; each was placed for two weeks in a tiny individual isolation cell, where a man had to stoop, in the mental patients' section of the hospital. One of the men was Ramiro Valdés. In the afternoon, Fidel was taken away from the group and put in solitary in a fifteen- by twelve-foot cell by the door of the hospital, across the corridor from the prison morgue. Then Díaz Cartaya was locked up in an isolation cell, the guards flaying him with ox-dick whips; on February 15 he was beaten so severely that he was left unconscious on the floor of his cell.
Castro and his companions paid a heavy price for their brief act of defiance of Batista. Fidel himself would remain in solitary until he was released from prison under the amnesty fourteen months later (his brother Raúl was allowed to join him six months before they left the Isle of Pines). In their hospital ward they were deprived of newspapers and mail, their radios, and for a time, outside visitors. Though Castro was able to maintain communication with his companions in prison and the outside world through a chain of amazingly inventive clandestine methods—and to go on directing the Movement from his cell—he no longer had direct contact with the group. He could no longer teach and indoctrinate them, and before too long the "ideological academy" quietly folded. The Fidelistas were now busy in intricate prison conspiracies, required to support Castro's organization and propaganda efforts.
All things considered, Fidel was not uncomfortable in his cell. It was large enough for him to pace up and down, as was his habit, and it had a toilet and a shower. He had a bookcase and a small hot plate (it took a half hour or more to cook a portion of spaghetti on it, as he tells visitors he now guides through the cell), and the metal hospital bed was equipped with mosquito netting. The big problem was light: In the daytime, a weak light seeped through a window high up on the wall. Fidel had no artificial light for forty days of his imprisonment, and he strained his eyes trying to read at night with a tiny oil lamp, as candles were not allowed. Later, electric light was installed in the cell, and he wrote a friend that enforced darkness and "the humiliation of the shadows" were the "most absurd of all the human barbarianisms I can conceive." After two months in solitary, Fidel told a woman friend in Havana in a letter that "you can't imagine how this solitude devours energy; sometimes I'm exhausted . . . when one is fatigued by everything, there is no refuge from boredom. . . . Days elapse like in lethargy. . . . I always do something, I invent my own worlds, and I think and I think, but this is precisely why I am so exhausted. How did they shrink me as a human being? . . ." Frequent rainstorms flooded his cell, and often he had to hide his beloved books inside suitcases to protect them from the water.
On February 20, 1954, Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were released from the women's prison at Guanajay, after serving five months of their seven-month sentences. For Fidel Castro, this was an event of immense importance: Melba, a skilled lawyer and one of the key personages in organizing the Moncada attack, would now become his trusted agent on the outside to help him revive the Movement. From the original leadership group, Melba was the only one to whom Fidel could now turn—all the others were either dead or imprisoned. Moreover, the prison had made her even more combative. Leaving the prison, she spoke freely to waiting newsmen, and Havana radio stations (temporarily free of censorship because of the Batista electoral campaign) were able to broadcast her words: "We went to Moncada moved by a sacred love for freedom, and we are ready to give our lives for its principles." Clearly, however, the regime was attaching no importance to the opinions of a woman just out of jail.
It did not seem to pay any attention, either, to the increased activities of Mirta on behalf of her imprisoned husband, or those of Lidia, Fidel's revolution-minded older sister, and Naty Revuelta, who not only corresponded with him openly but also served as a clandestine communications channel. In the history of the Cuban revolution and in Castro's success, women have played a role that may well have been decisive, a fact that a great many Cubans do not fully appreciate even today.
Mirta and Fidelito were permitted to visit Castro several times (he wrote to a friend in June 1954 that "I have now spent more than three thousand hours completely alone, except fo
r the briefest moments I have spent with my wife and my son"), and they used these meetings to exchange operational messages for the establishment of a revolutionary network. During June, Mirta attended a tribute at Havana's Theater of Comedy for the Ortodoxo radio commentator Luis Conte Agüero, going on stage to read a letter from Fidel, praising his friend and denouncing Batista as a "tyrant" and "despot." But Castro also wrote about his life in solitary: "I only have company when some dead prisoner, who may have been mysteriously hanged or strangely assassinated . . . is laid out in the small mortuary facing my cell."
When Fidel sent his first letter of instructions clandestinely to Melba Hernández on April 17, he told her that "Mirta will give you the means of communication with me every day if you want to." In insisting that "propaganda cannot be abandoned even for a minute because it is the soul of all the struggle," Castro advised Melba that "Mirta will speak to you about a pamphlet of decisive importance because of its ideological content and its tremendous accusations, to which I want you to pay the greatest attention." He urged her to maintain the "most absolute reserve" about the communications channel he had set up with Mirta. He also reported that Mirta had told him in prison "about the great enthusiasm with which [all of] you are fighting . . . I only feel the immense nostalgia about being absent."
Castro's communications system within the prison and with the outside functioned perfectly. Most of his secret messages were written in lemon juice, used as invisible ink, between the lines of open letters he wrote to friends and relatives in Havana, which the prison censor passed. When heat was applied to the white paper, the brown tracing of lemon-juice writing stood out. As part of the system, he was receiving large numbers of lemons along with other foods sent him from the outside; his appetite for lemons was never questioned by the jailers. Fidel also tells of placing tiny scraps of paper covered with nearly microscopic writing inside false bottoms of wooden match boxes. The boxes were switched back and forth between Fidel (and other rebels) and visitors as they kept lighting cigars and cigarettes, and this, too, went unnoticed by the wardens. Pedro Miret reminisced many years later about the means used by the prisoners to keep in touch with Fidel in solitary and with the outside. Their hospital ward was about 150 yards from Castro's cell in the same structure, he says, and one outside patio was used by the whole group of prisoners for exercising while Fidel had a separate patio with a wall and the roof of the hospital building between them.
"In our patio, we often played with rag balls, which we made ourselves," Miret says, "and every once in a while we would deliberately make the ball land on the roof. One of the prisoners would then ask permission [of the guards] to climb to the roof, supposedly to recover the ball, and would throw it to the other side and [Fidel] would pick it up." Written messages were concealed inside the rag balls, and Castro would hurl balls to his companions over the wall with his messages. Fidel, according to Miret, sometimes threw "strange objects over to us . . .once he even threw a can." Miret recalls that "we played ball all the time," and that sometimes even the common criminals using the same patio helped them recover the rag balls or threw them over to Castro. Again, the wardens never discovered the system.
At one point, Miret and Raúl Castro found a Petit Larousse dictionary in the prison library and discovered the deaf-mute sign-language code. Miret says it took them a month to learn the hand signals, but when, after six months of separation, Raúl was allowed to join his brother in his cell, the code served its purpose. Though the barred doors of Fidel's and Raúl's cell and those of the hospital ward were at a certain distance, Pedro Miret and Raúl managed to signal each other by sticking their hands outside the bars and using their fingers to communicate. "It was very difficult," Miret says, "but it worked," with the two of them straining their eyes. Later, Raúl perfected a system of using fingers for letters of the alphabet to make the "dialogue" easier, Miret recalls, and even today the young Castro playfully addresses him with hand signals.
Food also was a message-delivery device. Miret says that the prisoners sometimes cooked a dish and had a guard take it over to Fidel in his cell. On one occasion, the guard realized what was occurring, "but Fidel spoke with him and convinced him to continue passing the messages." Mashed potatoes were a favorite delivery method, but cigars were the best for sending lengthy pieces of information. Miret and the others learned how to unroll and reroll cigars with great expertise—the cigars were presents the prisoners received from the outside—to insert the messages inside. To ensure that guards did not discover the stratagem, three or four cigars were sent to Fidel at a time via a warden. Fidel then had to unroll all of them to find the slip of paper. To send out messages, tiny pieces of paper were put inside the half a man placed in his mouth. On visiting days, prisoners would go to meet their families holding lit cigars and put them out just in time so that the fire would not reach too far, then pass the cigars to their relatives during an affectionate embrace. In still another method the prisoners carved matchbox holders out of wood and passed them on to visitors with messages hidden inside the holders.
The internal communication was to keep Fidel informed of occurrences in the prison as well as outside, and so he could deliver instructions to his companions and send out materials from the island. The prisoners received such materials from Castro and arranged to have them smuggled out in cigars and matchbox holders.
The entire text of Castro's "History Will Absolve Me" discourse was smuggled out of prison through all these means. Fidel spent several months reconstructing from memory what he had said before the judges in the Santiago hospital lounge, and he proceeded to commit it to paper in small, barely legible writing. He completed it in June. "History" was the pamphlet of "decisive importance" that Mirta mentioned to Melba Hernández on Fidel's instructions, and now they all faced the tremendous task of getting it out, transcribing it, and publishing it. This mass of material, adding up to fifty-four closely printed book pages, was sent out in part as lemon-juice interline writing in letters by Fidel and others, and in part inside cigars. Miret says it took three months to smuggle out the entire text.
Melba and Lidia coordinated this astounding editorial enterprise. The two women and Haydée Santamaría first ironed the letters to bring out the text of the lemon-juice writing. Then the manuscript was typed by five persons working separately, including Melba and her father, Manuel Hernández, at the family apartment. Next, the typewritten pages were taken to Lidia's apartment to be collated. But meeting Fidel's subsequent instructions proved impossible. He had written Melba in mid-June that "at least 100,000 copies should be distributed within four months" throughout the island, with mailings to "all journalists, lawyers and doctors' offices and teachers and other professional groups." Castro had somehow calculated that it would cost only three hundred dollars to print each batch of ten thousand copies, completely underestimating the problems involved, but insisting that it must be done because "it contains our program and our ideology, without which nothing great may be expected." The next day, he wrote that "our immediate task . . . is not to organize revolutionary cells to build our ranks—that would be a grievous error—but our task now is to mobilize public opinion in our favor, to spread out ideas and win the people's backing."
For this reason he was anxious to publish "History" in a mass printing. But lack of money and the need to print the pamphlet clandestinely limited the circulation to only 27,500 copies, and it was not until the end of the year that even this number could be distributed. The public impact was limited.
Publishing "History" was not the only task with which Melba was charged. Castro ordered her to travel to Mexico to establish contacts with Movement members exiled there, notably with his university friend Lester Rodríguez. Fidel was very disturbed over the prospects that other opposition groups, especially the wealthy faction headed by the ousted president, Carlos Prío, might achieve success and attract others to its banner. This would naturally undermine Castro's ambitions to bring Cubans together in support of
his proposed revolution. Melba's mission in Mexico was to persuade Castro's friends abroad not to follow Prío. In May Batista had granted amnesty to the ex-president and the other signers of the 1953 Montreal Pact, but this excluded "those who took part in the attack on the Moncada Garrison," and Fidel had every reason to feel threatened politically.
The isolation also began to tell on him. Apart from a few visits in the early part of 1954 by Mirta and Fidelito, and an unexpected one in April from Waldo Medina, a Havana judge whom he had known at the university, Castro saw nobody but prison guards. This monotony was broken on the five occasions when he was taken to the court in Nueva Gerona, the capital of the Isle of Pines, to testify in the criminal cases he had brought against government officials for the killings at Moncada. But the prison director overrode the instructions from Interior Minister Ramón O. Hermida to let the Castro brothers appear before courts in Santiago and Havana, leaving Fidel deeply embittered.
Having completed the "History" text and issued secret instructions to Melba and other Movement members, he turned again to his marathon reading endeavors. He reported in a letter to Havana that he fell asleep finishing Kant's The Transcendental Aesthetics of Space and Time, remarking that "of course, space and time disappeared for a good while from my mind." He complained in another missive that "I have nothing at all about Roosevelt's New Deal," and that "I mainly want information on him: in agriculture, his price-raising policies for crops, the protection and conservation of soil fertility, credit facilities, the moratorium on debts and the extension of markets at home and abroad; in the social field, how he provided more jobs, shortened the workday, raised wages and pushed through social assistance to the unemployed, the old and crippled; and, in the field of the general economy, his reorganization of industry, new tax systems, regulation of the trusts and banking and monetary reforms." Five years later, when his revolution triumphed, his policies covered every single point in the New Deal legislation he had studied in prison—before he turned to Marxist formulas. In the meantime, Fidel wrote a friend, "I can't stop thinking about these subjects, because—sincerely—I would revolutionize this country from end to end with joy . . . I am convinced that one could make happy all its inhabitants. I would be disposed to bring upon myself the hatred and the ill-will of a thousand or two men, among whom some parents, half of my friends, two thirds of my colleagues, and four fifths of my former college companions! . . ."