by Tad Szulc
Fidel approved the proposal to land near Pilón (though plans were changed later), but it remained a closely guarded secret. Miret flew back to Cuba to continue organizing the 26th of July Movement inside the country, and to begin the preparations for the landing expected a year or so later. He kept in touch with Celia, and flew again to Mexico at the start of 1957 to bring Castro up to date on all the developments. Miret was able to report that the Movement, now known by its initials, "MR-26-7" (Movimiento Revolucionario 26 Julio), was acquiring personnel and importance.
Being clandestine, the Movement at this stage was small by definition, and potential members were carefully screened by the National Directorate Castro had left behind in Cuba. Specific functions, from recruitment and fund-raising to propaganda and preparations to supply a guerrilla war in the mountains, were assigned Movement members, and there were "coordinators" on the national, provincial, and municipal levels. The Ortodoxo party, on the other hand, was perceived by Fidel at that juncture as a massive political base for his revolutionary enterprise. He was careful to maintain his identification with the Ortodoxos (on his return from prison he had promised to be active in the party), but from Mexico he went over the heads of the leaders to the rank-and-file to urge commitment to armed insurrection.
Eager to appear as the legitimate heir to the great Eddy Chibás, in mid-August Castro sent a message to the Congress of Ortodoxo Militants, then being held in Havana, telling them they had a central role to play in "the struggle for national liberation." The message, read to some five hundred delegates by Faustino Pérez, a member of the Movement's National Directorate, urged the party to reject Batista's offer of congressional elections as "a peaceful solution" since it was a sham. Castro told Batista to resign "because the whims of an adventurer cannot be put ahead of the interests of six million Cubans; if you do not resign, and if you keep trying to impose yourself through force, the six million will use force, and we shall sweep you and your clique of infamous murderers from the face of the earth." For the opposition, Fidel said, there were two alternatives: to "cross their arms and cry like Mary Magdalene because they lack the courage to demand anything with honor," or to take the road "called revolution, the right of all people to revolt against oppression!" The delegates, on their feet, broke into chants of "Revolution! . . . Revolution! . . . Revolution!" As far as Fidel was concerned, the Ortodoxos had signed up for "armed insurrection," and his Movement was "the revolutionary apparatus of Chibásismo." Thus he merged his two organizations politically.
The Communists had no interest in Castro's insurrection, still believing they could control or coordinate militant opposition to Batista in Cuba. Learning that Fidel was about to leave the country, the party dispatched Raúl Valdés Vivó, the secretary general of Socialist Youth at Havana University, to talk him out of it. The Communists preferred that Castro stay in Cuba and work with them to organize a united political front against Batista, again underestimating his intelligence and his ego. Fidel replied that any mass movement had to be built around a direct confrontation with the enemy, and that he was going away to prepare the ground for a revolution. What remains unclear so many years later is what part, if any, Raúl Castro played in the Communist strategy—if indeed there was a long-range strategy. Though a party member since the eve of Moncada, Raúl's loyalty seemed to be first and foremost to his brother, at least until these two loyalties became fused in the aftermath of the revolution. In the meantime, Raúl was in Mexico, a member of Fidel's personal circle of future invasion leaders.
They commemorated the second anniversary of Moncada by laying a wreath at the monument to the Heroic Children of Chapultepec, a Mexican patriotic shrine, and Fidel expanded his efforts to develop contacts with influential Mexicans, radical Latin American exiles living in Mexico, and Cuban refugees. For Castro the new revolutionary activity was around the clock: conferring, scheming and conspiring, reading and writing, looking for money and recruits, keeping an eye on the political life in Cuba, and giving shape to the 26th of July Movement.
Fidel's first home in Mexico City was a tiny room overlooking a courtyard in a cheap downtown hotel. He did all his reading and writing there. For lunch and dinner, he had to walk from wherever he happened to be to the apartment of María Antonia González, a Cuban married to a Mexican wrestler named Avelino Palomo, in the old section of the city on Emparán Street. María Antonia's apartment was the haven, shelter, kitchen, and headquarters for all Cuban political refugees in Mexico, and where Raúl Castro went to live on his arrival. The Castro brothers had known María Antonia back in Cuba, and during the Mexican exile she became the fairy godmother of the Fidelistas, one more in the galaxy of Cuban revolutionary women who made the ultimate victory possible. Her generosity kept the brothers alive. Fidel was receiving eighty dollars monthly from Cuba, and Raúl only forty dollars.
A week after arriving in Mexico, Castro wrote Faustino Pérez through a secret channel that he was studying the Mexican revolutionary process under the presidency of General Lázaro Cárdenas. In the 1930s Cárdenas had expropriated foreign oil companies and promulgated drastic land reform (and he would presently become Fidel's protector). This became part of Castro's draft of a "complete revolutionary program," which he planned to send to Cuba as a pamphlet for mass clandestine distribution. He had to pawn his overcoat to pay for the printing of some copies of his document, remarking in a letter to a friend that "the pawnshops here are run by the state and they charge very low interest . . . if the rest of my clothes were forced to go the same way, I wouldn't hesitate for a second."
Castro caught the grippe, but despite his high fever, he continued to write in longhand his plans for Cuba after Batista's defeat. At dawn of August 2, he scribbled a note to his sister Lidia in Havana that "although it is now already four o'clock and five minutes in the morning, I'm still writing. I have no idea how many pages in all I have written! I have to deliver it to the courier at 8:00 A.M. I have no alarm clock; if I oversleep, I may miss the courier, so I won't go to sleep. . . . I have grippe with a cough, and my whole body aches. I have no Cuban cigars, and I really miss them." In another letter that week, he remarked that his life in exile was "sad, lonely, and hard."
What his solitary writing produced was the Movement's "Manifesto No. 1 to the People of Cuba," signed by Castro and dated August 8, 1955. Based on a fifteen-point program, this document was much more radical that his proposals two years earlier in "History Will Absolve Me." The Manifesto was intended to reach Cubans on August 16, the fourth anniversary of Eddy Chibás's death. Symbolism was crucial in the continued elaboration of Castro's image, so the Manifesto opened with the requisite citations from Martí and General Antonio Maceo. Castro instructed his followers at home to print "at least fifty-thousand" copies of the document, and to start distributing them at Chibás's grave in the Havana cemetery. In Mexico two thousand copies were printed by Alsacio Vanegas Arroyo, a Mexican printer who was a friend of María Antonia's. The original handwritten text of the Manifesto was smuggled by another woman friend, the sister of the pop singer Orquídea Pino, inside the History of the Incas, a classic of the Spanish conquest. That week, Fidel had his twenty-ninth birthday.
Castro's Manifesto was essentially designed to transform the Movement ideologically and militarily into a new streamlined structure while maintaining the continuity of the Moncada tradition. Enormously lengthy, as were all Castro's writings and pronouncements, it was "an open call for revolution, and a frontal attack against the clique of criminals who trample the honor of the nation and rule its destiny counter to its destiny and the sovereign will of the people. . . . The bridges have been burned: either we conquer the fatherland at any price so that we can live with dignity and honor, or we shall remain without one." The Movement, Castro wrote, "is formed without hatred for anyone; it is not a political party but a revolutionary movement; its ranks are open to all Cubans who sincerely desire to see political democracy reestablished and social justice introduced in Cuba; its leaders
hip is collective and secret, formed by new men of strong will who are not accomplices of the past. . . . We defended the military when no one defended them, and fought them when they supported the tyranny, but we shall welcome them with open arms when they join the cause of liberty . . ."
The specific points of the revolutionary program provided for: "The outlawing of the latifundia, distribution of the land among peasant families. . . . The right of the worker to broad participation in the profits of all the large industrial, commercial, and mining enterprises. . . . Immediate industrialization of the country by means of a vast plan made and promoted by the state. . . . Drastic decrease in all rents, effectively benefiting the 2,200,000 persons who are today spending a third of their income on rent. . . . Construction by the state of decent housing to shelter the 400,000 families crowded into filthy single rooms, huts, shacks, and tenements. . . . Extension of electricity to the 2,800,000 persons in our rural and suburban sectors who have none. . . . Nationalization of public services: telephone, electricity, and gas. . . . Construction of ten children's cities to fully shelter and educate 200,000 children of workers and peasants. . . . Extension of education to the farthest corner of the country. . . . General reform of the tax system. . . . Reorganization of public administration. . . . Establishment of an inviolable military roster safeguarding the members of the armed forces so that they can be removed from their posts only for good reasons. . . . Elimination of the death penalty in the Military Penal Code for crimes committed during peacetime. . . . Generous and decent pay to all public employees. . . . Adequate measures in education and legislation to put an end to every vestige of discrimination for reasons of race or sex which regrettably still exists in our social and economic life. . . . Reorganization of the judicial branch. . . . Confiscation of all the assets of embezzlers acquired under all past governments . . ."
As with the "History" address, the Manifesto has been submitted to endless analysis and interpretation to determine to what extent, if any, it either suggested or brilliantly concealed Castro's real or attributed Marxism-Leninism. Interestingly, those people who accused him of communism before he publicly announced his faith in it, and today's official spokesmen who insist that he always was a Marxist-Leninist, both concur in finding the Manifesto to represent Marxist views. Careful scrutiny of the text in the context of the period during which it was written may lead, however, to a different conclusion: that Castro had left his options open so that in the future he could select the interpretation that suited him best politically. Obviously, land reform, profit sharing, rental cuts, state housing, state-managed industrialization, rural electrification, effective education, and antidiscrimination measures were not inherently Marxist notions even in a Latin American country in 1955, but they could be automatically inserted into a Communist or socialist program. Nationalization of public services, even if they belonged to United States interests, need not be a Marxist act (though the Eisenhower administration, for example, might have seen it that way). Mexico under Cárdenas, whose policies Castro studied so closely, had gone much further in nationalization without being accused of communism; though Perón in Argentina was considered a Fascist and a thug, he had recently nationalized British and American public-service interests, and public services of this type had been nationalized in most of Western Europe since World War II.
In this sense, then, it is an idle endeavor to search for hidden ideology in this Castro Manifesto. He knew exactly what he was saying—and how far he could and should go. In 1955, and even four years later, he always retained the freedom to maneuver. It is certainly plausible that Fidel was already a convinced Marxist-Leninist when he sat, pen in hand, in his tiny Mexican hotel room. He told Lionel Martin twenty years later that his early programs were "the antechamber of the socialist revolution," but this is ex post facto management of history.
Beyond question, however, were Castro's "anti-imperialist" or plain anti-Yankee sentiments, which were never disguised. As a student, he had belonged to organizations advocating independence for Puerto Rico, and among the first friends he made in Mexico was the Peruvian-born Laura Meneses, the wife of the imprisoned Puerto Rican independentista leader Pedro Albizu Campos. Albizu Campos was serving a long prison term in the United States, and Castro regarded him as a hero. Laura had attended Fidel's commemoration of the Moncada attack on July 26, and for the balance of his stay in Mexico, they remained close friends, spending much time together.
In his speech on Che Guevara's death in 1967, Castro said that "it was a day in the month of July or August 1955, when we met Che." Fidel Castro and Ernesto Guevara met for the first time at the apartment of María Antonia González in Mexico City. Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian with Incan features who was Guevara's first wife, places the meeting at "the beginning of July" in her book on Che (Hilda died of cancer in Havana in 1974, having been divorced from Che in the early 1960s). An account of Castro's Mexican exile published by the Central Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces says he and Guevara "established relations around the month of September." Castro's history-keepers seem unperturbed by such imprecisions.
It happens that Castro and Guevara began their active revolutionary careers within two weeks of each other's through a coincidence in personal histories. On July 8, 1953, as Fidel Castro was completing the preparations for Moncada, Che Guevara departed Buenos Aires for Bolivia on the first leg of a revolutionary journey. His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, recalls that when Che was saying good-bye to him and his mother, he explained that he was undertaking a self-appointed mission "to combat for the liberation of America from United States imperialism."
"Here goes a soldier of the Americas," Che told his parents, adding that he could help in the anti-American crusade he thought Juan Perón, whom he greatly admired as a potential hemisphere leader, had launched from the presidency of Argentina. Che, who was two years younger than Fidel Castro, had graduated from the medical school at Buenos Aires University on April 11, 1953, but almost instantly decided that he preferred revolution to the practice of medicine.
Considering himself a Marxist, but never formally joining the Argentine Communist party, Che had spent much of the previous year traveling through South America with a fellow medical student, convincing himself of the colonial status of the continent's nation, and acquiring a profound distaste for the United States during a month-long stay in Miami. According to his father, Guevara had run out of money there and had to await an Argentine plane on which he could hitch a free ride home. Living in Miami on a dollar per day, the father says, the asthmatic Che was forced to walk for miles every day; he ate poorly and seemed never to have met any Americans he cared to remember. He was back in Buenos Aires in September 1952, resuming his studies on a crash basis to be able to graduate with his class.
Che was in La Paz, the Bolivian capital, the day Castro attacked Moncada, and he must have read about it in the local press, but there is nothing to suggest that he was especially impressed. He did not rush to Cuba, journeying instead in slow stages across Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and finally Guatemala where, in mid-1954, he witnessed the overthrow of the leftist government of President Arbenz by rebels financed and organized by the Central intelligence Agency. Che reached Mexico in 1955, and it was only then, on "a cold Mexican night," as he put it, that he first met Fidel Castro, about whom he had been hearing reports through the Latin American revolutionary grapevine. From there on, their revolutionary destinies became joined.
The contacts between Guevara and the Cubans had first developed in Guatemala late in 1953, and early in 1954. Ñico López, one of Castro's most trusted lieutenants, had gone to Guatemala after escaping from the Bayamo affray on July 26, and he was soon introduced to Guevara and Hilda, then working for the leftist Arbenz regime. Guevara met other Fidelista refugees, learning the background and details of the Moncada and Bayamo uprisings. Dedicated to the notion of great Marxist revolutions in Latin America and visc
erally anti-American, he became fascinated by what he was told about Castro. After Arbenz was overthrown by his CIA-directed enemies, Guevara fled the country and reached Mexico on September 21, 1954. There he ran again into Ñico López, who kept assuring him that Castro would get out of prison in Cuba and probably come to Mexico.
By 1955, Guevara worked full time as a physician at the General Hospital of Mexico. His specialty was allergies (he was an asthma sufferer himself), and he lectured for free at the medical school of the National Autonomous University. The pay at the hospital was so low, however, that he was forced to work as a news photographer for the Latina News Agency to make ends meet. Guevara lived in a minuscule apartment on Napoles Street, his life-style was spartan, and his only extravagant gestures were occasional gifts of classical records and bits of silver jewelry for Hilda whom he married in Mexico in 1955. They had first met in Guatemala, and she followed him north after the Arbenz debacle. Clean-shaven and with his hair neatly trimmed, outwardly Ernesto seemed the classic young Latin American professional with an impressive intellectual bent, what in those days was regarded as a "parlor revolutionary." He had the gift of fine irony in conversation, preferring to be quietly in the background. He was superbly well read, he wrote descriptive prose and poetry exceedingly well; his French was excellent, but his English barely passable.