Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Ideologically, Guevara considered himself a Marxist-Leninist, and he was a serious student of the doctrine. Castro would say many years later that when they first met, "he already was a Marxist in his thoughts" and "a more advanced revolutionary than I was." Not immediately evident then was Ernesto Guevara's profound idealism, an absolute absence of political opportunism, and a passionate dedication to revolutionary causes. Upon being introduced to the freshly exiled secretary general of the Guatemalan Communist party, which had supported the Arbenz government, Guevara chastised the Guatemalan leftists for not having resisted the American-organized attack, arguing that Arbenz should have gone to the countryside "with a group of true revolutionaries" to keep fighting. As Hilda recalled, they parted "coldly." Ernesto was the romantic revolutionary in search of a revolution.

  When Raúl Castro arrived in Mexico late in June 1955, he was invited at once by companions from the Movement already there to meet Ernesto Guevara. The exiled Cubans knew Guevara through Ñico López, and the encounter with Raúl was a great success. Hilda recalled that Guevara brought Raúl to their apartment (she and Ernesto had just begun to live together), and that it instantly became a "great friendship." She wrote that Guevara and Raúl Castro met almost every day, and that Raúl introduced Che to other Latin American leftists exiled in Mexico. Of Raúl, she said that "he had Communist ideas, [was] a great admirer of the Soviet Union . . . and believed that the struggle for power was to make a revolution on behalf of the people, and that this struggle was not only for Cuba, but for Latin America and against Yankee imperialism." At the same time, Hilda recalled, "it was stimulating for the spirit to talk with Raúl: He was merry, open, sure of himself, very clear in the exposition of his ideas, with an incredible capacity for analysis and synthesis. This is why he got along so well with Ernesto."

  Around the second week of July (by Hilda's account), Raúl arranged for Fidel, in Mexico City since July 8, to meet Guevara at María Antonia's apartment. They hit it off immediately, talking continually for ten hours, from early evening until the morning. Hilda wrote that Ernesto had told her when he came home that Fidel was "a great political leader in a new style, modest, who knew where he was going, master of great tenacity and firmness" and that they "had exchanged views on Latin America and international problems." And Guevara told her: "If anything good has happened in Cuba since Martí, it is Fidel Castro: He will make the revolution. We agreed profoundly. . . . Only a person like him would I be disposed to help in everything."

  Afterward, Guevara wrote about meeting Castro: "I met him on one of those cold nights of Mexico, and I remember that our first discussion covered international politics. Within a few hours that night—at dawn—I was already one of the future expeditionaries." In a letter to his father in Buenos Aires the following year, explaining what he was doing in Mexico, Guevara said: "Sometime ago . . . a young Cuban leader invited me to join his movement of armed liberation of his people and I, naturally, accepted."

  And this was Fidel's recollection: "An Argentine by birth, he was Latin American in spirit, in his heart. . . . Much is written about all revolutionaries, and this was the case with Che. Some tried to present him as a conspirator, a subversive and shadowy individual, dedicated to devising plots and fomenting revolutions. . . . As a young man, Che had a special curiosity and interest in the things that were going on in Latin America, a special spirit of delving into students and knowledge, and a special yen for going to see all our homelands. . . . He didn't have anything more than his degree [of physician]. . . . But Che wasn't Che then. He was Ernesto Guevara. It was because of the Argentine custom of calling each other Che that the Cubans began to call him Che . . . the name which he made famous later, the name which he turned into a symbol. . . . It was a matter of minutes for Che to join that small group of us Cubans who were working on organizing a new phase of the struggle in our country."

  After their first encounter, Fidel and Che met two or three times a week, and late in July Castro went to dinner at the Guevaras'. Che also invited the wife of Albizu Campos and Juan Juarbes, another Puerto Rican exile. Much of the conversation consisted of Castro questioning them about the situation in Puerto Rico, but at one point Hilda asked him, "But why are you here, when your place should be in Cuba?" Fidel replied, "Ah, a very good question, and I shall answer you," and, as Hilda put it, "His reply lasted four hours." She remembered that his main points were that "the Yankee penetration of Cuba was complete, there was no other way than to continue the road of Moncada," and that he had come to Mexico to prepare an invasion of the island, "to launch an open battle against the army of Batista, who was supported by the Yankees," and that "the struggle in Cuba was part of the continental struggle against the Yankees that Bolívar and Martí had already foreseen." Castro went on to explain how the invasion was being prepared, and how important it was to maintain total security, "always being aware that there may be infiltrators, but knowing that traitors could be detected." The danger of treason was always on Castro's mind.

  Hilda's personal impression of Fidel was: "Very white and tall, big without being fat, with very black hair, shiny and curly, with a moustache, and with rapid, agile, and secure gestures. He did not seem to be the leader that he was: He could pass for a well-turned-out bourgeois tourist; but when he spoke, his eyes lit up with passion and faith in the Revolution. . . . He had the charm and the personality of a great leader and, at the same time, truly admirable naturality and simplicity."

  After Castro left, Guevara asked Hilda, "What do you think of this folly of the Cubans of wanting to invade a completely armed island?" She answered, "There is no doubt that it is folly, but we must be with it." Guevara embraced her and said, "I think the same . . . I've decided to be one of the future expeditionairies. . . . We shall soon begin our preparations, and I'll go as a doctor." On August 18, Che and Hilda were married in the village of Tepozotlán in the presence of Raúl Castro, Jesús Montané (who had just arrived from Cuba to join the conspiracy), and the Venezuela poetess Lucila Velásquez, the bride's closest friend. Fidel joined them later for an Argentine barbecue prepared by Che; he had originally planned to be the witness but decided against it for security reasons. He thought that Batista agents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Mexican political police were watching him, and he was not entirely wrong. The Cubans and the Guevaras were now inseparable; on one occasion, Fidel threw a party for his political friends, preparing spaghetti with seafood sauce and cheese.

  Even with Che and Hilda, Castro could not resist the temptation to run everybody's lives. When Hilda told him one day that Che had earned extra money for covering the Pan-American Games for his news agency, and that they could not decide whether to buy a car or take a trip, Castro counseled them "to buy something for the house, like a record player" because there was too much red tape in Mexico in owning automobiles. Anyway, he said, they had friends with cars if they ever needed one. The Guevaras did buy a record player, and Fidel was delighted to see it the next time he visited them. That particular evening, Castro met Lucila Velásquez, and they appeared to be interested in each other. He took the poetess out several times, but, as Hilda observed, "he was so busy with his political problems that he put aside all his other interests." Still, Lucila asked Hilda, "Tell me, how did you conquer Ernesto, how did you catch him to marry you?" Everybody laughed, including Fidel.

  In September, Guevara and Castro deplored together the army's overthrow of Juan Perón in Argentina. To a great many Argentines his ouster meant the end of a corrupt dictatorship and a gradual return to representative democracy, but to the two young revolutionaries it marked the end of what they perceived as an experiment in social justice. Guevara complained to Hilda that the people did not fight in the streets to defend Perón's regime. Both Che and Fidel had concluded independently that Perón's Justicialismo, a vague populism combined with a welfare state, was the beginning of liberation from capitalism and "imperialism," even though Perón was loudly anti-Communist. But he had
enormous support among urban workers, and he was anti-American. That was good enough for Guevara and Castro: They saw the military revolution as "reactionary," and Castro always remained pro-Perón, immune to the arbitrariness and corruption of Perónismo. It was Perón who had funded Castro's trip to Bogotá in 1948 for the students' congress, and it was Perón who financed the news agency for which Guevara now worked in Mexico. Meanwhile, while planning the revolution with Fidel, Che Guevara still found time in September to go to Veracruz to present a paper on allergies to a scientific congress there.

  With the Movement's top command now firmly established in Mexico, Fidel Castro proceeded to set in motion a series of new operations. When Pedro Miret arrived in September with the coastal charts, he instructed him to accelerate the departure of additional Movement members to train in Mexico for the invasion; he sent a stream of detailed orders to the National Directorate on the island; and he prepared for a long fund-raising voyage to the United States. Jesús Montané and Melba Hernández had already arrived from Havana, and with Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, they could coordinate activities in Mexico in Fidel's absence. Juan Manuel Márquez, the forty-year-old Ortodoxo party leader from Havana who had been beaten savagely by the Batista police because of his friendship with the Fidelistas, also succeeded in reaching Mexico at that time; he too joined the leadership circle. And the rebels also had a friend in Raúl Roa, the university professor who had sent them books when they were imprisoned on the Isle of Pines, and now lived in Mexico as coeditor of the periodical Humanismo.

  In Cuba the key personality in preparing for the invasion was Pedro Miret. He explained that during that period going to Mexico to brief Fidel was "one part of the plan"; the other part "was for me to send people over there" to join the military force. Miret says that "when Fidel left, I was charged with the confidential, conspiratorial responsibility, the most delicate aspect of it." With plans for an insurrection and, subsequently, a general strike, "the whole country had to be organized, and this took a long time because there were so many people in the Ortodoxo party turning toward insurrection, because we had to collect money for arms, make contacts to buy arms, and conceal arms." Then, Miret recalls, "we had to select companions to send to Mexico, and this had to be done systematically." First, the candidates "had to be tested . . . we had to see how they acted. For example, we would order them to paint a '26' sign [for the 26th of the July Movement] on walls or somewhere, which seems easy . . . but people painting the '26' began losing respect for the authorities, and they became reckless . . .

  "In many cases," Miret says, "the men had to prove their stability so that we could start selecting those who would be squadron leaders. When they became 'burned,' in the sense that the police were on to them, we undertook to send them abroad. So, we were sending people out at the rate they were getting 'burned.' . . . Sometimes, we could send them out openly, it was incredible what one could get away with. Once, I just changed my name a little bit. . . . But, of course, officials at the airport belonged to the Twenty-sixth of July. . . . Since we had no money, every time a person left, a cell of the Movement in Cuba had to commit itself to send him money abroad. . . . Some people got forty dollars monthly, but that was plenty in Mexico." Thus Fidel Castro's new Rebel Army grew.

  And Fidel was bombarding Cuba with his bulletins of instructions. Two weeks after "Manifesto No. 1" was distributed, he issued a letter to the National Directorate containing his ideas for the structure and functioning of the renascent Movement. His emphasis was on propaganda and security. Propaganda, he wrote, "must never fail. . . . I give it a decisive importance because apart from keeping the morale high, materials circulating clandestinely in the country do the work of thousands of activists, converting every enthusiastic citizen into a militant who repeats the arguments and the ideas . . ." On the other hand, Castro demanded "the most rigorous silence" concerning arms, persons handling them, and places where they are stored. "If any compañero learns too much because of his activities, he must be removed from the internal front," Fidel ordered, adding that no more than fifteen or twenty persons in Cuba should have knowledge about such matters, and none should know who the others were. He insisted on indoctrination work among the workers.

  The new Movement could have "a centralized direction," Castro said, "that will control all the principal links, but a decentralized organization of the masses, acting in specific tasks; these tasks will be given to all the members of the armed forces who sympathize with us." In this fashion, he expected that the best-known leaders of the Movement inside Cuba could be replaced gradually without any break in the work. The main difference in strategy from the past was that whereas Moncada was conceived as a relatively rapid insurrectional war based on the cities, the new phase called for a prolonged war in the rural areas as well as urban centers. The prolonged-war concept was now central in Castro's thinking.

  On September 17, Fidel dispatched a lengthy communication to the Women's Martí Centennial Civic Front, insisting on the basis of the Moncada experience that a revolution must be organized in such a way that no unexpected event or accident can derail it. He remarked that "a revolutionary strategy is always more complicated than a war strategy, it cannot be studied in any academy, and the professional military with their rigid mental notions are the least likely to conceive it." Having given it profound thought, Castro had come to the conclusion that a well-directed and imaginative guerrilla operation had a very good chance against a traditional army that operated by the book; this was the real key to his decision to launch an invasion. According to Castro, political groups should play different roles in a revolution, depending on their public record and the "social interests" they represent; this was his first hint that in his revolutionary unity, some groups will be more equal than others (this was the point that was generally missed by a great many early Fidelista backers).

  Modern sabotage techniques were to be taught to special combat units inside the country for followup action after the invasion, Castro wrote, and 80 percent of collected funds should be spent on buying arms and 20 percent on organization and propaganda. Everybody could participate in the revolution, he said, from the young to the old, men and women, providing "useful collaboration" without necessarily having to use a rifle. But in a letter on October 4, Fidel demanded a commitment from Movement activists in Cuba to provide systematic financial support; this would be his chief test of "loyalty of our militants to revolutionary principles and discipline." Referring to himself as "Alex" (one of his conspiracy names, derived from his middle name, Alejandro), he wrote that "Alex is convinced" that the revolutionary plan will be successful if funds are adequate. For this reason, in October Fidel undertook a speechmaking and money-raising tour of the United States, his first public political exposure on the American scene.

  "I can inform you with complete reliability that in 1956, we will be free or we will be martyrs!" Fidel Castro exclaimed before an audience of eight hundred exiled Cubans at the Palm Garden hall at Fifty-second Street and Eighth Avenue in New York on Sunday, October 30, 1955. This was the first time Castro had publicly and formally made the specific commitment, to be repeated over and over in the year to come, to invade Cuba before the end of 1956. He did so for the twin purpose of making his Movement more credible by setting an approximate date for the invasion, creating a deadline for himself and his companions, and keeping the Batista regime off guard. If the Movement was to grow inside Cuba, Castro reasoned, it had to be given something more tangible than vague promises of a revolutionary return—someday. And he believed that a direct challenge to Batista would psychologically weaken him within his own government. He told his enthusiastic New York audience that "the regime is totally disoriented with regard to our revolutionary activities . . . we have developed invincible methods of organization and work. . . . Our apparatus of counterespionage functions much better than their espionage. Whenever their agents abroad inform the government, we immediately get the information here. All information office
s and Batista's spies are carefully watched by us."

  The New York speech was one of the highlights of Castro's seven-week American tour. Its practical objective was to raise funds for the Movement and to create "Patriotic Clubs" of Cubans living in the United States to support the revolution in a sustained fashion. However, Fidel made sure that the symbolism of following in José Martí's footsteps by mobilizing Cuban exile communities for the "war in liberation" was not lost on anyone at home or abroad. Martí had lived in New York for years before proclaiming the revolution in 1895, and departing on his ill-fated expedition to free the island. Most of the financing for the final war of independence came from Cuban businessmen and workers in the New York area and from cigarmakers in Tampa, Florida. As Fidel moved along the east coast of the United States to deliver his revolutionary exhortations, the spirits of José Martí and Eddy Chibás went with him, their names invoked continuously. (And Chibás's voice was heard on records Fidel had brought with him.)

  Castro began his trip to the United States by dispatching a letter on October 8 to the Ortodoxo party executive committee in New York, promising "a radical and profound change in national life" as a linchpin in the process of liberating Cuba. He expanded on the theme at the Palm Garden by saying that "the Cuban people want something more than a simple change of command," that "Cuba longs for a radical change in every aspect of its political and social life. . . . The people must be given something more than liberty and democracy in the abstract; decent living must be given to every Cuban." To his audience, these were the themes of Martí and Chibás, and they went over smoothly; nobody read Marxist messages into them until later.