Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Rufo López-Fresquet, the revolution's first finance minister, recalls being summoned to Castro's hotel penthouse late in January and asked if there were funds available for "an immediate purchase of arms." Castro told him he was concerned about an invasion from the Dominican Republic, where Batista had found haven with Trujillo, and that Cuba was disarmed because "the generals stole the money, and, in spite of the heavy expenditures on armaments, these are nowhere to be found." López-Fresquet was able to track down $5. 3 million of Cuban military funds in European banks, and the regime purchased 25,000 light automatic FAL rifles (including 2,000 weapons with grenade-throwing attachments), 50 million rounds of ammunition, and 100,000 grenades from Belgium. The United States had not begun pressing foreign governments to refuse Cuba arms, and the first FAL shipment reached Havana in September, just in time for the fresh militia units (though the militias' creation was only announced by Castro on October 26).

  José Ramón Fernández, the career army officer imprisoned by Batista for plotting against him, was one of Castro's principal arms buyers as well as the chief organizer of the militias. Now a vice-president of Cuba and an alternate member of the Communist party Politburo, Fernández recalls shopping for arms in Italy, Switzerland, West Germany, and Israel in mid-1959, but was only able to obtain them in Italy. Cuba took delivery of nearly one hundred .81mm-caliber mortars, two batteries of 105mm howitzers (made in the United States), and one hundred heavy machine guns, flamethrowers, and light weapons, but a subsequent dispute between Rome and Havana blocked further purchases. In Israel, Fernández met with Golda Meir, then foreign minister, but after touring Israeli defense plants, he could not find suitable weapons for the Cuban Army; Israel was willing to sell him Uzi submachine guns, but these weapons did not fit into the Cubans' plans. Soon, however, the Europeans, under pressure from Washington, declined to sell arms to Cuba. Britain, honoring an American request, refused to supply Hawker Hunter jet fighters to the Cuban Air Force. Yugoslavia, approached secretly by the Cubans in 1959, decided on its own not to sell arms to Castro, presumably to avoid antagonizing the United States, with which it maintained a delicate relationship.

  Announcing in October the creation of the militias because, as he put it, of growing counterrevolutionary dangers and attacks from the United States, Castro told a million Cubans at a presidential palace rally that "if we cannot buy planes, we shall fight on land, when the time comes to fight on land . . . we shall immediately start training peasants and workers . . . if they don't sell us planes in England, we shall buy them wherever they will sell to us; and if there is no money for warplanes, the people will buy the warplanes. . ." Turning to Army Chief of staff Juan Almeida, Castro exclaimed: "And right here, I hand you a check from the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister as a contribution for the purchase of the planes. "

  José Ramón Fernández says that the first arms from Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union began arriving late in 1960, months after the final breach in Cuban-American economic ties; the first jet aircraft were delivered in mid-1961, at the earliest. As Castro had said, Cuba would buy arms wherever possible (and accept them free), but the record suggests that neither Havana nor Moscow were interested in arms deals during 1959. Castro had tried Western sources first, and Ambassador Bonsal is right in saying that the revolutionaries were forced into dependence on the Soviet bloc. According to Fernández, the first Czech shipments were automatic M-52 rifles, BEZA-792 machine guns that could be used for antiaircraft fire, and 82mm mortars. Czech instructors accompanied the weapons. Soviet arms came next.

  If Castro feared an invasion from the United States in 1959, he also feared an attack from the Dominican Republic by his archenemy, the generalissimo. Trujillo, who remembered Fidel's involvement in the abortive Cayo Confites expedition against him twelve years earlier, was just as concerned with the threat of a Cuban invasion, directly or through Haiti. Both rulers therefore devoted themselves to preparations for preemptive blows, though neither seemed to understand the political situation in the other's country. Trujillo started out by organizing a "foreign legion," including Caribbean mercenaries, anti-Castro Cubans, Fascist Blue Division veterans from Spain, Germans, and right-wing Croatians. It was never clear if Trujillo planned to use this "legion" to defend Haiti from Cuba or to attack Cuba, but Castro, who had been training anti-Trujillo Dominicans in his camps, struck first. At dusk on June 14, a C-46 twin-engine transport plane provided by Venezuela landed in Constanza in the central mountains of the Dominican Republic with fifty-six rebels aboard. Ten of them were Cubans, and the commander was Major Delio Gómez Ochoa, the former 26th of July Movement coordinator in Havana. The Dominican Army rapidly destroyed the invading force, capturing Gómez, and six days later Trujillo's air force and warships sank two yachts filled with additional Dominican rebels trying to land at Puerto Plata on the north coast. This marked the end of Castro's only attempt to tangle with Trujillo, and it is probably irrelevant if he was again practicing "internationalism" or simply hoping to discourage the old dictator from assaulting him.

  In any event, Trujillo would not give up, and immediately after Constanza, his top intelligence agents resumed plotting with two Rebel Army comandantes whom they considered ready to betray Castro. One was an American mercenary named William Morgan and the other was a Spaniard named Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo who had participated with his brother Carlos in the Students' Revolutionary Directorate attack on Batista's palace in 1957. Carlos was killed, and in the attack the following year Eloy joined the DR guerrillas in Escambray where he met Morgan who seemed to be fighting there strictly for the money. Trujillo supposedly offered Morgan and Gutiérrez Menoyo $1 million for starting a rebellion in the Escambray Mountains that would then be supported by coastal landings by Cuban exiles and the Dominican "legion." Inasmuch as there was bad blood between the DR factions and Castro, Morgan and his Spanish friend appeared to the Dominicans to be perfectly plausible traitors, and the American mercenary actually collected $500,000 as a down payment.

  What Trujillo did not know was that Morgan and Gutiérrez Menoyo had informed Castro of the conspiracy, which allowed the Cubans to tape radio traffic between the two comandantes and the Dominican capital. It is entirely possible that the two men were playing a double or triple game, depending on the most favorable outcome, but on August 12 they radioed Ciudad Trujillo on Castro's instructions that "rebel guerrillas" had taken the port of Trinidad and were now awaiting reinforcements. Castro and his bodyguards sat inside a mango grove off the airfield listening to the radio exchanges all night, then they watched a Dominican plane land munitions and depart, and finally came out from behind a mango tree to capture ten Cubans disembarking from a second Dominican plane at dawn on August 13. It was his thirty-third birthday treat. The area was surrounded by several Rebel Army battalions, but Fidel proudly relived the guerrilla days by personally capturing the pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Soto, who had flown Batista to exile on January 1. It is strange that Trujillo had fallen into the Castro trap, considering that only four days earlier the Cuban security forces had rounded up around a thousand ex-Batista soldiers and others with Dominican connections, but then logic was never a prevailing wind in the Caribbean. As for Morgan, he was shot two years later for being involved in a "counterrevolutionary" conspiracy, and Gutiérrez Menoyo was captured in 1961, after landing clandestinely from a CIA boat from Florida. He was still in prison in 1986, despite entreaties by Spain's socialist government.

  For Fidel the Trinidad incident was a welcome and exhilarating distraction from the rigors of managing a revolution, living behind a microphone, and juggling all his political balls. His temperament required constant movement and change, and he succeeded reasonably often in pleasing himself. In Havana he had the choice of working at either of his offices at INRA (he disliked the presidential palace and never set foot at the nearby official quarters of the prime minister), at the hotel penthouse suite, at the seaside house in Cojímar, at Celia Sánchez's apartment o
n Eleventh Street, or at another house set aside for him next to the Chaplin theater in Miramar. He also had his secret military command post in the Vedado residential district. Though Castro commuted continually among all these places, he was ever restless. Occasionally, he turned up at the Cerro stadium in the evening to pitch a few balls at the Sugar Kings' batters; or he would appear at Carmelo's terrace café in Vedado, across the street from Alicia Alonso's ballet school, so that Fidel could eat ice cream and chat with the patrons; or he would drop in at a foreign embassy reception. One night, late in March, after a midnight steak dinner in the kitchen of the Habana Libre Hotel (the Hilton's new name), he took Herbert Matthews and me to a suburban beach in the small hours to have Cokes and show us the resorts the revolution had built for the people. Afterward, we chatted in the hotel cafeteria until midmorning, Fidel being the only one who was not sleepy. Sometimes, he spent several days at a military camp, usually in Oriente, chatting with the troops, reading, and writing. Caught by three days and nights of rain in one such camp, he avidly played dominoes and chess for hours on end, strangely showing no impatience. His torso bare, he did chin-ups, shot baskets, or played with his German Shepherd, Guardián. Celia Sánchez was usually along on these trips, but Castro seemed to enjoy the military camaraderie with his friends and bodyguards: his physician, René Vallejo, his chief bodyguard, Jesús Yañez Pelletier (the Santiago jailer who had saved his life), until he was fired for improper behavior, his friend Nuñez Jiménez, and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara if they happened to be around. Fidelito visited his father at the Cojímar house, but he was a boarder at school and their contacts were not very frequent. During the spring of 1959, Fidelito was in an automobile accident near Matanzas, perforating his spleen, and it took hours for Castro to be located and brought to the hospital.

  Always looking for the new and the unusual, Fidel Castro discovered and invaded the Bay of Pigs two years before the Americans thought of it. Moreover, when the CIA decided to surprise him in the great southern swamp at that time, they had no idea that Fidel knew the Ciénaga de Zapata like the back of his hand, making it even easier for him to win the battle. It was one of those coincidences of history. The Ciénaga de Zapata is an immense, virtually uninhabited marshland stretching far inland along the southern coasts of Havana and Matanzas provinces—the domain of quicksand, charcoal men, crocodiles, and mosquitoes. Probably because it was the only geographic challenge left for him in Cuba after conquering the Sierra Maestra—and assuredly because it was even poorer than the Sierra—Castro became fascinated with the Ciénaga, and in March 1959, he began visiting the area regularly. At least twice, he nearly lost his life in the immensity of the treacherous swamp.

  The Ciénaga was a classic example of Castro's enthusiastic, sweeping, generous, and more often than not impractical approaches to social-economic development projects. His idea was that great drainage works would turn the 480,000 acres of western Ciénaga into an immense rice granary, that the destitute charcoal men's families would prosper through rice cultivation and the expansion of tourism, and that canals, roads, and resorts should be built at once to make it all possible. More than a quarter-century later, however, no huge rice plantations followed Castro's original experimental station, tourism has remained marginal, though crocodiles and sea cows have been saved. The usual plague of insufficient resources, know-how, and follow-up have diluted the revolution's most ambitious plans.

  On one of Fidel's first visits to the swamp, the vessel taking him, Celia Sánchez, and Nuñez Jiménez and his wife down a canal suddenly went down, and only the agile Commander in Chief managed to jump to a bank. When his wet companions joined him, they found Castro relaxing, reading a copy of Giovanni Papini's The Remote Past he happened to be carrying in his pocket. The next few days brought greater dangers. First, the pilot of Castro's helicopter, Air Force Commander in Chief Major Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, told Fidel he lacked sufficient fuel for the planned tour of the Ciénaga. He left Castro, Nuñez Jiménez, and Pedro Miret on Playa Girón, one of the landing beaches for the future Bay of Pigs invasion, to pick up gasoline at a sugar mill in the north, and he was to return within a few hours. The three men spent the afternoon in gun practice on the beach, but Díaz Lanz did not return, and they had to sleep in a fisherman's shack. In the morning, Castro and his companions walked ten or more miles to a military post in order to telephone the sugar mill—and learned that the helicopter had never made it. After summoning search aircraft from Havana, Castro climbed into a single-engine light plane with a pilot, and took off in driving rain to look for Díaz Lanz; returning an hour later, he reported having spotted the crashed chopper with no sign of survivors. Meanwhile, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, and other top rebel commanders arrived aboard Fidel's personal plane, Sierra Maestra, from Havana, followed by two helicopters. Fidel took off in one of the helicopters, with the storm still raging, and four light planes, Raúl in one, went after him in a search pattern. While Fidel's helicopter landed near the crashed craft, the light plane with Raúl vanished in the rain clouds. Díaz Lanz was found late that day at the far end of the swamp where he had reached help, but Raúl was still missing. The following morning, Raúl's plane was located pancaked in the mud near the coast. Raúl and two pilots were lost in the marshland, but were rescued by a search party and placed aboard a navy flying boat on the beach. On the way to Havana, the Catalina's landing gear collapsed, and the pilot made a successful crash landing at the airfield.

  The Ciénaga's pitfalls and adventures did not discourage Fidel. The marshland had become his pet project, and he kept referring to it rhapsodically in his speeches. "We have rediscovered the Bay of Pigs, broad and deep," he said in December in a speech the CIA must have missed, "and we have one more bay, the one of Pigs. Cuba is a country that rediscovers a bay!" On Christmas Eve Castro and Nuñez Jiménez drove from Havana to the Laguna del Tesoro resort in the center of the Ciénaga, then flew by helicopter to the charcoal men's village of Soplillar, joining local families at a dinner of roast pig and revolutionary songs. A contemporary photograph shows a smiling Fidel, his rifle in his left hand, looking down at a table surrounded by children and holding a machine gun on a tripod, an ammunition belt, bottles of wines and rum, glasses, and candy. After Christmas he had a small aluminum house-and-office structure erected at the Laguna del Tesoro: for a time, it was Castro's favorite hideaway and a place to receive special guests.

  In Havana, in a rhythm of point and counterpoint, the Castro revolution and its enemies, foreign and domestic, were turning increasingly confrontational. In June 1959, Castro felt powerful enough to force the resignation of Foreign Minister Roberto Agramonte, a pro-American politician of the old school, replacing him with Raúl Roa, the vociferously revolutionary ambassador to the Organization of American States who only two years earlier had bitterly denounced the Soviet intervention in Hungary in a series of articles. But Roa had joined the Fidelista camp. Four other "moderate" ministers were also dismissed, and Castro now prepared to remove President Urrutia. The basic issue on which the internal battle had focused was communism: The charges from the moderates that communism was taking over the revolution, and the response from the Castro camp that anticommunism was the principal instrument of the "counterrevolution," mainly forged in Washington. This was exactly two months after Castro had proclaimed in New York, "I have said in a clear and definitive fashion that we are not Communists. . . . The doors are open to private investments that contribute to the industrial development of Cuba. . . . It is absolutely impossible for us to make progress if we do not understand each other with the United States. "

  By June, however, not even Castro and Ambassador Bonsal seemed to understand each other. Following the signing of the new agrarian law, Bonsal had sent a note to the Cuban government, pointing to the problems it posed for American investors in Cuba, and the next day, June 12, the ambassador was invited to visit Castro in Cojímar. It was their first formal meeting since Bonsal's get-acquainted call on the prime minister
in March despite Bonsal's repeated requests. Bonsal has written that Castro was "cordial" and replied with "an emphatic affirmative" to the ambassador's question if American interests still had a role in the development of revolutionary Cuba. According to Bonsal, Castro also denied in press comments that "my approach to him [was] . . . a proconsular attitude." In a speech in December 1961, however, Castro had a different recollection of his overall relations with Bonsal: "From the first moment, shocks began over criteria and viewpoints, and these meetings became so intolerable that . . . he kept asking for an interview for three months until, in the end, there was no way of not granting it, for the most elementary protocol norms. Why? Because this gentleman's statements were simply intolerable . . ." Twelve years later Bonsal's comment in his book was that "[it] is far from a unique example of the manner in which the Maximum Leader's flexible memory permits him statements contrary to the truth of the event he is recalling." All this was regrettable, principally because Castro did not seem to realize that Bonsal was virtually putting his own career on the line in arguing in Washington for maintaining a dialogue with Cuba.