Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Fidel Castro had no way of knowing about the fiasco of this planned diversion, but another deception almost literally exploded in his face a few minutes after six o'clock on the morning of Saturday, April 15. This was the sight of two B-26 light bombers with his air force's FAR insignia rocketing from low altitude the runway at Ciudad Libertad. Here the former Camp Columbia army camp had been transformed into a school, but a military landing strip was still operational. It was less than a half-mile from Castro's command post. Then the planes came back for bombing and strafing runs, hitting houses in the densely inhabited neighborhood around Ciudad Libertad. Within minutes, Castro was informed that air-force bases at San Antonio de los Baños, his principal base, near Havana, and at Santiago in Oriente had been attacked simultaneously by two B-26s each. Castro's first thought was that the aerial attacks signified the start of the invasion, but there was no follow-up, and a few hours elapsed before it became clear what had happened.

  The air strike at the three Cuban bases was designed to destroy Castro's aviation to assure full control of the air on invasion two days later, but the CIA believed it could perpetuate the deception that the B-26s belonged to the FAR, and that their pilots were defecting to the United States after destroying other aircraft on the ground. The planes had actually flown from Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua, and they were part of the CIA's exile brigade, but the agency thought that there were political and propaganda advantages in making the world believe that Castro's pilots were defecting; Castro obviously knew within seconds that there were no such defections. The strike was as ill-conceived as everything else in the invasion: Whereas sixteen B-26s were supposed to have flown the mission, Kennedy had the number cut in half the day before (he was uneasy about the whole proposition, and this was a compromise). Out of the eight bombers in the sortie, only six participated in the attacks (one being shot down by teenage militiamen firing Czech-made quadruple-barrel antiaircraft guns at San Antonio) and two flew directly to Florida, running out of fuel. The others returned to Nicaragua. Finally, the political deception collapsed when news photographs of a B-26 that had landed in Miami were presented that night to the Political Committee of the U. N. General Assembly meeting in an emergency session in New York at Cuba's request. They showed that this particular B-26 had a solid-metal nose whereas the B-26s Castro had inherited from Batista had Plexiglas noses, a detail the CIA had forgotten but which the Cubans immediately called to the Political Committee's attention.

  Castro's tiny air force lost five planes on the ground in the raids, including two B-26s, an AT-6 propeller trainer, a DC-3 transport, and one T-33 jet trainer—leaving it with four British-made Sea Fury light attack bombers, one B-26, and three T-33s as the only operational aircraft. As Fidel remarked later, he had eight planes and only seven pilots, but the CIA could not be sure just what the Cubans could still do in the air. And it understood even less Castro's special talent for turning seeming defeats into triumphs. Apart from the fact that the Saturday attacks warned him of the real imminence of an invasion—all the military units went on high alert and the seven pilots took turns sitting inside cockpits or sleeping on cots under aircraft wings—Fidel was handed a great political victory. Seven persons were killed and fifty-two wounded as a result of the raid on Havana, and he turned the funeral into a stirring act of patriotic and nationalist mourning and revolutionary defiance. A quarter of a century later, Castro was still emotional and indignant about the attack, telling a foreign visitor that "one of those who were dying there, a wounded man, was bleeding away, and he wrote my name with his blood on a wall. . . . It reflected the attitude of the people: A young militiaman who is dying, and his protest was to write a name with his blood. "

  In his funeral oration at Colón cemetery on Sunday, April 16, Castro compared the air raid to Pearl Harbor, except, he said, that it was "twice as treacherous and a thousand times more cowardly." He proclaimed that "the attack of yesterday was the prelude to the aggression of the mercenaries" paid by the United States, and that the American government could be called "liars" for the deception it practiced by pretending that the attacking pilots were defectors. He reminded the audience of soldiers and militia men and women that the previous year the Eisenhower administration had also initially lied about the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union, and went on to compare the "admirable" Soviet achievement of putting man into space with the American achievement of "bombing the installation of a country that has no air force." His voice rising to a roaring climax, Fidel Castro then issued his ideological indictment: "Because what the imperialists cannot forgive us . . . is that we have made a socialist revolution under the noses of the United States . . . and that we shall defend with these rifles this socialist revolution!. . ."

  This was the first time Castro had publicly described the Cuban revolution as a "socialist revolution," marking another watershed in its history. But, again, he left it unclear as to when and how he had concluded that time was ripe for socialism in Cuba—again interpreting history to suit his needs at that particular moment. In a long discussion of ideology in January 1984, Castro told me that even though he already considered himself a Marxist-Leninist, "not at the time of Moncada nor at the triumph of the Revolution did we consider the intention of the development of a socialist revolution in Cuba as an immediate question. . . . I don't want to say that I didn't dream, that I wasn't convinced that in the long run the type of revolution that should be made in our country was socialism, but this was not a question that could be considered an immediate objective at that stage, thinking of the realities of our country, the level of political culture in our country, the level of preparation of our people, the enormous objective difficulties that we would have encountered if we tried to push ahead with this type of revolution. "

  If that was his judgment, the question arises why the CIA air raids in April 1961 suddenly made Cuba ready for socialism. In interviews in 1985 with Frei Betto, the Brazilian Dominican friar, Castro explained that "faced with an invasion organized by the Yankees, our nation is already struggling for socialism. . . . If since 1956 [the nation] is fighting for the constitution, for the overthrow of Batista, for an advanced social program, but not yet a socialist one, at this moment it is fighting for socialism. And this has great symbolism because tens of thousands of men were disposed to face what may come. . . . I proclaimed the socialist character of the Revolution before the battles of Girón . . . ."

  Castro and other Cuban leaders have said on many occasions that he had to unveil the revolution's socialism on April 16 because men had the right to know for what they would be dying in the new inevitable confrontation. This would imply, however, that socialism was being created, in effect, behind the backs of most of the population—which was true—and it would be an admission that Castro had been misleading Cubans, especially when he fulminated against the "lies about communism." And 1961 was the year when Castro was busy quietly organizing the fusion of his revolutionary movement with the Communists. There is a school of thought propounding that it was American pressure, culminating in the Bay of Pigs, that pushed Castro into openly espousing socialism (or communism) before he was really committed to it. But such top leaders as Armando Hart, a member of the party's Political Bureau, and Blas Roca, former secretary-general of the "old" Communist party, told me in separate conversations in mid-1985 that Castro had all along planned to proclaim the socialist revolution in his May Day speech. In this case, the proclamation came two weeks ahead of schedule. Under the circumstances, Castro's course was absolutely logical: The patriotic passion aroused by the air raids created the perfect conditions to make the new official ideology fully acceptable to a nation on the threshhold of the battle for its survival. As Fidel always said, Martí and Marx are inseparable in the Cuban revolution, and he told the irate cemetery crowd that Cubans would defend this revolution "of the humble, by the humble, and for the humble to the last drop of blood."

  And even as Castro spoke in Havana on Sunday, April 16, John F.
Kennedy gave the final authorization for the invasion in a telephone call from the Virginia estate of Glen Ora to the CIA headquarters in Washington. But he simultaneously signed the invasion's death warrant when he forbade air strikes by Cuban exiles' B-26s against the remainder of Castro's aviation in support of the landings on D-Day. The President feared that such missions, which would have to be flown from Nicaragua or Florida, would publicly compromise the United States in the eyes of the world. Cubans, he told the CIA, could fly combat missions the moment they secured a field on Cuban territory. The invasion might have failed even if Kennedy had allowed the D-Day strikes: Without them it did not have a prayer of success because Fidel had a secret weapon and quite a few surprises for his foes.

  The secret weapon and the other surprises were produced by Fidel Castro, the master at the game of letting his enemies trap themselves in defeat, within five hours or so of the first landing of the exiles' invading force on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. The men of Brigade 2506 (so named after the serial number of its first volunteer to die during training in Guatemala) began coming ashore first on Playa Larga ("Red Beach") deep inside the bay and then on Playa Girón ("Blue Beach") at its eastern entrance about 1: 15 A. M. of Monday, April 17, from landing craft launched from the ships that had brought them from Puerto Cabezas. The force of approximately fifteen hundred men was under the command of José Pérez "Pepe" San Román, a young career officer who was trained in the United States, fought in the Batista army against Castro, then turned against the dictator toward the end of the war. As the Havana regime kept emphasizing later, the Brigade included nearly two-hundred ex-Batista officers, soldiers, and officials, sons of rich or middle-class families, and over one hundred of what it contemptuously called "lumpen." But the Brigade was well trained and equipped, and Castro took the landings with the greatest seriousness when word reached him just before 2: 30 A. M.

  Militia patrols had spotted the invaders immediately and began the first fire exchanges, but it took messengers in jeeps almost an hour to reach the town of Jagüey Grande to the north where the nearest telephone was located. From there, reports on the landings were phoned to the "Punto Uno" command post in Havana and instantly relayed to Fidel who was spending the night at Celia Sánchez's Eleventh Street apartment, less than ten minutes away. Castro's instinctive reaction was that the Bay of Pigs was the principal invasion area, and he proceeded at once to unveil his strategic surprises: on the land and in the air—where his secret weapon awaited action.

  The first telephone call Castro made was to his trusted friend Captain José Ramón, "Gallego" Fernández at his commander's quarters at the army cadets' school in Managua, just south of Havana, to pass on the fragmentary information he had received, and to order him to the Bay of Pigs. Castro told him to pick up on the way, in Matanzas, the elite Militia Officers' School Battalion headquartered there—870 men—and assume operational command in the whole battlefield region; the other unit immediately available to Fernández was Militia Battalion 339 from Cienfuegos, which had detachments throughout the great swamp. At that stage, Castro had no idea of the size or composition of the invading army, but his political judgment was that he had to prevent at all costs the consolidation of a beachhead large enough to allow the exiles to set up a provisional government and request international recognition. As it happened, this was exactly the centerpiece of the CIA's master plan. While Fernández was racing south in his green Toyota jeep, Castro was ordering artillery units from Managua and Havana to move urgently to the battle zone and having Soviet-built T-34 tanks placed on flatbed trucks to be transported there as well. He was careful, however, not to denude Havana of its rebel army and militia troops: he could not yet rule out landings on the north coast.

  Now operating from "Punto Uno," Castro made his next telephone call to the air force base at San Antonio de los Baños where the exiles' B-26s had attacked on Saturday. Poised on the runway were two Sea Furys, two B-26s, and three T-33 jet trainers. And the T-33s were Fedil's secret weapon in the context of his very imaginative overall aerial strategy. He had decided that the rocket-equipped Sea Furys would concentrate on attacking the eight-vessel invasion fleet to sink as many as quickly as possible while the three T-33s (one was destroyed on Saturday) were to neutralize enemy aviation. CIA and Pentagon planners had assumed that Castro's small air force would be destroyed on the ground, and it had never occurred to them that whatever planes were left would be used against the ships. The vessels therefore had no antiaircraft weapons. As to the jet trainers, the Americans never suspected that Castro had them armed with two .50-caliber machine guns each. With this armament and a jet's maneuverability and speed, the T-33s were vastly superior to the lumbering B-26s that began at first daylight flying exhausting round-trip combat missions between Nicaragua and the Bay of Pigs. In this fashion, the little jets played a key role in Castro's victory, depriving the brigade of air support, and allowing the Sea Furies to go unchallenged after the ships. Testifying in May before a presidential inquiry board, the Air Chief of Staff, General Thomas White, remarked, "Well, I really believe that the Cuban air force had a whale of an effect on the bad outcome. . . . I was surprised to find that [the T-33s] were armed." He acknowledged that the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not consider the T-33s to be "combat aircraft." National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote in a formal statement to General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the inquiry board, that "one startling omission. . . is the failure of any of the President's advisers to warn of the danger of the T-33s. "

  Castro made a point of personally urging his pilots to find and destroy the ships, impatient over every minute elapsing. He knew the pilots from earlier visits to the base, and he wanted to impress on them how vital it was to deprive the invaders of the ships still carrying weapons, ammunition, food, and stores; this was consistent with his goal of isolating the Brigade on the beachhead and then smashing it. His greatest concern was that the exiles might succeed in establishing positions on the high ground in the Zapata swamps beyond the beachhead and controlling the three paved highways linking the Bay of Pigs with firm land in the north and east. If they achieved it and continued to be supplied from the sea, it might have become impossible to dislodge them. Castro correctly guessed the enemy plan, and acted accordingly.

  At 4: 30 A. M., Fidel called the air base and demanded to talk to Captain Enrique Carreras, the senior pilot, who had been sitting strapped inside the cockpit of his single-seat Sea Fury. Carreras raced to the phone to hear Castro tell him, "chico, you must sink those ships for me! . . ." At the first light, minutes before 6: 00 A. M., Carreras took off in his Sea Fury armed with rockets and four 20mm cannon, followed by another Sea Fury and a B-26. Reaching the Bay of Pigs, Carreras saw landing craft moving toward the beaches, and a large freighter approaching Playa Larga. He missed on the first pass, but on the second pass his rockets hit the freighter, which was the Houston carrying the Brigade's Fifth Battalion and its equipment, and seconds later the second Sea Fury scored, too. At 6: 30 A. M., the Houston went aground five miles south of Playa Larga, and the battalion could never land to join the fray. Barbara J, a landing craft infantry (LCI) serving as a CIA command vessel, was damaged by Sea Fury machine gun fire, began to take water, and fled for the open sea. Carreras returned to San Antonio to refuel and rearm, and he was back over the bay at 9: 30 A. M., this time hitting and sinking the freighter Rio Escondido, which carried ten days' supply of ammunition for the Brigade and essential communications gear. At that juncture, other invasion ships steamed out of the bay, leaving some 1, 350 Brigade men stranded ashore. Not even Castro understood it yet, but the battle of the Bay of Pigs was won by the Sea Furys eight hours after the first landings. Captain Carreras was hit in an engine by fire from a Brigade B-26, but he limped home to San Antonio where ground crews rushed to repair the plane. Then the T-33s took to the air to cope with the exiles' B-26s, shooting down four of them during the day. Castro lost two Sea Furys (not Carreras's; twenty-five years later he is still flying,
now as an airline pilot out of Havana) and two B-26s, but strategically it no longer mattered. His aerial secret weapons had accomplished their mission.

  Proceeding south from Matanzas with his militia officers' battalion, Fernández halted in Jovellanos, where he was intercepted by a phone call from Castro, who wanted to check on his progress. Fernández and his battalion reached the Australia sugar mill on the outer perimeter of the Zapata swamps around 8:00 A. M., and now Castro ordered him to take Palpite, a village just three miles north of Playa Larga, one of the two Brigade beachheads. Palpite was some twelve miles from Australia by paved highway, and advancing in buses and trucks under enemy air bombardment, the militia battalion occupied the village by noon while another unit raced a few miles southeast to take the village of Soplillar where there was a landing strip. Fernández was just in time because Brigade units from Playa Larga were trying to reach Palpite and the south-north highway. He was helped by the fact that paratroops earmarked for this mission were dropped too far away to be of any assistance, and soon they were captured by the militias. Another paratroop unit took San Blas to the east of Girón, but it had no strategic importance at that point, even the men came immediately under fire from the Cienfuegos battalion.