by Tad Szulc
Castro, however, has convinced himself that true culture for the people does exist in Cuba because of the near-miracle of making the whole nation literate, because by 1986, over fifty million copies of books were being printed annually, and because ballet, music, and quality theater and cinema were available to the masses. It does not seem to matter in the context of the revolution that no fresh ideas are germinating in a country ruled by a man endowed with an extraordinary intellect; to Castro this is not a contradiction even in terms of his own place in history. It does not seem to trouble him that between 1968 and 1976, the best Cuban writers of his own generation were blacklisted without explanation by Cuban publishers, and that self-censorship is now a revolutionary institution as well. It may be escapism, but twenty-five years after Castro delivered his "Words to Intellectuals," the most widely read authors are Hemingway (so admired by Fidel) along with Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.
Finally, in its cultural travail, the revolution is responsible for the persecution of homosexuals—among them some of the most talented writers and artists with the freest minds—that reached its apex in the 1960s and 1970s, when hundreds or more were forcibly enrolled (along with common criminals) in the so-called Military Units for the Support of Production (UMAP). These forced-labor units have since been abolished, but there is no explanation of why a man of Fidel's humanistic and intellectual orientation tolerated them in the first place as if to assert the machismo of the fiery fighters of the Sierra Maestra.
To proclaim his revolutionary defiance at home and abroad regardless of the possible consequences of his attitudes was part of Fidel Castro's nature as a permanent guerrillero. Indeed, he loved to taunt his enemies, the "imperialists," as if anxious for another confrontation and another test of his militarized society. In his speech on July 26, 1961, he preached the necessity of always keeping weapons in hand "because the imperialists do not want to forgive us our successes, and the more we become organized, the more they become filled with ire over the conquests of our people." He spoke after awarding the newly created Order of Girón to his guest of honor, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, whom he told, "You can fly twice around the world while I'm delivering my speech. "
Castro's defiance included his willingness to accept the awesome brain drain affecting the Cuban economic structure with the exodus of tens of thousands of middle-class physicians, engineers, managers, and professors. As many as 250,000 Cubans out of a population of 6 million fled in the first three years of the revolution, but Fidel saw them as "parasites" and potential counterrevolutionaries, and he preferred them in the United States. It was a calculated long-range risk to do without a management class he did not trust anyway, and to educate his own revolutioniary elites, and from his viewpoint Castro was undoubtedly right. He has been vindicated now, twenty-five years later, when Cuba has trained enough physicians to assign thousands of them to work throughout the Third World, after achieving at home one of the world's highest ratios of doctors to the population.
Fidel Castro's moment of supreme challenge came on the evening of December 1, 1961, when he informed Cuba and the world that the new united revolutionary political party would have "a Marxist-Leninist program adjusted to the precise objective conditions of our country," that this would no longer be "a secret," and that "today we shall see to it that to be a Communist is a merit." This culminated three years of the revolution, and it crystallized once and for all Castro's political and ideological identity. At the age of thirty-five, Fidel Castro had attained the ultimate definition of his personality in every observable sense: As a man and as a political figure he would not appreciably change in the years and decades to come. Obviously, great maturity and experience came with age, but it was not very different to converse with Fidel in 1985 from what it was after the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
In the conversations in 1961, Fidel offered his special mix of earnestness and good-humored informality when I asked why and how he had become a Marxist. We were sitting in the Riviera Hotel restaurant in Havana, and after I raised the ideological question, he twirled his cigar, and said, "Men evolve politically. You mustn't forget that." Then his eyes twinkled, and Castro added, "You know, Dante once wrote what was essentially a novel, but he insisted on calling it The Divine Comedy. We made a revolution that we first called 'humanist,' but we now call it 'Socialist.' . . . I came to believe in socialism when I discovered that capitalism means the exploitation of man by man, when I saw the cyclical crises of capitalism, when I realized that imperialism was doomed. . . . Now, you should not be surprised that I came to this conclusion. We all read the same books, don't we?"
In December, Castro typically chose to announce the advent of Marxism-Leninism on the Popular University television program, and the format was not a formal speech but a chat about the history of his revolutionary movement, back to his own youth, and badinage with others on the panel. He speculated aloud about how little Lenin and Marx could have done if they lived in the eighteenth century, to make the point that nothing exists in a vacuum, and that the Cuban revolution was made when the necessary conditions developed. Of Marx and Lenin, he said that "one cannot be the intellectual of a class that does not exist or the creator of the doctrine of a revolution that cannot occur." Describing the early phases of his movement, Castro acknowledged that at the time of Moncada "certain proposals were made with the hope of not damaging the scope of the revolutionary movement. . . . If we hadn't drafted this document carefully, and had made it more radical, the revolutionary movement of struggle against Batista would not have acquired the amplitude that made victory possible. "
Rhetorically, he asked himself, "Do I believe absolutely in Marxism? I believe absolutely in Marxism. . . . Did I understand it [in 1953] as I understand it today after ten years of struggle? No, I didn't understand it then as I understand it today. . . . Did I have prejudices concerning communists? Yes. Was I influenced by the propaganda of imperialism and reaction against communism? Yes. . . . Did I think communists were thieves? No, never. . . . I always thought communists were honorable, honest people . . . ." And twenty-five years later, addressing Latin American participants at a Havana conference—and in private conversations—Castro handled the topic in almost identical phrases and formulations. He had become an experienced juggler of politics and ideology, with dozens of balls in the air at the same time, each intended to entice and fascinate a different viewer in the audience. He always felt in control.
In declaring Cuba to be embarking on the Marxist-Leninist road, Castro knew that he was increasing by a vast order of magnitude the risk and likelihood of new United States intervention in one form or another. His announcement hit the Kennedy administration like a bombshell. And even as he explained before the television cameras why Cuba must move toward communism, he was publicly warning that "the entire military science of the Pentagon will smash itself against the reality in which live the people of America." Secretly, he was pondering how best and how fast he could protect Marxist-Leninist Cuba from the Pentagon—with his own resources and those of his new faraway allies. The great crisis was less than a year away, but neither Kennedy in Washington nor Khrushchev in Moscow had yet comprehended where Fidel Castro was pushing them.
And the Soviets may also have had difficulty reconciling Castro's overwhelming need and desire for greater economic and military assistance, especially as a new crisis with America was obviously approaching, with his ruthless treatment of the "old" Communists with close Moscow ties, who had dared to challenge his leadership at home. Fidel had survived and succeeded in the last decade because he never compromised in the attainment of his goals—not at Alegrí de Pío and not at the Bay of Pigs—and he was not prepared to abandon his principles in dealing with local Communists or with the Russians. This power battle was over the issue of "sectarianism" that erupted early in 1962, and Castro dealt with these Communists as if they were the "bandits" of Escambray.
After Castro had sealed his alliance with the "old"
Communists in the secret Cojímar meetings early in 1959, and decided to merge the 26th of July Movement, the Students' Revolutionary Directorate (DR) and the Communists' Popular Socialist Party into a single political organization, it became necessary to hammer it all together. As the first step, the three groups were joined in the ORI (Integrated Revolutionary Organizations) in preparation for the emergence of the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC) with Castro as the secretary general. The "new" Communist party would be the final step. In accordance with Castro's respect for the "old" Communists' supposed political skills, Aníbal Escalante, an old-line leader, was given the task of organizing the ORI. It seemed like a fine idea until Castro indignantly realized that Escalante and his associates were packing the whole organization with their own party people on every level, and, in effect, carrying out a classical Communist takeover from the inside. It was a quiet attempt at a coup d'état, which would have placed the revolution in the hands of orthodox Communists, and presumably turned Fidel into a magnificent figurehead.
Castro himself has not suggested publicly that this astonishing notion had been elaborated in Moscow, but there are valid reasons not to exclude this possibility. The Russians still regarded Fidel as a loose cannon, and may have wished to exercise some form of control over a regime whose upkeep was becoming increasingly onerous. It is also possible that at least a faction among the "old" Communists may have concluded that they should run Castro, and not the other way around, and that they might find allies among ideologically sympathetic rebel officers who would agree to elevate him to the rank of an exalted statesman of the revolution, but with reduced powers of governance. The only certainty is that Aníbal Escalante could not have invented it all by himself; too many other Communist old-timers were involved. How these Communists came to believe that they could capture Fidel Castro is still a mystery. Their conspiracy was elegantly called "sectarianism"—in revolutionary Cuba it was a superiority complex that many 26th of July Movement officers as well as "old" Communists tended to display in relation to each other and everybody else—but to Castro is was pure and simple counterrevolution.
With his superb sense of timing, Castro waited for the right moment to strike. Thus he said nothing publicly when the composition of the twenty-five-man National Directorate of ORI was announced—evidently with his approval—on March 9, 1962, with him, Raúl Castro, and Che Guevara leading the list as chiefs of the 26th of July Movement. But of the twenty-five members, ten were "old" Communists (who played no serious role in the war), and among the thirteen men from Fidel's Movement, at least three had strong Communist leanings. The Students' Directorate, which fought against Batista in Escambray, received only two seats. Theoretically, then, as Fidel knew, the orthodox Communist faction could assemble a leadership in the ORI leadership. Four days later, Castro exploded in unprecedented public fury when at anniversary commemorations at the university of the Directorate's 1957 attack on the Batista palace, a Communist party orator omitted the invocation to God in the text of the "testament" of the student leader José Antonio Echevarría. He shouted that the memory of a dead companion was being censored and falsified, and it was entirely in character for Castro to do so as a matter of principle.
Nevertheless, those who knew him well thought that Fidel was sending the Communists a message. If he was, they missed it altogether. Castro waited two more weeks, and on March 26 (his favorite day of the month in his private superstitions), he staged one of his great dramatic television productions. In his television appearance earlier in March, Castro had announced a depressingly sharp program of food rationing (agriculture under the revolution was not keeping up with consumer demand and needs), but now he focused the national attention on the "sectarian" plot. Aware that political dramas must be personalized in order not to be abstract for the masses, Castro singled out Aníbal Escalante for some of the most withering accusations in the formidable arsenal of sarcastic invective. He informed Cubans that Escalante had created "a counterrevolutionary monstrosity" in ORI, that he had built up his own "machine" to take over the party and the government, and that Fidelista veterans from the Sierra Maestra were losing troop commands to Communist officers (who may have been part of the Escalante affair). Escalante was suffocating Cuba, Castro said, to the point that when "a cat had four kittens, one had to go to the ORI office to resolve the matter" of the kittens' fate.
However, Fidel had the political sagacity not to declare war on all the "old" Communists, having made his point with the public political execution of Escalante. Several other party leaders were purged along with Escalante, including the cultural chief, Edith García Buchaca, and her husband Joaquín Ordoqui, an executive bureau member of the PSP. Others in the party leadership realized that they could not confront Castro, and they were delighted to let Aníbal Escalante be the principal sacrificial lamb. (His brother César Escalante, joined in the rites and remained in the leadership.) Once more, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez rose to the occasion to mediate between his friend Fidel and his old comrades, negotiating from a position of power toward the party inasmuch as Castro had named him president of INRA only the month before. With the farm crisis raging, Castro preferred to concentrate on other matters and resigned from the INRA presidency, leaving agricultural problems to Rodríguez and Che Guevara. Others fell instantly into line. The PSP's secretary general, Blas Roca, wrote in the party newspaper Hoy that Castro was "the best and the most efficient Marxist-Leninist in our country" and Marxism-Leninism's "insuperable guide and chief," remarkable praise for a man who had formally embraced this doctrine only five months earlier. A quarter-century later, Escalante's "sectarianism" remains a sore topic with the "old" Communists; both Blas Roca and Fabio Grobart uncomfortably called it "simple measles" in separate interviews in 1985.
The Soviets chose to stay publicly out of this internal affray, preferring to let nature take its course and not assuming positions prematurely. That Castro was angry at them for unspecified reasons was made obvious when he refused to receive Soviet Ambassador Kudryatsev for a farewell audience (apparently he had requested his removal, and had said to friends that Kudryatsev "tires no more than Bonsal did") in a typical display of displeasure. Still, Moscow chose to maintain the friendship with Havana, and it is probable that the mounting schism with China played a role in the decision to swallow Castro's manifestations of independence. Thus Aleksandr Alexsiev, the young "journalist" who drank the vodka toast with Fidel in 1959, was named as the new ambassador to Havana to the Cubans' great satisfaction. Alexsiev accompanied Mikoyan in 1960 for the signing of the first trade treaty, and now he came from his ambassadorship in Argentina. Pravda wrote an editorial on April 11 praising Castro and denouncing the unfortunate Escalante, and Deputy Foreign Trade Minister I. I. Kuzmin turned up in Havana to conclude a new trade treaty for 1962. It increased the two-way trade (in reality, Soviet deliveries to Cuba) from $540 million to $750 million.
A trade accord with China, though on a much smaller scale, had been signed a month earlier, and the Peking official journals hailed Castro for opposing "sectarianism." Khrushchev obviously did not think the Cubans would go over to the Chinese side, but even the thought of evenhandedness toward China was troublesome to him in the midst of the rising Soviet battle for the control of the world Communist movement as well as the sympathies of the increasingly important Third World. Castro had his way, and now he was in the best possible position to extract Soviet guarantees of military protection for Cuba against the United States. In a June speech, he was happy to describe Khrushchev as "that great and dearly beloved friend of Cuba." Again, Fidel was demonstrating that strategy and tactics must never be confused.
And foremost on his mind was the threat from the United States. There were no plans afoot by the Kennedy administration, as far as is known, to launch an American invasion of Cuba, although Castro (and possibly Khrushchev) believed that a direct attack was in the offing. This was a misperception that produced dire results, but it is just as true th
at Castro could not afford to rule out an invasion, and that he had to be ready for one. His subsequent behavior and accords with the Soviets are consistent with his overall precautionary stance, even though it remains unclear a generation later how exactly Castro and Khrushchev arrived at the notion of deploying Soviet nuclear weapons on the island. Nor is it comprehensible how the two of them could have expected that the United States would fail to discover the presence of these weapons—and stand still for it.
Castro, however, was absolutely right in assuming that the Kennedy administration was attempting by all means short of invasion to remove him from power, and his intelligence services were providing him with growing evidence of such subversive activities. Under the circumstances, Castro had to conclude that an invasion could well be the next logical move against him. What he was witnessing, starting early in 1962, was the launching of "Operation Mongoose," authorized by the President the previous November "to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime. "
General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency specialist, was named to head Mongoose, and the operational plan he presented at the White House in mid-January 1962 called for a six-phase effort by the entire United States government to undermine Castro from inside. It was designed to culminate—ironically, as it turned out—in October, "with an open revolt and overthrow of the communist regime." An invasion might indeed have come around that time inasmuch as the Lansdale plan included planning for "use of U. S. military force to support the Cuban popular movement." Such a movement was most unlikely to materialize, but Castro certainly had reason to be very much worried about the Americans.
As it happened, Operation Mongoose never came close to attaining any of its anti-Cuban goals (although four hundred CIA officers in Washington and Miami were attached full time to this enterprise). The best it could do was to run minor intelligence-infiltration missions, carry out minimal sabotage, and, as far as the CIA was concerned, revive plans to assasinate Castro. The agency had attempted an assassination plot through Mafia figures in 1960 and, acting on its own, dusted off those plans when Mongoose was created. Richard Helms, at the time the CIA's deputy director for plans (covert operations), testified before a Senate committee in 1975 that he had assumed that the "intense" pressure exercised by the administration to oust Castro had given the agency authority to kill him, albeit assassination was never formally ordered. In this sense, Helms used almost identical reasoning, from his standpoint, as Castro did in his conversation with me in speculating that plots for his demise may have stemmed from overzealous interpretation of broad policy instructions. Thus Helms said: "I believe it was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done in this connection, that was within what was expected. "