Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  That Guevara had left Cuba was confirmed by Castro as early as April 20, 1965, when he tersely told foreign newsmen that "Comandante Guevara is where he is most useful to the Revolution." Guevara had returned on March 15, from his latest tour of Africa and Asia, and was met at the airport by Castro and President Dorticós, but he was not seen again, and journalists began inquiring about him. It is not known exactly when Che left Cuba or when he wrote his farewell letter to Fidel. However, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of this missive with its assertion that "I feel that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban Revolution in its territory, and I bid farewell to you and the compañeros, your people who are already mine"—and that "my only shortcoming of some gravity was not to have trusted in you more from the first moments in the Sierra Maestra and not to have understood with sufficient celerity your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary." Not only is the style pure Guevara, but it was also in character for him to mention, in the revolutionary spirit of self-criticism, his Sierra "shortcoming." This was his doubt, which he had expressed in a wartime letter, about Castro's honesty in dealings with exiled anti-Batista politicians late in 1957.

  Simultaneously, Che had written to his parents, who then lived in Buenos Aires, that "once again I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rosinante. . . I return to the road with my lance under my arm." He reminded them that over ten years earlier he had written "another letter of farewell." On leaving Argentina he wrote: "Here goes a soldier of the Americas"—and now "my Marxism has taken deep root and become purified. . . . I believe in armed struggle as the only solution for those people who fight to liberate themselves. . . . Once in a while, remember this small condottiere of the twentieth century." In 1985, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, Che's father, told me in Havana (where he moved after his wife died and he remarried) that he had taken the letter at face value, understanding his son's restlessness. But he said that was all he knew, not having seen Che since 1961. Most probably, Fidel Castro is the only person who knows the full truth.

  Castro knows, for example, why Che chose Bolivia for his new guerrilla enterprise, improbable as the choice was, given the fact that he would fight in terrible mountain and jungle territory where he did not speak the local Indian languages (Andean peasants seldom know Spanish), instead of Salta province in his native Argentina where he had originally hoped to start a revolution. The Bolivian mission was much more suicidal than the Granma landing a decade earlier, but Fidel evidently went along with this idea, at least to the extent of assigning Rebel Army fighters to Che's guerrilla detachment, equipping and financing the expedition, and maintaining regular radio contact with Guevara until the end. Perhaps Castro should have guessed that Che would indeed be betrayed by the Moscow-oriented Bolivian Communist party, which virtually delivered Guevara to the Bolivian Army rangers and their CIA advisers.

  In retrospect, it is understandable that there was really not much left for Che to do in Cuba after the consolidation of the revolution. He was minister of industry, but on fundamental issues of Marxist economic development, he was very much at odds with Castro. In an oversimplified fashion, their differences centered on Che's idealistic belief in moral incentives for the population to produce and Castro's more practical conclusion that material incentives, such as higher wages and bonuses, were more likely to stimulate work. For a time in the early 1960s, Che's view prevailed, but then Fidel in effect overruled him (though in 1986, Castro reinvented moral incentives). None of this, of course, has ever been publicly debated or reported in Cuba, yet Castro provided the best clue to the ideological convulsions of those days in the reply he gave me in 1984 when I asked him what errors the revolution had committed. He was surprisingly candid, during that Havana dawn in his office, about the trajectory of the revolution, and the awesome problems of creating a new society. He was pensive, stroking his beard slowly as he spoke.

  "At the outset of the Revolution," he said, "when we had to assume all the functions of the state and all the functions of the economy . . . we began this task without experts, just ignorant people who did not know what had to be done. . . . Our economic development was sustained development, it had highs and lows, reaching an average of four point seven percent in twenty-five years. It was slow in the first years, when our objective was fundamentally to survive more than to develop, but it was more accelerated in the subsequent years. We passed through different stages. We suffered the consequences of different errors. Let us say that one error we committed was to want to jump stages, wanting to arrive at Communist forms of [wealth] distribution, jumping over the socialist form of distribution—and it is impossible to jump stages. Our own history demonstrates that we wanted to go too far and establish Communist forms of distribution, when the correct course really is to follow socialist distribution forms, in which distribution is made according to the work of the people .. . . The Communist formula is: Each must give according to his capacity and receive according to his needs. The socialist one is: Each must give according to his capacity and receive according to his work. . . . We were marching too rapidly toward Communist formulas when it was really premature. It was a jump, and it created problems. But we rectified it in time. "

  Castro then went on to explain how, in the Eighties, a blend of communism and socialism existed in Cuba, and "many things are distributed in a Communist form." This was his definition of Cuban Marxism-Leninism: "I think that salaries are paid according to the work and the capacity. But education, for example, universal and generalized, is free, and it is a service of the Communist type. The same possibilities of education and the same education are received by the son of an engineer and the son of a worker, the son of a father who works hard, and the son of a father who does not work much. . . . Medical services are received in an egalitarian form by the whole population, that is, a Communist-type service. . . . We start from the concept that according to the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, communism is the final objective, but there is the stage of socialism. This formula is not applied in a chemically pure fashion. . . . In salaries, what is paid a worker is not according to the needs he has. There are workers who have one or two children, and they earn twice what is earned by a worker who has three, four or five children because their contribution through work and their capacity may in a given case be greater. So, this is not Communist distribution. The Communist system would be to pay more to the worker who has seven children than the worker who has one child. . . . In the socialist formula, the worker who has more capacity, even though he has less necessity, is paid more. The one who has less capacity, although he may have more need, is paid less. In a harbor a worker who can load, say, twenty tons in a ship receives more than the worker who can load ten tons. But there was a moment when we paid the same to the worker who carried twenty tons and the one who carried ten or five tons. This was an error. It doesn't really stimulate work. "

  Castro never suggested that Che Guevara might have inspired such errors, but they were "rectified," as he put it, in the mid-1960s. This coincided with Che's gradual withdrawal from economic policy-making, and his growing concentration on contacts with the Third World, evidently in concurrence with Castro. Guevara seemed to enjoy this mission, seeing it through the prism of revolution making, and the contributions the Cubans could offer in this realm. This was the impression I gained spending hours with him—for the last time—in December 1964 in New York when he came to address the United Nations General Assembly. After we appeared together on a television interview program, we chatted for several hours about Cuba and the Third World; the next day Che left for Africa and Communist China in what would be his farewell world tour on behalf of the Cuban revolution.

  This was a time of continuing—as well as additional—tensions between Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union, and the "old" Communists at home. Despite Castro's regal reception in the Soviet Union in May 1963, he went on resenting the Russian "betrayal" of the October missile crisis, and pressing them for more and more economic assi
stance. In fact, he had developed the rationale that inasmuch as Cuba was dealt out of the crisis settlement by Khrushchev and Kennedy, thereby winning no concessions, the Soviets owed his country even more aid than before. It was Fidel's ever-successful way of turning defeat to advantage.

  Nevertheless, a public display of fraternal love was maintained by both sides. In December 1963, Nikolai Podgorny, a powerful member of the Soviet Politburo, came to Cuba for a two-week visit, the highest-ranking Kremlin figure to appear in Havana up till then. On January 12, 1964, Castro flew with Podgorny to Moscow, where he conferred at length with Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev: Ten days later, the Russians signed an agreement with him to purchase the bulk of the Cuban sugar harvest for the next five years with a guaranteed minimum price—above the world market. Then Che Guevara signed an accord on technical assistance, and the two Cuban leaders went home, apparently satisfied with their achievements.

  Two months later, however, Fidel Castro orchestrated the trial of Marcos Rodríguez, the pro-Communist student who in 1957 had betrayed four of his companions in the conspiracy against Batista. They had been murdered by the Batista police in the famous "Humboldt Street Crime," and it developed later that Rodríguez was in effect being protected by key members of the "old" Communist party. It was Faure Chomón Mediavilla, formerly the leader of the Students' Revolutionary Directorate to which the four assassinated youths belonged, who produced the evidence against Rodríguez, a fact rendered especially interesting because he was currently Cuba's ambassador to Moscow. In terms of internal Cuban politics, the Rodríguez trial inevitably revived all the Fidelista resentments against the Communists and the Russians, and Castro chose to let this happen. He may have decided to use the Rodríguez affair as another warning to the "old" Communists not to try to repeat their previous "sectarianism" as the new party was about to be launched; in any event, the trial, held during March 1964, was a Byzantine event, highlighted by an immensely confusing courtroom speech by Castro. He succeeded in clearing the party of actual guilt, but left enough of its officials besmirched; Rodríguez was sentenced to death twice (the second time on appeal, suggested by Fidel) and executed.

  During the summer of 1964, Castro threw out hints—mainly through newspaper interviews—that he was interested in improved relations with the United States, inaugurating a pattern that was to continue for the next twenty years of always leaving the door open to some accommodation with Washington while keeping a reliance on the Soviets for military and economic survival. He always believed in multiple facets in foreign policy, emphasizing or minimizing one or another, depending on changing circumstances. In mid-1964, for example, Fidel was showing new interest in dealing with the United States even though he was simultaneously investing in revolutionary conspiracies around Latin America (though not very successfully), and being the target of harsh pressure by the Johnson administration. American U-2 spy planes were again overflying the island, and the CIA was back in the assassination business with a vengeance.

  (Ramiro Valdés told me in an interview in mid-1985, when he still served as interior minister, that most of the CIA assassination attempts on Castro, perhaps as many as thirty, had occurred during 1964 and 1965. He said the only attempt that nearly succeeded was in 1964 when Fidel stopped, as he often did, for a milkshake at the cafeteria at the Habana Libre Hotel. The CIA had discovered this habit, and had suborned a cafeteria employee to try to slip a cyanide capsule into the milkshake. The next time Castro came to the cafeteria and ordered the milkshake, the employee took the capsule out of the refrigerator, where he had kept it, to put it into the drink. But, Valdés said, "The capsule was frozen and it broke, and the man couldn't slip it into the milkshake. It seems he was very nervous. And, you know, cyanide is lethal poison; it would have instantly killed Fidel. . . . This was the closest it ever came.")

  Castro's overtures to the United States led nowhere, but in October 1964 he was suddenly faced with a new set of partners in Moscow. Just as President Dorticós was visiting Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev was fired by the Central Committee and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the Communist party, Aleksei Kosygin as premier, and Nikolai Podgorny as chief of state. In November Che Guevara flew to Moscow for what turned out to be his final visit as well as the confirmation of his growing suspicions that the Soviet Union no longer stood for real revolution. But for Castro, who had the immediate responsibility for keeping Cuba afloat, the question was whether the Brezhnev leadership would continue Khrushchev's attitude of supporting the Cubans at all costs, and he reasoned correctly that there was no reason for any change.

  While failure to consult his Politburo colleagues adequately during the Cuban missile crisis was one of fifteen formal charges against Khrushchev, and the whole Cuban adventure was one of the real reasons for his removal, Castro remained an extremely valuable ally and client in terms of Soviet strategic interest, and it would have made no sense to penalize him. Fidel remarked once in a private conversation that the supreme irony was that it was Khrushchev's humiliation by Kennedy in Cuba that led to the Soviets' decision to catch up with the United States by embarking on a crash nuclear armament program so that they would never again be defeated thus. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that "the experience of the Caribbean crisis also convinced us that we were right to concentrate on the manufacture of nuclear missiles. . . . When we created missiles which America and the whole world knew could deliver a crushing blow anywhere on the globe—that represented a triumph in the battle . . . in defending the security of our homeland." Thus unwittingly Fidel Castro contributed to a fundamental shift in the superpower nuclear balance.

  Meanwhile, Castro decided to demonstrate his independence by not rushing to Moscow to congratulate Brezhnev on his elevation to power; such hurry befitted Communist satellite leaders in Eastern Europe and Asia but not the proud Cuban revolutionary chief, who had many disagreements with the Russians. In fact, Fidel waited eight years before his next voyage to Moscow. He told me that many years elapsed before Cuban-Soviet relations were restored to the cordiality that preceded the missile crisis. Instead, Raúl Castro was given the mission of conducting high-level contacts at the Kremlin; he saw Brezhnev for the first time on April 2, 1965, and went on visiting Moscow on the average of twice a year. President Dorticós went there four times between 1964 and 1971, while Premier Kosygin visited Havana in 1967 and 1971. But after 1965 permanent contact beteween Cuba and the Soviet Union was established at the level of deputy premiers; Carlos Rafael Rodríguez had had this responsibility for over twenty years, and Deputy Premier Vladimir Novikov replaced Anastas Mikoyan in what became virtually a full-time job of dealing with the Cubans. More recently, Deputy Premier Ivan Arjipov inherited this strategic headache.

  Throughout the 1960s, the underlying issue of contention between the Cubans and the Soviet Union was that of Third World revolutions—apart from the aftermath of the missile crisis, permanent economic-aid problems, and the role of Moscow-influenced "old" Communists in Castro's new Cuban communism. Che Guevara played a crucial intellectual and inspirational role in this area, convinced that the responsibility of a triumphant revolution was to spawn revolutions elsewhere. (Che was too subtle, however, to imitate Trotsky's "permanent revolution" rhetoric.) Guevara and Castro shared this view from the time they first met in Mexico, and both sought to put it into effect as soon as they had seized power.

  To Guevara the concept was ideological, romantic, and mystical—the ultimate ideal embodied in his Bolivian self-sacrifice. To Castro the idea was considerably more practical in that he knew the Cuban revolution would be more secure if it were successfully repeated elsewhere in Latin America: He had coined the Guevara-like phrase that the Andes would be the Sierra Maestra of the Americas. And when he solemnly declared on December 2, 1961, that "I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall remain it until the last day of my life," he was committing himself to the revolutionary propagation of Marxism-Leninism throughout the Third World. In the early 1960s, this wa
s the meaning of Castro's support for the emerging guerrillas in Venezuela (after the failure of his earlier revolutionary expeditions around the Caribbean), and of Che Guevara's advising the leftists in Congo (Brazzaville) and the Frelimo guerrillas of Mozambique.

  None of it, however, pleased the Soviet leadership (neither during Khrushchev's time nor Brezhnev's), which, thinking in cautious superpower terms, preferred the traditional "united front" coalitions of local Communists with the "progressive bourgeoisie" in the Third World rather than unpredictable revolutions. Curiously, the Soviets were applying moderate "Euro-communism" political tactics to the Third World, being careful always not to challenge the United States excessively. Moreover, they were concerned that sudden successful revolutions might be captured by China, the Kremlin's newest archenemy. In the case of Cuba, therefore, the Soviets discouraged revolutionary impulses in the direction of Latin America or Africa; most ironically, Moscow disliked Cuba's "export of revolutions" as much as Washington feared it. They regarded the Cuban promotion of revolutions to be just as "putschist" and "adventurist" on an international scale as Castro's Moncada and Sierra war undertakings in Cuba earlier.

  To show their displeasure, the Russians harassed Castro with long delays in signing annual economic-aid agreements (they were called "trade agreements") and other accords as well as in delivering such vitally needed commodities as petroleum. The Soviets believed this was the way to bring Castro back to his senses if not to his knees—and Fidel responded with gestures of independence, such as the creation of new international mechanisms for encouraging revolutions and his refusal to visit Brezhnev in Moscow. But it was Che Guevara who took it upon himself to deliver a public attack on Soviet behavior. In his last public speech, on February 24, 1965, to the Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization in Algiers, Guevara, in effect, accused Moscow of being as bad as the "imperialists" in the treatment of the struggling new countries.