Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  The Angolan operation proved that Cuba and the Soviet Union could coordinate overseas military undertakings smoothly in Africa—and presumably elsewhere in the Third World—through rapid deployments of Cuban personnel with small arms and simultaneous (or prepositioned) deliveries of heavy Soviet arms. It is nonsense, however, to suggest that the Cubans are the "Gurkhas of the Soviet empire" (as American administrations have charged), and that their troops were ordered into Angola by the Russians. While in Angola, and later in Ethiopia, Cuban and Soviet interests have obviously coincided, it is not plausible that Moscow even attempted to "order" Cubans there. It would not work practically, and, above all, there is ample evidence that it was all Fidel's idea in the first place.

  There was no reason to doubt Castro's veracity when he told Barbara Walters in a television interview in 1977 that "you should not think that the Soviets were capable of asking Cuba to send a single man to Angola. . . . That is totally alien to Soviet relations with Cuba and to Soviet behavior. A decision of that nature could exclusively be taken by our party and our government on our own initiative at the request of the Angolan government. . . . The Soviets absolutely did not ask us. They never said a single word in that sense. It was exclusively a Cuban decision." He added: "We decided to send the first military unit to Angola to fight against South African troops. That is the reason why we made the decision. If we had not made that effort, it is most likely that South Africa would have taken over Angola. "

  Castro's denial that Moscow had pushed him into Angola is corroborated by Arkady Shevchenko, a senior Soviet diplomat who defected to the United States in 1978. Shevchenko wrote in his memoirs that when he asked Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov sometime in 1976, "How did we persuade the Cubans to provide their contingent?" Kuznetsov "laughed." Shevchenko added that "after acknowledging that Castro might be playing his own game in sending about 20,000 troops to Angola, Kuznetsov told me that the idea for the large-scale military operation had originated in Havana, not Moscow. It was startling information. As I later discovered, it was also a virtual secret in the Soviet capital. "

  When I raised the question of Angola in a conversation with Castro in January 1984, he said that "the Angolans asked us for help, and we sent them help, with great effort and great sacrifice. . . . Angola was invaded by South Afrida [which] has the moral condemnation of the entire world. . . . Therefore, we could never have done anything more than just to help Angola against an external invasion from South Africa. . . . In the instances in which we have provided help, outside of Latin America, it was to the countries that have been attacked. It is not the case of actions against governments there, regardless of what the governments are. We helped the people of the Portuguese colonies as everybody was helping them everywhere, and when the United Nations helped them. We fight against South Africa when the United Nations condemns South Africa for its aggression in Angola; we helped Ethiopia when it was the target of an external invasion aimed at disintegrating the country." Castro also makes the point that, as in Nicaragua, the Cubans provide extensive medical, educational, and technical assistance to Angola along with military help. It is a unique formula, accepted by the Angolans, Ethiopians, Nicaraguans, and others in the Third World because it comes from a Third World country.

  Just as Cuba was becoming engaged in Angola, the Ford administration decided that the time might have come to improve relations with Fidel Castro. The idea came from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who did not think that the emerging rivalry in Angola would prevent reaching some understanding with Cuba after nearly fifteen years of broken relations and unremitting mutual hostility. Kissinger had succeeded in negotiating an overture to China (and a Nixon trip to Peking) in the midst of the Vietnam War, and he reasoned that it should be possible to establish a dialogue with Castro. The Soviet-American détente was in full bloom, which loomed as another favorable factor in approaching the Cubans. Besides, Kissinger had valid reasons to think that Castro would be interested. What he could not predict was the ultimate degree of Cuban involvement in Angola.

  Before any action was taken, the State Department undertook a series of confidential conversations with Cuban diplomats at the United Nations to assess Havana's reactions to possible talks, and obtained encouraging replies. Castro was known to be flexible on certain aspects of relations with the United States when it suited him—he allowed the resumption of emigration to the mainland that meant the departure of 250,000 Cubans between 1965 and 1973, and worked out an antihijacking "understanding" with Washington in 1973. Now Kissinger wanted to know how much further the Cuban leader might go. In a speech in March 1975, he pointedly said there was "no virtue in perpetual antagonism" with Cuba. In May he approved a "secret advance probe" policy through which Castro was informed that the United States was considering lifting sanctions against Cuba selectively and would suspend RB-71 spy-plane overflights over the island during preliminary contacts.

  On July 29 the United States joined a majority of OAS members at a conference in San José, Costa Rica, to abolish the collective embargo on economic and political ties with the Cubans. This followed fairly detailed secret conversations conducted with Cuban emissaries, who had step-by-step personal instructions from Castro. The American negotiator was Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs William D. Rogers, a highly respected international law practitioner, whose cloak-and-dagger meetings with the Cubans ranged from the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan to coffee shops at New York's La Guardia Airport to National Airport in Washington. The most promising aspect of this effort was that both sides agreed in principle that there should be no preconditions to actual negotiations, everything being negotiable. Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, the Cuban emissary, advised Rogers that Castro did not insist that the United States end the economic embargo before negotiations began, a very major change in his stand. Rogers told the Cubans that the fate of the Guantánamo naval base was negotiable as well.

  When on August 9 Castro returned to Southern Airways the $2 million ransom the Cuban government had collected three years earlier for a hijacked plane, the administration read this as a positive signal. Ten days later, the State Department announced that American firms based in foreign countries would be allowed to do business with Cuba for the first time in twelve years. This measure had been under consideration for some time, but now it was meant as a firm diplomatic gesture toward Castro. Late in September, Rogers announced that the United States was prepared "to improve our relations with Cuba" and "to enter into a dialogue." But then the whole effort went off the track. In Angola the Cuban military presence assumed large proportions, eliciting public criticism by Kissinger. In Havana Castro chose that particular period to sponsor a "Puerto Rican Solidarity Conference," urging Puerto Rican independence as "a matter of principle," knowing perfectly well that it was an issue calculated to provoke United States anger. At the United Nations, Cuban Ambassador Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada tied it all together in an October speech declaring that "Cuban solidarity with Puerto Rico is nonnegotiable" and "it is Cuba's duty to give effective support to MPLA in Angola. "

  Late in November, Rogers and Sánchez-Parodi had their last secret meeting. The diplomatic enterprise had collapsed and the traditional hostility returned. The American side claims the Cubans decided to break off the preliminary negotiations without providing a clear explanation; the suspicion is that Castro felt it was impossible to enter into full-fledged negotiations with Washington while the war in Angola was raging. The Cubans say that it was the Americans who severed the contacts out of anger over the Puerto Rican Solidarity episode in Havana, but they do not explain why Castro had so blatantly reopened this extremely controversial issue if indeed he was serious about talks with the United States. Fidel frequently chooses not to explain his actions even to his closest associates, but late in 1985 he told an American visitor—without providing any explanation for the breakdown—that the Kissinger diplomatic effort ten years earlier had come the nearest to a real breakthrough in
the whole history of postrevolutionary relations between the United States and Cuba.

  The first great milestone in Fidel Castro's revolution were the victory in 1959 and the creation of the new Communist party in 1965 as the ruling political body in Cuba. The next milestone was the "institutionalization of the Revolution," as Castro called it, through the promulgation of a new Cuban constitution on February 24, 1976. Over the past seventeen years, the "Fundamental Law," drafted immediately by the first revolutionary government, and literally thousands of laws and regulations formed the juridical framework of the Cuban state, though no doubt ever existed as to where actual power reposed.

  Nevertheless, laws had to be refined, revised, and codified, and, as much as anything else, full legitimacy had to be granted to the socialist character of Cuba and its Communist objectives. Consequently, in October 1974, Blas Roca, secretary general of the old Communist party and a member of the Politburo of the new party, was named chairman of a commission charged with the task of drafting the new constitution. The draft was published six months later, then it was submitted for discussion to millions of Cubans in party and military organizations, labor unions, and youth and women's groups. Clearly, no basic changes resulted from these discussions, which Castro regarded as "direct democracy," but—quite surprising to the regime—people wanted that democracy to be even more direct.

  An innovation in the constitutional draft was the creation of a type of local self-government called "Popular Power" (no such governmental structure exists in other Communist countries) capped by a National Assembly with legislative functions described as the "supreme organ of state power." A profound division developed, however, over the method of selecting deputies to the National Assembly. Some advocated direct elections and some favored choice by municipal Popular Power assemblies. In the first instance, voters would at least potentially have a voice in the formulation of main national policies, and the decision-making process would have to be made reasonably visible to the public. In the second instance, membership in the National Assembly could be determined through political manipulation on the local level with candidates nominated from the municipal assemblies or by party and government officials. Inasmuch as the draft also provided for National Assembly deputies "to explain the policy of the state and periodically render account to [the electors]," direct elections could have been disastrous for the central government. So bitter was the internal dispute over this point that the constitution, on which a popular referendum was held on February 15, 1976, failed to spell out the method of election. Only after 97. 7 percent of the voters had approved the charter, did the Central Preparatory Commission, headed by Fidel Castro, insert the provision that "the National Assembly. . . is composed of deputies elected by the Municipal Assemblies." This was the end of the first and last major attempt to democratize Cuban Marxism.

  The constitutional referendum was preceded in December 1975 by the first Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, chaired by Castro and attended by Mikhail Suslov, the chief Soviet Communist ideologue and one of the most powerful members of the Politburo. Castro's report to the Congress was a 248-page document (in book form) chronicling the history of Cuba, the Fidelista revolutionary movement, its transformation into socialism, the first ten years of the Communist party, the achievements of the revolution, and the Cuban struggle against "imperialism" and in support of "liberation movements." Although Cuban troops were fighting in Angola even as Castro addressed the Congress, his report made no mention of it; he simply alluded to "the recent constitution of the independent republic of Angola, under the direction of the MPLA, in the midst of strong and heroic struggle against imperialism." The Angolan war was not yet a public event as far as Cuban opinion was concerned.

  The constitution itself defined Cuba as a "socialist state of workers and peasants and all other manual and intellectual workers," and the Communist party was "the highest leading force of the society and of the state, which organizes and guides the common effort toward the goals of the construction of socialism and the progress toward a Communist society." First, it hailed José Martí, who "led us to the people's revolutionary victory," then Fidel Castro, under whose leadership the "triumphant revolution" was to be carried forward.

  Thus enshrined in the constitutional text, Castro was in effect named Leader for Life as a law; the corollary was that it would be unconstitutional (and not just "counterrevolutionary") to challenge him. Pursuant to constitutional provisions, the National Assembly then elected a thirty-one-member Council of State with Fidel Castro as president and Raúl Castro as first vice-president. As president of the council, Castro became "the Head of State and Head of Government." Total power was therefore legally vested in him as President of Cuba and chairman of the Council of Ministers as well as first secretary of the Communist party and military Commander in Chief.

  There was no specific succession procedure, but Raúl was the first vice-president of both the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, the second secretary of the Communist party (no other Communist party in the world has such a post), and defense minister; the rank of General of the Army was also created for him. Succession was thus automatically resolved, and Fidel remarked once in absolute seriousness, "The creation of the institutions has assured the continuity of the Revolution" after his death. He added straightfacedly that he was not really needed anymore, explaining over the years that Raúl was his successor (automatically) because he had the leadership qualities, not because he was his brother. The faithful Dorticós was demoted from the presidency of Cuba to a ministerial post (he later committed suicide).

  The 1976 constitution and the Cuban Communist party's First Congress established the permanent character of the Cuban revolutionary state, ruling out any basic structural or ideological changes in the future—barring cataclysms. As time went on, normal societal requirements would be reflected, but the existing structure or philosophy of the state would never be affected. In this sense, the future of Cuba was set in granite. By 1986, after two more quinquennial Communist party congresses, everything remained the same, with Fidel Castro the only and final authority and arbiter of every decision taken in Cuba. The National Assembly held its two annual sessions as prescribed by the constitution, but each session lasted only two or three days.

  The decade between 1976 and 1986, the year when Fidel Castro celebrated his sixtieth birthday and the twenty-seventh anniversary of his revolution, was devoted to immense activity in foreign policy and to continually frustrated efforts to energize and organize the Cuban economy and improve the quality of life of the island's ten million citizens after basic needs of health and education had been met equitably. Internationally, Castro scored more successes than defeats, remaining as defiant as ever and gaining a considerable degree of world acceptability and respectability. In fact, his only defeats since the 1970s, when Allende was overthrown in Chile, were the electoral ouster of his friend Prime Minister Michael Manley in Jamaica, and the American invasion of Grenada, where Castro had had great hopes of expanding Cuban influence in the eastern Caribbean.

  Grenada was a bitter blow to Castro because his combat platoons and armed workers there hardly resisted the American invasion and were quickly defeated. Castro demoted his military commander and his ambassador in Angola to lowly occupations. At the Havana airport, when the bodies of dead Cubans arrived from Grenada, Fidel stood alone for a long moment of meditation, his shoulders hunched.

  With the United States, there were gains and losses. Negotiations with the Carter administration led to the establishment of diplomatic "interests sections" by the Cubans in Washington and by the Americans in Havana in 1977. These "sections," euphemisms for embassies in the absence of actual diplomatic relations, provided instant channels of communication between the two governments. The Carter and Reagan administrations kept the chief of the Cuban interests section at arms' length, but Castro made a point of giving quasi-ambassadorial treatment to the senior American diplomat in Havana, inviting him to
palace receptions. When he was informed in 1985 that a new chief of the American interests section had been appointed, he showed great curiosity, asking visiting Americans and diplomats what sort of person the new Americano was. Talks with the United States in 1978 led to an agreement that allowed exiles on the mainland to visit their families in Cuba. Tens of thousands took advantage of this agreement (it was suspended in 1985 when Castro became annoyed with the Reagan administration over the establishment of the antiregime Radio Martí operated by the Voice of America). Political negotiations with the Carter administration, personally orchestrated by Castro, fizzled out, and in 1980 the exodus of over 120,000 Cubans to Florida in small boats from the port of Mariel put an end to the diplomatic contacts. Castro encouraged their departure out of anger over an unguarded remark by President Carter that the United States awaited Cuban political refugees with "open arms. "

  Castro's great moment in the international sun came when he was elected chairman of the Nonaligned Movement for 1979–1982, assuming the formal Third World leadership to which he had so long aspired. He hosted the Nonaligned Movement's summit conference in Havana in September 1979, at which ninety-two heads of state or their representatives were present—from the Communist octogenarian Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia to the deeply religious Islamic president of Pakistan, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India—and he succeeded at all times in keeping the spotlight on himself. Events were going his way everywhere. In March of 1979, a pro-Cuban regime was established on the tiny island of Grenada in the eastern Caribbean by his friend Maurice Bishop, a leftist lawyer and politician of vast personal appeal. In July the Sandinista Liberation Front rebels ousted the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua; Castro knew Carlos Fonseca, the founder of the Sandinista movement who was killed in 1966, well and he provided considerable assistance to the rebels after forcing them to unite in a common front. Now Cuba had revolutionary allies in Central America and on the outer fringes of the Caribbean, just a hop away from strategic Venezuela.