Fidel Castro Page 3

  It was a terrible strain on Chibás and the situation really, in his eyes, ruined his political career and his life, extinguishing any hope he had that he could be the voice to lead the righteous to taking over the Right. Castro said of the scandal that “[Chibás] came under terrible pressure; he was accused of lying and slander. So he fell into a terrible depression and shot himself in the stomach.”

  It was the how of Chibás shooting himself that really made a statement though. On Aug. 5, 1951, Chibás was supposed to deliver this “proof” he had of Arango’s wrongdoings on the air. It was what he had promised his listeners, and he was not going to be able to do it. So he decided to try to make a statement with a gunshot instead.

  As what was to be a dramatic apology to his listeners for taking what could only now be considered hearsay and blowing it out of proportion, Chibás was set to take his own life—and do it while he was on the air. Unfortunately for him, but perhaps luckily for his listenership at large, Chibás inadvertently pulled the trigger during the commercial break, and while it looked for a while like he might survive, he died in the hospital 11 days later.

  Castro said, “Chibás’s dramatic death gave great impetus to the party he’d founded, but the fact that there were no more denunciations made it easier for Batista, whom Chibás had constantly denounced, to carry out his coup. Chibás was a popular figure who’d have been able to offer some resistance to the usurper’s coup.”

  Following Eduardo Chibás’s suicide, Castro was instrumental in holding together the Cuban Orthodox party, and used what could have dissolved into chaos and despair as a stepping stone to become the Ortodoxos candidate in the 1952 election.

  But despite having been aligned with Chibás inhiss early political career, something did not sit right for Fidel about Chibás and his loyalty to the cause. And while it would have been impossible to blame Chibás for the later unsuccessful taking down of President Batista via the Moncada attacks, there was something about his association with the group that never seemed to quite sit right with Fidel.

  Regarding the earlier traitorous statement Fidel seemingly made about the man whom he had considered a friend, “We were using a mimeograph machine to print up a clandestine newspaper, a flier, a manifesto, trying to create a clandestine revolutionary publication and also a radio station, using short wave radio … This son of Valero’s informed Batista’s police of—I believe I am correct—the location of the mimeograph machine we were using to print up our little newspaper, El Acusador (The Accuser). That’s where I published our first manifest, which I wrote a year after Chibás’s death, on 16 August 1952, four months after Batista’s military coup.”

  Whatever the cause, Fidel knew even then that the risks of their endeavor might well outweigh the reward, but the risks had to be taken, and with great force and fury, if change was ever going to come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CASTRO VS. BATISTA

  “On my own I came to the conclusion that the capitalist economy was absurd. What I’d already become, before I came into contact with Marxist or Lenin material, was a utopian Communist. A utopian Communist is someone whose ideas don’t have any basis in science or history, but who sees that things are very bad, who sees poverty, injustice, inequality, and insuperable contradiction between society and true development … When people talk about the ‘crisis of overproduction’ and the ‘crisis of unemployment’ and other problems, I gradually came to the conclusion that the system didn’t work.”

  Not only did Castro believe the capitalist system didn’t work, he believed it needed to be abolished, the years and his increasing level of education only supporting what he fundamentally knew inside to be true. Some of the people should not be hoarding all the wealth and resources for themselves, especially when there was no real fairness in how those resources came to be hoarded, except through the fact that the people who controlled the wealth and the power held on to the wealth and the power. All that was going to change in Castro’s Cuba, though it wouldn’t happen with one sweeping overnight change as Castro would have liked. It would take years, cost lives, and even cost Castro years of his life in prison. But we’ll get to all that in a bit.

  Following the death of Chibás, Fidel became the Ortodoxos party candidate for president. Also running in the 1952 election was former president Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar. Batista had ruled over the island country between 1940 and 1944, elected on the populist platform. He instated the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, which, at the time, was progressive, and ruled the country without much chaos at home. The world was at war, after all, and people were focused globally, more than on their own private national interests. After his rule ended in 1944, Batista moved to the United States, and wasn’t heard from again until the early 1950s.

  While Batista was enjoying all the creature comforts of capitalism in the United States, remember that these years, 1944-1952, were incredibly formative for Castro. He already had his ideals, the ones that were already a part of him from a young age. As Castro said, “I think that very early on, in school, at home, I started to see and live through things that were unfair, unjust. I’d been born on a large tract of land in the country, and I knew how that was. I have an indelible memory of what capitalism was in the country. The images of so many poor, hard-working, humble people … hungry, barefoot … especially the men and women who worked for the large American sugar companies … they would come to my father and ask for his help.”

  The knowledge Fidel received outside his high school and college classrooms was more important, more significant to him, than anything he took in from books and lessons. To continue the seed metaphor, the case had cracked, the roots were deep, and the sprout of what this life would be was just about to peek out. “Little by little I began to acquire notions of justice and dignity, certain central values,” he said. “So my character was molded by the hard tests I had to pass, difficulties I had to overcome, conflicts I had to face, decisions I had to make, rebellions … I started to question that society on my own … With no one to help me, really.”

  Well, perhaps as a child, growing up in a right-wing, wealthy, capitalism-benefitting sprawling homestead, there was no one there to help him, except maybe the cook for whom he had read newspapers, the cook whose illiteracy had gained Fidel a wealth of knowledge about the workings of the world. And also his authoritarian father, whose corporal punishments had shown Fidel how authority sometimes abused its place, and the teachers Fidel had encountered who had strengthened this idea for Fidel. “Very early on, all those experiences led me to see the abuses, the injustice, or the simple humiliation of another person as inconceivable wrongs. I began to acquire awareness. I never resigned myself to abuses. I acquired a profound sense of justice, ethics, a sense of equality. All that, in addition to a temperament that was unquestionably rebellious, must have exerted a strong influence on my political and revolutionary vocation.”

  Could it be more well timed that the year that Fidel was ready to begin his political career, to really start moving and shaking with a decision to run for office in the 1952 elections, that Batista decided to come back to Cuba to run for president again? And when he decided he was probably not going to get elected, to take over the country by military coup?

  Yet this is precisely what happened. In the midst of Fidel’s realizations within himself that he needed to take on tyranny with his bare hands, that he needed to be the force that forced out government corruption, this former president came back and not only reclaimed the government by force, but actually suspended the constitution he had put in place 12 years before and revoked the people’s political liberties. He would then aligned himself with wealth in the country, and worked to elevate the richest to more wealth, and worked to further oppress the poor. Could there be a better time for Fidel to begin his mission? His movement to revolution?

  Castro said, “That movement began not with the intention of carrying out a revolution all by ourselves, but rather on the basis of another premise: E
veryone would fight to return to the situation prior to 10 March, and with that to the constitutional and political situation destroyed by the coup.”

  In the months following the coup, the economy stagnated, Batista’s regime became increasingly corrupt and repressive and poisoned Cuba’s commercial interests through exploitative practices involving drug trafficking, prostitution, and just general badness.

  The people were upset. Riots and demonstrations broke out in spite of Batista revoking the people’s rights to demonstrate. Censorship was rampant, and Batista’s anti-communist police tortured and executed nearly 20,000 Cuban citizens. It was a mess.

  Castro said, “I believed everyone would come together to wipe out Batista’s tyranny. It was clear to me that Batista had to be overthrown by arms and that constitutional government had to be restored. To me it was simple: Join hands to fight the traitorous coup of the 10th of March. Until that day, I, who had pretty well-formed idea of what should be done … was using legal means, although they led, on the basis of my ideas, to the idea or the revolutionary seizure of power. The coup destroyed all that. In the new situation … I thought, to return to the starting point.”

  Almost immediately, Fidel and his followers began in earnest to set a plan in motion to overthrow the tyrant and return Cuba back to the people. It was no longer time for talking and playing fair; it was time to take all resources available and begin the revolution. Said Castro of himself and his contingent of dedicated followers, “If we hadn’t studied Marxism … if we hadn’t read Marx’s books on political theory, and if we hadn’t been inspired by Marti, Marx, and Lenin, we couldn’t possibly have conceived the idea of a revolution in Cuba, because with a group of men, none of whom has gone through a military academy, you can’t wage a war against a well-organized, well-armed, well-trained army and win a victory starting practically from scratch. Those ideas were the essential building blocks of the revolution.”

  In a year’s time, Fidel and his men would believe themselves ready to take down the Batista regime. Though, thanks to what Fidel believes to have been some communication leaks within the ranks, they would be more surprised by their “surprise” attack on the Moncada Barracks than their enemies.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PLANNING THE MONCADA BARRACKS ATTACKS

  “I must pause to consider the facts for a moment. The government itself said the attack showed such precision and perfection that it must have been planned by military strategists. Nothing could have been farther from the truth! The plan was drawn up by a group of young men, none of whom had any military experience at all. I will reveal their names, omitting two who are neither dead nor in prison: Abel Santamaría, José Luis Tasende, Renato Guitart Rosell, Pedro Miret, Jesús Montané, and myself. Half of them are dead, and in tribute to their memory I can say that although they were not military experts they had enough patriotism to have given, had we not been at such a great disadvantage, a good beating to that entire lot of generals together, those generals of the 10th of March who are neither soldiers nor patriots. Much more difficult than the planning of the attack was our organizing, training, mobilizing and arming men under this repressive regime with its millions of dollars spent on espionage, bribery and information services. Nevertheless, all this was carried out by those men and many others like them with incredible seriousness, discretion and discipline. Still more praiseworthy is the fact that they gave this task everything they had; ultimately, their very lives.”

  —From his speech HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME, a reconstruction of Fidel Castro’s statements in court after the failed Moncada Barracks attack.

  While Fidel Castro had been involved in political movements since his early college years, he took his first true steps onto the world stage on July 26, 1953, with his attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago, Cuba. The attack failed and many of Castro’s soldiers were killed, but the bold ambush put Castro in a position to broadcast his views and revolutionary ideas from his jail cell.

  Castro made his move soon after Fulgencia Batista’s military coup on March 10, 1953. The political climate was tense, and few groups spoke out openly against Batista’s regime; however, Castro released a manifesto soon after speaking out against the unjust transfer of power. Castro later described the situation. “When did we decide to attack Moncada? When we became convinced that nobody was going to do anything, that there was not going to be any fight against Batista, and that many of the existing groups—in which there were lots and lots of people who were members of several [groups] at the same time—were not prepared, not organized, to carry out the armed struggle that I was hoping for.”

  While the attack may have gone poorly for Castro and his men, the planning for the offensive went much more smoothly. Castro was able to recruit, train, and outfit his army right under the nose of Batista’s regime without giving them any warning before the day of the attack.

  Castro’s soldiers were mostly young members of the Cuban Orthodox Revolutionary Party, which Castro had joined in 1947, and under which he had run for office in 1952, before Batista’s coup.

  The young recruits required training, but it was to be done covertly, so as not to raise the regime’s suspicions. Instead of setting up a training camp somewhere out of the way, Castro explains that the men were trained in Havana, in the open. “Do you know where we trained to learn to shoot rifles? … [A]t firing ranges in Havanah. We disguised some of our compañeros as good upstanding members of the bourgeoisie—businessmen, whatever, depending on what you looked like, your style, your abilities. We’d register them first, for example, in hunting clubs, and they’d invite us to their clubs to practice clay-pigeon shooting.”

  The day before the attack, Castro and his men met at a farm near Santiago to organize and to give final orders for the attack. They disguised the farm so no one would suspect it to be the launch point for their attack, even setting up a fake chicken coop and planting extra trees to hide their cars from being seen from the air. At the farm they also handed out uniforms; they were to be dressed in the same uniforms as Batista’s men, all with the rank of sergeant. They had bought and sewn enough uniforms for everyone, and only their shoes were their own.

  They set off from the farm early the next morning and headed for the Moncada Barracks in Santiago. Fidel lead a group of 160 men and women, mostly members of the Ortodoxos party, while another group went to another army post near Bayamo. Fidel had chosen these targets for his surprise attack so that the group could obtain more weapons before retreating into the mountains, according to Naty Revuelta, an Ortodoxos member who later had a close personal relationship and a daughter with Castro. The timing was chosen to coincide with festivals in the city, which made their movements easier as many visitors and tourists came and went from Santiago. Everything was ready: The plan was to arrive at the barracks early, as they expected the soldiers to be sleeping, perhaps even hungover from the celebrations the night before. Castro explained the plan. “The soldiers were going to be asleep and they’d be pushed out of the barracks dormitories into the rear courtyard … The soldiers were going to be in their underwear because they wouldn’t have had time to get dressed or pick up their weapons.” But the plan was disrupted quickly as a pair of soldiers on patrol spotted Castro’s men and alerted the guard post. A number of other setbacks quickly ended the offensive: Alarms rang out, Castro’s men got lost and mistook their objectives, and everything fell into disorganization and chaos. Castro realized their plan had failed and ordered a retreat.

  In many ways, the attack on the Moncada Barracks was a complete failure for Castro. Many of his men were killed and tortured by their captors, and the popular uprising Castro expected from the people of Santiago never materialized. Still, the attack was eventually considered the “first shot” in the Cuban revolution, and the date became a rallying cry for Castro’s supporters, with Castro taking the name “the 26th of July Movement” for his political movement that later unseated Batista. Castro said later, reflecting on the
attack, “If I were to organize a plan for taking the Moncada Barracks again, I would do it exactly the same way. I wouldn’t change a thing. What failed there was that we lacked sufficient combat experience. Later, we picked it up …” It served as an important step in Castro’s ascent to power, a learning experience that put him in the public eye.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ABSOLVED BY HISTORY

  “Since this trial may, as you said, be the most important trial since we achieved our national sovereignty, what I say here will perhaps be lost in the silence which the dictatorship has tried to impose on me, but posterity will often turn its eyes to what you do here. Remember that today you are judging an accused man, but that you yourselves will be judged not once, but many times, as often as these days are submitted to scrutiny in the future. What I say here will be then repeated many times, not because it comes from my lips, but because the problem of justice is eternal and the people have a deep sense of justice above and beyond the hairsplitting of jurisprudence. The people wield simple but implacable logic, in conflict with all that is absurd and contradictory. Furthermore, if there is in this world a people that utterly abhors favoritism and inequality, it is the Cuban people. To them, justice is symbolized by a maiden with a scale and a sword in her hands. Should she cower before one group and furiously wield that sword against another group, then to the people of Cuba the maiden of justice will seem nothing more than a prostitute brandishing a dagger. My logic is the simple logic of the people. […] I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”