Fidel Castro Read online

  A bitter custody battle ensued. There was no way Mirta was handing over her son; there was no way Fidel was going to let her have him. From prison, he wrote, “About the boy, I remain unchanged in my point of view at the first opportunity—immediately after the filing—will press the court to force his return to Cuba to attend school, consistent with my thinking. Such a deep abyss separates me from these people [the Diaz-Balants] that I resist the thought of my son sleeping for one night under the same roof that shelters my most despicable enemies and receiving on his innocent cheeks the kisses of those miserable Judases.”

  Fidel fought furiously, relying on the only ammunition he had in his arsenal: his words, delivered by his faithful followers, including his older sister from his father’s first marriage. He wrote, “I am enough of a gentleman to avoid bitter contest if my kidnapped son is returned to me. I have decided to carry on this bitter legal action wherever it leads if they persist in the foolish fantasy that I would allow them to educate the boy to live as a parasite, without a homeland, without honor, and without principles.”

  Mirta was finally forced to give up the fight. In 1955, after the divorce was final, she married Emilio Núñez Blanco, and left Cuba and her son behind to live with her new husband in Madrid, Spain. She did eventually return to Cuba while her son was young, before ultimately moving to the U.S.

  Fidel had had a reputation of being something of a womanizer, which had affected his marriage when a letter to his mistress ended up with his wife. So the family situation was the kindling for the divorce, but learning there was another woman, and that there could have been several more, is a reason many biographers have attributed to Mirta taking Fidelito out of Cuba.

  In any case, once divorced, and then released from prison, however, he was free to do what he wanted. He ended up fathering several illegitimate children, all born to different mothers, the year after his release; all the women were fierce supporters of Castro and his ideals.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TRAINING AN ARMY IN MEXICO

  “We had neither money nor weapons. We had to find a way to overthrow the tyranny and make a revolution in Cuba. And success crowned our venture. I’m not going to tell you that it worked purely on its own merits—luck played an important part.”

  Once released from prison in 1955, Fidel and Raul returned to Havana; however, it was very clear very early on that there was no way they were going to be able to stage a proper revolution under Batista’s ever-watchful eye. They needed another plan. Even while still in prison they decided they would ultimately go to Mexico, as it was a country that had long been friendly to leftist exiles, as well as being a place other Cubans had gone before to stage prior uprisings.

  Raul headed to Mexico first, leaving Fidel to get organized in Havana. One of the last things he did was to write a letter to the newspapers, telling them that he was “leaving Cuba because all doors of peaceful struggle have been closed to me. Six weeks after being released from prison, I am convinced more than ever of the dictatorship’s intention, masked in many ways, to remain in power for 20 years, ruling as now by the use of terror and crime and ignoring the patience of the Cuban people, which has its limits. As a follower of Martí, I believe the hour has come to take our rights and not beg for them, to fight instead of pleading for them.”

  In Mexico, Raul became acquainted with Che Guevera, a young Argentine doctor. Fidel finally arrived in Mexico, and on being introduced to Che, knew the South American would play a large part in what they were trying to accomplish.

  The objective in Mexico was to organize, arm, and then ambush. Rigorous training defined days spent in the Sierra Maestra. Castro said, “In Mexico … we trained many compañeros. I had to do the organizational work and find and acquire weapons, and I was training the men on the firing ranges.” He also made trips to the states to secure funds from supporters there, and to acquire more weapons.

  Strategies were formed, relying on Castro’s vast knowledge, having studied intensely other wars in Cuba. Castro recalled, “[The wars] in Cuba helped us in formulating a different strategy, because both Maceo and Maximo Gomez had cavalry, a very mobile army, and they had virtual freedom of movement … Our main combats, however, in the circumstances of our war, were planned, with cover, trenches prepared, all sorts of other essential measures taken.”

  There was no man among them who had been formerly trained in the military, so it all came down to studying and understanding what had worked in histories of past battles, and lots and lots of practice. “There in Mexico we practiced our marksmanship at a range near Mexico City. It belonged to an old confederate of Pancho Villa’s, and he’d leaded it to us. When we disembarked, we had 55 rifles with telescopic sights. Our practice with those rifles consisted of shooting sheep that were turned loose 200 yards out in the firing range—without support for the rifle, free-handed … Our men were very good shots. They’d send a man out 200 yards, and put a bottle down on the ground beside him … we’d fire hundreds of rounds … Those practices gave us complete confidence in what we could do with one of those weapons.”

  Another effect of the time spent in Mexico preparing to overthrow Batista was that the men began to grow beards, which became, as Castro explained, “a kind of badge of identity.” This was only an interesting side-effect, though; the men weren’t growing beards for any kind of “branding” reason. “We didn’t have any razor blades, or straight razors.” Not to mention that it was simply easier to grow a beard than to have to deal with shaving every day. Castro said, “A beard has a practical advantage: you don’t have to shave every day. If you multiply the 15 minutes you spend shaving every day by the number of days in a year, you’ll see that you devoted almost 5,500 minutes to shaving. An eight-hour day of work consists of 480 minutes, so if you don’t shave, you gain about ten days that you can devote to work, to reading, to sport, or whatever you like … The only disadvantage is that grey hair show first in your beard.”

  Castro and his compañeros were not left completely alone in while in Mexico. Batista was keeping tabs on them, and was especially interest in a trip Fidel made to the U.S. to secure funding. He ending up collecting about $100,000. Upon his return, some of Batista’s agents failed to assassinate him. The agents additionally bribed Mexican authorities to seize the rebels and their camp, but they were soon released.

  “Batista had influence among the Secret Police; he’d bought them off, so they supported him, and he had plans to kidnap us in Mexico. We were forced to take counter-measures, so one afternoon, just at nightfall, when we were moving from one house to another, we were exposed, you see, [and] several Federales … saw us moving and decided to arrest us. They were pretty sharp, I must say.”

  What ensued was an arrest during which Castro was captured and, along with others, was brought in for questioning. In speaking with the Federales, Castro gleaned that one of his own people had let a paper slip, which sparked suspicion when it landed in the hands of the police, who followed procedure to follow the trail. “We were captured [in Mexico]. I was taken prisoner almost by chance. A little piece of paper here and another one there that the Mexican police discovered in the pockets of some [of our men] whom they’d arrested … They initially thought we were smugglers or something, because we made ourselves look suspicious because of certain measures we took against being kidnapped and killed by Batista’s agents [in Mexico]. Our movements look strange to them [the Federales] … Thank goodness the police hadn’t thought of investigating that telephone number more closely, because that would have been the end. But they still confiscated quite a few weapons by following other clues. You could see, though, that as they got to know us, they began to have more respect for us.”

  Another interesting development while Castro and his guerrillas trained in the Sierra Maestra was a general strike against Batista by a militant anti-Batista group formed by the student movement; most notable was the Revolutionary Directorate (DR), founded by the Federation of University Students (FEU)
. The president, Jose Antonio Echevarria, headed to Mexico to seek Castro’s support, but Castro did not come out in favor of the strike. He was too focused on his group’s efforts to support the strike, which ultimately failed. The fact of the matter was that sometimes these things happened. “You can make mistakes, commit errors, or do things as perfectly as possible, and there are still things you can’t foresee,” Castro said.

  Castro and crew set sail from Veracruz on November 25, 1956, armed with rifles, machine guns, pistols, and hand-held anti-tank guns. And a strategy was ready to put in motion, a strategy that was years in the making. Recalls Castro: “Even before I went to prison, I had the plan for the war in the Sierra Maestra, the whole plan. We developed a warfare of movement … attack and fall back. Surprise. Attack, and attack again. And a great deal of psychological warfare … But for us, guerrilla warfare was the detonator of another process whose objective was the revolutionary takeover of power. And with a culminating point: a revolutionary general strike and a general uprising of the populace.”

  They were on their way.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CASTRO AND CHE

  “[Che] distinguished himself in so many ways, through so many fine qualities … As a man, as an extraordinary human being. He was also a person of great culture, a person of great intelligence. And with military qualities as well. Che was a doctor who became a soldier without ceasing for a single minute to be a doctor.”

  Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara made for an extraordinary team because their personalities clicked. They were contrasting and also complementary. It has been said that Che was Fidel’s “brain,” but in so many ways, he was the “heart.” To best understand the relationship between Fidel and Che, it’s important to have some background on Che.

  Born in Rosario, Argentina, on June 14, 1928, making him just under two years younger than Fidel, Ernesto Guevara was like Castro in that he came from a large, wealthy family. The oldest of five children, Ernesto was of Basque and Irish descent. His leftist ideals were learned from his parents, who did not lean as far left as he did, but who believed in education and doing right by humanity. From a very early age, he understood the plight of the poor and was compelled to do something. He was also an athlete, despite his sometimes crippling asthma, and an intellectual, and, like Fidel, he read constantly. It is said his parents’ home contained more than 3,000 books. He was passionate about poetry, and also a chess champion.

  As a student, he had traveled through South America on a motorcycle with a friend, and the experience set the course for the rest of his life. The poverty he witnessed in his travels sparked a desire in him to devote himself to helping those who could not help themselves. And his passion for helping others was contagious. Castro said of Che, “He had a gift for people. He was one of those people that everyone immediately cares about—it was his naturalness, his simplicity, his sense of comradeship and all his virtues.”

  Once he finished medical school, he became devoted to undoing what he perceived as the damage that capitalism had wrought in Latin America, especially in the overthrow of Guatemala’s left-wing government in a CIA-backed coup in 1954. The situation frustrated Guevara; he felt that President Jacob Arbenz should have held on, had the people hold on, even if it necessitated violence.

  In the fall of 1954, Guevara, a lifelong asthmatic who also had terrible allergies of his own, began working in the allergy division of the Mexico City General Hospital. The following June, Ñico López, a Cuban exile he knew from his work in Guatemala, introduced him to Raul Castro. With his amazing passion for overturning imperialism, corruption, exploitation, when he encountered the Castro brothers and their band of revolutionaries in the Mexican jungle in the mid-1950s, he was ready to join the cause. He essentially saw the United States as a kind of “puppet-master” that manipulated others into oppressing their own people in the interest of profits, and he saw Batista as one of the most insidious of the U.S. “puppets.”

  As Castro recalls, “So Raul went to Mexico, and there, through our compañeros who were already there, he met Che. Of course, Che wasn’t Che yet; he was Ernesto Guevara, but since the Argentines are always saying !che hombre!, ‘che’ this and ‘che’ that, the Cubans started calling him El Che, and it stuck.”

  Because of their similar backgrounds and ideals, Fidel and Che bonded quickly and easily. They were not countrymen, but they shared a political connection that transcended nationalism. As Castro explains, “[Che] was already a Marxist. Although he wasn’t a member of any party at that time, he was, at that point, a Marxist by conviction … I was a utopian Marxist. That explains to a degree my bonding with Che. The congruence of so many ideas was perhaps one of the things that aided that bonding.”

  Che didn’t need a lot of convincing to join the revolution. As Castro related, “He knew that in our movement there were even some petit-bourgeois members and a bit of everything. But he saw that we were going to fight a revolution of national liberation, an anti-imperialist revolution; he didn’t yet see a socialist revolution, but that was no obstacle—he joined right up, he immediately signed on.”

  Che became the medic for the troops, and over the course of the training, began rising in the ranks. When it was time to board the Granma and head back to Cuba, Che was already easily second-in-command. In his training, the athletic Che excelled. In learning theory, he was apt. But the thing that perhaps impressed Fidel the most about Che was his fierce determination:

  “Near Mexico City, there’s a volcano, Popocatepetl, and every weekend, Che would try to climb Popocatepetl … He’d make a tremendous effort but he’d never make it to the top. The asthma prevented him. The next week, he’d try again to climb Popo, as he called it, but he wouldn’t make it. He never made it to the top … But he kept trying to climb the mountain, and he’d have spent his entire life trying to climb Popocatepetl. He made a heroic effort, although he never managed to reach that summit. So there you see his strength of character. That gives you some idea of his spiritual strength, his constancy.”

  As a commander, Che was mostly respected by his troops, although there was resentment among some that he was not Cuban. Fidel brushed this off. For him, what mattered about Che was not the nation of his birth, but his qualities. “Here, in our war, he was the medic, but because of his bravery, his qualities, we gave him the command of a column, and he distinguished himself in so many ways, through so many fine qualities.”

  But he wasn’t perfect, by any means. While Fidel found him brave, he also thought Che pushed too far, and had to reel him in often from taking too many risks with his men. Che was also righteous and outspoken, and didn’t necessarily “put a cork in it” at the times it was necessary to simply keep quiet. Castro recalls a time when they were under arrest in Mexico City and Che almost got them shut down. “When did he create a problem for us? When they interrogated him and asked him, ‘Are you a communist?’ ‘Yes I’m a communist,’ he answered. And the newspapers over there in Mexico started reporting that were were a communist organization, that we were conspiring to ‘liquidate democracy on the continent [South America]’ and I don’t know what else.”

  While it bothered some Cubans that this Argentine was leading them to take back Cuba, it never mattered to Che that he was fighting a battle for another country. For him, again, the fight wasn’t about nationalism; it was about the fight. It was about working toward a cause that was not just a benefit for Cuba, but a possible benefit for the world. Though Castro recalls he did have at least one thing to say about it. “He said just one thing to me: ‘The only thing I ask is that when the Revolution triumphs in Cuba, you not forbid me, for reasons of state, from going to Argentina to make a revolution there.”

  Che would not lead a revolution in Argentina, however. After helping Castro and company take back Cuba, he stayed with them several more years, taking on various jobs in the new government, including in land and bank reform and literacy. He eventually left Cuba to pursue other interests, i
ncluding the cause of the Congo, as well as the stubborn fixation he had with Bolivia, which Castro felt he was being impatient about and tried to distract him with other causes until the time was right. It’s hard to know if Che and his men would still have been executed in Bolivia in 1967 had Che listened to Castro and taken a step back.

  Castro said of Che, “Che was a man who fought to the last bullet, and who had no fear of death.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE GRANMA LANDING

  “We didn’t know much about sailing, and when we loaded eighty-two men, plus weapons, munitions, food and extra fuel into the Granma, it slowed the boat down tremendously, so it took seven days for the trip instead of five, and there [were] only a few inches of fuel left in the tanks. It took us two days longer than planned. And we were attacked three days after we landed.”

  Fully trained and ready to take down Batista, the only thing missing was a way to get the soldiers from Mexico to Cuba. They knew they needed a boat, and tried to purchase a military vessel, but to no avail. What they ended up getting instead was an old, broken-down, 43-foot yacht meant designed to accommodate 12 passengers but maybe comfortably hold 20. They had four times that many to transport through the Gulf of Mexico.

  Quietly, on November 25, 1956, the crew set out on their 1,200-mile trek to save Cuba. The time was right, according to the plan, but it wasn’t the best time to cross the Gulf of Mexico. It was hurricane season, and while the crew, which consisted of Fidel, Raul, Che, and most of the others (about 50 had to be left behind because there wasn’t room on the boat), were lucky in that they didn’t get hit with any hurricanes, the seas were still stormy.