(IN THE FINEST SENSE)
At Belén they called him “King of the Curve,” his looping breaking ball notorious for making fools of right-handed batters. But on a seasonable Saturday afternoon in late November 1946, Castro’s control eluded him, and Los Comerciales bounded to a four-run lead over El Derecho halfway through the second inning. Officially, there was not much at stake besides bragging rights in this tilt between the law and the business school students at manicured University Stadium. But in the hard-charging world of the University of Havana, bragging rights mattered, and the would-be lawyers liked to think of themselves as kings of the Hill. Castro did not contribute much at the plate that day, going 0–4. He recovered his stuff in the middle innings, but it was too little too late, and Los Comerciales advanced to the Intramural Championship, 5–4. In all, this was a day to forget for a losing pitcher: four strikeouts, seven walks, one put-out, two assists, an error, hitless at bat. It was enough to make an aspiring athlete go into politics.1
In fact, politics may have had something to do with Castro’s performance at University Stadium that day. Baseball was never Castro’s first love. That was soccer and basketball. Arriving at the university in autumn 1945, Castro expected to pick up where he had left off at Belén, excelling at virtually everything he tried his hand at. When stiff competition prevented him from succeeding to his accustomed standard, he committed himself to student government. Even here he did not meet with unqualified success, never winning election to the presidency of the Law School, despite later assertions to the contrary. Still, the very week he got shelled by Los Comerciales, Castro was selected by his peers to speak at ceremonies commemorating eight medical students executed by Spanish authorities on November 27, 1871, during the Ten Years War of Independence. This was to be his national debut, and Castro determined to make the most of it.
Entering the University of Havana the previous autumn, Castro found himself in yet another large and unfamiliar environment. In middle and high school, the kids who generally stood out were athletes, a realm to which Castro was fitted by nature and age to succeed. At the university, student politics was the path to distinction. Student leaders commanded considerable attention and wielded real political power, a legacy of both the autonomy written into the university’s charter and its monopoly on educating the country’s future leaders. With much at stake, university politics did not lend itself to Castro’s act-now, ask-questions-later manner of being in the world, and this nearly got him killed. Over time, he learned to navigate the complex network of allegiances atop University Hill, never shying away from conflict, exactly, but tempering his impulsiveness with growing political sensibility. And, above all, cultivating the right allies.
The purpose of the upcoming commemoration of the murdered medical students was to call attention to government corruption and persuade Cuban citizens to rededicate themselves to the dream of Cuba Libre—a Cuba free and independent of foreign rule. In July 1944, Ramón Grau, the former leader of the 1933 revolutionary government now turned mainstream politician, defeated the handpicked successor of outgoing President Fulgencio Batista in the presidential election. In the run-up to the election, Grau promised to curb the military’s role in Cuban life and raise the standard of living throughout the country. His candidacy succeeded thanks in part to the work of former friends and associates from the anti-Machado coalition of the early 1930s, who seemed to take Grau’s promises at face value.
The Grau who came into office in November 1944 retained few of the good and most of the debilitating traits of the revolutionary figurehead of a decade earlier. Grau had never had much of an appetite for conflict (his reluctance to confront Batista’s treachery in October 1933 changed the course of Cuban history). Elevated to power a second time, Grau proved at once self-interested and aloof, doling out important ministries to the men who had helped him get elected, while turning a blind eye to their mendacity. Showcase in point was Minister of Education José Manuel Alemán, who—with Batista ensconced in Daytona Beach, Florida, and the army looking out for its own good—exercised power throughout the country via the so-called “action groups” spawned by the anti-Machado struggle, now become outright criminal gangs. Batista’s rise and decade-plus monopoly on the use of force had driven these groups underground. With Grau’s blessing, the action groups reemerged in Cuban society like Uzi-bearing rats, littering the capital with mutilated corpses, while raiding the treasury of every penny they could get their hands on. In 1947 alone, this uncivil war claimed the lives of sixty-four people, injuring dozens more.2
“Gangsters exist for political reasons,” Congressman Rolando Masferrer told his colleagues that year. “Almost all political bosses arm their groups and use them for electoral purposes.” It was simply unrealistic, Masferrer observed, “to ask favors of them one day and persecute them the next.”3 The congressman knew whereof he spoke. Founder of one of the most notorious gangs, the Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario (MSR), Masferrer benefited from the quid pro quo as much as anybody. He was not about to let idealistic university students spoil the feeding frenzy.
By 1945, intimidation and the threat of violence hung like a pall over the Escalinata, the grand staircase leading up to the University of Havana and the epicenter of student activism. For over two centuries the nation’s only institute of higher learning, the university exerted outsized influence in Cuban politics and culture. Anybody who aspired to leadership in Cuba went there. Since Julio Antonio Mella and friends first formed the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU) back in 1922, university students had made life difficult for Cuban governments from a favorable perch atop University Hill. It was university students who galvanized the opposition to Machado and propelled the 1933 Revolution. Student divisiveness was partly to blame for the Revolution’s demise.4
In down times, the university presented great opportunity for those with an entrepreneurial bent, as the action groups competed with one another to manipulate and control not only course grades and degrees, but also faculty and administrative appointments, including the campus police. The year 1940 closed with assassinations mounting, with several professors gunned down simply for trying to carry out their jobs. The faculty council, still nominally in charge on the Hill, expelled the alleged perpetrators and disbanded the offending organizations. The violence did not abate. By 1945, the year Castro arrived, the old factions had consolidated into new organizations, including Masferrer’s MSR, which made its predecessors look like weaklings.5
The only thing worse than a police force in the command of a criminal gang is one split between warring factions. As befits a country coming apart at the seams, the second highest-ranking police office in Cuba (the National Police Academy) belonged to a member of MSR’s bitter rival, the Unión Insurreccional Revolucionaria (UIR), which was committed to MSR’s destruction. UIR was founded by Emilio Tro, a veteran of both the Spanish Civil War and World War II (when he fought with the Americans and was awarded a Purple Heart). Like Alemán, Tro was a friend of President Grau. Grau awarded Tro leadership over the Police Academy, his office just down the hall from his nemesis, Mario Salabarría, chief of the Bureau of Police Investigations.
If this alphabet soup of gangs, leaders, and assignments seems confusing, it should. Not much but name differentiated these gangs from one another ideologically (MSR leaned slightly to the left, UIR slightly to the right). They shared common characteristics (entitlement, ruthlessness) and common goals (money, influence). With little to distinguish them, much was at stake. The only thing an aspiring student could not do was go without protection from one or the other. “In those days,” recalled Enrique Ovares, who arrived on the scene a year after Castro, and who led the FEU for three years (1947–49), “everybody went around armed. You carried a pistol not to hurt anybody but to ensure that you yourself were not hurt. I had one, everybody had one. That’s the truth.”6
Castro spent the summer between high school and college playing basketball on an elite team based at the Havana Yacht Club. It was there he met Enrique Ovares. The two hung out together, talking sports and movies. At this stage in their lives, Ovares recalled, neither paid much attention to politics. As an athlete, Castro stood out for “his constancy, tenacity, and dedication.” He never missed a practice, Ovares said. “If told to shoot fifty shots, he shot a hundred.”7 Concentrating on sports, Castro was able to maintain some distance from MSR and company his freshman year.
Alfredo Guevara, a classmate and lifelong friend of Castro’s, remembered running into him for the first time on Plaza Cadenas, a shady oasis just outside the entrance to the Law School, in autumn 1945. Guevara and Castro came from very different backgrounds. Born and raised in Havana, Guevara attended city schools, eventually rising to a leadership in the Instituto Segundo Enseñanza, a network of public secondary schools across the country. A self-described anarcho-syndicalist at the time, Guevara looked disdainfully on the spoiled rich kids from Belén and other private institutions. Learning of Castro’s private school background, Guevara expected the worst. Castro took Guevara by surprise. He was hard to pin down, Guevara said, and seemed to be motivated less by ideology than by a sense of historical inheritance. “Castro drank deeply in the sources of the War of Independence,” which is another way of saying that he knew his history.8
In college, Castro continued to pay more attention to extracurricular activities than to classwork. At the university, students were evaluated not by class participation or fulfillment of regular assignments, but by their performance on final exams. Class was “a waste of time,” Castro told an interviewer. “In that period, I studied very little, by myself with books and notes.” He showed more interest in electives (Cuban and world history, political science, and English and French literature) than in required courses (civil, criminal, administrative, constitutional, and property law, for example). He was famous for pulling off acceptable (occasionally outstanding) grades simply by sitting down with the assigned texts the night before his final exams. This proved effective practically speaking but did not prepare him for the give-and-take of politics. At a time when many young men and women learned to engage the opinions of peers and professors they did not agree with, Castro remained aloof from class discussions. “In those days, I came and went.”9
In March of his freshman year, Castro ran for political office as a class delegate from Legal Anthropology. Candidates were not above campaigning, and a copy survives of Castro’s first political solicitation. At the time, Castro lived at the Hotel Vedado, on the corner of 19th and M Streets, not far from the university. In meticulous penmanship on hotel stationery, he reached out to his fellow students with a few simple lines: “Esteemed friend,” he wrote a classmate, “the Law School elections will be held on the morning of the 18th. I hope you will come out this day to help in the triumph of our slate, for which I would be very grateful. Affectionately, Fidel Castro.”10
Ovares remembered Castro running a disciplined campaign. He was a natural politician, Ovares reported, with “dedication, size, popularity, political ideals; he was eloquent, and he had followers.” Castro won that first election handily, a victory that immediately embroiled him in the MSR-UIR turf war that passed for student politics at the time. As competitive as he was politically ambitious, Castro was simultaneously attracted to and repelled by FEU president Manolo Castro, a member of MSR. On the one hand, Carlos Franqui recalled, Castro aspired to political leadership himself, hence envied Manolo Castro’s success and popularity. On the other hand, Castro was allergic to arbitrary power, refusing to yield to anybody simply for the sake of it. This inevitably brought him into conflict with Manolo Castro, Masferrer, Salabarría, and other MSR enforcers. Castro remembered feeling exposed. “I was totally alone in the university,” he later remarked, “absolutely alone, when, suddenly, in that electoral process, I confronted the mafia that dominated the university.”11
There is no record of how Castro was selected to represent the university at the commemoration of the murdered medical students. But it is hard to imagine that he could have been granted the honor without a nod from Manolo Castro. The last time he delivered a public address was at the Belén award ceremony the previous year, where he parroted his teachers’ words about the inalienable right of private religious schools to adopt whatever curriculum they saw fit. If Manolo Castro expected Castro to hew to a party line this time, he was in for a surprise, as Castro delivered a blistering attack on the political patronage that allowed the likes of Manolo Castro to establish a virtual dictatorship over the university.
The commemoration of the student martyrs began at Colón Cemetery at nine o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, November 27, 1946. It ended twelve hours later in the magnificent Aula Magna (Great Hall) on University Hill. Castro was the last of three speakers to address the crowd at the Colón Cemetery. By the time he mounted the rostrum, he had overcome much of the shyness described by José Ignacio Rasco back at Belén. Still, public speaking did not come naturally to him, and Rasco remembers Castro camped out at the Rasco home in Marianao the week before the speech, writing draft after draft of his remarks and committing them to memory. Called on to pitch against Los Comerciales in the middle of this preparation, Castro consented, but he could be excused if his head was not one hundred percent in it.12
Castro began his national political debut by invoking the patron saint of Cuban independence, José Martí, a poet and critic of such intellectual breadth and amplitude that Cubans left, right, and center continue to claim him as their own. Invoking Martí, Castro established the ideological foundation of his work through the triumph of the Cuban Revolution: the people’s duty to hold one another and their government accountable to a sovereign and independent Cuba committed to the well-being not just of its own people, but of Latin Americans in general. Over time, Castro would build on this foundation, moving from an emphasis on civil and political liberties to an emphasis on social rights (security, health care, education), but he never abandoned it. History mattered to him not as curiosity but as inspiration for contemporary political engagement. The point of “flying on the wings of memory to events that have galvanized students across generations,” he told the Colón Cemetery crowd, was to wake the people from their slumber.13
The martyred medical students mattered on this day, Castro said, not simply because they had stood up to colonial oppression, but because they defended the people’s right to education, which was essential to “moral improvement.” That right was in deep jeopardy in contemporary Cuba thanks to President Grau turning over the Education Department to a notorious crook (Alemán), who was committed only to lining his own pockets. Just days earlier, Alemán unleashed his private police force on the protesting staff of a rural normal school who asked for nothing more than resources sufficient to carry out their job (“helping peasants improve their standard of living”). Where was the outrage? Castro demanded. Where were the patriots ready to stand up and make things right?
These were strong words coming from a young student with little or no political backing. Alemán had friends throughout the university, and one can imagine Castro’s audience shifting uneasily in their seats. But Castro was just warming up. Bad as the violence of Presidents Machado and Batista had been, that was nothing compared to the “cynicism” engendered by Grau administration depravity. “Batista and Machado had murdered many Cubans,” Castro remarked; Grau was “killing hope itself.” The president had campaigned on a platform that promised a merchant marine, a court of auditors, a new national bank, administrative transparency, and agricultural and industrial development. Halfway through his term, not a single one of those promises had come to pass, and yet Cubans did not seem to notice. Castro challenged elected officials who retained a sense of honor to join with the students to root out corruption, or—like the martyred medical students celebrated that day—to die trying. If the politicians failed to step forward, the students were ready to go it alone, once again demonstrating that “the pure blood of vital youth has been and will remain fertile.”
Rasco said that Castro struck a chord with his audience that day. Journalist José Pardo Llada characterized the speech as “more Martían than the Apostle himself” (the Apostle was Martí’s nickname). Castro himself was “very pleased” by how his speech came off.14 Others were less than pleased. Two weeks later, Castro was involved in a shooting incident on the outskirts of the university—the only episode in which critics and defenders agreed that he participated. Curiously, this was also the only one for which he was not dragged before the police. Castro never spoke openly about his role in the violence. Government historians gloss over it. Castro’s enemies exaggerate it, ignoring the context in which such violence occurred. To complicate things further, sources changed their accounts about such incidents depending on their perception of what the interviewer wanted to hear.
All of which is to say that we may never know for sure what happened on December 10, 1946, when a group of MSR members, including Castro, concealed on the grounds of the Medical School, shot fellow student Leonel Gómez in the back as he exited nearby University Stadium. Before enrolling in the university, Gómez had been president of the Secondary School Association, second in influence among aspiring student leaders only to the FEU itself. Gómez was a member of UIR and a rival of Manolo Castro. Manolo Castro believed that Gómez was getting ahead of himself and needed to be brought in line. Fidel Castro had some lessons of his own to learn. His Colón Cemetery speech received widespread press coverage, with a few papers carrying his remarks in their entirety. Neither MSR nor UIR could have been happy with it, and it is likely that Manolo Castro’s people reminded Fidel Castro that if he was not with them he was against them. Castro promptly signed on with MSR.
Simply signing on with a gang did not guarantee its protection. Protection had to be earned and loyalty demonstrated by participating in the dirty work. Gómez was shot in the back of the shoulder. Another bystander was shot in the leg. Still others may have been injured. Nobody was killed, nobody arrested. With MSR pulling the trigger, the police investigative unit was never summoned, and it is not clear how many bullets were fired and who exactly did the shooting. Rafael Díaz-Balart, a friend and fellow law student at the time, said that Castro burst into his home that afternoon saying, “I just shot Leonel.” Who else may have been involved, Diaz-Balart did not say.15
In retrospect, critics point to this episode as evidence that one of the world’s most famous guerrillas could not shoot straight. That seems implausible given Castro’s early introduction to firearms in Birán and raises the question of whether Castro, if it was indeed he who pulled the trigger, had purposely shot to injure rather than kill. Regardless, he soon recognized MSR for the trap that it was, eventually soliciting Emilio Tro for membership in UIR.16 There he joined his friend and future nemesis Rafael Díaz-Balart (brother of Mirta, his wife to be), who also knew firsthand the difficult choices confronting university students in mid-century Cuba. Determined to escape “the spiral of violence,” Díaz-Balart abandoned Cuba for Princeton University in summer 1947. “It was not so much that one would get murdered,” he explained, “but that one had to kill in an organized way.”17
It was not long before Castro’s outspokenness attracted the attention of Grau’s henchmen. In early January 1947, Castro and Díaz-Balart reconstituted the old Student Directory founded in 1927 after President Machado disbanded the FEU, and now meant to serve as an alternative to that discredited institution. A few weeks later, the new Directory launched its first broadside, with Castro’s name emblazoned atop a manifesto signed by delegates from the thirteen university faculties. The manifesto recapitulated the form and content of Castro’s Colón Cemetery address, balancing historical references with an urgent call to action. This time the target was not only President Grau’s decision to seek a second term (an “astonishing travesty”), but the student-on-student violence that Castro himself had so recently been a part of. Benefiting from his relationship to Grau, Masferrer, and Salabarría, Manolo Castro may have been content to stand idly by as one university student after another fell victim to the mayhem, the manifesto remarked; the rest of the student body had had enough. A new generation of students stood ready to defend “the glorious flag” for which previous student martyrs had died. It was “better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”18
Manolo Castro’s election as president of FEU in 1945 terminated a period of relative tranquillity in university politics that had held since 1942, when student protest helped unseat a discredited prime minister. Manolo Castro was reelected FEU president in 1946, despite the growing perception that he was indifferent to student interests. Poised for defeat the following year, he resigned his presidency to accept the cushy position of directorship general of sports in the Grau government. His resignation left Humberto Ruiz Leiro, a UIR loyalist, atop the FEU hierarchy, thereby ensuring a contentious 1947 election.19
In March 1947, Castro was elected class delegate a second time and was later selected vice president of the Law School. The next month, the Law School Executive Committee, of which Castro was a member, withdrew its support for newly elected Law School president Federico Marín, who, the Committee charged, had failed to carry out his mandate. Marín was a member of MSR. All but one of the students calling for his removal belonged to UIR. There could be no doubt, one newspaper put it, that Marín’s “defenestration” was the result of gang rivalries. Whatever the cause, Marín’s ouster meant that Castro, then vice president, became acting president of the Law School for the first and only time in his career.20 Castro did not last long in office. With a UIR member atop the Law School masthead, UIR now held the deciding vote in the upcoming general election. Enter MSR heavy Mario Salabarría. A day into Castro’s term in office, he and a few friends in the FEU hierarchy were picked up by the police, charged with carrying unlicensed weapons, and held in isolation as warrantless searches were carried out on their homes (Salabarría himself was among the arresting officers). Leiro was severely beaten. With no weapons on them, most of the group was released within hours. Castro was held for nearly three days, before vociferous protests by fellow students induced President Grau to secure him a hearing before the Urgency Court, which promptly exonerated him.
The episode began a long series of politicized run-ins between Castro and the National Police all of which were resolved in Castro’s favor. Critics point to these arrests as evidence of Castro’s involvement in the gang violence that marked this era. This was hardly unique to him, as Ovares and Díaz-Balart attest. Moreover, these arrests by a corrupt regime’s brazen partisans constitute proof of nothing. In the most recent case, city newspapers easily discerned the motivation behind the arrests. At the time Salabarría’s men went into action, Leiro was leading his MSR rival in the balloting for FEU president ten votes to three.
Castro responded to Salabarría’s ham-handed intervention in university affairs like a seasoned professional, exploiting favorable attention in the press. At the end of April, presidents of the thirteen faculties of the University of Havana issued another manifesto which appears to have come from Castro’s pen. The arrests of the student leaders, the beating of Leiro, the warrantless searches all called to mind the lawless days of the Machado presidency, the manifesto stated. The “intervention of foreign agents” into student affairs created “a climate of insecurity, coercion, and violence” incompatible with the university’s educational mission. With the integrity of the university at stake, the students vowed to press on with their criticism “until they had established in the FEU an empire of decency and propriety, as the majority of students desired.” Castro signed the document as president of the Law School.21
This was his last act in that role. That same day, the University Council, comprised of senior faculty under the influence of MSR, reinstated the deposed Law School president, thus bringing Castro’s brief presidency to an end. To the surprise of many, this action did not kill the impetus for reform. With the MSR and UIR presidential candidates deadlocked in the most recent poll, a new contender came to the fore, Castro’s old friend, Enrique Ovares, who shared much of UIR’s vision for the student government while lacking the stain of gang affiliation. In fact, Prensa Libre reported, Castro proved instrumental in elevating Ovares and arriving at a peaceful resolution. How long the comity would last, no one could say, but for a moment, anyway, the good of the university appeared to have taken precedence over established political interests. As if to ratify the current peace, FEU leaders agreed to convoke a Constitutional Assembly later that year to make the selection of its officers more democratic. Despite losing their respective presidencies, Castro and his friend Leiro proclaimed victory and celebrated these events like statesmen.22
In summer 1947, just as the gang violence reached its peak in Havana, idealistic young men across Cuba flocked to the eastern city of Holguín to enlist in an expeditionary force targeting Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. There they joined a group of Dominican exiles calling itself the Dominican Revolutionary Party, which was founded in Havana six years before by the writer Juan Bosch, among others. The outbreak of war in Europe forced the Dominicans to postpone their plans for a marine and aerial invasion. The Allied victory in World War II stoked the hopes of democratic reformers throughout the Western Hemisphere at a time when local governments were flush with cash (from inflated sugar prices) and arms (thanks to the U.S. wartime policy Lend-Lease, which distributed weapons to friendly countries in exchange for access to military bases). In short, the immediate postwar period was a good time to be looking for men, money, and munitions, and by summer 1947, Cuba was awash in soldiers of fortune and the contraband of war.
In theory, the operation known to posterity as Cayo Confites (after the bite-sized cay where things came to a dispiriting end) was privately orchestrated and privately funded. Cuba had ratified the Havana Convention (1928) and was poised to sign the Rio Pact, both of which committed signatories to respect the sovereignty of fellow nations. In fact, members of the Cuban government exercised an enormous role in funding and planning the expedition, even as a hapless President Grau buried his head in the sand. Education Secretary Alemán, for one, provided much of the expedition’s funding with money leached from the education budget. MSR leaders Rolando Masferrer and Manolo Castro purchased airplanes, landing craft, and ammunition, and recruited foot soldiers. Bosch and his fellow Dominicans did the lion’s share of the early work. But the mission was delayed, and the Dominicans’ purses ran dry, leaving Alemán, Masferrer, and Manolo Castro to assume an ever-expanding role, so that by the end Bosch was said to have felt like their prisoner.
The role of Alemán, Masferrer, and Manolo Castro in a mission to establish constitutional democracy in the Dominican Republic seems curious at first glance. What interest did these sowers of mayhem have in promoting democracy? Well, Masferrer, for one, had started out as a leftist proponent of the people’s will and actively opposed the Machado dictatorship. His and Manolo Castro’s antipathy toward Trujillo was sincere and long lasting. But so, too, was their thirst for power. A U.S. intelligence report looking back on the debacle in October 1947 confirms their motivation. Their participation “can only finally be explained in terms of gross self-seeking,” U.S. ambassador Henry Norweb wrote Secretary of State George Marshall. The Cuban ministers “were to be given properties” in the Dominican Republic, “another was to be a collector of customs, another was to be Minister of Finance.” A joke circulated among U.S. consular officers that at one point there were no fewer than twelve people on Cayo Confites “who expected to be the next President of the Dominican Republic,” by no means all of them Dominican.23
Fidel Castro joined the expedition at its training ground at Instituto Politécnico in Holguín that July. Instinctively, he leaned toward the Dominicans who answered to Bosch, thus gaining his protection. Among the Dominicans Castro befriended was a daring and charismatic ship’s captain named Ramón Mejías del Castillo, known by the nickname Pichirilo, whose experience would later come in handy.24 Castro’s participation in the expedition fit right in with his dreams for Cuba and veneration of Martí. From the outset of his political activism, Castro saw the fight for self-determination and social justice in Cuba as part of a hemispheric movement. In November 1946, ten days before his Colón Cemetery debut, the newspaper Juventud Rebelde noted the intervention of an apparently unknown law student named Fidel Castro at a ceremony in support of the student-led Czech resistance. Castro shared the floor at this event with the current Law School president and a delegate to the First Global Congress of Students to be held in Prague. The following year, Castro presided over the establishment of the student-led Cuban Committee for the Liberation of the Dominican Republic.25 In short, Cayo Confites was not a one-time-only event for him. To the surprise of some (and consternation of many), he always tied his work in Cuba to liberation projects elsewhere.26
Castro’s sister Juanita recalls the day her parents learned that their son had enlisted in Cayo Confites. Ángel, who had been talking to a friend in his office, entered the kitchen stricken. “I have just learned that Fidel has joined an expedition of Dominicans and Cubans intending to overthrow the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo,” he announced. Sure that this would be the end of Fidel, he asked Lina to visit the training camp and talk some sense into him. Lina, typically guarded, broke down in the company of her daughters. “She was dying of sadness,” Juanita reports. By supper that night, Lina had recovered her resolve. “There’s nothing to do but go to Cayo Confites,” she declared, departing for the camp early the next day.27
Accompanied by Juanita and Enma, Lina made for Preston, the United Fruit port on the Bay of Nipe, where they boarded a steamer for the 150-mile trip up the coast. Arriving at Cayo Confites, Lina met a motley collection of men from across the Caribbean and Cuba, including well-heeled members of MSR. Lina went off to find Fidel. Once found, he was not easy to persuade. “I can’t pull out,” he told his mother. “To overthrow Trujillo is a democratic mission, and if the price is life, then all of us here are ready to pay it.” Resisting further entreaties, Castro escorted his family off the cay, pleading with his mother not to cry. “Have faith,” he urged; “everything will end well and nothing bad will happen.”28
The expedition was a poorly kept secret. As early as January 1947, U.S. intelligence officials picked up noise of an impending anti-Trujillo conspiracy to be launched from Cuba. In February, the FBI trailed cash-laden Dominicans hunting for weapons in New York City. By July, U.S. officials knew that an international brigade of soldiers of fortune was assembling outside Holguín. At the end of that month, they learned of a fleet of six airplanes bound for Cuba from the United States. U.S. ambassador Norweb made repeated inquiries of Cuba’s foreign minister as to what was going on. His counterpart replied just as repeatedly that nothing was going on at all. At the end of July, two Puerto Rican recruits “escaped” from the expedition and took their story to The Miami Herald. The Herald’s subsequent article on the impending invasion exposed the Cuban denials as bald-faced lies. Meanwhile, the Trujillo government had been condemning the forces amassing in Cuba for weeks, pressuring the U.S. government to bring the “communist” machinations to a halt.29
Trujillo was not the only one becoming increasingly alarmed. The existence on Cuban soil of a heavily armed and well-trained invasion force, some 1,500 strong, did not sit well with Cuban Army Chief of Staff Genovevo Pérez Dámera. Though ostensibly bound for the Dominican Republic, such a force could readily be deployed against the Cuban government itself. Pressured on all sides, and with Trujillo threatening to invade the country, Grau gave the expeditionaries until the end of July to move out. On July 29, the force departed Holguín for the port of Antilla, located along the northern shore of the Bay of Nipe. On August 11, the force abandoned the mainland for Cayo Confites, an oversized sandbar 150 miles up the coast. For forty-nine torturous days, the expeditionaries languished on the mosquito-infested cay, in blistering sun, with little to eat, nowhere suitable to sleep, and no firm date of departure.
Through August and into September Grau remained at loggerheads with his conscience about the wisdom of the venture. His choice of whether to pull the plug or sign off on the expedition was made more difficult by an escalation of gang warfare in the capital. As if MSR was not busy enough trying to launch an amphibious assault on a foreign country, its agents tried to assassinate Emilio Tro in early September. In response, Tro’s agents assassinated Rafael Ávila, chief of the Health Ministry Police and an MSR loyalist. In the ensuing tit for tat, Salabarría ordered Tro’s arrest. But rather than arresting Tro, the police attacked the UIR chief and a fellow member, Antonio Morín Dopico, at Dopico’s house in the Havana suburb of Marianao. As Tro and Dopico enjoyed a sumptuous lunch surrounded by their families, three police cars pulled up and unloaded on the house. A three-hour gunfight ensued in which Tro and five others, including Dopico’s wife, were killed. The couple’s infant child was shot and rushed to the hospital.
The astonishing spectacle was broadcast live on Cuban radio. It came to an end only after a diffident Grau dispatched the army. At the time of the incident, Army Chief of Staff Genovevo was in Washington, D.C., where U.S. officials lectured him about the sovereignty of other nations. Upon hearing news of what became known as the Orfila Massacre (after the neighborhood in Marianao), Genovevo returned to Havana, ordered Salabarría’s arrest, and confiscated more than a dozen trucks laden with guns, ammunition, and other contraband from a farm belonging to Education Minister Alemán. Still unwilling to acknowledge what was happening just off the coast, Grau claimed that the seized weapons were part of a foiled coup.
By the end of September, with its disinformation campaign finally discredited, the Grau administration pulled its support for the Dominican invasion. U.S. pilots, poised to play a supporting role in the expedition, returned home. On Cayo Confites, the Cuban leaders of the expedition resolved to take things into their own hands. They loaded two transports, Fantasma and Maceo, and prepared to depart for the Dominican Republic. Curiously, Fantasma, with Masferrer aboard, headed west toward Havana rather than east in the direction of the intended target. Meawnhile, Maceo took off in the other direction after leaving behind some men who wanted out. With the force split and its numbers radically reduced, Maceo came to a halt off Nipe Bay, where the Dominicans on board considered their options. Castro and Pichirilo urged Maderne and Bosch to press on. Maderne and Bosch recognized that their reduced force had no chance of a success without air support.
Intercepted by the Cuban Navy on the afternoon of September 21, Maceo and Fantasma were escorted to the port of Antilla before being taken to Havana the next day. Castro anticipated that the expedition’s demise would end the uneasy truce that prevailed among its members. A consistent critic of the Grau government, he was not looking forward to falling into its clutches when the boats arrived in Havana. As Maceo, escorted by the Cuban Navy, made its way through the channel at Antilla, it became obscured from its naval escort by a small island. At this point, Pichirilo, aware of Castro’s desire to get away, lowered a dinghy into the water with Castro and three others aboard. Spotted by a navy patrol boat, the dinghy made frantically for the Cuban coast. The helmsman warned the passengers that they were about to be intercepted, prompting Castro to plunge into the water some 250 meters from shore. He was joined by two men from the dinghy, all of them fully dressed and laden with arms. “I hit the water and began to sink,” Castro said. He did better after releasing one of two Thompson machine guns he was carrying. Worried about shots from above them and sharks below, the three men swam ashore at Cayo Saité, then spent the next several hours dodging government soldiers, before finally splitting up. Castro, familiar with the general area, recovered his bearings and struck out on foot for Birán, eventually hitching a ride in a passing car and arriving home just as the cock began to crow.30
The U.S. response to the failed operation makes for interesting reading in light of the nation’s history of intervention in Cuba and elsewhere. U.S. intelligence officials had long cast a dark eye on countries intervening in one another’s affairs—so long as the offending party was not the United States itself. From first getting word of Dominican exiles amassing in Holguín, the U.S. State Department dismissed the plan as “quixotic.” U.S. diplomatic cables were full of self-serving comparisons between the “American and Latin-American mind,” with the former described as practical, orderly, and sensible, and the latter impulsive, unpredictable, and irrational. Ignoring the U.S. government’s notorious coddling of dictators, U.S. officials attributed the region’s political volatility to “an ingrained fetish of revolution.”31
Castro drew two critical lessons from the aborted mission: first, that secrecy was paramount in such operations; second, that for expeditions such as this you had to choose your own people. The mission to overthrow Trujillo was one of the worst-kept secrets in history, he said. Masferrer’s recruiters strode through Havana plucking people off the streets who had no military experience, no knowledge of camp life, no ideological commitment to the cause. As a result, when things dragged on in August and September—amid scarce food, incessant rain, and pestilential insects—the recruits had no resources to draw on, becoming, alternately, morose, recalcitrant, and volatile. Never had such a mission been constructed of men “less apt.” Years later, recruiting men and women for his own campaigns, Castro kept the lesson of Cayo Confites close at hand, personally overseeing (when not, indeed, conducting) the recruiting, and keeping his cards so close to his chest that his forces often did not know where they were headed until arriving at their destination.32
Participation in Cayo Confites precluded Castro from taking exams and fulfilling end-of-year requirements. It also prevented him from matriculating at the university in academic year 1947–48. Students could still enlist in courses and take exams without attending classes (as “free” rather than “regular” students), but they could not be elected to student government. And so Castro’s career in university politics came to an end, just as his influence as a student leader mounted. In the days ahead, Castro exerted himself as a leader of a new generation of student and youth activists ready to take on corruption, colonialism, and dictatorship—not only in Cuba but throughout Latin America. He had not completely extricated himself from the thuggery that continued to dominate student life and Cuban politics through the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, but as his political reputation grew, he began to look for a way out of the gang warfare.33
Castro returned to the capital in early October 1947, just as a new controversy was brewing. In the aftermath of Cayo Confites and the Orfila Massacre, the Grau administration looked to burnish its tarnished reputation. October 10, Veterans’ Day, was fast approaching and Interior Minister Alejo Cossío del Pino had the inspired idea of appropriating the Bell of Demajagua and transporting it from its home in Manzanillo to Havana for memorial services. Struck by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes on October 10, 1868, at the start of the Ten Years War, the bell became a symbol of independence and abolition as Céspedes recognized that there could be no overthrowing colonialism without eliminating the slavery that went with it. Céspedes’s slaves won their liberty that day and helped launch the War of Independence.
Cossío del Pino asked the Manzanillo City Council if he could borrow the hallowed relic. The council was on the verge of granting permission when one of its members interrupted. Wait a minute, César Montejo demanded, whatever happened to the money recently allocated for schools and public works in Manzanillo? Had it not been pilfered by the very government now trying to conceal its corruption beneath the mantle of patriotism. Montejo rallied local citizens and veterans groups in protest. “Robbers,” the people shouted, “never this bell!” With city papers trumpeting the dignity and valor of the protesters, the interior minister returned to Havana empty-handed, mumbling about a lack of “civility.”34
Cossío del Pino was not the only one who appreciated the symbolic power of the Bell of Demajagua. Reading newspaper accounts of the affair, Castro believed that if anyone in midcentury Cuba could claim to be heirs to Céspedes and the fathers of Cuban independence it was students like himself. And so, he conferred with the FEU hierarchy and a couple of senators about borrowing the bell and bringing it to the university to serve as backdrop for a series of rallies meant to reawaken Cubans to the ideals for which the Republic once stood. The plan required money for transportation to Manzanillo and the return to Havana by train. The senators and student leaders liked the idea and offered financial support. Castro then reached out to Manzanillo veterans and the City Council. The parties invited Castro to a meeting, and in early November Castro and his friend Lionel Soto traveled to Manzanillo to make their case in person. After meeting Castro and assessing his character, the veterans and city leaders signed on, dispatching two of their number to help escort the precious cargo, all four hundred pounds of it, to the capital.
Meanwhile, the FEU had not been idle. Cuban students were good at ginning up publicity, and the bell-bearers were greeted at the rail station by a raucous crowd. The Grau administration also saw this coming, regarding the demonstration as an affront to Minister Cossío and a threat to government authority. Castro anticipated this. Before heading off to Manzanillo, he advised his friend Alfredo Guevara, FEU treasurer at the time, to collect weapons and foot soldiers sufficient to safeguard the bell’s passage from the train station to University Hill. The bell arrived in Havana on the afternoon of November 3. Its presence united a divided city, as left and right, young and old, students and professionals, workers and public officials joined a long procession snaking its way past the Capitolio, through the Parque Central, before moving on to the university.
Castro warned Guevara that once in place, the bell needed to be guarded around the clock. “Castro was the only one of us to understand the threat clearly,” Guevara remembered. For most of that night and into the wee hours of the following day, the students and their paid police maintained their vigil. At four in the morning, confident the threat had expired, the last tired sentinels staggered off to bed, to return in a few hours. When they did so, the bell had vanished. “We failed,” Guevara admitted, before praising Castro’s uncanny “intuition” to sense danger when no one else could feel it.
Arriving at the university the next morning, Castro was unhappy to learn that his warning had not been heeded and that the bell had been stolen. After chewing out his peers, he, Soto, and Guevara began to scour the city for the bell. They started at the home of FEU president Enrique Ovares, whom many considered an opportunist and a person of dubious loyalty. Departing Ovares’s house, the students ran into Eufemio Fernández, chief of the Secret Police, member of MSR, and intimate of President Grau. Fernández was obviously trailing the students to gauge their response. Castro confronted Fernández and asked what he and his cronies had done with the bell. Naturally, Fernández did not say.
The fate of the bell became the talk of the town, with journalists, broadcasters, and citizens alike all weighing in on its location. Some expected the bell to show up at the Presidential Palace. Many attributed the professionalism of the heist to complicity between the National Police, the university police, and MSR agents within the FEU. On November 5, Castro and his fellow students announced that there would be a rally at the university the next day. The size of the crowd exceeded expectations, with an estimated thirty thousand people mounting the Escalinata and spilling into Plaza Cadenas and adjacent squares. As the principal organizers of the bell’s pilgrimage, Castro, Guevara, and Soto each addressed the throng. Castro picked up where he had left off in his Colón Cemetery speech, accusing President Grau, Alemán, Masferrer, Fernández, Manolo Castro, and company of selling out their patriotism to naked self-interest. The government assumed immunity born of public cynicism, Castro said. Well, this audience had news for them: the “spirit of the university” was not dead, “the conscience of the nation” not yet extinguished. The kidnapping of the bell had awakened a sleeping giant. The Cuban people were fed up; the nation’s youth would never surrender. The crowd rose up, as if on cue, chanting “Out with Grau! Out with Grau!” Over the course of the following week, pressure mounted on the administration, which quietly returned the bell to Manzanillo.
It is hard to imagine a better outcome to the Demajagua affair from Castro’s perspective. He had set out to expose government bullying and duplicity. The government responded with bullying and duplicity. The press was starstruck. Castro’s image was emblazoned on newspaper front pages across the country. Initiating behavior that would become a hallmark, Castro dressed to impress throughout the affair, donning the charcoal gray pinstripe suit that would become his signature, complete with starched white shirt, pocket handkerchief, and a geometrically patterned tie. In the week between the disappearance of the bell and its return to Manzanillo, Castro made speech after speech and was granted airtime on the influential radio station CMQ. Exploiting his growing celebrity, he moved from one venue to another, criticizing government officials, confronting the police, educating the public. This was his first real experience in political mobilization, and by any measure it had been a smashing success.
People noticed. In the nearby town of Artemisa, for example, Juan Miguel Carvajal Moriyón, president of the Association of Secondary School Students, was looking for a speaker to address an upcoming rally. Carvajal regarded Castro’s leadership of the Demajagua affair as “an act of extraordinary political transcendence.” He tracked down the young maverick and asked him to come to Artemisa. Carvajal remembered Castro looking at him intensely, as if to gauge his sincerity. “I have many obligations in these days,” Castro finally responded. “But if I can attend you can be sure that I will be with you.” That was enough for Carvajal, who walked away “happy.” Castro was “very deliberate, very precise,” he said.35
Castro’s obligations continued to mount through the winter of 1947–48. In late March 1948, representatives of twenty-one nations convened in Bogotá, Colombia, for the Ninth International Conference of American States. The United States set the conference agenda: the rising tide of communism in the hemisphere. The conference took place against the backdrop of mounting Cold War tensions in Eastern and Central Europe, and on the Korean Peninsula. The Soviet Union was flexing its muscle in Germany. Czechoslovakia has just fallen to the communists. It was only a matter of time, U.S. intelligence officials insisted, before Russia would try to establish a beachhead in Latin America. Some regarded the leftist governments of Argentina’s Juan Perón and Venezuela’s Rómulo Betancourt as evidence of beachheads already in place. That same March, the countries of Western Europe signed the Brussels Pact, the signatories pledging to help keep communism at bay. The United States wanted a Brussels Pact for the Americas, and U.S. diplomats arrived in Bogotá with hemispheric security topmost on their minds.36
Other countries saw the hemisphere’s principal challenge differently, as if one man’s communism is another man’s social democracy. The Allied victory in World War II sparked renewed debate about the nature of democracy itself. More concerned about national sovereignty and social equality than free markets, the citizens of Argentina and Venezuela elected leftist governments pledged to universal suffrage, access to health care and education, land distribution, and rural development. Argentina’s Perón and Venezuela’s new president, Rómulo Gallegos, headed for Bogotá no less interested than U.S. officials in hemispheric harmony, but their vision of harmony excluded dictators like Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, both of whom had cozy relationships with the United States, while casting a jaundiced eye on the North Americans’ talk about the inviolability of national borders.
In the months leading up to the meeting in Bogotá, Perón reached out to sympathetic governments and civil society organizations across the hemisphere in order to counter what he interpreted as the U.S. desire to consolidate its economic dominance over the Western Hemisphere. His delegation to Cuba included the student representative César Tronconi, as well as Senator Diego Luis Molinari, both of whom were given a warm reception by Cuban students. In spring 1948, the University of Havana continued to reverberate with accusations that the Cuban government had betrayed the cause of democracy in the Dominican Republic. Castro played a major role in the agitation, presiding over not just the pro-Dominican Democracy Committee, but also over the Committee for Puerto Rican Independence. Indeed, there was scarcely a cause in Latin America’s campaign for national sovereignty and economic independence that escaped Castro and his peers: the battle against the dictators Trujillo and Somoza, Puerto Rican independence, the fate of the Panama Canal Zone, the devolution of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) to Argentina, the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo Bay, the Guatemalan revolution, just to name a few.
At the urging of the Argentines, the Cuban students agreed to help establish a new Latin American Student Association. The upcoming Ninth Congress provided the perfect context in which to unite students from across Latin America to promote democracy and national sovereignty. Though not enrolled in the university at the time (hence not involved in the FEU), Castro made plans to travel to Bogotá by way of Panama and Venezuela.37
In fact, he chose a good time to leave the country. On February 22, 1948, Manolo Castro was gunned down in central Havana. The perpetrator, Gustavo Ortiz Fáez, was picked up a few blocks away, his gun still smoking. Rolando Masferrer and his confederate Mario Salabarría thought to pin responsibility on Castro. A few days later, Castro was arrested and charged with the murder. Taken to police headquarters, he was given a paraffin test, which proved negative, and released. Former friends Frank Díaz-Balart and Enrique Ovares vouched for Castro’s innocence. “Castro had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of Manolo Castro,” Ovares insisted, “no connection to the cell from which the murderer came.”38
Castro did not waste the opportunity to accuse his accusers of willful misdirection. He charged Masferrer of wanting “to take over the leadership of the university to make it serve his personal interests.” When the students resisted Masferrer’s overtures, he dispatched his bullies to intimidate the students. Now Masferrer sought to blame innocent people to disguise his own complicity in the murder. In short, Castro said, Masferrer hoped to “profit from the death of a friend.” Curiously, since participating in Cayo Confites, Castro had developed grudging respect for Manolo Castro’s intelligence and idealism. At the time the former FEU president was gunned down, Castro had ceased to consider Manolo Castro the students’ most salient problem. Looking back on these events years later, Castro noted that Manolo Castro was not involved in university politics at the time of his death, and there was no reason for him to have been assassinated. Far from encouraging the crime, Castro said, had he known it was going to happen he would have tried to prevent it.39
Castro set out for Bogotá on Monday, March 22, 1948, in the company of fellow student Rafael del Pino. On the eve of his departure, a journalist from Bohemia magazine caught up with the rising young leader to discuss his hopes for the trip. The aim was very simple, Castro explained, to unite “university students in the anti-imperialist struggle.” This put the students on a collision course with the U.S. delegation, which intended to consolidate its control over the nations of the south.40
This was Castro’s first trip outside Cuba. In a letter to his father, Castro provided a detailed account of his itinerary. The trip had begun with four days in Caracas. Castro was spellbound by Venezuela’s landscape and impressed by the riches generated by “its massive petroleum production.” Venezuela had just experienced a smooth democratic transition, Castro reported, with provisional president Rómulo Betancourt peacefully surrendering the reins of power to his successor. Venezuela’s government contrasted favorably to Cuba’s own. “Politically speaking,” Castro observed, “the country moves along admirably,” with Betancourt leaving office without having enriched himself. In short, the country’s public administration was “honorable,” its people “satisfied” with an administration “undertaking measures to benefit the country as a whole.”41
From Venezuela, Castro and del Pino moved on to Panama. Impressed by what they saw in the young Cuban leader, the Panamanian students invited him to address a public audience on March 30. This was an honor he would never forget, he told his fellow students, “one I surely do not deserve.” He said he spoke for all Cuban youth in sympathizing with the Panamanians’ fight against colonialism. “Brothers at the beginning of history”—i.e., in the struggle against Spanish colonialism—Cubans and Panamanians would be “brothers to the end,” he said, “brothers in culture, brothers in roots, members of the great family of Latin American nations.” Latin Americans would need to draw on that common history, those common ends, to succeed in the ongoing “struggle for the defense of the rights of our America.”42
In the uproar over the Demajagua affair, Castro demonstrated a precocious awareness of the power of symbols to mobilize public sentiment. He had not left that awareness at home. In Panama, he visited a hospital where a student named Sebastián Tapia lay paralyzed after clashing with government soldiers during a rally against U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone. Years later, witnesses credited Castro with the ability to make the humblest interlocutor feel like the most important person in the world. Castro’s visit to Tapia’s bedside left a deep impression on the Panamanians, which he reinforced by laying a wreath at the foot of a bust honoring Amador Guerrero, Panama’s first president, after whom the hospital was named. Castro was clever. Such visits had a strategic dimension to them. But no one doubted his sincerity.43
Castro departed Panama on March 31. His plane flew along the Pacific coast toward Medellín, “one of the richest, most industrialized” cities in Colombia, he told his father. From Medellín, he continued on to Bogotá. Far below, “the Magdalena and Cauca rivers overflowed their banks, shimmering like white rays on the surface of the earth.” Castro was impressed by Bogotá. “Modern and almost as big as Havana,” the city “swarmed with people in the streets like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” He found Bogotá to be “a very cultivated, civilized city,” with many of its residents “of Indian blood and characterized by tranquility.” Like Venezuela, Colombia compared favorably to Cuba. Colombia had a cash crop of its own, in this case coffee. But unlike Cuba, “whose only source of wealth is sugar, thereby exposing it to disastrous undulations in the global market,” Colombia possessed “rich silver and gold mines, raised its own cattle, and produced all the food it consumes.” Colombia’s standard of living was high, the cost of living cheap. He and his friend had found “cheap rooms in a good hotel (the Claridge) with magnificent food.”44
Castro promised his father that he would not ramble on, lest he have nothing to say later. But he could not help himself. So far, the trip had been a “total success,” he said. In Panama, he had spoken for “a half hour on the country’s most popular radio stations.” In Venezuela, former President Betancourt himself had met with the students (“We were in the actual home of the Venezuelan president and the family treated us very kindly,” Castro said). Meanwhile, in Bogotá, he expected to interview the chief diplomats from many of the participating nations. All of which got him thinking about Cuba’s lack of political accountability. How different this all seemed from “Cuban democracy, where the doors of the houses of government are closed to citizens.”45
The Ninth Conference of the Americas opened with great fanfare on April 1, 1948. U.S. secretary of state George Marshall provided the introductory remarks. The conference was expected to result in a new Organization of American States, a collaborative endeavor meant to serve the popular aspiration for peace and plenty. Just days after inaugurating this meeting, the United States would announce the Marshall Plan, a commitment of $13 billion (roughly $30 billion today) to rebuild war-torn Europe. Some Latin American leaders anticipated a similar plan to spur industrialization and economic development on this side of the Atlantic. They would be disappointed, with the U.S. delegation offering nothing so much as stern warnings that there could be no neutrality in the unfolding contest between democracy and communism.46
On April 4, FEU officers Enrique Ovares and Alfredo Guevara arrived in Bogotá. Their sudden entry into the mix created awkwardness among the student assembly. Just who was in charge of the Cuban delegation, anyway? As elected representatives of the FEU, Ovares and Guevara had every right to assert themselves. And yet Castro was personally known now to student delegates from Argentina, Venezuela, Panama, and Colombia. Many had praised him to their peers from countries he had not yet visited. His youthful shyness gone, Castro rose to address the issue, acknowledging his compatriots’ role while reminding the assembled crowd of his leadership in making the congress a reality. Years later, Ovares insisted he retained control of the Cuban delegation; Guevara reported that the congress embraced Castro’s leadership of both the Cuban delegation and the Student Congress itself.47
The clash between Castro and Ovares was never really a contest, Guevara explained. Ovares attained his position in the polarized world of the University of Havana by being studiously noncommittal. Castro achieved his position of influence by virtue of his idealism and charisma. Guevara described Castro at this stage of his career as “a spontaneous leader who simply dominated an assembly within minutes of appearing, even when others had exerted much time and effort organizing.” Ovares could not compete with Castro’s “enthusiasm, stature, oratorical ability, or the passion he transmits in everything he does.” Castro did not want to distract from the task at hand, and he and Ovares reached a “modus vivendi.” Still, everyone knew where the real power and influence lay, according to Guevara. It had been Castro who welcomed Perón’s representatives to Havana, he who had done the advance work in Venezuela and Panama, he (second only to the Argentines) who had imagined the Student Congress in the first place.48
Arriving on March 31, Castro spent several days getting oriented before the Student Congress officially opened on Monday, April 5. Castro and Rafael del Pino almost did not make it to the first meeting. The previous Saturday, delegates to the Ninth Conference attended a reception at the Teatro Colón, on 10th Street, just down from Plaza Bolívar, in the heart of the Colombian capital. Having slipped into the theater unannounced, Castro and Pino engaged in a bit of mischief, ascending the balcony and showering the guests with a manifesto listing the student demands—an end to Trujillo’s dictatorship, along with U.S. and British colonialism in Puerto Rico, Panama, and the Malvinas. Years later, Castro conceded that there was nothing original or revolutionary about this wish list. The point was simply to make the delegates aware of students’ presence in the city. Returning to their rooms at the Claridge Hotel, the two were met by Colombian police. They were taken away, fingerprinted, interrogated, and eventually released, their naïveté more apparent than their threat. The Student Congress proceeded uneventfully, with the students hammering out responses to the various parts of their agenda.
On Friday, April 9, the Cuban students were scheduled to meet with Colombia’s liberal opposition leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whom Castro had briefly encountered a few days before. Popular among Colombian students and dissidents, Gaitán embraced the idea of the Student Congress and agreed to help wrap up the event. On their way to Gaitán’s office that afternoon, the Cuban delegation encountered a frantic crowd fanning out from Bolívar Square in the heart of the old city. “They killed Gaitán! They killed Gaitán!” the people shouted. As if on cue, the city erupted in violence that left hundreds of people dead (many more hurt) and millions of dollars of property destroyed. By now, readers may anticipate Castro’s response. Rather than retreat to his hotel room, as Guevara and Ovares had done, he joined the melee, as if to support, even steer a revolution dedicated to . . . well, nobody knew quite what.
Looking back on the so-called Bogotazo years later, Castro portrayed his participation in the ensuing chaos as the work of a budding revolutionary. He tells a detailed if somewhat tedious story of his every move, as if his later success earned a reckless rabble-rouser the right to be taken seriously. “I smashed a typewriter . . . I joined the multitude . . . I grabbed a tear gas gun . . . I put on a uniform . . . I restored order . . . I harangued a crowd . . . I climbed into a jeep . . . I advised the garrison chief what to do . . . I fired some shots”—all evidence of his “Quixotic streak,” he explained, “in the finest sense of the word.”49
In fact, Castro had run around the disabled city like a chicken with its head cut off. Desperate for a scapegoat, the Colombian government accused the two young Cubans they had picked up at the Teatro Colón the previous week of plotting with communists to overthrow the government, thus grossly exaggerating Castro’s influence and organizational ability. The disorder lasted several days, by which time an all-points bulletin circulated through police and military circles with Castro and del Pino in the crosshairs. On the afternoon of August 11, with a 6 p.m. curfew closing in on them, the two were picked up off the street by some sympathetic Argentine officials who delivered them safely into the hands of the Cuban embassy, where they were joined by Ovares and Guevara. Within hours, the students were on their way home to Havana aboard a Cuban government airplane dispatched to Bogotá by one of Grau’s ministers to pick up some champion fighting bulls.
It had been a remarkable three years. Castro arrived at the University of Havana in autumn 1945 as a nineteen-year-old youth little known beyond the athletic fields of Colegio de Belén. Returning to Havana from Bogotá nearly three years later, he had developed a reputation among his peers as a bold and persuasive student leader, committed to the economic and political well-being not just of Cuba, but of Latin America besides. His trajectory from one to the other was anything but smooth. Eager to fit in on University Hill, he tried his hand first at sports then at gang warfare before finally committing himself to politics. The things that made him good at the first and susceptible to the second (his athleticism and love of action) accompanied his progress, lending his political activism a cartoonlike quality at times, as his behavior during the Bogotazo attests. Along the way, the characteristics that would come to distinguish Castro as a leader were becoming set in stone, conspicuous among them uncompromising idealism, a self-confidence easily mistaken for arrogance, and an audacity bordering on recklessness. Alfredo Guevara’s response upon first encountering Castro in the Plaza Cadenas on the first day of law school captures the ambiguity of his emerging personality and provides a fitting epitaph to this stage of his life: “I hope this guy is for good,” Guevara thought to himself, “because if he is for ill he will be impossible to resist.”50