Sundays at Finca Manacas provided a welcome break from the relentless toil of farm work. On July 26, 1953, “a precious summer Sunday,” in Juanita Castro’s words, Ángel and Lina gathered around the dinner table with their daughters, Juanita, Enma, and Augustina, and their granddaughter Tania, daughter of their eldest son, Ramón. While the women chatted amiably, Ángel quit the room to tune into the latest newscast. A special bulletin brought the nearby conversation to a halt. “We interrupt this broadcast to inform you that a group of rebels assaulted the Moncada Barracks today. . . . There is talk of many dead and injured. We will keep you informed.”1
The news sucked the air out of the room. “I don’t know why,” Ángel broke in, “but something tells me Fidel is mixed up in this.” Oh nonsense, Enma chided. “How ridiculous to think that Fidel has anything to do with that. Get that out of your head.” Just shy of convinced, the family struggled to distract itself, as members of the rural guard, posted at the farm, retreated to the nearby army barracks at Central Marcané. Hours later, a clerk from the company store burst through the door shouting, “Doña Lina, Doña Lina, I just heard over the radio that the leader of the Moncada assault is Fidel!” Juanita thought first of Raúl, her nearest and dearest sibling. His devotion to his older brother surely pulled him into this, she thought. Eyes brimming with tears, Lina collapsed in a chair, murmuring, “My God, My God.”
Moments later, another radio bulletin: “We interrupt again to confirm that the leader of the Moncada attack is Fidel Castro Ruz. His brother Raúl was also in the group. More to follow.” Ángel, notoriously reserved, broke down in tears. Lina fingered her rosary. Juanita remembers her father cursing Fidel. “I entrusted Fidel with Raúl, my youngest son, expecting him to make Raúl into a good man, and look what he’s done! He’s made him a murderer!” Years later, Castro confirmed feeling guilty for having included Raúl, barely twenty-one at the time, “in that rash and daring action.”2
By nightfall, the Castro home was doubly encircled, first by friends and workers concerned about the boys, then by a larger ring of soldiers stationed to keep a lookout for the fugitives. The soldiers’ presence buoyed Ángel. “Fidel and Raúl must surely be alive,” he told the others. Why else would the government deploy soldiers there but to cut off their escape? Ángel’s logic proved a tonic to the others, with Enma remarking that Fidel would never fall into so obvious a trap. Still, no one slept that night. “Ay Viejo,” Lina sighed, “more victims, more families torn apart by suffering fathers, brothers, sons in mourning. Will there ever be peace in Cuban homes?”3
News of the massacre of captured assailants sent Lina and Juanita speeding to Santiago the next morning in an attempt to mobilize influential friends to save as many lives as possible, including, of course, Fidel’s and Raúl’s. They stopped first at the office of Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes, a frequent guest at the Castro home. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Santiago buzzed with soldiers, onlookers, and worried families. “At first, they told us that Fidel was dead,” Juanita recalls. “Then that both Fidel and Raúl were dead.” Finally, the authorities confirmed that the brothers were alive . . . and on the run. Meanwhile, mother and daughter joined forces with Castro’s wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, whose own father and brother worked for Batista, and who possessed a written order that her husband must be captured alive. What about Raúl? Lina demanded. The same, Mirta replied. “The order is to bring them in alive.”4
The family received confirmation of Raúl’s safety on Monday when police in the town of San Luis telephoned the Marcané barracks to verify his identity. The officer in charge at Marcané was a family friend, who notified Ángel and Lina of Raúl’s whereabouts before heading off to San Luis to identify Raúl in person. On Tuesday, at the insistence of this same officer, Raúl was transferred to Palma Soriano, where he remained for three days until being taken to the Santiago Vivac (city jail) on Thursday afternoon. The intervention of this officer and Raúl’s protracted transfer undoubtedly saved his life, as rebels turned over to Chaviano’s men before noon on Wednesday, July 29, did not make it to the jail alive. Meanwhile, skeptical of government pledges, Lina and Juanita hurried to Palma Soriano, where they saw Raúl with their own eyes. They were finally able to speak to him that Friday at the jail, where, asked if he knew his brother’s whereabouts, Raúl could only shake his head.5
Lina and her daughters returned to the jail the following day, Saturday, August 1, laden with food for the prisoners. Approaching the entrance, they were greeted by police barricades, swarms of military vehicles, and an excited crowd. This could only mean one thing, Lina concluded. “They’re both alive!” she exclaimed. “And they are together! They are together!” Lina was right: Fidel and Raúl were alive, safe, and together. At least, for now.6
Brought to the Santiago Vivac that morning, Castro was plopped down on a bench at the end of a long hall. The commotion attending his arrival confirmed rumors circulating among his fellow captives that Castro had survived. With Lina and her daughters already at the jail to see Raúl, Castro was permitted a brief visit with his family before being led to the warden’s office and a private interview with Chaviano.
The interview lasted several hours, after which the press was granted access to the new celebrity. Carlos Selva Yero, a reporter with Radio CMKR, recalled wading through a crush of spectators outside the jail eager to catch a glimpse of the rebel leader. Selva found Castro standing in the middle of a room, as if awaiting a public audience. He was dressed in a light-colored short-sleeved shirt and denim pants, worn at the knees. His chin was covered in stubble and his face was sunburned. Selva remembered Castro appearing preternaturally serene. He said that he and he alone—not Carlos Prío, not the Ortodoxo Party, not the Communists—was responsible for the attack, whose aim had not been to harm innocent soldiers but to return sovereignty to Cuba and improve the lives of rural citizens. He then went on to list a number of reforms to be enacted should his “revolution” have been successful, including land reform, improved access to health care and education, and an end to political corruption. In short, he said, the rebels wanted to “regenerate Cuba.”7
Castro’s comments caught Colonel Chaviano off guard. Alarmed by the direction the interview was taking, Chaviano cut Castro off and seized Selva’s tapes, which he sent off to SIM for cleansing. In the end, twenty minutes of tape were cut to eight. The tape was broadcast that afternoon, with Castro’s avowal of personal responsibility printed in newspapers across the land. Later that same day, the prisoners were moved to Boniato Prison, located in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, just outside Santiago. Castro’s forthright demeanor won him many admirers. But not everyone was happy with what they heard from the young rebel, including Lieutenant Ángel Machado, who was so incensed by Castro’s remarks that he ordered Castro’s jailer, Lieutenant Yánez Pelletier, to poison Castro. Yánez Pelletier refused and was later relieved of duty.8
Castro’s treatment at Boniato in the two and a half months between the day of his arrest (August 1) and the day he went on trial (October 16) is the subject of debate. Castro insisted he was kept in isolation and denied visitors as well as the right to review the charges against him (“I spent seventy-five days in an isolation cell,” he said. “No one was allowed to speak to me”). Others claimed that he had many visitors, including defense attorney Baudilio Castellanos, who was assigned to the case.9 Nobody denies that Castro was isolated from the general prison population in a wing of the infirmary. Still, thanks to friendships forged with members of the prison staff, he succeeded in communicating with his fellow insurgents, even orchestrating a hunger strike that culminated in more privileges. The success of the hunger strike suggests that Castro retained the loyalty of his men despite the abject failure of the attack. At least one witness testifies that Castro remained engaged and upbeat through this stage of his incarceration. “While I shaved,” recalled Luis Casero Guillén, an Auténtico Party leader swept up in the government dragnet, “a shirtless Fidel would hang his arms out the cell bars and ask me questions about the merchant marine.” Casero was impressed by Castro’s curiosity and intuition. Far from the nihilist thug described in government propaganda, the man Casero came to know was an “idealist and intellectual.”10
Castro liked to boast that between the time of Batista’s coup in March 1952 and the date of the Moncada attack sixteen months later, he put thirty thousand miles on his 1950 Chevrolet.11 Gas station receipts bear him out. Since first arriving at the University of Havana in autumn 1946, he had been a veritable whirlwind of political activism, somehow managing to extricate himself from the countless controversies that embroiled him. Still, all the activity and engagement did not a political platform make, and prison provided an opportunity to elaborate and sharpen his political program. “Prison will be tougher for me than it has ever been for anyone else,” he wrote a friend, before admitting to his brother Ramón that, but for the fact of it being forced on him, prison constituted a rare opportunity for “a good rest. I know how to use my time,” he said. “I read and study.”12
He also wrote letters, mostly to family at first, later to an expanding range of friends and fellow dissidents. His letters were censored, and though his candor and charisma eventually endeared him to prison officials, his early correspondence was nonpolitical and businesslike. Even to his wife, Mirta.
Castro had not set eyes on Mirta since departing Havana on the eve of the attack (which she had known nothing about). Mirta traveled to Santiago de Cuba the day Castro was brought to the Santiago Vivac, and she had later dropped off clothes for him at Boniato. But that was that, and a frustrated husband reached out on August 18, noting that he had received little news of her and still less of their son, Fidelito. Fidelito, now four, was set to begin kindergarten, and Castro wanted to know where Mirta had enrolled him. He himself was holding up just fine, in case she wondered (“prison bars dent neither my spirit nor my mind nor my conscience”). He then asked her to send along some books, including the complete Shakespeare and Julian Marías’s magisterial Philosophy, along with any novels she thought might suit him. Finally, with his trial date looming, Castro was, as always, concerned about his physical appearance. He asked her to drop off a freshly dry-cleaned suit, along with “a collared shirt and a tie by the start of the trial.”13
Known officially as Causa 37, the Moncada trial opened on Monday, September 21, 1953, in the packed plenary room of the Palace of Justice, just a few hundred yards from the barracks. Presiding over the tribunal were three judges, Adolfo Nieto Piñeiro-Osorio, Ricardo Díaz Olivera, and Juan Francisco Mejías Valdivieso, who shared the cramped space with the prosecutor, Francisco Mendieta Hechavarría, along with fifty-six defendants (many of them innocent opposition figures picked up by the police), twenty-seven defense attorneys, some two hundred soldiers, and a public throng estimated at between three and four hundred, including friends and families of the victims and the accused. There were no juries in Cuban criminal trials. Journalist Marta Rojas remembers that first day as the hottest in a scorching summer, with the heat and humidity ratcheting up the tension in an already explosive courtroom.14
After what seemed like an interminable wait, the din of an impatient crowd was silenced by the jangle of metal chains, as fifty-six men, their wrists bound by metal handcuffs, were led into the dock. Castro attempted to approach the magistrates. His path was quickly blocked by soldiers, who forced him to his seat. The three judges occupied the traditional raised bench at the front of the room. To their left in the corner sat the secretary, Raúl Mascaró Yarini, also on an elevated bench. Below the judges, with backs turned to the room, sat two stenographers. Along the flanks of the courtroom, on still more raised benches, perched the chief prosecutor and defense attorneys. Facing the bench in horizontal rows were the defendants, each row flanked by armed guards. Behind the defendants came the press, the families, and finally the general public.15 (See Insert 2, Image 11.)
At exactly 10 a.m., a voice rang out from the dock: “Señor Presidente, señores magistrados!” Fidel Castro was on his feet. “I want to call your attention to something unusual here.” The rights of the accused were already being violated thereby jeopardizing the trial’s legitimacy. “You can’t judge a person in handcuffs,” Castro said, citing Cuban law, as his codefendants rattled their chains. The soldiers shifted uneasily. After an awkward pause, Nieto, the presiding judge, announced that the trial would be suspended until the handcuffs were removed. Nieto then upbraided the chief of the guard and retired to his chambers. Thereafter, a remarkable scene unfolded, Rojas recalls, with the chief himself removing Castro’s handcuffs, as he stood bolt upright in his aquamarine suit (“red tie with black stripes, black shoes and socks”), arms extended and sweat flowing down his neck. An old caramel-colored belt pinched his trousers at the waist, evidence that he had thinned during his month and half in pretrial detention.
“Who is left?” a guard called out. When nobody answered, Nieto returned to the bench and signaled to the secretary to proceed with a roll call of the defendants. The secretary then read aloud the formal indictment followed by Colonel Chaviano’s account of the attack. Chaviano’s report, a litany of fabrications, undercut the government’s credibility from the start. The attackers came bearing the most modern instruments of war, Chaviano alleged, including Remington rifles and fragmentation bullets. They were commanded by deposed president Carlos Prío, along with other Auténtico, Ortodoxo, and Communist Party officials (the illogic of such a coalition escaped the ignorant officer). The attackers had no scruples, no humanity, and made a mockery of the laws of war. There were foreigners among them, maybe Mexicans, maybe Guatemalans, maybe Venezuelans. Marks on their ammunition boxes revealed that their weapons originated in Montreal (thought to be Prío’s base). The attackers perpetrated gratuitous, unspeakable crimes, which included storming the Civil Hospital with knives drawn, taking patients and staff hostage, and slitting the throats of hapless victims. All told, the assailants numbered in the hundreds, their devious plan to put Santiago to the gun repelled only by the loyal guardians of Batista’s public peace.16
Looking on from his seat on the far left of the third bench from the front of the room, Castro struggled to restrain himself. He rose to his feet. Nieto signaled for him to sit down. When the court secretary completed Chaviano’s report, Castro rose once more, announcing that he intended to exercise his right to assume his own defense. “In due course,” Nieto responded curtly, as if already perturbed by the direction the trial had taken.
Jammed into the back of the courtroom with other journalists and the general public, Rojas remembers the atmosphere growing tenser with every jab and parry between the chief magistrate and the main defendant. With constitutional guarantees suspended and strict censorship in effect, nobody had dared to openly discuss the Moncada events in the lead-up to the trial, though privately many doubted the government’s account. “For two consecutive months,” Rojas says, “the only audible voice was the government’s.” The opening of the trial brought the government’s monopoly to an end, and the significance of the moment was lost on nobody, including the presiding judge.
The examination of defendants began. As his name rang out, Castro (along with the nearby guard) rose to his feet. The chief of the guard approached Castro, his hand on the butt of his pistol, the silence broken only by the buzz of a low-flying plane. The prosecutor read the charges. Castro listened intently. The guards raised their bayonets. Chaviano had ordered the doors of the courthouse closed, and the room was suffocating. “Respond truthfully to the prosecutor,” Nieto ordered. Did you participate in the attack on such and such a place on such and such a day, the prosecutor asked? “Yes, I participated,” Castro replied. And those youngsters over there? “Yes,” Castro replied again; “like me, they love the freedom of their country. They have committed no crime other than wanting what’s best for their country, just as they were taught in school.” Nieto interrupted with his bell. “Keep to the prosecutor’s questions,” he ordered. The prosecutor continued. Did Castro’s followers really understand the extent of his plan? he wanted to know. Did they understand the political significance of the act and the risk they incurred? Please answer my questions, he went on, and spare us the political harangue. Politics was hardly the point, Castro shot back, “I seek only to reveal the truth.”
The prosecutor thought to portray Castro as a bitter nihilist who coerced a group of innocent youth to join a scheme to overthrow a legitimate government. Castro rejected the prosecutor’s portrait. He had coerced nobody, he said. The men, nearly all of them members of the Ortodoxo Party, shared his conviction that armed insurrection was the only solution to Batista. Why hadn’t the rebels tried civil opposition? the prosecutor demanded; after all, hadn’t Castro as a newly minted lawyer sworn to uphold the rule of law? The answer, Castro replied, was twofold: first, civil liberty no longer existed in Batista Cuba; second, he had indeed thought to marshal the rule of law in Cuba’s defense, taking Batista to court in the days following the coup. The court could have sentenced Batista to over a hundred years in jail, Castro noted. Instead, the case was thrown out. With civil and legal recourse foreclosed, violence was the only option.
After a few hours of questioning, the prosecutor stood down, as if aware that the trial was not going how he had imagined. Then defense attorneys representing the political officials uninvolved in the attack lined up to clear their clients of complicity. Time after time, Castro denied anybody’s responsibility for the attack besides his own and that of his fellow insurgents. “Nobody should worry about being accused of having been the intellectual inspiration of the Revolution,” Castro announced emphatically, “because the only intellectual inspiration of the Moncada attack is José Martí, the Apostle of our Independence.” The line elicited applause from some of Castro’s men, which inspired yet another reprimand from Judge Nieto. The questions continued. Did you conspire with the communist leader so and so? With these ex-officials of Santiago de Cuba? With the FEU? No, no, no, Castro replied, before acknowledging that he had received help from individual FEU members, if not from the institution itself.
Baudilio Castellanos, general counsel to the defense, then posed a very leading question. In law school, Castellanos wanted to know, had Castro been “taught that the Constitution of Cuba should be defended?” Out of order! exclaimed one of the judges, prompting Castellanos to reword his question. More lawyers followed with more questions, allowing Castro to exculpate all but those who had directly participated in the attack. Finally, Nieto invited Castro to provide any details that might aid the court in exonerating those who had no direct or indirect role in the attack. Castro sensed an opportunity. Already on his feet, he paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts. He then began to speak, very softly at first, as if challenging the audience to attend his every word. “Señor Presidente, señores magistrados,” he began, before repeating his readiness to accept full responsibility for masterminding the attack, to explain the steps he took to carry it out, and to exonerate innocent opposition leaders. He acknowledged that he had not informed all his fellow rebels about his plans in advance, inviting them to deny some culpability. At this point, he was cut off by a loud chorus of “NOs!” emanating from the insurgents. “Silence,” bellowed the chief magistrate. “What I mean,” Castro continued, “is that there might be some that understand their obligation to their country differently—” Again, he was cut off, as the insurgents shot to their feet in unison, answering with a resounding “Ninguno!” (none). Then an unfamiliar voice spoke out from the group, as clipped and hurried as Castro’s was confident and measured: “All of us who participated in the attack are ready to say so expressly,” Raúl Castro said, despite his brother informing some that the government lacked evidence against them. “We are going to tell the truth, even as they go about releasing others; we were the ones who fought.”
The sound of a bell returned order to a proceeding, which, though barely begun, had already revealed so much. The opposition political leaders had all but been exonerated, Raúl Castro had made a name for himself, the young insurgents had demonstrated their continued loyalty to Castro, who had refuted Chaviano’s depiction of him as a hapless, cowardly bully. At this point, Nieto asked Castro if he had anything more to say for himself. In fact, Castro had said just about all he had to say in this stage of the trial. He repeated his assertion that his group murdered no innocent people that day. He asked how seventy rebels could be dead when only nine died in combat. He complimented the soldiers who carried out their duty protecting the barracks, while repudiating those who killed his men in cold blood. He accused General Martín Díaz Tamayo of ordering the ensuing massacre. He then reiterated his desire to serve as his own defense counsel. The judges granted his wish. A clerk handed him a cloak. Castro sat down on the bank of seats flanking the dock reserved for defense counsel. Two more defendants were called, both maintained their innocence, and at exactly 12:20 p.m. the proceedings were suspended for the day.17
Day two of the trial proved perhaps the most riveting. The first rebel to be called after Castro was Andrés García Díaz, who had participated in the assault at Bayamo. García appeared pale and thin. Seven weeks after the attack, his shaven head was covered in scars and his neck was encircled by an abrasion that could only have been made by a noose. “Young man,” the prosecutor began, “did you participate in the July 26 attack on the army barracks?” “Yes,” García replied eagerly, as the audience rose to its feet. Amid gasps and murmurs, Nieto ordered the gallery to be seated. The prosecutor then asked García if he had joined the mission of his own volition. Absolutely, the defendant replied. “I’m done,” the prosecutor said, as if convinced that the sooner García retreated from view the better. “With your permission,” García addressed the bench, “I’d like to say something.” The judge nodded, and García told the following story.
After fleeing the attack on the Bayamo garrison in the company of two rebels, he was spotted on a bus, apprehended, and taken to the town of Manzanillo, where he and his comrades were beaten. Returned to Bayamo in the early morning of July 27, the three were driven to a cemetery outside the town of Veguitas. There, they were smashed in the head with rifle butts, collared with nooses, and dragged to their deaths. Or so their captors thought. García regained consciousness just before dawn, awaking to find his friends lying mutilated alongside him, and his own neck ringed by a noose. Local peasants nursed García back to life and kept him secluded until, with yet another intervention by Archbishop Pérez Serantes, he could safely be turned over to the authorities and receive medical treatment. García raised a hand to his head to display a still open wound from the crack of a rifle butt. “And this bruise,” he continued, pointing to his neck, “is from the noose with which they tried to hang me.”18
When García, known hereafter as “The Living Dead,” concluded, Nieto asked if any of the lawyers would like to cross-examine him. Castro spoke up. “I would like to be allowed to examine the accused,” he said. The judge agreed, and Castro asked García just who exactly committed those crimes. “Six or seven soldiers,” García replied. “And did they act on their own authority or were they obeying orders?” Castro demanded. “They were obeying orders.” Had García overheard any conversations to that effect? Castro asked. Yes, García replied. “One said that for every assailant killed he was going to be promoted a grade, and that by that count, he could already be made a captain.” There were a few good apples among the bad, García allowed, describing a soldier who had appeared reluctant to carry out the orders. He was overruled by another who insisted that the order to finish off the captives had come down from Havana and that they had to comply. Chaviano himself had called to say that no rebels should be returned to Santiago alive.
García’s story came to an end, and Castro paused as if to allow the gravity of it to sink in. Any other questions? the judge asked. Only that the court retain record of this testimony should the opportunity arise to prosecute the perpetrators, Castro replied. Noted, Nieto responded, ringing his bell to return García to his seat. With the silence broken, the courtroom filled with the murmur of hundreds of voices. Nieto called for order—“for the last time,” he warned. It was only just after noon and two thirds of the defendants had yet to be called. As the soldiers stirred uneasily, and as the lawyers whispered among themselves, Nieto consulted his fellow judges. He then dismissed the trial until the following Thursday.
Each day in court began with a roll call of the scores of defendants, a tedious and seemingly unnecessary process to which nobody paid particular attention. When the trial recommenced on Saturday morning, September 26, after an extended break, the bailiff was making his way down the alphabet when he came to the letter C. “Fidel Castro,” the bailiff intoned. Nothing. “Fidel Castro,” the bailiff said a little louder. Still nothing. “Fidel Castro!” the bailiff exclaimed. Silence . . . accompanied by quizzical looks all around. The chief justice ordered the bailiff to proceed. The bailiff explained that Fidel Castro was not present. The trial must go on, Nieto responded. “The trial cannot proceed without the main defendant,” Baudilio Castellanos insisted, as the judges eyed one another quizzically.
After an awkward silence, Nieto threw up his hands. Castellanos remained on his feet, arms extended on the defense attorneys’ table, as if refusing to back down. His colleagues rose around him, with the guards quickly following suit. “Sit down,” Nieto commanded, before summoning the army lieutenant in charge of trial security. Lieutenant Vicente Camps scurried up to the bench. Where was Fidel Castro? Nieto demanded. Camps handed him a letter, which Nieto read and then passed on to the two other judges. He had an announcement. “The principal defendant has not been brought to trial, owing to his having taken ill at Boniato prison.” Accompanying the letter was a signed doctor’s certificate confirming Castro’s indisposal. Nieto prepared to go on.
“Fidel is NOT ill!” cried a voice from among the defendants. The voice belonged to Melba Hernández, one of the few female defendants in the dock. Hernández quickly made her way toward the judges’ bench, while reaching beneath the scarf that covered her head to remove a small note concealed within the folds of her ample hair. Nieto ordered her back to her seat, as several guards moved to cut her off. “OK,” she replied, “but first I have to deliver this letter from doctor Fidel Castro to the Tribunal.” She dropped a slip of paper on the dais. One after another, the judges read the paper before passing it to the court secretary. Nieto told the lawyers that they could read the note at the end of the session. The lawyers protested, and Nieto called a ten-minute recess as the courtroom erupted in commotion.
In his note to the magistrates, Castro charged the authorities of contriving his illness to prevent him from exposing the egregious lies concocted by the government to conceal the massacre of Moncada prisoners. He was perfectly healthy, he told the judges, neither ill nor ailing in any way. He protested his isolation in jail since his arrest and claimed to be the victim of repeated assassination attempts, first by the pretext of the Ley de Fugas, then by poisoning and other means still unfolding. He asked the judges to dispatch a respected doctor from the University of Santiago de Cuba to evaluate him and confirm his health. He also demanded that the judges take responsibility for all the prisoners’ safety hereafter by ensuring their transport to and from the courthouse for the duration of the trial. He was not alone, he said, in imagining the government staging a prisoner escape to simply finish the defendants off. Finally, he asked the judges to share his letter with colleagues throughout the country, including the National Lawyers Guild, the Supreme Court, and other civil society institutions, to inform them about the level of deception to which the government had stooped.
Typically, Castro concluded by emphasizing what he knew to be at stake here, both for the Urgency Court and for Cuba’s judicial system. If the trial continued in its bastardized form, it would be thoroughly discredited, he warned. The eyes of the nation were on this courthouse. This was not a question of one man’s life, but of the fate of the ideas of “right and honor.”19
With the ten-minute recess approaching the twenty-minute mark, Nieto returned to the bench, saying that he had called Castro’s jailers to account and dispatched a team of physicians to evaluate the defendant’s health. Meanwhile, the trial would proceed. The owner of the Siboney farm was called. Did he know of the pending attack? He did not. Had he been to the farm when the rebels were present? He had not. Whom besides Abel Santamaría possessed keys to the house? Only Andrés Pérez Chaumont, aide to Colonel Chaviano. No one else. Next came the radio operator who had pulled out of the plan just before departing for Moncada. Had he refused to participate, the prosecutor asked? He had, indeed. Castro did not force you to go? “I would not be forced,” he said, insisting that Castro had defrauded him and that he had wanted no part in the attack. More innocent men were called. Nieto ordered another break. Heat and humidity hung over the courthouse like an electric blanket. The pace of the proceedings would have to be accelerated. When the court reconvened at 10:30 a.m., eighteen defendants testified within forty minutes, giving the audience hope that the trial might speedily conclude.20
Later that morning the prosecutor Mendieta approached the bench. He handed the judges a list of political leaders exonerated by Castro, requesting that they be granted provisional liberty. After a brief recess, the judges agreed, whereupon the trial was suspended to the following Monday. A long succession of rebels testified that day. Had they participated? Yes! Was their participation coerced? No! Had they used knives to attack innocent patients? Had they fired indiscriminately? Did they carry grenades? Were there foreigners among them? No, no, no. No! One by one, Chaviano’s lies fell by the wayside in the face of testimony by young rebels with nothing to hide.
Judge Nieto granted Raúl Castro the final word of the day. He aired a fear common among the rebels that his brother’s life remained in grave jeopardy, despite the intervention of the court. “Fidel still runs the risk of being assassinated at any time at Boniato prison,” Raúl Castro announced, “the Court must recognize this.” He went on to list examples of ongoing mistreatment of defendants, begging the court to treat a crime as a crime. Just as the defendants would not deny their role in the attack, so they would not be silent in the face of crimes committed against them. Raúl Castro’s plea brought the day to an end.
Day after day of testimony followed in which prosecutor Mendieta tried vainly to confirm Chaviano’s lies.21 Finally on Monday, October 5, day nine of the trial, it came time for closing arguments. Nieto called the courtroom to order and invited Mendieta to have his say. The prosecutor began by asking the court to free the sixty-five defendants who had played no role in the attack, including the eleven who had previously been granted provisional liberty. After reading the names on this list, Mendieta then turned to the perpetrators. They invoked the doctrine of José Martí, the prosecutor observed. They said they wanted to liberate Cuba. But he doubted Martí would have endorsed “a war among brothers.” It was true that “Martí preached war, but not among Cubans, rather against a foreign yoke. I don’t think we should invoke Martí in response to these questions,” he said.
Mendieta reminded the audience that at the beginning of the trial he had asked Castro why a “cynical” public would ever follow the likes of little old him. For the same reason Cubans followed Antonio Maceo, Manuel de Céspedes, and the other fathers of Cuban Independence, Castro had replied, namely, because the rebels shared their dream of Cuba Libre, of a Cuba free and independent of foreign rule. Ah, but these others had already proved themselves in war and civil society, Mendieta said now. The act before the court hardly merited comparison. The rebels were misguided. “They brought only mourning to their own households and to the households of their friends and soldiers,” while “generating hatred among Cubans.” Cubans were nobler than that.
Mendieta acknowledged that the defendants had comported themselves with honor, sincerity, and valor. He found their confessions “civically minded” and even suggested that they might one day fulfill their objectives (presumably by nonviolent means). By sparing the lives of soldiers in the very building in which the trial was now taking place, the attackers under Raúl Castro’s authority had demonstrated a “nobility” no different from the soldiers they confronted. A people that behaves with such valor and nobleness should not succumb to fratricide, he said. He signed off by commending the principal defendant’s “odd strength of character.”22
The next day, Tuesday, came Castellanos’s turn. He commended the magistrates for their professionalism. In a setting in which the legislature was shuttered, the press moribund, the Constitution destroyed, and the rights of man trampled, it was indeed a pleasant surprise to see a Cuban court uphold the rule of law and judges carry out their duty with professionalism befitting their station. If there were shortcomings in this trial, they were not entirely the fault of the magistrates, Castellanos observed, and he thanked them for providing security in the chamber. He then returned the prosecutor’s courtesy, acknowledging that Mendieta “had acted according to the dictates of his conscience,” no mean thing in the Cuba of Fulgencio Batista.23
Next Castellanos turned to the glaring absence in the courtroom—Fidel Castro, the main defendant. Castro’s honorable bearing before the court jogged Castellanos’s memory, and he told the story of witnessing Castro’s first court case as a lawyer, when the tables were turned and Castro defended Castellanos against a charge of public disorder. In winning Castellanos’s acquittal, Castro had impressed the presiding magistrate, who noted that the defense attorney had carried out his job with poise and polish unusual in one so young, pointedly telling Castro that Cuban law expected much from him. This was the person so feared by the Batista government that it had gone out of its way not only to banish him from the trial, but to try to assassinate him in the process. What was the government so afraid of?
Castellanos then proceeded to refute the prosecutor’s suggestion that the Moncada attack owed little to the doctrines of Martí or the tradition of Cuba’s founding fathers. Wasn’t it interesting, he observed, that the prisoners asked for but were not allowed to read Martí’s works at Boniato Prison during the trial? In the name of Martí, he continued, if there existed no similarity between the two, why in the world forbid the prisoners from reading the Apostle’s books? He then cited Martí’s own “Manifesto of Montecristi” (1895), which described war undertaken on behalf of liberty as the crucible of national solidarity and virtue. The prosecutor maintained that the Moncada attack could only promote disorder. Well, Castellanos asked the magistrates, what kind of order reigned in the Cuba of Fulgencio Batista? For every rebel on his way to jail, Castellanos warned, there were countless others ready to take his or her place, to support a war for liberty. It was not hatred the rebels sowed, nor hatred that inspired them. They offered up their lives for a better Cuba. And despite the best effort of Batista propaganda ministers “repeating and repeating and repeating” their lies, it was not hatred with which the country now regarded them.
Castellanos closed by asking the judges to acquit the defendants before them. They were not the ringleaders of the alleged crime but the rank and file. The ringleaders were either dead (Santamaría and Tasende) or absent (Castro). Moreover, it could be argued that the attackers had committed no crime. Crimes were acts against established law. There was nothing lawful or legitimate about Batista’s government. There were any number of eminent legal authorities going back through history ready to defend the rebels’ actions. Indeed, Cuba’s own Constitution sanctioned armed resistance against tyranny. The Rights of Man of the French Revolution did likewise, even to the extreme of tyrannicide. Based on these and other law codes, the defendants were not guilty and must be granted liberty. There cannot be two kinds of justice in this world, Castellanos concluded, “one for Fidel Castro and another for Chaviano, one for God and one for the Devil.”24
After a short recess, the judges announced the sentences for the confessed rebels (minus Castro). For their part in leading the assault, Ernesto Tizol, Oscar Alcalde, and Pedro Miret each received a sentence of thirteen years in prison. Curiously, Raúl Castro, by no means one of the principal planners of the attack (he had only recently returned from an extended trip abroad that June), was also sentenced to thirteen years. The majority of the foot soldiers—Juan Almeida, Jesús Montané, Andrés García Díaz (the Living Dead), and so on—received ten-year terms. A few others received three-year terms. Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were sentenced to seven months at the Women’s Correctional Facility in Guanajay, the hometown of Rosa Mier. The men were all supposed to be imprisoned at Havana’s La Cabana fortress. At the last minute, they were rerouted to the National Men’s Prison on the Isle of Pines.
With the majority of the rebels on their way to jail, there remained only the cases of those too sick or injured to appear in court: Castro, Abelardo Crespo, and Gerardo Poll Cabrera (two other accused, an injured rebel named Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, and the Communist Party leader, Juan Marinello, would be the last to be tried a few days later). To accommodate Crespo, who was bedridden from a bullet wound, the trial took place in a patient room at Santiago’s Civil Hospital on Friday, October 16, 1953. The room measured a mere twelve feet square but somehow managed to accommodate a makeshift bench for the judges, desks and armchairs for the prosecutor, court secretary, and defense attorneys (including Fidel Castro), seats for six journalists (including Marta Rojas), Gerardo Poll, and Judge Mejías’s niece (a recent law school graduate), and Crespo’s bed. Armed guards occupied the meager standing space that remained. Last but not least, in one corner of the room stood a cabinet containing a life-size skeleton whose hollow eyes and ghoulish smile provided a fitting commentary on the state of justice in Batista’s Cuba.
Castro entered the courtroom at 9 a.m., dressed in the same aquamarine suit, white shirt, and brown tie that he had worn on September 22, when he last appeared at the Palace of Justice. He was already bathed in sweat, though, as always, he did not seem to notice. Over the suit he wore a fraying black robe borrowed from the local Lawyers Guild. Observers divide the day into two parts: the conventional parade of accused and witnesses, including Castro, and a long address by Castro to the court (later published in expanded form as “History Will Absolve Me”).
Castro had already assumed responsibility for the attack on the Moncada Barracks and exposed the government’s lies. Hence this stage of the trial proceeded with relatively little drama. In one short but telling exchange, Castro asked Major Andrés Pérez Chaumont, second in command at Moncada and the person who, along with Chaviano, was thought to have ordered the massacre, how many rebels he had met in hostile encounters in the first three days following the attack. “There were many,” Chaumont replied. “I went out on three such patrols.” Could he remember the number of rebels killed on these patrols, Castro asked? Eighteen, Chaumont said. And on the army side, how many had fallen? One or two were injured, Chaumont replied. How could Chaumont explain eighteen deaths and no injuries among the rebels, and one or two minor injuries among his men? Castro demanded. “Had he used atomic weapons?” Chaumont erupted, forcing Nieto to intervene. Ultimately, Chaumont attributed the vast discrepancy in losses among the two sides to the “better aim” of his marksmen. Ah, Castro said, and stood down.25
Prosecutor Mendieta’s summary lasted a mere two minutes. Poll should go free, the other two should be sentenced according to Article 148 of the Civil Defense Code. The law stipulated a sentence of between five and twenty years for those “who committed an armed uprising against the constitutional powers of the state.” Mendieta asked the judges to sentence Castro to the full extent of the law: to twenty years plus six more for aggravating circumstances. Mendieta then took his seat without justifying his extraordinary sentence. A prosecutor would request a twenty-six-year prison sentence without bothering to explain himself? Castro could not conceal his astonishment. But it was not yet his turn to speak. First came a word from Poll’s attorney and then from Castellanos on behalf of Crespo. Finally, the chief magistrate turned to Castro. Did he still intend to assume his own defense? That he did, Castro replied. The room fell silent as he asked to borrow Castellanos’s copy of Cuba’s legal code, along with a piece of paper and a pen. The clock on the wall read 11 a.m. The morning proceedings had taken two hours so far. Castro would hold his audience in place for two hours more.
Castro regarded his auto-defense as the opportunity to complete the task interrupted by his removal from the Palace of Justice, namely to defend the rebels’ right to resist an unconstitutional government. He did not intend to inconvenience the court by engaging in “epic narrations,” he said, before launching off on an epic narration. Much of what followed recapitulated testimony already aired during the formal phase of the trial. From there, Castro went on to lay out his revolutionary platform in the most detail to date. Had the rebels been successful, he said, they would have enacted a series of Revolutionary Laws to restore the 1940 Constitution, redistribute land, promote profit sharing, and recover stolen property. He pledged to align Cuban policy in Latin America “with the democratic peoples of this continent.” Countries struggling against political oppression would find sympathy and support “in the land of Martí.” Only then could Cuba become “a bulwark of liberty and not a shameful link in the chain of despotism.”
This Castro—committed to social equity, regulation, and central planning—will be familiar to casual observers. Later in life, Castro responded to critics who accused him of ignoring individual rights by remarking that all individuals had the right to good medical care, education, housing, employment, and a decent standard of living, as if elevating social rights over civil and political liberties. But at this stage in his development, he remained a liberal constitutionalist and civil libertarian. If you do not like the person in office, he had scolded Batista after the coup, then vote him out.
So long, that is, as that person in office has been placed there legitimately. The most compelling part of this speech was Castro’s detailed recitation of how Batista’s conduct during and after his coup violated Cuban law. The people’s liberties derived not from individual largesse but from natural right as expressed in institutions like the 1940 Constitution. That Constitution made military coups illegal, and in the face of such provided citizens with a “lifeboat”—the last remaining right that every individual everywhere possesses by virtue of his or her humanity—namely, the right to resist tyranny. Castro had done his reading, citing in support of the right to rebel not only chapter and verse of the Cuban Constitution but nameless ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese philosophers, Montesquieu, John of Salisbury, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Philipp Melancthon, John Calvin, Juan de Mariana, François Hotman, Stephanus Junius Brutus, John Knox, John Poynet, John Althus, America’s founding fathers, John Milton, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine besides.
At stake here was Cuba’s place in the constitutional pantheon. Bearing ideas like the social contract and the consent of the governed, revolutionary mavericks in North America and France overthrew inherited power. Those revolutions made possible “the liberation of the Spanish Colonies in the New World,” Castro noted, “the final link in the chain being broken by Cuba.” There remained much work to do. And so, rather than juxtaposing social rights to civil liberties, the writers of Cuba’s 1940 Constitution codified what Castro called “the social function of private property and of man’s inalienable right to a decent standard of living.” Therein lay Cuba’s contribution to liberal constitutionalism, he emphasized; it recognized “the socialist currents of our time.” Read this way, the reform platform he championed in this and other speeches was not out of place among Western political philosophy but was simply the most updated articulation of it. Castro’s future and the future of his Movement would depend on his being right.
When Castro was picked up by Cuban authorities in the hills above the village of Sevilla a few days after his disastrous attack, he did not seem to have much going for him. Within less than three months, thanks to the astonishing incompetence of the Batista government, and to his own resourcefulness, he emerged from the ordeal triumphant, if not yet victorious, in the eyes of many Cubans. In the courtroom, he had conducted himself with dignity, professionalism, and respect. His intelligence and self-confidence made him formidable in the courtroom; combined with his memory, these rendered many of the contests he entered unfair. The historical record contains no evidence of his knowledge or use of the law being called into question by a fellow counsel, a prosecutor, or a judge. In Batista-era Cuba, his legal arguments were often overruled, but they were rarely, if ever, refuted.
Looking back on this period knowing how things turned out, it is easy to mistake the recklessness of a young firebrand for the revolutionary to be. But little of what Castro argued for in his self-defense was new to Cuban politicians. Years earlier, President Machado himself had articulated a platform not so different from Castro’s, as had subsequent presidential candidates, including Fulgencio Batista. What made Castro radical, even revolutionary, was that he meant what he said and was willing to back his words up with force in a manner not seen in Cuba since the War of Independence. In mid-century Cuba, it would take a revolution to enact sensible reforms, so entrenched were the interests of Cuba’s professional politicians and their foreign patrons.
One hallmark of the ensuing struggle is the extent to which Castro’s early commitment to both civil and political liberties (freedom of expression and association, habeas corpus, the right to vote) and social rights (the right to a good education, good health care, a good job, a fair wage, a decent standard of living) yielded to an emphasis on the latter at the cost of the former. This is a long story, and it need not be rushed. Up to this point in his political development, Castro’s campaign for national regeneration and Cuba Libre depended on his being able to get the word out, to say and publish what he wanted, where he wanted, to whatever audience was willing to listen. Here, again, Castro’s thrust was not all that radical. Addressing questions of liberty and justice, he appealed to a broad swath of Cuban society that included middle- and upper-class Cubans like himself (largely urban, educated, and accustomed to exercising their rights in the press and at the ballot box) and lower-class Cubans (renters and squatters, often rural, uneducated, and underserved). The first constituency had more to gain from a defense of political and civil rights and liberties, the second from talk of land, health care, and educational reform. But the two went together, Castro insisted, as reflected in the still largely aspirational 1940 Constitution. Once everybody enjoyed the social security of regular work, good housing, education, and health care, all would benefit equally from the civil and political rights so prized by intellectual and professional elites.
Castro’s liberal constitutionalism was rooted in the bedrock of Cuban history. Revolution and resistance to tyranny were at the heart of what it meant to be Cuban, he told the magistrates. Since childhood, he had been taught that “to live in chains is to live in opprobrium,” that “to die for the country is to live.” Such teachings, and the rights and liberties they sustained were a “heritage from our forefathers.”26 Defending and extending that freedom was the very essence of patriotism. In choosing resistance over material comfort and political office, the rebels rose to the level of Céspedes, Maceo, Gómez, and Martí, Castro said, before going on to cite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s proposition that to renounce one’s freedom was to renounce one’s status as a man.27