Castro’s plan to save Cuba was bolstered by the release from prison in February 1954 of two trusted lieutenants, Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría, the two women who took part in the Moncada attack. Seasoned militants no less committed to a new Cuba than Castro, the two could expect to shoulder great responsibility for revitalizing the dormant Movement at a time when virtually all fellow members were either in prison, in exile, or in hiding. With this responsibility came great pressure, as Castro expected Hernández and Santamaría to carry out his every command with the devotion and intensity, even mania, with which he himself would have done it. This, of course, was simply not possible. As a result, his cajoling occasionally came off as abuse, raising questions about his ability to delegate authority and work productively with his peers in the Movement.
In mid-April, Castro wrote Hernández a note to discuss strategy and explain how she could get in touch with him. Mirta had advised him about the good work that Hernández and Santamaría were doing, and he began to issue directions. Drawing on the lessons of his prison reading, he told Hernández to begin with propaganda, which he characterized as “the soul of the struggle.” Political messaging must be carefully adjusted to the tenor of the circumstances, he had learned from a book about Napoleon. The obvious talking point of the moment was the illegitimacy and brutality of the Batista government. “We must not stop denouncing the assassinations,” he said. Mirta, who was serving as a messenger, would fill them in on a brochure he was preparing of “decisive importance,” a reference to the forthcoming “History Will Absolve Me.” He also urged the women to organize a memorial for the first anniversary of Moncada. The event must be done with great “dignity,” he advised, and include a demonstration on the Escalinata. If properly orchestrated with the FEU, and timed to coincide with similar events in Santiago de Cuba, New York, Mexico City, and Costa Rica, the demonstration could inflict a “terrible blow” on the Batista government.1
Castro warned Hernández that the fight was sure to become more difficult the closer the rebels came to their goal of overthrowing the dictator. He directed her to travel to Mexico to take the pulse of Raúl Martínez, Lester Rodríguez, and other militants who had eluded prison in the wake of the Moncada and Bayamo attacks. The question of coordinating the Movement’s action with other groups was already proving tricky, and Castro cautioned her to be wary of those who would simply invoke the Movement’s name to fulfill their own agenda, like José Pardo Llada, for instance. The rebels were in an enviable position, having distinguished themselves from the rest of the pack. It would be better for the Movement to “hoist the banner alone until the formidable boys that are imprisoned and who steeled themselves for struggle get out of jail.” Patience was essential now, Castro observed, invoking Martí. “To know how to wait is the great secret of success.”2
This would not be easy, Castro acknowledged. Hernández must not let others’ envy and jealousy get her down. Appearances were everything. She and Santamaría should “offend nobody and smile at everyone.” This was precisely the tactic he had used so successfully at trial (“defending our point of view without stirring the hive”). There would be opportunity soon enough to “crush the cockroaches.” Be open to anyone who wants to help, he said, but “trust no one.”3
With Marx and Lenin fresh on his mind, with two lieutenants free to resume the work, and with “History Will Absolve Me” nearing completion, Castro appeared at once distracted and steely. Revuelta could not help but notice. You don’t write me anymore, she said at the end of April. He had not forgotten her, he wrote back, “it’s just that I am completely submerged in my thoughts”—thoughts which had so recently been centered upon her. He still needed her. To get him books. He was moving on to history, he said, Cuban history. By returning to Cuba’s past, he gained a clearer picture of “the paradise it might become.” That, more than anything else, “is the question that consumes me now. I am more in love with Cuba than ever,” he said, “like a suitor who blindly follows a woman regardless of the many setbacks.” If Revuelta was not jealous now, she was not paying attention. Castro had found his true and only love—the Revolution—and there would never be another rival.4
In early May 1954, the inevitable happened. Letters Castro had written to Revuelta and Mirta crossed, with each ending up in the other’s hands. Mirta called Revuelta to report the error and “exploded,” Revuelta said. Distracted at that moment, she had inadequately explained herself, but she was mortified. She was fond of Mirta, at least she allowed Mirta to think so. Over the course of the preceding months, she had repeatedly sought out Mirta’s and Fidelito’s company, as if a substitute for Castro himself. Initially, Revuelta thought to forward her letter on to Mirta but had decided against it, as she did not know the “tone” Castro had used and did not want the contrast to be hurtful. She urged Castro to reach out to his wife, if only for her (Revuelta’s) sake. Mirta accused Revuelta of “deceit and betrayal,” threatening “to take revenge, by any means,” if she continued to write him. Of course, Mirta had a right to defend what was hers, Revuelta said. She asked him not to second-guess his affection for his wife and begged him not to worry about her. “My conscience is at peace,” she said a little unconvincingly; “the truth will come out in the long run.”5
In fact, Revuelta’s conscience gnawed away at her. In the days ahead, she tried to find consolation in the inspiration behind her originally reaching out to a married man, namely, to comfort him and thereby ease the isolation of prison. There was no dishonor in that. This need not have been kept secret from Mirta. Naively, Revuelta said that she never imagined an outcome as disagreeable as this, and suggested they cease their correspondence. She then repeated some previous advice: the only thing that could assuage Mirta was evidence that his love for her had not changed. Having come face-to-face with “the smoking volcano,” Revuelta thought it in nobody’s interest “to see it erupt.” She pledged to return to her initial silence (though “without forgetting”). “Hasta que Dios quiera,” she signed off, until it pleases God.6
Castro, now fully mobilized politically, interpreted the episode differently. This was not some regrettable, if inevitable, mistake, he wrote, but the result of a deliberate campaign to smear and silence him. Thanks to his special relationship with the censor (“a man incapable of such an oversight”), he knew that these letters had not passed through the usual mill but had been deliberately switched. Previous irregularities in the treatment of their correspondence now made sense, he said. He had been naive not to expect this of Batista officials. Revuelta was right to conclude that they must bring their correspondence to a halt. He hoped she would retain the faith that she had declared in him. He would still write her when he needed something, and when his doing so could not be turned by his enemies into something harmful. “Don’t worry about me,” he signed off, “I am fine.”
Castro’s letter to his wife is not in the public record. He was not a man given to apology and was not accustomed to accepting blame. But Mirta was too valuable to the Movement for him not to patch things up. On May 12, using the subject of Fidelito as an icebreaker, he wrote her a short note to say that he was thinking of her. He’d been looking at a recent photograph of Fidelito and was delighted to see how “big and strong” he had become. He worried lest Ángel be late in providing money to cover her and Fidelito’s expenses and begged her not to waste any money on her prisoner. This was not a letter likely to buoy the spirits of a disheartened wife. “It’s been raining here non-stop,” he wrote; “I almost never see the sun, and rarely use the patio. When I do go outside it’s only for a few minutes as it’s even more boring there than in this cell.” Promising to write again soon, he signed off with “many kisses” to her (and to Fidelito).
This letter was not as transparent as it seemed. Written between the lines of this note, in lemon juice (that old childhood trick!), which once dried faded from view, was another note for Mirta to pass on to Melba Hernández. When the paper was moistened, the hidden contents became visible. The coded letter explained that by this identical method, he would be smuggling out of prison the entire text of his speech at his Santiago trial. The document represented the rebels’ revolutionary program. Nothing could be more important than presenting the Cuban people with a goal worthy of the ultimate sacrifice. Castro acknowledged that his was not the only opposition group at the time. His own members, like those Melba Hernández was to visit in Mexico, were itching for action, and Castro worried lest they fall under the influence of Carlos Prío’s Montrealistas, now feverishly recruiting.7
With his epistolary affair all but over, Castro focused single-mindedly on the task at hand. When next he wrote Revuelta, in late June 1954, he described a “change of tactics.” It was no longer enough for the rebels to act as an independent cell, he told her. It was time to “close ranks with the people,” by which he meant reach out to laborers, peasants, students, and disgruntled professionals. Prison was not a waste of time he said, reprising comments he had made to his brother Ramón. By providing an opportunity “to study, observe, analyze, plan, and shape the men,” it advanced the cause immeasurably. “I know where and how to find Cuba’s best. I began alone; now we are many.”8
Indeed, Castro was no longer in solitary confinement. That same month, two marine convicts had been placed in his cell, to be followed soon by his brother Raúl. Prison officials had joined his cell to another with access to a large outdoor patio, open from sunrise to sundown. He now slept with the lights off and had access to electricity, food, and clean clothes (“for free”). He could follow any schedule he wanted. Come to think of it, he said playfully, “we don’t pay any rent, and have visitors twice a month”; could life be any better on the outside? He could not say how long he would remain “in this paradise,” but expected the presidential election, scheduled for November 1, would “leave a residue of dissatisfaction and discontent.” Perhaps an amnesty could relieve “the tension.”9
The mass mobilization to which Castro committed himself that month depended on getting the Movement’s message out. Focus on propaganda! he had told Hernández in April. He now practiced as he preached, reaching out to Luis Conte, who boasted a loyal opposition following on Oriente Radio Network and had somehow managed to escape Batista’s censors. In early June, Conte was to be celebrated at an event at Havana’s Teatro de la Comedia. Mirta attended the event, reading aloud a letter by her husband ostensibly praising Conte while calling attention to his own fate and what it augured for the Ortodoxo Party’s future.
Of all Ortodoxo officials, Castro wrote, Conte had been the most consistent defender of the rebel cause (“of those who do not resign themselves to be slaves in the thousand-times glorious motherland where today her children are even denied the right to be men”). Castro described the treatment he suffered in jail since being cast in solitary confinement the previous February. Conte himself had been recently jailed for speaking the truth and defending constitutionalism and the rule of law. Together the two made quite a contrast to the “traitors” who abandoned Ortodoxo principles to seek personal gain alongside Batista in a discredited Congress. It wasn’t too late to make amends, Castro said. “Everything is saved if our principles are saved; from the depth of rot the redeeming ideal will rise, purified and clean.”10
Castro followed up a week later with a personal letter to Conte commending his work and asking him to use his influence to mount an amnesty campaign for the Moncada rebels exiled in Mexico. Together with Mirta, Hernández, Santamaría, and perhaps even Roberto Agramonte, they could enlist the help of university students, the Cuban bar association, and other sympathetic groups to join the cause. Conte might announce the length of Castro’s prison sentence day by day on his radio show. That would provide incalculable publicity. Naturally, Castro had other ideas to further the work of propaganda. If his friend agreed to devote just a little of his time and energy on this, together they could “attack the dictatorship in an area where it cannot defend itself.”11
Hernández’s trip to Mexico went better than expected. Through Mirta, Castro learned that his lieutenant had been warmly welcomed by the exiles, all of whom were doing well. Still, her visit confirmed his suspicion that other opposition leaders were also mobilizing. In Mexico, Hernández acquired a copy of a letter from Carlos Prío instructing his agents to “penetrate the Fidelista group,” and vowing to eliminate it once coming to power, a warning Castro would never forget.12 More worrying in the short term to Castro was news that Prío had approached Aureliano Sánchez Arango, founder of the action group known as AAA, insisting that it was time for the opposition to unite. To Castro’s chagrin, Conte, Santamaría, and Hernández were inclined to agree with Prío. Two sharp letters to the two women, written in mid-June, reveal Castro’s increasingly imperious management style.
There was no evidence to suggest that Auténtico Party leaders like Prío and Sánchez Arango had a solution to the problems besetting Cuba, Castro wrote. Nor had they demonstrated any competence as opposition leaders (as evidence, he pointed to reports that a list of Auténtico members had recently been discovered by police in a suitcase loaded with contraband). In fact, the Auténtico Party appeared to be in a state of meltdown, “lacking ideals and morale and compromised to the bone.” But regardless of their current state, the women’s inclination to ally with them constituted “an ideological deviation.” If the Movement had not done so earlier when it was penniless and unknown, why would it do so now? “By virtue of what principle, what idea, what reason are we to lower our unblemished flag in their name?” he demanded. “What ideas, what history, what principles do they propose to join to ours?” Even if sincere, Prío’s overture came two years too late. The Revolution’s first order of business would be to clean out the nation’s political stables to make room for “honest men.”
The next most urgent task, Castro said, was to “mobilize tens of thousands of men.” This would not be done clandestinely, as before, but openly, with the rebels making the case for change in propaganda distributed to the Cuban people. At this critical stage of the conflict, ideological clarity and consistency was everything, and there was simply no room for those “who change their political positions like they change their clothes.” Who did this leave? Why, him and his fellow prisoners, whose self-sacrifice and discipline gave them (and them alone) the “right” to lead the Revolution. Just as the rebels had pride of place among the opposition, so he himself would lead the rebels. “I have reason to know about such things,” he told the two, “because to me has fallen the task of searching and organizing and fighting against a million intrigues.”
His lecture over, Castro turned to tactics. The biggest threat to the Movement at this time came from mercenaries ready to sell themselves to the first person able to put a gun in their hands, he said. Such people should be expelled at once, “just as those who cower in the face of battle should be shot.” The Revolution had no room for “gangsters or adventurers.” It wanted only “men conscious of their historical destiny, who knew how to work patiently for the well-being of their country.” That had always been the Movement’s guiding light. That was what motivated his fellow prisoners. “None of us are impatient,” he said. The rebels knew how to wait. And they would be ready to strike when the time was right.
Castro then turned to the subject of “History Will Absolve Me,” recently smuggled out of prison. He ordered Santamaría and Hernández to print and distribute 100,000 copies before the upcoming presidential election. With Conte Agüero’s assistance, they should get copies to all major news outlets and to all important Ortodoxo leaders. This had to be done with absolute discretion, making sure that none of the production sites were discovered and that nobody was detained. They were to safeguard this document as if it were their own limbs. Mirta would help them in this. The very future of the Movement depended on this mission. Though written by him alone, the document “contained our program and ideology without which nothing else was possible.”13
Stung by Castro’s criticism, it took Santamaría and Hernández six weeks to write back. They accused Castro of committing the sort of errors that he had cautioned others against: trusting in hearsay, making assumptions about people’s motivations, playing favorites, and promoting the very infighting he claimed to detest. He had said that things would be hard. Hard they were ready for, and for “firmness,” too. What dismayed them, Hernández wrote, was when they looked to Castro for firmness and found him wanting. She raised the case of a recent incident in which Castro had accused her and Santamaría of pettiness in questioning the reliability of a new recruit. After everything the two had been through Hernández couldn’t believe it. “You obviously don’t know me very well,” she wrote.14
In letters that summer, Castro urged Conte to appeal to Miguel Quevedo, editor of Bohemia magazine, to publicize the plight of the Moncada prisoners and join the call for amnesty. The July 12 edition of Bohemia suggests that Conte achieved his mission beyond Castro’s wildest dreams. A four-page spread introduces readers to the National Men’s Prison on the Isle of Pines. Photographs of the Moncada prisoners share the pages with images of soldiers convicted in various conspiracies against the military dictatorship. Due to the censorship in effect since the Moncada attack and subsequent trial, this constituted many Cubans’ introduction to Castro’s group. In these photos, the rebels do not seem like the diabolical murderers that Batista and Chaviano made them out to be. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish Castro’s men from the professional soldiers. Castro was the inspiration for the article, and he was its main beneficiary. Two entire pages are devoted to photographs and commentary of and by him. These pages, too, belie the government’s portrait of a young nihilist bent on cold-blooded murder.
At the time of this profile, Castro was one month shy of twenty-eight. The photographs reveal a solid, increasingly columnar young man, clean-shaven, crisply dressed, just beginning to boast a double chin. He looks well-fed, smokes a cigar, chats easily, and listens intently to questions posed by an interviewer. The images include a few photographs from earlier, happier times, showing Castro alongside Mirta and Fidelito, in something approaching familial bliss. The net effect is of a serious, reflective, and responsible leader, and this before you arrive at his words.
These were to be the first words that Castro could be sure would reach the Cuban public since his arrest, and he chose them carefully. He began by complimenting his jailers for their fairness and professionalism. “Despite being separated from my companions,” he remarked, “I am being treated with the highest consideration possible given the circumstances.” He was granted normal privileges and enjoyed regular visits from his family. The place was run by the book. He had never been mistreated. The food was good.
Pivoting quickly, he said that he hoped this interview would serve as a bridge allowing the nation to transcend the current fratricide. Asked for his thoughts about the state of the Ortodoxo Party, he said that it should unite to halt the upcoming presidential election, which was called to rubber-stamp the dictatorship. In fact, the party was badly split at this time, with some (Carlos Márquez Sterling and Federico Fernández Casas) calling for it to field a presidential candidate of its own, some (Emilio Ochoa) conniving with Carlos Prío and his Montrealistas, and some (Roberto Agramonte and Castro) insisting the party boycott the election and maintain its distance from other opposition groups. In the current political context, Castro told Bohemia, a free and fair election was impossible, hence all who participated in it would only legitimate electoral fraud and further entrench the dictatorship. In short, he was all for party unity, but only if the party lived up to the principles of its founder, Eduardo Chibás, and recommitted itself in the name of the Moncada fallen to the welfare of Cubans as a whole. “That is my opinion,” Castro concluded, “and I say it knowing that it may win me a thousand enemies and five more years in jail.”15
One of the photographs of the Bohemia spread stands out from the rest. It reveals Castro not in animated conversation, but seated alone, his face sober, his focus riveted on an article in the previous month’s Bohemia about a social revolution not so different from the one he himself imagined for Cuba coming undone. GUATEMALA, blared the headline, its contents recounting the latest chapter in President Jacobo Árbenz’s effort to raise the living standard of the nation’s indigenous majority by redistributing land, expanding education, and broadening suffrage. As in Cuba, this initiative met fierce resistance from those with the most to lose, including the Guatemalan military (from which Árbenz himself had sprung), and U.S. companies accustomed to go about their business as usual. Throw in a few communists in government ranks, an escalating Cold War, and savvy opportunists all around (including in Washington, D.C.), and you have the potential for a big explosion. In June 1954, Guatemala exploded when a motley band of disgruntled officers backed by U.S. warplanes toppled Árbenz, persecuted, jailed, and assassinated progressive ministers and judges, and restored military dictatorship to the country under the command of a colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas.16
The caption accompanying this photograph does not refer directly to the incidents described here. But the lesson was not lost on Castro and other revolutionaries to be, including Ernesto (Che) Guevara, who, as a restless and peripatetic young physician, witnessed these events firsthand. Those who aspired to lead movements for national sovereignty and social reform in Latin America at the height of the Cold War would have to reckon with the opposition of the United States. In Cuba all the more so, given the two nations’ intimate relationship.
Always a perfectionist, Castro refused to let well enough alone. After reading the profile, Castro dispatched his wife, Mirta, to Bohemia’s headquarters to correct a potential misinterpretation of his plight. This represented the last time the couple worked as a team. That month, their marriage suffered a shock graver than the revelation of Castro’s epistolary love affair. Listening to his radio on the evening of Saturday, July 17, Castro caught news of Mirta being relieved of a position in the Batista government. Castro knew of her family’s intimacy with Batista going back to their common roots in Banes. Mirta’s brother and his old friend Rafael served as Batista’s undersecretary of the interior (responsible for state security). But Castro couldn’t imagine Mirta ever taking a job in the government of his sworn enemy—no matter how strapped she was for cash. The story implied that Mirta had done no work at all but was nevertheless receiving a government salary—a common form of corruption known colloquially as la botella (the bottle)—which, if true, could jeopardize Castro’s credibility.
Unable to believe what he had heard, Castro assumed this was yet another government plot to destroy him. “Perhaps the government has forged your signature or perhaps someone has spoken in your name,” he wrote his wife. That would be easy to find out. Meanwhile, he had already begun legal proceedings. If this were the work of her brother Rafael, she must demand that he take it back even if it cost him his job. “It is your name that’s in play here,” Castro said. Rafael could not avoid responsibility for slandering “his only sister, now motherless and fatherless, and with her husband in jail!” Now more than ever it was important for her to present the text of “History Will Absolve Me” to Miguel Quevedo and Bohemia. It was Batista, along with her brother, who invited the conflict. “I recognize your pain and your great sadness,” he said; “you can count unconditionally on my confidence and love.”17
Meanwhile, in a note to Conte, Castro characterized the “plot” as “ruinous, cowardly, indecent, and intolerable.” Despite his reluctance to believe it, it appeared that Mirta was being “seduced” by her family. The event was “hard and sad beyond imagination,” he said. The Revolution itself was at stake here, and Castro vowed to take appropriate action no matter how dire the consequences, even if this meant breaking with his wife. “Only a faggot like Hermida in the last stage of sexual degeneration” could have come up with such a cowardly plot, Castro said, referring to interior minister Ramón Hermida, Rafael’s boss. Hermida deserved to be shot, Castro declared, before asking whether he might challenge the minister to a duel? Rafael, too, for that matter. “I am blind with rage, and can’t even think.” Conte had urged him to reconcile with Mirta; Castro reported that there would be no reconciliation. “On private matters, I have already made my decision,” he said, “which I must take as a man who places duty to the homeland and the love of its ideals above all other sentiments.” By this time, conjugal love was simply a distraction. Castro would file for a divorce.18
Later that same summer, Conte proposed that Castro and the rebels join a “civic” front, insisting that a disciplined, nonviolent attempt to oust the dictator had never been tried. Castro appeared open to the idea, despite having castigated Hernández and Santamaría for entertaining the idea themselves. “I agree wholly with you regarding that necessity,” he replied. “You cannot imagine the long hours I have meditated on this and innumerable other ideas, based on my experience of the last few years.” It is hard to say whether Castro was being sincere in this reply or simply trying to appear so in order to remain close to Conte and thereby exploit him for propaganda purposes. Regardless, he was prescient in anticipating the challenges such an alliance would present. Challenge number one would be reconciling the various egos that such a front implied, as there was an “excess of personalities and ambitions among the groups and leaders,” his own included. The more experienced and respected the person, the harder it was for him to commit himself to a cause greater than his own.19
Conte’s overture reminded Castro of Martí’s attempt to corral Cuban independence fighters into a coherent force back in 1895. “Each one had his history, his glories, his individual expertise,” Castro said; “each thought himself more entitled to a position of leadership than the next, or at least as equal.” Through patriotism, patience, and persistence, Martí managed to bring these factions together. Of his many glorious feats, this was the most “gigantic.” Had Martí failed, Cuba might be “a Spanish colony or Yankee protectorate” to this day.20
October was a difficult month for Castro. With election day fast approaching, any hope for a political amnesty faded away. That month Batista bestowed the Order of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Medal upon Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The award mocked Céspedes’s dedication to liberty and independence, Castro said. Meanwhile, at a meeting in Monterrey, Mexico, the old politicians convened to discuss Cuba’s future, but without acknowledging the need for social and political reform.
On the other hand, “History Will Absolve Me” was at long last published and disseminated throughout the country—not, to be sure, in the volume Castro had imagined—but to enthusiasm and happy effect. A glossy edition of the pamphlet hit the street in New York City on October 30. The document publicized the plight of the political prisoners still languishing on the Isle of Pines. At the end of the month, while listening to a radio station out of Oriente, Castro learned firsthand that his message was getting through. At the end of a political rally meant to whip up support for Ramón Grau (who pulled out of the fraudulent election within days), Castro heard the crowd chanting his, rather than Grau’s, name. “What a formidable lesson for the assembled elite!” a grateful Castro told his sister Lidia.21
In an uncontested election on November 1, 1954, Batista received just shy of 1.3 million votes. The election lent a veneer of legitimacy to Batista’s dictatorship but did nothing to stop the violence and repression afflicting Cuba. The following January 28, Batista’s police prevented Grau himself from honoring the birth of José Martí. The same day, the police attacked a group of students in Santiago de Cuba on the way to Martí’s grave. Others were arrested across the island. Books were banned, dissidents intimidated, students beaten up, workers arrested.22 Batista’s inauguration on February 24, 1955, did not stop the murder, intimidation, and arrest of dissidents. But it did imbue the new president with a feeling of generosity that inspired him to take up the subject of amnesty for Castro and his companions. In his first letter from the National Men’s Prison back in November 1953, Castro had told his parents that he expected his prison term to be short. His optimism was based on speculation surrounding Batista’s announcement in October 1953 that he planned to hold a presidential election the following November. At the time of the announcement, many opposition leaders were in jail or in exile, and any thoughts Batista had about achieving electoral legitimacy depended on his enabling rival political parties to field a plausible candidate or two.
This prompted the talk of political amnesty. But an amnesty of whom? Of all political prisoners? An influential few? Over the course of the next few months, Batista granted amnesty to opposition leaders piecemeal—one here, a few there, talk of perhaps a couple more—before finally announcing a general amnesty on June 4, 1954, for all political opponents except the Moncada attackers, who had done nothing to improve their chances by serenading the dictator on his visit to the Isle of Pines the previous February.
The rebels’ case was not entirely forgotten. On Saturday, May 15, 1954, the day before Mother’s Day in Cuba, a group of parents of rebel prisoners calling itself the “Suffering Mothers” released a message to the country. The nation was about to celebrate its Independence Day (on May 20). But were Cubans truly independent? they asked. Were they happy? Had the nation “fulfilled the aspirations of the liberty struggle?” Of course, the answer depended on whom you asked. “We can’t be happy while our boys are in jail.” They called for amnesty not just for their own boys but all political prisoners. “Empty the cells,” they demanded. “Open the gates. Grant liberty to those detained solely for their ideals.”23
Batista’s “election” relegated the question of amnesty to at best tertiary importance. But the idea was kept alive by the parents of Jesús Montané (from Nueva Gerona on the Isle of Pines) and Juan Almeida (from Havana’s Poey neighborhood), who took advantage of the parade of friends and family members through the Montané household on visiting days to organize an amnesty committee. They produced postcards publicizing the prisoners’ plight and pleading for “a generous amnesty” for Cubans jailed “because of their love for country and its freedom.” In early December, the FEU picked up the cause, amplifying the families’ message. By the end of the year 1954, the Montané-Bosque committee created an amnesty petition, with family and friends (and friends of friends) fanning out across the country, going door-to-door, visiting factories, shops, schools, and universities, collecting signatures, distributing pamphlets and telegrams, and writing articles for newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts.
The amnesty campaign provided a lesson in political mobilization that transcended its immediate cause. By its conclusion the following May, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had signed the petition. The heart of the campaign through winter and spring of 1954 coincided with the publication of “History Will Absolve Me,” and Castro was becoming a household name. The Communist Party (PSP) was not the only group once leery of Castro to get on the amnesty bandwagon. In late February, a who’s who of respected writers and politicians, including Carlos Márquez Sterling, José Pardo Llada, Luis Conte Agüero, and Max Lesnik, signed a petition, published in Bohemia, demanding “freedom for those imprisoned for political reasons and guarantees for the return of all those in exile, with no qualifications or exclusions.”24 Batista himself took up the subject that same day, telling journalist Marta Rojas that a new amnesty law should “be as broad as the people want it to be.” He said he “would not be averse to approving an act of pardon passed by the Congress if it would bring the nation long-term peace.” This could not be an unconditional amnesty, mind; he would grant “no exceptional benefits to those who have broken the laws of the republic so that these groups could then go on disturbing family life, the economy, our institutions, and the nation itself.”25
As the amnesty campaign gained momentum, Castro and Revuelta’s correspondence ground to a halt. The two exchanged nary a letter in the month of November. Castro wrote a brief note in early December on the subject of books. He had been reading with “extraordinary spirit,” he told her. He loved Robert Sherwood’s book on FDR, and asked her to get him the second volume. Curiously, he expressed interest in Simón Bolívar, as if encountering him for the first time. He wanted something beyond Thomas Rourke’s Man of Glory, he said, wondering if Cubans had written anything about the man who had “liberated five countries.” His ambition seemed to be swelling.
Back in October, he had said that it was time he and Revuelta moved beyond the scandal. December arrived and he himself had clearly not done so. The thing that kept it present, he explained, was the pain of not being able to express his love for her adequately—to write without holding himself back. Again, he refused to take responsibility for their predicament, blaming it once more on his enemies in the government.
There was one topic on which stoicism eluded him, namely, the well-being of Fidelito, now in the presence of those who had become his mortal enemies, the Díaz-Balarts (including Mirta). In late October, he had received news from his sister Lidia that his divorce was nearly settled, and that, according to his wishes, Fidelito would remain in school in Havana. At the end of November, however, Lidia informed him that Mirta had taken Fidelito to Miami without his consent. He planned to ask a judge to order the boy’s return. “So deep is the chasm that separates me from these people,” he told his sister, “that I resist even the thought of my son spending a single night beneath the same roof as my despicable enemies, receiving on his innocent cheeks the kisses of such miserable Judases.”26
Revuelta counseled against his taking Fidelito away from his mother. The best place for a young child, she said, was in its mother’s arms. Castro would not budge on this and wanted Revuelta to see the issue from his perspective. This was more than just a family affair; Fidelito had become the “mascot” of the Moncada rebels (“many of whom are no longer among us”). The boy would have to be rescued. A few weeks later, upon learning that a judge had denied him custody, Castro planned to appeal. If the court ruled against him because he was in jail for defending the integrity of Cuba, he told Revuelta, then he would consider defeat in this custody battle “an honor.” An adverse ruling would “reaffirm my principles and my tireless purpose of struggling until death to live in a more respectable Republic. . . . I would not mind losing the case legally if I could win it morally.”27
Just before Christmas, a little over a year after first taking up his correspondence with Revuelta, Castro wrote her one final letter from prison, the longest yet. In a previous letter, he had expressed his novel appreciation for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. This long letter, really a brief for the defense, might be entitled, “Aphrodite Will Absolve Me.” He held a photograph of her in his hand, “eyes big and beautiful, smile burning about me, mouth pretty and provocative (lips seeking a kiss, a million kisses!), gesture resolved, the features of someone talking eloquently about love.” (See Insert 2, Photo 12.) How could he be expected to write “serenely” in the face of this? he asked. “You know that I adore you, and at times lose my mind with love.”28
He had been thinking a lot about the two of them, recently, and also about the matter of honor. The word brought to mind “someone who would sacrifice the opinion of others for the love of another person . . . or who acts out of profound conviction” rather than egotism. Honor was not the same as selflessness or devotion to good; those inspired nobody, he said. He had become devoted to what was “noble, good, intelligent, and humane” in Revuelta. Loving that in her, he came to regard her “with delirium.” There was nothing “impure” or shameful about that. On the contrary, their love for each other was entirely honorable. He went on, as if confessing for the last time what had been welling up in him since the previous May. He had found in her “spiritual essence,” he said, “the feminine ideal.” Her love for him calmed and fulfilled him, just as the psychologist Mira y López promised. What lay ahead he couldn’t say, only that he could not “conceive anything better than to see my life one day united with yours in body and soul.” That seemed unlikely, he allowed, before signing off: “I have much faith and faith makes miracles.”29
Revuelta got the last word. She had just met a doctor who had examined Castro in prison and asked the doctor how the prisoner fared. Well, the doctor replied. And physically? Revuelta asked. Fine again, he said, notwithstanding the prisoner’s concern about his son. The letter reads like an epitaph to unrequited love. “Get some sun,” she counseled. “Take the vitamins I gave you. Take care of yourself.” Yes, she was delicate just now, and her nerves were frayed. But she slept “like a rock,” she said. “Time, long or short, and God, will help me get over my nervousness.”30
Meanwhile, the amnesty campaign gained momentum in the first several months of the new year, thanks to the efforts of the Montané-Bosque committee and its swelling ranks throughout the country. Indeed, the amnesty campaign had become so popular by late winter that former enemies and conservative politicians were coming on board. This made Castro and his allies on the outside suspicious. Looking down from his perch atop University Hill, FEU president José Antonio Echeverría denounced “the contemptible spectacle” of politicians tripping over each other to catch a train that had long since left the station, as if their sudden change of heart could redeem their participation in the recent elections. In March one of Batista’s former cabinet ministers predicted that the amnesty would soon become a reality, “not only because it is supported by the citizens, but because the president of the republic and his cabinet fully share the people’s feelings.”31 In early April, Diario Nacional registered the turning tide of national opinion with a front-page banner emblazoned, “All Cuba Calls for the Amnesty Law.”32
Naturally, Castro had a lot to say about the subject. When, in early March, Bohemia suggested that he had agreed to curtail his political activity in exchange for his liberty, he wrote Conte that he would never agree to such conditions and would happily spend two more years in jail rather than “undermine” his “moral stature.” Castro was still having difficulty wrapping his mind around the fact that his fate was in Batista’s hands.33 Once published, this sentiment earned Castro a hearing before the Administrative Council of the National Men’s Prison at the end of the month. He was sentenced to thirty days in solitary confinement for smuggling a letter out of prison. The same sentence was levied against his brother Raúl, though without the benefit of a hearing. Predictably, the government’s heavy-handed response only increased the call for amnesty. On Monday, May 2, Cuba’s House of Representatives passed an amnesty bill over the objections of Rafael Díaz-Balart, a newly elected congressman. The Senate approved the amnesty bill the following day. On Friday, May 6, Batista signed the bill into law.
That same Monday (May 2), with the amnesty law all but on the books, Castro wrote Lidia what is believed to be his last surviving letter from jail. The immediate need was a place to live. Lidia reported finding an apartment large enough for her liberated half-brothers, their sister Enma, now a resident of Havana, and herself. Adjacent to the apartment was another smaller residence that might serve as a haven from what was sure to be an onslaught of visitors. “I was thinking of turning one of the two apartments into a sort of office where I could take care of my affairs and leave the other exclusively as a residence for the four of us,” Castro explained. “Otherwise one’s home is constantly invaded, and it is impossible to have any kind of private life.”
This he knew from experience, when, as a young attorney, he tried practicing law out of his own kitchen, before finally renting space in Old Havana. The alternative to separating one’s public from private life, he observed, was to “end up tired of people and the world.” There was too much work ahead for that. More than ready to leave prison, he would nonetheless miss a few of its conveniences. “I have a bohemian temperament, which is unorganized by nature,” he told Lidia; “there is nothing more agreeable than having a place where one can flick on the floor as many cigarette butts as one deems convenient without the subconscious fear of a housewife, vigilant as a sentinel, setting the ashtray where the ashes are about to fall.” He had learned the hard way that “domestic peace” was incompatible with the “frenetic energy of a rebel.” It was wise to keep the two apart.
Castro pleaded with his sister to disregard material comfort in order to keep expenses to a minimum. He would have no means of making a living when he got out of jail. He also asked her to take great care of his books. These would be shipped to the new address, and he worried about their safekeeping and organization. Some were worn from use (Martí), some not, some missing, some still in the hands of fellow rebels. He had catalogued the books in his possession more or less by subject (“history, economics, literature, social and political questions, etc.”). There followed talk of money, debt, and creditors, all of which made him wonder if he would not come “to miss the calm of prison.” People were never satisfied with what they had. “Here at least, one is not bothered by creditors.”34
The prisoners were to be freed on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 15, 1955. In preparation, families and friends made arrangements for one last pilgrimage to the Isle of Pines. Lina Castro traveled to the capital, where she awaited the return of her sons. Enma and Juanita Castro sailed to Nueva Gerona and took their place among the eager greeters who amassed outside the prison gates. “The Isle of Pines was like a beehive that morning,” El Crisol reported. “Families and journalists teemed over the grounds just outside the Model Prison, overwhelming all the public establishments and hotels in town.”35
Expected to be released at 11 a.m., the first of three groups of prisoners emerged onto the prison portico shortly after noon. It did not contain the Castro brothers, but that didn’t stop the crowd from erupting. Forty-five minutes later, a second group of prisoners appeared on the portico, this time with Fidel and Raúl Castro among them. Their liberation is captured in an iconic photograph in which Castro walks toward the crowd flanked by Raúl, Juan Almeida, and Jesús Montané. The men are impeccably dressed. With broad smiles, arms extended, and suitcases in hand, they could be tourists arriving home from a cruise. Most of the men cannot conceal their jubilation. Having caught sight of his sisters, Raúl smiles contagiously. Only Fidel Castro, the rebel leader, withholds a smile. His arm, too, is raised, though less in greeting than in triumph, his expression calm, but purposeful, as if determined to impart a message to the Cuban people: we are free, beholden to no one, and more than ever committed to the project for which we went to jail.
Castro’s demeanor softened when the prisoners fell into the arms of their families and friends. Juanita Castro remembers experiencing something close to ecstasy as the four siblings came together amid “exploding tears.”36 Similar scenes unfolded throughout the grounds. The once disparate group of freedom fighters had become, for one sweet afternoon, a single family, and it was hours before the intensity subsided. By early evening the group retired to the Hotel Nueva Gerona to await the boat that would return them to the mainland overnight. Castro held a hastily convened press conference, in which he struggled to balance magnanimity and defiance. He distributed copies of a document titled “Manifesto to the Cuban People from Fidel Castro and the Combatants,” which was published in Cuban newspapers the next day.
Cubans who put their faith in the rebels would not be let down, the document stated. “We leave prison without prejudice, either or mind or soul; neither insults nor calumnies can turn us toward hate or away from the path we are obligated to follow.” And yet Castro was not the least bit contrite. He presided over the press conference like a commander in chief, poised on the edge of his seat, back rigid, index finger extended, punctuating his points with gesticulations and table banging. The journalists devoured his words like famished cadets. Would he go into exile? Had prison changed him? Had he forsaken the Ortodoxo Party? Had he cut a deal with Batista? “I will answer all of your questions,” Castro said, imposing order. “I will speak only the truth.”
First, he emphasized that he spoke not for himself but for the rebels collectively. The rebels would not go into exile. They had not abandoned the Ortodoxo Party. They would ally with the FEU. They had cut no deals and were prepared to be the test case of the government’s guarantee to extend constitutional protections to all former prisoners and exiles. He was not naive, he insisted. He had already received word that Batista’s henchmen had him in their sights.37 He refuted what he labeled government lies circulated about him and his fellow rebels in advance of their release. He had no political ambitions once Batista was deposed and the Constitution restored. He disavowed the use of terrorism as a tactic in the struggle, but warned that if real political and civil liberties were not restored to Cuba, the opposition had no choice but to resort to violence.38
Rapturous crowds thronged the stations dotting the rail line between the port of Batabanó, on the Cuban mainland, and Havana. Local officials, laborers, policemen, soldiers, families, and children craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Castro and his men. The closer the train got to Havana, the thicker the crowds became. Upon arriving in the capital, the train was forced to stop as Castro was pulled out a train window, hoisted onto shoulders, and paraded out of the station, in his arms a Cuban flag presented by a group of mothers of Moncada victims. The well-wishers included FEU president José Antonio Echeverría and Luis Conte Agüero.
Batista was right to regard Castro as a threat. Cuba had a new symbol of hope. “That was a day of celebration for the thousands who were against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista,” Juanita Castro remembered. To Juanita, who became a vehement critic of the Cuban Revolution, this was the pinnacle of her brother’s prestige and her family’s pride and happiness. “Looking back on that day,” she wrote, “it is difficult to find words to describe it.” Her brother appeared “larger than life, respected, heroic . . . after so much anguish and suffering. It seemed a dream to us, something unforgettable.” Amid the excitement, Enma Castro was reduced to babble. “It’s unbelievable,” she said repeatedly; “it’s unbelievable to be living all of this.” In the face of that “human whirlwind,” the Castro sisters recognized that this was not the time for intimate reunions. They retreated in the company of their mother to the elegant Hotel Bristol. That afternoon the Castro women set off on a triumphant stroll across a city the girls had come to love as students, now suddenly full of hope and good feeling. Later that night, Lina hosted a party for all comers at the family’s favorite Chinese restaurant. But the Castros weren’t buying that night. “This one’s on the house!” the manager exclaimed.39
On Tuesday, May 17, a torrential rain forced the cancellation of rallies to support the Moncada rebels, stranding cars and flooding cellars across the city.40 Castro took refuge in his new apartment just off Jardín le Printemps in Vedado.41 As he predicted, the apartment was overrun by well-wishers, political allies, and journalists, including Bohemia’s Agustín Alles Soberón, who managed to steal a few minutes alone with the celebrity in the company of a staff photographer.
In May 1955, there was much talk in the city’s newspapers about the state of peace and democracy not only in Cuba and Latin America but around the world. Alles opened by asking Castro about the prospect for peace in Cuba.42 On the face of it, this was an easy question, as who in their right mind is against peace? In fact, Castro explained, the question was not so simple, as despots had long brandished peace as the means to preserve order and maintain power. The interview is notable less for what Castro said than for how he looked in the accompanying photographs. Castro was nearly twenty-nine now. As a child he had become accustomed to being photographed. As an athlete and aspiring student leader, he forced his way to the front and center of virtually every photograph he was ever a part of. When ranking pushed him to the background, he still managed to stand out from the crowd. For Castro posing was performance, the point to convey authority and gravity. By contrast, the photographs accompanying this article show Castro with his guard down and are among the most intimate photographs of him publicly displayed. They are not flattering. They humanize him, revealing him from angles that only a son, a wife, an intimate would know.
The first image reveals a mustachioed face seen from below. If prison had not dampened the rebel leader’s spirit, as Alles suggested, it thickened his waist, neck, and chin, as these photographs attest. From inches away, Castro looks young, his features softened by baby fat that, paradoxically, was absent in childhood. His mustache is thin, his whiskers uneven. He remains as handsome as ever, his roman nose, thick eyebrows, and dark eyes providing the bulwark for the surrounding edifice. In the second image, Castro embraces the daughter of a comrade murdered in the aftermath of Moncada. She will never know her father. Castro’s tenderness with the child recalls a prison photograph with Fidelito perched atop his father’s lap. It was then that Fidelito asked about one of the fallen men, and, discovering his fate, dissolved in tears. “This moved me deeply,” Castro had written Naty Revuelta; “from that day I loved him more because he has suffered from my ideas.”43 Fidelito was neither the first nor the last to have suffered so. Judging from the little girl’s delight at being in the arms of someone she just met, Castro was as irresistible to young kids as he was to their parents and, indeed, to strangers.
Another image shows Castro seated on a bench, arms on thighs, leaning forward, head down, hands fidgeting, listening intently to someone or something outside the picture frame. This is not the strident, insistent, domineering attention seeker other photographs portray him to be. Here he appears thoughtful, reflective, sympathetic, even vulnerable (and, yes, exhausted). Still another image shows him lounging comfortably in an old armchair, one leg crossed across his lap. His right hand rests on a foot covered by socks so worn you can see his toes. A broad smile reveals teeth a little worse for the wear of cigar smoke, black coffee, and haphazard personal hygiene. Castro is typically depicted as a man without equals. These photographs reveal him as an ordinary guy, in conversation with peers and friends, now listening, now laughing, at all times relaxed. Even the one photograph where Castro looks directly at the viewer is less assertive than interrogatory, as if there remains something of the curious boy in the increasingly indomitable man. Castro seems to be asking for recognition and acceptance, his steeliness balanced by vulnerability.
The cease-fire did not hold. Within a fortnight of his release, Castro and the Batista administration were back at it, the catalyst Alberto del Río Chaviano, perpetrator of the Moncada atrocities and ensuing cover-up. With the rebels safely incarcerated, and despite overwhelming evidence of his incompetence, Chaviano was given command of Oriente Province. At the time of the amnesty, he was back in the headlines when two broadcasters from the dissident radio station CMKC in Santiago were tortured. Called to account for the bullying by the editors of Bohemia, Chaviano struck back not at the magazine but at Castro, reprising his spurious account of the Moncada events. One might imagine Batista officials counseling Chaviano to steer clear of Castro after he turned the tables on the commander at the Santiago trial.
Castro was an effective counterpuncher. He used the words of the government prosecutor in the trial at Santiago to rebut Chaviano. The revolutionaries had comported themselves honorably at the trial, the prosecutor had acknowledged. During the attack itself, they had spared the lives of those they might have killed. The government’s own witnesses had refuted Chaviano’s charges, making a mockery of the government’s lies. Moreover, the people of Oriente had sided with the rebels during the trial, just as they had joined the recent campaign for amnesty.44
In late May, the government announced that Castro’s rebuke of Chaviano would be treated as a provocation.45 Tension mounted early the next month, when the administration propagated the unlikely story that Carlos Prío, just returned to Cuba from exile, intended to assassinate Castro. Castro interpreted this news in the only logical way possible: that the government planned to eliminate him and blame Prío partisans. “If something happens to me,” he told readers of La Calle, “they and they alone will be responsible.”46
With Castro outperforming the government spokesmen, Batista himself joined the fray at the renaming of a Havana boulevard in his honor (“twenty more years, twenty more years,” the crowd chanted). He had tried to be patient with the amnestied prisoners—those “braggarts and bullies”—he assured the crowd. But his patience was not infinite, and his government would use force as well as “brains and hearts” to convince the public of its righteousness. Castro talked a lot about the rebels’ courage, Batista noted. “The only one who has courage here is the one who rules close to the people with dignity and affection.”47
Police and intelligence officials interpreted Batista’s threat as a green light to target dissidents, just as Castro anticipated. Juan Manuel Márquez was picked up and severely beaten by police, prompting Castro to warn that government bullying only increased the ranks of rebels “ready to die to defeat the tyranny.”48 Violence did indeed breed violence, though not from Castro and his group. Yet. On June 10, dissidents unconnected to the Movement exploded seven bombs across the capital. Opposed to terrorism, Castro denied complicity, suggesting that the regime itself had carried out the bombing to justify the ensuing crackdown.
In a still more egregious example of state-sanctioned violence, former minister of the navy Jorge Agostini was brutally assassinated. Agostini was a member of Aureliano Sánchez Arango’s AAA. In justifying his murder, the police explained that he had a pistol in his backpack, and that he was “meeting with subversives at his Vedado home.” To Castro, this said just about all that needed to be said about how the Batista administration functioned. A respected naval officer riddled with bullets for carrying a pistol in his backpack. “Agostini was not a gangster,” Castro said. “He never abused or killed anyone; he never stole.” This was the logical result of Batista’s recent threat. Who, Castro wondered, would be the next to fall?49
One reasonable answer was Castro himself. When this editorial campaign did not silence Castro, Batista turned the matter over to his minister of communications, Ramón Vasconcelas, who all but banished Castro from the radio, while threatening to close down La Calle, the pro-Castro daily (Vasconcelas would do so within a matter of weeks). It was a sad day, Castro remarked, for those who “recently left prison hoping to contribute to the civic solutions demanded by the country,” only to be met by “a total absence of constitutional guarantees.” Lacking such guarantees, amnesty became “a trap,” and life itself “hung like a thread before the whims of paid assassins.” Castro took heart in the evidence that the Cuban public sided with the rebels. He pledged to continue to exercise his civil liberties and “press on with his Martían mission.”50
In mid-June, the government began to target individuals close to Castro, including his brother Raúl, who was falsely accused of bombing a city movie theater (at the time Raúl was visiting his parents in Birán, with credible witnesses to vouch for him), and his sister Lidia.51 These threats led Castro to conclude that it was time to leave the country; it simply was “not possible to live here anymore.”52 With his mind made up, Castro and his colleagues came together to formalize their organization and appoint officers. The purposely nondescript “Movement” would now become the “July 26 Movement” (Movimiento de 26 de Julio), after the date of the Moncada attack. Besides Castro, the leadership included Pedro Miret, Jesús Montané, Haydée Santamaría, Melba Hernández, “Pepe” Suárez, Pedro Aguilera, Luis Bonito, Ñico López, Armando Hart, and Faustino Pérez. María Antonia Figueroa, a friend from Santiago, was named treasurer. Hernández’s house, 107 Jovellar Street in Havana, became the center of activity, along with the old Ortodoxo office at 109 Prado. Miret, Pérez, and Suárez were charged with collecting weapons. López and Hart would take care of propaganda. Frank País, Vilma Espín, and Léster Rodríguez, among others, were already hard at work in Oriente, setting a standard of efficiency and effectiveness that would not be matched elsewhere.53
On July 7, 1954, Castro went into exile. “The doors of civic struggle are closed to the people,” he told a crowd at José Martí Airport gathered to say goodbye. He said he no longer believed in general elections. He vowed to return with a revolutionary force capable of restoring Cubans’ “right to liberty and a decorous living, without despotism or hunger.” To fight for those rights was the essence of what it meant to be Cuban, he said, finishing his goodbye with words from the Cuban national anthem and José Martí.54
In abandoning Cuba for Mexico, Castro surrendered more than his son, Fidelito, and more than his country. He also sacrificed a short-lived love affair with Naty Revuelta, now finally consummated. Juanita Castro suggests that Castro enjoyed the company of several different women in the period between the amnesty and his departure for Mexico.55 Revuelta described ten blissful days and nights in Castro’s company in the confines of the small apartment attached to the larger space Lidia had rented. The two wasted little time asleep. Moving from coffee to wine then back to coffee, they pored through old letters, soothed old wounds, and clarified misconceptions. Castro, a passionate cook, re-created favorite recipes from prison, including paella, pulled pork, and garlic chicken, all devoured in the rosy glow of the rising sun. Enma Castro remembers surprising them one day and seeing Revuelta, seated at Castro’s feet, staring adoringly into his eyes. Enma knew Revuelta was married and scolded her older brother. Revuelta said both she and Castro knew that this rhapsody could not last. Still, they wrung it for all it was worth, to the point of physical exhaustion.
Nine months later, Revuelta gave birth to a baby girl, living proof that those ten days were not a dream. And proof was needed by then, as Castro was on to other things and other women, Naty Revuelta for all intents and purposes discarded.56