Havana’s Palace of Conventions overflowed with jostling, pontificating foreign dignitaries from about a hundred countries, the largest assemblage of national leaders that had ever gathered in Cuba. From the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Mediterranean they clogged the hall, chattering in a babel of tongues. International celebrities and infamous dictators among them, they were the full, polychromatic representation of third-world humanity. Nearly all had come to honor Fidel. His lifelong quest for fame and glory had reached its zenith.
As technicians struggled to keep the sputtering air conditioning system running on that muggy, hot afternoon, September 3, 1979—Fidel strode to the podium amid prolonged, exuberant applause. He looked more satisfied than he had in years. Many setbacks and embarrassments had befallen him in the 1960s and early 1970s, but on that late summer day his stars were in alignment. He was at the top of his form. Pausing at the lectern, dramatically fondling the microphones, he looked out over the large room full of his admirers and sycophants. Several of them would not even have risen to power in their countries were it not for Cuban help. He was among adoring friends, a multitude of them. And they were about to bestow the most improbable honor he has ever received.
This reliable ally of the Soviet Union was assuming the presidency of the non-aligned movement. That evening Fidel would be elected by acclamation to lead all of the countries and liberation movements that supposedly were free of binding entanglements with either the United States or the Soviet bloc. It was the culmination of the most remarkable foreign policy juggling act he has ever carried off. He had achieved what should have been impossible. Cuba was aligned yet non-aligned, closely tied to the Kremlin yet simultaneously the new leader of the non-aligned movement.
There was no denying his affiliation with the Soviets. They provided about $5 billion annually in economic subsidies. The 1975 estimate concluded there were five to eight thousand Soviet civilian advisers working in the Cuban government, trying to jump start the still chaotic economy. Every year Moscow also gave another $1 billion worth of free military supplies, including everything from berets and bullets to tanks and fighter aircraft. Several thousand Soviet military advisers and trainers were posted on the island. Cuban troops had fought in 1978 under the command of Soviet generals in the Horn of Africa, in support of the revolutionary Marxist regime in Ethiopia during its war with neighboring Somalia. To his enemies Fidel was a mercenary Soviet pawn.
But in most of the third world, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, his dependence on Moscow no longer mattered much. He was one of them. He was an original, an audacious revolutionary hero unlike anyone else on the world stage. The Cuban troops in Angola had secured the revolutionary Marxist regime and then, late in 1975, at the end of a long, dangerously stretched supply line, they had met the racist South African army on dusty battlefields and triumphed. It was the South African dictatorship’s Bay of Pigs. The Cubans fought with incredible ferocity, true to their commander-in-chief’s uncompromising demands. They “rarely surrendered and, quite simply, fought cheerfully until death” according to South Africa’s leading historian of the conflict.1
More than forty thousand Cuban troops were still in Angola at the time of the non-aligned meeting, doing most of the fighting to contain a stubborn rural rebellion. Another ten to fifteen thousand were stationed in Ethiopia and there were discussions in the Cuban leadership about deploying some to help the insurgents in neighboring Sudan.2 Contingents of Raul’s best—military, security, and intelligence specialists—were bolstering friendly governments and revolutionary groups in at least another dozen countries. In all, twenty-eight of the non-aligned nations represented that week in Havana were benefiting from the services of Cuban doctors, teachers, and advisers who helped with everything from agronomy to presidential security.3
Cubans had been bravely dying in distant insurgencies and national liberation wars since the mid-1960s. Such “internationalist service” was a badge of honor in Raul’s armed forces, and a number of his top generals had survived one or more such tours. Nine Cubans had died fighting covertly in just one tiny West African country, once a Portuguese colony, and now known as Guinea-Bissau.4
The cumulative human toll was staggering, especially for a country of just 10 or 11 million. The true number of casualties is still a sensitive state secret known to only a few in Havana. But Rafael del Pino, a distinguished Cuban air force general who defected in May 1987, believed that ten thousand Cubans had fallen overseas by that time pursuing Fidel’s internationalist dreams.5
In Southeast Asia, Fidel had made no secret of Cuba’s enthusiastic support for the Viet Cong insurgency. He dispatched as many as two thousand Cuban advisers and during a visit to Vietnam in 1973, delivered a militant speech at the ruins of an American military base, predicting the bloody defeat of U.S. forces.
“Friends, you have given the imperialists a great lesson. They considered themselves invincible. However, friends, you were able to defeat them. We are gathered here today in the South Vietnamese liberated area, at a place where the imperialists built a strong military base which they thought no enemy force could occupy.”6
For about a year in the late 1960s, American prisoners of war held by the North Vietnamese were tortured by English-speaking Caucasian foreigners they believed to be Cubans. The most vicious, nicknamed “Fidel” by the POWs, inflicted beatings with rubber truncheons, and used water torture, and other brutal punishment on about twenty Americans, nearly killing at least two. Eventually all of them were broken. The Cubans’ identities have never been established despite exhaustive efforts by American defense and intelligence specialists. There can be little doubt that the Castro brothers authorized what came to be known among the abused prisoners as “the Cuban program.”7
When Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies overran Saigon in April 1975, it was just the first of a series of similar victories that bolstered Fidel’s non-aligned credentials. During the four years between the 1975 intelligence estimate and the non-aligned summit, at least eight countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean basin came under the control of revolutionary Marxist–Leninist or Marxist-oriented regimes. Every one of them owed a debt of gratitude to Fidel. He was the rare leader who did not just talk. For years he had been saying that it was his duty to assist other revolutionaries anywhere, and he was true to his word.
The crowd in the Palace of Conventions fell silent as he began a measured hour-and-a-half-long speech, a carefully scripted one by all indications. Brutal despots and the commanders of nearly all of the world’s remaining guerrilla and insurgent groups were there, shoulder to shoulder with the presidents and prime ministers of fifty-three other countries, many of them democratically elected.
They came from India and Tanzania, Malta and Jamaica, and from Equatorial Guinea, Cape Verde, and other newly independent African nations few had yet heard of. The octogenarian Tito of Yugoslavia and Pham van Dong, the Vietnamese prime minister, attended. United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was there, not because the function in any way required his presence, but as a courtesy to the large number of UN member states that were represented. Nearly all expected private meetings with Fidel, though most had to settle for talks with other Cuban officials. Raul, however, was not in evidence at all, as has always been the norm during diplomatic occasions. Every hotel room in the city was booked as Cuban officialdom turned out en masse to tend to their visitors’ needs.
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was there. So was the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, a swaggering Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Iranian foreign minister, all of whom delivered foaming speeches denouncing the United States and Israel. The Egyptian delegate, a future United Nations Secretary General, was barraged with criticism for his government’s part in the recent Camp David accords brokered by the Carter administration. With Cuban military advisers providing training for Palestinian and other Arab guerrilla and terrorist groups, Fidel enjoyed strong radical Middle Eastern support.8
His two new allies in his own neighborhood, the first sibling revolutionary regimes Cuba had finally been able to boost into power in the backyard of the United States, were represented by their top leaders. Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Maurice Bishop of Grenada, both in office for only several months, and already in Havana’s orbit, were among the most ecstatic participants. To them, and many of the Africans, Fidel was a virtual deity.
The leader of the Marxist Puerto Rican independence party was there, a favorite stepchild of the Cuban hosts during the week-long proceedings. In his speech to the delegates Fidel placed Puerto Rico first on the short list of oppressed nations, along with apartheid South Africa, colonial Rhodesia, and Palestine. He told the delegates, Puerto Rico “deserves our support without hesitation or weakness.”
He was in a triumphal mood. I had written in the 1975 estimate that he actually was beginning to believe “imperialism is in eclipse,” and a few years later he had even more abundant reasons to conclude that. As preposterous as it sounds today, years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, by the middle of the 1970s Fidel was convinced that he was on the right side of an historical divide. Repeatedly using a standard Marxist term, he claimed that the “correlation of international forces” was shifting to the side of revolutionary, Cuban-style Marxism–Leninism.
It was not just classic fidelista hubris. Yanqui imperialism seemed to be experiencing a debilitating crisis in the second half of the 1970s. Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, the retreat from Vietnam, the congressional exposés of CIA wrongdoings, and legislation restraining intelligence and military capabilities were all encouraging signs for Fidel. Anti-war sentiment in the United States and hostility to any more interventions in third world-conflicts resulted in what has been called the “Vietnam syndrome.” Taking advantage of the opportunities that new pacifist mood in the United States provided, Fidel embarked on promising new internationalist ventures.
A large number of young revolutionaries from El Salvador would soon receive advanced guerrilla training in Cuba. Fidel persuaded the leaders of five feuding revolutionary groups there to join forces under a single guerrilla banner that he could then support even more generously. He believed that Nicaragua’s small neighbor, where Latin America’s newest insurgency was taking hold, was just about ripe to drop out of the imperialist tree. With Nicaragua under the control of his Marxist allies, the Sandinistas, El Salvador became Havana’s next highest priority.
Nicaragua was the model. The Sandinistas had won power in July, just two months before the summit meeting, with massive, covert Cuban military assistance. To them Fidel was almost kin, a godfather or favorite uncle who had been providing encouragement, help, and advise for years. The Somoza dynasty they had overthrown together had been one of the original prime targets of Cuban subversion, beginning in the first weeks of the revolution. In his first large press conference after winning power, Fidel goaded Nicaraguans to take to the mountains and fight for justice as he had done.9
Twenty years later, he finally had the opportunity to help deliver the coup de grace to the dictatorship. Applying all his powers of persuasion, he enlisted the support of several other Latin American governments and leaders as revolutionary co-conspirators. He and Raul, along with their military and intelligence chieftains, masterminded a complex multinational covert action to provide the Sandinistas with a huge quantity of modern armaments. Cuban intelligence and paramilitary advisers poured into Nicaragua along with the equipment.10
They fought side by side with raw young Sandinista recruits, helping to plan and execute the final military offensives against Somoza’s National Guard. It was no coincidence, therefore, that a Cuban general from the Ministry of Interior—where all the intelligence, police, and security functions are centered—was the first to storm into Somoza’s bunker as it was being overrun by Cubans and Nicaraguans. The dictator had managed to escape, eventually finding asylum in Asuncion, the steamy capital of Paraguay, where a kindred dictator ruled.
But he was not safe there either. On September 17, 1980, a small multinational team of paramilitary operatives, undoubtedly carrying out a plan devised in Havana, was waiting as he was chauffeured about the city. The second shot from a bazooka, from fairly close range, incinerated the vehicle in an instant. It was just the kind of operation of which Fidel, the grandmaster of Cuban intelligence, loved to conceive. Another of his long-time nemeses—Somoza had provided critical support for the Bay of Pigs operations in 1961—finally was gone.11
These bold Cuban initiatives in so many countries were reminiscent of one of the most memorable, if macabre, revolutionary dicta that Fidel has put on the record. It first appeared in a speech late in 1961—and subsequently in a rallying document known as the Second Declaration of Havana—as he was aggressively ratcheting up Cuban support for the first waves of Latin American guerrillas. He exhorted Cubans and all those in the region aspiring to emulate the Cuban guerrilla experience to be fighting zealots.
Just as he had insisted as a youth in Bogotá, he maintained that it was their duty, their obligation to fight as revolutionaries. They must help conquer imperialism and not just sit idly by watching the fight. He said, “The duty of every revolutionary is to make a revolution … a revolutionary must not sit at his door and watch the corpse of imperialism go by.” The non-aligned movement’s headquarters would be in Havana for the next three years. Cuban officials and intelligence agents would constitute its bureaucracy and it would be among Fidel’s highest personal priorities, perhaps second only to his unceasing vigil aimed at preserving his political hegemony at home.
He could now roam the globe challenging the rich nations of the industrialized world and demanding that they concede more to underdeveloped countries. He would be the secular pope for the world’s poor and exploited. And he would do all that with legitimacy, ironically, because he had been elected to the movement’s presidency in a relatively open process. No one could deny that he was the overwhelming popular choice to lead the non-aligned nations.
Fidel did not wait long to begin asserting these new prerogatives. Just a month after the Havana conference he traveled to New York to speak again at the United Nations. This time he would talk for less than two hours, making no effort to break the record he set there in 1960. And unlike that earlier, vitriolic performance, he did not insult prominent Americans or any of those present.
He spoke calmly, still for the most part employing the familiar royal “we” rather than the first-person singular “I.” In the past, “we” had meant Cubans and the Cuban Revolution. Now, in his new, much grander international role, “we” stood for the hundreds of millions of non-aligned, oppressed or exploited people of the third world. His theme was familiar, but now it was being applied on a global scale.
“We want a new world order based on justice, equality, and peace to replace the unfair and unequal system that prevails today…”
He demanded that a new international economic order and monetary system be established and that rich creditor nations cancel third-world-country debt. The wealthy nations, he said, should contribute a total of $300 billion to the underdeveloped countries during the decade of the 1980s. He said that was how much was being spent every year on armaments. He was in earnest but provided few specifics. It was a thoroughly unrealistic, poorly conceived concept, immediately dismissed in Western capitals and financial centers. But he had every intention of leading that crusade wherever it might take him. When he finished he was applauded wildly, many in the UN audience sprinting to the speakers podium to embrace and congratulate him.
During that fall of 1979 Fidel was at the pinnacle of his extraordinary career. It would never be so good again. Even the victories over Batista in 1959 and Kennedy two years later at the Bay of Pigs paled in comparison to what he had accomplished during the second half of the 1970s. He did not want or need better relations with the United States. The Kissinger initiative of 1975 had withered on the vine after Cuba’s intervention in Angola.
But a few years later the Carter administration just as seriously took up the possibility of rapprochement again. Limited diplomatic relations were restored and serious talks conducted. They broke down in 1978, however, as Cuban troops were pumped into Ethiopia. Once again it was clear that Fidel placed a higher priority on his internationalist interests and duties than on better relations with the United States. Jimmy Carter was the last American president to engage in a serious effort to work out the full spectrum of bilateral issues.
Fidel’s triumphalism, the giddy conceits that surged in him after all the Cuban victories in the late 1970s, culminating at the non-aligned summit and his UN speech, infused him with an unprecedented hubris. He had become self-absorbed in his own grandiosity.
Florentino Aspillaga, the Cuban intelligence defector, recalls Fidel’s visit to a Cuban military installation in Angola after the first major victories there in late 1975. The commander-in-chief arrived like a conquering Roman general, intent on parading before his troops and basking in the glow of his triumphs.
Aspillaga, who was present for Fidel’s speech, recalls that about six hundred Cubans, all trusted military and intelligence personnel and ranking officials, also heard him that day. He said Fidel spoke candidly; for once, the CIA was not listening. Fidel proceeded arrogantly to expound on his exceptional leadership qualities, glorying in how much he and his small country had achieved all over the globe. He was behaving like a gallego, not a Cuban, Aspillaga thought to himself.
The defector believed it was the first time Fidel had ever spoken to any sizeable audience that way, boasting about his own exceptional leadership qualities. Fidel was uninhibited. He said his charisma was one of his most impressive characteristics. “But his greatest virtue,” Aspillaga remembered Fidel saying, “was that he could move the multitudes,” not just Cubans but many other nationalities as well.
Fidel was obviously in his own thrall, experiencing a narcissistic high as one victory followed another through the fall of 1979. Aspillaga, a tough and worldly intelligence veteran, who had seen so much action in many arenas, was appalled by his chief’s performance. “It was sheer euphoria.”12 Fidel was acting out childhood fantasies and dreams of exalted destinies.
After the military victories in Africa and Nicaragua, he was able to think of himself as a Cold War Julius Caesar, a tropical Napoleon, or, more in keeping with his personal favorite hero, a contemporary Alexander the Great.
On several occasions Fidel has ruminated about those three “event making” men. He has said in interviews that it is Napoleon who deserves the greatest admiration. Unlike Alexander and Caesar, he was the only one to rise from humble origins. So in his own mind, Fidel is one part Alexander and one part Napoleon.
Fidel’s uncontrolled hubris was out in the open in the autumn of 1979. As president of the non-aligned movement he was at his personal summit, intoxicated with visions of how he would transform the position into one of the world’s most important and visible international offices. He expected Cuba would now win a coveted seat on the UN Security Council. He probably fantasized that he would negotiate with the president of the World Bank, the UN Secretary General, the head of the International Monetary Fund, and leaders of the wealthy nations. He would do it for the world’s exploited and poor.
But for reasons beyond his control, Fidel would have only a short time more to enjoy the glory.
* * *
About ten weeks after the New York speech, as he was developing specific plans for transforming the non-aligned movement, the unstable contraption of his foreign policy came crashing down around him. In one shocking day Fidel’s legitimacy as the non-aligned leader was shattered forever. A large airlift of invading Soviet troops landed in Afghanistan on Christmas Eve in 1979, followed by motorized rifle divisions.13 The Muslim president of the country was killed in the fighting. Under military occupation, this previously non-aligned nation became another Soviet satellite. Fidel, of course, had not been consulted.
He had to decide whether to endorse or denounce the intervention, to be either aligned or non-aligned, but he did not have much of a choice considering the extent of Cuban dependence on the Kremlin’s largesse. Nearly every other non-aligned government condemned the intervention, but Fidel cast his vote at the United Nations with Moscow. Professor Jorge Dominguez, the dean of Cuban political studies in the United States, has written “In the choice between the non-aligned movement and the USSR, there was no doubt: Cuba was a communist country first and foremost, under Soviet hegemony.”14
Fidel later admitted the obvious, that he had been conflicted. He was pressed by an American broadcast journalist about whether he had “privately and personally” approved of the invasion.
“No,” he said, squirming a bit, but then, as he so often does, he tried to shift the onus.
“We were not going to place ourselves on the side of the United States and so we were on the side of the Soviet Union.”15 And then, because it was so unpleasant, he changed the subject.
The leader of the non-aligned countries could be forgiven for nearly everything else in his relationship with the Soviets, but not for approving their invasion of another member state. Despite everything Fidel had done to earn the presidency of the movement, his legitimacy in that position evaporated the minute those first Soviet invading forces landed in Afghanistan.
He would not be able to travel the world as he had planned. Cuba could not attract enough votes to win the UN Security Council seat. For the rest of his three-year term as non-aligned president, Fidel was unable to take any significant initiatives or convene any meaningful meetings in that capacity, and he could no longer even press for the global economic restructuring he had demanded at the United Nations. The exotic non-aligned rug had been violently wrenched out from under him.
Psychologically, it was such a devastating blow that his behavior in the aftermath demonstrated how profoundly traumatized he was. The manic optimism of the triumphal years faded into a brooding, downcast fury that affected his judgment and caused him during the first half of 1980 to commit some of the worst leadership errors he has ever made. His judgment seemed to have been temporarily impaired.
There was a deadly military confrontation when two Cuban MIG jets sank a Bahamian patrol boat inside the territorial waters of that neighboring country. Many of its crew were killed in a blatant act of Cuban aggression. Fidel fairly openly supported a new urban guerrilla group in Colombia, in part to retaliate against the government in Bogotá that had played a key role in denying Cuba the UN Security Council seat. He miscalculated, seriously blundering while under the stress of rejection by his third-world friends and betrayal by the Kremlin.
Wayne Smith was the chief American diplomat in Havana at the time. He has written that Fidel “seemed not to be himself.” He was “drawn and preoccupied,” and following the death of Celia Sanchez that January, his decision making “reflected a certain irrationality.”16 In fact, there has been no other period during the history of the revolution when its leader has behaved so erratically, obviously under the pressure of emotional distress.
The worst was yet to come. A Cuban policeman on routine guard duty at the Peruvian embassy in Havana was killed on April 1 as a group trying to gain political asylum crashed through the gates. Fidel was so enraged that he withdrew the remaining guards and let it be known that any disaffected Cubans who wanted to leave the country could freely do so via the embassy. He thought just a small number would go, but he was out of touch with the mood in the streets.
Economic problems had worsened considerably while he had been preoccupied with his international feats, and with little regard for their plight, he had been demanding greater sacrifice and harder work from the populace. He made the mistake of publicly reprimanding the Cuban people, telling them to tighten their belts and work harder because it would be many more years before the economic hardships would be ameliorated. It was the last straw for many who had been suffering extreme hardships for the last twenty years.
Given the unexpected chance to emigrate, Cubans soon were rushing to the Peruvian embassy from all over the island. Guajiro and urban working-class people, the revolution’s main beneficiaries, went in large numbers. Entire extended families huddled in hasty consultations around kitchen tables and then fled together as fast as they could to the embassy grounds. Policemen roared up to the gates on motorcycles, threw them down, and joined the throngs seeking asylum.
It was not long before about ten thousand desperate Cubans had congregated there, occupying every tiny patch of open space, perching on tree limbs, squatting precariously on the roofs of the buildings, children and the elderly sitting on top of relatives. For the regime it was a scene of horrible, humiliating bedlam.
About two weeks later Fidel devised a standard solution; he would transfer the problem to the United States. The Mariel boatlift began. It was the second of the massive seaborne migrations from Cuba to southern Florida with Americans, mostly Cuban émigrés, piloting small craft to that port on Cuba’s north coast. There they took relatives and friends, as well as Peruvian embassy refugees, on board.
But Fidel’s fury was still out of control and beyond reason. In response to an unspeakably cruel decision that no other leader in Cuba could have made, mental institutions and prisons were emptied and the inmates brought to Mariel to be forcibly placed on board boats headed to Key West and Miami. Murderers, rapists, and criminally insane patients were cynically removed from their families and medical treatment and disposed of in this fashion. The Cuban government has refused to take them back ever since, and almost all remain in the United States today.
The boatlift dragged on until September 1980, when Fidel, more and more embarrassed and concerned about deteriorating security conditions on the island, abruptly ended it. More than 125,000 people had departed. During the exodus Fidel was told by the Minister of Interior, his top security adviser, that at least another two million Cubans were also anxious to get on the boats and leave for Florida. He was enraged.17
Cuban society was in turmoil. Rafael del Pino, the air force general who had defected in a MIG fighter in 1987, had been among the many military commanders who were horrified by the spectacle and by their commander-in-chief’s performance. For him and many others it was the beginning of their final disillusionment with the revolution.18
My own disenthrallment had begun in the aftermath of the 1975 intelligence estimate and would be complete within another year or so. I finally came to understand that Fidel was pathologically hostile to the United States and that this hatred could never be assuaged. He needs and wants the American enemy so that it can be blamed for his and the regime’s failures. He will never retire his guerrilla uniform, shave the beard, or abandon his anti-Americanism because they are all essential elements of his revolutionary persona. He will go to his grave as that revolutionary.
His internationalist obligations will always be non-negotiable. He will never renounce support for terrorism or lethal violence, even though the issue of Puerto Rican independence has finally all but evaporated as the movement on the island has as well. There is little chance that he will ever be willing to enter into serious counterterrorism cooperation with Washington intelligence and homeland security agencies. What would a rapprochement mean without that critical element? After all, in May 2001, Fidel traveled to Iran—like Cuba, also certified by the Department of State as a state sponsor of international terrorism—and proclaimed publicly, in the presence of radical mullahs, “Together we must bring imperialism to its knees.”
The absolute personal power Fidel exercises, the brutal suppression of all dissent, the egregious human rights violations committed in the name of revolutionary ardor will never be open to compromise. As long as he is physically and mentally able, he will run Cuba the way he has for more than four and a half decades, with an iron fist, an unyielding will, and a malign gaze on the hated United States.
To employ the kind of language used in national intelligence estimates, it is highly unlikely that a rapprochement involving mutual concessions on issues of importance to the United States and Cuba will be possible as long as Fidel is in power.
I wish it were not so.