Arnaldo Ochoa was probably Raul’s closest friend. They had worked together in the defense ministry for thirty years, sharing in spectacular successes. The bronze-skinned two star general was affectionately referred to as “el Negro” by his boss. Their friendship enjoyed a level of easy informality that only a few other top officers in the rigidly hierarchical armed forces experienced. Ochoa’s first wife and Raul’s wife Vilma were good friends. The four were like family.
On the night of Ochoa’s birthday Raul had showed up at his home with a couple of others for an intimate surprise celebration. As usual, there was lots of drinking and camaraderie. It was the kind of spontaneous socializing Fidel abhors, but that Raul takes pleasure in. Raul gets to know his colleagues’ families, he drinks with the men; they tell war stories, and occasionally he reveals personal demons, even secrets from his past. That is how he came to admit the murder he committed in Mexico.
Ochoa’s natural, unrehearsed charisma and warm personality appealed to the taciturn Raul. The general was gregarious and self-effacing. He was six foot two—a little taller than Fidel—and from a guajiro background, strong and seemingly without an enemy in the world. He was admired up and down the military chain of command, equally by raw recruits and hardened veterans, and as well by leaders and counterparts in every country where he had performed internationalist military service.
He wore more decorations than any other officer, including the most coveted, Hero of the Republic. His exploits and swashbuckling demeanor while commanding Cuban troops in Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua elevated him to a level of international fame perhaps second only to that of the Castros. He had fought against Batista as a teenager and with Venezuelan guerrillas in the 1960s. Most of his adult life was spent abroad in pursuit of Fidel’s dreams of glory. He was the incarnation of Cuban internationalism and epitomized the selfless “new revolutionary man,” living unpretentiously with no interest in luxuries or perquisites.
Ochoa was irrepressibly exuberant, like so many Cubans, but he had been putting Fidel on edge for years. In 1971 during a group boating excursion in Chile, he had infuriated the commander-in-chief by making fun of his underwear.
“Chief, you look really sexy in that underwear!”1
No one else would have dared joust with Fidel’s vanity that way, but under Raul’s protection he was seemingly untouchable. Ochoa sometimes presumed to use the informal tu when speaking to Fidel, making no effort as others do to be deferential. He was always joking, making light of sacred cows.
Raul’s former chief of staff Alcibiades Hidalgo, who was a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, told me in Miami during extended interviews that he is convinced Fidel’s long simmering irritations with Ochoa came to a boil as he learned in the mid and late 1980s that the general was losing respect for him.
Hidalgo said Ochoa “discovered that Fidel is not a great man” after all. For the proud and paranoid commander-in-chief who gradually became aware of that, it was the equivalent of betrayal.2
The general had been indiscreet in private conversations that had been captured by military counterintelligence wiretaps and bugs. Such surveillance, even of trusted high level officials, had been routine for years, but Ochoa no doubt was singled out for more searching scrutiny because of Fidel’s deepening doubts. Later, the Ministry of Interior intelligence agent who had collected the most incriminating evidence used against Ochoa was himself promoted to general officer rank as a reward and given a choice assignment in Cuba.3
Tensions with Fidel spilled over during Ochoa’s last tour as chief of the military mission in Angola. The general bristled as Fidel, ensconced in the defense ministry in Havana and communicating daily with him via a Soviet satellite hookup, second-guessed nearly every tactical order he issued. Raul’s aide Hidalgo remembers that the face-off with South Africa in Angola in late 1987 and early 1988 became Fidel’s “personal war.” He was making every decision down to platoon level-operations.
He had done the same during the insurgency against Batista and would have done so in Grenada if he could have. Huber Matos, the former Sierra Maestra guerrilla leader, told me in Miami how Fidel had micromanaged everything during the insurgency.
“He was a brilliant strategist. He had a grand vision. But he was never involved in the actual fighting, and even from afar, he wanted to direct all the details of the battles … I wanted to take actions and not wait to receive little papers from Fidel, which was his way of directing all the details of the war.”4
Fidel frequently reprimanded Ochoa in Angola for failing to follow such instructions. In one cable he complained: “I am very angry over your unexpected, inexplicable ideas that clash with my concept of the struggle.…”5
Ochoa seethed, but the last straw for Fidel—and the one that probably sealed the general’s fate—was apparently the fruit of a surreptitious recording of Ochoa’s last private conversation with Raul in his office at the defense ministry. It was a tense session. The general knew by then his career had run off the track and he lost his temper, protesting in an angry outburst that Fidel had been sending Cuban boys off to distant third world battlefields to die heroically, sometimes under orders never to surrender, while always managing to avoid any life-threatening situations himself. It was clear he had come to view Fidel as a bully and a coward.6
But Raul continued to “love Ochoa like no other friend.” His aide Hidalgo—who defected on a moonless night in the Marquesas, mangrove islets in the Gulf of Mexico between Key West and the Dry Tortugas—told me Raul remained “extremely close to Ochoa.”7
The Castro brothers’ disagreements about Cuba’s most accomplished general came to a head during the summer of 1989. For Raul, those were days of Old Testament anguish and ordeal. It was as if he were Abraham, instructed by God to slay his son Isaac as a demonstration of his faith. Raul had to choose between his best friend and his brother. There could be no splitting the difference, no neutral ground. Fidel decided what had to be done and it was then Raul’s responsibility to explain the virtually inexplicable to the rest of the military.
He had to tell the army’s top officers that their most revered colleague was suddenly in disgrace, under arrest, and suspected of treason. It was Raul’s job to do that persuasively enough so that the officers’ loyalty to the regime would not falter. The brothers were so concerned about a backlash that they barricaded themselves in Raul’s offices for days on end, sleeping little while monitoring key officers and units.8
As Fidel has done on other occasions, beginning in Mexico in 1956, he insisted that a colleague who somehow came to doubt him must be eliminated. He had to be certain that Ochoa would never defect to the United States, as General del Pino and the intelligence agent Aspillaga had done two years earlier. Fidel knew from bugged conversations that Ochoa had actually muttered about that possibility.
Most importantly, Fidel wanted to preclude any possibility that Cuba’s most popular troop commander, who was attracted to the reform movements proliferating at that time in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, could ever become a rallying point for reformist critics of the regime. Ochoa had commanded a total of more than three hundred thousand Cuban troops in his different overseas assignments, and remained enormously popular. That alone was cause for concern. For Fidel it has always been axiomatic that a popular and charismatic troop commander would be the greatest threat to his hegemony.
As always since he took over as defense minister, Raul had no choice but to do Fidel’s ruthless bidding. If it had been up to him, the whole Ochoa affair would have been resolved quietly, swept under the rug. His friend’s indiscretions did not seem that serious. Ochoa was guilty of nothing more than inappropriate talk—mostly bluster, and bluster was Ochoa’s style. There was no evidence that he was plotting against the regime and it was inconceivable to Raul that he would.
Furthermore, purging him might provoke an upheaval in the officer corps. Ochoa, Raul believed, could have been forced into retirement, one more out-of-favor official in what is known half-humorously in Cuba as the Plan Pijama, the Pajama Plan, former top officials in home exile, metaphorically living out the rest of their years in pajamas. But Fidel was adamant. He wanted the death penalty for Ochoa.
Hidalgo recalled that Raul “appeared to be destroyed personally.” Executions were second nature to Raul, but the men condemned in the past had not been close to him.
He faltered under the pressure. That strange, rambling speech to the army officers he delivered in mid-June 1989, when he said Fidel “is our father,” was just the first of two highly emotional performances. In each of them Raul admitted implicitly to his audiences that he felt pain and trauma for what he had to do.
Hidalgo does not believe Raul was inebriated when he spoke to the officers, as many suspected, but that his erratic, tortured display was the result of stress. Hidalgo is also convinced that Raul made no concerted effort to dissuade Fidel, to argue strenuously that his friend’s life be spared.
“I think Raul always submits to Fidel’s decisions.”
Raul knew that Fidel had made up his mind, and, like the biblical Abraham, he faithfully complied, except that in the end Ochoa was not spared as Abraham’s son was. There were many who did plead with Fidel to change his mind. Sandinista leaders in Nicaragua, the head of the Soviet military mission in Cuba, and others tried their best to persuade him to spare the general. But despite how he really felt, Raul, it seems, did not join in that chorus.9
On the eve of the execution, in his second strange performance, a nationally broadcast speech, Raul admitted to behavior unbefitting a senior military officer. He revealed that he had cried in his office at the ministry as he brooded about his friend’s fate and family. He said that when he looked at himself in his bathroom mirror, “tears were streaming down my cheeks.”
“At first I was angry with myself. I immediately got back my composure and understood that I was crying for Ochoa’s children whom I have known since they were born.”10
Most who knew him well understood that Raul was at war with himself. He agonized and suffered in ways that are beyond his brother’s emotional competence. It is possible when he told of his crying episode that he wanted his misgivings to be obvious to his colleagues in the armed forces. Hidalgo, who probably knows the adult Raul better than any other Cuban in exile, says that he is given to occasional scenes of high melodrama.
Raul’s sense of compassion conflicts with the image of “Raul the Terrible,” a term he once used to describe himself. In January 1957, during the first days of the insurgency when defeat seemed likely, he scribbled out a last will and testament in his field diary. If he died fighting, he wrote, he wanted most of his substantial estate to go to the daughter of one of his colleagues who died in the Moncada attack. He also wanted some of his inheritance to be used to build a house for the mother and sister of a dead Granma expeditionary—hardly Marxist or tough revolutionary sentiments.11
A woman who knew Raul fairly well in the early 1950s in Havana told me with considerable feeling and shuddering gestures that Raul was “a serial killer.” Yet, expressing contradictory impressions of him, as so many do, she added, “He is a pleasant serial killer.”
She told me she learned from one of Raul’s sisters that in early 1959, shortly after the guerrilla victory, that he took personal responsibility for bringing a number of young war orphans from the countryside to Havana, where they were boarded at a military base under his control.
Many anecdotes about his cruelty and implacability circulate among people who have known him. But those stories coexist with others illuminating his gentler side. He forgives and can be generous, even to those whom his brother would have mercilessly dispatched to prison, exile, or the execution wall in an unblinking instant. When he succeeds his brother in power, these opposing sides of Raul’s personality undoubtedly will continue to be in conflict as they have since he carried out his first brutal acts.
* * *
Before dawn on July 13, 1989 Arnaldo Ochoa was roused from his prison cell, sweating in the mid-summer tropical heat. He was marched a short distance, and under bright lights illuminating a patch of the darkness, made to stand before a military firing squad. He knew better than to expect a last-minute reprieve.
It was the culmination of what had probably been the most painful personal crisis of Raul’s life. His two vacillating performances before national audiences left the impression of a leader lacking in so many of Fidel’s exceptional leadership qualities. Raul had appeared indecisive, inarticulate, fearful, and drained.
Fidel had never faltered as a leader, and some top Cuban officials wondered if his younger brother would be strong enough to survive for long after he assumed power in his own right. Yet, amid the crisis, the wily Raul managed to bolster his standing in the line of succession by securing control over an institution almost as powerful as the armed forces.
Additional executions, supposed suicides and accidental deaths, and the most dangerous political purges in the history of the revolution were all to follow Ochoa’s demise in quick succession. Together they were the Cuban Revolution’s nearly bloodless Tiananmen Square.
The slaughter of the pro-democracy activists in Beijing had occurred just a week or so before Raul’s speech to the assembled officers and may well have been the critical turning point in Fidel’s calculus about what he had to do. Always the strategic grandmaster, planning ahead for his next moves, anticipating not reacting, seizing initiatives, he meant to warn those in Cuba tempted to imitate the demonstrators in China that if they even contemplated action against the regime they would share Ochoa’s fate.
The summer of 1989 in Cuba was the season of cataclysmic change throughout the Marxist–Leninist world. Coinciding with Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the Eastern European communist societies began hemorrhaging. The Berlin Wall was torn down in November, and with that the Cold War effectively was over. Soviet subsidies were drying up as Fidel imposed more draconian policies in defiant opposition to perestroika and glasnost.
In turn, he and the regime soon were being criticized in the alternative new Soviet media. This led him, only a few weeks after Ochoa’s execution, to ban two popular Spanish language publications published in Moscow. He denounced them publicly as subversive, doing the bidding of Yankee imperialism. Fidel could never have imagined such a move in 1961 when he declared his undying faith in Marxism–Leninism.
The evidence linking Ochoa to Soviet, Chinese, or Eastern European style reform thinking is circumstantial, but I concluded at the time in a report I authored for the White House that indeed the general wanted the Cuban political system to be relaxed and opened. No evidence has ever surfaced, however, that Ochoa was organizing a dissident group or considered leading a military rebellion. But he probably was caught by eavesdropping operations while advocating reforms. Raul intimated as much in his speech to the army officers.
International communism was collapsing nearly everywhere. Fidel wanted to make sure that his regime would not also go down or be forced, as the Chinese leaders had been, to massacre large numbers of protesting civilians in the streets. He had to preempt potential crises, and Ochoa was the unfortunate scapegoat. Soon a new revolutionary motto was hoisted and heard everywhere, one with which Fidel and Raul would end all of their speeches. “Socialism or Death.” It meant to convey that there would be no dilution of fidelista absolutism. Even to discuss the possibility of political reform would be a capital offense.
I completed my classified analysis of the Ochoa Affair coincidentally on the same day the general was executed. I was working then for the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community organization that produces national estimates. I was asked by senior staff officers at the National Security Council to play devil’s advocate because many new analysts, especially in the CIA, believed the Cuban government’s explanation that Ochoa was guilty of drug trafficking, the fictitious charge the regime leveled against him. Ana Montes, the Cuban mole in the Defense Intelligence Agency, later did her best to promote that canard, no doubt under instructions from her Cuban intelligence handlers.12
I concluded in the assessment that was sent to the White House and other senior national security officials that “Castro deliberately engineered the crisis” and that “Ochoa’s principal ‘crimes’ were in questioning the Castros’ authority and contemplating defection.” I believed then, and still do, that Fidel “concluded that Ochoa had to be convicted of truly heinous crimes … in order to preclude any backlash … in the military.” The drug trafficking charges were a smoke screen.13
After years of studying Fidel, and having long before abandoned all romantic notions about his priorities and character, I was sure Ochoa was the victim of a Stalinist show trial. He appeared to many who watched Cuban television coverage to be drugged and dazed as he sat in the docket. His answers to the prosecutor’s questions sounded scripted and false.
Many Cubans, military and civilian, came to the same conclusion. Several defectors have told me that they came to despise the Castro government after Ochoa’s execution and set about arranging to emigrate. One young, previously loyal Soviet-trained field grade officer I know of came home from his job at the defense ministry the day the general was shot, sat at his dinner table, and wept for the man he so respected. Now living in Florida, he is one among many who were alienated in similar fashions.
Ochoa was condemned to death by a kangaroo court that obediently bowed to the dictates of the commander-in-chief. The sentence was ratified by Cuba’s Council of State, the highest executive body in the government, and by a military tribunal of more than three dozen of the country’s top generals, all of whom in the process became accomplices in the death sentence. Raul’s wife, Vilma Espin, then a member of the Council of State, was among them and said in a firm voice, “Let the sentence be confirmed and carried out.”14
In reality, other than Fidel, there was probably not another man or woman on the island who independently would have insisted on the death penalty.
* * *
Moments after the general was shot, senior intelligence officer and respected Ministry of Interior colonel, Antonio de la Guardia, followed in the general’s footsteps to the execution line. De la Guardia’s demise, and the subsequent unexplained arrest and supposed accidental death in prison of the Minister of Interior, signaled that the Castro brothers intended to use the crisis to solve another, unrelated set of problems. That is typical of Fidel’s operating style. He has often provoked one crisis with the intention of justifying extreme actions for other political purposes.
In this instance, the country’s intelligence and security agencies were purged and reconstituted under Raul’s authority as a reward for his betrayal of Ochoa. Since the Sierra Maestra days, Fidel had always insisted on maintaining competing intelligence and special forces capabilities under different chains of command. Raul’s defense ministry, officially the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and known in Cuba by its acronym MINFAR, and the Ministry of Interior, known as MININT, had been rivals, often adversaries, for decades. It was as if a chastened FBI was suddenly put under the control of the CIA director or the Secretary of Defense.
Although Raul had been conniving for years to get control of MININT, he had previously scored only one major victory in those efforts. Four years earlier, he had persuaded Fidel to oust the powerful minister, Ramiro Valdes, who was a formidable personal rival. Valdes’s revolutionary credentials were impeccable, and he commanded powerful, often sinister organizations that operated in towns and cities across the island and in numerous foreign countries. In 1985 Fidel finally agreed to remove him but, perhaps in another test of his brother’s mettle, required Raul to personally deliver the news.
Valdes was summoned to Raul’s office, and just in case he might become violent, Raul hid the chief of his personal security detachment in the bathroom that opens directly to his office. With his pistol drawn and cocked, the security man silently stood guard, listening to every word in the conversation as Valdes learned that his political star had fallen.
Some outside of Cuba believe the former minister could reemerge as a powerful rival to Raul in a succession struggle, and that possibility gained some credibility in 2003 when Valdes emerged from years of obscurity with an appointment to the Council of State. If he were elevated again by Fidel, say, to a seat on the party Politburo, speculation about his rehabilitation might prove to be accurate. But Alcibiades Hidalgo is convinced that “Raul completely defeated Ramiro” in that showdown in 1985.15
The rival ministries had some overlapping functions and comparable rank structures, and MININT also operated elite paramilitary forces that Raul and his generals resented. MININT personnel were adept at bugging the private conversations of army generals, even in their own homes. Intelligence officers generally enjoyed much higher living standards than their armed forces counterparts, and because of the undercover work that many did, they had easy access to illicit sources of enrichment. Hidalgo, who in Cuba was a civilian unassociated with either ministry, told me that before the 1989 purges an intelligence colonel typically lived a hundred times better than Raul’s generals.
The most senior of them, Corps General Abelardo Colome Ibarra, then the only three-star officer, took over as Minister of Interior shortly before Ochoa’s execution. Hundreds of career officials immediately were purged, including a number of the most senior and highly decorated. With those decisive strokes, MININT was converted into a free-standing branch of Raul’s defense ministry. All foreign intelligence, internal security, and police functions were finally under his control through a trusted surrogate.
In his late sixties, Colome continues inconspicuously to run the ministry today. Known by his childhood nickname “Furry,” he proudly states that he has been under Raul’s command for almost fifty years, longer than anyone else. He was about sixteen when he ventured up into the Sierra Maestra in early 1957 and then went with Raul a year later to open the Second Front in the Sierra Cristal, where he served as his personal aide. He adores Raul, who he says saved him from what might have been a life of hard labor in a Santiago coffee warehouse.
Colome’s resume reads like a history of the revolutionary armed forces, checkered with internationalist tours, police and intelligence work, and both staff and troop command responsibilities. He served as Havana police chief, later going under-cover in Algeria and Bolivia with a forged Algerian passport to support a failed insurgency in Argentina.
He demonstrated his revolutionary zeal and conformity with the Castros’ leadership style by participating in a hangman’s jury to condemn a young Argentine—a reluctant guerrilla—to death. “Furry” is among the few elite Cuban warriors to wear the highest decoration as Hero of the Republic. He was the first commander of the Cuban military mission in Angola and later was Raul’s principal deputy in the ministry.16
Their relationship has been so close for so long that Colome essentially has been to Raul what Raul is to Fidel. This third most powerful man in Cuba—he is also a long time member of the party Politburo and the Council of State—will be one of the two or three most reliable and potent guarantors of Raul’s succession after Fidel is no longer able to lead. And with Colome’s hands on so many of the highest voltage-levers of power across the island, he will have the wherewithal to identify and neutralize anyone who might dare oppose Raul’s ascension.
In short, Colome is the consummate raulista. The term applies to those ranking officers—and some civilians—who have long-standing, special relationships with Raul. The old guard raulistas are in their sixties and seventies, and served under him during the insurgency and in the early 1960s. Most worked overseas covertly as internationalists or commanders of expeditionary military forces, typically doing both.
They include many of the two- and three-star generals, as well as a number of others who retired from active duty but still have considerable influence. Like Colome, they identify more with Raul than with Fidel, though they know not to stray in the least from what the commander-in-chief expects of them. Ochoa’s fate reminds them constantly of that. Nonetheless, these are men who Raul developed, encouraged, and promoted and who in turn reciprocate his trust.
A triumvirate of old guard raulistas in all likelihood will be just as determined as general Colome that Raul follow Fidel in power and that the process proceed smoothly. Julio Casas, Raul’s principal deputy in MINFAR, and also a Politburo member, has been with him almost as long as “Furry” has. He heads the MINFAR holding company that operates about a dozen enterprises earning hard currency for the military, and he therefore controls a substantial flow of funds. The enterprises—the tourism conglomerate “Gaviota” is the largest—are run by senior army officers either retired or on detached duty, all reporting to General Casas. He was promoted to three-star rank in 2001.
Alvaro Lopez Miera, MINFAR chief of staff, is the next most powerful of the raulista old guard. The son of Spanish communist immigrants who were early supporters of the Castro brothers, the young Lopez went up to the Sierra Cristal to join Raul in the last months of the conflict. He was just fourteen, considered too young to fight, so he was assigned to teach peasant children in one of the schools run by the Second Front. Later, he saw action in Angola and Ethiopia as an artillery officer and studied for two years at one of the most prestigious Soviet military academies. He is Raul’s right-hand man in day-to-day military affairs and was also promoted to corps general in 2001.17
Ulises Rosales del Toro, the third three star in Raul’s powerful army triumvirate is another long-time colleague. He served as his chief of staff for more than fifteen years and now is the government minister in charge of the collapsing sugar industry. In the early 1960s he volunteered for combat in Vietnam and was also tempted to serve with several friends departing for the Dominican Republic to fight covertly against the dictator Trujillo, Fidel’s old nemesis from the 1940s. Instead, he was sent to fight with Cuban-sponsored guerrillas attempting to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela.
It gave him “tremendous joy,” he says, when he was selected for that duty, though it turned out to be a harsh and disillusioning experience. He and three other Cuban guerrilla advisers were reduced to eating monkeys, burros, and poisonous snakes. One of them, gravely ill, wasted away to about one hundred pounds and could barely walk before they were all clandestinely exfiltrated back to Cuba. Not all of Fidel’s followers in internationalist service found glory. But Rosales was steeled by the experience and later become a Hero of the Republic and a Politburo member.18
The raulista old guard and the middle grade officers he has brought up through the ranks have confidence in Raul. His emotional performances during the Ochoa affair have not been repeated, and he is not known to have faltered again since then. His loyalists know that he would never make fanatical demands on them, as Fidel did to Colonel Tortolo in Grenada, or insist on making every tactical operational decision.
They appreciate that the pursuit of personal fame and glory has never been Raul’s compelling motivation. His rhetoric is never apocalyptic as Fidel’s has often been. His style is more relaxed, less confrontational. He delegates authority, maintains genuinely collaborative relationships, often acting on the advice he solicits from subordinates, and has worked with the same trusted associates for decades.
Under his leadership, the armed forces have always been the revolution’s most stable and best managed institution. They alone have experienced a high degree of leadership continuity, due in no small part to Raul’s success in insulating them from his brother’s whims and micromanagement. He has been the only senior regime official who has been allowed a relatively free hand to run his organization. He has made the military into the nearest thing to a true meritocracy among Cuba’s revolutionary institutions. Officer promotions and assignments up through middle ranks have been based mainly on competence and achievement rather than political, family, or other connections.
Fidel’s managerial style could not be more different from his brother’s. He regularly purges civilian officials with important portfolios, relegating most to the Pajama Plan. Since 1959, fewer than twenty top officials—out of thousands who have exercised real responsibility—have been able to hold on to their positions for extended periods. Fidel fears that if they stay in the same jobs too long they might develop independent power bases, become self-important, or linger in the limelight he refuses to share.
Very few officials manage to please Fidel for long, including even some of the most successful administrators. He does not welcome criticism or indulge doubts about policies he favors, and as he has aged into his late seventies he has become even more intransigent and sensitive to imagined slights.
Raul is also a tough disciplinarian, to be sure, but patient and willing to forgive honest human error. General Colome told an interviewer that Raul does not hesitate to reprimand subordinates, including himself, but that once the incident passes it is never brought up again. Fidel, in contrast, never forgets a slight or an error. Raul is detail-oriented and “profoundly respects his family,” Colome added, perhaps consciously contrasting the brothers. He is more predictable and approachable than Fidel. “Raul inspires confidence,” the general concluded; “you can discuss any kind of problems with him.” Hardly anyone would say that about Fidel.19
The raulistas respect Raul’s organizational and managerial skills. His successes in 1958, during the last year of the insurgency, exceeded those of any other commander, including his brother. He developed the largest guerrilla force, controlled the greatest expanse of territory with the largest civilian population, and he built extensive infrastructure—including airstrips—in his operating zone. He did all of that in less than a year. General Colome has lauded the “superior development” that Raul achieved, perhaps not mindful enough, however, of how Fidel might construe that comment.20
The commander-in-chief never volunteers to commend his brother’s work. He does not like to admit that the military has been the one truly indispensable guarantor of the regime or that during difficult periods—including the last dozen years—it provided needed leadership in running critical sectors of the economy.
He tends to take Raul for granted and even seems jealous of his organizational abilities. Most of all, Fidel strives to give the impression that the military’s successes have been the result of his own strategic vision and charisma, never mentioning—perhaps hardly considering—that those qualities do not keep the tanks and jet aircraft running or the troops fed and clothed.
Even when he is pressed by interviewers to talk about his brother’s contributions, Fidel is generally evasive or noncommittal. He does not like to admit that Raul has steadily grown in stature and accomplishment or that the historic internationalist victories would not have been possible without him.
During the early years Fidel was sometimes cruelly dismissive of Raul. It must have been at a time of high tensions between the brothers when, in an interview in 1965 with Lee Lockwood, Fidel portrayed Raul as a glorified staff sergeant who takes orders but does not give them.
“He does not make decisions,” Fidel said, “because he knows it is not his right to do so. He is extraordinarily respectful. He always consults me about all important questions.”21
But Raul grew progressively stronger during the decades of the seventies and eighties, both politically and personally. And as he did, fraternal tensions not surprisingly, intruded periodically in their relationship, just as they did when Raul flew to Houston in April 1959 for the brothers’ first known showdown. Stresses appear to have peaked again in late 1986 after Raul’s triumph over Ramiro Valdes. Prominent raulistas had been granted unprecedented influence in the highest councils of the regime at that time, especially in the Communist Party after its Third Congress. They formed the largest single bloc in the Politburo and seemed so ascendant that Raul evidently felt it necessary to clear the air.
He scheduled one of his rare interviews, which was published the following January in a MININT magazine. Discoursing in a mostly desultory fashion, he seemed intent on raising what must have been the real irritant with Fidel. He denied that his Second Front had grown into “a state within a state” during the fight against Batista. It was a metaphor for the situation in the second half of the 1980s.
Rivals and critics probably had been bandying that term about, complaining that Raul and the raulistas had gained too much leverage, that they were eclipsing other elite groups in the party and government. Most likely the criticism originated in MININT among the disciples of Valdes. To dispel the impression they and other rivals of Raul were sowing, he did the only thing he could do. He heaped praise on Fidel’s leadership.
“The type of organization” he had developed in his zone of operations “also existed in other fronts,” Raul said of the guerrilla days. That was not true but surely helped to assuage the tensions. Bowing further to Fidel’s sensitivities, he told the reporter that the “penal regulations we initially implemented in the Second Front had been drafted” under Fidel. It was a minor point, meant to show that what Raul had done in his operating area was mostly derivative and turned out to be successful because of Fidel’s vision and leadership. That was not the case either, but Raul knew better than anyone that there could be no hint of a personality cult developing around anyone else, not even Fidel’s acknowledged successor.22
Regardless of their periodic tensions, Fidel has never been known to muse about the possibility of any other heir. He does not like to discuss the dynastic succession either, especially for audiences in democratic societies.
He prefers to avoid the appearance that the revolution resembles a medieval Middle Eastern monarchy or the bizarre North Korean communist dictatorship where sons or brothers take over automatically when a leader dies. Thus, when he is pressed to discuss the succession, he usually insists it would not be automatic for Raul to replace him. The Communist Party and appropriate government institutions would have to ratify the choice, he says, and he has many “brothers” in the leadership.
Fidel employed this analogy in 1977 in the course of putting on the record perhaps his most enthusiastic endorsement of Raul’s qualifications to succeed him.
“All those who died defending just causes in any corner of the world, they are my brothers,” he told Barbara Walters. Then he paused for effect.
“Raul is my brother twice over: a brother in this entire struggle and a brother in ideas. But Raul does not have an office in this Revolution because he is my blood brother but rather because he is my brother in ideas and because he has earned that place through his sacrifice, his valor, and his capacity.”23
No one, with the possible exception of former interior minister Ramiro Valdes, has ever seemed to have had a chance of supplanting Raul in the line of succession. Fidel has been consistent since January 1959 that his brother is the only possible heir, and that has been ratified a number of times by the top Communist Party and government institutions. Article 94 of Cuba’s Marxist constitution makes it legal. It states that “in the absence, illness, or death of the President of the Council of State, the First Vice President replaces him in his functions.” Raul has been the First Vice President since the position was created in the 1970s.
Assuming that he is in good health when his brother dies or is incapacitated, the odds will be negligible that others would lay claim to the succession or that they would have a chance of replacing him. Once confirmed, either as acting or permanent President of the Council, he will function as head of state and government as well as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. One of the three-star generals will take over the defense ministry, and Raul might also cede figurehead leadership of the Communist Party to someone else now serving on the Politburo.
Since the new leaders will want to minimize international perceptions that Cuba is governed by a praetorian guard, most of the civilians prominent today will continue to be influential, especially in economic and financial management and in foreign affairs. Carlos Lage, Secretary and First Vice President of the Council of Ministers and a member of the Politburo and the Council of State, has enjoyed Fidel’s confidence—mostly in economic management—many years longer than all but a few other officials ever have. Evidently he also works well with Raul.
Ricardo Alarcon, the president of the rubber-stamp National Assembly, has performed a number of prominent roles as a diplomat and statesman and is a Politburo member. But like many of Fidel’s other civilian subordinates who are obsequious and docile in his presence, he may not have earned enough respect with Raul and the generals to last long in a senior office. The abrasive young foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, has been one of Fidel’s favorite sycophants for the last several years, and he too might be expendable. Initially, nonetheless, a key objective of the successor regime would be to maintain the appearances of as much continuity from the fidelista past as possible.
The raulista generals, five of whom serve on the Politburo, will be the kingmakers. Leaders of no other institution, including the party, state and government entities, or the regime’s large popular organizations, alone or in any combination, could effectively challenge the firepower, intelligence, and security resources the generals have at their disposal. Nor would anyone else be able to impose policies on the new regime that a united and disciplined military leadership opposed.
The most critical variable in every conceivable succession scenario will therefore be the extent to which Raul and the generals are able to uphold loyalty to the chain of command. The odds of that will be much in their favor, in the beginning at least. Since 1959, when Raul took charge of the new defense ministry, no military anywhere else in Latin America has remained so stalwart.
The 1959 and 1989 purges of respected senior officers were the only serious political shocks to the military establishment, and General del Pino was the only top officer to defect since the first unstable months of the Cuban Revolution. There have been no coup attempts, military rebellions, junior officer upheavals, or barracks revolts in Raul’s armed forces. In any event, officers will have every incentive to collaborate in securing a peaceful succession in which their privileged statuses and prerogatives can be preserved.
They will be likely at first to enjoy the support of most among Cuba’s civilian elites who will work constructively with them hoping too for a nonviolent transition in which they can also retain their privileges. Fear throughout Cuban officialdom that many in the exile community will lay claim to expropriated properties on the island and try to return to assert political leadership will help the elites to cohere. Fidel’s successors will keep up the drumbeat of nationalistic rhetoric to distract the populace from the hardships they endure, to maintain morale and vigilance in the uniformed services, and to sanctify his memory as a unifying force.
But after a short honeymoon, the successors will have to choose between equally ominous sets of policy options. Fidel himself long ago recognized that the short term aftermath of his demise will be the most dangerous time. He told Herbert Matthews, a New York Times reporter, in an unpublished interview in May 1966 that “the first period after something happened to him could be the most difficult.”24
Pent-up popular demand for meaningful change will probably soar once his titanic, intimidating hold is released. New leaders will be challenged then either to assuage or suppress those hopes, to permit the perestroika and glasnost type reforms that Fidel has rejected or to uphold his intransigence posthumously. The dilemma will get progressively worse as time goes on because Raul will not inherit Fidel’s standing with the populace or his ability to communicate inspirationally with them.
His friend Che Guevara recognized this critical deficiency as early as 1960. He told Simone de Beauvoir during her visit to Cuba with Jean-Paul Sartre, “I love Raul … enormously. He is a remarkable man, but he does not have the same direct influence on the country as Fidel.”25
* * *
So how will Raul try to lead in the dangerous vacuum after Fidel? Would the compassionate Raul or “Raul the Terrible” predominate? Most of the populace will expect the latter. For so many years his was the most strident voice in the regime for cracking down ruthlessly on intellectual and cultural deviance. The respected Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who was mercilessly denounced by Raul, and briefly imprisoned before going into exile, was earlier present at a meeting in Prague to hear one of his anti-intellectual tirades.
“In Cuba, fortunately, there are very few intellectuals,” Padilla remembered Raul saying, “and those there are do nothing but get bogged down reinventing the wheel.”
Padilla also quoted an American intellectual, otherwise blithely intoxicated with the revolution, who despised and feared Raul. “There is some deep abnormality in Raul. He is cold and cruel and is capable of any crime.”26
It was the implacable Raul who acted as the regime’s point man in carrying out massive political purges in the past. A defector from Cuba’s foreign intelligence service told a congressional committee in Washington in 1969 that Raul personally gave the orders to state security for the harsh measures to adopt when the so-called microfaction was expelled from the Communist Party the year before.27
A few years earlier, savage campaigns were conducted with military precision to round up male homosexuals to perform forced labor. White-collar city workers, deemed insufficiently revolutionary or effete, were purged in large numbers in destabilizing “anti-bureaucracy” sieges.
In 1972 Raul spearheaded the campaign against “ideological diversionism,” which was a catch all phrase for almost anyone who disagreed with the revolution or was merely disenchanted. The Nixon administration, long-haired “anti-social youth groups” in Cuba, foreign intellectuals including Fidel’s one-time European traveling companion, K. S. Karol, and a prominent American anthropologist were denounced. The socialist Karol was a CIA agent, according to Raul.
It was the most infamous of his cutthroat speeches, delivered with the thundering repetition dozens of times of the phrase “ideological diversionism.” The transcript excludes all of his histrionics, but it is easy to imagine that he pounded the lectern for emphasis time and again as he uttered the signature phrase. The real targets of the heightened repression that ensued were Cubans tempted by any of the forbidden thinking.
Raul has had some strange and sinister admirers too. The communist East German Markus Wolf, self-proclaimed as “communism’s greatest spymaster,” is notably in that company. For many years he headed his country’s top notch foreign intelligence service, visiting Cuba, helping to train its intelligence agents, and running joint operations with them. He was critical of Ramiro Valdes, who was “less of a statesman than an adventurous operative.”28
But Raul was “far more steady, well educated, and statesmanlike.” Possibly alluding to Fidel, Wolf added that Raul, “unlike his more emotional colleagues took a cool strategic view of Cuba’s situation.” The East German was amazed that, unlike so many Cubans, Raul always turned up for appointments on time, leading him approvingly to tell how colleagues came to refer to Raul as “the Prussian.” It was a supreme compliment from one tough intriguer to another.29
But on the other hand, Raul’s softer side has been progressively more evident as the inevitable succession draws closer. Breaking with his hardline image, he has avoided close identification with Fidel’s brutal suppression of human rights and pro-democracy activists in two major crackdowns since 1996. In the past it was expected that he would lead the charge against such groups.
He is also widely believed to have been the regime’s most persistent advocate of liberalizing economic reforms in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Fidel has stubbornly refused to agree, he has given Raul a freer hand to establish the hard-currency-earning enterprises run by senior officers.
During the same period, the two ministries that Raul controls have been waging a skillful campaign to portray him and the armed forces in the most favorable light. Their main targets are influential audiences in the United States.
He and Cuban generals have welcomed and squired visiting groups of retired American senior officers, most of whom return home advocating the establishment of military-to-military ties across the Florida Straits. In 1991 the Cuban National Defense College was created with the central purpose of fomenting ties with foreign military establishments.
Secretos de Generales, an attractively packaged book authorized by the defense ministry, and published in Spain in 1997, subtly makes the same case. Forty-one Cuban generals were interviewed about their lives and careers in a synchronized effort to put an appealing human face on the high command. All of them avoided the harsh and confrontational language about the United States that is still characteristic of Fidel’s speeches and much regime propaganda. General Rosales, then the chief of staff and the highest ranking officer interviewed—and clearly authorized to speak for Raul—commented on the desirability of military to military discussions with the U.S. Defense Department.30
The most remarkable document in this public relations campaign was a little-known unclassified study written by Ana Montes, the Cuban mole in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Her study of the Cuban military was issued under the seal of that agency in August 1993 after she completed a fully paid sabbatical year supposedly to investigate the subject.
Montes was in the select company of about a half dozen other intelligence community analysts chosen competitively to participate in the Director of Central Intelligence Exceptional Analyst Program. Nearly all of those selected included relevant foreign travel in their research proposals, and it is likely Montes did as well.
It is reasonable to speculate, therefore, that she traveled to Cuba at American taxpayers’ expense during her unsupervised year in that elite program, which was long after she betrayed the United States to work as a spy for Fidel. If Montes did in fact visit Cuba that year, her handlers no doubt took advantage of the opportunity to provide her specialized training in espionage and countersurveillance tradecraft with no fear of being detected. I had certainly been wrong about her all along. Indeed, she was an “exceptional” intelligence analyst.
No doubt taking her cue from Cuban intelligence, she wrote in her study of the military: “The armed forces believe that improved relations with the U.S. are a necessary component of Cuba’s future economic stability and will continue to jump at the chance to improve communications with the U.S. The Cubans will be anxious to improve cooperation on operational issues, almost certainly would like to exchange military visits, and likely would accept U.S. military lecturers at (their National Defense College.)”31
In 1993 those were iconoclastic conclusions to say the least. No other intelligence analyst could have come to that view based on the available evidence. Some of her language in that passage, and throughout the paper, so faithfully, even adoringly reflected Cuban policy that it is surprising in retrospect she did not come under suspicion earlier than she did. The study is replete with pandering to the official Cuban line that ought to have at least raised eyebrows in American security and counterintelligence circles.
But Montes was not apprehended for another eight years as she continued to do terrible damage to American interests. The most curious, and to me still inexplicable, passage in her study was a cutting critique of Raul. Although in other places she cast him in a favorable light, here she wrote: “Fidel likely believes Raul has progressively become a poor judge of character, an advocate of too much economic change, and unable to handle sudden crises.”
When she wrote it Raul was in overall charge of Cuban intelligence operations through General Colome. So it is difficult to fathom what, if anything at all, she was trying to achieve by undermining him. One obvious possibility is that lower ranking intelligence officers, still alienated by the Ochoa era purges four years earlier, were trying to discredit him.
On the cover of Montes’s study there is a standard issue disclaimer that must have been deliciously ironic for her and her Cuban intelligence overseers. They probably shared some good laughs at the expense of all those in the American government who trusted her. It said: “The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official opinion or position of the Department of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, or the U.S. Government.”
To survive in the game for long, a high level mole, just like a double agent, must do sleight-of-hand work with smoke and mirrors. There were no dead give-aways in her study and her critical observations about Raul may have been no more than a throwaway that Cuban intelligence agents approved believing they might add to her credibility among her peers.
She was right, of course, that Raul’s prestige had been damaged by his speeches during the Ochoa crisis. He did not handle himself well, and Fidel probably does worry about how he will manage even more threatening challenges when he assumes power in his own right.
Raul’s exceptional qualities all are best exhibited behind the scenes, where he has been most comfortable all these years. But without his brother’s charisma, extraordinary intellect, vision, communications skills, ability to persuade and inspire, and strategic gifts in planning many moves ahead, he will be tested once in power himself as he has never been tested before.
Whatever her motives, the Cuban mole was actually right on this one point. It is appropriate to speculate about how well Raul will manage the inevitable crises on his watch. How decisive will he be under extreme pressure? Will he be as ruthless as Fidel when he is in charge, or will his compassionate side give enemies room to maneuver against him?
It cannot even be said with confidence that Raul will want to be more than a transitional leader. He has ruminated publicly about retiring to a favorite place in the countryside, and will not enjoy the pounding pressures and crises that make Fidel’s adrenalin surge and typically induce his best thinking. And most critically for Cuba, Cuban Americans, and the United States generally, what kind of future for Cuba does Raul want?
The answers to these and similar questions are not likely to be known until after Fidel is gone. It won’t be until then that the younger brother will begin to emerge in his own right. The puzzling juggling of his masks will finally come to an end, and he will be able to express himself without fear that he will disappoint Fidel.