Fidel arrived at the University of Havana in the fall of 1945 in buoyant spirits and high style, driving the new shiny black Ford V-8 that Angel had been persuaded to purchase for him. He matriculated in the law school, settled in an apartment near the campus on L Street with one or two of his sisters, and set out immediately to launch a political career.
His goal was to become president of the university student federation, a stepping stone to national politics. There was no doubting his priorities, or his determination. He was seething with restless energy, anxious to perform on the university’s larger stage where approximately twenty-five thousand students, Cuba’s best and brightest, were enrolled. It would be Fidel’s first window on the wider worlds that he wanted to conquer, though for what purpose greater than his own ambitions he had no idea as yet.
The issues he would champion, the causes he would pursue could be grafted on later as opportunities might allow. Had there been a credible right wing political party or movement in Cuba, he could as easily have moved in that direction. In political terms he was a tabula rasa. Twenty years later he admitted as much.
“I had been a political illiterate. I had brought nothing more than a rebellious temperament and the uprightness, the severe character they had inculcated in me in the Jesuit school.”1
What he did know for sure was that he wanted to vault into a leadership position, make a name for himself. He was aware by then that he was endowed with exceptional personal and leadership qualities that were propelling him to achieve great things. The Jesuits had reinforced his childhood fascination with heroes, conquerors, and colorful revolutionaries. After the calm, contemplative summer he had spent at Biran following graduation from Belen, Fidel had utter confidence in his own mystical aura and destiny.
Alfredo Esquivel, known by the fairly common nickname el Chino, met Fidel on their first day of classes and instantly was drawn to him. Fidel was relaxing outside the law school, leaning against a wall. He struck up a conversation with Esquivel almost immediately and asked him if he was interested in university politics.
Fidel had set out on his very first day at the university to begin recruiting a political following, enlisting allies and backers. The immediate goal was to take his first step on the Cuban political ladder by getting elected as his class representative to the law school council. El Chino Esquivel agreed to help, and thus became the first fidelista.2
Esquivel’s two initial impressions of Fidel were that he was somewhat “scatterbrained” and that he had extraordinary leadership qualities. Esquivel concluded, as most would, that those abilities were innate, bred in Fidel, fixed in his genes.
“He was born with it,” Esquivel observed many years later from exile in Miami. Although he disagreed with most of what Fidel had done since winning power, he was still in awe of his former friend.
Like many others who had been close to Fidel at different times in his life, Esquivel insisted that the young man he had befriended at the university was an entirely different person than the one he became, that early on he was likable and loyal. Esquivel felt that Fidel was more decisive, ingenious, audacious, persuasive, and intelligent than anyone else he knew.
Characteristics of a political prodigy began to emerge as Fidel campaigned for the law school office. Students were issued wallet-size identification cards with their names, addresses, and photographs. Fidel somehow was able to gain access to the originals—whether through duplicity or charm, it is not clear. With that information about his classmates soon committed to memory, he was able to approach them individually, address them by name, and make personalized small talk.
His tactic did not always succeed, however. Some classmates were put off, considering him a shameless grandstander. His biographer Robert Quirk tells of Fidel self-righteously approaching some fellow students in the school cafeteria. They were unimpressed when he told them that all the Catholic students should band together. He came across as a right-winger. “He was obnoxious, monopolizing the conversation.”3
Esquivel remembers how Fidel operated when he was trying to recruit or persuade a classmate to support him. He has used the same approach ever since, first adopting it at Belen with Juan Grau and those other boys. The recruitment begins with a lot of physical contact as Fidel starts to present his argument, with gestures and extravagant body language well beyond the usual. While pulling on his target’s shirt, Fidel touches, pokes, holds, and squeezes the recruit’s arm, talking in a ceaseless flow, raising and lowering his voice with ingratiating charm. Fidel’s pauses are strategically timed. Esquivel remembers Fidel’s tone as “whining,” but so persistent and persuasive that when he was working on an individual man, he was usually successful in whatever it was he was trying to achieve.
“You became a fidelista,” Esquivel observed. “You sympathized with him because he was born with that.”
El Chino came to realize fairly early in their friendship that Fidel was quite aware of his leadership gifts and special qualities. He was as close to Fidel as anyone was allowed to get in those days, remaining his ally and follower in all manner of political intrigues for several years. After the guerrilla victory, Fidel offered him the highly desirable position of Cuban ambassador to Mexico City, which he declined. They spent a lot of time together, Esquivel becoming an astute observer of his contemporary.
He knew Fidel so well that when the news broke in Havana that the Moncada barracks in Santiago had erupted in violence, and many believed that fighting had broken out between different factions of Batista’s troops, Esquivel realized instantly, though he had no prior knowledge of the planning, that Fidel had led an attack.
Esquivel also tells a revealing story about Fidel’s precocious sense of destiny. They were studying one night and around midnight took a break to have a cup of coffee in a café nearby. They sat with some other students who began in the quiet of the night to share with each other their dreams and aspirations for their futures after finishing law school. One said he wanted to become a poet. Another hoped to turn out to be a really good lawyer. Esquivel says that he then turned to Fidel, using a nickname that he, and few others could get away with. “Guajiro, what about you?” Fidel responded reflexively, without pausing.
“I want to win glory and fame!”
There was still no framework, no motivating sensibility, no intellectual or ideological foundation for those heroic aspirations. There was no plan for carving himself a place in Cuban history. But in its clarity and singularity Fidel’s vision of his own exceptionalism went far beyond the casual maunderings of most youths his age. He knew in his first year at the university, Esquivel emphasizes, that he had extraordinary talents, and he was determined to use them to win recognition, acclaim, and above all influence.
When deciphered through the lens of his long record in office, what he really had meant by “glory and fame” was power and political greatness. He had no interest in becoming a prominent lawyer, intellectual, or businessman. Certainly he had no desire to join the Cuban military. Yet by Esquivel’s account and those of others, in that first year of law school Fidel had no altruistic thoughts whatsoever about who might benefit from his anticipated political success, other than himself.
He was nineteen years old.* He had grown to be physically imposing, over six feet tall and about 190 pounds. His thick, wavy black hair was cut short when Esquivel first met him. He had the profile of a Roman nobleman or centurion, and he liked to thrust his chin out in ways that accentuated his aquiline nose. He was aware that his size and physical strength had worked to his advantage since childhood and had no qualms about asserting them. The strong religious faith he had found comfort in when he was younger was evaporating now as he confronted the harsher world of university politics.
He was a mosaic of contradictions, as unsure of himself emotionally as he was confident in his transactional and cognitive skills. Still prone to erratic and extreme behavior that was sometimes calculated to attract attention, on some occasions he wreaked havoc in order to advance some improbable political goal.
After the protected years under Jesuit tutelage he was immature compared with most of his contemporaries. He had no ability at all to confide in others or enter into any kind of genuinely cooperative relationship. He feared any kind of dependency that might make him vulnerable again to exploitation. What he told Betto, the Brazilian friar, about not having had a mentor or inspirational older guide when he was a boy and teenager remained true at the university.
There were no professors he looked up to, no role models or men he sought out for counsel. There was no one he respected enough to submit himself to in any way. Emotionally, it was impossible for him to become anyone’s disciple, and he would live the rest of his life without ever doing so. There would never again be a sympathetic figure like Father Llorente who would try to crack the hard crust of his psyche, to offer him counsel.
Fidel was surprisingly unsocial for one so politically gifted. He did not smoke and rarely drank. He dated very little and was awkward and unsure of himself with young women. Several contemporaries from that time recall that he was referred to behind his back with a caustic play on words as el casto, the chaste. He had no interest—then or ever—in dancing, despite the encouragement of Cuba’s Hispanic-African culture and energizing music.
To this day he does not sing—not even in the shower, he admitted once to an interviewer. Then he avoided going to parties, though it was not because he was spending much time studying. He bothered very little with academic matters, attending classes only intermittently but, as in Belen, passing tests after intense bouts of last-minute memorization. He did spend a lot of time in cafés, endlessly talking politics with whoever would listen.
Fidel still had not shed all of his rural, guajiro characteristics either, often appearing in soiled, wrinkled clothing. He acquired unflattering nicknames: “greaseball” and “dirtball” were the most common, and they stuck to him for a number of years. El Chino Esquivel remembers Fidel’s utter indifference to his attire. He would wear mismatched shoes and socks, strange color combinations. He would pull a pair of pants off a hook to wear no matter what color they were. He was viewed by many of his schoolmates as an unsophisticated hick. Trying to put a more positive spin on that impression, he told Carlos Franqui once that he had been a “bohemian.”
Fidel’s female relatives helped maintain some semblance of order in his chaotic domestic life. In later years, both before and after he won power, his sisters were replaced by other doting women—especially his aide Celia Sanchez—who looked after him. At least two of his biographers have written that one or another of his sisters was routinely available to arrange his clothes, shine his shoes, and even to cut his fingernails. His daughter Alina has written that much later he demanded manicures when he came to visit her.4
A number of interviewers over the years have remarked on the incongruity of his fine hands, with long, slender fingers that have always been uncalloused, certainly unlike his father’s. Fidel was already vain, spoiled, and narcissistic at the university. He expected to be tended to like the dauphin of some exotic principality, so that he would have more time to spend on more important matters.5
In September 1995, fifty years after he had enrolled in the law school, Fidel went back to deliver a long, self-indulgent speech to a new generation of students. He appeared in the Aula Magna, the university’s great hall, to reminisce at length about his own experiences there. He wanted the students to have some sense of what he was like as a young man, some perspectives that were not available to them in any published form in Cuba. It is characteristic, especially in his advanced stage in life, to be neither modest nor self-effacing.
“Relatively speaking,” he told the students of his law school days, “I had already started to stand out.”6
* * *
The two-hundred-year-old University of Havana, prominent on a hill in the Vedado neighborhood, was distinguished by handsome if somewhat mottled and faded buildings in the classical style. Most had marble facades lined with Greek columns, impressive pediments, and adornments.
The imposing Escalinata, an outdoor tiered esplanade of 163 wide stone steps served as the school’s formal main entry, its cynosure. Students met and mingled there, staging events of all kinds, including numerous demonstrations during the five years Fidel was in the law school. Beginning in his second year he organized many of them, leading processions of shouting protestors down the Escalinata onto San Lazaro Street and from there to some government building or public plaza.
In his first year he had not thrived politically as planned. With El Chino’s help, he had been elected his class’s delegate but was permanently blocked from progressing any higher in the student federation because of the opposition of those who had come to despise and mistrust him. He wanted to control ever-thing including the spotlight. His tenacious ambitions were just too transparent; he needed to camouflage them better. He also realized he had to identify with popular political positions, and move beyond university politics—down the Escalinata and into the streets of the city toward more propitious arenas.
Failure was hard to swallow, but as he would for the rest of his life, Fidel blamed others and moved on. He claimed it was corrupt politics and the dishonesty of rival student leaders that had stymied him. Regardless of how he rationalized disappointment, he rebounded as he always has after painful failures, starting afresh. He pragmatically reassessed his situation and set a new course while seeking different allies more appropriate to his new objectives. That too would become his standard operating style after setbacks. New teams of officials would perennially replace ones that he professed had not served him or the revolution adequately.
While attending the university, he made three critical choices. The easiest one was to assume a leadership role in confronting the corrupt government of Ramon Grau San Martin. Fidel was well cast in the role of strident opposition organizer, and he soon was playing that part to the hilt. His decision in July 1947 to affiliate with a new reformist political party, the Ortodoxos, was another matter, however. The charismatic Eduardo Chibas founded the Orthodox Party but never trusted Fidel, not believing he could ever subordinate his own ambitions and outsize personality within a hierarchical political structure. Even more damaging for Fidel’s political ambitions was his 1946 involvement in the nefarious activities of violent campus mafias that were euphemistically called “action groups.”
The Grau San Martin administration was a legitimate target for angry university students and reform-minded Cubans of all persuasions. A former professor and reform politician himself, the president had been elected in one of Cuba’s few relatively fair presidential elections and was inaugurated in October 1944 for a four-year term. Despite the high hopes surrounding his surprise victory, he betrayed the popular trust and was soon presiding over an egregiously venal administration.
Graft was condoned everywhere elected or appointed officials operated, extending from the president and his cronies down to the lowest government bureaucrats, many of them grasping for an illegal take. Grau San Martin encouraged mafia-style gangs, politicized the police, and condoned savage violence by his supporters. By one account, sixty-four political assassinations were carried out during his term.7
It was in this noxious mix that Fidel found his first political cause, an agenda to fight those abuses. As usual, he pushed his commitment to extremes. The government had so violated the popular trust that it had to be taken down. It was illegitimate. And by Fidel’s reasoning, it was not just Grau San Martin and his henchmen who were at fault but the whole rotten political system. Fidel finally had a popular issue he could brandish while simultaneously advancing his own ambitions.
In November 1946 he delivered his first national speech, attracting newspaper coverage. He vilified Grau San Martin, attacked official corruption and violence, and for the first time took up a social cause, decrying how corrupt politicians were stealing the lifeblood of Cuba’s poor.
Fidel had prepared thoroughly for that powerful, course-setting performance. Chino Esquivel says that as a young man Fidel drafted some speeches by hand and then memorized them “from beginning to end.” Fidel also invested considerable effort in practicing just the right physical poses and gestures and their timing. He was still developing his oratorical style, Esquivel said, adding how much it struck him at the time that Fidel “was enchanted with public speaking.”
He was moving tentatively to the left, in the same direction as the strongest political currents, but he was still not sure that hardline right-wing methods might not better suit him and Cuba. Jose Pardo Llada, one of Fidel’s closest associates at the university and in later years—he was a groomsman at Fidel’s marriage in October 1948—remembered that Fidel kept a twelve-volume Spanish-language edition of the writings and speeches of Benito Mussolini. Jose Ignacio Rasco also remembers that Fidel read Hitler with interest at the university. Their recollections are consistent with other credible testimonies.8
But ideology or doctrine was still secondary for Fidel; he was a man of action and had no need to tie himself down to any single creed. What really mattered was to get more attention as a leading voice of the opposition to the government. He organized demonstrations whenever an opportunity arose and at the same time began thinking in violently conspiratorial terms.
When the government announced an increase in public bus fares, he led protesting students, carrying a huge Cuban flag down the Escalinata and into the city where they were attacked by police. He was struck on the head, though not wounded as badly as the length of white gauze bandage wrapped around his scalp would suggest.
One of Fidel’s most bizarre escapades followed. Hoping to quell the unrest, Grau San Martin invited four students, including Fidel and Chino Esquivel, to meet with him at the presidential palace. In 1976 Jose Pardo Llada wrote about the scheme Fidel hatched after the sixty-three-year-old president invited the students to wait for him on his balcony, to enjoy the fresh air, and discuss the increase in bus fares. As they stood there alone, Fidel whispered to the others.
“I have the formula to take power and once and for all to get rid of this old crook.”
The others were dumbfounded as he persisted.
“When the old man comes back, let’s the four of us pick him up and throw him off the balcony. Once he’s dead we’ll proclaim the triumph of the student revolution … it’s a great opportunity for us to seize power.”
Pardo Llada wrote that Chino Esquivel grabbed Fidel’s shoulder and shouted, “Come on, guajiro, you’re crazy.”
As Fidel insisted on his macabre plan, Enrique Ovares demanded he stop. “We have come here for a lowering of bus fares, not to commit an assassination.”9
As Machiavellian as the improvised plot seemed to the others, it was just one of several that Fidel devised between the late 1940s and early 1950s. They had in common a sudden shocking act of violence that would ignite popular rioting and disturbances, like the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789, and would topple the ancien régime and bring revolutionaries to power.
Another of these escapades occurred in November 1947 when Fidel originated a brilliantly pernicious scheme to discredit the Grau San Martin administration. It involved sequestering one of the most important symbols of Cuba’s nineteenth-century independence struggle, the Bell of Demajagua, the equivalent of the American Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
The Cuban bell was kept in a place of honor in Manzanillo, a provincial town in Oriente. Fidel’s idea was to bring it secretly to the university, where it would be rung clamorously amid ceremonies and nationalistic speeches, and provoke crowds to rush to the presidential palace demanding the president’s resignation.
Lionel Martin, a sympathetic biographer who was allowed access to senior Cuban officials, wrote “Fidel had dreamed of sparking a massive movement … that would shake the government to its foundations.”10 Unlike the balcony caper, this idea attracted the support of most other student leaders, though it could never be implemented as conceived.
Fidel’s strategic thinking behind the Moncada and Granma attacks derived from this same conspiratorial approach, except his earlier plans were not executed. For the youthful Fidel, revolutionary ends justified almost any means. Less clear when he was at the university, however, was his own motivation. Did he calculate nihilistic acts of violence primarily to bring fame and glory to himself, or did his hatred of establishment politicians provide the compelling impetus?
Many years later, perhaps with those moments on Grau San Martin’s balcony cemented in his mind, Fidel commented to an interviewer that he did not like to use the balcony outside his office in the building where he relocated the presidency after winning power.
“I almost never stand here on this balcony to look at the city.”11
* * *
Soon Fidel was always armed. He once straddled a chair in the law school cafeteria where some other students were seated and promptly intimidated them by twirling an automatic pistol on the table top. He became a menacing figure in this new role, associating with truly bloodthirsty murderers and criminals in the mafia action groups. He was a dangerous noir character, a dark figure like the hit men in the Hollywood gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s.
He was actually implicated in two murder cases, one of a prominent rival student leader and the other of a campus policeman. He was a prime suspect and was charged in one case and briefly held, but he was released due to either insufficient evidence or string pulling by political allies. There is no doubt, however, that he did take the lead in an earlier attack, a cold-blooded murder attempt in December 1946 against another aspiring student leader.
Though Lionel Gomez was still in preparatory school, he had declared his intent to make his mark the following term in university politics. He was ambitious, astute, and charismatic, a genuine rival on Fidel’s horizon and from a mold much like his own. Gomez was affiliated with a rival mafia gang. It was the perfect formula for provoking all of Fidel’s worst instincts.
Beginning with this young upstart, Fidel has never hesitated in the six decades since 1946 to take whatever actions he might consider necessary, including lethal ones, to preempt an opponent and prevent him from becoming a full-fledged threat at some future time.
Chino Esquivel was with Fidel one evening outside the university sports stadium when they saw Gomez leaving. Always armed and ready to seize an opportunity, Fidel took cover behind a stone wall and fired at the youth without warning. By some accounts, the bullet entered through Gomez’s back and lodged in a lung. He was able to flee on foot, seriously wounded. A second person was shot in the leg.12
That incident reflected innate character traits that Fidel’s Jesuit teachers never imagined were there. This was the behavior of a sociopath, someone with no ability or inclination to distinguish between right and wrong. As early as the age of twenty, Fidel considered murder and mayhem justifiable and acceptable means to advance his personal interests. In classical Freudian terms this behavior was the product of a psyche entirely lacking in superego or conscience.
All of the religious instruction Fidel had been exposed to had been discarded. The attempted murder of Lionel Gomez has never been described as an act of self-defense by any of its witnesses. The young student was not a party—at least not yet—to a conspiracy that threatened Fidel. He was not a corrupt politician in Cuba’s pseudo-democracy who had wantonly violated public trusts. And Fidel was not a freedom fighter, a combatant in a “just war,” situations in which moralists and theologians generally condone the taking of another life. The young Gomez was nothing more than an unrealized future threat to Fidel.
Campus conflicts became so heated that Fidel in turn was also targeted for assassination and had to go into hiding. His extended honeymoon in New York City at the end of 1948, where for a few months he and his bride lived in the Bronx while he studied English, provided just such an opportunity.
Fidel has talked about this grotesque gangland chapter in his life on a few occasions and has tried to put a noble and heroic face on it. In 1995, when he spoke at the University of Havana, he was characteristically belligerent.
“If there is one thing I learned through those years when I had to look death in the face, unarmed, on many occasions, it is that the enemy respects those who do not fear him, those who challenge him. The action I took of doing my duty … won their respect.”13
* * *
Other facets of his character and world-view that would come to characterize his entire political career were also taking shape during these years. The latent anti-Americanism he had assimilated at Belen came into clear focus. Before law school he probably had only a passing acquaintance with the late-nineteenth-century Cuban hero Jose Marti. Now he became enthralled, reading almost everything Marti had written. He finally had found his missing mentor, a guide—though not a living one who could impose on him.
He started accumulating his first library, consisting entirely of Marti’s works, and committed favorite articles and speeches to memory. At times he seems to have so thoroughly identified with his idol that, in a fashion, he actually impersonated Marti. Jose Pardo Llada and Jose Ignacio Rasco both remember an elaborately rehearsed speech Fidel delivered that closely mimicked one Marti had spoken years before. Pardo Llada wrote that in fact it was Marti’s speech and that Fidel repeated it from memory, word for word.14
In a history woefully bereft of truly unifying national heroes, Marti—Cuba’s “Apostle”—had it all. He was a notable turn-of-the-century orator and literary figure, a poet of real repute. He made his living as a journalist and essayist and was also a man of action, a political organizer of and fundraiser for Cuba’s war for independence against Spain.
And he was a martyr. Landing at night in a small boat on the shores of southeastern Oriente in 1895 to join the guerrilla struggle that he helped organize against the Spanish army, Marti wrote lyrically in his diary: “Moon comes up red … We land on a rocky beach.” Only a month or so later, mounted on a white stallion, a conspicuous target, he was shot dead by a Spanish colonel.
In his last scribblings Marti had penned galvanizing lines. They suggested more venomous feelings about the United States than he actually felt, but nonetheless they clearly reflected his growing fear of American imperial designs on Cuba.
“I know the monster well,” he wrote about the lengths of time he had spent in New York and Florida, “because I have lived in its entrails. My weapon is only the slingshot of David.”
Marti also rhetorically wondered, “Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?”
These probably are among the most influential lines Fidel ever read as his personal political philosophy was developing. Marti became his lifelong idol. The destiny he felt in him now had a north star. He would complete Marti’s work. He would free Cuba from foreign domination, become its David against the American Goliath.
Fidel wrote almost precisely that in the summer of 1958, during the last months of the Sierra Maestra insurgency, in a letter to Celia Sanchez: “I have sworn that the Americans will pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war has ended, a much bigger and greater war will start for me, the war I shall launch against them. I realize that this is my true destiny.”
Marti had deplored the materialism, expansionist appetite, “excessive individualism,” and “reverence for wealth” of Teddy Roosevelt’s robber baron America. In a typically romantic flourish, he contrasted the rapidly industrializing United States with Nuestra America, Our America, meaning all of the benighted Spanish-speaking nations in the Western Hemisphere, where, he believed, more modest humanistic virtues prevailed and needed to be protected. Nuestra America would be a phrase and slogan adopted and reiterated endlessly by Fidel’s revolution.
Under Marti’s spell, and with his new appreciation of Cuban history, Fidel became a fervid nationalist. Little to no nationalist sentiment had been expressed to Fidel while he was growing up in remote Biran with a Spanish father, at the Haitian foster home, or under the influence of the Spanish Jesuits.
But now he felt an acute, wounded pride in being Cuban. The positive thrust of his nationalism was mixed, however, with a sense of inherited national shame. Like many of his generation, especially at the university, Fidel became more and more preoccupied with Cuba’s traumatized past, with what he believed were the injustices and exploitation it had suffered under foreign domination. He became obsessed with the Cuban people’s frustrated longings for an identity independent of all great powers. Quite logically, the United States was seen as the culprit, the “monster” Marti had warned against.
It was also a stock conclusion for his generation that Marti’s fellow revolutionaries and guerrillas—the mambises—would have won total independence for their homeland had the Americans not intervened in the Spanish–American War to fight on their side.
However wishful their thinking, Cuban nationalists believed the mambises would have defeated Spain by themselves. When the Spanish generals did surrender at the end of the war, it was to the Americans. American military commanders would not even permit the mambises to enter Santiago as victors, an historical lesson Fidel warily held close as he was preparing triumphantly to enter that city himself on January 1, 1959.
He delivered his first speech as Cuba’s second “Apostle” there that night. He made clear that he and his revolution would not be humiliated as the mambises had been: “This time the revolution will not be thwarted. This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will be consummated. It will not be like the war of 1895, when the Americans arrived and made themselves masters of the country. They intervened at the last minute and later did not even allow Calixto Garcia, who has been fighting for thirty years, to enter Santiago.”
By 1948, his third full year at the university, Fidel’s anti-imperialist sentiment mirrored Marti’s fear of what Cubans often simply call el Norte, the North. Nationalists abhorred the perceived subservience of Cuban governments after the Spanish–American War, the cession of Guantanamo Bay—the best port on the island—in perpetuity to the Americans, and of course, the Platt Amendment. It gave American presidents the right to intervene in Cuba on almost any pretext, and it had been invoked several times before being abrogated in 1934 by Franklin Roosevelt. Bitter memories of the interventions were still strong a dozen years later when Fidel was being politicized at the university.
With retroactive passion, he also came to despise the big American companies, like United Fruit, that had metastasized all around the Bay of Nipe where he had grown up. American cultural and economic influence was everywhere. But like Marti, Fidel sought out opportunities to “live in the entrails of the monster,” in his case so that he could better understand it and, not incidentally, to learn English.
Later, when he was fighting to overthrow Batista, Fidel deceptively concealed the true depths of his anti-Americanism. He knew that prevailing attitudes in Cuba were overwhelmingly pro-American and that he could not be victorious if he expressed his true feelings.
* * *
Following in Marti’s footsteps, Fidel crossed another Rubicon, geopolitically one of the most important. “The Apostle” had considered himself not just a Cuban, but a citizen of all of Hispanic America. In this respect, his thinking ran parallel to the hispanidad of the Spanish falangist Jose Antonio, and in Fidel’s developing world-view the two compatible currents had an easy confluence.
There were other Latin American societies besides Cuba—Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Panama were the most obvious—that had also fallen under American sway. So Fidel began to look over the horizon toward those and other neighboring Spanish-speaking nations for additional challenges. His island homeland would never again be a large enough stage or provide him sufficient stimulus by itself.
Some have speculated that Fidel’s political and internationalist awakening at the University of Havana bred resentments not only of foreign exploiters, but also of Cubans themselves. For centuries Cubans had slavishly endured outside domination without successfully rebelling. All other Latin American countries had fought for independence early in the nineteenth century and had extirpated Spanish rule. Cuba, known as Spain’s “ever-faithful Isle,” did not begin to consider independence until after the American Civil War. With Puerto Rico, Cuba was alone in the Spanish realm in the Americas still under the colonial yoke.
By this reasoning, Fidel, the son of a gallego, and a gallego of sorts himself, looked condescendingly at his countrymen as his nationalism intensified, perhaps as he had at Biran that day when he accosted the poor peasant Aracelio Peña. The Cuban people had waited too long, endured too much colonial subjugation to be worthy of great respect. It would become his mission to awaken them, radicalize them so that, like him, they could become the masters of their own destinies. But even then, Cuba would never be a big or deserving enough platform for his Alexandrian ambitions.15
In 1947, at the age of twenty-one, and looking beyond Cuba’s shores, he took over leadership of the university Committee for the Liberation of Puerto Rico and the separate Dominican Pro-Democracy Committee. That was perhaps the only time in his life when he worked in seemingly collegial structures, although nothing is known today about how those committees operated. Fidel has never worked effectively in situations where power or decision making is shared, and it is unlikely that those student organizations were exceptions. He has never been a team player, always loath to delegate authority, except to Raul.
Fidel’s interest in the Dominican and Puerto Rican situations was in agitating, organizing student protests, and getting involved physically. He had no interest in presiding over endless discussions about the plight of those neighboring peoples or confining himself to political posturing.16
That summer he joined about twelve hundred young Dominicans and Cubans training at Cayo Confites, a small key off the Cuban north coast, to overthrow the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Sweltering, he stayed nearly two months on that mosquito-infested spit of land, wearing a military uniform and training with high-caliber weapons.
He has said he joined as a rank-and-file foot soldier, and if it is true that he obeyed orders and stayed in line, the interlude—and the two years he later spent in prison—would have been the only times in his adult life that Fidel submitted to the will or command of others. It is difficult, however, to imagine that he was an obedient and reliable subordinate.
Juan Bosch, a scholar, intellectual, and later president of the Dominican Republic for a short time in 1963, was at Cayo Confites as the nominal leader of the expedition. Years later he told Georgie Anne Geyer, one of Fidel’s principal biographers, about the aggressive and heartless young Cuban he was just then getting to know.
One of the other trainees accidentally shot himself and “his whole stomach was hanging out,” Bosch recalled. Fidel witnessed the accident from close at hand, and Bosch said that he scrutinized his reactions carefully: “His gaze was fixed on the face of the wounded man. Someone said, ‘Put in the stomach.’ And there was terror on the face of the man. But Fidel just kept looking, very serious, showing nothing. The man died. It was an accident. But I will always remember that Fidel was very cold and serene. The fact was that he made no demonstration of emotion; and he continues to be that way.”17
Fidel has defended his involvement in the Cayo Confites adventure on different occasions, saying that Cuba owed an internationalist obligation—a “debt of honor”—to the Dominican people. One of the top three leaders of the Cuban guerrillas who fought against Spain, Maximo Gomez, was a Dominican. So Fidel for many years remained determined personally to assure repayment in kind for Gomez’s sacrifices. When he initially met Bosch in Havana, Fidel had impressed him greatly with animated grandiloquence, promising “to die for the liberty” of the Dominican people.18
After the intervention was aborted, Fidel’s next opportunity to support the Dominican people came, probably not coincidentally, almost exactly a dozen years later, in June 1959, six months after the Castro brothers had won power. Together they supported a dead serious expedition that, on that second try, was successful in landing Cuban-trained insurgents on the Dominican coast, and with exactly the same goal, to overthrow the entrenched dictator.
That second expedition also failed, but not because Cuban leaders, as in 1947, had lost their nerve. Fidel told three American journalists in July 1959, just after the second attempt, that it had been carefully planned by his government, “with three groups, well armed and the best men available.” He said he could not understand why the expeditionaries had been defeated, although he was sure some had survived and gone up into the hills to fight against Trujillo as guerrillas.
The discussion with the reporters was off the record and thereby unusually candid. It was one of the few times Fidel has admitted explicitly to providing tangible support to foreign revolutionaries. He was unguarded too when he fantasized about joining the Dominican insurgents so he could once again become personally involved in the struggle against Trujillo.
Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, who was trusted by Fidel and other Cuban leaders, was one of the reporters present. His notes of the meeting were kept in his private collection for many years before being released to the archives at Columbia University. He wrote that when Fidel spoke of the surviving guerrillas he presumed were still in the hills in the Dominican Republic, he brooded about joining them. He was convinced they did not have sufficiently inspiring and decisive leadership.
According to Matthews’s notes of the meeting, Fidel “had no doubts that if he were able, he could go there and lead them, and said how much he wishes he could do that instead of running Cuba.”19
Fidel’s interest in toppling the brutal Trujillo, then in his third decade in power, reflected the commitment he had made as a university agitator. In one of the rare instances of its kind since the first days of the Cuban Revolution, American and Cuban policies toward a Latin American country virtually coincided where Trujillo was concerned. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations also targeted the dictator, covertly providing arms to Dominican dissidents who eventually succeeded in assassinating him in May 1961, when Kennedy was in office.20
Supporting the independence movement in Puerto Rico, however, was a much bolder undertaking for Fidel than helping romantic Dominican youths fight a grotesque dictator. The island has been an integral part of the United States since the end of the nineteenth century. Fidel took on the challenge with relish, originally as a militant student leader and later by assigning Cuba’s intelligence services the high-priority responsibility of promoting Puerto Rican independence through both peaceful and violent means.
Fidel has believed since his university days that Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States and therefore must be “liberated.” In his view, Puerto Ricans have suffered injustices and exploitation since the inglorious end of the Spanish–American War. They were given no choice when they came under American rule. They speak Spanish, their customs and folklore have little to do with Anglo-Saxon traditions; in short, they are a Latin American people. In a televised interview Fidel succinctly stated his view.
“The United States seized Puerto Rico and turned it into a colony.”21
Other historical principles have also motivated this obsession. Several prominent Puerto Ricans had worked closely with Marti’s Cuban Revolutionary Party, which also advocated independence for their island. Their contributions to the Cuban cause, and Marti’s commitment to theirs, provided the young Fidel with moral and historical justification. He has publicly cited commonality of interests as an underlying reason for his enduring interest in Puerto Rican independence. It is another debt of internationalist gratitude he has felt obliged to repay.
His efforts to do just that started as he was assimilating Marti’s works at the university and when he went on to assume the leadership of the Committee for the Liberation of Puerto Rico. He participated in pro-independence demonstrations and was bloodied in at least one of them. There were “many, large solidarity demonstrations” at the university he later recalled.22
“One day in front of the American consulate, in Old Havana,” he remembered about thirty years later, “the police hit me a goodly number of blows because I was participating in a demonstration in support of independence for Puerto Rico.”23
So for at least four decades, beginning in his third year at the university, one of Fidel’s most cherished international objectives was the pursuit of Puerto Rican independence, no matter how that affected relations with the United States. He provided extensive support of all types—and not just political and moral help, as he claimed—to Puerto Rican independence parties and front groups, and also to terrorist cells that engaged in lethal violence on the island and in mainland American cities. Puerto Rican terrorist campaigns, assisted for decades by some of Cuba’s best and most daring intelligence agents, reached their apogee in the 1970s and early 1980s.
* * *
By 1948, many of the beliefs he would hold and disseminate for the rest of his life had coalesced. His personality and character traits, leadership methods, and style were well developed by the time he reached his twenty-second birthday. The abrasively self-confident young man of action had found issues and causes that could propel his ambitions. He was unencumbered by the kinds of moral qualms that cause other men to hesitate or give quarter to real or imagined enemies. The essence of the revolutionary icon who has governed Cuba with an iron fist for more than four and a half decades had been distilled. And it was at about this time that Raul returned to Havana to come under Fidel’s wing, after whiling away several years at Biran.
Fidel was not a Marxist yet, but he had begun studying the founders’ theoretical works—the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Engels—and he made common cause with communist student leaders in most of his anti-government activities. But even in the unlikely event that he had wanted to join Cuba’s Communist Party or its youth affiliate, neither organization would have wanted him. He was too volatile and violent, unlikely to submit to party discipline. It was suggestive of how he would evolve ideologically, however, that in those dawning days of the Cold War—1948 was the year of the Berlin airlift—he refused to identify with the anti-communist and anti-Soviet policies that were being adopted throughout the Western democracies.
He was implacably anti-American. Many other young Cubans also described themselves as anti-imperialist, harboring strong grievances against the United States. That was both fashionable and historically correct, but for nearly all of them those attitudes were largely honored in the abstract; they were issues to be parried in Cuban domestic politics, aired in café banter, but they should not be allowed to undermine good relations with the United States. For him, however, confrontation with Marti’s “monster” to the north was both inevitable and desirable. It would be his destiny. It would be his surest route to fame and glory.
Philip Bonsal, the American ambassador until January 1961, bent over backwards to establish a good working relationship with the revolutionary leadership. It was not to be. And in the end, that liberal career diplomat, fluent in Spanish who worked so assiduously to prevent the rupture in bilateral relations, concluded that Fidel was determined to free Cuba of the American presence because he regarded the United States “as his major competitor.” Bonsal’s interpretation added a new dimension to explanations of Fidel’s anti-Americanism. The ambassador wrote that in 1959 Fidel was anti-imperialist because “he sensed that the American presence was inimical to his own drive for absolute power.”24
In retrospect it is easy to discern in Fidel, the university student, the makings of the adult adversary of the United States. It was not so easy for American observers at the time.
As he was making his way to power, Fidel was masterful in concealing and denying his true beliefs. With only a few exceptions, American journalists and government officials took him largely at his word. He professed, on many occasions and in a variety of settings, to be a democrat. He said he would schedule free and fair elections, reinstate the progressive Cuban constitution of 1940, and maintain good relations with the United States. He denied repeatedly that he had communist inclinations. The revolution was “humanist,” he claimed.
There was a lot of wishful thinking by American officials, even in the CIA, that Fidel and his barbudo revolutionaries in the mountains were noble young romantics, determined to bring an end to a particularly odious dictatorship. By the middle of 1958 his victory seemed all but inevitable and therefore most U.S. government officials simply hoped for the best. Fidel certainly appeared to have authoritarian tendencies, but American diplomatic and intelligence specialists expected he would mature and mellow. At least there was no evidence that he was a communist, and surely he would keep the two most prominent Marxists in his entourage—Raul and Che Guevara—in check.
That wishful thinking resulted in the first of innumerable American intelligence and policy failures over Cuba. Fidel’s many character flaws were overlooked or ignored. His record of revolutionary internationalist involvements was not seen as very important. Little reliable information about him had been gathered by the American embassy in Havana, the consulate in Santiago, or the CIA. His involvement in anti-imperialist activities, Puerto Rican independence, and mafia-style gangland activities were mostly ignored in the dispatches.
There would be many other intelligence failures involving assessments of Fidel. Sadly, they occurred in every decade he has been in power, and for a long time they were compounded, year after year, as the same wrongheaded mindsets about him were perpetuated. Perhaps none of them was as crucial as the original error that persisted for many years. CIA analysts and leaders insisted on believing, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, that Fidel was amenable to good relations with the United States.