Bogotá, the somber capital of Colombia more than eight thousand feet high in the Andes, resembles no other large Latin American city. There is no tropical greenery, no palm trees or pastel colors, little surviving Spanish colonial architecture. Red brick houses and apartment buildings look vaguely Tudor, strangely out of place. The mood is formal, taciturn, wary. Shouldered on three sides by towering snow capped peaks, it is a dark, cool metropolis where even in summer it is wise to wear a coat or shawl against the chilling evening breezes.
The city was the scene of perhaps the worst single outbreak of fratricidal violence in modern Latin American history. A few thousand died there in April 1948 in convulsions of killing and looting—the bogotazo it was called—that erupted following the assassination of a wildly popular political leader. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was the beloved head of the Liberal Party, the apparent presidential front runner trying to unseat the arch enemy Conservatives with promises to uplift the poor and working classes. Instead, his sudden murder at lunchtime on a street near his law office in downtown Bogotá ignited a cataclysmic outburst of violence.
Fidel was there. Just twenty-one years old, he was making his first foreign sojourn, accompanied by three other young Cubans, including his frequent comrade in violent adventure, Rafael del Pino. Fidel and del Pino had earlier collaborated in a little known murder attempt in Havana, according to a prominent historian. That one—the fourth Fidel was said to have been involved in during his university years—targeted Rolando Masferrer, the founder and head of one of the university-based mafia gangs.1 In Bogotá, Fidel and del Pino were intent on making trouble for the United States, not participating in a revolutionary upheaval. They wound up doing both.
American Secretary of State George Marshall and the foreign ministers of the Latin American countries had gathered in the Colombian capital to hold an important pan-American conference out of which the Organization of American States emerged. Fidel was determined to disrupt and discredit the proceedings. He considered the conference the latest intrusion of American imperialism in Latin America, a menacing effort by the United States, as he once said, to “consolidate its dominance” in the region.
The Cubans, with students from Argentina and a few other countries, hosted a rival conclave that overflowed with heavy doses of anti-imperialist rhetoric, though they got little notice. Undeterred, Fidel and del Pino found a better way to attract attention and to get their anti-American messages communicated at the highest levels.
Somehow they got into the ornate Colon Theater in downtown Bogotá, where the foreign ministers were meeting. From high on a balcony they scattered thousands of leaflets on the delegates who were seated below, mingling with the cream of Colombian society. Most of the propaganda had been printed in Havana. It propounded Fidel’s familiar litany of that time, demands for the independence of Puerto Rico, the return of the Panama Canal, and the end of the Trujillo dictatorship.2
The two Cubans were arrested and interrogated as their hotel room was searched. But Fidel says he was able to talk his way out by persuading the Colombian detectives that his intentions were idealistic and harmless, and that the conservative Colombian government was not his target. He later said he had passionately explained to the police his view of the injustices Latin American countries were suffering under American influence while making clear his noble, romantic intentions. If that part of his account can be taken at face value, as it more or less probably can, once again Fidel’s gilded tongue worked its powers of persuasion. He and del Pino were soon released.
In an interview more than thirty years later with a Colombian journalist, Fidel recalled that brief detention, as well as his involvement a few days later in the bogotazo: “We were rather lucky in our talk with the detectives. In fact I got the impression that someone in charge even liked what we were saying. We were quite persuasive.”3
Fidel and del Pino had met with the charismatic Gaitan just two days before he was assassinated, winning his implicit support for their rump conference. They were scheduled to meet with him again on the afternoon he was murdered. That coincidence fueled extravagant rumors, believed by many to this day, that the two Cubans shared somehow in the responsibility for the murder and the violence it ignited.
Fidel was impressed with Gaitan, a persuasive orator and organizer. He was charismatic, physically imposing. His progressive politics and energetic style resembled those of Eduardo Chibas, the leader of Cuba’s new Orthodox Party, with which Fidel had affiliated the year before. Gaitan, however, was more in touch with the common people.
There was little Fidel saw in Bogotá that reminded him of Cuba. Colombia, in the Andean highlands, was like nothing he had ever seen before. Far from home, he knew no one. Colombian history and politics were largely unknown to him as well; he had almost no basis for judging why multitudes of Gaitan’s supporters would soon be spilling into the streets bent on vengeance over the death of their leader. Fidel may not have known that anti-imperialist grievances were the furthest thing from their minds. The United States had never intervened in Colombia. The political situation was nothing like that in Panama or the Dominican Republic.
Like everyone else in Bogotá, Fidel was taken by surprise when the brooding city burst suddenly into unprecedented bloodshed. He did know that nothing like it had ever happened in Cuba. In fact, nothing comparable had occurred anywhere in Latin America.
The tumult erupted as soon as Gaitan’s followers learned of his death. “They’ve killed Gaitan. They’ve killed Gaitan,” was screamed through the streets.
“We saw an enormous procession of people–a river of people coming along a street,” Fidel later remembered. “They had weapons; some had rifles.… It was an enormous crowd—thousands of people advancing along that street … I joined them. I got in the front line of that crowd.”
Without much contemplation, Fidel decided to join the rioters, plunging headlong into the mayhem. It was not enough to be just an anonymous body in that roiling mass; he quickly moved up to a position in the vanguard, at the front lines of the rioters where he could more easily assert a leadership role.
He had no difficulty arming himself, at first with a tear gas gun and later with a rifle. He remained in the fray for about two days, first in the streets with the mobs, attacking and ransacking government buildings and police stations, and then overnight at a hillside redoubt, firing and being fired upon and for a period of time actually leading a squad of men ready to resist an army assault.
He had never been in a situation anything like it. Fires were burning out of control, the charred hulks of buses and cars were lying overturned in the streets, armed and raging mobs were running amok. Entirely by chance he was experiencing a popular upheaval like ones he had only read about. The storming of the Bastille by mobs of frenzied French revolutionaries was on his mind.
He thought it must be the first, chaotic stage of a revolution. He remembers being “filled with revolutionary fervor, trying to get as many people as possible to join the revolutionary movement.” Later, on the first afternoon of the violence, armed with the rifle he stole, he leapt onto a bench in front of the war ministry building in the chaotic downtown of the city.
He says that he “harangued the military men who were there, trying to get them to join the revolution.”
That and his other responses to the situation reflect the unique character traits he has exhibited in dangerous and stressful situations ever since. Few other foreigners caught in the maelstrom reacted as he did. Nearly all fled or hid. Del Pino was with him for part of the time in the streets, but the other two Cubans remained safely behind in their lodgings. One of them was a leader of the young communists at the university, and later Fidel would never let him forget that he timorously sat out the turbulence.
To have participated in the violence would have been insane by almost anyone’s standards, especially for one who had no stake in Colombian politics. Fidel did not give it a second thought. His decision to join the rioters and the subsequent choices he made to stay and fight with them were entirely consistent with his mindset, convictions, personality framework, and proclivity for violence. His response was completely in character.
His accounts of why he decided to stay, offered much later, are exculpatory and self-serving. As always, his retrospective version of events reflected the shrewd eye he fixes on how he will be remembered in history. He asserted that his decisions derived only from internationalist convictions, that his purposes were honorable and selfless. There is nothing in his explanations to suggest the larger truth, that his actions sprung more from sanguinary compulsions than noble promptings.
Above all Fidel sensed an opportunity to win fame and glory. He lusted for action and perhaps also for danger. The bogotazo was a means to learn first hand how to make the best of a revolutionary situation, so that one day he could apply the lessons learned there at home in Cuba. And he should also be taken at his word that he eventually felt an internationalist obligation to help Gaitan’s rioting followers. But that, by his own accounts, came later, well after he had hurled himself into the streets with the rioters.
He says it was not until the early morning hours of the second day of the unrest that he began seriously to contemplate what he was doing, and “I was overcome by an internationalist sentiment. I thought, well, the people here are the same as the people in Cuba. These people are oppressed and exploited … I may die here, but I am staying.”
It did not turn out to be Colombia’s Bastille. Gaitan’s followers did not bring about a revolution; the fever of the violence abated almost as quickly as it had flared. Order was restored after leaders of the Liberal and Conservative political parties concluded a cease fire, wanting above all to end the killing as quickly as possible. Fidel later characterized that solution as a betrayal of the interests of all those—including himself—who had taken to the streets.
When it was over, as he was preparing to go back to his hotel, he realized that his personal arsenal had grown from the rifle he began with to a sword and a cutlass. He had managed to acquire a policeman’s vest and a cap, which he wore as a beret. Along the way he had attempted to steal a pair of boots from a terrified policeman, but they did not fit. He had made himself as ready as he could for combat.
Fidel’s usually precise memory failed him, however, when, in three different accounts of his activities during interviews in three different decades, he had diverging recollections about how many bullets he had left when the violence ended.4
In a taped interview in the 1960s, he told Carlos Franqui he had fired four of the sixteen bullets he acquired. In two subsequent accounts, he recalled he had either nine or fourteen bullets left at the end. The most interesting discrepancy is that he admitted only to Franqui that he had actually fired his rifle four times.
By 1948 Fidel was an expert marksman. He did not tell Franqui if any of the shots he fired struck their targets, but clearly he was choosing his shots carefully and, as always, not wasting ammunition. If he thought he had killed or injured Colombian military personnel who remained loyal to the government that night, he would not have wanted it known. He avoided the subject entirely in his three extended public accountings and has never been questioned about it on the record.
Enrique Ovares was one of the four Cubans in the student delegation that went with Fidel to Bogotá. He recalled in an interview in Miami in 1967 that Fidel was still carrying the purloined rifle when they caught up with each other. “I asked him what he was doing. Fidel only responded that it was his duty.”5
Fidel has admitted he was fascinated by the terrible violence he witnessed, but has never said he was also appalled or repelled by it. Each time he has described his participation, he failed to express remorse for the thousands of dead and wounded, the widespread property damage in the city, or the years of savage internecine conflict the bogotazo sparked in the Colombian countryside. His sentiments then—and every time he spoke of those events since—were cold, detached, and bloodless. He has repeatedly insisted too that he was proud of what he did: “I acted in accord with my moral principles, with dignity and honor, with discipline and with incredible selflessness.”6
In August 1993, Fidel returned for the first time to Colombia since those events in 1948, ironically to attend a conference not too unlike the foreign ministers meeting in Bogotá he had disrupted. He went to Cartagena, a colonial city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, for a meeting of Latin American and Iberian heads of government. He was asked during a news conference at the VIP guest house where he stayed if the decades-old rumors were true and if he had personally instigated the bogotazo. He denied that he had, of course, cloaking his involvement in internationalist virtue: “It was one of the most disinterested and altruistic moments of my life.”7 Enrique Ovares remembered it quite differently. “It was an hysteric, ambitious, and uncontrollable Fidel who acted in those events.”8
Alfredo Guevara, president of the University of Havana student federation, and the communist who had stayed in his hotel room, was the fourth Cuban in Bogotá. He was also horrified by how Fidel and del Pino had behaved. Del Pino had looted jewelry stores during the rioting, and although Fidel has never been charged with that, he was considered guilty by association. He was viewed as even more disreputable after the bogotazo than he had been before.
Safely back at the University of Havana, Fidel found his notoriety soaring. “The Cubans,” as he and del Pino were being referred to in the Colombian press, had attracted considerable attention. The conservative government was looking for convenient foreign scapegoats, even for accomplices they could try to implicate in Gaitan’s assassination. An international conspiracy was a politically more palatable explanation for the violence than the truth, which was that a large sector of the population was aggrieved.
All sorts of rumors were flying, some of which continue to be believed by many today. Respected American diplomats who attended the inter-American conference later claimed to have heard Fidel, in a raging radio broadcast in Bogotá at the height of the violence, proclaim that a socialist revolution had begun.
He and del Pino reportedly were observed by Colombian intelligence agents conspiring with radical labor leaders. It was said that Gaitan’s assassin had been seen that morning in a downtown Bogotá café conferring with del Pino as Fidel monitored them nearby.9 Other, even wilder stories proliferated. None of these reports has ever been substantiated, and some have been definitively refuted. Whatever the truth of these more incendiary tales, Fidel’s legend for extraordinary behavior was taking hold, and not just in Cuba.
As an adjunct professor at Georgetown University for twenty-five years, teaching courses on the Cuban Revolution, I always emphasized the importance of the bogotazo. Fidel emerged from it with his revolutionary character almost fully formed. I always polled my students, asking what they would have done if they had found themselves stranded in a strange foreign city as it exploded into savage violence. I never had one who said he or she would have joined the rioters.
* * *
Fidel’s participation in the violence was of enduring significance for him and Cuba. The bogotazo instilled a number of lessons—strategic, doctrinal, tactical, and personal.
He later said he had been impressed with “the phenomenon of how an oppressed people could erupt.… The April ninth uprising influenced me greatly in my later revolutionary life.”
Most immediately, it illuminated the path to his victory in Cuba. It gave flesh-and-blood relevance to his childhood and adolescent musings about the storming of the Bastille and other decisive revolutionary moments in history. It demonstrated in particular, that an unexpected, shocking act of violence—whether planned or not—could ignite a revolutionary upheaval. Bogotá in 1948 was therefore the precursor of the Moncada assault that launched him on his trajectory to power.
A second strategic lesson of more enduring significance for Cuba and many other countries was that Fidel’s internationalist vision was cemented in Bogotá. Cayo Confites had been a dress rehearsal; Bogotá was the real thing. The commitments he made to fight for another people were fixed with certainty and finality.
That awakening happened in the streets of the city, and, by his telling, most poignantly on the slopes of the nearly ten-thousand-foot tall Monserrate mountain, on the first night of the violence as he waited for the Colombian army to attack his position with tanks. The danger seemed to be acute, but he says he decided to stay and fight with Gaitan’s beleaguered followers. The way he tells it, his decision was an electrifying, life-altering event.
Through the rest of his career, he would always expect his subordinates and followers to perform in dangerous situations as he did. On two or three occasions, he says, he narrowly escaped death in Bogotá, implying that Colombians around him during one of those skirmishes were killed under military fire. He recalled that at some point he decided to lead an attack on a divisional police headquarters to obtain more weapons. It seemed “suicidal,” though, as it turned out, the policemen there had joined the rioters and did not resist. For him those most dangerous moments, when he was pumped up with adrenalin, were high points, tests of his valor.
However self-serving his recollections may be, he has always expected other revolutionaries to emulate his behaviour. Zealotry in the pursuit of his revolutionary causes would be the fundamental requirement. He believes true revolutionaries must plunge willingly, heroically into action without getting bogged down in needless contemplation or theorizing. He came to expect fanaticism from those charged with defending the revolution at home and in pursuing revolutionary internationalist causes abroad. In Fidel’s mind, at least, the decision to stay and fight on Bogotá’s Monserrate mountain provided the model for all future revolutionary internationalists.
Once in power, with the capability to assist peoples whom he considered oppressed or exploited, he would never waver in performing internationalist duties. Internationalism would remain his and Cuba’s sacred obligation as he provided clandestine and propaganda support, and on some momentous occasions massive military backing, for guerrillas and revolutionaries in about two dozen countries on three continents.
In particular, he never gave up hope that Colombian revolutionaries would one day complete the task that had been thwarted in April 1948. With Cuban government assistance, Marxist guerrillas first took up arms in remote regions of the Andean foothills in the early 1960s, inspired by the Cuban Revolution and Fidel’s constant calls for revolutionary action. More than forty years later two of those movements are still waging bloody guerrilla warfare in large areas of the Colombian countryside. No other nation has for so many years been the object of his revolutionary entanglements.
The National Liberation Army and the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces are no longer mistaken for virtuous, romantic advocates of Gaitan’s legacy. Today they enjoy the support of no more than 3 or 4 percent of the Colombian populace, and even that small number has declined as their acts of urban terrorism have turned especially savage and their dependence on narcotics trafficking has increased.
Both groups have been certified by the U.S. Department of State as international terrorist organizations. The larger Revolutionary Armed Forces have kidnapped and killed Americans, conducting brutal campaigns in Bogotá and other large cities that have targeted innocent civilians. The National Liberation Army, historically the closer of the two movements to the Cuban government, has specialized in bombing remote petroleum pipelines and facilities as well as kidnappings. Both groups have stubbornly refused to lay down their arms and participate in the Colombian democratic process despite the many peace initiatives and internationally assisted negotiating processes that have been mounted.
* * *
K. S. Karol, a Polish–French Marxist intellectual who spent extended periods of time in Cuba in the 1960s in the thrall of the revolution, wrote of a third critically important lesson Fidel derived from the bogotazo. It would prove to be the most consequential of all.
Karol traveled around the island with Fidel and was, until their later bitter falling out, an influential Paris-based supporter. He concluded that Fidel was so galvanized by his Bogotá experiences that he was impelled for the first time to begin developing a real social philosophy. By Karol’s informed analysis, Fidel’s reflections led to his initial attraction to Marxist–Leninist doctrine. Fidel concluded that what he had seen in Bogotá was class warfare in the raw.
Karol believed that by witnessing “the extraordinary violence smoldering just beneath the apparently peaceful surface of Latin America,” Fidel returned to Cuba with an appreciation of the region’s acute social problems. Gaitan’s murder was what had sparked the rioting, but “desperation and hunger,” in Karol’s words, were its root causes.
As Karol explained it in his book, Guerrillas in Power, Fidel “came to realize that the fight for moral right and justice must be coupled with the fight for social improvements.” Karol believed that “this discovery left a deep mark” on Fidel.10
Lionel Martin, who interviewed Fidel and other Cuban government officials for his biographical study, The Early Fidel, agreed with Karol. He wrote that “…it was precisely in the period following the bogotazo that Fidel began studying Marxism in earnest.”11
Fidel himself has never made that connection, though his periodic musings on the subject support the view. He told Lee Lockwood that for a year or two before 1948 he had been “a kind of utopian socialist,” perhaps not unlike large numbers of curious university students in almost any country during much of the twentieth century.
He says his Marxist–Leninist awakening began when he read Lenin’s landmark work, State and Revolution, and became acquainted with the writings of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. He says Marx and Engels “had an almost apocalyptic influence” on him. In a speech in Chile in 1971 he recalled the discovery as an epiphany: “For me it was a revelation … so persuasive that I was absolutely amazed. I was converted to those ideas.”12
He told the Brazilian priest Betto much the same, that in 1948 his discovery of Marxist thinking opened intellectual horizons for him: “It completely won me over. Just as Ulysses was ensnared by the Siren’s song, I was captivated by the irrefutable truths of Marxist literature. Immediately I began to grasp it.”13
Despite the assurance those remarks suggest, Fidel was not yet a dedicated Marxist. Over the years, he has often been inconsistent and vague about the timing of his conversion. In an interview with the sympathetic biographer Lionel Martin in 1974, he said that when he graduated from the university “I already had a Marxist–Leninist formation.” That equivocation is about as close as he has ever come to claiming that by 1950 his thinking had coalesced into full-scale Marxism–Leninism.
There is no doubt, that he was keenly attracted to communist doctrine, but he was just as determined to avoid any embrace of the communist party. A ranking Cuban communist who knew Fidel well once observed that in his latter university days he liked individual communists, but not the communism of Cuba’s party.14
Fidel was aware he could never advance politically as a member of the party. Cuban communists by and large were too cautious, even bourgeois, to support his style of confrontational militance. They had supported the Batista government during World War II; two party elders held cabinet posts in his government. The party was linked to the political establishment. Most members were café dilettantes, and Fidel knew there was no chance they would adopt a revolutionary program.
And his reservations about them were reciprocated. They were repelled by his notoriety and grandiosity and his penchant for violence. They later denounced the Moncada attack as reckless and “putschist,” a term that was used to smear him as a fascist. They knew he could never function under party discipline. His more pliable brother Raul, in contrast, was a more likely prospect.
After returning from Bogotá, Fidel realized his political ambitions required him to conceal or minimize his increasingly radical thinking. In 1948, popular support for anti-imperialist causes was evaporating in Cuba. Large wheels of history were turning as global relationships were changing. The Cold War had just begun in Europe following the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Berlin airlift began shortly after Fidel returned from Bogotá. Stalin’s Soviet Union was aggressively challenging the West while consolidating a huge communist sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Mao was triumphing in China.
Suddenly, there was little sympathy for anti-American rhetoric or demonstrations in favor of causes like Puerto Rican independence, which now seemed peripheral. Fidel has said that around the time he returned from Bogotá the number of anti-imperialist students at the university had dwindled to no more than thirty, including himself and the communists.15 In terms of his own political aspirations, he understood that going back to the ramparts and brandishing anti-imperialism would not advance his political career.
He was no less an anti-imperialist but decided pragmatically to push those convictions into the background, where they would stay until some months after he won power. They were sublimated, never abandoned.
Fidel organized and led fewer anti-American demonstrations, backed off on the Puerto Rican independence issue, and got in step with the Cuba-centric programs of the Orthodox Party. Chibas and the other principal leaders of that party had no anti-American ax to grind. They were openly anti-Soviet and anticommunist.
Fidel, however, never resorted to anti-communist baiting, which is perhaps the clearest indication that he was attracted to Marxist–Leninist doctrine. With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, his fundamental differences with Chibas over the Cold War became clear. The Orthodox Party leader supported the Truman administration, downplaying his earlier support for anti-imperialist bashing because now the Soviet bloc loomed as an even greater threat. Fidel never supported the war in Korea, Cuban participation, or American Cold War foreign policies in general.
He was then drafting articles for two communist youth publications reflecting his concern over the plight of Cuban workers and peasants. He signed an international petition, organized by pro-Soviet front groups, to ban nuclear weapons. He did not openly identify with Soviet or communist causes, but rejected the paranoiac anti-communism that was shaping American responses during the early years of the Cold War. Leaving himself plenty of room for future strategical maneuvering, Fidel neither condemned nor overtly supported communists or communism.
His intellectual baggage was gradually becoming more heavily weighted with the works of the communist world’s leading lights. The many volumes of Marti in his library now were being nudged aside for Marxist treatises. He bought a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital in New York during his honeymoon. He began to learn—apparently for the first time—about the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. His friendships with communist student leaders deepened as he frequented the Communist Party bookstore in Old Havana. Intellectually and politically he may have been moving in different directions, but he sensed that someday doctrine and destiny would converge.
* * *
When Fidel completed his law studies in September 1950, he was set adrift without a course or navigating skills. His ambitions and need for political triumphs were as strong as ever, but he had no plan and poor prospects given his unsavory reputation. His biographer Robert Quirk concluded that Fidel had expected fame, but instead got notoriety: “Whatever his apologists wrote later, he never distinguished himself in any capacity during his five years at the university.”16
He was now certified to practice law, and did not object in those days when he was referred to as “Dr. Castro,” though it was soon evident he had hardly any interest in the profession. That was the latest of the disappointments he inflicted on Angel and Lina, who had hoped he would return to Oriente to represent the family’s interests. Surely, however, Fidel never considered the life of a provincial lawyer as a possibility. He despised ponderous procedure, the intricacies of due process, the need to weigh evidence judiciously, and he knew that much of the legal system was corrupt.
In another society he might have thrived as a thundering prosecutor or flamboyant trial attorney. He did try his hand at least once during those wilderness years in the early 1950s at righteous legal drama. He filed an indictment against the new Cuban president for malfeasance, with no hope at all of winning but the intention of embarrassing the president while attracting attention to himself.
Fidel’s only big case ironically turned out to be the self-defense he mounted at his own trial following the Moncada assault. His courtroom peroration, later rewritten and widely disseminated in pamphlet form, would be one of the most important documents ever associated with him. It outlined and endeavored to justify his revolutionary program.
The speech, History Will Absolve Me, is remembered by its last four words. Many scholars and Castro biographers have pointed out that Fidel’s final phrase bore a stunning resemblance to the closing phrase Hitler uttered in self-defense at his trial in Munich in 1923. But Fidel’s statement no doubt was also modeled on speeches by classical orators he had studied.
“Condemn me if you wish. It does not matter. Because history will absolve me.”
Halfheartedly, with two working-class students who had graduated with him, he set up a tenuous practice in a walk-up on Tejadilla Street in Old Havana, advertising legal representation in “civil, criminal, and social” matters. It was the Cuban equivalent of a poverty law practice. Nearly all of the clients were poor, and usually they could not pay in cash. One defendant he managed to get acquitted—a Spanish sculptor—reimbursed him with a bust of Marti that Fidel kept in a place of honor in his library.17
In October 1948 Fidel had married Mirta Diaz Balart, and the following year their son Fidelito was born. The Castro family was delighted with the match; most of the conservative Diaz Balarts were horrified. Angel continued to provide an allowance. The stipends kept flowing at least into 1951, when Fidel was twenty-five years old.18 Fidel was a married man and father, but the prospect of settling down into a conventional bourgeois lifestyle held no attraction.
By nearly all accounts he was deeply in love with his bride, although a few detractors have claimed it was a marriage of convenience because her family was so well connected to powerful political interests. He was a terrible provider, took little interest in the household, and was not often home with his wife and son. When he was there they ate mostly spaghetti. A few years later he began his affair with the equally beautiful Natalia Revuelta, who later bore him his only known daughter, Alina Fernandez.
Carlos Prio had succeeded the despised Grau San Martin as president in October 1948, campaigning on platitudes and calls for anti-communist vigilance. It proved to be the last time Cubans went to the polls in anything resembling democratic elections.
Prio was from the same political party as his predecessor and not much of an improvement. Cuban politics remained mired in corruption as gangland political violence continued to roar out of control. Nevertheless, because the economy was thriving in the postwar boom, most Cubans stoically endured their country’s political scandals. Their best hope for the future was Eduardo Chibas.
Chibas had broken in disgust from the governing party in May 1947, announcing the creation of the new Orthodox Party that quickly became the principal focus of center–left opposition interests. Fidel was among the first to join its youth branch, transferring much of his passion for organizing and protesting to the party’s political operations. Chibas was a mesmerizing, passionate orator who campaigned indefatigably against corruption and violence. Every Sunday night Cubans gathered in homes and cafés to listen to his radio broadsides in which he lambasted public officials with specific and sordid details of corruption. His reputation for honesty and probity set him apart from the bilious political mainstream, and his following steadily grew.
Chibas had little use for Fidel, who endeavored tirelessly to attach himself to that rising star. According to Fidel’s friend Jose Pardo Llada, the Orthodox leader did not want Fidel around him. Chibas believed “he was a gangster,” a notorious pistolero who could only hurt Chibas and the party’s image.19 It did not matter that Fidel was loosening his ties with the university-based mafia gangs by the time he joined the party. The stains of his past were not so easily expunged.
Chibas and the party chieftains thought of Fidel as unprincipled. They were aware that he was opportunistically pursuing other possibilities on the political right and the extreme left. He may even have been conniving to win a sinecure in the same Prio administration he was denouncing, and some who knew him speculate that he was receiving an illicit government stipend.
He may well have been weighing four divergent routes to a more promising political future. It was such behavior that prompted his political associate of that era, Luis Conte Aguero, who I interviewed in Coral Gables, Florida many years after he left Cuba, to suggest that Fidel had been nothing more than “a chameleon.”
In early February 1950, Fidel’s namesake and would-be godfather Fidel Pino Santos, then a member of Congress, wrote to Prio’s secretary of agriculture seeking a position there for “the son of our friend Angel Castro.” The minister, Carlos Hevia, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who had once been president of Cuba for approximately seventy-two hours, responded courteously six days later that he could not help. Hevia had a reputation for honesty and was a dedicated anti-communist. He had no interest in the controversial young man whose reputation had surely come to his attention.20
It was also during this period that Fidel flirted with the possibility of forging some kind of relationship with Fulgencio Batista. The one-time army sergeant, the only Cuban ever to rise from poverty to the presidency, had ruled for ten years in different capacities after a 1933 coup. He was fairly elected to a four-year presidential term in 1940, proceeding to build a mixed record of progressive reforms that boosted his popularity with the working classes. But at the same time he sanctioned targeted acts of violence against opponents. Batista won a Senate seat in 1948, planning to be reelected as president in the 1952 elections as a right-of-center candidate.
Fidel met with his future mortal adversary at Batista’s country estate, “Kukines.” Batista and Angel had known each other in Oriente, and the one-time enlisted man who had promoted himself to general was receptive to a meeting with the intriguing upstart, Angel Castro’s son. Fidel’s brother-in-law Rafael Diaz Balart, then a member of Batista’s infant political party, arranged the meeting. Most of what transpired remains clouded in mystery, though it is clear that the two men fascinated each other. Diaz Balart many years later told Georgie Anne Geyer that they “looked at each other with admiration.”21
They warily sized each other up but seem never to have reached any agreement about ways in which they might collaborate while probably not foreclosing that possibility either. Diaz Balart remembers that Fidel asked for the meeting, telling him he wanted to encourage Batista to undertake a coup. The meeting took place in Batista’s library with Diaz Balart and another Batista supporter present. The two principals toyed with each other. Fidel perused books on Batista’s library shelves and mused aloud, “Your library is very attractive, but it seems to be missing a very important work.” He paused, then added that the missing book was an obscure old tome about techniques for conducting a military coup.22
With that transparent reference Fidel meant to indicate that he would support a coup by Batista. Diaz Balart recalls that everyone laughed heartily and awkwardly, too, no doubt, but the wily older man did not take the bait. Afterwards, he presciently told Diaz Balart that his friend “was very intelligent but dangerous.” Fidel’s Orthodox Party friend Pardo Llada, wrote that Fidel arranged subsequent meetings with Batista. He was keeping a spectrum of options open for getting ahead, whether through legitimate or revolutionary means.23
Fidel was still hopeful that a Bastille or bogotazo style event might yet provide his opening. When Chibas died of a gunshot wound, sensationally self inflicted during a live radio broadcast in August 1951, Fidel had the chance to revive his familiar anarchist notion of provoking a mass uprising. The suicide aroused an enormous outpouring of grief and concern. It had been widely assumed that Chibas would win the presidency the following year. Could the bogotazo be replicated in Cuba?
At the funeral, after delivering five different versions of a lengthy eulogy, Fidel approached Pardo Llada, wanting to know where the body would be taken after the ceremonies.
“To the cemetery.”
Instead, Fidel insisted, they should take the remains processionally through the streets to the presidential palace. He wanted to take advantage of the large, mourning crowds that had gathered. He understood how intense the popular feeling was. “Why the palace?” Pardo Llada wanted to know.24 “So we can seize power,” Fidel retorted.
Unlike accounts of his other most incendiary proposals, Fidel boastfully confirmed this one. Speaking to a group of Latin American journalists in August 1967, he told them that Chibas’s mourners had numbered around five hundred thousand. He told the reporters what he remembered saying to the Orthodox Party leaders assembled at the funeral: “Let’s carry the body to the palace, and there the people will topple the government. With this multitude confronting it, the government will fall. In one hour the revolution will have triumphed.”25
Sixteen years after Chibas’s death, Fidel was proud of what he had wanted to do, convinced he might actually have sparked a revolution. Of course his wild idea had been incredulously brushed aside, and his standing in the eyes of Chibas’s Orthodox Party successors sank even lower.
He was able, nonetheless, to bully his way, against the Orthodox Party’s wishes, into campaigning as a candidate for a seat in the lower house of Congress. He never actually received the nomination, though he campaigned with characteristic fervor and energy, finding ingenious ways to make himself familiar to working-class voters in poor Havana neighborhoods. Historians generally agree that Fidel probably would have won. He has said repeatedly, however, that he had no intention of being a retiring back-bencher. He described his plan in 1967: “When I was seated in the congress I would immediately present a revolutionary program to the people, four or five revolutionary bills, not so that they would be approved but to present a program for a revolution.”26
Just as he had no disposition for practicing law, Fidel’s personality and proclivity for violence ruled out any possibility he could ever function in a democratic environment.
By 1952 he deplored virtually everything about democratic process in Cuba. The country had labored through nearly its entire existence as an independent nation under dictators or corrupt strongmen masquerading as democrats. Nothing in his education had led him to think positively about democracy. Even in the large body of Marti’s writings there were no ringing endorsements of liberal democracy. By Fidel’s reckoning, moreover, the nearest democracy, the United States, was a rapacious exploiter and imperialist overlord, hardly a model for Cuba.
Furthermore, Fidel’s few personal experiences with electoral politics had all confirmed that the Cuban system was rotten. He blamed his failures to advance in university politics on others and on corruption, but never on his own shortcomings. He remembered as a boy helping his half brother Pedro Emilio in a campaign to win office in Oriente. The effort failed, and again he said it was because of corruption. In the Betto interview he deplored how his father felt it necessary to subsidize local politicians Fidel considered venal. There was nothing in democracy as he knew it that appealed to him. By running for Congress he meant only to advance his revolutionary ends—to bring down the pseudo-democratic system and to seize power.
* * *
It turned out, however, that Batista did it first. The 1952 elections, scheduled for that June, were nullified by the surprise military coup Batista staged almost bloodlessly on March 10. He did not consult with his future nemesis, of course, but the coup is all the more interesting in light of the meeting Batista had with Fidel at “Kukines.”
Had Fidel in fact hoped for a military coup? If not, how can his oblique reference to a takeover of the government when he first visited Batista be explained? Was he strategically so farsighted that he could envision an unpopular right-wing dictatorship as better for his political fortunes than the alternatives? Did he give Batista even more explicit encouragement in their later off-the-record meetings?
These tantalizing questions are impossible to answer. But considered in the context of Fidel’s long record of political sagacity and duplicity, it would seem there is a good chance he did yearn for a right-wing dictatorship to take power. Batista’s coup was a godsend. It was the most promising turning point in Fidel’s career until then. Discredited and mistrusted in Cuba’s most influential political circles, he would get a new lease on life in a situation in which his audacity would be admired, in which his violent and conspiratorial methods would be considered necessary and virtuous. Rudderless after graduating from the university, he was able to set a new course toward a destiny Marti would have approved. His David versus Goliath mission would be to bring down the dictatorship. With Batista illegally in office, Fidel could legitimately go about trying to seize power.
The anti-dictatorial struggle would make the best of his many intellectual and leadership strengths. His oratorical and other public performance skills, his gift for recruiting and motivating followers, his indefatigability and determination would all be powerful advantages. The unflinching certainty that he was somehow meant to play a crucial historical role would no longer seem so preposterous and egotistical. Even his record since childhood of springing surprise confrontations on authority figures was perfectly suited for his new mission.
His principal character flaws—narcissism, egotism, and an obsessive need for power and control—could actually now work to his advantage. The revolutionary movement would have to be vertically structured, with strong and decisive central leadership, and a charismatic figure at the top. Fidel’s need to be in control of every detail, to count every bullet, could actually be helpful. He was twenty-six and cleverly presented his youth as an asset. He and his young supporters, in what after Moncada came to be known as the July Twenty-sixth Movement, represented a generational challenge to the corrupt and failed older men who had governed Cuba for so long.
He learned to feign humility and simplicity, in the process becoming more skillful at communicating nuanced messages to sophisticated audiences. Everything about him was now primed and practiced for the challenge of taking on Batista. Everything else in his life was soon subordinated to that strategic plan. His wife and son rarely saw him. He abandoned his struggling little law practice. He ignored the family at Biran.
Planning many moves ahead on the chessboard, he knew he would need to attract broad support from diverse sectors of Cuban society. He therefore avoided his old communist friends from the university and had no interest in recruiting any of them to join him and begin military training. Years later he acknowledged that well-calculated element of his strategy. He told an interviewer that there were no communists aboard the Granma. He could have said the same about Moncada, except that Raul was the single exception in both cases. Any associations with communism or communists, other than those of his brother who denied them would have been detrimental.
With just as much foresight and clarity of purpose, he ceased nearly all criticism of the United States and made almost no further mention of internationalist issues. He promised free and fair elections, to reinstate Cuba’s progressive 1940 Constitution that Batista had suspended, and to restore democracy. He repeated these and similar pledges whenever he had the chance. He knew he had to have the support of Cuba’s urban middle classes and that he could never prevail if the American government was determined to prevent his victory.
So after the 1952 coup, when he set his course straight and clear, Fidel never again spoke critically of the United States—that is, until the first day after he won power.