Dozens of squat, glass-sheathed office buildings have sprouted in recent years along the burgeoning high-tech corridor in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs, many of them housing government agencies and contractor firms engaged in intelligence and security work. One of the most nondescript is the headquarters of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, America’s oldest civilian foreign intelligence organization. FBIS was founded in February 1941 and was already hard at work for nearly a year and a half when President Franklin Roosevelt established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the parent of today’s CIA.
With a network of bureaus, most of them in cooperating foreign countries, FBIS monitors foreign radio and television broadcasts in more than sixty languages. Known to intelligence analysts as Fibiss, it is small, unmysterious, and operates without any covert trappings. Transcribing and translating Japanese broadcasting before Pearl Harbor, the first generation of its propaganda analysts did not anticipate the attack any better than others in the U.S. government. They did report, however, that Tokyo had become more “hostile and defiant.” That was one of the important clues that went unheeded.1
FBIS is exceptional among American intelligence collection activities because the information it gathers every day of the year is unclassified, plucked from the world’s open air waves. Its modest annual budget would probably be consumed in less than a week by any of the larger agencies. Spies, reconnaissance planes, satellites, eavesdropping and other technical systems absorb the lion’s share of the approximately $40 billion spent every year on intelligence activities. But the information this unheralded little operation acquires has often been more valuable to intelligence analysts than the top secret, ultra-sensitive reporting from the bigger, more glamorous collection programs.
FBIS was never more essential than during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellite countries, and Mao’s China were “hard” intelligence targets or “denied areas,” where espionage and other covert collection was difficult and dangerous. Spies and eavesdropping systems can be neutralized, sensitive installations concealed from overhead reconnaissance systems, but governments in those hard target countries had to communicate openly with their own people, and they beamed large volumes of propaganda to foreign audiences they wanted to influence.
With that much to monitor, FBIS collection never flagged. Transcripts of radio programming from targeted countries reached analysts almost in real time, and in a steady flow. It was important to know what Soviet Politburo members were saying, what new communist party statements and ideological tracts portended. This open source information filled gaps about political issues, policymaking, economic, and military developments, and critical leadership dynamics in countries that were otherwise largely impervious to outside observers.
Cuba gradually became another of those denied areas after the Castro brothers’ victory. With the Soviet intelligence and military assistance that Raul requested in April 1959, Cuban intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities steadily improved. Well-placed and reliable covert sources who had provided information to the CIA chose to go into exile rather than run the risk of staying on the island in the role of traitors to the revolution. It was incriminating for Cubans who stayed even to be seen with American diplomats. Intelligence reporting about the working of the new government and the thinking of its leaders became harder and harder to acquire.
Then, in January 1961, just before Eisenhower left office, his administration severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, and the American embassy in Havana was shuttered. FBIS’s role in helping to fill the widening information gaps became even more crucial as a long dry spell for American intelligence analysts concerned with Cuba began. Speeches and press conferences, statements by Cuban leaders, and government edicts and propaganda became essential as primary sources that could be sifted for valuable and otherwise hard to come by clues.
As a journeyman CIA Cuba analyst, I was impressed by the seemingly endless speeches slowly scrolling out of FBIS ticker machines in the Agency’s operations center. There were nights when I stood in front of them for hours, pulling out sheet after sheet of Fidel’s orations not too many minutes after he spoke them.
* * *
When Fidel came down from the Sierra Maestra to assume power on New Year’s Day in 1959, FBIS—by then integrated into the CIA—was preparing to monitor his public appearances. The first was a celebratory address he delivered from a balcony overlooking Cespedes Park in Santiago, on the night of his victory. It was one of the few speeches he has ever delivered publicly that was not transcribed by FBIS though the text was published in a Havana newspaper.
Only minutes into that signal oration he made it clear to any who might still have had doubts about his intentions that Cuba would never be the same. The long guerrilla conflict was over, but a revolution, not a mere change in government or leadership, was beginning. He was not going to lead a mere reform program. The old political and economic order would be shaken to its roots. He warned the faint of heart that “a harsh and dangerous undertaking” had begun.
His outlook was dominated by unacknowledged Marxist–Leninist and anti-imperialist thinking and internationalist aspirations. But he had no precise program or timetable in mind. There was no brain trust of advisers to plan the transition, because except for Raul there was no one Fidel trusted sufficiently. Through all the campaigns to defeat Batista, Fidel had made every strategic decision himself, and he intended to continue doing so.
His leadership style had been fixed since he began organizing the Moncada attack. It was then that he began telling associates that the revolution could have only one leader. Victory convinced him that his centralized command style had been vindicated. His friend Teresa Casuso remembered him saying in Mexico City that “it was essential to inspire the people with faith in one person.”2 The once sympathetic K. S. Karol described Fidel’s control obsession more critically, as a “consuming feeling of his own indispensability.”
Fidel’s immediate priority in those first days of power was to consolidate the gains already made. First, his small guerrilla forces—at most a few thousand individuals who were experienced and under arms—had to take control of Havana and neutralize any remaining pockets of opposition. He had to secure his personal control over a smattering of other anti-Batista groups and assert his authority over pro-democratic elements of his own movement.
Confrontation with the United States was inevitable. It was not merely the goal of “waging war” on the North Americans. It was his “true destiny.” Cleansing Cuba of the large and contaminating American presence could not, of course, be discussed with the U.S. embassy, which was one reason he avoided meeting with the liberal and well-intentioned ambassador Bonsal. He knew that he could not unleash revolutionary change without antagonizing the Eisenhower administration and powerful American economic interests on the island, and so he preferred to move cautiously. Raul, in contrast, was pressing him to implement a radical program swiftly and openly embrace the communists.
The brothers agreed, however, that there were three directions that the revolution would take them. There would be conflict with the United States, support for revolutionary internationalism in Latin America, and an upheaval in Cuba to create a more just society.
It was also evident from Fidel’s first oration in Santiago that he saw himself and the revolution as synonymous. He began to use the royal “we.” Over the next few years the use of the first-person singular all but disappeared from his public discourse. At his insistence a law was enacted prohibiting the installation of statues of any leaders in public places, or the naming of streets, parks, or towns after them. There would be no cult of personality, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. But Fidel’s fusion of self and revolution actually has done more to encourage a leadership cult than statues ever could have.
Many of the clues that Fidel dropped about his intentions in that first Santiago speech went unnoticed or were dismissed in Washington and at the American embassy in Havana. In the euphoria of the guerrilla victory, Cubans and Americans alike were anxious to give him the benefit of the doubt. What sounded like paranoid anti-Americanism and militant internationalism could be explained away. He was only thirty-two years old, unpracticed in diplomatic niceties and political nuance. Some thought that he was being carried away by the excitement of the ecstatic crowds when he delivered speeches. Surely, most in the U.S. government believed, he would soon settle into a more moderate and predictable mode.
In mid-February 1959, about six weeks into his reign, the American embassy cabled the State Department that there had not been “a single public speech by Castro since the triumph of the revolution in which he has not shown some feeling against the United States.” But the diplomats, hoping to discern a silver lining, added there was reason to believe he was “not as anti-American as he sounds.”3 In reality, what he said in FBIS transcribed speeches was calculated and true to his thinking.
Still wary about entering Havana, Fidel moved slowly, with an ever-growing contingent of boisterous followers, westward across the island toward the capital, stopping to exhale long orations in towns and cities along the way.
When he paused on January 4 in the sugar and cattle crossroads town of Camaguey, FBIS monitors were ready. His speech, broadcast by the local radio station, was the first to be captured by FBIS. Soon, the English translation was in Washington being studied by analysts.
“A totally new era” was beginning, he exulted, not yet recognizing that he was also entering into a strange partnership with American intelligence analysts. Many thousands of his speeches and press conferences, containing billions of words, have been transcribed over the decades since then. From that first monitored appearance in Camaguey, speech transcripts have been the gold standard for all those trying to assess the Cuban Revolution.
In Camaguey, Fidel deceptively promised, as he would for several more months, to establish a “civilized, democratic system.” He insisted he would restore the liberal constitution of 1940 and promised elections within “fifteen months, more or less.” On January 14, after his arrival in the capital, he said “our Revolution is genuinely Cuban, genuinely democratic.” When pressed, he described his personal philosophy as “humanist.”
He promised “to launch an offensive against corruption, immorality, gambling, stealing, illiteracy, disease, hunger, exploitation, and injustice.”
In Camaguey, and in subsequent speeches all through the years, he has dwelled on the last two matters, on his profoundly personalized concepts of exploitation and injustice. Those twin evils, broadly conceived and vaguely articulated, were, he believed, at the root of Cuba’s ills. Combating them would provide the enduring justifications for nearly everything that would follow in his long revolutionary journey, not just at home in Cuba but in his many internationalist causes as well. He had begun articulating the defining themes that would henceforth undergird nearly all of his domestic and foreign policies.
Imbued with Marxist beliefs that had matured during the two years in the sierra, Fidel had come to identify more intimately with the guajiros and the poor, mostly landless and illiterate peasantry. His childhood at Biran and the mockery he endured because of his guajiro qualities drew him closer to them. He knew they would be the principal beneficiaries and symbols of the revolution. The social consciousness that he first experienced after the bogotazo had grown into full blown Marxist awareness of class struggle.
In those first days his message was vague but portentous. He would wage war on all those he believed exploited the poor and disadvantaged. Exploiters would be his and the revolution’s mortal enemies. Perceived injustices would be rectified through revolutionary justice, redistributive programs, and a collective empowerment of the masses. No other social issues have ever had more salience in his revolutionary preachings. Themes of exploitation and injustice have consistently over the decades been the most frequently cited in his public performances.
* * *
Fidel’s conversion to communism accelerated in the first weeks after victory. Raul and Che were urging him to embrace openly the “old communists,” and all the immediate political imperatives he confronted were pushing him in that direction as well. Within his ragtag movement there simply were too few with the education, political skills, managerial, or organizational abilities to staff the new government. The guerrilla barbudos who had fought in the mountains were hardened revolutionaries but would be laughable as bureaucrats and managers.
And Fidel had no intention of relying on his movement’s urban underground, the pro-democracy civilians who had been essential to fund-raising and political action but who now were expendable. Many were exactly the kind of educated and skilled professionals he desperately needed to build a government, but he considered them insufficiently revolutionary, too likely to want good relations with the Americans and to press for early elections.
He was even less inclined to listen to the technocrats and political figures from the Grau San Martin and Prio years, especially not the former Orthodox Party leaders who had disdained him. Initially, a number of men and women of that older, liberal generation were brought into the government, but nearly all would be gone within eight or nine months.
There was only one place Fidel could turn; it was to the “old communists.” They comprised the most disciplined political party in the country. With about seventeen-thousand members—more than in his own movement—they were well organized across the island. They had managerial skills, bases of support in the labor sector, and considerable influence with intellectuals and other important groups. They advocated the kind of sweeping restructuring of society and the economy that Fidel also wanted but did not yet know how to carry out. The process of integrating communists into the military was already well underway, with Raul taking the lead. The next step would be to bring them into civilian administration.
Biographers and historians have disagreed about exactly when Fidel made the fateful decision to become a full-fledged communist. He first announced the socialist nature of the revolution in April 1961, and he declared himself a Marxist–Leninist that December. Some, including his sister Juanita, have said, however, he was a dedicated but secret Marxist by 1956 in Mexico, and Raul suggested that too in the 1975 interview with the Mexican paper El Dia.4
Fidel’s biographer Tad Szulc concluded that the conversion occurred “with finality” in the Sierra Maestra, in the late spring of 1958. Many other, wildly diverging opinions have also been offered. The nearest thing to a consensus view has been that Fidel crossed his ideological watershed sometime during the spring or summer of his first year in power.
For many years I agreed with that consensus, though more recently I have come to believe that Fidel’s manipulation of his brother’s outlook signaled that his own Marxist and Leninist convictions were solid by the early or mid-1950s. By then nearly everything about Fidel’s character and belief system were pointing him in only one direction, that is, toward Marxism and Leninism.
Yet to a certain extent the question and the long-running debate are misleading. Fidel experienced no deciding moment to which he or anyone could date his conversion. There was no single turning point, as if a switch were thrown, after which he definitively changed. There was no incident, no act of political seduction, or inspiring tract he discovered that had made a critical difference. As with all major decisions Fidel makes, his conversion developed from overlapping layers of calculation about what would serve his ambitions best. There was no need—in fact, there were very strong disincentives—for him to openly embrace communism or the communists before he defeated Batista. It was power he wanted, not opportunities to lounge in cafés and discuss the esoteric finer points of Marxist doctrine.
Once he achieved power, however, affiliation with Soviet-led international communism was the only route that made any sense for him strategically, personally, and politically. He and Raul had probably concluded exactly that during their stay in Mexico.
Strategically, his and the revolution’s entwined destinies could be advanced only in alliance with the Soviet Union. He needed the Kremlin to help protect the revolution from the inevitable American onslaught. Furthermore, allying himself and his revolution with Moscow would be the ultimate repudiation of the United States.
Personally, he was driven by his sense of destiny to exercise authoritarian control for as long as he lived. That was possible in monarchies but also in communist countries where leaders could hold on to power indefinitely and with a certain legitimacy.
Politically, he needed the skills and organizational base of the “old communists,” so that he could profoundly reshape Cuban society. In a letter from prison on the Isle of Pines in April 1954 he wrote: “How pleased I would be to revolutionize this country from top to bottom.”5
The last component in the decision to begin embracing communism openly fell into place by the end of his first month in power. Fidel enjoyed such overwhelming popular support just a few weeks after coming down from the sierra that no conceivable combination of political forces on the island could threaten him. It was then that he finally felt secure enough to adopt the “old communists” on his terms and with little fear that those wily old foxes could gain the upper hand.
Communists he knew at the university remembered his saying that he would consider becoming one only if he could be Stalin. He meant that he would never subordinate himself to the discipline of others, especially in a hierarchical party in which he would have to start out at the bottom. If he were to become a communist he would have to be in charge. He realized soon after winning power that he was in position to do precisely that.
But it was Lenin, not Marx, whose lessons and achievements most attracted Fidel. The sage “old communist” Carlos Rafael Rodriguez told Herbert Matthews that Fidel was more impressed with Lenin’s writings than with Marx’s. Fidel had begun reading Lenin at the university. Later, he carried one of Lenin’s works with him as he recruited trainees for Moncada, apparently the same volume that was seized by Batista’s police after the attack. Fidel’s understanding of Lenin was perfected during the Isle of Pines confinement and in Mexico where he and Che studied the Soviet leader together.6
All of Fidel’s political instincts since the late 1940s were essentially Leninist. Through singular, fanatical determination, often against incredible odds, Lenin had imposed Bolshevik revolutionary rule in the October Revolution. He organized the Communist Party and state, creating the Soviet Union out of the wreckage of czarist Russia. His proven methods for seizing power and then structuring it in a hegemonic political party that he alone controlled were breathtaking models for Fidel. Lenin was an autocrat who believed that Marx’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat should be interpreted literally. The party, under his implacable control, would be the engine of the dictatorship.
For Fidel, Lenin was a flesh-and-blood revolutionary, a man of action, not a hot house intellectual like Marx. Lenin became Fidel’s guide and model, the exemplar of an institutionalized personal destiny. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fidel frequently delivered speeches commemorating Lenin, speaking of him like a favorite old uncle, and referring to him as the perfect role model. What he told Barbara Walters in a 1977 interview was typical: “Lenin was an extraordinary man in every way and there is not a single blemish in his life.”7
* * *
When I was a young analyst in the 1960s, no one doubted that either of the Castro brothers was a dedicated communist. Yet, like so many of my generation in that turbulent time, I wanted to believe that they were Cuban nationalists above all.
If only the United States could devise just the right policies, I thought, Fidel might turn out to be a Titoist, a non-aligned Marxist who could deal with both superpowers as a neutral in the Cold War. The corollary in either case was that he would end or greatly curtail his economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union if given an opportunity to do so by the United States.
There were good reasons to postulate that. He was already defying the Kremlin by purging, even executing, “old communists.” Nothing about him was clearer than his aggressive spirit of personal independence and nationalism. It didn’t seem to make sense, therefore, that he would tear out the roots of Cuba’s dependence on the United States and then plant the Kremlin in its place.
I was mistakenly seized by that logic until a number of years, and many bilateral crises later. The problem with that thinking was that it ignored or misunderstood the depths of Fidel’s antipathy for the United States. For him it was a simple calculation, and it has never changed. There could not be a successful revolution while Cuba maintained good relations with Washington. His absolute personal authority would be threatened if the United States were able to exercise any influence on the island.
At least a half dozen American administrations since 1959 wanted to find a route to better relations with him, and in the 1970s presidents Ford and Carter engaged in serious, extended diplomatic efforts to do so. My view at the time was the typically naive one of my generation. I believed that Fidel placed a fairly high priority on achieving a diplomatic breakthrough, that he would see it in his interests to open up trade and get relief from the American economic embargo that outlawed almost all bilateral commerce.
I was still optimistic in 1975 when, as a more senior CIA Cuba specialist, I worked closely as the principal intelligence adviser to the top State Department officers trying to negotiate a diplomatic breakthrough with their counterparts in Havana.
But I had been making the same mistake for a long time. It was poor intelligence tradecraft to base conclusions on unfounded assumptions or wishful thinking. Learning the hard way, I subsequently came to realize that Fidel’s abiding commitment to revolutionary internationalist causes, dating back to Cayo Confites and the bogotazo, was a much higher priority for him than improving relations with the United States. So was his alliance with Moscow. I had underestimated both, as well as the depths of his hostility toward the Goliath to the north.
In the end I came to doubt that Fidel has ever been sincere about wanting better relations with the United States—unless, of course, if he could procure them strictly on his own terms.
Fidel spoke in Havana on January 21, 1959, before a giant outdoor rally; news reports said a million ecstatic Cubans were there. He began to articulate foreign policy positions that he knew could never be compatible with those of democratic societies. Although few in the U.S. government took notice at the time, his remarks betrayed the quickening coalescence of his Marxist–Leninist orientation: “How much America and the peoples of our hemisphere need a revolution like the one that has taken place in Cuba. How much America needs an example like this in all its nations. How much it needs for the millionaires who have become rich by stealing the people’s money to lose everything they have stolen.”
The speech was a bludgeoning broadside aimed at the plutocrats and ruling classes of all the Latin American countries. Fidel was threatening the region’s wealthiest and most powerful interests, pleading with like-minded young Latin Americans to emulate the Cuban Revolution. There was no mistaking his violent internationalist intent when he added: “How much America needs for the war criminals in the countries of our hemisphere to be shot.”
He was referring indirectly to the waves of executions that Raul and Che had been carrying out. Many of the condemned Cubans had been given the hasty due process that had been extended to others in Mexico and during the insurgency. But there were grotesque abuses, circus-like show trials, and filmed executions that provoked sharp criticism in the United States, notably among some members of Congress. Fidel reacted as if the criticism had been direct American intervention.
His belligerent language was reminiscent of his anarchic outbursts on the presidential balcony and at Chibas’s funeral. But now he was talking about the seizure of power by revolutionaries throughout Latin America. No American government, either of the right or the left, at that white hot stage of the Cold War could have reconciled with such subversive policies. They were theoretically compatible, however, with international communist strategy and doctrine. Marxists accepted with little questioning that world revolution was inevitable. Soviet leaders beginning with Lenin were all internationalists, dedicated to spawning new communist governments.
Fidel delivered dozens of speeches during that first year. Some lasted six or more hours as his words spoken on the record and transcribed by FBIS grew to mountainous dimensions. Most performances, extravagant and often melodramatic, generated so much excitement around the world that he was instantly a global superstar. Raul’s and Che’s speeches were monitored as well, but not with the same priority.
A shadow-boxing game of sorts developed between Fidel and the American intelligence analysts perusing his words for clues and indicators. Often his most attentive audience was not the gathered Cuban bureaucrats or the crowd arrayed right before him wherever he was speaking, but us, the anonymous American intelligence analysts working in distant cubicles, parsing his every sentence.
He soon understood that he was being tracked and scrutinized, but perhaps flattered by the attention or attracted to the game itself, he has only rarely been known to deliver important speeches off the record or in secure settings. Knowing we were listening imposed a seemingly welcome discipline on him.
He liked the challenge of communicating regularly with the Cuban masses while not giving away any secrets or making mistakes that could be used against him. This may help to explain his extraordinary success—with only a few really damaging exceptions through the years—at avoiding slips of the tongue and unconsidered outbursts in his public appearances.
Often he tries to confuse or entrap his distant listeners by tossing out beguiling and misleading clues about his intentions. He has also done the opposite, issuing carefully crafted warnings, roughly the equivalent of the highest level diplomatic protest notes. From the last weeks of the Eisenhower administration until September 1977, Cuba and the United States had no diplomatic missions in each others’ capitals. That put Fidel in the habit of issuing warnings and threats in his broadcast speeches meant for the eyes and ears of American officials. Some of the bombast was real and some bluster, but none could be dismissed out of hand.
Fidel occasionally has also engaged in a dialogue of sorts with his American intelligence trackers. He and I have communicated with each other through the diligence of Cuban and FBIS speech transcribers. The first of our “secret” exchanges was for me, at least, the most memorable.
In February 1990, as the Soviet Union and the communist bloc were disintegrating, I was invited by the University of Miami to speak about Fidel at a large public forum. By then I was a senior CIA officer and well known to Fidel and the Cuban intelligence service. I recognized that what I said would be in his morning intelligence briefing within a day or two, probably after being taped by someone in the audience and then transcribed and translated in Havana. For years I had been a high priority target of Cuban intelligence and knew that Fidel was interested in what I said and wrote about him. My tracking of him had come full circle.
I spoke in Miami about how I thought he was reacting as international communism was disintegrating around him. It was just a few months after the Berlin Wall had fallen and as the enormous Soviet subsidies Cuba had been receiving were drying up. How could he compensate? How did he feel about the momentous decision he made years earlier to become a communist and align himself strategically with the now-dissolving Soviet empire? Did he recognize what a calamitous mistake he had made?
A speech FBIS had transcribed a few months earlier provided the hook for my talk. Fidel visited the Salvador Allende hospital in Havana, and spoke to a small audience in an outdoor courtyard. Mango trees were growing there, and as he droned on about the revolution’s accomplishments in health care, he digressed. The trees somehow distracted and irritated him. The FBIS transcript had it all word for word: “Why is this mango tree here? This mango tree does not belong in this patio. It must be cut down.”
It was not a typical performance. Fidel is not given to public soliloquies, and does not often digress so abruptly. The aside was a rare nugget in the billions of words he had spoken on the record that was revealing of character and personality flaws. A part of his arbitrary leadership style was in full view. I used those remarks as the centerpiece for my talk that day.
“There could be no doubt,” I said, “that the mango tree was promptly cut down, despite whatever pleasures it may have provided the patients.” Surely there had been no discussion about it with the hospital administrators or anyone else. The commander-in-chief said the tree must be cut down and that was all there was to it.
It was an all-too-typical example, I said, of Fidel’s micromanagerial style when even the most obscure and irrelevant matters suddenly, and for no apparent reason, become important to him. It was Fidel at his autocratic worst. It reflected pettiness, obduracy, total self-absorption, disregard for everyone. Incredibly, a mango tree had become an issue of state.
A year went by and I was still thinking about the questions I had addressed in Miami. By then, in the early 1990s, Fidel’s speeches were tedious, lacking the flair and surprises of the 1960s, but I was still reading them faithfully, searching for clues and hidden meaning. Plowing through a particularly boring one he delivered in February, 1991 at a provincial assembly in Havana, I was jolted by a passage about the Salvador Allende hospital.
He was speaking again about accomplishments in medicine and health care. He boasted that the Allende hospital was “a very good institution … the pride of the capital.”
Then, the FBIS transcribers noted, he paused. His mention of the Allende hospital had triggered the memory of my criticisms of him in Miami. In an angry outburst, he reacted, defending what he had done. I had been right. The mango tree was cut down. Except it was actually a small grove of trees that he had destroyed. As if speaking only to himself and to me, he complained: “What came out in that meeting about the Salvador Allende hospital was incredible. The fences were broken because of the construction work which, who knows how many years had been going on. There was a mango grove. That was the only time in my life that I ordered to clean, to bulldoze a mango grove.
“The mango grove was inside the hospital. The kids jumped everywhere. In fact they did not have to jump because there was no fence and they got in there to eat the mangoes. Everyone ate mangoes there. Even the patients ate the mangoes. The place was full of flies and there was a terrible lack of hygiene.”
He concluded by emphasizing, “There is a beautiful park there now.”
I wondered as I read on whether anyone in his audience that day, or anyone else who heard the broadcast of the speech or read the text later could have had the slightest idea of what he was talking about. He gave no explanation or context for that strange digression directed at me. I imagined dutiful Cuban bureaucrats in his audience scratching their heads in confusion. Did anyone in the Cuban leadership, other than a few of his intelligence advisers, have any idea what he was talking about?
I was surprised, especially by the intensity and candor of his response. It revealed a man with much greater sensitivity to criticism than I had imagined. I had never thought of him as thin-skinned, but there it was, quite plainly in sight. I could think of no other examples of his being provoked into such a confessional outburst. He was defensive, even somewhat ashamed, perhaps especially because it had been a senior CIA officer who had made so much of the matter. Was the little park in the hospital courtyard that he had installed as an afterthought the penance he paid for the sin of ordering the mango grove destroyed?
I even imagined that I had been responsible for the creation of that park at the Salvador Allende hospital. I guess it was my small contribution to the work of the Cuban Revolution. Some day I plan to go and see it for myself.
* * *
When FBIS began transcribing everything Fidel said in public, no one in Washington could have imagined how long the task would last or how great the cost and commitment would be. What had started with the trickle of words in Camaguey in January 1959, followed by the steady flow in other cities on his route to Havana that first week, would soon cascade and then surge into a torrential flood of oratory unparalleled in history.
It is no exaggeration to say that he has spoken more words on the public record than any political leader in history. Probably no other human in any line of work has ever been recorded uttering such avalanches of words. The same could have been said of him hundreds of long speeches ago which could have garnered him the dubious Guinness Book of World Records-type of distinction sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. And now in his late seventies, he still shows no signs of wanting to retire from the speaker’s platform.
Fidel’s biographer Tad Szulc wrote in 1986 that the number of speeches by then had probably exceeded twenty-five hundred.8 Szulc unsuccessfully sought a more precise count from Cuban government historians who probably did not have reliable records themselves. An extensive but incomplete electronic database of several thousand speeches and interviews, all of them transcribed by FBIS, is maintained at a University of Texas website. My own collection of English and Spanish texts of speeches, press conferences, and interviews also numbers in the thousands, and the total keeps growing. The compulsion for Fidel to speak at length and on the record is still irresistible. “As you may well know,” he said in a November 1993 speech, “my job is to talk.”
Standing up ramrod straight to deliver speeches has been so essential to his leadership style and imagery, perhaps even to his emotional well being, that he insists on continuing in that manner no matter how much his aura, health, and acuity have faded. It is about as unimaginable that he will ever stop delivering speeches as it is that he will cut off his beard or admit that he has made some serious mistakes.
Many of the orations, especially during his first decade in power, were incomprehensibly long, and just as tedious, lasting five, six, even eight hours. A speech delivered in January 1968 during a major political purge went on for twelve hours. About midway through it, no doubt to the shuddering relief of his captive audience, Fidel granted an intermission, though normally, even during five- and six-hour performances, no breaks or interruptions are allowed.
He still holds the record for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations. He opened it with an alluring but misbegotten promise: “Although we have earned a name for talking at length, do not worry. We will do all possible to be brief.”
He then droned on extemporaneously, using only scraps of paper as notes, for about four and a half hours as exhausted diplomats one by one slipped out of the hall. He was openly annoyed at one point after noticing some were dozing off. Others, however, hung on his every word. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and a phalanx of eastern bloc officials were present, often interrupting him with prolonged applause.
That was on September 26, 1960, in the final weeks of the American presidential campaign. The candidates had been vying with each other to promise the toughest stance against the Cuban regime, and in response Fidel was truculent. John Kennedy, he said, was “an illiterate, ignorant millionaire,” quickly adding that this “does not imply that we like Nixon.” He was interrupted by the president of the General Assembly and admonished to refrain from personal attacks.
In addition to the speeches, Fidel has committed millions of words to the record in interviews and press conferences, some of the former so protracted that his interlocutors were left staggering and dazed. He has been the world’s most prolific monologist. All of his talks are entirely one-sided. He is always in control, cool and exceedingly articulate, grandly manipulating the occasion and later often editing his words so that the published transcripts will make him look even better.
Unlike other world leaders, he has never had a press spokesperson or adviser, but if he did there is very little he has ever said in public that would warrant a correction or elaboration. There would never have been a Cuban government press release to the effect of, “What the comandante really meant to say was…”
The billions of words he has spoken in public are on the record, preserved for posterity because for more than forty-six years one small American intelligence component has been keeping track of them. The cumulative record of speaking and transcribing, which still goes on, has been astonishing.
It is also notable that in those billions of spoken words, Fidel will not be remembered for any single galvanizing performance or sparkling passage that is uniquely his own. Unlike many great orators he has hoped to emulate, nothing he has uttered in public has reverberated over time as a defining rhetorical moment. His oratory is bereft of adornment, memorable phrases, or poignant passages. There is little subtlety, and no metaphors, aphorisms, or allusions. A majority of the speeches have been appallingly boring recitations of facts and figures, often going on self-indulgently for hours.
Fidel unquestionably must be ranked among just a few of the most charismatic world figures of the last hundred years. Yet his words, when transcribed out of their dramatic performance context, are surprisingly banal.