Fidel Castro rampaged around the presidential suite on the eighteenth floor of Houston’s ostentatious Shamrock Hilton hotel, spewing squalid invective in the spit-fire Cuban Spanish that most Latin Americans would have difficulty understanding. He was exhausted after an eleven-day whistle-stop tour of the northeastern United States and was infuriated with his younger brother Raul, the utterly unintimidated target of his wrath.
Fidel had just arrived in Texas after a stopover in Montreal, and Raul had come up earlier the same day on a Cubana Airlines flight from Havana. Both traveled with retinues of advisers and bodyguards, many of whom, like the brothers, were still sporting the wrinkled fatigue uniforms of guerrilla warriors. The Castros were resilient survivors of violent conspiracies that had begun in July 1953 and that culminated, after a two-year insurgency, in the ousting of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Raul had subordinated himself to Fidel throughout the entire revolutionary process, and until their shouting match in Houston, they had worked together with no evident difficulties.
But at that moment in their government’s infancy they had come to diverge on a number of critical matters. They had different visions and priorities, at least for Cuba’s short-term future. They seemed to have contradictory loyalties and affinities. Raul was in more of a hurry, more ideologically fixed, and less cautious than Fidel. Perhaps most ominously for the brothers’ partnership, their trust in each other seemed to be plummeting. Houston turned out to be a convenient midway location between Canada and Cuba where they could meet and thrash everything out. One witness remembers them at the Shamrock that night spewing profanities at each other for hours, although nothing else of what they said was intelligible.
It was late April 1959, not quite four months since they and their ragged guerrilla bands had triumphed in Cuba. On the first day of January the Castros, along with the doomed Che Guevara and processions of other hirsute guerrillas under their commands, had descended from mountain sanctuaries to be greeted with a tumultuous reception across the island. They were young, exuberant, romantic heroes like none Cuba—or perhaps any other Latin American country—had produced before. The euphoria their revolution stirred in the Cuban masses suggested they enjoyed near-universal approval as the Castros and their lieutenants were thrust, on that exciting New Year’s Day, into the glare of an incredulous international media.
Fidel’s trip to the United States was unofficial. He had been invited to address a meeting of newspaper editors at the National Press Club in downtown Washington, and he accepted even though President Eisenhower chose to ignore him by playing a round of golf in Georgia. Relations were already strained by then. The dignified sixty-eight-year-old president, the hero of the Normandy invasion who had put away his uniform years before, was repulsed by the prospect of sitting down with the unkempt and khaki-clad thirty-two-year-old Castro who was criticizing the United States regularly in nationalistic perorations.
If Eisenhower would have nothing to do with him, Castro thought, he would go directly to the American people to explain himself and the revolution. After wooing Washington’s media elite, he extended his stay, traveling up the East Coast. He took the train to Princeton and was cheered by a large crowd of university students. The next day he continued on to New York where he told reporters mischievously that Cuba should have its own major league baseball franchise. He addressed a curious and excited crowd estimated at thirty-five thousand from a band shell in Central Park. Later, in Boston, he thrilled an audience of about ten thousand at Harvard. Newspaper and wire service reporters tracked his every move. He was interviewed on popular television programs. Fidel’s strategy for winning over American public opinion was succeeding beyond his wildest expectations. Speaking halting but often charmingly lilting English, he seemed to be as popular on his American tour as he was in Cuba.
He was uncomfortable, though, with the sometimes rough give-and-take the American press demanded and grew tired of having to grin at fawning American businessmen hoping to cut profitable deals. Reporters clamored around him to ask probing questions he did not want to answer. “Premier Castro, when will Cuba have elections? Is it true your brother Raul and Che Guevara are communists? Is your government supporting violent revolutions in other Latin American countries?” In public Fidel concealed his irritation with theatrical flair, always smiling, always quick with a finely calibrated and reassuring response. But in phone conversations with Raul back in Havana, he railed.
Fidel blamed his brother for undercutting him, provoking tensions with the United States at precisely the moment he was trying to assuage them. With his principal ally Che Guevara, Raul was sponsoring revolutionary groups hoping to overthrow other Latin American governments. One such expedition had just landed on the east coast of Panama, and all but one of the intruders, it turned out, were Cubans. The first of hundreds of such entanglements by the Castros’ regime in support of revolutionary causes in third world countries, the incursion generated widespread criticism in the United States and Panama and provoked American military forces in the Canal Zone to go on alert. Put on the defensive by the Panama affair, Fidel repeatedly had to deny to American questioners that his government was involved.
And to make matters worse, Raul was no longer trying to conceal that he was a communist. Only a few weeks after the guerrilla victory, and still at his command post in Cuba’s second city, Santiago, he had consented to an interview with a reporter from The Worker, the official weekly of the American Communist Party. To an appreciative audience, Raul muttered darkly about “the yoke of imperialism” and came across as the veteran Marxist he was.1
He had first come to Soviet attention in early 1953 when he traveled to Vienna to participate in an international communist youth festival and then went on to visit three Eastern European communist capitals. By 1959 there was perhaps no better judge of Raul’s communist principles than Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, who was impressed with him. Khrushchev would write in his memoirs that Raul was “a good communist” who had managed to keep his convictions hidden from Fidel.2 Since then, documents from once secret Kremlin archives have confirmed that Soviet leaders believed Fidel had been deceived about his brother’s true beliefs for a number of years.
They wondered if the famously mercurial Fidel was capable of the discipline required of a communist, a trait they clearly believed was one of Raul’s finest qualities.3 Wanting to protect its most powerful ally in the new Cuban regime, Moscow tried to hide the blossoming relationship with Raul, even from his own brother. In reality, however, the Soviets had almost no understanding at that time of the labyrinthine relationship between the Castro brothers, and they certainly had no idea yet how to assess Fidel.
It was during Fidel’s American public relations tour that Raul clandestinely initiated Cuba’s first official contacts with the Soviet Union. Ironically, his request for assistance to help consolidate the small and disorganized armed forces he commanded was approved by the Kremlin at about the same time Fidel was huddled secretly with an influential CIA official in Washington. Raul may have been aware of that three-hour meeting and that Fidel had agreed to institute regular intelligence exchanges with the Agency to keep tabs on Cuba’s communists. The arrangement would never take effect, but a government minister traveling in Fidel’s entourage observed that the CIA officer was in a state of euphoria after the meeting. He is said to have assured Agency superiors that Fidel was not a communist and that he could be counted on to restrict communist activities in Cuba.4
In Havana, Raul was becoming more alarmed that his brother’s revolutionary convictions were being compromised. Fidel had been delivering speeches in which he promised to maintain good relations with the United States and to have elections in Cuba so that democracy could flourish after years of dictatorship. He had condemned the incursion against the government of Panama and promised that Cuba would not support such interventions. But Raul feared his brother was telling American audiences exactly what they wanted to hear—worse, he worried that Fidel was beginning to believe it himself.
In a candid interview with a Mexican reporter years later, Raul was uncharacteristically reflective in recalling his sentiments in those days. He said he would never have put his life at risk as a guerrilla for only “a few reforms.”5 He had fought for comprehensive socialist change, for a sweeping restructuring of Cuba’s institutions and political culture. And in April 1959, already the second most powerful man in Cuba, the tough and seasoned twenty-eight-year-old Raul was not inclined to be silent or subservient. A close associate of Fidel’s who traveled in his entourage wrote that while in New York, Fidel received an angry call from Raul. It was “being said” in Cuba that he had “sold out to the Americans.”6
It was true that Fidel’s meeting with Vice President Richard Nixon at the Capitol in Washington had been surprisingly cordial. Nixon viewed the young revolutionary somewhat sympathetically while also astutely taking his measure. Castro had demonstrated naiveté and assorted deficiencies, Nixon wrote in a memo for Eisenhower, but he also observed that the Cuban exuded “indefinable qualities” that would assure him an enduring leadership role in Cuba and the rest of Latin America.7 During the overnight stop in Princeton, Fidel had remarked to Ernesto Betancourt, a Cuban official traveling with him, that the Americans he met during the visit were not like the ones he had previously known at home.8 It was a potentially momentous discovery.
The Castro brothers had grown up near large American mining and sugar enterprises. There, Fidel objected bitterly to the comfortable lifestyles, private clubs, and neocolonial attitudes of the extended expatriate communities near the Castro family home. The United Fruit Company was the largest foreign proprietor. The daughter of the company’s manager knew Fidel around the time he married a local girl in 1948. She remembers that when Fidel visited, he was often incensed that United Fruit maintained a beach for its employees that Cubans could not use.9 Perhaps, as Raul feared, Fidel was reconsidering those anti-American impressions amid the embracing enthusiasm of the crowds he encountered everywhere from Washington to Boston.
Hugh Thomas, the first scholar to produce an ample history of the Cuban Revolution, concluded that the April 1959 visit was the “high point of Castro’s democratic phase.”10 If Fidel was ever to have adopted a benign view of America’s role in the world and its dominance over Cuba, it was most likely to have been then, while he was basking in the warm glow of American public approval. Many other Cuba specialists remain convinced, in contrast, that Fidel’s antipathy for nearly everything American was already indelible by April 1959, and that he cynically staged the visit.
As with so many other mysteries surrounding his intentions, little hard evidence has ever come to light to resolve the matter. As a young CIA analyst I thought he had been sincerely interested in improving relations and that the Eisenhower administration had let a good opportunity pass. But later, as I learned more about Fidel and discerned duplicitous patterns in his behavior, I concluded that his main intention had been to manipulate American public opinion. Raul really had nothing to worry about.
But he believed Fidel had been away from Cuba too long. He urged him to return home in time to announce new revolutionary programs at a mass gathering in Havana on the first of May, which was to become one of the revolution’s most important holidays. Fidel had been out of touch with developments on the island; tensions and political rivalries were increasing. Critical decisions were being postponed. Doubts were growing about who was in charge, and even whether Fidel—still untested as Cuba’s fledgling prime minister—was really more of a dilettante than a purposeful leader.
Many years later he ruminated about the quality of his leadership in those days: “I shiver to think about my ignorance at the time the revolution triumphed,” he told two American interviewers. “It amazes me.”11
Some who knew the Castros well in those early days actually suspected that their relationship was so tortured in early 1959 that it was potentially violent. Huber Matos, one of the most effective and popular of the Cuban guerrilla commanders, believed they had a psychologically seething, even possibly murderous Cain and Abel type relationship. Matos told others Raul would some day murder Fidel.
And one of Fidel’s university professors—a leading scholar and intellectual of the pre-revolutionary era, a man known for his impeccable probity—independently reached the same conclusion. He wrote after he went into exile that a foreign journalist who knew the brothers was also convinced Raul at that time was capable of murdering Fidel. The journalist is said to have questioned Fidel about it, and Fidel reportedly responded, “Yes, Raul would be capable of that.”12
Indeed, the younger brother had a record of especially bloodthirsty behavior that began in Mexico when the Castros were preparing to launch their insurgency in Cuba. As a guerrilla commander he had insisted on executing a large number of civilians suspected of collaborating with the enemy. An American adventurer who briefly served with him recounted that Raul’s patrols often captured suspected informers and brought them back to camp “and Raul would string them up.”13 Actually, firing squads were the standard revolutionary means of execution then and ever since. A hundred or more of Raul’s prisoners were summarily shot in the final days of the guerrilla war at the end of 1958, and according to a regime insider, he continued mandating executions even after being directed by his brother to desist.14 Some of the executions were remorselessly carried out by Raul himself.
Philip Bonsal, the new American ambassador in Havana, a career diplomat fluent in Spanish, was selected by the Eisenhower administration in the hope that he could find a modus vivendi with the Cuban regime. Unsuccessful, he later wrote in his memoirs that prisoners “were mowed down” at Raul’s instigation and then bulldozed underground without the semblance of a trial.15 During the first months of the new government Raul had advocated the execution of Felipe Pazos, a mild-mannered and internationally respected economist suspected of a minor disloyalty. Huber Matos, the guerrilla commander, scolded Raul and told him, “We are a government now and should avoid violence.” Raul angrily responded, “No, that is romanticism.”16
During that chaotic early stage of the revolution it was the Jacobin Raul who did the most to inflict a reign of terror on its enemies. And curiously, it was his own brother who did more than any other individual to promote Raul’s early reputation as Cuba’s Robespierre. After only three weeks in power—in mid-January 1959—Fidel told a large crowd gathered at the presidential palace in Havana that if he were assassinated, “behind me come others more radical than me.” In the next breath he made clear that above all he meant Raul. He announced that his brother would henceforth be second-in-command of their Twenty-sixth of July Movement as well as his choice as his successor.17
But by April the brothers were probably more at odds over tactical issues than at any other time before or since. Above all, Raul was conniving to accelerate the pace and severity of revolutionary change while bringing leaders of the Cuban communist party into the government so they could help implement redistributive and revolutionary programs. With Che Guevara, he wanted to sponsor and assist young revolutionaries from other Latin American countries who were flocking to Havana, hoping to emulate Cuban guerrilla successes. Fidel should come back immediately from his extended hegira in the United States, Raul believed, and he should speak plainly and with genuine revolutionary passion to the Cuban people on May Day. After all, he had publicly promised before he left Cuba that he would be back by then.
Perhaps because Fidel had no idea what he would say if he did preside over those festivities, he decided not to return immediately. Instead, he extended his itinerary to Buenos Aires and Montevideo while summoning Raul to confer with him in Houston. Accepting a standing invitation from the local Junior Chamber of Commerce as the public cover for the visit, Fidel arrived at Houston International Airport on April 28.
* * *
Raul, who had arrived three hours earlier, went directly into seclusion at the Shamrock and did not return to the airport to greet Fidel. Although Raul had never set foot in the United States before, he had no interest in sightseeing, no agenda except to consult with his brother. Houston, itching with the boosterism that would soon transform it into a major American metropolis, was alien territory, and Raul was in no mood to mix with American businessmen or crowds of well-wishers or to engage in charming small talk. He may have feared as well that if he did he would be viewed by his more radical revolutionary colleagues back in Cuba as toadying to the Americans. As it turned out, he went out of his way to be rude and diffident.
The ever-ebullient Fidel was tired after the long flight from Montreal, but he went straight from the tarmac into the terminal’s Cloud Room, a restaurant and lounge where the elite of Houston’s younger generation of capitalists held a lively luncheon for him. He was jocular and expansive as usual, but he declined to give a press conference. He reasoned that reporters repeatedly asked him the same questions, which he had already answered. Texas rice producers, oilmen, and cattle ranchers jostled to talk to him. Cuba was a lucrative market for their products, and they hoped for assurances that the revolution would uphold normal trade and economic relations with the United States.
An oilman, teamed with a prominent Hollywood producer, hoped to nail down a deal for Marlon Brando to star in an adventure movie about the Cuban Revolution. Brando, of course, would play the inimitable Fidel. The movie would be filmed entirely in Cuba, improbably with members of Raul’s rebel army as extras.
Texas’s oil hub turned out to be the last stop of Fidel’s fourth sojourn in the United States. He had spent his honeymoon in late 1948, mostly in New York, lavishly spending his father’s generous wedding allowance. In November 1955 he visited New York again from exile in Mexico where he delivered a speech at the Palm Garden on Fifty-second Street. The largely Cuban exile audience was beseeched to donate funds for his revolutionary movement. During that trip he also spoke at the Flagler Theatre in Miami. “We do not care if we have to beg for the fatherland,” he said, “we do so with honor.”18
Houston was new to Fidel, but in fact he had visited Texas once before. It is the only one of his now-numerous visits to the United States—a clandestine one—that he has never publicly acknowledged. In 1956, when the brothers were in exile in Mexico, training and preparing for the insurgency they launched at the end of that year, Fidel needed to enter the United States a second time to solicit contributions. But his visa had been canceled following protests by the Batista regime.
In an unguarded moment during a press conference in Havana in February 1959, Fidel revealed that American officials “invented a series of things, and refused the visa.”19 Undeterred, and with characteristic audacity, Fidel trekked north to the Mexican border and then swam or forded the Rio Grande. He did so alone, and probably in the dark of night. Then, after meeting a former Cuban president in a Texas border town and receiving a grant from him of $50,000 for his cause, Fidel returned covertly to Mexico the same way he had departed.
His second sojourn in Texas would be much more luxurious. The Shamrock Hilton was Houston’s premiere hotel, and for several years after it opened on St. Patrick’s Day in 1949, it embodied the entrepreneurial spirit of that booming city. The Shamrock was boisterously colorful, as extravagant—and perhaps as vulgar—as many of Texas’s new oil millionaires. Glenn McCarthy, “the Irish Wildcatter,” had built it.
Eighteen stories high, with more than one thousand rooms and an enormous swimming pool that some said could accommodate water skiers, it was a magnificent caricature of uniquely Texan hyperbole. McCarthy had all the rooms and public spaces decorated in no fewer than sixty-three shades of green. One visitor recalled that the bathroom faucet knobs were faux pineapples.
The grand opening had been heralded by the arrival of a trainload of Hollywood stars and dignitaries. About fifty-thousand gawkers came to witness the spectacle, and the lines to get in that night were so long that it took Houston’s mayor two hours to poke his way through. It’s said that Edna Ferber’s fascination with McCarthy and the extravaganzas he regularly staged at the Shamrock inspired the central character in her novel Giant.
The hotel was perfectly cast as the site for the Castro brothers’ confrontation. They had been born and raised in Cuba’s own version of Texas, the wild and then mostly untamed easternmost province of Oriente. The Castro family was parvenu in the extreme. Neither of the parents could read very well, and Angel, the patriarch, for all his long life remained ill at ease and out of his element in Cuba’s cities. The peasant Castros certainly made no appearances in the drawing rooms or country clubs of Cuba’s upper classes.
But like so many hardscrabble Texas wildcatters and ranchers who struck it rich, the elder Castro was filled with ingenuity, ambition, and considerable cunning as he accumulated one of the largest fortunes in Oriente. The brothers grew up in contradictory circumstances in the 1930s and ’40s, at once rich and miserably poor. Like the archetypical new oil-rich Texans of the 1950s, the brothers were paragons in their country of a brand of personal exceptionalism and bravado that the establishment classes had almost no ability to comprehend.
With their entourages they filled fifty-six rooms at the Shamrock, and as soon as Fidel and Raul were reunited in the spacious suite 18-C, the tensions that had been building for weeks erupted. They shouted reciprocating jeremiads into the pre-dawn warmth of that mid-spring Texas morning. Ernesto Betancourt, still a member of Fidel’s entourage, could make out little of what they said from a nearby room but has told me of distinctly remembering each of the brothers repeatedly inciting the other with the gutter profanity—hijo de puta—a shameless slander of their own mother.20 Few in nearby rooms could sleep through the turmoil. They were appalled and fascinated by this fraternal clash that seemed to threaten the sundering of the Castros’ infant regime.
The next morning, the brothers appeared in public. Fidel was relaxed and serene once again. Asked by local reporters if they had “fallen out,” Raul responded that that was “absurd.” Fidel said, “Never! How could that be possible? Me, prime minister, and him the commander of the armed forces. We almost never have disagreements.”
To further discredit reports of a rift, the two spent much of that day together. In the morning they crowded with a driver onto the front seat of a limousine to travel about sixty miles to the Bar JF Ranch near the town of Wharton. A Houston Chronicle photographer captured the moment as the brothers left the Shamrock. Fidel sat high in his seat, gazing straight ahead with a large cigar clutched jauntily between his teeth. The unsmiling Raul sat rigidly next to him, gazing down under hooded eyelids. Their twenty-two vehicle caravan paused along the way so they could have a hearty breakfast of steak and fried eggs at a country café. There, as at every other stop that day, they were greeted with gracious Texas hospitality. Fidel in return was engaging and loquacious, as usual.
At the ranch, he was given a gold-and-platinum pistol and a prize quarter horse colt that, he said, reminded him of one he had as a boy. He smiled broadly under a crimped-brim Stetson presented to him by an oilman, and he went out of his way to be sure these souvenirs of Texas would get back to Cuba with him.
Raul was sullen and insisted on wearing the trademark beret he favored during his years as a guerrilla commander. There were no reports in the Houston press that he was offered any mementos of the visit. Raul sulked in the background during his stay at the ranch, refusing to join in the cowboy camaraderie. The Houston Post commented indulgently the next morning that he had been interested mainly in hanging out in a parking area with Vilma Espin, his bride of a few months, while Fidel and his hosts regaled each other with stories.21
From the ranch the brothers returned directly to the Houston airport where they conferred alone one last time in a baggage office. Ernesto Betancourt, who would now return to Havana on Raul’s plane, remembers that in private the brothers argued again, loudly and at length. Fidel then flew from Houston to Buenos Aires. Raul and his party left about ten minutes later. Betancourt, for many years in exile, recalls that on Raul’s plane they traveled almost the entire way to Cuba in silence. He said Raul refused to acknowledge him because “he was convinced I had been persuading Fidel to improve relations with the Americans.”22
* * *
That hastily arranged Houston summit proved to be a Rubicon of sorts for both Castros. During the ensuing decades the brothers worked together closely, virtually as one, with no public disagreements or disputes. As with any siblings, particularly such ruthless and intractable ones, there have been other conflicts and estrangements, but only hints of discord have filtered out. Although it will probably never be known what they demanded or extracted from each other in Houston, soon the most searing issues that had divided them were resolved.
Within weeks of his return home, Fidel committed to virtually all of his brother’s more radical positions. In mid-May a sweeping agrarian reform was proclaimed that among other things, “proscribed” the privately owned sugar plantations that had defined Cuba’s economy since the eighteenth century. Latin American revolutionaries received stepped-up Cuban support, with Fidel giving his personal blessing to a group that landed on the shores of the Dominican Republic in June, imbued with the quickly vanquished hope of overthrowing the entrenched dictator there.23 Rapprochement with Cuba’s communists progressed as relations with the United States deteriorated. The liberal ambassador Bonsal, who clung to the belief that an amicable relationship could yet be established, would have only two more substantive meetings with Fidel. By October he had given up all “hope for rational relations.”24
The shift leftward provoked opposition on many fronts—including in the United States, where the seeds of the Bay of Pigs invasion two years later would soon begin to germinate. Many Cubans opposed to Castro were going underground or into the hills where they hoped to topple the regime that increasingly resembled the dictatorship it had replaced. There were a number of defections and purges of moderates and anticommunists, with Raul and Che Guevara typically passing judgment on them. Novice military forces that Raul was developing began to track down guerrillas who were receiving covert support from the CIA.25
As threats multiplied, the impulsive and disorganized Fidel knew that his brother’s managerial and military skills, network of loyal lieutenants and aides, and penchant for employing brutal force would be indispensable if his enemies were to be eliminated. Fidel inspired and mobilized others to do his bidding while Raul methodically built the structures through which they could be successful.
And brother or not, Raul was objectively the outstanding candidate to lead Cuba’s military services. The other guerrilla commanders were either hopelessly disorganized romantics or obsequious followers with scant education or imagination. Unlike them, Raul had exhibited exceptional organizational and leadership qualities during the year he commanded his own guerrilla front in the Sierra Cristal mountains in northern Oriente. He had matured and gained confidence, demonstrated skills few suspected he possessed, and succeeded in ways that exceeded even Fidel’s accomplishments as a guerrilla commander.
The areas that Raul brought under his control were more extensive than those Fidel dominated, and within them he created an elaborate revolutionary administration that in many ways would be the model for the new regime in Havana. Raul kept a diary during his guerrilla days. It shows that he started out with fifty-three men, a nucleus that within approximately nine months burgeoned into an effective force of more than one thousand fighters.26 He promoted men from within his ranks up to the rank of lieutenant, and organized his own local intelligence service as well as factories, schools, hospitals, and administrative bodies throughout the zone he controlled.
A number of diary entries reflect his interest in organizing peasant committees to indoctrinate the local populace and to induce them to provide support. In a notation inscribed within days of the launching of his Second Front, on March 10, 1958, he wrote, “I began the organization of the Majaguabo zone.” Overall, the most impressive theme of the bland diary is Raul’s obsession with organization.
He had excelled as the most tenacious and versatile of Fidel’s guerrilla chieftains. Even then, in his mid-twenties, five years younger than Fidel, he was creative at identifying and encouraging the talents of men who could usefully serve the revolution. While training in Mexico City in 1955, it was he who first noticed the Argentine Che Guevara and arranged for him to meet Fidel. In the mountains of Cuba Raul recruited and then developed the military and leadership skills of many other young men, some uneducated, who enthusiastically joined his ranks. Several of them are now ranking generals. Others who worked loyally under him for years have retired or taken influential civilian positions. These so-called raulistas are scattered across the top levels of military and civilian power.
Raul has a knack for preserving the loyalty and friendship of subordinates over extended periods of time. That is because unlike his brother, he readily delegates responsibility, solicits opinions, treats his men as intellectual equals, and maintains close personal relationships with them and their families. He invests emotionally in others, developing ties based on trust and frank interaction. He is also patient, exercising a paternal influence by encouraging and rewarding promising younger men. Fidel is notoriously incapable of any such empathy in his relationships.
Fidel has never admitted any weaknesses in his leadership capabilities, probably not even to Raul. Nonetheless, by 1959 there was ample evidence that he had blundered badly and repeatedly as a military tactician and organizer. The attack of July 26, 1953, on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago was the opening sortie of the revolution that followed. It was a disaster, so badly planned and executed that it proved suicidal for most of the participants.
Many years later I interviewed one of the survivors in Miami who recalled Fidel’s confusion as they met stiff resistance. “He ran around screaming orders hysterically. The orders made no sense.”27 Fidel was captured a few days later—because of carelessness that he has said was one of the worst mistakes he has ever made—and after a trial and imprisonment he began to regroup in Mexico.
There was considerable confusion there too as Fidel trained and organized for the voyage in November 1956 aboard the sixty foot Granma, the yacht he had purchased with some of the money he received in his clandestine visit to Texas. The Granma stratagem was nearly as calamitous as the Moncada attack, and just as disorganized. Fidel himself has admitted “there was no medicine” on board.28 There was barely enough food for the eighty-two men and water and fuel were running out just as they reached the Cuban coast. Fidel had no navigational aids and no experience as a seaman.
He unwisely gave the order to set sail from the small Mexican port of Tuxpan just as gale force winds started blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. Not surprisingly, they went wildly off course and when, days later, they finally came within sight of land, they were not sure if it was Cuba or Jamaica. Fidel did not think to bring maps of the Cuban coast where they would land to launch the insurgency.29 What little equipment he had brought on board was lost in the confusion of the disastrous landing. “We were all wearing new boots,” Che Guevara recalled, and soon “everyone was suffering from blisters and foot sores.”30
Fidel’s talents as a political strategist and propagandist would soon compensate for his organizational and management deficiencies, and his exceptionally good luck would help get him through many more close calls. Yet he was gradually realizing without ever acknowledging it that his principal weaknesses as a leader ironically were his brother’s greatest strengths. A subordinate later wrote that Raul was promoted to captain while aboard the Granma. “Raul climbed up on the roof of the boat with pencil and paper in hand. ‘I’ve just been promoted to captain, and I am making a list of those I’ve selected for my platoon.’”31 It was the beginning of his first real command responsibilities.
Notably, until then he had not been consulted by his brother, who insisted on controlling every detail of his movement’s activities and plans. Fidel had no chief of staff, no deputy then to help structure military operations, and he had very little experience himself. It seems likely in retrospect that had he recognized Raul’s talents earlier—or been willing to delegate more responsibility to another qualified subordinate—some of the disastrous errors of those early days might have been mitigated or avoided altogether. Possibly, too, the lives of many colleagues who bravely took risks under Fidel’s bizarre orders might have been saved.
It is in this context that after Houston the brothers worked out a successful division of labor that has remained in force ever since. Raul was given control of the military and considerable freedom to operate autonomously, more than any other Cuban leader has ever been granted. Under his direction, the military soon became the only true meritocracy in Cuba, despite Fidel’s enduring fear that any strong institution under capable leadership might be turned against him. Raul would be the single exception. So in October 1959 he was named Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the position he has retained to this day.
In that capacity, many years ago he became the world’s longest-serving defense minister, and one of its ablest as well. With the exception of Israel, no other small country has tallied as many stunning battlefield victories as Cuba has. Not even the Israeli military has ever exhibited the long-range force projection capabilities that Cuba’s did in the 1970s, when tens of thousands of troops were dispatched first to Angola and later to Ethiopia, both many thousands of miles from Cuban shores.
It was Fidel to be sure who was the grand strategist of those interventions and who astutely calculated the geopolitical benefits and risks. Most of the glory for those feats was reaped by Fidel, who, always loath to share the spotlight, has never explicitly acknowledged his brother’s essential role. But without the years Raul spent systemically organizing and training Cuba’s armed forces, those successes would have been impossible.
Raul is also the linchpin in Fidel’s succession strategy. Other than in the world’s small number of surviving monarchies, there have been few countries in the last half century or more where political succession possibilities have been so definitively frozen. Obviously, this has been a crucial factor in preserving the stability of the Castros’ regime. As first in the line of succession in the government, state, and communist party, Raul has had no rivals.
He has been so feared—and respected, too, by most government officials—that no one dares to undermine or even contemplate trying to eclipse him for Fidel’s favor. Through successive generations of Cuban leaders it has been understood that any challenge to one brother would immediately threaten and mobilize both into action. As one former high level official who worked closely with the Castros told me over dinner in Miami’s Little Havana, “Each of them is very dangerous, but the combination is terrible to contemplate.”32
Today they maintain adjoining offices in the Palace of the Revolution in Havana, with a connecting private corridor that is off limits to all but their closest aides.33 There is no question that these remarkable brothers consult regularly, discussing policy options and priorities. Their disagreements and debates are now conducted in private and protected spaces, in secret chambers, usually with no witnesses who might gossip or defect some day. As with any such cloistered activity, the secrecy surrounding their deliberations and relationship has given rise to enduring mysteries and misunderstandings, especially about the normally self-effacing Raul.
The principal result is that Fidel almost always receives the credit for every new revolutionary initiative, every policy and pronouncement. He is Cuba’s colossus: all power and revolutionary principle emanate from him. Fidel has persistently promoted this perception of himself. It burnishes the image of his invincibility that he appears not to depend on anyone. In a long interview with a trusted Marxist confidante in 1992 he spoke favorably of Raul when asked, but as in so many similar situations, he also could not repress a certain meanness and jealousy. “I don’t know how much he has been harmed by being my brother, because when there is a tall tree, it always casts a little shade on the others.”34
Working diligently in that shade since the Houston summit, Raul has allowed himself to be perceived as an insignificant subaltern, a dull factotum who stiffly salutes Fidel and carries out his orders. Raul has been ridiculed from the beginning because physically he compares so unfavorably to his robust brother. The historian Hugh Thomas described him as “mysterious, physically almost child-like.”35 A full head shorter than Fidel, he struggled as a guerrilla to sprout a wispy beard as the other barbudos, or bearded ones, cultivated thick, black growths that for a long time were a revolutionary trademark. Raul has been mocked and misrepresented in many other ways as well, underestimated by most outside observers. One result is that almost nothing of weight has been written about him. At least a dozen biographies of Fidel have been published; not even a decent biographical sketch of Raul has appeared.
Yet the truth is that if the depths of the brothers’ relationship could ever be understood, the secrets—the innermost workings of the Cuban Revolution through its entire history—would become transparent. Each brother demonstrates unique leadership qualities, personalities, and character traits that seamlessly complement the other’s. They fit perfectly, like the stone walls built by the Inca civilization in Peru hundreds of years ago. The rocks were chiseled so finely, so precisely, that when placed together, one on top of the other, no mortar or filler was required. The joints are barely visible. Together, the Castros, like those Inca walls, have stood solid and imposing, in their case for more than four and a half decades. That is a longer run in power than all but one or two modern world leaders and longer than all but one in the entire history of the Western Hemisphere since earliest colonial times.
It is highly unlikely that Fidel could have held power so long without Raul’s steady control of the armed forces. In what other Latin American country over the last four or five decades could it be said that no general or colonel was ever known to conspire against the president? Where else have the troops stayed obediently in their barracks without stirring politically? Raul has been the guarantor of that political stability in Cuba.
But Fidel has often seemed to resent the only truly essential man in his regime. When they were together in the mountains, in the earliest days of the guerrilla campaign, Fidel was enraged one day by some tactical mistake he said Raul had made. A witness recalls Fidel screaming at Raul. “You hijo de puta. If it were not for me, you’d be working at a warehouse in Biran.”36