ROOFTOP STORIES
ASPILLAGA WAS A RED-DIAPER BABY, STEEPED IN MARXIST IDEOLogy and admiration for the Soviet Union. His father, also named Florentino, made sure of that. A loyal veteran of the pre-Castro Communist Party, he was a dedicated activist in its underground campaigns against the Batista dictatorship.
The father inducted his son as a boy of ten or eleven into acts of petty intrigue and street agitation. Together they distributed subversive propaganda, the boy scampering over fences at the homes of Batista henchmen to slip brochures under their doors. He got his first taste of the intelligence work he would later master by one day climbing high into an avocado tree to attach a crude antenna the communists would use for clandestine communications. When illegal conclaves were held in the family home, the boy played lookout. Intelligence work would be his natural—and inherited—calling.
Tiny believed his father had long been an informant for Soviet intelligence. Florentino senior also quickly ingratiated himself with the Castro brothers. Just three months into their new regime, he was entrusted with sequestering a ranking KGB officer in his home. The Soviet, the first Kremlin representative to arrive in revolutionary Havana, soon began meeting secretly with Raúl Castro to lay the groundwork for the alliance that would soon flourish. The father was duly rewarded with a position in Fidel’s inner sanctum, as political chief of his large security detail. He served the brothers loyally, though with increasing resentment, for many more years.
In November 1986, the night before Tiny departed for Bratislava, father and son had a soul-searching conversation alone on the roof of the son’s apartment building in Havana. They knew no listening devices were installed there; no witnesses could eavesdrop. Even the most trusted revolutionaries were never completely immune from suspicion. Tiny told me about some of Fidel’s closest advisors and most senior officials whose homes and offices were secretly bugged by counterintelligence on his orders.
Sensing that they would never see each other again, the elder Aspillaga wanted to share with his son defamatory information about Fidel he had never told anyone before. Someone he trusted should also bear the secrets he had preserved for decades. He suspected his son was planning to defect and might even have hoped that details of the incidents he witnessed would eventually reach American ears.
Florentino senior’s two remarkable rooftop stories are chilling, incriminating commentaries on the moral void that explains so much of Fidel Castro’s behavior since he was in his early twenties. They were among his best-kept secrets.
Fidel was a University of Havana student when the first incident occurred in February 1948. A feared gunslinger, notable in Cuba’s noir underworld where student assassins and criminal gang lords mingled, he was usually armed and cocked for action. The elder Aspillaga saw Fidel fatally shoot another youth, also named Castro—Manolo Castro—who was no relation. Manolo was a notorious youth leader, a politically well-connected gangster engaged in graft and believed to be involved in mafia-style mayhem.
He was gunned down outside a Havana movie theater. The two Castros had been violent adversaries, members of opposing criminal gangs that preyed on each other. Perhaps more than anything else in their violent relationship, it must have galled Fidel that his powerful nemesis, so like him in character and ambition, bore the same last name.
Manolo Castro died in the street where he was struck. Aspillaga senior told his son he was there. He had followed Fidel, hidden behind a tree, and, without anyone noticing, watched him pull the trigger. Fearing that he would be killed if he told anyone what he had seen, he kept the secret for thirty-eight years.
Fidel was immediately a prime suspect in the murder. He was known as a sworn enemy of his rival. Acts of extreme violence, carried out with no qualms or regrets, were second nature to him by then. And he had motive to retaliate after narrowly escaping assassination attempts by associates of Manolo Castro. DGI defector José Maragon has no doubt who the killer was. He told me that “everyone I ever talked to about it believed it was Fidel.”1
Accused by a cousin of the dead man, Castro was detained by the police but released for a lack of evidence. It helped that he had a credible alibi. Yet at least two of his biographers placed him at or near the scene of the crime. One said he was seen leaving the area at the time of the assassination. Another cited witnesses who noticed that “he was hanging around the street that day.” Other bystanders “saw him and found him unusually nervous and high strung” near the movie theater. On balance nonetheless, these authors, and several others who have written about the murder, exonerate him.2
A more recent biographer, who enjoyed the support of the Cuban government and the Castro family, came to a more ambiguous conclusion, however. He wrote that while Fidel “probably did not directly participate,” he “may well have been involved in discussions and planning of the attack.” Culpable or not, triggerman or not, he sufficiently feared for his life that he immediately went into hiding, moving from one address to another for the next four or five weeks.3
The murder served his purposes and became indelibly part of his legend. His reputation for decisive and menacing action was enhanced. The killing eliminated a despised gangster, and many Cubans were relieved he was gone. Fidel’s standing as a courageous if trigger-happy political activist grew. He was able to have it both ways: He could not be charged, but his enemies now took him even more seriously. That pleased him at a time when he was vigorously flexing his political wings and coming to the attention of Cubans as an aspiring national leader.
His rival’s elimination also provided a satisfying finality for Fidel. Never again would he have to joust with another man named Castro, not a Cuban or an adversary of any nationality. He would be the only one under the lights on the world stage. But Manolo Castro’s name lives on—and on Fidel’s orders. Following the triumph of the revolution, a science building at the University of Havana was named after him. Maragon told me he considered that “a sign of Fidel’s perverse sense of humor.”
Today, after so many years, it is impossible to corroborate or verify Florentino senior’s murder story. Unlike virtually everything else I heard from the younger Aspillaga, the account is secondhand from a now-deceased source. (The father died in Cuba in 1994 at the age of seventy-five.) His account is therefore easy to dismiss as just another example of extreme, anti-Castro ranting.
Most sympathizers of the revolution treat allegations of Fidel’s involvement in Manolo Castro’s death in that way.
Yet the incident is so similar to a confirmed assassination attempt of another student leader Fidel carried out fourteen months earlier in Havana that it rings true. In December 1946, Fidel is known—from undisputed testimonies of contemporaries—to have attempted the cold-blooded, unprovoked murder of Leonel Gomez, a promising younger student who also loomed as a political rival.
Fidel took cover behind a stone wall near the university sports stadium and fired at the youth’s back without warning. Shot through a lung, Gomez staggered, seriously wounded, but survived. Max Lesnick, a contemporary close to Fidel in that era—and still, in exile and in his eighties, an enthusiastic supporter— remembered the incident vividly. He told an interviewer in Miami that Castro did it to call attention to himself and to curry favor with rival gang leaders. The attack on Gomez—in fact, everything Fidel did—had a rational explanation, according to Lesnick. His “mind is a logical mind.”4
Fidel was thinking strategically. His objective was precisely the same in the Gomez and Manolo Castro assaults. He was determined to clear Cuba’s political main stage of charismatic young competitors and to acquire powerful allies who could provide protection in Havana’s raging gang wars. As would be the case so frequently in later years, his plan succeeded. After Gomez was wounded, Fidel was brought under the wing of one of the country’s most notorious gangsters who became his criminal “godfather.” According to Lesnick, this new patron gave Castro a pistol and a car and protection from his numerous enemies.
Five months after the Manolo Castro murder, Fidel was identified by a witness in still another killing in which a University of Havana police sergeant was gunned down. The testimony was later retracted, however, and, again, no charges could be filed. It was the last murder allegation Fidel would have to evade or defend against. Never again was he physically close enough to such a crime to be implicated. His hands would always remain clean of the blood spilled on his behalf and on his orders.
He would be responsible, however, for many more killings and attempted ones. He ordered assassinations by a succession of trusted hit men, spectacular commando operations against prominent foreign targets, gangland street murders, and innumerable executions of Cubans by firing squads and in apparent accidents. He deployed Cuban and foreign hit men, including elite members of foreign terrorist and guerrilla groups dependent on Cuba. On his orders, men were marked for elimination (from all the evidence I have been able to gather, there was never a female victim) for the same reasons that motivated him during his university years. In almost all cases he sought to exact revenge or to eliminate powerful rivals and enemies, including serving and former heads of state.
An especially sensitive and reliable covert CIA source reported in November 1962 that Castro was “dominated by vanity, had megalomaniacal tendencies, and possessed a compulsion for revenge that was notorious.” The agent added that on occasion, it caused Castro “to reach back as far as twenty years to avenge actions taken against him at that time.”5
Like Tiny Aspillaga, some of Fidel’s targets eluded their assigned assassins. Many others, however, died under mysterious circumstances in countries around the world. They were Cubans, Cuban exiles and defectors, other Latin Americans, and probably some of other nationalities. As in the Manolo Castro case, the evidence trail fades off into confusion and plausible denial in virtually all of these other instances. But these pages will exhume several of the cold cases, based on new evidence provided by Aspillaga and other defectors from Cuban intelligence.
When he was interviewed by one of Castro’s biographers in 1984, Max Lesnick had no reservations about describing his friend Fidel’s imperative to violence. It was as defining and intrinsic as his smoldering sense of destiny. According to Lesnick, Castro “had precise plans for creating his own place in history. He was always imbued with the conviction that he had to fulfill some transcendental mission, and he was violent but also always calculating.”
Lesnick relished telling another revealing story. When he was in hiding after the Manolo Castro murder, Fidel relied on friends to provide safe havens from his enemies. He stayed for a while with Lesnick, in a small room in his grandmother’s apartment in Old Havana. It faced the north balcony of the presidential palace, only about a hundred yards away. President Carlos Prío sometimes used the balcony to address crowds below.
One morning as he was reading, Fidel idly glanced out the window of his room. Lesnick was not at home, but his grandmother witnessed what happened next. Castro stood, picked up a broomstick, and pointed it out the window toward the presidential balcony. Holding it up to shoulder height like a sharpshooter, he aimed it as if it were a rifle with a telescopic sight, musing aloud about how easy it would be to assassinate Prío from right there. Lesnick’s grandmother was startled but engaged him.
“Well, okay, my boy, and after you do that, what’s going to happen to you . . . and to me?” His response was characteristically calculating, and cold-blooded. “Bueno, vieja . . .” he began. “Well, my dear old lady. I’ll go down these stairs, take the elevator, and leave right onto Prado Street. Nothing at all will happen to me.”6
He “was obsessed with conquering power, by whatever means,” his lifelong friend Lesnick concluded.
It was not the first time Fidel had fantasized about killing a Cuban president on that balcony. Prío’s predecessor, Ramón Grau San Martín, once invited Castro and a few other student leaders to confer with him at the palace. He asked them to wait for him on the balcony as he did some other business. Fidel whispered to the others as they stood there alone, “I have the formula to take power once and for all to get rid of this old crook. When the old man comes back, let’s the four of us pick him up and throw him off the balcony. Once he’s dead we’ll proclaim the triumph of the student revolution.”
The others were horrified, and refused, but not until Fidel exclaimed, “It’s a great opportunity for us to seize power.”7
The Aspillagas’ story about the Manolo Castro murder fits neatly into this peculiar pathology. I cannot vouch for the senior Florentino’s reliability as a source, but I have no reason to doubt all of what his son shared with me, including the rooftop stories. There was no reason for the father to exaggerate or fabricate.
I am sure Aspillaga remembered the conversation accurately; it had occurred only seven months before his defection. The father’s experiences with Fidel were so startling and vivid, moreover—and, in the retelling, so easily summarized in simple, declarative statements—that it seems unlikely they have been garbled by the son.
The second rooftop story is even more revealing of Fidel at his diabolical worst. It reflects on his willingness to bring down the fury of the gods—to destroy their temple, and himself, like a vengeful, blinded Samson—should his quest for a historic destiny be denied.
Lesnick believed that is essential to understanding Fidel. “I always saw Castro as a man with a destiny; he would either achieve it or die trying.” That morbid tension was never more evident than in late October 1962.
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS was entering its final and most dangerous twenty-four hours on the hot and humid night of October 26 and 27 that year.
Fidel was agitated and exhausted. Up before dawn, all that day he had rushed from one military installation to another, issuing orders, hectoring and encouraging Cuban defenders, coordinating island-wide defenses with Soviet commanders. A few hours before midnight he rushed to the Soviet embassy in Havana, his driver and backup vehicles speeding through the dim and eerily deserted streets of the city. Four days earlier he had put Cuba on maximum military alert.
Aspillaga senior was with him, monitoring Castro’s personal security detail. They were joined at the embassy by Aleksandr Alekseyev, the veteran KGB troubleshooter and confidant of the Castro brothers, who was also the Soviet ambassador. Alekseyev’s aide, another Kremlin Cuba specialist, was with him.
The superpowers were staring each other down across a nuclear abyss. More than forty Soviet medium and intermediate-range rockets, with nuclear warheads, capable of striking Washington, New York, and most major American cities, were on or near launch pads on the island. They had been secretly delivered with Castro’s blessing. Discovered when a high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane flew over one of the bases, the crisis started in Washington on the morning of October 16 as President John F. Kennedy began meeting secretly with advisors. Six days later he addressed the American public and threw down the gauntlet. He imposed a naval quarantine of Cuba to block any further weapons deliveries and gave the Kremlin an ultimatum: all of its offensive weapons would have to be removed.
Fidel recognized that the crisis was coming to a head, that Cuba was in acute peril. Thirty years later at an international conference in Havana that discussed the events, he recalled his thinking on that last night of the nuclear showdown: “On that night . . . we saw no possible solution. We couldn’t see a way out.”8
He went to the embassy determined to communicate securely with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Angry and bellicose, Castro behaved as he always did when under pressure: He seized the initiative. Until then he had been on the sidelines of the crisis; now he thrust himself into its combustible center. Kennedy and Khrushchev were struggling to reach a peaceful solution, but Fidel remained intransigent, fearing his interests were being ignored. He was not being consulted, and, worse yet, he suspected the Soviet leader was losing his nerve, that he might cave in to the Americans. Fidel recalled:
“I aimed at encouraging him . . . I was afraid that there’d be mistakes, hesitations.”
For Castro, hesitation was the precursor of cowardice. “Throughout our revolutionary history,” he boasted at the Havana conference, “any time that we have smelled danger, we’ve taken the necessary steps. And we would rather make the mistake of taking excessive precautions than be taken by surprise because of carelessness.” Khrushchev, he was convinced, was not measuring up to those standards.9
So Fidel presumed to provide the Soviet leader strategic advice. Still relatively inexperienced on the world stage, the thirty-six-year-old Castro took it upon himself to counsel Khrushchev, the wizened veteran of World War II and survivor of Stalin’s purges, who was thirty-two years his senior. The tough old Bolshevik was in charge when the Kremlin lofted Sputnik, the first satellite, and later Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space; he had built the Soviet Union into a nuclear-armed superpower; and he was boldly challenging Kennedy in America’s Caribbean backyard. Khrushchev was not expecting carping, unsolicited advice from the upstart Castro.
Alekseyev and his aide, both fluent in Spanish, translated as Fidel scribbled and then dictated what he had written. It was a letter that would be cabled to Moscow, tagged with codes indicating the most urgent priority. The drafting took several hours as Fidel, writing in Spanish with a pencil, corrected and redrafted his message and the Soviets fine-tuned the translation. Near dawn the next morning, October 27, the last full day of the missile crisis, the cable was finally dispatched to the Kremlin. The senior Aspillaga had witnessed the entire process.
Tiny remembered the letter’s apocalyptic essence when he recounted his father’s rooftop story to me, using the Cuban term for the missile crisis. “Fidel Castro . . . asked Khrushchev to launch the missiles against the United States during the October Crisis.”
The father did not provide any elaboration to his son. But the memory, summed up in those few words, was burned into their consciousness. When Aspillaga shared the story with his American government debriefers during the summer of 1987, Castro’s letter had not even been whispered about outside of small, elite circles in Moscow. In Cuba, quite possibly only Fidel and Florentino senior knew of it. In the United States, no one had any idea it existed until a few years later. It must have been one of the few things Aspillaga revealed to the CIA that seemed barely believable. The story was seemingly so absurd that it might even have caused the debriefers to doubt his reliability. The opposite, of course, turned out to be true: Aspillaga was the first to tell anyone in the United States about Fidel’s letter. His report turned out to be ironclad truth.
The language Castro used in the letter was somewhat more nuanced than what either of the Aspillagas remembered, but it was macabre just the same. The thrust of the message is revealed in just a few sentences in the copy that the Cuban government eventually released.
“Dear Comrade Khrushchev,” Fidel began. “From an analysis of the situation and the reports in our possession, I consider that the aggression is almost imminent within the next 24 or 72 hours.”
Fidel believed that Kennedy was considering two kinds of aggression:
The first and most likely is an air attack against certain targets with the limited objective of destroying them; the second, less probable although possible, is invasion. . . . If the second variant is implemented and the imperialists invade Cuba with the goal of occupying it, the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event, the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.10
These are the operative words of what has become known as Fidel’s Armageddon letter. Incredibly, he advocated a massive preemptive nuclear attack on the United States, a nuclear holocaust, if Cuba were invaded. Some have argued that he meant Khrushchev should attack in order to save Cuba, to destroy American military capabilities before invading troops could occupy the island. Castro and his sympathizers insist, however, that he meant Khrushchev should order an attack after an invasion to prevent a surprise American assault on Soviet targets.
Journalist and Castro biographer Tad Szulc, who spent many hours in meetings with Fidel, believed the ambiguous language of the letter could be read either way. On balance, however, he concluded that Castro had advocated a preemptive attack to stave off an American invasion and military occupation of Cuba.11
It was not just the missiles on the island that Fidel thought should be launched but also the strategic arsenal based on Soviet soil. Surely he knew that millions of civilians on both sides of the Iron Curtain would die after such a nuclear onslaught. Major American cities would be leveled. Much of the Soviet Union would be reduced to rubble in retaliatory responses from American Minutemen missiles in hardened silos, submarine-launched nuclear warheads, and strategic bombers that survived the initial attack. Clouds of radiation would soak continents. The physical and environmental damage would be incalculable.
There is nothing like the Armageddon letter in the entire history of the nuclear age since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No other world leader is known to have recommended the use of even a single nuclear warhead since President Harry Truman approved those American attacks on Japan at the end of World War II. Fidel’s recommendation to Khrushchev was orders of magnitude greater. He urged a massive, surprise attack in which there could have been hundreds of nuclear explosions, all vastly more powerful than the two bombs dropped on Japan. Even in film and fiction such grotesque thoughts are relegated only to insane Dr. Strangelove–type characters.
Yet, as reprehensible as it was, nothing came of it. Castro was baying into the wind that night at the Soviet embassy. Khrushchev was horrified when he received the letter. He had been traumatized by his wartime experiences and was loath to endure anything like them again. In one of his letters to Kennedy during the crisis, he mused, “I have been in two wars and know that war ends only when it has rolled through the cities and villages, sowing in its wake death and destruction.”12
Khrushchev’s most respected biographer noted that during World War II, “thousands died before his eyes, from simple soldiers mowed down in ill-advised battles to generals who committed suicide in his presence.” A year into the carnage in which 27 million Soviets perished, Khrushchev himself was almost killed when German planes bombed his command post. Fidel should have known there was no chance that the Soviet leader would preemptively fire his strategic arsenal at American targets and by doing so provoke a pulverizing nuclear counterattack.13
It may be argued, therefore, that the Armageddon letter was not Fidel’s greatest crime because nothing came of it. Other more consequential decisions he made were anything but hypothetical. The actions he took early in his revolution to uproot Cuba’s entire moneyed class took a horrendous toll. The revolution seized virtually all private property; nearly all of the former owners were propelled into exile with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They were not compensated and have been ridiculed by Fidel and his propagandists ever since as monstrous social deviates. Hundreds of thousands—ultimately more than a million—people were forced from their homeland this way. Even today, twenty thousand Cubans legally emigrate to the United States every year in search of better lives. They are the disposable detritus of Fidel’s failed revolution.
Another truly contemptible decision he made, in 1980, was comparable but on a smaller scale. During the mass exodus of Cubans from the port of Mariel, he emptied psychiatric hospital wards and maximum security prisons, then expelled those Cubans by forcing them onto boats going to Miami and Key West. Slightly more than 127,000 people fled the island in that chaotic sealift he ordered. Among them were about 17,000 criminals—including murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers—and people with severe mental illnesses who were abruptly torn from their families and treatments. Only a handful of those so-called excludables was ever accepted back. The rest remain in their adopted country, many incarcerated for committing heinous capital crimes, including mass murders. Only Fidel could have made the decision to force them onto the boats to Florida. He has rarely been challenged to explain it, and he has never apologized or expressed regret.
Those and other egregious violations of human rights committed by Castro are well known. In contrast, for twenty-eight years the Armageddon letter was one of his best-kept secrets. He never expected it to be exposed. It was, after all, a private and secret communication between allied heads of state. He never suspected the Soviet Union would eventually self-destruct and that many sensitive documents would spill forth.
Khrushchev’s son Sergei was the first to mention the letter on the public record. It happened during another international conference about the missile crisis, in Moscow, in January 1989. Sergei let it slip that his father had mentioned that Fidel wrote a letter recommending a nuclear attack on the United States.
The reaction to the revelation was fierce. Cuban and Soviet denials were so strident that Sergei felt compelled to retract his words. Alekseyev, the KGB ambassador and translator, told an American reporter, “That’s stupid. I wrote the telexes and there was nothing of that kind.” The Cuban government joined the chorus with a rebuttal published in Granma: “It’s ridiculous.” Under the weight of the denials, the media furor soon subsided; the allegation seemed just too preposterous to be credible.
Nothing more was heard until September 1990. Glasnost, the policy of greater openness in the moribund Soviet Union, encouraged candor that had not previously been permissible. It was in that spirit that the third volume of Khrushchev’s posthumously published memoirs, known by its subtitle, The Glasnost Tapes, appeared and finally burst the bubble Fidel had tried so hard to protect.
After his ouster from power in 1964, Khrushchev secretly dictated his life story into a tape recorder hidden at the dacha, the secluded country house where he was exiled. The subject he chose to treat first was the one of greatest emotional importance to him: Fidel and the missile crisis. Khrushchev’s published words provided an authoritative description of the letter. They seem to support Szulc’s interpretation that Fidel hoped for a nuclear attack to prevent an American invasion and occupation of the island. The fallen Soviet leader wrote: “We received a telegram from our ambassador in Cuba. . . . Castro suggested that in order to prevent our nuclear missiles from being destroyed, we should launch a preemptive strike against the United States. . . . We needed to immediately deliver a nuclear missile strike.”14
Reluctantly at first, Fidel responded, ridiculing the story in a speech in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater on September 28. He tried to blame the United States— specifically, he meant the CIA. “They have always used or found ways to create animosity and hatred against Cuba within American public opinion.” As usual he worried more about how he would be perceived by important shapers of opinion in the United States than by the Cuban people.
He continued: Alekseyev was not really proficient in Spanish; he had translated the message poorly, distorting his meaning. Fidel revealed, nonetheless, that a copy of the letter had been found and would be released. He no doubt was aware that another copy, in the original Russian, was scheduled to be pulled from Soviet archives.15
Khrushchev provided additional incriminating details in his memoirs. He explained that he and Fidel had an opportunity in May 1963 to review the controversy during an extended visit Castro paid to the Soviet Union. Still unable to comprehend how Fidel could have advocated nuclear holocaust, Khrushchev did not mince words with the leader he described as “young and hotheaded.”
I told Castro . . . You wanted to start a war with the United States. If the war had begun we would somehow have survived, but Cuba no doubt would have ceased to exist. It would have been crushed into powder. Yet you suggested a nuclear strike!16
Oleg Troyanovsky, a senior ambassador and Khrushchev foreign policy aide, received Fidel’s cabled letter when it arrived in Moscow. He also wrote about it:
Khrushchev received a telegram from Fidel Castro. The message, written with the typical emotionality of Fidel, was filled with anxiety. I remember calling up Khrushchev who was at home and reading him the telegram . . . I have no doubt that it added fuel to the anxious thoughts preying on his mind.17
What Troyanovsky meant, and what other evidence supports, is that the Soviet leader was so disturbed by Fidel’s words that he realized he could delay no longer in reaching a settlement with Kennedy. The Soviet leadership knew by late in the day on October 27 that, as Troyanovsky put it, “one spark could trigger an explosion.” They had no idea what Castro—acting like a rancorous child playing with fire—might do next.
There had been other alarming developments that day, roughly coinciding with the receipt of Fidel’s letter in Moscow. The first shots fired in anger during the crisis were heard in the morning. On Fidel’s orders, at first light, hundreds of Cuban antiaircraft batteries started shooting at low-altitude American reconnaissance aircraft. The Cuban media were filled with reports of rallies and a nation preparing for house-to-house combat. Discussing the crisis at the 1992 Havana conference, Fidel remembered how close he had brought the superpowers to actual hostilities.
“War started in Cuba on October 27 in the morning.” He preferred violent confrontation even as Kennedy and Khrushchev were desperately trying to avoid it.18
That afternoon, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over eastern Cuba by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. Major Rudolf Anderson, the air force pilot, was killed. Fidel has admitted that he had provoked the incident by stoking a mood of red hot militancy that inflamed both Cuban and Soviet commanders. He later admitted: “We cannot say they were totally responsible . . . the firing started, and in a basic spirit of solidarity, the Soviets decided to fire as well.” Without authorization from Moscow, the Soviet missile base commander ordered the plane shot down. In another interview, Fidel stated simply that the plane was destroyed “undoubtedly as a result of a situation created by our decision.”19
Still, Khrushchev remembered the incident differently. He wrote: “Castro ordered our antiaircraft officers to shoot down a U-2 reconnaissance plane.”20
In March 1963, a sensitive and highly valued CIA spy who was never doubled and enjoyed access to Cuban leaders was the first to report on the incident. His account was similar to Khrushchev’s. Fidel had seized the initiative; the responsibility for the U-2 shoot-down was his. The source reported that “Castro harangued a Soviet commander” who gave in to the pressure and “to Castro’s persuasiveness,” and then ordered the plane shot down. The source said “the Soviet command was furious,” and the officer was sent home under arrest.21
Command and control were breaking down within the Soviet expeditionary forces in Cuba; Khrushchev’s commanders were taking orders from Fidel. The combination of that concern, the Armageddon letter, the destruction of the U-2, and the Cuban antiaircraft barrages against American aircraft were too much for the Soviet leader. He knew the crisis he started had to be brought to a peaceful end. Without seeking additional concessions that Kennedy was prepared to make or consulting with Castro, he capitulated. He announced his decision to withdraw the missiles.
FIDEL HAS REMAINED UNREPENTANT. In the September 1990 speech in Havana he blustered: “I do not regret in the least what I did nor what I said.” Expressions of shame or sincere regret have always been as alien to him as the possibility of shaving off his signature beard.
During the 1992 Havana conference, he spoke briefly and elliptically about the letter and again was unapologetic. He was asked about it six years later, during an extended interview with CNN News. By then, better rehearsed and with a fistful of relevant documents, he offered the most detailed defense of his actions. He still refused to admit he had been grotesquely wrong.
With a grand flourish, he told the interviewer: “It is the most tremendous letter in history.” He was trying to create a new narrative about the incident. He wanted somehow to spin the experience 180 degrees, into something noble. Castro proclaimed: “I think one needed to be very strong, and I would say that one needed great moral courage to say that, because that was the way I perceived things, my perception of what was about to happen.”
In these and on a few other occasions when the subject of the letter was raised, Fidel has been adroit in controlling the discussions. He did so by flooding his interlocutors with flows of verbiage, always articulate and precise, and often flattering, while rarely revealing more than what he planned to at the start. Smoothly changing the subject midstream, he tacked in new directions and did not stop talking until the purpose of the original question was forgotten. The result is that during the years that elapsed after he wrote the letter, and before he went into retirement and seclusion, he was never pressed to explain the mystery of what he was thinking when he advocated nuclear war.
Some have argued he must have been irrational that night at the Soviet embassy, an idea easy enough to surmise. One respected American scholar wrote, “A leader who convinces himself that only collective suicide is possible is not acting rationally.”22
But the senior Aspillaga reported no such emotional or psychotic lapses. He said nothing to his son about Fidel seeming unstable or erratic that night at the Soviet embassy. The truth is he was not out of control. He did not dictate the Armageddon letter in a moment of madness or a burst of magical realism. His assessment of the situation in those final, bleak hours of the missile crisis was coldly, cruelly rational. His friend Max Lesnick had it right: His “mind is a logical mind.”
Although Fidel has always calculated his moves carefully, misunderstandings about his most extreme behavior have been common. That is because observers have consistently underestimated his capacity to do the unthinkable, to act aggressively in ways that would be unlikely for any other world leader. All through his career he was masterful at hurling bolts from the blue, astonishing adversaries with his audacity and perfect timing.
When he secretly sent thousands of Cuban troops to fight in Angola in 1975 alongside the Marxist guerrillas he had sponsored, for example, American intelligence was completely surprised. We were not the only ones. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger later wrote in his memoirs that it had been unimaginable Fidel “would act so provocatively so far from home.”23
That intervention and a similar one in Ethiopia a few years later were just two of dozens of examples of sudden discontinuities, bold strokes in Cuban policy conceived by Fidel. Preempting and eliminating enemies, seizing initiatives, taking calculated risks, going on the offensive, conspiring and manipulating for personal advantage have been hallmarks of his leadership style since his university days. In his prime, Fidel’s behavior could rarely be predicted reliably. He was sui generis, perhaps the modern world’s most idiosyncratic major leader. He was unique because of the limitless grandiosity of his ambitions.
Lesnick recognized that Fidel’s quest for a historic destiny would likely only produce two outcomes: either greatness or martyrdom. They are the poles that explain why Castro has eschewed the middle latitudes that are, from his adventurer’s perspective, for ordinary men, those seeking safety and comfort.
Starting on July 26, 1953, when he led a suicidal attack against the Moncada military garrison in eastern Cuba to jump-start his revolutionary odyssey, Fidel veered between these extremes. By his own—exaggerated—count, eighty of the men he threw into that battle were killed. Again, in early December 1956, only a few survived the landing of his expeditionary force on Cuba’s southeastern coast that launched his insurgency. In a fundraising speech in New York the previous November, he had promised that “in 1956 we will be free or we will be martyrs.” He needed dead heroes and revolutionary pyrotechnics to legitimize his cause. Once in power two years later, it would always be the same.24
He expected his followers—whether a few dozen or an entire nation—to join him in triumph or heroic death. Many times he resembled a disturbed fire-and-brimstone evangelist leading his flock to mass martyrdom, all for the sake of his distorted visions and conceits.
In a speech in April 1963 marking the second anniversary of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro recalled the tense end game of the missile crisis, no doubt with the scene at the Soviet embassy in mind. “We are reminded of those days in which all the people, with impressive serenity, prepared to resist the enemy attack . . . prepared to fight, and prepared to die.”25
It is an observation he has repeated many times over the years, actually believing that masses of Cubans would have given their lives for him. In September 1981, for example, he told a Mexican journalist: “The calmness with which the people were ready to die proved touching, and almost incredible to me.”26
The beauty of mass martyrdom preoccupied him on other occasions too. During the first year of the Reagan presidency he greatly feared, Fidel was again openly seized by forebodings of death and destruction. I wrote an intelligence assessment about his dark moods in November 1981, when I was the principal analyst in the National Intelligence Council. The study was based entirely on unclassified information, mainly his speeches and public performances. I wrote about “his persistent emphasis on themes related to holocaust and apocalypse.”
There was abundant evidence in his oratory that he feared the new American administration and its threatening stances toward Cuba. The Soviet leadership, remembering his belligerent behavior during the missile crisis, had notified him that there would be no security guarantee if the United States initiated hostilities. He felt alone, close to a precipice, even as he confronted dire social and economic problems on the island in the aftermath of the Mariel exodus. I knew nothing about the Armageddon letter when I wrote in a now declassified assessment about his black broodings at that critical juncture:
An apparently despairing Castro has frequently masked his rising fears of conflict with the United States with bravado about how true Cuban revolutionaries must fight to the last man. His apocalyptic mood is often quite explicit. He has repeatedly used the word “holocaust,” has mused about Cuba and the world after nuclear warfare between the superpowers and has admonished his audiences to increase their vigilance and revolutionary worth in the face of impending disaster.27
In mid-September 1981 he had said that President Reagan’s defense buildup will “lead to nothing but a final holocaust.” On October 24 he concluded: “to die honorably is a good way to behave and act.” Another time he said, “[I]f they dare to invade, more Yankees will die here than in World War II,” and again, that “millions of Yankees will die. . . . We are not like the Christians of ancient Rome who meekly surrendered.”
Just as he did twenty-one years earlier when he drafted the Armageddon letter, he was feeling an extreme sense of isolation and abandonment. I noted in the intelligence assessment how on two other occasions he reiterated the same gruesome vision of his and the revolution’s denouement. “As long as there is a single armed man,” he said, “we will fight to the last.”28
Castro often fantasized that he would be the last warrior holding out against encircling forces of evil. For decades that was a standard element of his apocalyptic musings. Partly it is attributable to his bravura, to his belief in his personal exceptionalism. But it is also a reflection of the precautions he always takes when in dangerous situations. He shot Leonel Gomez in the back from a distance. His first known kill in the Sierra Maestra during his guerrilla campaign was also from a considerable distance, when he fired a powerful rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. Others who were with him during the attack on the Moncada garrison remember him hanging back, avoiding the worst of the battle, screaming incoherent orders.29
And in October 1962 when he drafted the Armageddon letter, he reportedly also played it safe. Anatoly Dobrynin, the well-connected Soviet ambassador in Washington for many years, wrote in his memoirs that Fidel “even suggested that our ambassador withdraw with him to the bunker built at the command post in a cave near Havana.” Fidel might well have survived an American invasion there, possibly even a nuclear war.30
Another example of his apocalypse complex, also thoroughly publicized in the official Cuban media, occurred in October 1983. About eight hundred Cubans were caught on the small Caribbean nation of Grenada when American military forces invaded, ostensibly to rescue American medical students. Fidel radioed his personnel—military and civilian construction workers—ordering them to fight to the death. Later, when he thought they were complying, he again reached their commanding officer: “We congratulate you on your heroic resistance. Cuban people are proud of you. Do not surrender under any circumstances.”31
He expected mass suicide for the glory of the revolution, his revolution. The top Cuban officer and all but a small number of the others ignored their commander in chief’s bizarre orders, however, and surrendered to the Americans. Aspillaga was familiar with the aftermath. He wrote in the manuscript he shared with me that when the survivors returned to Cuba, they were harshly interrogated over extended periods of time.
Some, he knew from a friend who was one of the interrogators, had cooperated with their captors even though they were only held for a brief period in Grenada before being repatriated to Cuba. “At least four,” Aspillaga wrote, “confessed to accepting offers to work for the enemy upon their return to Cuba.” Some were then turned by Cuban counterintelligence into double agents. At least one officer suspected of having been recruited by American intelligence refused to confess and was reduced in rank and assigned to meaningless work. Aspillaga’s interrogator friend told him that the Cubans in Grenada were justified in disregarding Fidel’s orders.
Tiny wrote that the investigation in Havana revealed that they “chose not to confront the Americans not only because of the lack of efficient command, but because they did not understand why they had to die if they were not defending their own country.”
He added that “all were sentenced to hard labor in constructing roads and other public works in the province of Matanzas. Officers of high rank were sent to highest-risk war zones in Angola.”
Fidel expected all Cubans, even the civilians in Grenada, to mimic the ideal Spartan warrior. He required them to be indifferent to hardship and pain, to blindly follow his orders, to die blithely in defense of the fatherland. Loyal Cuban revolutionaries were not to reason why or to second guess him. It was a bitter blow when so few lived up to those expectations.
Yet another period of apocalyptic thinking occurred in 2010, more than two years after Fidel officially surrendered the presidency. In his retirement, he took to penning ruminations about assorted subjects from his Havana convalescent quarters, editorials that then were issued by the Cuban media. They are called “Fidel’s Reflections.” Nearly all concerned international issues, and some were clearly intended to repair or embellish his image. Between June and November, a dozen of these articles were devoted to his renewed preoccupation with nuclear holocaust. One was titled “The Dangers of Nuclear War,” another “On the Brink of Tragedy.” On June 16 he wrote that “the sky is growing increasingly cloudy,” and on July 11 he brooded that “today everything hangs by a thread.”
Then, on August 23, he appeared to return to the knotty matter of the Armageddon letter. He made no explicit reference to it, but his intent seemed clear enough. The article was titled “Nuclear Winter.” It was still bothering him so many years later that he had come across as a Cuban Dr. Strangelove when the message to Khrushchev was released. In his dotage he sought another way to be exonerated, to explain it away.
Nearly coinciding with his eighty-fourth birthday, he wrote that he had only recently come to understand some of the most fundamental and commonly known realities of textbook strategic warfare. He said he had consulted earlier in the day with four Cuban experts, including his eldest son—who was once in charge of the Cuban nuclear agency—along with the head of the military’s science and technology department. They helped him, he claimed, finally to appreciate what he said that had previously eluded him.
“I should have understood much earlier that the risks of a nuclear war were much more serious than I imagined . . . I had not taken into account one quite simple reality: it is not the same to explode 500 nuclear bombs in 1,000 days as it is to have them explode in one single day.”32
There is no reason to believe Castro was senile when he wrote or, more likely, dictated those words. It strains credulity, though, that he did not know this simple truth that was for decades clear to schoolboys and girls across the globe. Over the years, he had studied the missile crisis in depth with some of its most prominent American and Soviet decision makers of that time. He participated in the 1992
Havana conference. He presided over one of the best intelligence services in the world and led the most accomplished military from any third-world nation. Fidel prides himself on his photographic memory. And he is a voracious reader. Yet he pretended not ever to have discussed the simple mechanics of nuclear conflict with anyone before or to have read any of the thousands of articles and treatises that have explained it.
With that preposterous, self-exculpating explanation, he apparently hoped to put the Armageddon letter behind him once and for all. He was worried about his legacy, how he would be viewed by historians. No other decision he had made nagged at him as much. He could not bring himself to admit that he had been mistaken in October 1962. He wanted it known that he considered nuclear war abhorrent and despicable.
He had already done his best to seize the moral high ground on that issue. On March 2, 2003, during his only visit to Japan, he went to Hiroshima, where he laid a wreath in memory of the dead at the Peace Memorial Museum. Back home a few days later, during a ceremony in which he was inaugurated for a new term as Cuba’s president, he railed against the world’s first nuclear power.
“The attack was absolutely unnecessary and can never be morally justified. . . . There was no excuse whatsoever for that terrible slaughter of children, women, old persons and innocent people of any age. . . . Millions of people should visit this site so that the world will know what really happened.”33
Righteous he was. But there is no denying that he had been willing in October 1962 for millions to perish in a cataclysmic global requiem for the Cuban revolution. By any reading, his letter to Khrushchev demonstrated a cosmic disregard for humanity.