Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (122 page)

Castro’s chance came in 1951–2, when Chibás went mad and shot himself, leaving the ‘idealist’ role vacant, and Batista, in an attempt to end gangsterism, abolished the parties and made himself dictator. His ‘freedom
coup’
was popular with the workers and he would
probably have restored constitutional rule eventually, as he had done before. But Castro did not give him time. He seems to have welcomed the
coup
as a chance to get down to serious fighting:
Le hora es de lucha
, as he put it in his first political statement. He took to the Sierra with 150 other gunmen. His guerrilla campaign was never very serious, though urban terrorism cost many lives. The Cuban economy continued to flourish until 1957. In all essentials, the battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington. Castro’s principal advocate was Herbert Matthews of the
New York Times
, who presented him as the T.E.Lawrence of the Caribbean.
²⁴
Just as the Hearst press helped to make the Cuban revolution in 1898, so the
Times
sponsored Castro. This swung round the State Department. William Wieland, in charge of the Caribbean desk, had hitherto taken the view, ‘I know Batista is considered by many as a sonofabitch … but American interests come first … at least he is our sonofabitch.’
²⁵
Now Wieland changed sides. Earl Smith, appointed Ambassador to Havana in 1957, was told: ‘You are assigned to Cuba to preside over the downfall of Batista. The decision has been taken that Batista has to go.’ Wieland sent him to be briefed by Matthews, who told him: ‘it would be in the best interests of Cuba and… the world … if Batista were removed.’ Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of State, was also pro-Castro, as were the
CIA
in Havana.
²⁶

Once in Cuba, however, Smith grasped that a Castro victory would be a disaster for America, and sought to prevent it. He insisted on flying to Washington, at his own expense (Rubottom refused to authorize it from state funds), to hold a warning press conference, at which he said that ‘the US government’ would never be able ‘to do business with Fidel Castro’ because he ‘would not honour international obligations’.
²⁷
Thereafter the State Department worked behind his back. The pattern of muddle, duplicity and cross-purpose recalled Roosevelt diplomacy at its worst, and attempts by some State Department officials to undermine the Shah of Iran in 1979. On 13 March 1958 Smith saw Batista in his study lined with busts of Lincoln, and agreement was reached to hold free elections and for Batista to stand down on 24 February 1959. The next day, unknown to Smith, Washington took the decision to suspend all official arms sales to Cuba. A shipment of Garrand rifles was stopped at the New York dockside. As Castro’s American well-wishers continued to subscribe for arms to him, America was now, from early 1958, arming one side: the rebels. The US arms embargo was the turning-point in Castro’s road to power. Before it, he had never had more than three-hundred men. After it, the Cubans concluded the Americans had changed their policy and switched sides accordingly.
Castro’s support rocketed up; the economy plummeted. Even so, Castro never had more than 3,000 followers. His ‘battles’ were public relations exercises. In the so-called ‘Battle of Santa Clara’ his losses were six, and only forty in the defeat of Batista’s 1958 summer offensive, the largest engagement in the ‘war’. Batista’s total losses were only 300. The real fighters were the anti-Batista elements in the towns, of whom between 1,500 and 2,000 were killed. The ‘guerrilla war’ was largely propaganda.
²⁸
As Che Guevara admitted, after it was over: ‘The presence of a foreign journalist, American for preference, was more important for us than a military victory.’
²⁹
Apart from America’s switch, the morale of the Batista regime was destroyed by the urban bands, which were non-Castroist. At the last minute, in November 1958, the American government sought to organize the succession of a non-Castro government, characteristically without telling their Ambassador.
³⁰
But by then it was too late. Batista got out in January 1959, and Cuba was at Castro’s mercy.

At what point Castro became a Leninist is unclear. He had obviously studied carefully the methods both Lenin and Hitler had used to make themselves absolute masters. When he took over in January 1959 he had himself made Commander-in-Chief and, using as his excuse the necessity to prevent the re-emergence of gangsterism, secured for himself a monopoly of force. All police forces were placed under himself, not the Interior Ministry, and key posts in both police and army were rapidly taken over by his guerrilla colleagues. The critical moment was when he got the rival anti-Batista forces, especially the democratic
Directorio Revolucionario
, to lay down their arms.
³¹
Thereafter he could do what he liked; and did so. The provisional president, Judge Manuel Urrutia, was made to agree with Castro’s demand to postpone elections for eighteen months, with rule by decree in the meantime. This was the Lenin technique. One of the first decrees abolished all political parties, his paper,
Revolucion
, explaining: ‘Worthy men who belong to definite political parties already have posts in the provisional government …. The others … would do better to be silent’ (7 January 1959). That was the Hitler touch. So was the decree of 7 February, described as ‘a fundamental law of the republic’, investing legislative power in the cabinet – the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Law. Immediately after it, Castro took over as Prime Minister, banning the President from cabinet meetings.
³²
Thus, within weeks of the take-over, the liberals and democrats had been effectively excluded from power. The cabinet was the Politburo; and, within it, thanks to his relations and cronies, Castro was dictator, exactly like Batista. But Batista had the saving grace of caring for money as well as power. Castro wanted power alone.

Castro had already been running purge courts-martial to kill his enemies. The first unambiguous act of tyranny came on 3 March 1959, after forty-four Batista air force men, accused of ‘war crimes’, were acquitted in a Santiago court for lack of evidence. Castro immediately announced on
TV
that the trial was a mistake. There would be another. The president of the court was found dead. A creature of the Castros was appointed in his place. The men were retried and sentenced to twenty to thirty years’ imprisonment. Castro announced: ‘Revolutionary Justice is based not upon legal precepts but on moral conviction.’ It was the end of the rule of law in Cuba.
³³
When Grau asked when elections would be held, Castro replied when the agrarian reform was complete, when all children went free to school and could read and write, when all had free access to medicine and doctors. Never, in short. He got rid of Urrutia over the Agrarian Reform law in summer 1959. The President fled to the Venezuelan Embassy and then out of the country.

The movement to Soviet Russia began at the same time. The truth is, Cuba had, and has, a dependent economy. If America was unacceptable as a patron, another great power had to fill the role. And America was unacceptable, in the sense that Castro, like other Third World dictators, needed an enemy. After Batista went, it had to be America. And with America as enemy, he needed an ally; it had to be Soviet Russia. With Russia as ally and, from mid-1959, paymaster, Castro’s ideology had to be Marxism, which fitted in well with his Left—fascist brand of domestic autocracy. Castro was never an orthodox Marxist-Leninist ruler in that he governed not merely by secret committee but by public oratory, in the tradition of Mussolini, Hitler and Perón. But in the second half of 1959 he signed his treaty with Mephistopheles by getting Soviet arms, advisers and
KGB
assistance in organizing his security services. He was hooked. From now on, for a Cuban just to hold anti-Communist views was enough for arrest. At the same time, the first gangland killing of Castro’s opponents started, with the mysterious death of the army Commander-in-Chief Camilo Cienfuegos. Purge-trials of old Castro associates, such as Hubert Matos, who would not accept his totalitarian system, began in December 1959. By the end of the year Cuba was a Communist dictatorship.
³⁴

For an island only forty miles from America to transform itself abruptly from a dependent ally into a Soviet satellite was in itself a momentous shift in the world balance of power, especially since Castro himself, in a four-thousand-word manifesto published in 1957, had openly proclaimed that, once in power, he would pursue an active foreign policy against, as he put it, ‘other Caribbean dictators’.
³⁵
America would have been within her rights to reverse the development by any means, including force. Perhaps the best analogy was with
neutral Finland, whose foreign and defence policy, because of the proximity to Russia, were conducted subject to a Soviet veto. But by the end of 1959, Dulles was dead and Eisenhower was a lame-duck president not running for re-election. Nothing definite was done, though many plans were considered. When Kennedy took over, early in 1961, he found a proposal, supported by the
CIA
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for 12,000 armed Cuban exiles, known as the Cuban Liberation Corps, to land in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs and detonate a popular rising against Castro. It is hard to believe the wily and experienced Eisenhower would have given final approval to the scheme. It had all the disadvantages of involving America morally and politically (the first two men to step ashore were
CIA
operatives
³⁶
) with none of the real advantages of US air and naval participation. Naively and weakly, Kennedy allowed it to go ahead on 17 April. It proved a fiasco. The invasion should have got full American backing, or been dropped. This was Kennedy’s instinct. As he said to his brother Robert, he would ‘rather be called an aggressor than a bum’.
³⁷
But in the event he lacked the resolution: in its political and military miscalculations, the Bay of Pigs raised uneasy echoes of Eden’s Suez misadventure.
³⁸
For Cuba it was a disaster, for it gave Castro the opportunity to wage a terror-campaign against the opposition. Most of those already in custody were shot. Perhaps as many as 100,000 were arrested. They included the real underground, most of the
CIA’S
2,500 agents, and 20,000 counter-revolutionary sympathizers.
³⁹
On 1 May Castro announced that Cuba was now a socialist state. There would be no more elections: there was, he said, an election every day in Cuba since the revolutionary regime expressed the will of the people.
⁴⁰

American opinion was outraged by the Bay of Pigs failure and would have supported direct intervention. One senior policy-maker, Chester Bowles, thought a decision by Kennedy ‘to send in troops or drop bombs or whatever … would have had the affirmative votes of at least 90 per cent of the people’. Richard Nixon, consulted, told the President: ‘I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in.’
⁴¹
But the Administration dithered. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara admitted: ‘We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter.’
⁴²
At various times, there were plans to employ gangsters to attack Cuban officials, to spread the rumour that Castro was Antichrist and a Second Coming imminent, with a submarine letting off star-shells, to attack sugar-workers with non-lethal chemicals, to use thallium salts to make Castro’s beard fall out, to lace his cigars with disorienting chemicals or impregnate them with deadly botulinus, to give his mistress, Marie Lorenz, poison capsules, to use Cuban—American gangsters to assassinate him under contract, to
give him a scuba-diving suit impregnated with a tuberculus bacillus and a skin-fungus, and to plant a rare seashell, filled with an explosive device, in the area where he dived. Richard Helms, whom Kennedy had made head of the
CIA
, later testified:

It was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro, and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done … we felt we were acting well within the guidelines …. Nobody wants to embarrass a President … by discussing the assassination of foreign leaders in his presence.
⁴³

None of these wild schemes came to anything. In the event it was Khrushchev who provided Kennedy with another opportunity to settle the Cuban problem. Khrushchev, too, had his ‘missile gap’, real or imaginary. By stationing medium-range missiles in Cuba he would alter the strategic nuclear equation drastically in Russia’s favour at virtually no extra expense. Once they were installed and properly defended, they could not be attacked without nuclear war, thus ensuring the inviolability of the Castro regime – Khrushchev was, it appears, scared of ‘losing’ Cuba to America and being blamed by his colleagues.
⁴⁴
According to Castro’s account, given to two French journalists, the ‘initial idea originated with the Russians and with them alone …. It was not in order to ensure our own defence but primarily to strengthen socialism on the international plane.’ Castro said he finally agreed because it was ‘impossible for us not to share the risks which the Soviet Union was taking to save us …. It was in the final analysis a question of honour.’
⁴⁵

In fact honour had nothing to do with it. The cost to Russia of maintaining the Cuban economy and financing Castro’s ambitious scheme was mounting rapidly, and Castro had no alternative but to provide his island as a missile-base in return. He also thought his regime, though not the Cuban people, would be safer with the missiles than without them. The scheme was as crackbrained as the Bay of Pigs venture and infinitely more dangerous. Castro claimed that Khrushchev boasted his move was something Stalin would never have dared. His colleague Anastas Mikoyan told a secret briefing of Soviet diplomats in Washington that it was designed to achieve ‘a definite shift in the power relationship between the socialist and the capitalist worlds’.
⁴⁶
What made the venture still more reckless was that Khrushchev deliberately lied to Kennedy. He admitted that Russia was arming Castro but gave secret assurances that only short-range surface-to-air missiles would be installed. In no circumstances would long-range strategic missiles be sent. In fact he sent forty-two medium-range
1,100
-miles nuclear missiles and twenty-four
2,200
-miles missiles (the latter never arrived), together with twenty-four
SAM
anti-aircraft missile groups and
22,000
Soviet troops and technicians.