The Double Life of Fidel Castro (4 page)

_______________

*
Rubén Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973) had been president of Cuba from 1940 to 1944 after democratic elections. His government included communist ministers.

I watched the event from a ringside seat: the balcony of my biological father’s apartment, on the first floor of the avenue Vía Blanca, had a view straight out onto History. That day we saw for the first time “in real life” the faces of those demigods named Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Huber Matos, and Raúl Castro. They were young, relaxed, charismatic, and handsome: veritable Latin lovers.

I remember my father’s exact words when Fidel passed by. He turned to me and said, “You’ll see, that
hombre
is going to get Cuba back on its feet. Everything is going to be alright now.” Little did I imagine that fifteen years later I would join the personal bodyguard team of the
Comandante.

In middle school and then high school I was good at literature, history, and, above all, sports: baseball, basketball, boxing, and karate, in which I earned a black belt. Despite my average size, I was something of a fighter. Nothing and nobody frightened me. Because I had the reputation of defending my friends, I was also very popular. One Saturday evening when I was seventeen I was at a dance in the Havana district of Cano. A young, quite well-known boxer, Jorge Luis Romero, was also there, and he started chatting up my girlfriend with great insistence, at which point I asked him what he was doing. The explanation degenerated into fisticuffs, with neither of us coming out on top. The security staff fired shots into the air to disperse the crowd that had formed and the police swarmed in to arrest us, but the crafty boxer managed to slip away. At the police station, I refused to reveal his name—a question of honor. Three days later he rang my doorbell. I was certain he had come looking for trouble. “Wait for me at the corner of the street, I’ll be there in two minutes,” I told him, ready to do battle. But outside he explained he had come to thank me for not having given him up to the cops. From that day on, the hope of Cuban boxing became one of my best friends.

In 1967, my family was split up in a way experienced by many other Cubans. My uncle and my grandmother, disappointed by the Revolution, managed to settle in the United States. I did not see the people who had brought me up for another forty years. A chapter had closed and I went back to live with my mother, who, unlike my uncle and grandmother, remained a convinced revolutionary, although she was still as poor as ever. Through a friend, I got a job in a construction unit called the Special Works Program. Its function? Building houses for the leaders of the Revolution. So there I was, a construction worker, carrying bags of cement, pushing wheelbarrows of sand, and placing bricks on top of each other. A year later, however, the Special Works Program had accomplished its mission and all its workers were transferred to the sugarcane fields in the municipality of Güines, about eighteen miles from the capital. Here I now was as a machete-wielding cane cutter! A diabolical task, and dangerous, too. There was a permanent risk of getting injured in the sun-scorched fields, both because of the way the cutter was swung and because of the leaves, as sharp as razor blades. Fortunately, after thirty days in the suffocating heat of the cane fields, I learned that I had been called for military service, which, on the initiative of the minister of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (essentially, defense minister), Raúl Castro, had become compulsory in 1965.

When I went back to Havana, a recruiting officer explained to me that I had not been called for national service but for something much more serious: I had been chosen by the minister of the interior (the MININT, a then-current abbreviation) to follow a special program. Unknown to me, the intelligence services of MININT had followed and observed me for several months. They had questioned my entourage, drawn up my psychological profile, realized that all the members of my family who had stayed in Cuba were real “Fidelists,” and concluded that my “revolutionary profile” was above suspicion. The MININT therefore proposed that I embark on my military career without further ado.

“If you agree to sign, your salary will increase to one hundred and twenty pesos instead of the seven pesos given to ordinary soldiers,” explained the recruiting officer. “And you’ll have three leave permits a week.”

I agreed, of course, becoming the first (and last) soldier in our family. The very next week, I entered the squaddie’s life: being woken up at five in the morning, marching, making a bed with hospital corners, and carrying out cleaning tasks. Not to mention more noble pursuits such as exercise and shooting practice, quickly distinguishing myself as one of the best shooters in our contingent of 300 students. I aimed true, I shot true, and I hit the bull’s-eye every time. After three months of classes, there was another selection: 250 were sent to the national police school while I and the 49 others who remained were assigned to Department no. 1 of Personal Security, which oversaw all the services dedicated to Fidel Castro’s personal security.

It was an immense honor: in the praetorian Cuban mentality, there was nothing more important than Department no. 1, responsible for protecting Fidel, and Department no. 2, responsible for the personal security of the defense minister, Raúl Castro. As for Department no. 3, it ensured the protection of the other members of the Communist party politburo.

Fidel’s
seguridad personal
was organized in three concentric
anillos
(rings). The third ring consisted of the thousands of soldiers assigned to all the tasks, including logistics, related to the security of the
Comandante
; the second ring, the “operational group,” was made up of eighty to a hundred soldiers; the first ring, the
escolta
, was composed of two teams of fifteen handpicked elite soldiers who worked in relays, one day on, one day off, ensuring close protection of Fidel twenty-four hours a day.

As a member of the third ring, my first assignment was
El Once
(The Eleven). This was a block of houses situated in
la calle Once
(Eleventh Street), in the very pleasant quarter of Vedado, five streets from the seafront. This assignment was in no way routine because
El Once
was above all the building where Celia Sánchez, a notable figure of the Revolution in general and of Fidel’s private life in particular, lived. Until her death from lung cancer in 1980, Celia participated closely in all the historic events of the Revolution; back in 1952, she was one of the first women to oppose Batista’s dictatorship, and then to join Castro’s subversive movement, the M26. In the Sierra Maestra she had worked as a courier, carrying telegrams in bouquets of flowers to get past the police. Celia also coordinated actions between the resistance fighters and clandestine urban cells; after the Triumph of the Revolution, she was rewarded with various official posts, including that of secretary of the Council of State, presided over by Fidel. Above all, this thin woman with an expression as dark as her hair was Fidel’s mistress and, even more important, his confidante—a remarkable feat since the
Comandante
confided in a tiny group of people: just his brother Raúl and the few “women in his life,” who could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The love between them was also political; in return, Celia enjoyed a considerable influence, particularly in terms of appointments to the top. Fidel loved Celia so much that he waited until her death to marry Dalia, the woman who had, in the greatest secrecy, shared his life since 1961.

A part of Celia Sánchez’s apartment on the fourth and last floor of the
Once
building, including a bathroom, was for Fidel’s private use; unknown to Dalia, he went there almost every day before returning to the presidential palace. It was at the bottom of the
Once
building that I saw Fidel at close hand for the first time.

I was on guard duty at the entrance to the building one day when he and his bodyguard screeched up in the three burgundycolored Alfa Romeos used by the escorts at the time—they would later be replaced by Mercedes 500s. The vehicles came to a stop several yards away from the entrance and the escort divided up according to the usual procedure: one soldier going ahead into the building to ensure the access was safe and then coming out to give the green light to the others, the following two taking up position on the pavement and, their backs to the building, observing the road, while six others took up position around Fidel, who was accompanied to the entrance by the head of the escort.

It was at that moment that
El Comandante
made his way directly toward me, placed his hand on my shoulder, and stared straight into my eyes. Petrified, I clung to my rifle so as to keep my composure. Then Fidel disappeared into the building. It had all lasted no more than two seconds, but I was overwhelmed at having met Fidel Castro in the flesh, the man I admired most in the world and for whom I was ready to give my life, no matter what.

The
Once
occupied a special place in the geography of Castrism. At the time it was a secret place that Fidel visited almost daily without anyone, or almost anyone, knowing anything about it. In order to guarantee its security, the entire block of houses was made private, and public access to that section of the street was blocked by checkpoints at both ends. All the rooftop terraces were connected, creating a vast open-air communication network. Over the years, other improvements were brought in. An elevator and a fitness room were installed—and even an ornately decorated bowling alley, two lanes of polished wood edged with clumps of ferns and rocks transported from the slopes of the Sierra Maestra. It was magnificent.

But the most astonishing feature was undoubtedly the stable that Fidel had built on the fourth floor of
Once
, in the very heart of the capital! At the beginning of 1969
El Comandante
had four cows winched up from the street to the roof terraces with the help of a construction site crane so that he could indulge his great fad of the time: breeding European Holstein (black-and-white) cows with Cuban zebus in the hope of creating a new race of cattle that would modernize farming and improve milk yields.

The existence of this stable at the top of a residential building in the middle of a city might seem implausible to a reader unfamiliar with the history of Castrism, but it will not surprise the more knowledgeable because Fidel’s passion for bovine genetics is a well-established historical fact. In December 1966, the Commander in Chief gave his first speech on this subject in the Santa Clara stadium. In the 1970s and 1980s, this crackpot passion turned into an obsession. In 1982, Fidel made Ubre Blanca, a cow famous for her prodigious production of milk, into a celebrity, using her as propaganda tool. The whole of Cuba watched on television as she set a world record for the Guinness World Records, producing 109.5 liters (about 29 gallons) of milk in a single day, irrefutable proof of the
Comandante’s
agronomic genius! The subject of numerous television reports, the cow was elevated to the status of national symbol—a stamp showing her effigy was even produced. When she died in 1985, the national daily
Granma
gave her an obituary, and a marble statue still holds pride of place in her native city Nueva Gerona, on the Isla de la Juventud.

Finally, I cannot talk about the
Once
building without mentioning the private basketball court, reserved for the exclusive use of Fidel Castro. In 1982, two years after the death of Celia Sánchez, a Canadian company modernized the athletics track at the Pedro Marrero stadium in Havana by turning it into a synthetic track in preparation for the fourteenth Central American and Caribbean games later that year. In order to foster relations with their client, the company proposed to give Cuba a sporting terrain of Fidel’s choice. Instead of seizing the opportunity to equip a school or sports facility in a locality that needed it, the
Comandante
asked them to construct an indoor basketball court for his sole use.

Basketball was always one of his favorite sports. Fidel never hesitated to take a break whenever he could in a school or a professional court to perform a few free throws or organize a game with his escort. The players would then divide into two teams: the reds and the blues. Obviously everyone played “for” Fidel—it was out of the question for him to lose a game. What is more, he chose the teams so as to keep for himself the best players, of which I had the honor to be one. Naturally, the
Comandante
played center—in basketball, this position is the mainstay of the game through whom all the balls pass. I remember him giving me a filthy look on one occasion because instead of passing him the ball I had thrown it to make a basket.

“
Coño
, why did you shoot, Sánchez?” he shouted at me, considerably irritated.

Fortunately, at almost that precise moment, the end of the game was declared. It was the last second of the match; Fidel realized I would not have had time to pass him the ball in order for him to score, so I was saved by the bell.

Also in 1982, toward the end of the year,
El Comandante
broke his big toe when he landed badly, trying to defend his ground. Vexed and irritated, he was forced to wear very unmanly slippers. Above all, he wanted his injury to remain secret, and so when he received a visitor at the presidential palace, he would slip on a pair of army boots (without doing up the zip) and stay seated behind his desk for the duration of the meeting without accompanying his guest to the door, as was his custom. For Fidel, orthopedic problems were state secrets.

But let’s go back to 1970. After eighteen months in the service of the
madrina
, the godmother (as the members of the personal security guard called Celia Sánchez, who was always attentive toward us), I was transferred six miles away, to Unit 160, situated in the Havana quarter of Siboney at the other end of the city. Stretched over five acres and hidden behind high walls, the 160 was vital to the good functioning of Fidel’s personal security corps, for it was the logistical unit that ran everything: transportation, fuel, telecommunication, food. There, car mechanics repaired Fidel’s Mercedes and technicians mended walkie-talkies and radio receivers; gunsmiths looked after the store of Kalashnikovs, Makarovs, and Brownings; and launderers washed and ironed the soldiers’ uniforms.