Fifties (118 page)

William Wieland, the State Department’s director for Caribbean and Mexican affairs, was the leader of those officials anxious to get rid of Batista and replace him with someone more centrist. Wieland wanted Batista out in no small part because he feared the
coming of someone like Castro. In 1958 he had told colleagues at a State Department meeting that if “Batista was bad medicine for everyone, Castro would be worse.”

Such fears were justified: If there was a growing disgust with Batista and his police brutality in Havana, then up in the hills of the interior, a guerrilla force was growing, pledged not only to bring Batista down but to install a revolutionary government in his place. Thirty years after he had come to power, Fidel Castro would appear to many in the West merely as an anachronism, a surviving Stalinist, a man who had sported his beard, fatigues, and Marxist rhetoric for too long. But when he first came to power, he possessed the mystique of the brave young rebel who risked his life to bring down a hated dictator and who seemed to promise a more enlightened, freer Cuba. He had gained immensely from the sheer cruelty of the Batista regime.

By the time he came down from the mountains, his myth was greater than his actual military power. Ironically, in contrast to Batista, Castro was the child of privilege, the son of a successful planter who leased large land holdings from United Fruit and sold his cane back to it. Fidel was sent to Jesuit schools and to the University of Havana law school, but from the start he had been a rebel. As a student he was part of a plot against Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and after Batista retook power in Cuba in 1952 by means of a coup, it was the young Castro who led a group of rebels against a regimental garrison headquarters on July 26, 1953. Most of his men were captured then, and some sixty-nine were tortured and murdered either in prison or in hospitals. That brutality shocked many Cubans, and church leaders intervened with Batista, demanding that if any more rebels were caught, they be tried. That probably saved Castro, who was captured about a week after the attack.

Castro had a natural instinct for the dramatic, and he represented himself at his trial. Thus allowed to cross-examine state witnesses, he used the trial as a means of highlighting Batista’s brutality and corruption. He read voraciously while in prison, and wrote a pamphlet, “History Will Absolve Me,” which outlined the historical and legal case for overthrowing tyrants. After close to two years he was released in a general amnesty. By this time he had become a national figure and, as far as Batista was concerned, a marked man. In December 1956, he led a small band of followers to Oriente province, where he hoped to start a guerrilla movement. Instead he was ambushed by government forces. About sixty of his men were killed or taken prisoner, and only about twenty made it into the rugged mountains.

As Castro hid with two of his colleagues that first night after the
ambush, he talked about the revolution he intended to lead and of how he would defeat Batista. Even though he was staring total annihilation right in the face that night, he was not given to doubting himself. Clearly, he saw himself as a man of destiny. He was a true believer in himself and his cause, and so in time were his men. As he and a handful of men moved into the rugged terrain of the interior on those first days, he asked a peasant. “Are we already in the Sierra Maestra?” The peasant said that they were. “Then the revolution has triumphed,” Castro said. In Havana the Batista forces put out an announcement that Fidel Castro was dead. It was picked up and sent all over the world by the United Press, an act for which Castro never forgave the agency.

In the beginning his forces were tiny, but he received a major break when a
New York Times
journalist and editorial writer, Herbert Matthews, appeared at his camp only two months after Castro arrived. Matthews was something of a romantic, in the view of his
Times
colleague Tad Szulc. His liberal politics had been profoundly shaped during the time he covered the Spanish Civil War. He had hated the idea of Franco’s victory. Matthews was instantly taken with Castro, whom he viewed as a brave, attractive young nationalist fighting against the dark forces of despotism. For Matthews Cuba was a replay of Spain, Szulc believed. He was fifty-seven when he met Castro, easily old enough to be Castro’s father, and he seemed to feel almost paternal toward the younger Cuban rebel.

Castro did a masterful job of making his small unit seem much larger. He kept Matthews in camp and dispatched different men to what were supposed to be other camps; guerrillas, supposedly from different rebel headquarters, reported in to Castro in front of Matthews. It was, wrote Tad Szulc, quite literally guerrilla theater. Matthews stayed for a few days and then filed his reports to the
Times.
“Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth, is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable vastness of the Sierra Maestra,” he began. He portrayed Batista’s forces as frustrated by Castro’s charismatic force. “The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership.” When Matthews’ stories were printed they had immense impact, not least by proving that Castro was alive, not dead as Batista had claimed.

In the making of the legend of Fidel Castro, the Matthews
stories played a crucial role. There was something exceptionally romantic about the young leader leaving his privileged life and going into the mountains with a few men and vowing never to return until he could walk into Havana with his revolution. It was a timeless myth, part Robin Hood, part Mao, and given the excesses of Batista, it found wide acceptance. Fidel Castro might have been hundreds of miles away in the distant mountains, but with those articles, in the minds of millions of Cubans, he
lived.

From his mountain base, he waged a guerrilla campaign similar to the Chinese Communists’ under Mao and the Vietminh’s in Vietnam. They attacked only when their strength was superior, then slipped quickly back into the mountains. The purpose of every engagement was to capture more weapons, not to kill. They lived simply, largely off the soil. The officers ate after the men and they ate the same rations. They treated the peasants well and never stole from them. They treated captured soldiers generously as well, often converting them. The life was hard, which was fine with Castro—he wanted hard men of conviction and purpose, not summer soldiers.

Slowly, his band grew in size. In March 1958, after some sixteen months, he opened a second front in the northern section of Oriente. His forces, compared to those of Batista, were still small, but their deeds were greatly magnified by rumors. In the spring of 1958 Batista opened a major offensive against him. Some ten thousand men were used to drive Castro’s men into a tiny defensive perimeter, but at that critical point the Batista troops pushed no further.

From then on there was a complicated dynamic at work: Castro was becoming stronger, and Batista was becoming weaker, and it was clear that American policymakers were becoming increasingly uneasy. The Americans no longer had confidence in Batista, but they had no one with whom to replace him. It was getting very late, and with the passage of time, not only was Castro’s reputation growing more powerful, but his claim to succeed Batista was seen as more and more legitimate in the eyes of most Cubans. There was still considerable talk at the higher levels of the State Department’s Latin American affairs section of a third force—nationalist, liberal, tainted neither by Batistaism nor Castroism. The problem with the third force, here as in other countries, most notably Vietnam, was that the Americans could not readily invent one at the last minute. The role of leader had to be
earned
and the only person earning the title, the respect, and the love of his fellow Cubans was Fidel Castro.

In November 1958, Castro began to take his men down from the hills. If he was not entirely ready for the final strike, he was nonetheless
aware that Batista was near collapse and he was wary that the Americans might take his prize and give it to someone else. At the time he began his final assault on Havana, Castro probably had several thousand men, while Batista had 40,000 soldiers and an additional 30,000 police officers. But as Castro moved forward it became more and more of a rout. Real battles were relatively rare. Instead, there were more and more instances when the Batista forces simply surrendered en masse. The Batista regime at the end was like “a walking corpse,” in the words of one observer. Castro’s growing victory march, his ever easier road to Havana, came as much from the old order collapsing of its own weight as it did from his exceptional military leadership of the rebels. It was a government literally rotting away.

In Havana Earl Smith had wanted to continue to support Batista, but in December he was told to tell Batista to leave the country. In the final hours of the Batista regime, there was a desperate attempt to have Colonel Ramon Barquin take over the government as an anti-Castro leader. But if he had once been something of a hero, who had tried to lead a coup against Batista, he had been taken out of play by the failure of his movement and his years in Batista’s prison. What might have worked twenty months earlier was now a useless footnote to the fast-moving stream of history. No one knew this better than Barquin. “What can I do?” he asked a friend in the CIA. “All they left me with is shit.”

The Americans had ended up with no one whose deeds spoke for themselves and whose charisma might match that of Castro. The third-force policy had produced nothing of consequence. The Americans were, wrote Wayne Smith, “like a bridge player who had held his aces too long until they were trumped.”

On January 8, 1959, Castro entered Havana as a victorious conqueror. Rarely had anyone present seen a celebration quite like it. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, one journalist said. Havana, as he entered, was still filled with armed Batista loyalists. Some of Castro’s soldiers wanted to precede him as he walked through the streets, for the city was still dangerous, but Castro would have none of it. Like MacArthur landing in Tokyo in August 1945 and walking around unarmed, he understood the power of the symbolic gesture, as few around him did. The people, he had said, would protect the revolutionaries. He would walk ahead of this massive parade and he would do it unarmed. “I will prove that I know the people,” he said. Of the joy that ran throughout the country there was no doubt, and of his immense broad-based popularity there was no doubt; and also
of the dilemma for American policymakers there was also no doubt.

How far left was Castro? Was he a Communist? And what should American policy be now? These were the critical questions for the Eisenhower administration. There was little in the way of definitive proof that Castro was actually a Communist. In the beginning, at least, there was the strong possibility he was a nationalist with no larger allegiance to any doctrine. In fact, there was a Communist party in Cuba, which had joined with Castro only relatively late in his struggle. His success had been largely indigenous. The weapons he used were primarily captured from Batista’s troops. Asked by Washington whether Castro was a Communist or not, the embassy put together a very careful report that said he had no links to the Communist party; nor, for that matter, did he have much sympathy for it. But there was much about him that gave cause for concern. Wayne Smith’s analysis noted at the time, for “... he seemed to have gargantuan ambitions, authoritarian tendencies, and not much in the way of an ideology of his own. He was also fiercely nationalistic.” Given the history of relations of the two countries, “he did not hold the U.S. in high regard. One could imagine him turning to the Communists. All depended on what he thought would best advance his interests—and Cuba’s as he interpreted them.” The CIA largely concurred with this analysis. As late as November 1959, the deputy director of the CIA told a Senate committee, “We believe that Castro is not a member of the Communist Party and does not consider himself to be a Communist.”

On his first trip to the United States in April 1959, at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an invitation that greatly irritated Dwight Eisenhower, Castro was on his best behavior and generally said all the right things. He was against dictatorships. He was for a free press, which he said was the first enemy of a dictatorship. His nominally conservative hosts gave him a standing ovation. He laid a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he would not expropriate United States property. The one person he did not charm was Vice-President Nixon, who met with him for three and a half hours as Eisenhower’s proxy. Shrewd and analytical, Nixon knew in this instance that his own career was very much at stake—he had attacked the Democrats for losing China, and after all, now here was Cuba only ninety miles away with an unknown radical as its leader.

In some ways Nixon was impressed with Castro. He found him intelligent and forceful. He could well understand his appeal in Cuba, but he was bothered by Castro’s answers on why he did not
hold elections (the Cuban people, Castro answered, did not want them) and why he was executing some of his opponents without fair trials (the Cuban people did not want them to be given trials). In a long memo to the President and Secretary of State Christian Herter, who had replaced Foster Dulles, Nixon wrote, “Castro is either incredibly naive about Communism or is under Communist discipline.” He had reason to worry, for Castro was soon to be his responsibility.

Nixon himself was fast approaching a critical moment in his career: his run for the presidency in 1960. After serving as Vice-President for almost seven years, he was seething with frustration and resentments. The vice-presidency is a job largely without portfolio in the best of circumstances, and these were hardly the best of circumstances, for he raged at his treatment by Ike. By 1958 Nixon was caught in a political bind, one partly of his own making. He needed to upgrade his image to that of someone worthy of the presidency. He had to redo himself and make a move to the center, without changing so completely that the Republican right would turn on him. Yet at the same time improvements in communications technology were making it more difficult to tailor speeches for specific audiences without there being a record. Some of his speeches in the Rocky Mountain states during the 1956 campaign had caused considerable controversy, but the local papers had not done a particularly serious job of covering them.