The Double Life of Fidel Castro (11 page)

Fidel’s escort might have constituted his only “real” family, but I have to acknowledge that the same was true for me. Entirely devoted to the Revolution, I had little time to spare for my wife and children. It has to be said that I had a fantastic job. Action, travel, spying, counterespionage, all while immersing myself in the nerve center of power: in short, all the ingredients of a good film. Icing on the cake: I acquired a certain fame. As I always appeared in the photo frame or on television behind the
Líder Máximo
, I was a celebrity in my neighborhood. I remember that before we moved into our own flat and were still living with my mother, pretty female neighbors would seize on the slightest pretext to come and visit us—preferably when my wife was not there—to check whether I might not, by chance, be on the premises. Though I would like to reassure my beloved ex-wife that the Revolution and service to Fidel left no time for philandering.

I have often been asked whether Fidel Castro was a father substitute. I always reply that no, he represented much more to me! I drank in his every word, believed everything he said, and followed him everywhere. I would have died for him. At one time, my deepest wish was truly to be killed in the act of saving his life. I had an unshakeable belief in the noble ideals of the Cuban Revolution and could reel off without doubt or hesitation the prevailing anti-imperialist creed. My eyes were opened later, but at that period I was too absorbed in my job and too fascinated by Fidel to exercise my critical faculties in any way.

The atmosphere within the escort was excellent, at least during the reign of Domingo Mainet, in other words before the arrival in 1987 of his idiotic successor, José Delgado Castro, the most incompetent leader—conspiratorial, cowardly, stupid, jealous: the list goes on—that Fidel ever had as head of his escort. Very fortunately, as I have already said, the real head of Fidel’s escort was in fact Fidel himself.

At any rate, my colleagues and I always aimed at excellence and, even under the reign of the imbecile José Delgado Castro, I believe we attained it. Our foreign counterparts themselves, including the CIA, said and wrote that the Cuban services as a whole were among the world’s elite, ranking alongside the five greats: the United States, USSR, Great Britain, France, and Israel. It is true that we took our inspiration mainly from the American Secret Service and the Israeli Mossad, but we were also influenced by the French service and the British MI5.

The experience of the KGB in terms of the protection of VIPs was, on the other hand, without value or use in our eyes. The Russians could teach us nothing because the public appearances of dignitaries in the Soviet Union were rare, static, orchestrated, and regulated like clockwork, with never the slightest direct contact with the crowd or any improvisation or spontaneity. In short, the very opposite of Fidel, who was instinctive and impulsive, diving into the crowd without warning and exposing himself to all sorts of risks and dangers.

Naturally, we analyzed in the smallest detail all the attacks, successful or attempted, that had taken place against heads of state or celebrities all over the world: John and Robert Kennedy (1963 and 1968), Anastasio Somoza (1980), John Paul II (1981), Indira Gandhi (1984), and the Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán (1989). As for the assassination attempt on General de Gaulle (1962) in the suburbs of Paris, we examined it from every conceivable angle, as we did the 1986 ambush on Pinochet in Chile in 1986—which had in fact been devised with the help of Cuba. I remember that my colleagues and I felt sincere admiration for the chauffeurs of the two presidents, who had demonstrated extraordinary sangfroid, reflexes, and courage in saving the lives of their bosses.

Imagining, anticipating, preparing for, and avoiding any attack against Fidel Castro was our permanent preoccupation at that time of cold war, particularly in the 1980s when the American president Ronald Reagan had vowed the death of international communism. The threat was real. We were very aware that one of Fidel’s most vulnerable points was his island vacation home of Cayo Piedra, if it were ever discovered. Several types of attack were possible: bombardment of the island via a tourist plane such as a Cessna flying at low altitude and therefore undetectable by radars; an attack from a fast patrol boat bombarding us like a gunboat; or a special operation of enemy underwater divers placing explosives on Fidel’s yacht, the
Aquarama II,
by night so as to blow it up when he was on board.

There were no refuges or air raid shelters on the island, and so an evacuation plan was drawn up to offset the danger of a bombardment. The idea was simple: to drive Fidel some two hundred yards from his main house to hide him in a swampy area where, beneath the vegetation that was invisible from the sky, a jetty had been built to provide Fidel shelter until the first salvo was over. The evacuation of the island would then immediately begin, the idea being to start up all the watercraft and helicopters present on the island at the same time, so as to confuse the enemy. Of course, Fidel would not be in his yacht but in a smaller, more discreet boat. A variation on this scenario had also been devised, in which Fidel would stay on the island as all the motorized vehicles left so as to create the illusion that he was fleeing; a Cuban commando would come several hours (or days) later to pick him up.

Needless to say, there was no scenario that Fidel—who almost caused a nuclear war to be unleashed during the 1962 missile crisis
*
—did not envisage, including regional or world war. A fallout shelter was therefore built in Havana under the presidential palace, and it was in this bunker that a war council consisting of Fidel, Raúl, the leading ministers, and the commanders of the three armies—land, air, and sea—would find refuge. This shelter of at least 1,200 square yards was large enough to contain offices or meeting rooms, a dormitory, a dining room, a kitchen, bathrooms, and a “war room” from where Fidel would supervise operations. About six yards underground, a secret tunnel over two hundred yards long ran underneath Independence Avenue and linked the
Palacio de la Revolución
to the Ministry of Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (under the leadership of Raúl Castro), which also housed a fallout shelter.

_______________

*
From October 14 to 28, 1962, the missile crisis pitted the United States against the Soviet Union when it was discovered that Soviet nuclear missiles pointing toward the United States had been secretly installed in Cuba. The crisis was the culmination of the cold war and was resolved directly between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, without Fidel Castro being consulted.

In the event of war, Fidel’s escort would immediately have swapped their Mercedes-Benz for Cruiser Land Rovers armed with RPG rocket launchers, RPK machine guns, and 30 to 40mm caliber grenade launchers. In such an eventuality I would have retained my role as head of car but of a British four-wheel drive carrying eight men: a chauffeur, six guards (including three snipers), and myself. As for Fidel, he would be driven everywhere in an armored military vehicle.

The security of Fidel’s family had not been overlooked. In case of international conflict, Dalia and her children would have had the choice of two shelters. The first was an unoccupied house in Punta Brava, the same one where Dalia had been accommodated in 1961 when she arrived in the capital, before going to live with Fidel,
*
the other hidden within the House of Gallego, a house situated just opposite Unit 160 where Fidel was in the custom of celebrating his birthday with his escort. On the other hand, contrary to the widespread rumors on the subject, the Castros’ house in Punto Cero contained no air raid shelters. That made sense: who would be stupid enough to hide in their own home?

We also knew that danger could present itself in the banal form of a meal, which was why all the food consumed by Fidel was, and still is, subject to bacteriological and chemical tests before being served to him. These tests are carried out by the famous Medical-Surgical Research Center in west Havana, just half a mile away from the Castros’ property. Similar precautions are taken in regard to the cases of wine that Fidel receives as gifts: the escort would choose several bottles at random to check that they did not contain explosives or poison. From time to time, a chauffeur from Unit 160 was chosen to test the drink; just like medieval kings, Fidel had his taster.

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*
Punta Brava is located on the outskirts of Havana, around four miles southwest of the family residence of Punto Cero.

Even the food from the Punto Cero complex was subjected to particular monitoring. Vets ensured the good health of the chickens and cows raised on the property while the fruit and vegetables grown in the six hothouses in the garden were systematically washed with ozone in a special method that rid the produce of potential contaminated residue, thereby avoiding cancer risks as far as possible. Similarly, the well water in the garden was regularly tested.

All these precautions give the impression that Fidel Castro was surrounded by enemies and lived under the permanent threat of poison attempts—and it was true! As the American secret services have themselves admitted, for a long time— doubtless until the beginning of the 1990s—the CIA concocted numerous assassination plans, although none of them came to fruition. In the early 2000s, a certain number of secret American archives dealing with this subject were declassified and made public. Nonetheless, that does not mean that Fidel had nothing but enemies. On the contrary, his worldwide followers were an extended family, much larger than that of his guards. I have seen many of them, whether revolutionary leaders, Latin American guerrilla fighters, or Basque terrorists, marching through Havana. These disciples see Fidel as the foremost leader of the developing world and the most experienced antiimperialist guerrilla fighter; for them, he is more than the head of the family. He is a guerrilla war leader, always ready to dispense wise advice on matters of subversion.

One of the best-kept secrets entrusted to me in Cuba was that of the existence of the training camp of Punto Cero de Guanabo (not to be confused with Punto Cero, the Castros’ private residence). It was here, fifteen miles east of Havana on a military terrain guarded by a nondescript-looking main gate, that the government trained, shaped, and advised guerrilla movements— and even certain guerrilla organizations—from all over the world. Just a few minutes from the idyllic beaches, on 3.8 square miles of rolling terrain covered with vegetation, over fifty buildings in separate “villages” linked by a network of country roads were spread out. There were classrooms, residential buildings, a canteen that could serve six hundred meals an hour, training grounds with obstacle courses, three practice target areas, a quarry for the detonation of explosives, and the frames of two propeller planes (an Ilyushin and an Antonov) in which life-size simulations of airplane hijacking took place. There was also a helicopter, similarly nailed to the ground, which allowed trainees to learn how to get down from such an aircraft after landing, when the blades were still turning, and, also, how to launch a hijacking attack on it.

Here, only the
tropas
—the shock troops—were Cuban. The recruits, for their part, came from Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua—in short, from all over Latin America and even beyond. In a conservative estimate, 90 percent of Latin American guerrilla leaders have passed through Punto Cero de Guanabo. Whether they were members of ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, Colombia’s National Liberation Army), FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), M19 (the April 19 Movement, another Colombian organization), the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), MRTA (Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, the Revolutionary Movement of Túpac Amaru, also from Peru), the FPMR (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez, the Patriotic Front of Manuel Rodríguez, Chile), the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, the Sandinista Front of National Liberation, Nicaragua), or else FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, Salvador), for them Cuba was Mecca and Punto Cero de Guanabo a prerequisite.

The golden age of this “campus of revolution” had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, it also played host to soldiers from other regions of the world such as militants or terrorists from the Basque separatist movement ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Liberty), the IR A (Irish Republican Army), Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Polisario Front (a popular movement in Western Sahara), or else the North American Black Panthers. Among its famous guests, we should cite the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal; brothers Daniel and Humberto Ortega, future Nicaraguan leaders; Abimael Guzmán, the mad terrorist of the Peruvian Shining Path; and, apparently, the “assistant commander,” Marcos of Mexico.