The Double Life of Fidel Castro (12 page)

Punto Cero de Guanabo was just twenty minutes away from the Palace of the Revolution, which housed Fidel’s office on the third floor. However, the place was so secret that I only went there three times, at the beginning of the 1980s. Even though this military zone was placed under Fidel’s direct responsibility (rather than that of the Ministry of the Interior or of the Armed Forces), the
Comandante
rarely went there. At that time, the place was run by Gen. Alejandro Ronda Marrero, the head of the
tropas
and a key figure who played a vital role in the secret dealings with the Latin American revolutionary left. It was he, for example, who in the 1970s was the officer dealing with the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos.

The first time I set foot on Punto Cero de Guanabo was in the company of Fidel, during one of his inspection tours. When we arrived that day, General Ronda Marrero was waiting for us outside the headquarters, in the company of three officer trainers. After greeting the
Comandante
, the general took him to carry out his tour of inspection, beginning with the pistol shooting range just behind the building. During our walkabout, we visited in succession Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Colombians, all guerrilla fighters in their respective countries who were on a training course there. Finally, the tour—which had lasted three hours in total—took us to the long guns (rifles, machine guns, and so on) shooting range, situated on a raised area, with metal targets placed on another raised area about 325 yards away.

Fidel then asked for his black suitcase, kept in the trunk of his Mercedes, which contained his AKM Kalashnikov 7.62. Then he stretched out on the ground to shoot at metal targets. For almost every shot, one could hear in the distance the little metallic sound—
ping!
—that showed he had hit the target despite the considerable distance. Fidel was in fact an excellent rifle shot. He loved to fire shot after shot, “peppering” like a madman as he emptied at one go cartridges that contained rounds of thirty or forty bullets. That day, he fired off so many that the varnish on the lower, wooden part of his weapon began to crack from the heat. So Fidel asked for his second rifle to be brought, the one with a folding butt that he always kept inside his car, at his feet. Then he went back to taking his potshots.

At the end of the day, we went back to the
palacio
. I no longer recall what Fidel said that day to the trainee guerrilla fighters, but he must have inspired them—as he knew so well how to do—with revolutionary fervor by talking to them about the importance of their commitment and their sacrifice for “the cause.” One thing was certain: seeing the Commander in Chief in the flesh must have been a major event for all these men— for some, probably the greatest day of their lives.

There is nothing inherently surprising about the existence of a camp like Punto Cero de Guanabo, a veritable guerrilla laboratory. Those who have some knowledge of the history of the Cuban Revolution and of Fidel’s personality know that such an infrastructure, dedicated to international subversion, was entirely in keeping with Castrist political thinking and military action.

From the start of the Revolution, the
Líder Máximo
had his sights set on international, even planetary, goals far beyond his domestic context. Fidel’s ambitions were not limited to Cuba. Castro intended to export his revolution everywhere, beginning with the Latin American continent, where he wanted to create a “One, two, three, Vietnam” according to the Castrist theory of
foco
(focus), or focalism.

Popularized by Ernesto Che Guevara, this doctrine recommends increasing the number of rural insurrectionist groups, whose actions would spread like fire to the large cities, then throughout an entire country. In 1967, the Frenchman Régis Debray took up the idea in
Revolution in the Revolution
, a book that became phenomenally successful. It has been forgotten now, but in university circles all over five continents this bestseller became the reference work for all guerrilla movements and their future combatants, as much in Latin America as in Africa or the Middle East.

Beginning in July 1959, Fidel moved on to a phase of “practical work,” launching very ambitious, all-out initiatives. Just six months after the overthrow of Batista, for example, he mobilized an expeditionary force of more than two hundred Cubans in the hope of unleashing an uprising against the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo on the neighboring volcanic island, the Dominican Republic. With the local army lying in wait for them, the rebels were wiped out. A month later, snap: an identical operation was mounted against the dictator François Duvalier, aka Papa Doc, on the other side of the island, in Haiti. Another failure, from which there were practically no survivors.

In 1961—the year the Berlin wall was built—Fidel took to the ocean for the first time, delivering cargos of weapons by boat to the fighters of the Algerian FLN (Front de Libération Nationale, National Liberation Front), at war with the French army. During the same period, several guerrilla movements sponsored by Havana rose up in South America: the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army) was started in Argentina in 1962 and included in its ranks a certain Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, aka Furry, the present Cuban minister of the interior; in Colombia, ELN and FARC saw the light of day in 1964. As for Che, he launched the “African adventure” in 1965 by trying, in vain, to create a gigantic
foco
in the Congo.

This historical note would be incomplete without mentioning the Tricontinental Conference, also known as Trico, that Fidel Castro organized in January 1966, during which he officially designated Havana the epicenter of world subversion. It was an unusual kind of conference: for two weeks, the Trico united “anti-imperialist” forces from all over Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Eighty-two delegations from former colonies, Afro-Asian liberation movements, and Latin American guerrillas were all gathered at the Habana Libre hotel. Among the participants were representatives from the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization); a Vietnamese delegation; Salvador Allende, future president of Chile; Amílcar Cabral, future hero of Guinea-Bissau independence; and the Guatemalan officer Luis Augusto Turcios Lima.

It was in this context that Fidel opened the training camp of Punto Cero de Guanabo. True, the death of Che Guevara on October 9, 1967, in the Bolivian maquis marked a turning point: Fidel acknowledged the failure of the
focos
of rural guerrillas because of their lack of preparation, due to an overly romantic approach to revolution. However, this in no way brought into question his fundamental goal of exporting revolution. To achieve that end, he needed to become more efficient, and the trainers of Punto Cero de Guanabo dedicated themselves to that objective.

To give an indication of the seriousness with which international revolution was being prepared in Cuba, the training courses at Punto Cero de Guanabo lasted an average of six to nine months—virtually as long as national service. During that period, students were absolutely forbidden to leave that ultrasecret zone. In addition, in order to guarantee participants’ anonymity, the various groups were hermetically sealed off by nationality: they lived in groups of forty or fifty in separate areas, ate in the canteen at different times, and went to the shooting range at different times of day. And so the Salvadorans never ran into the Colombians, who never met the Arabs, and so on. Anyone who disobeyed the rule was immediately sent back to his country. During our tour of inspection of Punto Cero de Guanabo, Fidel met the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, and the Colombians separately, and none of them knew about the existence of the other groups, just several hundred yards from their own sector. As another precaution, the groups traveled from one point to another in a minibus, and when they encountered another vehicle, they were ordered to plunge their head between their knees.

The
guerrilleros’
curriculum was wide-ranging and of a high quality. Other than Marxism and literacy for some students, there was instruction in how to handle firearms and explosives
,
map reading, photography, counterfeiting documents, disguise and change of appearance, identity theft, encryption of messages, basic techniques of espionage and counterespionage, urban and rural guerrilla methods, sabotage, terrorist acts, the planning of kidnaps and hostage taking, hijacking of boats and planes, interrogation and torture techniques, logistics, and political strategy.

Military maneuvers were also on the agenda. During their stay, students went off to camp in the forest for periods of ten days in real guerrilla conditions; there, they learned survival in hostile territory and tactical organization of small fighting units—in short, the art of war. These operations took place in one of the two Puntos de Entrenamiento de Tropas Irregulares (Training Centers for Irregular Troops) in the province of Pinar del Río, ninety-three miles away in the far west of the country. That was the only time the apprentices left the base of Punto Cero de Guanabo.

For the left and the extreme left in Latin America, all roads led to Havana. However, it would be simplistic to think that the Revolution was being prepared solely within the “university” of Punto Cero de Guanabo. Since his guerrilla years and the start of the Revolution, Fidel attached considerable importance to the espionage work carried out by his secret services abroad. Though not his only target, Latin America was his main one. In 1975, he created the notorious
Departamento América
under the leadership of Manuel Piñeiro, until then head of the General Intelligence Directorate. Nicknamed Barbarroja (“Redbeard”) because, unsurprisingly, of his ginger beard, this artfully cunning spymaster had the job of detecting, recruiting, and training supporters of the Cuban Revolution, whether students, trade unionists, university lecturers, politicians, or even CEOs. The goal was to create, all over the continent and for generations to come, agents who would influence and engage in propaganda and even moles who would infiltrate governments. One example among thousands: in the 1980s, the Venezuelan economist Adina Bastidas was recruited by the
Departamento América
when she was an adviser to the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; twenty years later, between 2000 and 2002, here she was, vice president of Venezuela in the government of Hugo Chávez. Another example of a recruit of the
Deparamento América
was Alí Rodríguez Araque, an ex-
guerillero
who had become minister of energy and oil, then foreign minister and minister of economy, in the same Chávez government.

One day in 1989, I saw Redbeard striding into Fidel’s anteroom at the
palacio
. He was accompanied by the Brazilian trade unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was running for the presidency of his country for the first time. While the electoral campaign was in full swing in Brazil, Lula apparently thought it useful to make a stopover in Havana to meet Fidel. Redbeard’s first words still resonate in my mind: “May I introduce you to the future president of Brazil?” he announced. His prophecy came to pass, but not until twelve years later. The spymaster never knew: he died in a car accident in 1998, at a time when he was about to embark on writing his memoirs. As for Lula, who was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, he was never heard to express the slightest criticism or reservation about the Castrist regime, even though during his term of office it held dozens of political prisoners. . . . Worse, in 2010 after the death in prison of the Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata after a hunger strike, Lula—in Cuba at the time—declared that he did not agree with such methods. He was talking about hunger strikes.

To judge the efficacy of the Cuban espionage system, one need only look at the case of Chile. Before the Nicaragua of Daniel Ortega in the 1980s and Venezuela of Hugo Chávez in the 2000s, the Chile of Salvador Allende at the start of the 1970s was without doubt the country in which Cuban influence had penetrated most deeply. Fidel devoted enormous energies and resources to it. I was obviously not in Fidel’s direct employment during the crucial years of the People’s Unity government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973), but from listening to Redbeard, who was always hanging around the presidential palace, and Chomy (José Miguel Miyar Barruecos, Fidel’s secretary) talking to the latter about Chile, I eventually absorbed the history as though I had lived it alongside them.

First of all, let us get one fact straight: despite what so many people said, Allende was not “Castro’s man,” nor his puppet. On the contrary, at the time, Allende’s accession did not really serve Fidel’s purpose. The Chilean had come to power through democratic means, demonstrating that for the Latin American left there was a real alternative to armed struggle: elections. Fidel’s real protégés were Miguel Enríquez, the leader of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, and Andrés Pascal Allende, cofounder of that radical movement and also nephew of President Allende. For Fidel, these two young Marxists who had partly trained in Cuba embodied the real future of Chile.

On that basis, the tactics of the ever-Machiavellian Fidel were simple. They consisted of cultivating and developing the image of these two hopefuls among Chilean youths. In the medium or long term, the objective of Fidel Castro, who always projected himself ahead into the future like a chess player thinking three or four moves ahead, was to impose one or the other of them as the natural leader of Chile the day circumstances allowed Allende to be succeeded. With a little patience, Cuba would thus have an unconditional ally in Santiago de Chile.

While waiting to fulfill that goal, Manuel Piñeiro and the Cuban services penetrated and infiltrated the entourage of Salvador Allende. First of all, they recruited the journalist Augusto Olivares, then media adviser to President Allende and head of public television. According to Redbeard, Olivares, nicknamed El Perro (the Dog), was “our best informer” in Santiago, and Piñeiro often liked to boast that “thanks to him, Fidel was always the first to know what was happening inside the Moneda [the Chilean presidential palace]. Sometimes even before Allende!”