The Double Life of Fidel Castro (14 page)

“Jokin, it is very, very important that you help us create companies outside Cuba,” insisted Fidel, always convincing and impressive, not least through his physical presence. “It’s crucial. That way, we can buy products that the harsh American blockade prevents us from acquiring.”

Jokin was very understanding and keen to help Fidel, going beyond his official mandate to do so. In any case, ETA had already been cooperating discreetly with Cuba in the economic domain. Since the early 1980s, the Basque organization had owned a fish import-export business in Cuba, Gadusmar, as well as a boiler and polyester tube manufacturing company. The latter also had a branch in Venezuela, another in Bolivia, and a third in Panama called—if my memory serves, and I believe it does—Kaidetarra. The purpose of these enterprises was to finance both Basque separatism and the Cuban Revolution.

And so, from the Spanish Basque country to Palestine and from Chile to Colombia, Fidel interfered in secret, dispensing advice and radio-controlled guerrilla fighters. His fervid desire was to change the course of history once again, just as he had done in 1959 in his own country. As patient as a chess player, he pushed his pawns forward without decisive victory. And then, after twenty years of effort, the
Líder Máximo
finally experienced success. And what a success! Over 1,800 miles from Havana, a remake of the Cuban Revolution was being staged: Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, fell into the hands of the “Sandinista revolution,” and, like Batista two decades before, the infamous dictator Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza peremptorily abandoned his bunker, the capital, and that volcanic country. The international press celebrated the triumph of the rebels of Central America led by two brothers, Daniel and Humberto Ortega. Yet nobody seemed to know about the role that Fidel had played in the wings—nobody except ourselves, a handful of ministers, generals, and his escort. From his Havanan war room, Fidel had been following the situation for several months, overseeing the advance of the rebels and, eventually, the fall of the last dictator of that banana republic.

“
Sánchez, tráeme un whiskycito, ¡en las rocas!”
(“Sánchez, bring me a little whisky, on the rocks!”) That was also occasionally part of my job, preparing the Commander in Chief ’s scotch when he was working alone in his office. Without being a great tippler like his brother Raúl, Fidel still drank every day. He liked scotch served with ice or water in a large glass, or else this “little whisky”—that is, a single shot with nothing else in a small glass.

When I brought him his drink that day, I found him plunged in
Newsweek
: he read English fluently and was reading an article that traced the history of the tyranny of the Somozas in Nicaragua.

It was the beginning of 1979 and the dictatorship of that little Central American republic was in its last throes. For more than four decades, the Somoza clan had been shamelessly exploiting the Nicaraguan people; since the assassination in 1934 of Augusto Sandino, the first legendary Nicaraguan guerrilla fighter, that family had been running Nicaragua as though it were its
jinca
(farm). The family owned everything: mines, the best terrain, cement works, pasteurization factories, coffee plantations, livestock farming, fisheries, and even parking meters in the capital! Trained by the American marines, the national guard imposed order through brute force, with the blessing of Washington. “Somoza might be a son of a bitch, but he is
our
son of a bitch,” Franklin D. Roosevelt once declared, referring to the elder Tacho Somoza, dictator since the 1930s.

When the latter’s son, bearing the same name, succeeded him in the 1960s, Washington continued to support without too many qualms this new “son of a bitch” who, in 1972, did not hesitate to misappropriate the international aid granted to victims of the earthquake that had just destroyed sixty thousand houses in the capital, killing twelve thousand people. At that moment, the Sandinista guerrilla movement—founded in Havana in 1961 as the FSLN—sprang into life; until then, its activities had been limited to the mountainous, sparsely populated regions.

When he had finished his reading of
Newsweek
and his small whisky, Fidel indicated to his aide-de-camp, Pepín, that he was ready to leave. Ten minutes later, there we were in the elevator that led directly from the third floor to the basement parking lot where the vehicles of the escort were lined up, ready to leave. Soon our cortege was driving away in procession into the Havanan dusk: that moment at twilight I love when the tropical air suddenly grows cooler and the streets burst into life. We were driving at a leisurely pace toward the quarter of El Laguito, where most of the protocol houses were situated. It was very close to Unit 160 and also to the house of Gabriel García Márquez. We parked outside protocol house no. 14 and went in, and that’s where the main leaders of the Nicaraguan revolution were waiting for us—or, rather, waiting for Fidel.

Like most of the protocol houses, it was a villa with a swimming pool. In the living room, the Nicaraguans were sitting in leather armchairs placed around the coffee table. When they caught sight of Fidel, they stood up as a single man; with his six feet and two and a half inches, he towered over the
Nicas
, generally of modest height. It was not their first visit to Havana, far from it, and so I knew them all. Gathered here were all the future heroes of the Sandinista revolution: Tomás Borge, the stocky fortysomething who was the oldest of this band of men in their thirties; Henry Ruiz Hernández, aka Modesto, a mathematician whose feats as a guerrilla fighter were already legendary; Bayardo Arce, a journalist who led the rebels in the region of Matagalpa; Jaime Wheelock, the grandson of an American businessman who had studied political science in Chile under Allende; Carlos Núñez Téllez, the most radical despite his youth; and finally the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto, who would soon become the Nicaraguan president and minister of defense, respectively. Before going into the room, Fidel reminded me to record the conversation, as was his custom, sometimes secretly and sometimes in full view of everybody present. I therefore placed the little cassette recorder on the coffee table and monitored the running of the tapes, which I replaced as often as necessary. Then I tried to make myself scarce in a corner, while continuing to listen attentively to the conversation.

As on previous occasions, the meeting went on and on; they talked until four in the morning. Fidel was a night owl, and he was in the habit of beginning a discussion around seven p.m. and finishing it at dawn. During the conversation, I noticed that the
Líder Máximo
seemed to appreciate Jaime Wheelock, who stood out from the crowd because of his eloquence. For my part, it was Commander Humberto Ortega who held my attention, probably because I sensed that, like me, this man was a soldier through and through. Fidel listened to the news from the “ground,” after the failure of the first general offensive against Somoza during the previous September. This badly coordinated popular uprising had not had the desired result: it had been ruthlessly crushed by the ten thousand soldiers of the national guard, who had not hesitated to bayonet civilians to death. The final toll was around five thousand dead.

Reorganization was called for and the
Comandante
gave himself to the task by devoting all his energy to persuading the rebels to get on with each other. “
Compañeros
, sacred union is the only way to attain our objectives,” he insisted. Now, at that time, the leadership of the FSLN was divided into three branches. The Prolonged Popular War Faction was the oldest, represented by Borge, Ruiz, and Arce, proponents of rural guerrilla warfare. The Marxists Wheelock and Núñez Téllez belonged, for their part, to the Proletarian Faction: since the split with the previous group in 1973, their priority had been to involve students and workers in the towns, alongside the insurgent rural groups. Finally, the
terceristas
—Third Force—constituted the largest grouping as well as the best organized and the least dogmatic, comprising five thousand armed men under the command of the Ortega brothers.

Based on his own experience, Fidel knew better than anyone that this division made the prospect of rapid victory less likely. So, having listened to all the points of view, he set out his own thinking, presenting it from every angle, using the example of Sierra Maestra, detailing the political aspects and the military advantages of his vision. Gradually, the “snake charmer” gained psychological ascendancy over his audience, eventually persuading them to his point of view.

Historians have not realized to what extent Fidel’s involvement was crucial in the Nicaraguan revolution. They have written about the financial aid given by Venezuela and Costa Rica, but they have not sufficiently highlighted the role of the Cuban leader. Without his force of conviction, the three factions would not have fallen into agreement so quickly. The proof of that? Because Communist leader Schafik Handal and his
guerillero
compatriot Joaquín Villalobos did not achieve the same cooperation in El Salvador—despite the intense efforts of Fidel, who regularly met the two men in Havana at the same period—the Salvadoran guerrilla movement never managed to overthrow the authorities during its long and bloody civil war from 1979 to 1992.

After making the signing of their sacred union agreement public in March 1979, the Sandinistas launched the “final offensive” in June. Nine months after the failure of the first uprising, a new, nationwide assault was launched. In the north, towns and villages changed hands every forty-eight hours. Popular areas formed pockets of resistance and in the south, where the guerrilla fighters had for several months sought sanctuary, the rebels widened their hold and marched on Managua, which was paralyzed by a general strike declared on June 4. The insurgents staged spectacular coups and acts of sabotage everywhere. Bridges were blown up. The Pan-American route that crossed Nicaragua from north to south was blocked. The rebel army included within its ranks a thousand “internationalist” volunteers come to lend it their strength, as well as a respectable quantity of Cuban “advisers.” It would, however, take fifteen thousand dead and thirty thousand wounded (in a country on the brink of ruin and with a population of barely two million) before the capital was taken by rebels. On July 19, 1979, Somoza abandoned his “bunker” and took off for the golden exile of Miami, accompanied by his exotic parrots and seventy members of his entourage. Fourteen months later, after having recently gone to a new political exile in Asunción (Paraguay), to which another tyrant, Alfredo Stroessner, had welcomed him, Somoza died at the age of fifty-five in a spectacular assassination: Argentinian guerrilla fighters, trained in Cuba by the instructors of the military campus of Punto Cero de Guanabo, fired a rocket launcher that pulverized his car in the middle of the street just after it left his house.

For the time being, Fidel savored his victory; after two decades of effort, he had finally managed to export his revolution. At first, a Sandinista junta took the reins of power, with Daniel Ortega as its “coordinator,” until he was elected to the presidency in 1984. His brother Humberto was appointed minister of the armed forces while Tomás Borge became minister of the interior, Jaime Wheelock minister of agriculture, and Henry Ruiz minister of external relations. Bayardo Arce was appointed coordinator of the political committee of the FSLN National Directorate, and Carlos Núñez Téllez first president of the National Assembly.
*

The images of jubilation in Managua inevitably reminded Fidel of his triumph, twenty years earlier, in Havana. From Cuba, he continued to dispense advice under the counter, as it were, to the Sandinista junta, although he kept a low profile, like any self-respecting espionage agent, so as not to arouse the suspicions—and irritation—of Washington. He even waited an entire year before going to Nicaragua, scene of one of his most striking successes.

Twelve months after the Sandinista revolution, we flew toward Managua in the presidential plane with, in addition to Fidel and his entire escort, the spymaster of the
Departamento América
Redbeard, and the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The view of Managua through the airplane windows as we approached it, with its series of geometric volcanoes, was as unexpected as it was breathtaking.

The visit lasted a week. Fidel decided to explore the whole country as he had done previously in Chile under Salvador Allende. Everywhere he wanted to see evidence of “his” victory. Our cortege stopped in the tiniest villages as well as the main towns: Estelí, León, Matagalpa, Granada, Rivas, Masaya. One day, we even went as far as Bluefields on the Atlantic coast, a journey of sixteen hours. Fidel went on more and more walkabouts—with me always just a yard away! To blend in better with the crowds, I swapped my khaki uniform for civilian clothes, thereby passing for a native of the country.

_______________

*
Daniel Ortega returned to power in 2007 and is the current president of Nicaragua. He is still an ally of Cuba. His brother Humberto left politics in 1995 to devote himself to business. Appointed ambassador of Peru in 2007, Tomás Borge died in 2012. Jaime Wheelock heads a nongovernmental organization, the Institute for Development and Democracy. Henry Ruiz is fighting against the current Ortegan corruption of power. Bayardo Arce is an economic adviser to President Ortega. Carlos Núñez Téllez died in Cuba in 1990.