The Double Life of Fidel Castro (15 page)

It was a fast-paced journey, rich in emotions. One day, we climbed up as far as the Masaya volcano, one of the most active in the country. The spectacle of the lake of lava at the bottom of the crater was phenomenal. The following day we want to Granada, on the edge of Lake Nicaragua, where our hosts attracted bull sharks (a rare species of freshwater shark) by throwing large buckets of scarlet blood into that immense lagoon.

However, the most extraordinary memory was the military procession itself on the first anniversary of the Sandinista victory, on July 19, 1980. Carlos Andrés Pérez, social democrat president of Venezuela and friend of Fidel, was also present, as was Michael Manley and Maurice Bishop, the prime ministers of Jamaica and of Grenada. The president of the Spanish government, Felipe González, had also traveled there. I was, as usual, in immediate proximity to Fidel on the official rostrum. The procession began with the armored cars and the jeeps, followed by the infantry soldiers of the
Nica
army, when, to general astonishment, a squad of young—and even very young— volunteer fighters appeared. During the whole course of my career, I had never seen such a thing: some of these
muchachos
were barely ten years old and the oldest were fifteen. Their rifles seemed disproportionately big and heavy. The image remains imprinted on my mind. Today, thirty-five years later, thinking of these child soldiers, who were my son’s age at the time, gives me goose bumps. On the rostrum, I remember having discreetly observed Fidel’s reaction from a corner of my eye: his expression was stone-like and inscrutable.

The surprises did not end there. That same evening, the Sandinistas arranged the best possible accommodations for Fidel, in a residential complex that had until recently belonged to the Somoza clan: eight or ten villas arranged in a circle around a swimming pool. Fidel occupied the largest. A fence protected the area, already surrounded by dense vegetation and a section of tropical forest that resonated with the rhythmic croaking of frogs at night. A military guard post dominated the entrance to the site, where
Nicas
were posted, though they were rather inexperienced in comparison to us Cubans, who already had two decades of practice behind us.

That evening, Fidel retired home on the stroke of eight p.m. I then undertook a reorganization of the security of the accommodations, beginning with placing one of our escort behind the house of the
Comandante
while I, for my part, took up the most important position, in front of the main entrance. From there I organized, as was the rule, the convoy of cars so that it was ready to leave at any moment, and, finally, carried out a general inspection to ascertain that the
Nica
guards were correctly deployed in a ring all around the site. Then I went back to the front steps of the house, where I began chatting with a Sandinista soldier.

All of a sudden—
bang!
A rifle shot rang out at the edge of the wood. A brief silence and then a second shot:
bang!
A fraction of a second later, a fusillade burst out—
bang, bang, bang, bang! Ratatatatatat!
Shots were unleashed in every direction for fifteen interminable seconds. Someone shouted, “Stop your fire!” The shooting ceased. I immediately ran to find out what was going on, expecting to find a corpse or a wounded man, covered in blood. But instead I discovered it was a rather nervous guard who had taken fright at the sound of a branch cracking beneath the weight of a passing cow. He had begun shooting, provoking a contagious free-for-all of rifle fire. Flabbergasted—and amused—by the amateurism of the
Nicas
, I turned toward Fidel, who was already waiting for me on the doorstep.

“
Sánchez, ¿qué pasa?”

“It’s nothing,
Comandante.
It was just a
Nica
who got scared when he asked the cow, ‘Who goes there?’ As the animal didn’t reply to the summons by saying, ‘Um, it’s me, the cow,’ he drew his gun and everyone panicked.”

Fidel burst into a volley of laughter such as I had rarely heard.

After a week in Nicaragua, we went back to Cuba, where other festivities awaited us: the national holiday which, that year, commemorated the twenty-seventh anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953. I barely had time to go home to see my wife and two children before I was already on my way to the town of Ciego de Ávila, about 250 miles east of Havana. Before the crowds of people waving their Cuban flags, Fidel began his speech with these words:

“
¡Compatriotas!
New things are happening. Last year we celebrated our national holiday a week after the great Sandinista victory in the presence of numerous Nicaraguan guerrilla fighters who had come to Cuba. [applause] This year, the relationship between our two people has deepened. [applause] We have just arrived back from Nicaragua. It is therefore inevitable that this country is uppermost in our mind. What is happening there concerns all Latin Americans. Understand the significance and take stock of the joy, enthusiasm, optimism, and emotion at witnessing a second Latin American country freeing itself from imperialism, [applause] to which must be added a third, Grenada. [applause] Now there are three of us that have shaken off the yoke of imperialism radically and permanently. [applause]”

Radically? No doubt about it. Permanently? Not exactly. On March 13, 1979, the Marxist revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop overthrew, almost without violence, the authoritarian regime of Prime Minister Eric Gairy, who had been the president of Grenada since the independence that had been won five years earlier from Great Britain. Grenada immediately fell into the Cuban orbit, thanks to the excellent personal relationship between Maurice Bishop and Fidel Castro, who supplied arms, advice, and military personnel to his alter ego. In 1983, however, the landing of American marines would put an end to the brief revolutionary experience of the Caribbean islands of Grenada.

As for the Sandinista revolution, it would be rapidly jeopardized by dissension. From 1980 on, the daily newspaper
La Prensa
, mouthpiece of the moderate opposition, denounced the authoritarian downward slide of the revolutionary government and the attacks on the freedom of the press. The Church, initially favoring the Sandinistas, also withdrew. The arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House at the start of 1981 complicated the scenario yet further. Anti-communist and antiCastrist, he suspended the economic aid given to the Sandinistas by the Carter government while secretly financing the Contras. This counter-revolution was driven by former members of the national guard as well as a section of the peasantry disappointed by the revolution, and it was financed and armed by Washington, which made numerous incursions from neighboring Honduras. Between 1982 and 1987, the country was embroiled in a civil war (twenty-nine thousand dead and thirty thousand wounded) similar to the war that raged in neighboring El Salvador (more than a hundred thousand deaths from 1979 to 1992).

For a decade, Central America was a bloody battlefield, the new theater of the cold war in which the United States opposed Russia and Cuba. A stakeholder in the conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Fidel personally supervised the arms trafficking that passed through Cuba to supply his allies in these two countries. Without entering into the details of the secret routes or of the estimated number of arms that passed through Havana en route for Nicaragua during those years, I will limit myself to relating the scene I witnessed twice at the military airfield of Baracoa, situated beyond the western exit to Havana, off the Pan-American route. It was here that the planes and helicopters used by the Cuban leaders customarily took off and landed. One evening—it was around 1984 or 1985, at the time when General Ochoa was the head of the Cuban military delegation in Nicaragua and was advising the army of the Sandinista government—Fidel left his office to go to this airfield where, at the end of the runway, was a meeting room for dignitaries and hangars for the aircraft.

When we got there, Fidel’s brother Raúl, the defense minister, was already present, accompanied by General Carrera, commander of the base. After the customary greetings, the two brothers sat down in the meeting room, without General Carrera but in the presence of the head of the escort Domingo Mainet and myself. There, in private and away from prying ears, Raúl outlined to his brother the methods by which war weapons would be loaded, transported, and secretly delivered to Ochoa. The latter, Raúl explained, was already stationed in the north of Nicaragua, near the border with Honduras, on the banks of the Río Coco, where under cover of darkness a few hours later he would receive the “merchandise” on a secret runway. Always anxious to check the smallest details and take stock of situations himself, Fidel listened attentively, preoccupied with one goal: making sure that his brother’s plan was flawless and that, should the trafficked goods be intercepted by the enemy, it would be impossible to establish the slightest link with Cuba.

After he had been reassured by Raúl on this point, the four of us went out onto the tarmac, where several military trucks had just arrived to deliver wooden crates containing war equipment, notably Kalashnikov rifles. It was dark and the place was badly lit, for most of the lights on the runway were extinguished, apart from the blue approach lights; nonetheless, I could still see that the tail of the machine—an old but imposing Britannia with propellers—had been masked with the colors of Honduras! Fidel greeted the pilots and continued asking Raúl questions; when he was happy that the operation was failsafe, he gave the signal to return to Havana. Several weeks later, I was witness to the same scene with the same protagonists and the same “Honduran” plane. The excursion lasted only an hour, but it allowed me to see that all arms trafficking in Cuba was subject to the green light of the Commander in Chief.

In any event, the peace efforts of the skillful president of Costa Rica, Óscar Arias, ended in the signing of the Esquipulas II agreement. Drawn up over several years under his auspices, it was signed in 1987, the year in which Arias received the Nobel Peace Prize. Esquipulas II gradually brought an end to all the conflicts in the region, from Nicaragua to El Salvador and including Guatemala. The agreement provided principally for the organization of elections in Nicaragua, which were due to take place in February 1990, three months after the fall of the Berlin wall and in a very different, post–cold war climate.

I had heard Fidel expressing his concern on this subject many times in Havana. He became aware of the growing unpopularity of the Sandinistas before anyone else, thanks to the “Cuban advisers” (in reality intelligence agents) that he had put in place around President Ortega. In power for a decade, Ortega’s government was not just suffering from the wear and tear of age and the civil war—above all, the people blamed their leaders for having appropriated all the Somozas’ assets and for living comfortably off them without really worrying about boosting their compatriots’ economic status.

One year before the organization of the elections, to which the Sandinistas had not yet given their support, Fidel brought up the subject with the head of the America Department, the notorious Manuel Piñeiro, the Redbeard.

“Piñeiro, you must convey the message to our Sandinista friends that I think it prudent that they do not hold these elections, because from what I see, there is much to lose and very little to gain,” Fidel told him in the office of the
palacio
, where I was also present.

This laconic way of expressing things was typical of Fidel’s style: he did not necessarily give precise orders but would often rather deliver opinions or formulate simple, seemingly tenuous outlines—that were in fact injunctions that he expected to see put effectively in place.

This time, however, Fidel no longer had any involvement in the peace process that had been set in motion in Central America. On February 26, 1990, Ortega and the Sandinistas were ousted by Violeta Chamorro, the widow of the editor of the daily
La Pensa
, assassinated by Somoza’s henchmen twelve years earlier. She became the first female president of Nicaragua, with an unchallenged result of 55 percent of the vote.

After the Nicaraguan election, I frequently heard Fidel ruminating over that defeat. He would repeat to Redbeard, who had been unable to convince the Sandinistas to block the holding of free elections, “I told them, the Sandinistas . . . I tried to warn them . . . I knew there was popular discontent. . . .” Then, no sooner had Redbeard left the room than Fidel would rage about him: “What an incompetent fool!”

Fidel was not particularly crude. His language in public had always been temperate, with the exception of a few speeches in the early years of the revolution in which he described the presidents of America as
hijos de perra
(sons of bitches) or as
hijos de puta
(essentially the same, of the noncanine variety). In more private circles, he sometimes expressed his annoyance with a
coño
(literally “cunt,” but used similarly to the American “fuck”) to remind people that, in the face of imperialism, Cubans had
cojones
(balls) or to say of an enemy,
¡Qué se vaya al carajo!
(Let him go screw himself !) Ronald Reagan and his successor George H. W. Bush were without doubt the American presidents he most maligned. There were reasons for that: in the 1980s, the Reagan administration had, from its election to power, represented the greatest danger to Fidel. Fiercely anti-communist, the president had financed the Contras in Nicaragua; sent the U.S. Marines to Grenada; and, in Africa, given military support to the soldiers of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (known as UNITA, the abbreviation of the Portuguese version of the name) who were fighting the Cuban army on the ground.
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