The Double Life of Fidel Castro (2 page)

Fidel was without question a participant in History with a capital H, and his captive guest, standing on the top deck in the scorching heat, would be hanging on to his every word, enthralled. It was almost as though he, too, were now experiencing history firsthand; he would doubtless treasure for the rest of his life the memory of those few hours of holiday spent on Fidel Castro’s yacht. Afterward, the two men would return to the sitting room to join Dalia and Professor Eugenio Selman. That is when the captain of
Aquarama II
slowed down and the water began to turn emerald green: we were approaching Cayo Piedra.

Few people know that, in an irony of history, Fidel Castro indirectly owed the discovery of this vacation home to the American invasion launched by JFK.

In the days following the failed Bay of Pigs landing in April 1961, Fidel was exploring the region when he encountered a local fisherman with a wrinkled face whom everyone called
El Viejo
Finalé. He asked Old Finalé to give him a tour of the area and the fisherman immediately took him on board his fishing boat to Cayo Piedra, a little “jewel” situated ten miles from the coast and known only to the local inhabitants. Fidel instantly fell in love with this place of wild beauty worthy of Robinson Crusoe and decided to have it for his own. The lighthouse keeper was asked to leave the premises and the lighthouse was put out of action, and later taken down.

In Cuba, a
cayo
—the Spanish word for key—is a flat, sandy island, often thin and narrow. There are thousands of them off the Cuban coast, and many are today visited by tourists and deep-sea diving enthusiasts. Fidel’s island stretched over a mile and was slightly curved in shape, oriented north to south. On the eastern side, the rocky coast faced the deep blue sea. To the west, sheltered from the wind, was a fine, sandy coastline and turquoise water. It was a paradise surrounded by glorious ocean, all as virtually untouched as it had been in the time of the great European explorers. Pirates might once have broken their journey, or buried treasure, there.

To be precise, Cayo Piedra consists of not one island but two, a passing cyclone having split it in half. Fidel had, however, rectified this by building a seven-hundred-foot-long bridge between the two parts, calling on the talents of the architect Osmany Cienfuegos, brother of the Castrist revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos. The southern island was slightly larger than its northern counterpart, and it was here, on the site of the former lighthouse, that the Castro couple had built their house: a cement-built, L-shaped bungalow arranged around a terrace that looked out to the east, onto the open sea. The house was functional and devoid of any showy luxury. Other than Fidel and Dalia’s bedroom, it comprised a dormitory bedroom for the children, a kitchen, and a dining-cum-sitting room that looked out onto the sea-facing terrace with its simple wooden furniture; most of the pictures, drawings, and photos on the walls represented fishing or underwater scenes.

From the French windows of this room, to the right, one could see the heliport and about three hundred feet or so further on, the house reserved for us, Fidel’s bodyguards. Opposite that was the garrison building that accommodated the rest of the staff—cooks, mechanics, electricians, radio officers, and the dozen armed soldiers permanently stationed on Cayo Piedra. A hangar adjoining the garrison housed a gas storage depot, supplies of drinking water (brought from the mainland by boat), and a miniature generating station.

On the west side of the island, facing the setting sun, the Castros had built a two-hundred-foot-long landing stage. It was situated below the house on the little beach of fine sand that lined the arc-shaped interior coastline of the
cayo
. To allow
Aquarama II
and the
Pioniera I
and
II
to dock, Fidel and Dalia had also had a half-mile-long channel dug; without this, their flotilla would not have been able to reach the island, surrounded by sand shoals.

The jetty formed the epicenter of social life on Cayo Piedra. A floating pontoon, twenty-three feet long, had been annexed to it, and on the pontoon stood a straw hut with a bar and barbecue grill. This was where the family ate most of their meals— when they were not served on board the yacht. From this floating bar and restaurant, everyone could admire the sea enclosure in which, to the delight of adults and children alike, turtles (some three feet long) were kept. On the other side of the landing stage was a dolphinarium containing two tame dolphins that livened up our daily routines with their pranks and jumps.

The other island, to the north, was practically deserted, housing only the guest quarters. Larger than the master’s house, this one had four bedrooms and a large sitting room; it also had an outdoor swimming pool as well as a natural whirlpool carved out of the rocks and fed with seawater via a sort of aqueduct cut into the stone that would fill with water with each new wave. The two houses were connected by a telephone line. We would travel the five hundred yards between them in one of Cayo Piedra’s two convertible Volkswagen Beetles; a Sovietmanufactured army vehicle was used for the transport of equipment and goods.

All his life, Fidel has repeated that he owns no property other than a modest “fisherman’s hut” somewhere on the coast. As we have seen, the fisherman’s hut was really a luxury vacation home that involved considerable logistics in terms of its surveillance and upkeep. In addition, there were twenty or so other properties, including Punto Cero, his huge property in Havana near the embassy quarter; La Caleta del Rosario, which also houses his private marina in the Bay of Pigs; and La Deseada, a chalet in the middle of a swampy area in Pinar del Río province, where Fidel went fishing and duck hunting every winter. Not to mention all the other properties reserved, in every administrative department of Cuba, for his exclusive use.

Fidel Castro also let it be understood, and sometimes directly stated, that the Revolution left him no possibility for respite or leisure and that he knew nothing about, and even despised, the bourgeois concept of vacation. Nothing could have been further from the truth. From 1977 to 1994, I accompanied him many hundreds of times to the little paradise of Cayo Piedra, where I took part in as many fishing or underwater hunting expeditions.

In the high season, from June to September, Fidel and Dalia went to Cayo Piedra every weekend. In the rainy season, on the other hand, Fidel preferred the house in La Deseada, where he hunted duck. The Castros would spend the month of August on their dream island. When duty called or a foreign VIP obliged the Commander of the Revolution to go to Havana, no problem—he would climb into the helicopter that was always ready and waiting at Cayo Piedra when he was there and make the return trip, sometimes in one day if need be!

It is extraordinary that I am the first person to reveal Cayo Piedra’s existence or describe it. Other than the Google Earth satellite images (in which Fidel’s house and the guesthouse, the jetty, the channel, and the bridge connecting the two islands can all be clearly seen), no other photo of this millionaire’s paradise exists. Some people might wonder why I didn’t film the place myself. The answer is simple: a lieutenant colonel in the security service charged with the protection of an important figure walks around with an automatic pistol in his belt, not a camera slung over his shoulder! What is more, the only person authorized to immortalize Cayo Piedra was Fidel’s official photographer, Pablo Caballero—but he was naturally more concerned with photographing the Commander’s activities than the landscapes around him. That is why, as far as I know, there are no images of Cayo Piedra or
Aquarama II
.

The private life of the
Comandante
was the best-kept secret in Cuba. Fidel Castro has always made sure that information concerning his family is kept private, so that over the course of six decades we have learned almost nothing about the seven brothers and sisters of the Castro family. This separation between public and private life, a legacy of the period when he lived in hiding, reached unimaginable proportions. None of his siblings was ever invited to or set foot on Cayo Piedra. Raúl, to whom Fidel was closest, might have gone there in his absence, although personally I never encountered him. Other than the closest family circle, in other words Dalia and the five children she had with Fidel Castro, those who can pride themselves on having seen the mysterious island with their own eyes are few and far between. Fidelito, the oldest of Fidel’s children from a first marriage, went there at least five times; Alina, Fidel’s only daughter born from an extramarital relationship (who today lives in Miami, Florida), never set foot there.

Other than several foreign businessmen whose names I have forgotten and several handpicked Cuban ministers, the only visitors to the island I can recall were the Colombian president Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–1978), who came to spend a weekend there with his wife, Cecilia, around 1977 or 1978; the French businessman Gérard Bourgoin, aka the Chicken King, who came to visit in around 1990 at the time he was exporting his poultry producing know-how to the whole world; the owner of CNN Ted Turner; the superstar presenter of the American channel ABC Barbara Walters; and Erich Honecker, communist leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1976 to 1989. I will never forget the latter’s twenty-fourhour visit to Cayo Piedra in 1980. Eight years earlier, in 1972, Fidel Castro had rechristened Cayo Blanco del Sur island Ernst Thälmann Island. Even better: in a show of symbolic friendship between the two “brother nations,” he had offered the GDR this morsel of uninhabited land, nine miles long and five hundred yards wide, situated an hour’s sailing from his private island.

Ernst Thälmann was a historic leader of the German communist party under the Weimar republic, ultimately executed by the Nazis in 1944. In 1980, during an official visit by Honecker to Cuba, the leader of East Berlin gave Fidel a statue of Thälmann. Very logically, Fidel decided to put the work of art on the island of the same name—which is how I came to be present at that incredible scene in which two heads of state turned up on
Aquarama II
and disembarked in the middle of nowhere to inaugurate the statue of a forgotten figure on a deserted island, witnessed only by iguanas and pelicans. The last I heard, the immense statue of Thälmann, six and a half feet high, had been toppled from its pedestal by Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

In fact, the only two really frequent visitors to Cayo Piedra other than the family were Gabriel García Márquez and Antonio Núñez Jiménez. The former, who spent a good part of his life in Cuba, was doubtless the greatest Colombian writer, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The second, who died in 1998, was a historic figure of the Cuban Revolution, in which he participated with the rank of captain and in remembrance of which he sported a bushy beard all his life. A respected intellectual figure, anthropologist and geographer, he also belonged to the very limited circle of Fidel’s close friends. These two were the main users of the guesthouse on Cayo Piedra.

On Cayo Piedra, wealth did not consist of big houses or yachts in the moorings. The real treasure of the island was its fabulous underwater life. Totally free from tourism and fishing, the waters that stretched out around the island constituted an incomparable ecological sanctuary. Fidel Castro had a personal aquarium of more than 125 square miles right in front of his house! It was an underwater playground unknown to millions of Cubans, as well as to millions of tourists who came every year to take part in deep-sea diving around the
cayos
run by the Ministry of Tourism.

Other than the famous French commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who came on a special mission on board the
Calypso
with Fidel’s express authorization, nobody else was ever able to marvel at the incredible animal and vegetable treasure house to which he enjoyed sole rights. Moonfish, squirrelfish, catfish, butterfly fish, boxfish, flute fish, trumpet fish, hamlet fish, cardinal fish, striped surgeonfish, pumpkinseed sunfish, tuna, sea bream, lobster—every imaginable variety of yellow, orange, blue, or green fish swam in and out of the red and white coral and the green, black, and red algae. Dolphins, tiger sharks, hammerhead sharks, swordfish, barracudas, and turtles completed the enchanted scene in this silent world.

Fidel Castro was an excellent diver. I am in a good position to know: throughout the years I spent in his service, it was my job to assist him during underwater fishing expeditions—in order, principally, to protect him against attacks by sharks, barracudas, and swordfish. I am sure that many envied me this aquatic mission, much more than my other duties such as keeping his diary or organizing security during his trips abroad. There was no greater privilege for one of Fidel’s escorts than accompanying him on his underwater expeditions and I went on many of them. . . . Though he liked basketball and hunting duck, deep-sea diving was his real passion. Fidel, six-foot-three and weighing 209 pounds, had an impressive lung capacity, able to free dive thirty feet below the sea without the least difficulty.

He also had a very particular way of practicing deep-sea fishing. The only thing I can compare it to is Louis XV’s royal hunts in the forests around Versailles. At dawn, when the sovereign was still asleep, a search party of fishermen led by Old Finalé would go out to find the places richest in fish in order to satisfy the monarch’s expectations. Mission accomplished, the team would return to Cayo Piedra during the morning—Old Finalé still in attendance—where they would wait for Fidel, who rarely got to bed before three in the morning, to wake up. “So what have we got today?” Fidel would ask before climbing on board
Aquarama II
.

“
Comandante
, skipjacks and dorados should be around. And if we’re in luck, lobsters will also show up.”

The
Aquarama II
would cast anchor. On board, it was preparation time, and we would get the masks and snorkels ready while Fidel sat, legs astride, waiting for somebody to kneel in front of him to put on his flippers and gloves. When I was equipped, I would go down the staircase first, followed by
El Comandante
. Underwater, I swam at his side or just above him. My working tool was a pneumatic rifle shooting round-tipped arrows that bounced back from their target, acting like punches to the head; they would see off any sharks or barracudas that came dangerously close to Fidel.