The Double Life of Fidel Castro (20 page)

One of the vital tasks assigned to ambassadors was that of recruiting foreign agents, whether they were simple “influence agents” or full-blown spies. The former were generally university lecturers, politicians, diplomats, journalists, arts and literary figures, or even company heads—in sum, anyone who had a position that gave him or her influence in society and who was favorably disposed in principle to the Cuban Revolution. For Cuba it was a matter of encouraging these people’s natural inclination so as to create networks of imperceptible pro-Castrist opinion: “useful idiots,” in Lenin’s phrase. The second, much rarer, category included those people who consciously worked for the Cuban services after having been recruited by the Intelligence Directorate.

Embassy receptions, cultural events (concerts, film screenings), or professional exhibitions (in the domain of tourism, for example) as well as meetings of cigar lovers all provided fruitful ground for the recruitment of agents. This task was placed under the authority of a recruiting officer, and there was one in every Cuban embassy in the world. It was usually someone cultivated, sociable, and affable, able to talk about every subject and to adapt to every situation. The recruiting officer’s first task consisted of sympathizing with people and making them speak in a bid to determine whether this or that person had a pro-Cuban profile and might therefore be recruited. Each potential recruit was the object of psychological profiling and his or her tastes, preferences, weaknesses, sexual orientation, degree of affinity with the Cuban Revolution, and interest in money were all methodically set down in writing. That was the obligatory starting point.

_______________

*
The officer responsible for encrypting communications with Havana.

All those who are familiar with the world of recruitment know that there are four levers that can be used to recruit agents: money, ideology, blackmail, and ego. Fidel has always favored the second category, based on the principle that taking on people who were truly motivated and shared his anti-imperialist (that is, anti-American) ideology was the least arduous method and also the safest in the long term. The most famous Cuban moles discovered by the CIA all belonged to that category: people such as Ana Belén Montes, the pro-Castrist mole from the Pentagon arrested in 2001 (and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison) or Walter Kendall Myers, ex-officer in the Department of State arrested in 2009 (and given a life sentence). The notion that they were fighting for the glory of the Cuban Revolution was enough for them.

However, sometimes agents were recruited on a one-off basis by means of blackmail. That is what happened to a French diplomat in a case that I learned about one morning as I was preparing Fidel’s mail. I have not yet explained that, other than the physical protection of the
Comandante
and the keeping of the
libreta
, I had each morning to organize all the summary reports sent in by the various ministers and intelligence services. And so one morning in the late 1980s, I caught sight of a counterespionage report concerning a French diplomat serving in Cuba recruited via the blackmail method. The recruitment of a foreign agent is not something that happens every day and was sufficiently interesting for me to want to delve further into the case; I did not have the time right then to read the report in detail because I had to prepare the pile of documents to give to Fidel. I remembered his name, however—and after that did not think much more about it. . . .

However, the story had a follow-up that occurred in Miami; I relate the main details because they are so revealing of how the Cuban security services work. As everyone knows, tens of thousands of exiles live in that southern Florida metropolis, among them a not insignificant number of former Cuban secret service agents who, given my pedigree, naturally made contact with me when I finally managed to escape from Cuba in 2008. One of them, a former intelligence officer who had deserted to the United States in 1995, asked me if I had ever heard of a certain X, as we will call him—a French diplomat recruited in the late 1980s in Havana. His name immediately rang a bell for me, almost twenty years later.

Several days later, the Cuban ex-officer showed me the extract of a nine-page report that he had drawn up for the attention of the American FBI after his desertion, a part of which concerned the diplomat in question. Contrary to what one might imagine, Castrist espionage did not necessarily only target the “big fish” but was also interested itself in middle-ranking officials—who had less prominent positions but were likely to have access to small pieces of information that would then be added to a bigger picture, like a piece in a puzzle. This case shows that Cuban espionage occasionally resorts to the blackmail method even if, as I say, Fidel favors recruitment by ideological sympathy, which is more reliable and longer-lasting.

And so, having found out that this diplomat, Mr. X, was involved with jewelry and art contraband, the
Departamento II
of Cuban counterespionage (in charge of foreign diplomats posted to Cuba) drew up his psychological profile and organized an operation to compromise him by filming him in the act of carrying out an illegal transaction. The operation was successful and the recruitment declared “positive”; the Frenchman was immediately asked to provide information about the interior of his diplomatic building, the alarm system, security measures, and so on, making a search of the premises possible. He was also asked to supply information about the private lives of the other officials, consular or commercial, so as to complete our data and determine whether there were other diplomats with a profile favorable to recruitment.

After detailed study of X’s personality, the counterespionage psychologists established that he was very interested in money. It was therefore decided to allow this new agent to pursue his negotiations for works of art, but in exchange for something in return. According to the “instructions of the highest authorities in the country” (in other words, Fidel), the counterespionage service had demanded that the Frenchman “play his part” so that Cuba could obtain financing from French institutions responsible for cooperation and development in third world countries. To this end, the Frenchman had, in the reports he sent to the French ministry of foreign affairs, to present Cuba’s political, economic, and social situation in the terms indicated by the Cuban services. X complied and then continued his activities without realizing, at first, that he was always being watched—a surveillance that of course compromised him again, enabling a renewed demand for information.

As far as I know, this gentleman is still a diplomat for his country’s foreign affairs.

The engines had been switched off and all one could hear were the little waves slapping against the hull of
Aquarama II
. Under the starry sky, the warm air caressed the skin and the full moon lit up the landscape. It was already late—midnight, perhaps. On board Fidel’s yacht, a nautical mile from his private island, Cayo Piedra, he and Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez) were engaged in a memorable nocturnal fishing expedition. Fidel had known García Márquez, the Colombian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature a year his junior, since the early 1960s when Latino journalists from all over South America founded the Cuban press agency Prensa Latina. A correspondent for this agency in the United States for a time, García Márquez had subsequently moved away from Castrism to devote himself to his vocation—literature—before returning to Fidel in the 1970s, fascinated by the man of power and his vision anchored in continental, or “pan-Latino,” nationalism.

A third man was on board, a personal guest of the
Comandante
, a South American businessman whose name and nationality I forget. This sea outing was Fidel’s idea. How delicious to be fishing in the Caribbean at night while sipping a twelve-yearold whisky! With Fidel, however, an innocent fishing trip could quickly turn into a competition. That evening, luck was on the guest’s side. “One down!” the South American businessman exclaimed joyfully as he pulled out his first fish. “And two! And here’s the third!” he went on triumphantly, not imagining for a moment that he was upsetting his host. The litany continued: “Four down!” and so on. . . . Two hours later, the guest had at least five fish more at the bottom of his bucket.

Out of the corner of my eye I observed the
Comandante
: he had a sullen air and had not uttered a word for some time. Gabo began to find time hung heavy and he yawned. Late into the night, the author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
eventually took me to one side and whispered into my ear, “Oh, tell our friend to stop his miraculous fishing, because at this rate we’re never going to get back and go to bed. . . .” Gabo knew Fidel well enough to realize he was as bad a loser at fishing as he was at basketball or any other competitive activity—and that he would not give up until he had pulled up at least one more fish than his guest. So I passed on the message to the latter and, one hour later, Fidel had caught up his shortfall and decreed: “Okay, I think we’ve had good fishing. It’s time to go back now!”

Since the 1970s, Gabriel García Márquez divided his time between Mexico, where he had a property, and Cuba, where Fidel had made a protocol house available to him, complete with swimming pool, Mercedes-Benz, chauffeur, cook, and so on, on 146th Street in the Playa neighborhood. During the 1980s, García Márquez spent an enormous amount of time in Cuba, continually cheek by jowl with Fidel, going to visit him at the
palacio
, receiving him in his own house, or else going off with him, on a weekend to the island paradise of Cayo Piedra. One evening in 1984, at around ten p.m., Fidel went to see Gabo in his house. During the conversation, the
Comandante
, who thought of politics constantly, always trying to twist things to his own advantage, suggested to him half-jokingly that he should run in the Colombian presidential election that was to take place in two years’ time.

“Listen, Gabo, I think you could legitimately run for Colombian president. . . . You have every chance of winning, you know. . . . You would be an excellent candidate and we in Cuba would support you with every means at our disposal.”

I remember that at that moment, Pepín, Fidel’s aide-decamp, took me to one side and said to me, half amused, half incredulous: “Did you hear? The boss is trying to put the idea of becoming president in his head. . . . Let’s see where it’s all going to take us. . . .”

Not very far, in fact, for Gabo quickly dismissed Fidel’s “brilliant” idea. Aware that he was not an electoral animal, the Colombian writer had always, it seems to me, preferred to enjoy the pleasures of life by keeping himself comfortably away from politics rather than launching into an uncertain adventure that did not suit his temperament. If he had chosen otherwise, Fidel would obviously have supported him to the hilt—and with all the political know-how of
El Jefe
, it is not inconceivable that García Márquez, then at the height of his fame, could have won the election in his country. It would then have been very easy for Fidel to advise, influence, and manipulate his friend to get Colombia into Cuba’s orbit for good—in the most democratic way possible.

History decided otherwise, but I recount this anecdote to show to what extent Fidel Castro, with his unbridled creativity, was capable of thinking outside the box in order to redistribute the cards in the great game of politics, at every moment and by all possible means, whether by subversion, elections, or by creating a Trojan horse, which is what Gabo would have been.

Having failed to use his friend to his advantage, it was in the neighboring country of Venezuela that the
Comandante
would win his hand, though much later, by gaining the upper hand over Col. Hugo Chávez, who at the end of the following decade, in 1999, acceded to power in Caracas.

Venezuela had always occupied a special place in Fidel’s geostrategic thinking. The
Comandante
had always had Venezuelan gas in his sights, for he knew from the outset that it would be the key to financing his international dream and to standing up to the Americans. It was therefore no coincidence that just three weeks after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in Havana, on January 23, 1959, he took off for Venezuela on his first international trip. This trip was doubly symbolic: first, because Fidel claimed he took direct inspiration from the
Libertador
Simón Bolívar, the hero of independence from Spain who had already dreamed of realizing the union between all the countries of Spanish America. And second, because Venezuelans identified with the young Fidel Castro, because of a similar past: they, too, had ousted a dictatorship, that of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, a year earlier on January 23, 1958. As a result, Fidel and his Cuban delegation, including his official companion Celia Sánchez, were given a heroes’ welcome by a crowd of men and women, to whom the
Comandante
gave speeches with prophetic overtones. There to seek financial aid from the newly elected Venezuelan president, Rómulo Betancourt, he came up against a flat refusal, which was the beginning of the disagreement between the two leaders. After their meeting, Betancourt declared, “That wasn’t a man I met—it was a tropical storm.”