The Double Life of Fidel Castro (21 page)

The trip to Caracas ended with another significant event, though this one was not of a political nature. Just before taking off in the twin-engine plane that was to fly the delegation to Havana, the head of Fidel’s escort, the
barbudo
Paco Cabrera, came back down onto the tarmac to get a weapon he had forgotten. He was caught by a spinning propeller, cutting into his skull and throwing him to the ground in a pool of blood. According to certain accounts, Fidel reacted without compassion to the death of this guard, who had been with him since the Sierra Maestra, declaring simply, “What an imbecile!” I don’t know if it is true, but one thing is certain: Fidel was not very grateful to people who devoted their lives to protecting him. The way in which he had me thrown into prison is proof of that, but there are other examples, such as that of my colleague, Capt. Armín Pompa Álvarez, who died in the early 1980s of a sudden illness—we never really found out what—after having been stung by mosquitoes during a tortoise fishing expedition, organized by Fidel, to an island infested with the insects. The
Comandante
had gone to the funeral in the Colón cemetery in Havana, where he had had a wreath of flowers delivered. He had even presented his condolences to the tearful widow and the guard’s family, his face expressing such sorrow that his emotion seemed real and sincere. However, as soon as the ceremony finished, he went to enjoy himself with his mistress, the interpreter Juanita Vera, in the meetinghouse of Unit 160. It defied comprehension that
El Jefe
would want to make love just after the burial of someone to whom he was so close and who had been so devoted to him. Some of the members of the escort could not hide their confusion; one of the guards declared, “So, the last thing you should do here is die—if you die, you’ll be forgotten in a flash.” Indeed, three weeks after his death, nobody ever mentioned Captain Armín again.

To return to Fidel’s ambitions in terms of Venezuela, it has to be remembered that from the beginning of the 1960s, the
Líder Máximo
, unable to get along with the president Rómulo Betancourt, had begun actively supporting the guerrilla movement by means of advice, military training in Cuba, and secret consignments of arms to Venezuela. When the dyed-in-the-wool social democrat Betancourt caught wind of this and received proof of it, he launched a tussle that began in 1962 with the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States, the authority that unites all the countries of North and South America. Fidel was isolated on the diplomatic scene—but that still did not make him abandon his fixation on Venezuela.

Starting in 1974, he forged a friendship with the new president, Carlos Andrés Pérez, who reestablished links with Cuba while maintaining friendly links with Washington. As vice president of the Socialist International, the head of state was, like Fidel, opposed to Somoza’s dictatorship in Nicaragua. Fidel now had a heavyweight ally in the region who supported him at the United Nations and in other international forums. Thanks to the gas crisis and the escalating price of “black gold,” the first term of office of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974–1979), also known as CAP, corresponded to a period of unprecedented prosperity. It was the time when that country was known as Saudi Venezuela and the Venezuelans as
damedos
(
dame dos
, “give me two of them”—in reference to their purchasing power, greater than all the other countries of the region).

Flushed with the success of his first term of office, CAP came back to power for a second time, from 1989 to 1993. It was my responsibility as scout (or forerunner) to organize the security for Fidel’s trip to Caracas for the inauguration ceremony in 1989. However, after several days spent at the Caracas Hilton, the Minister of the Interior José Abrantes suggested to Fidel that the whole of the Cuban delegation move to another hotel that had just opened, the Eurobuilding, which was rather far away but which was, above all, quieter. An atmosphere of chaos reigned at the Hilton, where most of the presidents were staying; the lobby was teeming with journalists who accosted Fidel, presidential advisers sitting around on the sofas, and security officers from every country. On top of that, the elevators were constantly blocked. As a result, Cuban security were not in control of the situation and could not manage to work in peace.

Fidel therefore accepted Abrantes’s proposal and sent me ahead as scout to sort out the practical matters involved in the transfer. Once I got there, I found the elevator that my boss was supposed to use two hours later out of order. I immediately improvised a plan B: Fidel would use the goods elevator situated close by. I used it myself, checking its condition with technicians, going over it with a fine-toothed comb to make sure there were no explosives present, and finally placed a Cuban guard in front of the door, another on Fidel’s floor, and a third in the basement. In the meantime, the
Comandante
had come into the lobby of the hotel before I had had time to warn either Abrantes or the head of the escort of all these changes.

I went over to Fidel, planting myself in front of him so as to stop him in the middle of the lobby. With a jerk of my chin and without uttering a word, I intimated to him that he was to follow me to the goods elevator—under the disapproving eye of Abrantes, who tried to intervene to contradict me, though in vain. Totally trusting, Fidel followed in my footsteps. In the goods elevator, Abrantes continued shooting daggers at me, his face contorted with irritation: he could not bear that my opinion had carried more weight than his. Once we got to our destination, the two men shut themselves in Fidel’s room and then, five minutes later, summoned me to give an explanation for my initiative. I explained it all from beginning to end and Fidel looked at Abrantes in silence, smiling as if to say, “You see, Sánchez is a pro, he knows what he’s doing.” The minister for the interior didn’t address another word to me until we got back to Havana.

Back in Cuba, Fidel announced several days later that we were going back to Venezuela, but this time on an ultra-secret trip to La Orchila, an island of fifteen square miles situated in the turquoise seas about thirty-seven miles north of the capital. This idyllic place housed a military base as well as an air and sea base; access to it was reserved exclusively for Venezuelan presidents, their families and close relatives, military personnel, and a few government officials.

Unusually, we traveled on a single plane, the presidential Ilyushin-62, without being accompanied by the two extra planes that normally followed Fidel’s to act as a replacement in case of a breakdown, but also to confuse enemies so that they would not know which plane contained Fidel. Once we arrived, we distributed the traditional presents to our Venezuelan counterparts: cases of rum and boxes of cigars. In return, they offered us baseball caps bearing the inscription LA ORCHILA—which Pepín confiscated almost immediately, in conformity with Fidel’s order for us to keep this trip shrouded in secrecy.

Not long afterward, Fidel lost no time in setting out to CAP the “fantastic” idea that he had had in mind for some time. Still obsessed by Venezuelan gas, the
Comandante
explained the advantages to everyone of Venezuela rather than Western Europe supplying gas to Cuba while the Soviet Union could supply hydrocarbons to Western Europe rather than to Cuba. In that way, no supplier—neither Venezuela nor the USSR—would be affected, transport costs would be reduced, and energy security maintained for all concerned. Ingenious and daring, the idea nonetheless seemed unrealistic to Carlos Andrés Pérez, who dismissed it. But the simple fact that it had taken root in Fidel Castro’s mind confirmed both his intense interest in Venezuelan gas and his premonitory anticipation at a time when, a few months before the fall of the Berlin wall, Gorbachev’s USSR was becoming an increasingly uncertain supplier. It also showed the worldwide dimension of his thinking, as though he felt cramped on his Caribbean island.

In the end, he had to wait another ten years, until the accession to power of Hugo Chávez, to get his hands on some of the Venezuelan black gold. With this new associate, Fidel implemented one of the most sensational alliances in the history of Castrism: the Caracas-Havana partnership. Since 2006, Venezuela has in effect supplied Cuba with discounted gas at a rate of 150,000 barrels a day in return for Cuban doctors being sent into slums and for Cuban “advisers.” More than forty years after his first trip to Caracas, Fidel obtained from his disciple Hugo Chávez the aid that he had sought in vain from Rómulo Betancourt. But that was not all. Together, Castro and Chávez, thanks to the political genius of one and the gas of the other, even managed to relaunch internationalism, the nineteenth-century project inspired by Simón Bolívar and the Cuban José Martí (a great anti-imperialist theoretician) that advocated international solidarity by creating the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, a left-wing organization that principally united Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. All this demonstrated one of the most striking features of Castrism: the obsessional perseverance of its head.

Fidel Castro might have waited forty years to get Venezuela where he wanted it, but he succeeded in the end.

We had been warned. And, in the airplane, they told us again: beware! That was the advice of the people from Cuban intelligence: “Be careful what you say; the North Koreans put mikes everywhere, listen to everything, and film everything.” “Everywhere” did not just mean in the president’s office, the ministerial meeting room, or the house of a diplomat for purposes of an investigation, as in Cuba. Everywhere was
absolutely
everywhere: in the elevators, in the hotel corridors, in all the rooms, in the bathrooms, and even in the toilets. On Fidel Castro’s first—and last—official visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in other words North Korea, I was curious to see whether what the Cuban espionage service said was true.

Our Ilyushin, which had set out from Moscow, landed and was now parked opposite the red carpet that had been rolled out onto the tarmac of the airport of Pyongyang. The dictator Kim Il-sung, wearing a beret that made him look like a little old man, stood awaiting his guest next to his son and successor, Kim Jong-il (father of the present leader, Kim Jong-un). Fidel, a red deerstalker on his head, walked down from the gangway and embraced the “Great Leader” vigorously, towering over him; he looked like a Siberian ogre next to the Koreans with his great height, his strange headgear, and his long coat. One could not fail to notice the tumor on Kim Il-sung’s neck, as big as a baseball—his paranoid fear prevented him from having it operated on. A young woman approached to give Fidel a bouquet of flowers, then five hundred balloons were released into the sky. There was also a military parade with goose-stepping soldiers. Finally, the two heads of state were able to get into a black, open-top limousine. Escorted by a squadron of thirty motorbikes, we drove toward the capital.

It was grandiose. Along the twenty-five miles between the airport and the capital, tens or hundreds of thousands of Koreans formed a guard of honor, waving Cuban and Korean flags. Portraits of Castro and Kim were placed at regular intervals, every fifty yards. At each bend, ballet dancers dressed in white, yellow, or sky blue appeared like strange apparitions, maneuvering fans, parasols, or ribbons in automated choreographies under the sad, gray Pyongyang sky.

As my vehicle preceded the presidential car by at least a thousand yards or so, I was in a good position to see how the authorities managed to get the people to line up so perfectly; ultra-disciplined, they all stayed behind the white lines stretched across each side of the route. This was not by chance: anyone who went past them, even with just the tips of their toes, received a beating from merciless soldiers positioned every ten yards. I saw that scene repeated along the whole length of the route, making me think of dogs being trained. Something else caught my attention: all the Koreans were dressed identically, so that they resembled tin soldiers.

There were more surprises still to come. The Cubans posted to our embassy told us that when a Korean got up in the morning, his first duty was to clean the section of road outside his house. They also told me about shortages that forced them to get the train to South Korea to stock up the embassy with food and all other supplies.

The objective of this official two-day visit, from March 8 to 10, 1986, was simple. For Fidel, it was a matter of returning a courtesy to the Koreans, who invited him to their Havanan embassy each year to celebrate the declaration of their independence on September 9, 1948, and who never forgot to give him gifts on August 13, his birthday. Of course, it also had something to do with maintaining links between “brother countries,” to which end a “friendship and cooperation treaty” was signed between Cuba and North Korea.

Everything was bound by protocol. When we visited the town, the only cars driving on the roads were police vehicles. We admired the twenty-two-yard-high bronze statue dedicated to the Korean leader. Then, Kim Il-sung proudly showed Fidel the model of a dam project currently under way somewhere in the country. In two days, the
Líder Máximo
was decorated three times: with the gold medal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with the Order of the National Flag, and the Order of Soldier’s Honor. One evening we attended a ballet at the Grand Theater of Pyongyang; nobody except Fidel, who had an interpreter, understood what it was about—but since the cult of personality was everywhere, one can presume it was about the glory of Kim Il-sung, who all throughout the visit struck me as someone both introverted and feared. He did not even need to give orders to be obeyed: a simple look, and his assistants went running, rivaling each other in servility. However, because of the language barrier, I could not speak to my Korean counterparts to find out more about their country, leaders, and customs—rather, I felt as though I had been plunged into a surreal silent film.