The Double Life of Fidel Castro (23 page)

Fidel did not hold him in great esteem, either. I think that Gaddafi had disappointed him enormously. At one time, the
Comandante
had thought the Libyan colonel would become a revolutionary leader capable of taking part of the Arab world along with him—but he quickly realized that despite his vast financial assets from gas, the man was incapable of having a coherent conversation. In front of us, Fidel said of him, “He’s an eccentric who loves exhibitionism.” Which was a polite way of saying that he was completely off the wall, impulsive, unpredictable, and unaware—the opposite of the dictator, Fidel Castro, in short. Many things can be said of Fidel, but not that he was intellectually mediocre like those tin-pot tyrants named Muammar al-Gaddafi and Kim Il-sung.

_______________

*
In 1977, Colonel Gaddafi changed the name of the country to the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

Is Fidel Castro loaded? Does he possess a hidden fortune? Does he have a secret bank account in a tax haven bank? Is he rolling in gold? I have often been asked these questions. In 2006, the American magazine
Forbes
published an article devoted to the fortunes of kings, queens, and dictators all over the world. It placed Fidel’s fortune among the top ten, alongside those of Elizabeth II, Prince Albert of Monaco, and the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang. The figure of $900 million was advanced based on an extrapolation: the magazine attributed to Fidel Castro a part of the turnover of the companies he created and controlled (Corporación Cimex, El Centro de Convenciones, and Medicuba) and into which he placed family members who held the purse strings for him. Relying on the testimonies of numerous senior Cuban officials who had defected, the magazine affirmed that Fidel syphoned off and used a considerable part of the national wealth according to his whim. It is not untrue. And even if the methodology used by
Forbes
was not scientific, they were more or less in the right ballpark.

The article by the American publication enraged the
Comandante
, who replied several days later to these “infamous calumnies.” He claimed that he possessed nothing other than his nine hundred pesos of monthly salary—in other words, thirty-eight dollars. Highly comic when you knew, as I did, the reality of his daily lifestyle and when you had seen, year after year, the leaders of state companies taking instructions from and delivering accounts to the
Líder Máximo
(who decided everything), either directly or via his two assistants Pepín Naranjo and Chomy, the secretary of the Council of State (his private secretary, in other words, since Fidel presided over that institution).

Nobody will ever be in a position to give a precise evaluation of Fidel’s fortune. But to get close to the truth, one has first to understand the Cuban reality that Fidel Castrol reigns over his island of eleven million inhabitants like an absolute monarch. In Cuba, he was the only person able to decide what to do with everything—take it for his own, sell it, or give it away. He alone, with the stroke of a pen, could authorize the creation (or the closure) of a state company, on the island or abroad. Gathered together as conglomerates, all the national companies are run like private businesses and placed under the control of three main institutions: MINFAR, headed by his brother Raúl until 2008; MININT, closely monitored by Fidel; or the Council of State, presided by him. It was Fidel who appointed, and fired, the business heads. In reality, this mode of functioning made Fidel the super-CEO of “Cuba holding,” of which he had also drawn up the organization. How many times had I heard him in his office giving economic directives to Pepín, to Chomy, or else to Abrantes, the minister of the interior, concerning the sale of particular assets or the creation of a front company in Panama to get around the American embargo!

Cuba was Fidel’s “thing.” He was its master, in the manner of a nineteenth-century landowner. It was as though he had transformed and enlarged his father’s property to make Cuba into a single hacienda of eleven million people. He did what he wanted with the national workforce. For example, medical schools trained doctors not so that they could freely practice their profession, but rather to become missionaries, sent under orders to the slums of Africa, Venezuela, or Brazil, according to the internationalist politics conceived, decided, and imposed by the head of state. Now, on missions abroad these good Samaritans were given only a small fraction of the salary their host country would normally pay them, for the lion’s share was given to the Cuban government, acting as a service provider. In the same way, French, Spanish, or Italian hotels that hired Cuban staff on the island did not pay their employees themselves, as is the case in any free society: instead, they paid the salaries to the Cuban state, which invoiced this labor at a high price (and in cash) before transferring a tiny proportion to the workers concerned in virtually valueless Cuban pesos. This modern variant on slavery is reminiscent of the relationship of dependence that existed in the nineteenth-century plantations toward the allpowerful master. Moreover, it was in complete contradiction to the principles of the UN’s International Labour Organization, which stipulates in writing that “every worker has the right to receive a salary without intervention of an intermediary.”

To free himself from all control, Fidel—who was above the law—had long ago created, in the 1960s, the notorious
reserva del Comandante
, a private account made up of special funds syphoned off from national economic activity. Designed for the exclusive use of the
Comandante
, it escaped all checks and was a virtually sacred and
intocable
(untouchable) resource that Fidel used as he saw fit. Fidel explained that the needs of the Revolution, that is to say the threat of imperialist aggression, made this unorthodox means of financial management necessary. In reality, the reserve served the private interests of Fidel Castro as much as the public ones. It was the pocket money that allowed him to live like a prince without ever thinking of the cost— and it also permitted him to behave like a great feudal overlord when he went to the countryside to “his” lands, across “his” island. Fidel could dip into his coffers to build a dispensary, a school, or a road, or to assign cars to a certain municipality (the
reserva
also included a fleet of vehicles) without going through a ministry or any organization. All the benefactor had to do was turn to his aide-de-camp and tell him an amount for a certain project to become reality . . . and for Fidel to immediately have the air of a fairy godfather—or a man of the people.

However, the relationship he had with money was not that of nouveaux riches like the Italian Silvio Berlusconi or the former Argentinian president Carlos Menem, who were so enamored of luxury, consumption, and instant gratification. True, the austere Fidel Castro did not neglect his own comfort, possessing as he did (albeit secretly) a thirty-some-yard yacht, for example. But he did not feel the need to replace it with the latest, flashier model. For him, wealth was above all an instrument of power, political survival, and personal protection. In this regard, knowing his caution-loving character and his mentality of an old Spanish peasant, it is unthinkable that he would not have made arrangements to protect his back—as do all dictators—in the eventuality that he and his family were forced to flee Cuba and settle abroad, for example in Galicia (Spain) on his father’s native land. Moreover, one day his wife Dalia said to me, in passing:
“No te preocupes, Sánchez, el futuro de la familia está asegurado.”
(“Don’t worry, Sánchez, the family’s future is assured.”)

Considered an asset of the Revolution, the
reserva
was not held by those in power to be something taboo; it was mentioned openly and directly in front of or by Fidel. It was not a state secret—unlike the actual size of the
reserva
. Since its creation in the 1960s, it was constantly replenished as the
Comandante
drew from it. When Cuba was dependent on the subsidies from the USSR, one often heard Fidel telling Chomy, his private secretary, to take a sum of
x
million dollars (since the currency of Fidel’s account was the dollar) from those funds to put into the reserve. In the same way, the
Líder Máximo
could do what he wanted with Soviet gas—give some to Nicaragua or sell some on the black market to generate cash. When Hugo Chávez agreed to sell Venezuelan black gold to Cuba at a discount, I am certain that these discretionary kinds of arrangements continued.

Various sources fed this special fund, starting with the companies placed under the guardianship of the Council of State (under Fidel’s leadership), as indicated in
Forbes
magazine in 2006. Among these were the Corporación Cimex (banks, property construction, car rental, and so on), Cubalese (wound up in 2009, this company supplied foreign embassies and companies with services such as the “rental” of Cuban staff or accommodations), or else the
Palacio de Convenciones
, created in 1979 to house the sixth summit of the Non-Aligned Movement and headed by the loyal Abraham Maciques. One day in the mid1980s, when the latter was welcoming Fidel to the convention center, I saw him give us an overnight bag filled with a million dollars in cash. As always, it was the aide-de-camp Pepín Naranjo who was assigned to carry the booty and allocate it to the reserve. Another day, also in the mid-1980s, it was the Minister of the Interior José Abrantes who came into Fidel’s office with a suitcase full of bills, uttering the sacred phrase, “Commander, this is for the Revolution!” Fidel simply replied, “Very good,” and turned to Pepín to tell him to put it in the
reserva.

I know that the director of the national bank, Héctor Rodríguez Llompart, was Fidel’s “financial adviser,” but I do not know what financial channels were involved or whether foreign bank accounts existed (in my view, they did). One thing is sure, however: Fidel never lacked cash, as demonstrated by my experience in Harare, for example, when I was given a suitcase with $250,000 in cash to prepare for the arrival of the Cuban head of state.

One of the funniest episodes I ever witnessed was the following: once, I heard Fidel say to Pepín and Chomy that part of the funds of the
reserva
would be used to loan money to the national bank, governed by Lllompart. Now, the pair of them, Llompart and Fidel, fixed the interest rate at 10 percent. In other words, the
Comandante
was going to lend money that did not belong to him to the country that he governed, via the bank that used interest rates that he fixed, pocketing the 10 percent profit along the way!

Fidel used anything that came to hand to feed the reserve. On occasion he could behave like the owner of a small business. His flotilla on the Caleta del Rosario was made to contribute: his private marine included his yacht
Aquarama II
and other smaller vessels, plus two fishing boats named
Purrial de Vicana I
and
II
, of which one of the captains was called Emilio. After their expeditions to sea, their catches were sent to freezing units at the port of Havana and at Unit 160. These fish were not meant for the consumption of the Castro family, who did not eat frozen fish, but were sold at one of the biggest food markets in Havana, the Super Mercado situated in the Miramar quarter on the corner of Third Avenue and Seventh Street.

Little streams making great rivers, a turkey production unit and a sheep-breeding farm were used to the same end of increasing the reserve. To this could be added the business transacted in Lunada during the Angola war on the
kandonga
, the celebrated Angolan black market on which Cubans were very active for fifteen years. This, too, swelled the funds in the Commander’s reserve.

At the time of the publication of the article in
Forbes
, the historian Eusebio Leal—who was very close to Fidel—stepped up to the plate to defend the reputation of the
Comandante
. As proof of the disinterestedness of the
Líder Máximo
, he revealed that in the 1990s the latter had asked him to distribute 11,687 gifts he had received to museums and cultural centers, including paintings, jewelry, ivory objects, and fine carpets from 133 countries. It might be true, but it proves nothing. Because for my part, I saw contraband diamonds in Fidel’s office that had come from Angola and been sent by Patricio de la Guardia and Arnaldo Ochoa, respectively head of the MININT mission and head of the Cuban military mission in this war-torn African country. They were small diamonds placed in a Cohiba cigar box. Chomy and Pepín passed them from hand to hand in front of Fidel, his personal doctor Eugenio Selman, and me. I can still remember their dialogue.

“Okay, Pepín, you know what you need to do with them. Sell them on the international market. . . .”

“Yes,
Comandante
,” replied the aide-de-camp, who had suddenly transformed into a gemology expert. “But you know the value of these stones is doubtless not very high, because they’re small. . . . Well, they must be worth something, anyway, because their size will be appreciated in costume and fine jewelry making.”