The Double Life of Fidel Castro (3 page)

I also carried the chief ’s hunting rifle so that he did not have to weigh himself down with it; when Fidel caught sight of prey and wanted to use the rifle, he would hold out his arm in my direction without looking at me. I knew what I had to do: immediately place the weapon in his hand, ready in shooting position. Fidel would shoot his harpoon and then immediately give it back to me. Whether he hit his target or not, I had to reload the rifle or go back up to the surface to place Fidel’s catch in the dinghy floating above us.

When the monarch decreed, we would return to Cayo Piedra. The ritual on our return was immutable. Fidel’s numerous catches would be lined up on the jetty and sorted into species: breams together, lobster together, and so on. The fish caught by Dalia, who hunted separately under the protection of two combat divers, were arranged next to them, she and Fidel then reviewing the ensuing feast to the admiring, amused commentaries of their entourage.

“
Comandante, ies otra una pesca milgrosa!
[another miraculous catch!],” I would say, certain that my comment would win me the smiles of the main party concerned as well as of all those present.

Then, the barbecue coals already glowing bright red, Fidel would indicate which fish he wanted grilled immediately; those he was magnanimously giving to the garrison; and those, finally, that he wanted to take in iceboxes to Havana to eat at home within forty-eight hours. Then the Castros would sit down to eat in the shade of the family beach restaurant.

This dolce vita represented enormous privilege compared with the lifestyle of ordinary Cubans, whose already Spartan way of life had gotten considerably harder since the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Subsidies from Moscow, which had maintained a certain level of prosperity, had dried up. The Cuban economy, which derived almost 80 percent of its external trade from the Eastern Bloc, was collapsing like a house of cards and households were surviving on the breadline while the GNP had decreased by 35 percent and electricity supplies were seriously inadequate. In 1992, in an attempt to tackle the dramatic decline in exports and imports, Fidel decreed the start of the Special Period in Time of Peace that marked the official beginning of the era of shortages and of mass international tourism.

Until the turning point of the 1990s, I never asked myself too many questions about the way the system operated. That is one of the flaws of military men. . . . As a good soldier, I carried out my mission to the best of my ability, and that was enough for me. What is more, my service record was impeccable: I was a judo black belt, a karate black belt, and a tae kwon do black belt, and also one of the best elite marksmen in Cuba. In 1990 I was declared sniper champion on fixed and mobile targets at twentyfive meters (about twenty-seven yards) in a two-day competition organized by the Cuban Ministry of the Interior. I was even the very first person to be awarded the honorific title of gun expert. At the same time I had earned my master’s degree in law and climbed every rung of the hierarchy to the rank of lieutenant colonel. I was given more and more onerous duties—organizing, for example, the security arrangements during the head of state’s international trips. Fidel himself was happy with me. More than once during these trips abroad, I heard him say as he walked down from the airplane to the runway, “Ah, Sánchez is here! Everything is in order. . . .” I could say that professionally I had succeeded. Socially also, come to that: in Cuba, there was virtually no more prestigious or enviable job than that of devoting one’s life to the physical protection of the
Líder Máximo
.

However, it was at that time that a crack began to appear in my convictions. It must be pointed out that in Cubans’ collective memory, 1989 corresponded less to the year in which the Berlin wall fell than it did to that of the so-called Ochoa Affair. This Castrist Dreyfus Affair will always remain an indelible stain on the history of the Cuban Revolution. At the end of a televised Stalinist trial that still haunts all our memories, Arnaldo Ochoa, national hero and the most respected general in the country, was sentenced to death and executed as an example for the crime of drug trafficking, along with three other members of the highest military echelons. Now, from my privileged position of intimacy with the country’s figurehead, I was well placed to know that this trafficking, designed to rake in funds to finance the Revolution, had been organized with the express approval of the
Comandante
, who was therefore directly mixed up in “the affair.” To divert attention from himself, Fidel Castro had not hesitated to sacrifice the most valiant and faithful of his generals, Arnaldo Ochoa, hero of the Bay of Pigs, of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and of the Angolan war against South Africa.

A little later I realized that Fidel would use people for as long as they were useful to him, and then dispose of them without the slightest qualms.

In 1994, a tad disenchanted with all I had seen, heard, and experienced, I wanted to retire. Nothing more than that: simply retire two years early and withdraw peacefully into the background—while obviously remaining faithful to the oath I had sworn to keep secret all the information to which I had been party over the seventeen years spent in the private circle of the
Líder Máximo
. For the capital crime of having dared say I wished to stop serving the Commander of the Revolution, I was thrown into a cockroach-infested prison cell like a dog. I was tortured. They even tried to poison me. For a time, I thought I would die there. But I come from a tough breed. During my imprisonment from 1994 to 1996, I swore to myself that the day I managed to escape Cuba (as I did in 2008, after ten unsuccessful attempts), I would write a book revealing what I knew, what I had seen, and what I had heard—telling the story of the “real” Fidel Castro as nobody had ever dared to do. From the inside.

For as far back as I can remember, I’ve been passionate about firearms. It was not altogether a coincidence when, at the peak of my career in 1992, I won the rank of best pistol shooter in Cuba in a contest that brought together the cream of the crop: my New Year’s gift when I was six was my first cowboy set with a magnificent silver cap gun. Over the following years I regularly received a new outfit and, above all, a new gun. My childhood was thus dedicated to putting imaginary Indians and fearful bandits out of action. But instead of just playing “Bang, bang, you’re dead!,” I took my mission very seriously, applying myself to getting my moving targets precisely in my sights, my arm stretched out and my right eye focusing.

When I was a teenager, I moved on to air rifles with lead pellets, ideal for shooting cardboard boxes from ten yards away. Which was why I later became the best trigger in Fidel’s escort team. Today, in my sixties, I train at least once a week at a shooting range in Florida, where I have lived in exile since 2008— and, of course, I don’t set foot outside the house without my shooter: in the eventuality of the many Cuban agents in Florida trying to stop me speaking out, the welcoming committee is ready! But let’s go back to my childhood. . . .

I was born on January 31, 1949, in Lisa, a poor quarter in west Havana, almost exactly ten years to the day before the Castrist Triumph of the Revolution. When I was two years old, my father, a worker in a poultry factory, separated from my mother, a cleaning lady. As she was too poor to bring me up by herself and my father didn’t see himself taking on the task in her place, he decided to entrust me to my paternal grandmother and uncle who lived in the same house. Such an arrangement is not unusual in Cuba: as elsewhere in the Caribbean, family is a fluid concept.

I was the apple of my grandmother’s eye, becoming like her own son to her. My uncle quickly became a substitute father and I called him “Dad.” My mother lived in the neighborhood and I saw her from time to time. I lacked for nothing, for my uncle had a good job as head accountant at the large abattoirs in Havana. The happy owner of a white 1955 Buick equipped with an air-conditioning system—an unheard-of piece of modern technology—he would drive us around in his fantastic car on weekends, sometimes as far as Varadero, the famous coastal resort less than a hundred miles from the capital.

It was the 1950s, Cuba’s golden age—above all, in Cuban music: rumba, mambo, cha-cha. The stars of the period were Benny Moré, Orlando Vallejo, Celia Cruz; they performed in the fashionable nightclubs (the Tropicana and the Montmartre), the luxury hotels (the Nacional, the Riviera), or else in the casinos run by Lucky Luciano or other Italian-American gang leaders.

Although we did not realize it at the time, it was also a golden age economically speaking. Distinctly wealthier than General Franco’s Spain, Cuba at that time produced sugar, bananas, and nickel. It was one of the most modern countries of Latin America, as proved by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development figures: with gas-producing Venezuela and meat-producing Argentina, Cuba was one of the countries with the least inequality and the best record of human development (literacy, life expectancy, and so on) in the region. The wealth of the middle class was measured by the number of cars “made in the USA,” the boom in electrical goods (such as televisions and refrigerators), regular people’s ability to eat at restaurants and shop at the always-full small shops. Havana radiated the atmosphere of a consumer society. At Christmas, market stalls in the capital proffered apples and pears imported from Europe and garish neon discotheque lights flashed in the night, but people gave little thought to the problems of rural life, where illiterate workers were exploited with rock-bottom wages by American multinationals such as the United Fruit Company. Anyway, who cared about social inequalities, apart from a handful of idealist students dreaming of revolution?

It was a troubled decade, a swirling mix of political turbulence, corruption, and student agitation. An explosive cocktail. In August 1951, the leader of the Orthodox Party, Eduardo Chibás, a great polemicist and leading political figure, committed suicide live on the radio after an umpteenth tirade against the rampant corruption and gangsterism of the Ramón Grau and Carlos Prior governments. There was widespread shock. The following year in 1952, Fulgencio Batista took back the reins of power after a coup d’etat, a month before the elections planned for March that he had been certain to lose.
*
A year went by, and then on July 26, 1953, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro, who had already made a name for himself during the student demonstrations, burst spectacularly onto the scene by carrying out an armed assault against the barracks of Moncada in Santiago de Cuba, in the east of the country. Most of the conspirators were killed in action or arrested, and many were executed. It was a bitter failure. Arrested, tried, and imprisoned, Fidel Castro was amnestied two years later.

It was, however, only the beginning of the story. Fidel Castro went into exile in Mexico, where his brother Raúl introduced him to an Argentinian named Ernesto Guevara, known to everybody by his nickname of Che. After several months of preparation, a group of eighty-two men led by Fidel landed on the southern coast of Cuba on board the
Granma
, a yacht bought secondhand, and from there the guerrillas took to the bush. So in 1956, here was Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains at the head of a guerrilla group, the July 26 Movement or M26, so called in reference to the date of the attack on the Moncada.

In 1958, the story accelerated: Washington withdrew its support from Batista’s corrupt and increasingly discredited regime. In February of the same year, the M26 carried out one of its most memorable feats: two masked men went into the Lincoln Hotel in Havana and kidnapped one of its VIP guests, the Argentinian race car driver Juan Manuel Fangio. The police set up roadblocks and checkpoints everywhere, but Fangio could not be found. His kidnappers installed him in a comfortable Havanan house where they tried to win the sportsman over to their revolutionary plans—with limited success, since the Argentine driver was apolitical. Nonetheless, well treated by the young rebels and freed after twenty-nine hours of capture, he had had time to forge friendships with these idealists. The publicity stunt by Fidel’s men had been a total success. They had got people talking about them and they had tarnished the government’s image a little further by disrupting the big occasion of the Cuba grand prix. The victory may have been psychological, but it was undeniable: after the Fangio affair, more and more Cubans sensed that Batista’s power was toppling. Ten months later, it fell like overripe fruit. On January 1, 1959, with the dictator having fled to Portugal, the exultant population filled the streets, which were decked with the red and black colors of the M26. It was ninety degrees in the shade; the crowd sang, danced, and shouted i
Viva la revolución!
Fidel, with his unparalleled sense of suspense, made people wait for him for no less than eight days—and then, like a Roman emperor, he made his triumphal entry into Havana. For a week, he and his
barbudos
had traveled the country from east to west, covering over six hundred miles, and all along the way they were greeted like heroes. The band of guerrillas finally arrived in the capital on January 8, Fidel standing in a jeep like Caesar raised up on a float.