The Double Life of Fidel Castro (5 page)

At 160 there were also the larders and refrigerated room where the stores of the Castro family and its escort were kept. To these were added laying hens and a flock of geese; during the festive season, Fidel would present a few specimens of the latter to his chosen recipients. There were also several bulls as well as zebus (domesticated oxen with humps) and Holstein cows, subjects of the lord of the manor’s genetic experiments. This “town within a town” also included a miniature ice cream factory for the delight of all the highest leaders of the Revolution— ministers, generals, and members of the politburo—with the notable exception of Fidel and Raúl. So as to minimize any risk of poisoning, their sorbets were prepared separately in a little workshop elsewhere in Unit 160.

Leisure pursuits were not forgotten. Other than a museum of gifts housing the collection of all the presents received by the head of state (with the exception of the most expensive, which he kept in his own possession), a private cinema run by a projectionist from the Ministry of the Interior was placed at the disposition of the
Comandante
and his family, and it was here that Fidel, obsessive by nature, enjoyed countless viewings of his favorite film: the interminable and soporific Soviet version of
War and Peace
adapted from Tolstoy’s novel that lasts at least five hours.

I was rapidly promoted to team leader at 160, my work consisting of assigning soldiers’ tasks and coordinating our movements with the presidential palace as well as Fidel’s private residence. In this post, I was soon in the know about everything—and as Dalia often called on our services, for a delivery of milk or to come and watch a film in the cinema, I soon learned of the existence of this “first lady,” totally unknown to the general public.

Dalia did not know it, but she was not the only woman to frequent 160. Behind the gift museum was a detached house, the House of Carbonell, where my boss engaged in extraconjugal visits with the greatest discretion. And so I would regularly receive phone calls from Pepín, Fidel’s aide-de-camp warning me in a laconic tone, “Be ready today, at such and such a time. A visit to the Carbonell House is planned.”

I would create a diversion at the stated time by summoning the soldiers on duty into my office so that they did not witness the arrival of the Commander in Chief or his lady visitor, who always arrived separately.

After four years of good and loyal service at Unit 160, my career took a new turn. In 1974 I was promoted to the
grupo operativo
, the operational group composed of eighty to a hundred men that formed the second ring around Fidel. Its main function was to offer extra support to the first-ring escort during the Commander in Chief ’s public movements, whether in a provincial factory or in Revolution Square in Havana. The operational group was also deployed when Raúl or the leading members of the Cuban Communist Party politburo, such as Ramiro Valdés or Juan Almeida Bosque, traveled around.

Barely had I integrated into the
grupo operativo
when, a month later, I along with thirty colleagues were sent to the
escuela de especialistas
, a training school for elite security agents. It had just opened and, attending from 1974 to the end of 1976, we were the first graduates in its history. The training left us barely any free time, the mornings devoted to physical education (race walking, martial arts, shooting practice) and the afternoons to theory. There I learned how explosives worked and, with a group of ten other students, mastered French. Another group of ten students learned Russian and a third English. We also familiarized ourselves with basic intelligence techniques and psychological motivation and studied in depth famous historical attacks—that against General de Gaulle in PetitClamart in 1962 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963—so as to learn lessons that could help in our protection of the
Líder Máximo.

When a foreign head of state or high-ranking official made an official visit to Cuba, it was the students of the specialist school who undertook their protection—this was how I met certain great world figures, such as the Jamaican president Michael Manley and prime ministers of Vietnam (Pham Van Dong), Sweden (Olof Palme), and Trinidad and Tobago (Eric Williams).

During those years, I really had the feeling that my career was taking a serious direction. There were increasing reasons for satisfaction. Very well graded by my superiors, I was promoted to sub-lieutenant, thereby joining the officers’ ranks, and I also won two more black belts, one in judo and another in a closecombat technique called Protection and Attack developed by the Cuban army. These were added to my karate black belt, which I had held for years. The icing on the cake was taking my first foreign trip, in 1976. Of the thirty students in my year, I was the only one chosen to join the escort of high-ranking leader Juan Almeida Bosque to Guyana.

I had never yet left my native island and was impatient and excited at the idea of seeing the world, beginning with that exotic Amazonian country bordering Brazil, Venezuela, and Suriname. I remember that I was particularly struck by the social inequalities that I saw on arriving in Georgetown, the capital; ten years after the former British Guyana had achieved independence, the white elite still lived in a very colonial comfort while the black population, crammed into ghettos and wearing rags, struggled in deplorable conditions. What a shock! In comparison, Cuba was El Dorado.

In my private life, too, I was lucky. At that period, I had already been sharing my life with Mayda for eight years. We had met at the beginning of 1968 at one of those dances that took place every Sunday evening in what we call in Cuba a “social circle”— it was basically a dance hall. When I turned up that evening at the Patrice Lumumba social circle in the district of Marianao and saw Mayda, I was immediately smitten. As the salsa crackled out from the PA system in the Havanan night, I first caught sight of that gorgeous little face, unable to tear my gaze from her smile. To my eyes, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. After exchanging several meaningful glances, I crossed the dance floor, victorious. As Mayda was accompanied by her mother, I turned toward the latter: “Please allow me to ask your daughter for a dance, Madam. . . .”

I led Mayda off toward the dance floor; seeing her mother’s surprise, I shouted out to her, “Have no fear: we’ll be married before the end of the year!”

I kept my promise. On December 21 that same year, we became a young married couple leaving for a week’s honeymoon at the Hotel Riviera, one of the famous Havanan seafront establishments that were formerly owned by the notorious American gangster Meyer Lansky. Our daughter was born the following year and our son in 1971. For the first few years we lived with my mother in the district of Lisa, where I had grown up, but in 1980, at the age of thirty-one, MININT granted me an apartment right in the center of the city not far from the Palace of the Revolution where Fidel had his office. This was where I lived the rest of my time in Cuba, until I escaped to the United States in 2008. Mayda was the perfect wife and mother: hardworking, she looked after everything, oversaw the children’s upbringing, and ran our household while I, consumed by my career, was always on the go.

It seemed as though the gods were with me: the good news kept on coming. At the end of 1976, back from Guyana, I was resting in the dormitory of the
escuela de especialistas
when an officer came in to tell me that I was to go immediately to see Eloy Pérez, the man who oversaw all the personal security arrangements for Commander in Chief Fidel Castro and on whom our school relied. Very surprised (and slightly worried), I spent the whole of the journey to the city center, where I had my appointment, wondering why I had been summoned. What could I have done wrong?

When I got there, I had not even had time to sit down when Eloy Pérez said to me, “Sánchez, the Commander in Chief has personally selected you to join his personal escort. From now on, nobody other than me or, obviously,
El Jefe
himself can give you orders or send you on a mission for any reason. Not even a minister, understood? From tomorrow, you will present yourself here every day at 8 a.m. And if at 5 p.m. you have not been given an assignment, you can go quietly back home to your wife and children.”

The joy I felt at that moment was, I imagine, comparable to that of a Hollywood actor who has just been told he’s won an Oscar. Several hours later I joined the crème de la crème of the Cuban army, its most prestigious, admired, and envied body of men: the group of twenty to thirty handpicked soldiers in charge of Fidel Castro’s around-the-clock protection. I did not realize it yet but I would spend the next seventeen years of my life in the wake of the man who had launched one of the most famous people’s revolutions of the twentieth century, after those in Mexico, China, and Russia.

However, I had to wait a little longer before I could take up a place beside the great man because from January to April our superiors were selecting the five other students of the Specialists’ School who would swell the ranks of Fidel’s escort. Finally, on May 1, 1977, after the traditional parade for the international celebration of International Labor Day on Revolution Square, our young group of six was introduced to the
Comandante
and joined the “holy of holies,”
el primer anillo
, the first ring of protection.

The general public often confuses the work of a guard with that of a bodyguard. They imagine that our job consists of doing wrestling tackles and moving at the speed of light. However, the work of a “personal security specialist” or “VIP protection specialist” demands many qualities other than simple brute force. They must coordinate the escort’s movements, anticipate potential threats, secure telecommunication, check foodstuffs to thwart any poisoning attempts, carry out spying and counterespionage assignments, uncover microphones hidden in hotel rooms abroad, examine all sorts of data with a fine-tooth comb, and draw up analysis reports. In addition, Fidel demanded that his escort attain a certain intellectual and cultural level.

In 1981, outside my career as one of Fidel’s escort—that is during my free time—I therefore embarked on a penal law degree at the MININT Higher Institute as well as another course entitled “counterintelligence operational investigation,” otherwise known as counterespionage, thanks to which I know how to carry out a police inquiry, examine a crime scene, take fingerprints, and so on. In 1985 I was awarded my master’s degree in law as well as an equivalent diploma in counterespionage. Much later, the penal law degree would come in handy, when I was put on trial myself. . . .

When I reflect on it now, Cuban education at that time was insanely immersed in the climate of the cold war and Marxist thinking. One has only to reread the titles of some of the subjects we studied: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the history of the Cuban workers’ movement, enemy subversive action, counterespionage, or else the critique of contemporary bourgeois trends. However, it was the courses on psychology and applied counterespionage psychology that most helped me in understanding the personality of Fidel Castro.

After the MININT college course, I put what I had learned to practical use by drawing up Fidel’s psychological profile, identifying certain of his personality traits. My conclusion was that he was egocentric and loved to be at the center of the conversation, grabbing the attention of all those around him. What is more, like many gifted people, he gave no importance to his clothing, hence his penchant for combat uniform. I often heard him say, “I gave up the constraint of a suit and tie long ago.” In fact, the main reason he had a beard was because it meant he did not have to shave every day. Another of his personality traits: it was absolutely impossible to contradict him on any subject whatsoever. Anyone who attempted to convince him he was wrong, that he was going down a blind alley or that one of his projects could be improved, even slightly, by making some alteration to it, was making a fatal error. From that moment on, Fidel viewed the poor unfortunate as an idiot. The best way of living with him was to accept all he said and did, even during a basketball game or a fishing expedition.

During the Angola war in the 1980s, General Arnaldo Ochoa was on the ground when he dared contradict the military directives of the
Jefe
—6,800 miles away in Havana—by suggesting other options that seemed to him better. Fidel never accepted this crime of lese majesty, and I believed it played a significant part in Ochoa’s death sentence in 1989.

In contradiction to what he always said, Fidel had in no way renounced capitalist comfort or chosen to live in austerity. On the contrary, his way of life resembled that of a capitalist, without any kind of limit. He never believed that his speeches required him to live the austere life of all self-respecting revolutionaries; neither he nor Raúl ever practiced the precepts they preached to their compatriots. Which leads one to the conclusion that Fidel was extremely manipulative; with his formidable intelligence, he was capable of manipulating a person or a group of people without difficulty or scruple—in addition to which, he was repetitive and obsessive. In discussions with his foreign counterparts, Fidel would repeat the same things as often as was necessary to convince them he was right.

It might indeed seem surprising that I did not question things earlier, given my understanding of Fidel’s psychological profile and the luxurious lifestyle I soon began to witness. But one has to take into account my youth and the real hero worship we all felt for the victorious leader of the Cuban Revolution. His authoritarianism? A quality in a fighter. The comfortable lifestyle he enjoyed? Did he not deserve it? And then, as I have said, I was a soldier. Soldiers are trained to act and obey . . . not criticize.

The Cuban authorities will of course do all they can to discredit my words and this book: that is their job. However, the difference between these officials who are blindly obeying orders and me is that I know what I am talking about. I devoted seventeen years of my life to Fidel, in addition to those years when I was not yet a member of his personal escort. If I add it all up, I have spent more time, more weekends and holidays, with him than with my own children and wife. At the presidential palace, on trips within Cuba and abroad, during official ceremonies, in his plane, on board his yacht, on the paradise island of Cayo Piedra or his other private properties, I was often no more than a few feet behind him. He trusted me totally. I was able to observe all his activities. What is more, until now nobody has been in a position to talk about the “private Fidel,” his women, his mistresses, his siblings, or his numerous offspring (he has at least nine children, products of various liaisons; almost all are boys). It is high time the veil is lifted on what Fidel Castro and the Cuban government have always treated as one of the country’s greatest state secrets: the Commander in Chief ’s family.