Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Giorgi Kornienko, a high-ranking Soviet official who worked in the Central Committee’s Information Department at the time, also recalled that the Soviets became enthusiastic about Cuba only
after
Castro’s victory. “I remember in January 1959, when Castro proclaimed a new regime,” Kornienko said. “Khrushchev asked the department: ‘What kind of guys are these? Who are they?’ Nobody knew how to answer his question ... not the Intelligence Services, not the Foreign Relations Ministry, not the International Department of the Central Committee. We didn’t know who these guys in Havana were. We sent a telegram to our office abroad, later to Intelligence and others. A few days later, we received a telegram from one of the Latin American capitals—I think Mexico—with some information about Castro and his people. And there was information to the effect that,
if not Fidel himself, maybe Raúl ... very possibly Che ... and some other people close to Fidel had Marxist points of view. I was present when this information was given to Khrushchev. ‘If it’s really like this,’ he said, ‘if these Cubans are Marxists and if they develop some sort of socialist movement there in Cuba, it would be fantastic! It would be the first place in the Western Hemisphere with a socialist or prosocialist government. That would be very good, very good for the socialist cause!’”
But other evidence indicates that the Kremlin did not suddenly “discover” Cuba after reading news reports of the revolution. Contacts between the exiled PSP leadership and the Kremlin had been maintained throughout the two-year civil war, and a Soviet journalist and a trade union delegation had visited Havana in January 1959. Moscow’s quick decision to recognize the new regime; the arrival of high-level PSP officials in Moscow so soon after Batista’s downfall; the contacts between Cuban Communist officials and Fidel, Raúl, and Che in the sierra—not to mention their prior contacts in Mexico with Soviet officials such as Yuri Paporov and Nikolai Leonov, both of whom would soon reemerge as Soviet emissaries to Cuba—all suggest a Soviet interest in Cuba’s revolution
prior to
the rebel victory. The Kremlin’s policy on Cuba seem to have been ratcheted up sometime in mid-1958, after the defeat of the army offensive in the Sierra Maestra had increased the rebels’ prospects of victory.
That said, there was certainly lingering skepticism about Castro’s revolution in the Kremlin, for what had happened in Cuba was not in the Soviet playbook. The revolution was not the result of PSP strategy; the Party was not in control; Fidel Castro was still an unknown quantity. Even if signs were promising—Fidel had allowed the Party to play a role, and the men closest to him (Che and Raúl) were Marxists—the jury was still out.
Meanwhile, there were good reasons for the foot-dragging in Havana over Alexiev’s visa. It was not an opportune time to authorize an eyebrow-raising “journalist’s” visa to a known Soviet intelligence official. More to the point, the Cuban chancellery was still (although not for much longer) in the hands of Roberto Agramonte, an anticommunist
ortodoxo
, who would hardly have viewed such a request with equanimity. An abrupt loss of faith in Fidel’s political allegiances by his allies, many of whom still believed he was merely biding his time before moving against the scheming, opportunistic Reds, might provoke a violent schism he could not contain.
Even more important, Fidel needed breathing space from the potentially most dangerous quarter of all—the United States. Of necessity, his first foreign-policy objective had to be to secure some sort of modus vivendi with Washington. Che, by contrast, wanted nothing to do with the United States
and had already begun to prepare for what he saw as an inevitable showdown with Washington. In this he was seconded by Raúl. Both favored a sharp radicalization in revolutionary policy, a final consolidation of power, and a break with the West.
On April 15, Fidel flew to Washington to serve as the keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was accompanied by a large entourage that included his most conservative, pro-American government economic ministers and financial advisers. The radicals, Che and Raúl, were left behind. In spite of Fidel’s repeated insistence that he was not going to ask Washington for economic aid in the time-honored tradition of new Latin heads of state, his traveling companions believed it was one of the primary motives of his trip. “Let
them
bring it up,” Fidel said, “and then we’ll see.”
Dressed in his
guerrillero
’s fatigues, Fidel gave a well-received speech at the National Press Club in Washington and had an amicable lunch with the acting secretary of state, Christian Herter. (John Foster Dulles, who had been diagnosed with cancer, resigned the day Fidel arrived.) He spoke before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, appeared on
Meet the Press
, and paid homage at the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials.
Fidel was on his best behavior and bent over backward to dispel Americans’ fears, reaffirming his commitment to foreign investment in Cuba and insisting that his agrarian reform law would affect only neglected or unused lands. He urged more American tourism and expressed his hope that the United States, the biggest buyer of Cuba’s sugar, would increase the sugar quota—the amount of sugar Cuba was legally permitted to export to the United States in any given year. Cuba would, of course, honor its mutual defense treaty with the United States and continue to allow the U.S. Navy to use the Guantánamo base—and while it might come as a surprise to those in the know back in Havana, he was also opposed to Communism and in favor of a free press.
*
Everywhere he went, Fidel was followed by reporters. With his beard and uniform, he was an exotic departure from the politicos of the day, and his habit of going on spontaneous walkabouts to meet with ordinary citizens added to his charisma. He loved the attention, although in private meetings his ego took a bruising. The powerful figures he met with were patronizing, brimming with unwanted advice and stern warnings, as if he were an intemperate adolescent who, by dint of luck, had found himself in
a position of power better suited to someone older and wiser. Repeatedly he found himself besieged by questions about his “purge trials” and executions, and probed about a timetable for elections. On both of these issues, he stood firm. The “people,” he said, demanded the tribunals and punishment of war criminals. As for elections, he thought that more time, perhaps four years, would be needed before Cuba was ready.
President Eisenhower arranged to be out of town during Fidel’s stay, going off to Georgia for a golfing holiday and leaving Vice President Richard Nixon to stand in for him. They had a private talk in the Capitol building that lasted two and a half hours. Afterward, both men were polite in public; but the talk had not gone well, and each emerged with a negative impression of the other. As Nixon later told Eisenhower, Castro either was a Communist himself or he was a dupe, “incredibly naive” about the Communist influence in his government, an appraisal that was to have serious consequences for U.S.-Cuban relations.
If Fidel had hoped for some sign of a more enlightened American policy toward Cuba, he was disappointed. If he had entertained genuine hopes of being offered some American economic aid, Nixon had dashed them by announcing that none would be forthcoming. Tactlessly, he had advised Fidel to apply the policies of Puerto Rico’s governor, who had encouraged private investment in his territory to improve economic conditions there. The notion that Cuba might benefit from the lessons of Puerto Rico, a small and heavily subsidized U.S. territory, was insulting, and Fidel had reacted by telling Nixon that the days of the Platt Amendment, when the United States had the right to intervene in Cuba, were over. Fidel must have come away from the meeting convinced that the Americans would be satisfied only if he toed their line, at the expense of Cuba’s sovereignty.
On April 21, after giving a talk at Princeton, Fidel agreed to a meeting with a CIA official in New York who had asked Rufo López Fresquet to act as go-between. They spoke in private for more than three hours. The CIA man, Gerry Droller, a German-American émigré who used the alias Frank Bender, told López Fresquet afterward that he was convinced Castro was an anticommunist and that they had agreed to exchange information about Communist activities in Cuba. López Fresquet was to be their liaison.
*
Most likely, Fidel used the meeting to give the CIA and his traveling companions the impression that he was biding his time until the Communists stuck their heads out far enough to be lopped off. Indeed, he spoke to one of his aides of the need to stop the executions and the Communist infiltration of the government, and to another of his plans to send Che on a long trip abroad.
In Boston, a few days after the meeting with “Mr. Bender,” López Fresquet was present when Fidel received a phone call from Raúl, who told his brother there was talk back home that he was selling out to the Yankees. Fidel reacted indignantly, and, if one considers the battering he was taking in defending himself to a skeptical American audience, Raúl’s words must have added insult to injury. Their exchange was followed by a strange encounter between the brothers a few days later. Fidel had accepted an invitation to visit with President Kubitschek of Brazil on his way to attend an economic conference in Buenos Aires sponsored by the OAS. On April 27, en route to Brazil, Fidel’s plane made a refueling stop in Houston, where Raúl and some aides met him. After a brief closed-door meeting at the airport, Raúl flew back to Havana, while Fidel proceeded on his journey south.
A number of possible reasons for the meeting have been put forward. “It has been said that the beardless commander of the army, Raúl, adjured his elder brother to maintain his revolutionary integrity,” Hugh Thomas wrote. “It seems equally probable that the main discussion was about the theme of the speeches that Raúl Castro and Guevara would make on May 1 in Cuba.” Castro’s biographer, Tad Szulc, on the other hand, linked the meeting to some embarrassing incidents that appeared to verify the American intelligence analysts’ early warnings about official complicity in armed plots against Cuba’s neighbors. On April 18, the military commander of Pinar del Río, where most of the foreign revolutionaries were being trained, had made a display of rounding up more than 100 Nicaraguan guerrilla trainees and seizing their arms. He then made a statement saying that Fidel had forbidden such expeditions from Cuban soil. That same day in Havana, a Panamanian named Ruben Miro announced that
his
group planned to invade Panama within a month. A few days later, while Fidel was in Boston, Panamanian authorities captured three armed rebels on the coast, two of whom were Cuban. According to Manuel Piñeiro, this expedition was
por la libre
, a freelance venture that did not have prior government approval. But, approved or not, these events seriously threatened Fidel’s efforts to construct a new public image in the United States. Immediately after his stop in Houston, while flying over Cuba’s airspace, he made a radio broadcast
condemning the Cubans involved as “irresponsible” and repeating that his government did not “export revolution.”
Away from the island, Fidel could deny activity against other governments and attribute the involvement of Cubans to the revolutionary euphoria of the time. In fact, the dragnet of the Nicaraguans seems to have been a diversionary maneuver aimed at creating the impression that, far from supporting such activities, Cuba was taking steps to prevent them. But, in addition to the Nicaraguans, an anti-Trujillo Dominican rebel group was being trained in Cuba, as were some Haitians and several other nationalities.
The day after Raúl and Fidel met in Houston, even Che delivered a disclaimer about the Panamanian excursion. “The revolution must be honest at all costs,” he said in a televised interview on the evening of April 28, “and I must regretfully admit that Cubans participated in it. What we have to say is that those Cubans left without our permission, without our authorization, without our auspices. ... We are exporters of the revolutionary idea, but we do not try to be exporters of revolutions. The revolution will be fought by the people in the place where the [offending] government presides, with the people who must suffer that government. We are only the example, the rest is the work of the people.”
As usual, Che’s words were carefully scrutinized by the political officers at the American embassy. And, as usual, although Che tried to be tactful, his honesty came through in the ways he dodged the tougher questions, most of which probed the issue of his political beliefs. To the first question—was he a Communist?—Che replied that he “didn’t feel such a question had to be answered directly” by someone who was in public life. “The facts speak for themselves,” he said. “Our way of thinking is clear, our behavior is transparent. The fact that I am not a Communist affiliated with the Communist Party, as I am not, has no importance. We are accused of being Communists for what we do, not for what we are or what we say. ... If you believe that what we do is Communism, then we are Communists. If you ask me if I am affiliated with the Communist Party or the Popular Socialist Party, as it is called here, then I have to say that I am not.”
Not surprisingly, the embassy’s conclusions, sent to Washington in a confidential dispatch on May 5, were: “Statements by Ernesto ‘Che’
GUEVARA
in Television Appearance Show Communist Orientation, anti-Americanism.”
Immediately after his TV interview, Che rushed off for a meeting with Raúl, who had just returned from Houston. In view of what happened next, it seems clear that one of the main discussion points of the Castro brothers had been a decision by Fidel to halt the firing squads. Since January, an estimated 550 executions had taken place in Cuba, and the issue had been a major source of irritation for Fidel during his trip to the United States. He
felt he needed to make a gesture of appeasement and earn some credit from the Americans for doing so. Che strongly opposed the decision but obeyed Fidel’s order.