The Double Life of Fidel Castro (16 page)

One of the characteristics of the 1980s was the proliferation of international events, from the boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow (1980) to the fall of the Berlin wall (1989), along with the Falklands war (1982); the end of dictatorships in Argentina (1983), Brazil (1984), and Uruguay (1986); and the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale (1987–1988) during the Angola war, which resulted in Cuba blocking the advance of the South African army.

The event that had the most effect on me personally was the sudden death of Leonid Brezhnev, who had presided over the USSR since 1964 and who succumbed to a heart attack on November 10, 1982.

Several days after having received news of the death, we took off for Moscow to attend the funeral of this leader of a “brother country,” leaving our tropical heat for the freezing cold of the banks of the Moskva. However, before reaching the Soviet Union on board the presidential Ilyushin-62 with its colors of the airline company Cubana de Aviación, our plane made a technical stopover at Shannon Airport in Ireland. As soon as it came to a halt, our plane was immediately surrounded by twenty or so soldiers who mounted guard, rifles slung over their shoulders. We were watching this spectacle from the windows of the plane when Fidel suddenly decided to disembark to enjoy an Irish coffee in the transit zone. It was sheer bravado: for the
Comandante
, it was a way of saying that nothing could stop him from making an incursion into enemy territory— on this occasion, that of Ireland, next door to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, an indefatigable ally of Ronald Reagan.

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Led by Jonas Savimbi and financed by the United States and South Africa, UNITA fought the Marxist-Leninist government of the People’s Republic of Angola, supported by the USSR and Cuba. Like the conflicts of Central America during the same period, the Angolan civil war from 1975 to 1992 was one of the main theaters of the armed conflict of the cold war.

And so, our small delegation went off in search of Irish coffee! There were eight of us: Fidel Castro, the interpreter Juanita Vera, the aide-de-camp Pepín Naranjo, the head of the escort Domingo Mainet, the Minister of the Interior Ramiro Valdés, the doctor Eugenio Selman, and two bodyguards. For me, this expedition constituted a dangerous moment because, while I always had to be armed when I accompanied Fidel, here that was strictly forbidden. If the police had found out that one of us was carrying a weapon, the discovery would have provoked a serious diplomatic incident.

In the Jetway leading from the plane, Valdés turned to me to ask me if I was indeed armed. I replied by opening my long winter coat, in which I had just pierced a hole through the pocket and the lining. In my left hand I held a mini Uzi, the smallest pistol machine gun produced by the Israeli manufacturers, with its diabolical firing rate: twelve hundred shots a minute! At the end of the Jetway we turned left, crossing the shopping zone, and sat down next to Irish passengers who were astonished to see Fidel, instantly recognizable with his height, his beard, and his military uniform. We just had time to order and swallow our hot drinks before we returned to the cabin of the Ilyushin. Fidel Castro’s only visit in proximity of Great Britain had lasted less than ten minutes!

After filling up with fuel, we took off again, flying over a Europe that was split into two by the cold war, east and west. Five hours later, the plane landed in the drab gloom of the grieving capital of the USSR. It was so cold that the personnel of the Cuban embassy went off to buy me fur boots to replace the ones I had on, unsuitable for the climate. A Spanish-speaking chauffeur from the Russian security service operated as guide and interpreter. Back at the embassy, this colleague from the KGB watched me as I put on my new boots and then suddenly blurted out: “They’re so expensive that even a doctor can’t afford to buy them. . . .” He went on: “In our country, a doctor earns much less than a mechanic. So there are lots of doctors and engineers who prefer to work in a factory.” At the time, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Seeing my perplexity, he continued: “Here, it’s better to have a university degree if you want to get a job as a skilled manual worker.” With a friendly smile I replied, “So if all the engineers want to become workers, who are the engineers?” I began asking myself questions. . . .

Later, we went to drop off our luggage at the hotel, then rejoined the
Comandante
in Lenin Hills (today called Sparrow Hills), where the Soviets always put a dacha (a country house) at Fidel’s disposition. In the USSR, the KGB took on most of the responsibility for Fidel’s security, making my workload a little less intense.

The following day we went to the House of the Trade Unions, where the embalmed body of Leonid Brezhnev was displayed for three days on a red bier decorated with flowers, numerous wreaths, and the countless medals of the deceased leader. Musicians wearing black played Rachmaninoff without a break. After the last homage of ordinary Muscovites came those of Soviet dignitaries and statesmen from all over the world. I recognized Indira Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, and Yasser Arafat, as well as the Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski and all the leaders of the other Soviet bloc countries. I do not believe Fidel was particularly affected by the death of the austere Brezhnev, even if he gave the opposite impression. I think he had much more natural affinity with the jovial Nikita Khrushchev—but that was not the essential point. The mutual alliance of our two countries was unconditional; for Moscow, Cuba was a vital element in the East-West balancing act, both because it was the sole communist ally in the Western world and because it was situated less than 125 miles from the American coast. And for Havana, Soviet military and economic assistance was, quite simply, vital: without it, Cuba would probably not have withstood American pressure for so long.

The moment arrived when the funeral cortege crossed the capital for the burial in Red Square. Yuri Andropov, former boss of the KGB and new master of the Kremlin, gave the eulogy. After the ceremony, I returned to the hotel with the chauffeurs of the Russian security services; no sooner had we got to our destination than the latter rushed to make purchases in the shop next to the lobby, theoretically reserved for foreign visitors, stocking up on deodorant, toothpaste, and soap manufactured in the countries of Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance that united the countries of the Soviet bloc: the USSR, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Cuba, Vietnam, and Mongolia. “You have to take advantage when there are goods for sale,” they explained to me, “because the only time shops have merchandise is when foreign delegations are visiting Moscow.”

The poverty in the USSR jumped out at you, particularly when you left Moscow for the countryside, where the peasants were dressed in clothes that resembled those worn at the time of the Second World War. In the capital, shortages were worse than in Havana, and yet the Soviet model for constructing a socialist state was supposed to be the most advanced. Somewhere deep down, the shadow of a political doubt took hold in my mind. Was the communist system really more efficient than that of capitalism? If that was where the Soviets had got to after sixtyfive years of revolution, was following their example truly a good idea? It was a tiny, elusive doubt and I immediately chased it from my mind to plunge back into action, in service of Fidel and the revolution.

After Brezhnev’s funeral, a period in which we took many trips to Moscow began—because Soviet dignitaries started dying, one after the other. The brilliant Yuri Andropov who headed the KGB for eighteen years died in 1984 at the age of seventy, after just fifteen months at the Kremlin. The reign of his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, already ill during his term of office, was even briefer—just thirteen months! The old apparatchik died in 1985, at the age of seventy-six. The sprightly fifty-four-year-old reformer Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded him: this protégé of Andropov then launched his famous policy of glasnost (transparency) and of perestroika (economic reconstruction)—of which Fidel soon expressed all his contempt by describing it as “another man’s woman.”

During the winter of 1986 we were back in Moscow, and Fidel was trying despite everything to forge links with Gorbachev, when terrible news flashed onto the news ticker of the press agencies: the previous evening, on February 28, 1986, the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme had been assassinated in a street in Stockholm. At exactly 11:21 p.m., Palme came out of a cinema in the capital with a woman. Two shots were fired into his back as the couple were walking back to his home; one hour later, Swedish doctors pronounced him officially dead. The man who fired the shots would never be found and Palme’s murder remains a mystery today. At any rate, the entire world found out that in the peaceful Scandinavian democracy, the head of the government was in the habit of walking about without any security presence whatever. . . .

Fidel Castro was thunderstruck by the news of the death of his ally. The Swedish leader—simultaneously socialist, third world–ist, and anti-imperialist—had openly demonstrated his support for the Cuban Revolution and as far back as 1972 Palme had provoked the anger of Washington and a breaking off of diplomatic relations with the United States for a year because of his participation, in his capacity as prime minister, in a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Even worse, on the radio he had compared the American bombing of Hanoi with that of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and to the massacre of the Jews at Treblinka by the Nazis. Then, in 1975, the daring Swede was the first head of state of a Western country to go on an official visit to Cuba, where Fidel Castro had given him a triumphal welcome in Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in the country. There, the two men had celebrated the national day of July 26 together.

Just a few hours after the announcement of Palme’s death, Fidel expressed the desire to attend the funeral of the Swedish prime minister. Over the following days, we had to exploit every means we could think of to remove the idea from his head, the subject of countless discussions between Fidel’s private secretary Chomy, who had been alongside the guerrilla fighter in the Sierra Maestra; the aide-de-camp Pepín Naranjo; Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, friend of Fidel and a diplomat who played a decisive role in Cuba’s relations with the Soviet bloc; and myself. We were all agreed: from the point of view of security, Fidel’s presence in Stockholm was inadvisable. Indeed, we did not know at the time—and still do not know today—the killer’s identity and motivation. Who knew if those who had ordered Palme’s assassination did not also want to make an attempt on Fidel’s life? In the end, the
Comandante
came over to our point of view and chose Rodríguez to represent him in Sweden.

“Sánchez will go with you to take care of your security,” he added. Fidel trusted me, and he was right to do so: taking advantage of a trip abroad to defect would not have entered my mind. At the time, I was perfectly happy in my work in service of Fidel and also impatient to rejoin my family in Havana after each mission away.

And so, the diplomat Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and I took off for Stockholm, via Copenhagen. Once at the Cuban embassy, I realized again to what extent being Fidel’s bodyguard conferred a special status. The ambassador asked my opinion on numerous subjects, as though he was talking to Fidel himself . . . and I have to admit, it was rather nice. On the other hand, the embassy employee who served us an aperitif was not quite as considerate! When she asked me what alcoholic drink I would like, I replied that I never drank. The ambassador insisted, however, and so I finally ordered a Napoleon brandy, inspired by the example of Fidel, who liked that spirit as well as whisky. The domestic servant lectured me in public: “Brandy is not an aperitif, it’s an after-dinner liqueur.” Stung to the quick, I swallowed my annoyance and replied like a shot, in a tone of humor: “You know what? When etiquette was invented, they forgot to ask my opinion. That’s a shame, because with brandy, I drink it before, during, and after meals, you understand?” Two days later, as we were leaving Sweden, I discovered that the wife of the Cuban ambassador, who had taken my comment at face value, had slipped a bottle of brandy into my suitcase as a surprise.

I also remember that before we left, I wandered around the streets of Stockholm, retracing the steps of Olof Palme from the cinema exit to the place where the prime minister had been shot down a few days earlier. The pavement was spilling over with flowers.

The Swedish capital made a strong impression on me, not so much because of its prosperity but rather because of the simplicity of the human relations between the people and their leaders. While I was there I learned that most ministers took the bus, the metro, or the commuter train to go to work. And that Olof Palme himself had regularly cycled around the capital on his bike; he had not wanted to benefit from any privilege—not even that of a bodyguard—in the name of his freedom and of the equality of citizens before the law. I was bowled over. It was exactly the opposite of the Cuban system in which Fidel, protected twenty-four hours a day, never went anywhere without a strict minimum of ten
guardaespaldas
(bodyguards).