The Double Life of Fidel Castro (18 page)

Raúl had met Vilma Espín in the guerrilla movement, when she was twenty-seven. One of the first militant anti-Batistas, this courageous, pretty young woman set her sights on this man, a year younger than her. After the Triumph of the Revolution, they married. Fidel’s sister-in-law then became one of the most emblematic female figures of the revolution, alongside Celia Sánchez, the aide-de-camp and mistress of the
Comandante
. Propelled to the head of the
Federación de mujeres cubanas
*
in 1960, she took on the role of “first lady” when Fidel judged it necessary to be seen in public with a woman beside him.

Smiling, likable, radiant, Vilma carried out her mission perfectly. But appearances are deceptive: she, too, had a double personality. During the trial of General Ochoa in 1989—with whom Raúl and she had been close friends—it was she who, before the Council of State over which she presided, had pronounced in a firm voice the terrible words: “Let the sentence be carried out!” The sentence was the death penalty.

In the interests of truth, I must also say that in private Vilma was an excellent mother, devoted to her husband, attentive and available to her four children: Deborah, Mariela, Alejandro, and Nilsita. Unlike the offspring of Fidel and Dalia, isolated from public life, Raúl’s children (with the exception of the youngest) all became involved in politics. Maybe they will play a leading role after the deaths of their father and uncle.

_______________

*
Federation of Cuban Women, a mass organization that comprises some four million members.

Adviser to the Ministry of Education, Deborah, born in 1960, was married for a long time to a pivotal establishment figure, Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas. Father of her two children and member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, this brigadier was the executive president of the GAESA holding company, which controlled most of the Cuban economy. In that connection, he knew better than anyone the secrets of the government’s financial packages. According to Café Fuerte, he is now divorced, at Deborah’s request, because of his repeated infidelity. I do not know if it’s true. Their son Raúl Guillermo, nicknamed Raulito (“little Raúl”), is the current personal bodyguard of his grandfather. Born in 1984 and nicknamed El Cangrejo (the Crab) because of a malformed finger, he occupies the same position with Raúl as I did with Fidel—he, at least, does not in theory run the risk of being thrown into prison as I was.

Mariela, the second daughter, is more flamboyant than her elder sister. Born in 1961, she has for many years been the head of the National Center for Sexual Education. A militant in favor of gay marriage, this sexologist with progressive ideas has long taken part in international conferences on homosexual rights, which gives her a worldwide platform. “She introduced perestroika in my family,” Raúl joked one day about his daughter and her bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle. In February 2013, Mariela Castro became a member of parliament, doubtless desirous of playing a role in “post-Raúl” Cuba.

Mariela has always been immersed in politics. Before marrying the photographer and Italian businessman Paolo Titolo, she was married to Juan Gutiérrez Fischmann, with whom she had a daughter. I have already mentioned him: founding member of the armed Chilean group FPMR, he settled in Cuba after Pinochet’s coup d’etat in 1973. Militarily trained at Punto Cero de Guanabo, he was one of the architects of the famous assassination attempt on General Pinochet in 1986. He was also one of the main people accused in the 1991 fatal attack against the Chilean senator Jaime Guzmán, who supported Pinochet. Despite the denials of the government, Gutiérrez Fischmann, who remains officially untraceable, is living peacefully in Cuba.

After Deborah and Mariela came Alejandro—who shares the name of one of Fidel and Dalia’s five sons. Born in 1964, Alejandro is a colonel in MININT (as previously mentioned, MININT is an abbreviation for the Department of Interior). In his capacity as head of coordination of intelligence between the two most important ministries in the country, MINFAR (Ministry of Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces ) and MININT, Alejandro is one of the closest advisers of his father, Raúl. In other words he has full access to all the secrets held by the various Cuban espionage services.

I remember him as a hyperactive kid. He was ten years old when I went to work for Fidel, and we members of the escort nicknamed him El Loquito (the Little Madman) because he played noisily on the patio of the house where Raúl’s family then lived, hurtling ahead without warning on roller skates, bike, or electric motorbike, narrowly missing knocking over whoever passed by. Afterward, I lost sight of him. He resurfaced in the mid-1980s when we learned that he had joined the Cuban military expedition that had gone to fight in Angola. He later returned from Africa with an eye missing, after an accident that had occurred outside the combat zone, earning him the nickname El Tuerto, the One-Eyed Man.

And then, turning on my television at home in Miami one day in November 2012, who should appear on the screen? The One-Eyed Man! For his first steps onto the world stage, this international relations graduate had gone to Moscow to introduce the Russian edition of his book (
The Reign of Terror
), an indictment of the United States. Interviewed in Spanish by a Russian TV channel, it cannot exactly be said that he lit up the screen with his monotonous delivery and pronounced lisp. His lack of charisma and eloquence are as obvious as his father’s—but that does not mean he might not go far. Col. Alejandro Castro Espín has the reputation of focusing on compromising cases that can get rid of anyone who gets in his way; inflexible, he apparently had the partner of his own sister, Nilsita, arrested on corruption charges.

I am curious to know whether Alejandro uses the same techniques as his uncle Fidel to manipulate and blackmail his enemies or put them into compromising positions: telephone bugs and secret video recordings that capture the sexual frolics of foreign diplomats in Havanan hotels. Based upon my knowledge of how the Castro regime functions, I imagine he does.

Fidel recorded everything. On the third floor of the
Palacio de la Revolución
, in a small area next to his office, was a set of professional recording equipment comparable to that seen in the 2006 film
The Lives of Others
, with two tape decks and two sets of headphones. Unless directed otherwise, the order was to start the tapes rolling each time Fidel had a private meeting with someone, whether Cuban or foreigner, and whether politician, minister, or general. Stenographers, their eyes riveted on the needle of the volume unit meter, controlled the volume and juggled tape decks when a ribbon got to the end of the reel. From the escorts’ premises—also adjoining Fidel’s office—I was the one responsible for switching the three hidden microphones on and off, by means of three keys that fitted into three locks hidden in a little cupboard that was also locked. It was also to me that Fidel would murmur,
“Sánchez, no grabes”
(“Don’t record, Sánchez”), if he judged it pointless to do so. In that case, I would not turn any keys and refrained from mobilizing the stenography service. It must be added that the room of the Council of Ministers, situated on the other side of the corridor less than ten yards from Fidel’s office, was itself stuffed with microphones, allowing the meetings of the Communist Party politburo to be immortalized.

Starting from the basis that everything that was said could be used and turned against his interlocutor, these recordings were methodically converted into cassettes or, from the 1980s on, CDs, and then carefully archived. Even years later, they could be used to confront someone with his contradictions. The same principle applied to all Fidel’s important telephone conversations; he could eventually use them to put pressure on or compromise his interlocutor.

True, most of these sound documents sat permanently in the archives and would never be made public, perhaps leading to the conclusion that it is all the fruit of my imagination. But fortunately—if I dare put it like that—several years after I left, Fidel Castro himself proved that I am inventing nothing. In 2002, he could not resist the temptation to make public the phone conversation he had just had with the then Mexican president, the conservative Vicente Fox. It was the day before a United Nations summit organized in Monterrey in Mexico and the head of state, with astounding naïveté and almost obscene clumsiness, telephoned Fidel to suggest to him, with heavy insistence, that he make his visit to Mexico, planned for the day after next, as short as possible—so as not to disturb the other participants. Icing on the cake: Fox asked him to abstain from any statements likely to displease George W. Bush, who was on the point of invading Iraq.

As I have explained, opposing Fidel head on is the last thing one should do if one wants to obtain any kind of result with him—and the first, if one wants to antagonize him. Which is exactly what poor Fox, whose understanding of psychology seemed minimal, to say the least, did. Stung to the quick, Fidel then decided to broadcast the whole of their sixteen-minute telephone conversation: from the next day, it was played in a loop on Latin American television and on YouTube, where it is still available. The left-wing press castigated Fox with relish, describing him as a “lackey of Washington.” In truth, that was all he was: his words were those of a servile creature submissive to the United States, giving him a disastrous image in that region of the world, where anti-Americanism was never far from the surface. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Fidel had “assassinated” Fox with ridicule. As far as I know, it is the only time such a recording, carried out in the room adjoining his office, had been brought to public knowledge. And yet there are thousands of them.

As much as possible, Fidel Castro also recorded his private conversations when he went abroad. I well remember our trip to Ecuador in August 1988, on the occasion of the inauguration of Rodrigo Borja, the new social democrat president of this Andean country known for its political instability. In Quito, capital of the Altiplano situated at an altitude of 2,800 meters, Fidel first went to visit his friend Oswaldo Guayasamín, a famous contemporary Ecuadorean artist whose work, inspired by American Indian art, deals with poverty, oppression, and racism. And Fidel, of whom he has painted numerous portraits. That day, the
Comandante
had taken an hour of his time to pose beside the easel of the man he called
mi hermano
(my brother), a phrase reserved for his few real, intimate friends such as Gabriel García Márquez. Later, Guayasamín came to Havana to finish the portrait that had been started in the painter’s fabulous modern house. I remember something he said on that occasion: “Fidel must show his hands because Fidel’s hands talk.”

The other memorable moment of that trip was an extraordinary episode during the presidential inauguration ceremony at the National Congress. Just as the exiting right-wing president, the very controversial León Febres Cordero, who was an ally of Washington, began his speech, the members of parliament started shouting, “Corrupt! Thief ! Son of a bitch!,” in an indescribable hullaballoo. Fidel’s eyes widened and his face wore an expression of astonishment that I had never seen before. . . . The performance extended as far as the street, under the spotlessly blue sky of the Altiplano, where demonstrators were also shouting down the ex-president. Given the surrounding tension, we decided to evacuate the
Comandante
through a hidden side door.

Finally, to return to the subject of recordings, Fidel took advantage of this trip to Quito to meet with the president of Costa Rica Óscar Arias, who was also there at that time, having recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1987 for his mediation in the conflicts in Central America. We went to the house that had been put at his disposition by the Ecuadorian authorities, the whole of Fidel’s escort, except me, staying outside. The two heads of state then went into a living room to embark on a discussion about Central America, for Arias was counting on Castro’s support to finalize the ongoing peace process, particularly in Nicaragua.

The first thing Arias told him was that he wanted the conversation to remain private—but I took my instructions from Fidel, not from the Costa Rican president. I therefore followed the wishes of
El Jefe
and started the Sanyo mini-recorder, which I took everywhere with me, as usual. I do not know why or how but, before the interview had even begun, the recorder hidden in my shirt pocket suddenly made a clicking noise! Arias heard it and politely requested Fidel to show me the exit; they then remained alone in private discussion. However, I had noticed that there was another door, situated at the back of the living room. So I tiptoed around via the corridor and discreetly placed the recorder, hidden in a briefcase, on a table near that back door, managing to record the whole conversation—even if the quality was very bad. Rather than reproaching me for my zealousness, Fidel was enthusiastic about getting a sound recording of his meeting; on our return to Havana, he asked the technical department of the secret police, the
Técnica
, to “clean” the tape to get rid of the ambient noise and improve the general sound quality.