The Double Life of Fidel Castro (27 page)

That day, around five p.m., after parking in the garage, José Abrantes came into Fidel’s anteroom. I announced his arrival:
“iComandante
,
aquí está el ministro!”
(“Commander, the minister is here!”); nobody, not even his brother Raúl, went into Fidel’s office without being presented first. I closed the double door, then went to sit in my office (next to the anteroom) where the closed-circuit TV screens monitoring the garage, the elevator, and the corridors were found, as well as the cupboard housing the three locks that turned on the recording mikes hidden in a false ceiling in Fidel’s office. A moment later, the
Comandante
came back, opened the door again, and gave me this instruction:
“Sánchez, ¡no grabes!”
(“Sánchez, don’t record!”)

While the two men were talking privately, I attended to my work, reading that day’s
Granma
, tidying papers, jotting down Fidel’s latest activities in the
libreta.
The interview seemed to go on forever . . . one hour went by, then two. The strange thing was that Fidel did not ask me to bring him a
whiskycito
(a little whisky) or to offer a
cortadito
(a strong espresso) to his interlocutor, who usually drank it in abundance. Never before had the minister of the interior stayed so long in the office of the
Líder Máximo.
And so, as much out of curiosity as to kill the time, I put on the listening headphones and turned key no. 1 to hear what was being said on the other side of the wall.

And then I eavesdropped on a conversation I should never have heard.

Their conversation centered on a Cuban
lanchero
(someone who smuggles drugs by boat) living in the United States, apparently conducting business with the government. And what business! Very simply, a huge drug trafficking transaction was being carried out at the highest echelons of the state.

Abrantes asked for Fidel’s authorization to bring this trafficker temporarily to Cuba, as he wanted to have a week’s vacation in his native land, accompanied by his parents, in Santa María del Mar—a beach situated about twelve miles east of Havana where the water is turquoise and the sand as fine as flour. For this trip, explained Abrantes, the
lanchero
would pay seventy-five thousand dollars—which, at a time of economic recession, wouldn’t go amiss. . . . Fidel was all for it. But he expressed a concern: how could they ensure that the parents of the
lanchero
would keep the secret and not go and blab everywhere that they had spent a week near Havana with their son, who was supposed to live in the United States? The minister had the solution: all they had to do was make them believe their son was a Cuban intelligence officer who had infiltrated the United States and whose life would be gravely endangered if they did not keep his visit to Cuba absolutely secret. “Very well . . . ,” concluded Fidel, who gave his agreement. Finally, Abrantes suggested to the
Comandante
that Tony de la Guardia, an old hand at special missions as well as a hero of struggles for independence in the developing world, look after the logistics of the trip. There, too, the
Comandante
had no objection.

It was as if the sky had fallen in on me. Stunned, incredulous, paralyzed, I wished I had misheard or that I was dreaming, but alas it was true. In just a few seconds, my whole world and all my ideals had come crashing down. I realized that the man for whom I had long sacrificed my life, the
Líder
whom I worshipped like a god and who counted more in my eyes than my own family, was caught up in cocaine trafficking to such an extent that he was directing illegal operations like a real godfather. In a state of distress, I put the headphones back in their place and turned the key to switch off mike no. 1, suddenly feeling a sense of immense solitude.

Abrantes finally left the office and, as he crossed the threshold, I let nothing of my dismay slip. But from that moment on, I no longer saw Fidel Castro in the same way. However, I decided to keep this terrible state secret to myself and not talk of it to anyone, not even my wife. Try as I might to remain professional and to chase this revelation from my mind, the disappointment would not leave. My life was irredeemably changed—and it would be even more so less than a year later, when Fidel sacrificed the devoted Abrantes by sending him to prison in order to show the world that he himself knew nothing about this drug trafficking that would have ruined his reputation.

Meanwhile, the
Comandante
, with his talent for dissimulation, went back to work as if nothing was amiss. One has to understand his logic. For him, drug trafficking was above all a weapon of revolutionary struggle more than a means of making money. His reasoning was as follows: if the Yanks were stupid enough to use drugs that came from Colombia, not only was that not his problem—as long as his involvement was not discovered, that is—but, in addition, it served his revolutionary objectives in the sense that it corrupted and destabilized American society. Icing on the cake: it was a means of bringing in cash to finance subversion. And so, as cocaine trafficking increased in Latin America, the line between guerrilla war and trafficking drugs gradually blurred. What was true in Colombia was just as true in Cuba. For my part, I never managed to accept this twisted reasoning, an absolute contradiction of my revolutionary ethics.

The year 1989 began with a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution. For world communism, however, it was a dangerous year. In China, demonstrators prepared to defy the tanks on Tiananmen Square while in Europe, the Berlin wall was about to come down. As for the island of Cuba, now deprived of Soviet subsidies, it would undergo an unprecedented existential crisis: in July, at the end of a Stalinesque trial, the heroic general Arnaldo Ochoa was shot with three others, all judged guilty of having “tainted the Revolution” and “betrayed Fidel” because of drug trafficking that, allegedly, the Commander in Chief knew nothing about. The Ochoa Affair caused a real national trauma and took with it the last illusions of Castrism: in Cuba, life is divided into before and after 1989.

To understand the affair, one has to go back a little, to the time of the creation of the MC Department in 1986, when economic aid from Moscow was starting to dry up. Placed under the authority of MININT, in other words of Minister José Abrantes, and headed by Col. Tony de la Guardia, the
Departamento MC
had the precise aim of generating dollars with the aid of front companies based principally in Panama, Mexico, and Nicaragua—hence the joke that the meaningless acronym MC, which had no particular meaning and merely corresponded to a stupid, malevolent military alphabet naming system, actually stood for
Moneda Convertible
(Convertible Currency).

Heir of the Z Department, created at the start of the 1980s, the MC Department made use of anything that came to hand and traded in everything: tobacco, lobsters, and cigars smuggled into the United States, clothes and electric goods exported to Africa, artwork and antiques peddled in Spain, not to mention the diamonds and ivory brought from Africa and sold in Latin America or elsewhere. Some of the business was legal, some not, but the existence of the department itself was in no way secret. On the contrary, the official daily
Granma
had one day explained its mission in these terms: “Its purpose is to fight against the economic blockade—or embargo—of the United States that has been in operation since 1962 so as to have the means to procure products such as medical equipment, medication, computers, and so on.” What was mysterious, on the other hand, was its functioning, its financial channels, and its accounting. Run without transparency, disorganized, and constantly having to improvise, the MC Department had only one obligation: to get paid in hard currency by third parties, principally Panama, which had always been the first rear base of illicit Cuban commercial activities under the reign of Fidel Castro. It was inevitable that in those years and in that region, the path of the “bandits” of Departments Z/MC would cross those of Colombian drug traffickers, also in search of easy money. It was therefore not altogether a coincidence that the Department MC soon acquired another nickname, the “Marijuana and Cocaine Department”!

The Americans first became suspicious of Cuba in this regard back in the 1980s, due to the testimonies of deserters from the various Cuban espionage services; senior Panamanian government officials working closely with President Manuel Noriega;
*
and drug traffickers arrested in Florida, some of whom asserted that the Cuban government was linked to Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel. In the mid-1980s, articles published in the American press talked of the increase in drug trafficking in Cuba, which served as a transit route for the Colombian white powder, and the possibility that the drug traffickers were linked to the highest levels of Cuban power.

Sensing that a scandal was brewing and probably alerted by the intelligence agents infiltrated in the United States, the
Líder Máximo
decided to take action to nip any possible suspicion about him in the bud. To clear his name, Fidel used the official daily paper
Granma
to inform its readers that an inquiry had been opened in April. Then, like a seasoned chess player, he suddenly changed the direction of the game by carrying out what might be likened to a castling move. In a good position to know who the Cuban officials involved in drug trafficking were, on June 12 he arranged for the arrest of the twins Tony and Patricio de la Guardia of the MC Department; Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, recently returned from Angola; and nine other senior MININT officers and two from MINFAR. A second wave of arrests, several weeks later, included Minister of the Interior José Abrantes and, in the latter’s entourage, two generals and four colonels.

_______________

*
Found guilty in the United States in 1992 of drug trafficking and money laundering.

Three weeks later, the double trial of General Ochoa began. First, on June 25, the accused testified alone, in his uniform, before a “military honor court” on the fourth floor of MINFAR, where he was demoted to the rank of private in the presence of the whole general staff of forty-seven generals. Then, on June 30, the accused was presented to the “special military court,” accompanied by thirteen codefendants, all wearing civilian dress, this time on the ground floor of the building in the
Sala Universal
, where MINFAR’s screening room was transformed into a courtroom for the occasion. The entirety of the proceedings were christened
Causa no. 1/1989
; the trial against José Abrantes, which followed soon afterward, was called
Causa no. 2/1989
. The hasty trial against Ochoa lasted four days and will remain forever imprinted on Cubans’ collective memory as one of the greatest injustices of the endless reign of Fidel Castro Ruz.

At the time, however, the government congratulated itself in the official press and on the radio for having brought this case to justice, sending out the message that the whole world was watching in amazement and that only a true, strong, unshakable, and deep Revolution was capable of such unusual and extraordinary proof of courage and morality. The Machiavellian Fidel, while declaring himself “appalled” by what he pretended to have discovered, even claimed that “the most honest imaginable political and judicial process” was under way.

Obviously, the reality was completely different. Comfortably installed in Raúl’s office on the fourth floor of MINFAR, Fidel Castro and his brother followed the live proceedings of
Causa no. 1
and
Causa no. 2
on the closed-circuit TV screens. Both trials were filmed—which is why one can today see large sections of them on YouTube—and broadcast to every Cuban home, though not live: the government wanted to be able to censor anything that might prove embarrassing.

Fidel even had the means to alert the president of the court discreetly, via a warning light, whenever he thought a session should be interrupted. I saw all that with my own eyes as I was there, either in front of the open door of Raúl’s office or inside the room. Whenever the court went into recess, Raúl gave me the following order: “Tell the head of the escort that the trial
compañeros
will be coming up at any moment.” Indeed, less than five minutes later, the president of the court, the public prosecutor, and the jury members would swarm out onto the fourth floor of the ministry to take their instructions from Fidel, who, as usual, organized and ordered everything, absolutely everything. Later, the
Comandante
twice acknowledged in public that at the time he had been in contact with the members of the court, but anxious to keep the powers separate, he had refrained from influencing them! When one knows Fidel’s mode of functioning, such a declaration does not stand up for a single second but is, rather, evidence of the blackest humor.

During
Causa no. 1
and
Causa no. 2
the prosecutors easily demonstrated the accused’s involvement in drug trafficking— which had, indeed, been proven. True, I might have been shocked by the fact that Ochoa, that hero of the Cuban Revolution, had agreed to take part in drug trafficking. But what could he do when the head of state himself was behind this trafficking, just as he presided over the other smuggling operations—tobacco, electrical goods, ivory, and so on? According to his logic, of course, it was all for the good of the Revolution!

At one point, the prosecution dwelled specifically on the issue of a hangar situated at an airport in Varadero where drugs and other contraband material were stocked en route for the United States.

That immediately rang a bell. I remembered having accompanied Fidel, Abrantes, Tony de la Guardia, and several other officers from Department MC to this hangar two years earlier. Having left the
palacio
in a convoy of three cars a good hour earlier, we had arrived at this building located on the right side of the Pan-American route. I had stayed outside while Abrantes and Tony de la Guardia had shown Fidel a supposed stock of bottles of rum and cigars destined for export. Then, having spent just a quarter of an hour there, we had turned around and gone back to the presidential palace.