The Double Life of Fidel Castro (9 page)

The Commander liked to be surrounded by his personal guard on his birthday. The tradition was that he and his escort would meet in the house at the heart of Unit 160—the same one where, unknown to Dalia, Fidel held his secret trysts. A whole sheep would be roasted and the guests would eat with their hands, in the Arab tradition, and wash it all down with Algerian wine. Also in attendance would be José Pepín Naranjo, the aide-de-camp who never left Fidel’s side; Antonio Núñez Jiménez, the Commander’s geographer friend who was one of the few people to visit the island of Cayo Piedra; and Manuel Piñeiro, otherwise known as Barbarroja (Redbeard), the head of the American department of the Cuban espionage service, one of the key figures of the administration. Once, I also ran into Gen. Humberto Ortega: President Daniel Ortega’s brother was at that time the defense minister in the Nicaraguan revolutionary Sandinista government.

On his birthday, Fidel would unfailingly visit his brother Raúl and his friend the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, who sometimes came to join our feast at Unit 160. The celebration would generally go on for three or four hours and was always immortalized by a photo session, usually after Fidel had been given his presents. A lot of time was needed to open all these gifts, sent by Fidel Castro’s foreign counterparts or admirers. There would be hundreds, among them the cases of wine sent by the Algerian president, the cartons of figs from the Iraqi head of state Saddam Hussein, or the
pata negra
hams given by a group of Spanish admirers who knew the Commander’s penchant for the delicacy.

This moment of relaxation was always the opportunity for Fidel to recount several anecdotes and childhood memories to a captive audience that he knew would let him talk without interruption.
El Jefe
would also launch into such asides during our trips into the provinces or abroad, after dinner with a few select guests. From my continual presence at his side I was able to garner a detailed knowledge of his biography, including the period before I joined the escort in 1977.

Fidel Castro was an unrivaled raconteur. But repetitiousness was also one of his dominant characteristics; something of an obsessive, he would repeat the same stories year after year, which meant I got to know some of them as well as if I had experienced them myself. In retrospect, I can see that some of these recitals revealed aspects of his character, such as wiliness, absolute stubbornness, and his solidly anchored belief that the ends justified all and any means, including lying.

I don’t know how many times he told us the “two notebooks story,” but it must have been dozens. It occurred during the period when Fidel had left his family home and his native village of Birán (in the region of Holguín, in eastern Cuba) for the big town of Santiago de Cuba, about seventy-five miles away, where he attended the Jesuit Dolores school. The young Castro boarded with one Luis Hippolite Hibbert, who was his godfather and a friend of his father’s but also the Haitian consul in that town, the second largest in Cuba. The diplomat was a strict sort who, taking his role as godfather and guardian seriously, demanded that the boy earned his twenty centavos a week of pocket money—with which he went to the cinema or bought himself treats such as comics—by getting excellent grades at school.

One fine day, Fidel claimed to have lost the notebook in which grades were recorded so that the school would give him another one. From then on, he kept a duplicate set of accounts, presenting his guardian with a fake notebook in which he was top of the class with 10 out of 10 for every subject while also forging his guardian’s signature in the real notebook so that he could give it back to his grade teacher, duly initialed. It was a fail-safe system. The only snag—this was the key to the story, which a mocking Fidel loved to recount—was that at the end of the school year, Luis Hippolite Hibbert was determined to attend the prize-giving ceremony. Here was how
El Jefe
gave us the end of the story:

And so we put on our Sunday best and set off for the Dolores school, my godfather of course convinced that I was going to bag all the prizes. Imagine his astonishment, sitting on the bench beside me, when the school principal began summoning streams of pupils to the stage—everybody but me. And so it was, “History . . . So-and-so! Biology. . . . Such-and-such! Mathematics. . . . Thingamajig! Congratulations, well done, etc.” Throughout the whole ceremony, my godfather was bubbling over with impatience, determined to tear a strip off the principal there and then. He was livid and I had no idea how I was going to get out of the situation, feeling more and more ill at ease as the ceremony progressed. Suddenly, however, Eureka! I saw the solution. As I had missed a large chunk of the first term because of a minor operation on my appendix, I explained to him that it had been impossible to include me in the rankings because the first three months of my schooling could not be included in the calculations. This pirouette saved me in the nick of time—he believed me. But talk about a close shave!

Another favorite anecdote of Fidel’s related to his youthful years in Havana. Now a university student, he had found a prospective furnished room to rent with the money that his father, a rich landowner, sent him. So Fidel duly put on his best suit to go and meet his future landlords and then, to demonstrate his good intentions and his solvency, he made the lordly gesture of giving them two months’ rent in advance, on the spot. Having thus sweet-talked the landlords, he lived with them for four months without giving them another centavo, then did a disappearing act, only to repeat the whole thing somewhere else! Fidel would end his recount with a burst of laughter: “There must be people in Havana who are still looking for me. . . .”

The history of Fidel’s escort is as old as the Revolution. From 1956, when the guerrilla fighter took to the bush in the Sierra Maestra, a small group formed of members of the revolutionary army was assigned to his personal protection. After the Triumph of the Revolution, in other words once he had come down from the mountains and had arrived in Havana, Fidel replaced his guerrilla corps with militants of the Communist Popular Socialist Party (PSP) and socialist youth movement. That was when Alfredo Gamonal and José Abrantes came on the scene; the former died in a car accident not long afterward, in 1963, but the latter quickly made a name for himself as one of Fidel’s right-hand men. Fidel duly appointed him head of his escort and then, after the Bay of Pigs Affair in 1961, propelled him to the head of the
Departamento de Seguridad del Estado
, the State Security Department, otherwise known as G2, which oversaw all the branches of the secret police.

Abrantes was eventually replaced as head of the escort by Captain Chicho (real name Bienvenido Pérez), an old Sierra Maestra fighter. In the 1970s, Captain Chicho was himself replaced by Ricardo Leyva Castro, then by Pedro Rodríguez Vargas, and finally by Domingo Mainet, who headed Fidel’s praetorian guard when I joined it in 1977.

At that time, Fidel Castro’s personal protection unit was already a highly developed, perfectly trained organization. The “first ring” of protection was composed of a troop of thirty to forty elite soldiers, some of whom were also chauffeurs, who accompanied
El Comandante
night and day, wherever he may be: at home in Punto Cero, at the
Palacio de la Revolución
(where his office was), on his island of Cayo Piedra, in one of his other private residences outside the capital, or else during his official trips abroad.

The escort was divided into two teams (
grupo 1
and
grupo 2
) who worked alternate twenty-four-hour shifts every other day, taking over from each other at noon. To this program was added a half day of physical training, so that a typical week would consist of the following: physical training on Monday morning, then resumption of service at noon until the following day at noon, then a half day of rest until another physical training on Wednesday morning, before resuming service at noon, and so on. When Fidel went out into the country or overseas, the escort was obviously deployed twenty-four hours a day.

Fidel always traveled with a minimum of fourteen guards, spread over four vehicles, three of which were black automatic Mercedes. In vehicle 1: Fidel, his aide-de-camp Pepín Naranjo, one of his three personal chauffeurs (Jesús Castellanos Benítez, Ángel Figueroa Peraza, René Vizcaino), and the head of the escort Colonel Mainet or sometimes his personal doctor Eugenio Selman. Two other vehicles each carried a chauffeur and three bodyguards, all in military attire. The fourth car also had a chauffeur and three bodyguards, but these men were in civilian dress and riding in a manual Soviet Lada with a souped-up engine to increase its power. This vehicle followed about a hundred yards behind the three Mercedes so that the military presence around Fidel was not too overwhelming. When
El Comandante
left the capital to go out to the provinces or for a weekend on his Cayo Piedra island, a fifth Mercedes would complete the procession, carrying the personal doctor Eugenio Selman, the nurse Wilder Fernández, the official photographer Pablo Caballero, and the butler Orestes Díaz, all considered full members of the escort.

When Fidel traveled within Cuba or to take part in a particular event, the operational group or “second ring” was deployed as reinforcement to cover the positions of the escort, at a greater distance from Fidel. If the latter visited a factory, school, village, neighborhood, or ministry, counterespionage officers were also present. They put themselves at the escort’s disposition, deploying all the intelligence agents inside and around the premises visited, while the air force took care of monitoring the air space with the aid of radars. When Fidel was on the coast or embarking onto a boat, the coast guards were also on red alert.

But let us return to the escort proper. Certain among this praetorian guard had not been chosen merely for their shooting skill or reflexes in one-to-one combat. Two of them, Andrés Arronte Martínez and Ambrosio Reyes Betancourt, had been selected because of their blood group. Their group of A negative, one of the rarest in humans (6 percent of the world population), was also shared by Fidel Castro. And so, in an emergency, their presence would allow an immediate, arm-to-arm transfusion of fresh blood to save
El Jefe
.

Fidel’s escort also included a double. Clean-shaven and smaller than the
Comandante
, Silvino Álvarez was not, strictly speaking, his true double. However, sitting at the back of a car wearing a false beard, he could easily be mistaken at a distance for the
Líder Máximo
(their forehead and nose formed the same oblique shape, slightly bent where they joined).

This means of disinformation had been used on various occasions, notably in 1983 and 1992, when Fidel Castro fell seriously ill without anyone knowing about it, as I will recount in greater detail in chapter 13.
El Comandante
took to his bed for several weeks amid the greatest secrecy while the fake Fidel was installed at the back of the presidential limousine, which drove around Havana, taking care to go through numerous populated areas such as the port, the Malecón (the seafront avenue), Prado Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and in front of the embassies of capitalist countries such as France and the United Kingdom. Silvino Álvarez would then lower the car window and, from a distance, greet passersby with gestures similar to those used by Fidel. The people were completely taken in, as the police informers stationed in the town would subsequently tell us.

Few could surpass Fidel Castro in matters of disinformation. As the history books record, when American journalists secretly went to interview him in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, the guerrilla fighter would mastermind a perfectly staged scene: this master of the art of illusion would make his soldiers move around every which way and that in the background so as to create the impression of a mass of people, making his interlocutors believe that his rebel troops were far more numerous than they really were.

Information manipulation techniques are at the heart of the work of protecting every prominent figure, but nowhere as systematically as in Cuba. There, each of Fidel’s movements was planned with the aim of deceiving the public about the time, place, and means of transport used. When the Commander in Chief spoke in public, his arrival was announced at a precise time but, in reality, he always came before or after. Similarly, it would commonly be announced that he was arriving in a helicopter when in fact he was being driven to the destination by car. Another example: during his trips abroad, we would make provision for two or three different places to stay (for example two hotel reservations and the residence of the Cuban ambassador) before choosing one at the last moment so as to wrong-foot anyone who, for whatever reason, wanted to know in advance where Fidel planned to spend the night.

Even in Havana, when he made his daily journey to the presidential palace from his property of Punto Cero (a journey of around 7.5 miles), the route to be taken would change at the last minute so that even his own guards would not know what route the head of the escort would choose. In addition, the three cars driving in procession constantly changed position so that nobody ever knew whether the
Líder Máximo
was in the one in front, in the middle, or at the back.

But, until 1979 Fidel’s car was easily identifiable: he drove around in a heavy black Soviet ZIL limousine, identical to those reserved for dignitaries in the USSR, that had been given to him by the Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev. We members of the escort would drive in burgundy-colored Alfa Romeo 1750s and 2000s—light, nervy, easily handled cars.

However, two years after I joined Fidel’s service, the car fleet was totally replaced. On leaving the sixth Non-Aligned Movement summit,
*
which took place at the beginning of September 1979 in Havana, the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, gave his Cuban counterpart an armored Mercedes-Benz 560 SEL, which he had brought with him from Baghdad. Subsequently, Fidel ordered two mechanics from garage no. 1 of the personal security department, two fellows by the names of Socarras and Álvarez, to go to West Germany to buy some secondhand Mercedes-Benz 500s to replace the now obsolete Alfa Romeos.