"The Soviet Coup" (continued)

It was a small dinner party for about twenty international sports officials and a few diplomats involved in the games' organization. Vazquez Raña had just made a toast "to the best games in history," when an agitated Castro aide walked to the head table and notified the Comandante that he had an important telephone call. Castro left to take it in a room nearby.

It was Communist Party ideology chief and top Castro aide Carlos Aldana, calling with critical news: a coup had been attempted in the Soviet Union. An emergency committee of eight hard-line Kremlin officials had ousted Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The Committee had been led by Vice President Gennady Yanayev, and included KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, and Defense Council Deputy Chairman Oleg Baklanov.

It was a miracle. Castro knew the new Soviet rulers well: they were Cuba's best friends in the Kremlin, old-guard Communists who had serious qualms about Gorbachev's reforms. Like Castro, they had long feared that Gorbachev's Perestroika would inevitably lead to the collapse of communism, and to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Yanayev, an old Communist Party bureaucrat, had last been in Havana in 1990 as president of the Soviet Workers' Federation (VESPS), and had been a strong Cuba supporter since ascending to the vice-presidency in December that year. KGB Chairman Kryuchkov had just visited in June 1991 on a mission to strengthen Soviet intelligence ties with Cuba. Defense Council Deputy Chairman Oleg Baklanov had last come to Havana in 1990, and was Raúl Castro's top contact man with the Soviet weapons and military supplies industries; Defense Minister Yazov had been based in Cuba as a young officer in the early sixties, and his name was prominently displayed on a commemorative plaque at the site of a former Soviet SAM missile base in Cuba's eastern province of Holguín.

Only a few weeks earlier, Castro had sent Aldana to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev and other top Soviet Communist Party leaders to discuss the Cuban situation. The exchange with Yanayev had been the most encouraging for the Cuban leader. Aldana had complained to him that the Soviets had failed to live up to their trade commitments during the first half of 1991. Soviet grain shipments to Cuba were far behind schedule, and the shortages were creating havoc on the island. Yanayev could hardly have been more sympathetic. He told Castro's envoy that Cuba would get "total support from Moscow" during the second half of the year².

When I asked Aldana whether he had received any hints of the upcoming coup attempt, he said, "Absolutely none." Referring to the hard-line Soviet officials he had met with, he added, "On the contrary, I found widespread pessimism about the Soviet Union's future."But of course, if Cuba had received a hint of the upcoming coup, Aldana would hardly have admitted it to foreign journalist after the plot's failure.

A week before the Soviet coup, Pravda had quoted Yanayev as strongly supporting continued Soviet subsidies to Cuba. He had called US pressure on the Kremlin to reduce aid to Cuba "absolutely unacceptable." When Fidel heard of the coup, and that Yanayev had been appointed a leader of the eight-member ruling junta, it was clear to him that with his friends taking power in Moscow, Cuba would emerge from its quandary. But he also knew that if they failed, the backlash could be brutal.

Castro returned to Vazquez Raña's dinner table. He asked his aide Jesús Montané, who was sitting near him, to get hold of the international news agencies' cables from Moscow. As the first wire stories were brought to him minutes later, Castro shared the news with the other guests, matter-of-factly. The dinner went on, as Fidel waited for more news.

Meantime, Cuban officials at more than a dozen parties throughout Havana celebrating the end of the Pan American Games were ecstatic. "They toasted the return of the old guard," a Western diplomat who attended one of the parties recalls. "I had never seen them so happy."

For Cuba, the coup couldn't have come at a better moment: a day later, Gorbachev was to sign a crucial treaty that would have given virtual economic autonomy to Russia and eight other Soviet republics. The Russian Federation-source of virtually all the Soviet oil shipped to Cuba-was to gain control of its natural resources and foreign trade. Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin had already expressed opposition to continued subsidized oil shipments to Cuba. Now, the new hard-line regime would straighten things out. A conservative Soviet-Chinese axis could re-emerge, since the Chinese had already reverted to hard-line Marxism with their 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on prodemocracy forces. Cuba would once again have a strong Communist bloc on which it could rely.

But Castro looked anxious as he read the cables. He stood, sat, stood again, walked to a nearby room, then came back, the cables still in his hand. The coup leaders' claims that Gorbachev had fallen ill at his vacation house in Crimea didn't sound credible. Two hours later, as Vazquez Raña and his guests were finishing dessert and the reports continued, it was evident that the plotters had failed to take control of the country.

Despite the junta's harsh-sounding state of emergency decrees, Yeltsin hadn't yet been arrested, and his top aides were even talking to CNN. The story was far from over. Castro turned to a sports official sitting next to him and pointed out that the news could spell trouble for Cuba: chaos in the Soviet Union was potentially more harmful to Cuban trade-at least in the short run-than an orderly transition to a federation of autonomous Soviet states. With anarchy came the danger that oil shipments to Cuba could come to a complete stop, Fidel said.

"He looked confused," the sports official recalled later. "He shared the news with us in a casual way, but he was clearly concerned about the situation. He wasn't celebrating."

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