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"The Soviet Coup" (continued) For the next twenty-four hours, the Cuban regime remained silent on the Soviet coup attempt. The West had thrown its weight behind Yeltsin's immediate call for Gorbachev's return to the Kremlin. Libya and Iraq had promptly stated their support for the new junta. Castro issued an official statement on the evening of August 20, 1991, after virtually all countries had taken sides on the coup attempt, and only twelve hours before the putsch collapsed. The carefully worded document had been painstakingly crafted not to burn Castro's bridges with either side. The communique indicated that it was "not the task of the Cuban government to judge events in the USSR," and expressed Cuba's hopes that the Soviet Union could "overcome its difficulties peacefully, and that that great country stay united." In a slip that Castro would regret later, however, it referred to the coup leaders as "the Soviet authorities." "We had been led to error," Aldana told me later, reflecting on the embarrassing delay and the neutral tone of Cuba's reaction. "We had received an official note (from the Soviet embassy) stating that Gorbachev was ill. . . . We then saw Yanayev on television, saying that Gorbachev would be reinstated in a few days. In those first hours, one could not exclude the possibility that. . . it hadn't been a coup attempt. I would like people to put themselves in our shoes in those first hours, and say whether they would have acted differently." In fact, except for China, Iraq and Libya, everyone else in the world had acted differently, although few had as much to lose as Cuba. When the junta disbanded itself sixty hours after it had taken power and a humbled Gorbachev returned to Moscow late August 22, Castro could only take solace in the fact that he had not rushed to publicly embrace the coup leaders. His friends Yanayev, Kryuchkov, Yazov and four others were quickly arrested and prosecuted on charges of high treason. Interior Minister Boris Pugo committed suicide as police were arriving at his house to arrest him. After the Soviet Union's three-day-long political roller coaster, the Cuban regime was in deeper trouble than ever before. Yeltsin had become the undisputed leader of the Soviet post-Communist era. The morning after Gorbachev's return to Moscow, Yeltsin announced before a crowd of more than one hundred thousand Muscovites that the Communist era's red flag with its hammer-and-sickle would be replaced by old Russia's red-white-and-blue. Thousands of jubilant Russians swarmed to tear down the statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky outside the Soviet secret police headquarters. Lenin's statues in the Baltics met with the same fate. But what disturbed the Cuban regime most was the dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party; its cells in the army, factories and foreign embassies were outlawed, and its 5,000 buildings seized. When Cuban officials tried to call their old Party comrades in Moscow a few days later, they were shocked to discover that they had been evicted from the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee head quarters. A new crowd was answering the phones: the building had been taken over by the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Yeltsin's Russian Federation. Yeltsin, at once Gorbachev's savior and nemesis, was cashing in on his new standing by signing decrees right and left, acting as the de facto leader of the entire union. Gorbachev would have little choice but to go along and put his signature where Yeltsin wanted it. . . . When I arrived in Cuba a few days after the foiled Soviet coup at tempt, the country was in a state of consternation. Cuban television, facing competition from U.S.-based exile radio stations, had little choice but to show the images of red flags and statues of Lenin coming down across the Soviet Union. Cubans watched, dumb founded. It was as if the Vatican had suddenly renounced Catholicism, and a devout congregation in a faraway parish was watching the rest of the world rejoice. Torrential summer rains were paralyzing Havana every afternoon. The lines in front of gasoline stations stretched for three blocks -- there were rumors that Soviet oil shipments would come to a complete halt. People went about their daily business, scurrying for pieces of cardboard to protect themselves from the rain, lining up for bread, or waiting at jammed bus lines. But their minds seemed to be elsewhere. Anxious Cubans asked visitors what would happen next. Was it true that the Soviets were turning against Cuba? Would they use their Lourdes intelligence-gathering facilities to spy on Cuba? Would the newly appointed KGB chiefs engineer a coup to topple Fidel? Predictably, the Castro regime responded to the growing public anxieties by flexing its muscles. A strongly worded Granma editorial lamenting the "tragedy" in the Soviet Union vowed that neither Lenin's statues nor Marxism-Leninism would ever be toppled in Cuba. "Our most sacred duty is to save the nation, the revolution and socialism," the front-page banner headline read. But, despite the emotional appeal to Cubans' patriotism, Castro looked more vulnerable than ever in his role as lone keeper of the Communist faith. 1 The US team had won in the total count of gold, silver and bronze medals, but Cuba claimed overall victory based on its gold medal supremacy. return to section 2 Weeks later, after the coup was foiled. Soviet Foreign Ministry officials wondered about Yanayev's assurances to Aldana. Had it been a subtle hint to Cuba that the hard-liners would soon take power? Or a simple Soviet commitment to carry out their obligations under existing agreements? Some Soviet officials speculated that Castro might have been informed in advance of the coup, but there was no hard evidence of that at the time of this writing. Most likely, Castro only speculated that the hard-liners would soon make a comeback-in all likelihood at the behest of Gorbachev himself-to prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union. During the Guadalajara summit of Ibero-American heads of state in late July 1991, three weeks after the Aldana-Yanayev meeting, Castro told at least two presidents in private conversations that he was expecting a normalization of Soviet exports to Cuba, based on the assumption that Gorbachev would have to take a harder line to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. return to section
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