The Dictator of the Cows
by Georgia Anne Geyer
from Guerrilla Prince: The Real Story of the Rise and Fall of Fidel Castro

I would have preferred an attempt to study nature and see how, by adapting to it, one could make maximum use of its resources and potentialities. No, in this military society, man commands, dominates, violates nature. -- René Dumont

The years following Che's death and Castro's rapprochement with the Russians should have been a period of new succor and security for the Cuban leader. Castro's friend, the Soviet Union, was to an extent re-Stalinizing under Leonid Brezhnev, after the heady years of liberalization under the now-deposed Khrushchev. Castro's eternal enemy, the United States, was daily sinking deeper and deeper into the worst period of its modern history, with the Vietnam war growing in horrors and providing a national alienation that was gloriously manipulatable by Castro. But nonetheless, these years were not good for Fidel.

At home, the once-tempestuous Cuba was beginning to look more and more like her dour and doughty cousins in the Eastern Bloc. Beautiful and expressive Havana perhaps best reflected the growing shabbiness of Cuba; her sensuously lovely buildings molted like snakes in season, her paint peeled away from lack of care, and her gardens, like her spirits, fell to weeds. For Cubans, historically accustomed to at least the expectation of the American way of life, there remained now nothing but shortage. A well-known chef, Nitza Villapol, who gave recipes on television, would tell her viewers to get the best meat. Then she would go on to say that if one didn't have that specific cut, well, one could use this, or that, or even wheat flour. How to present a major Cuban meat dish without meat, that was the challenge of the magical Cuba that Castro was constructing! But the most dramatic metaphor for Cuba's move behind the Iron Curtain was to be found in the omnipresent oil slick that covered the streets of the cities like a coat of oozing paint. The Russian oil was of such poor quality that it leaked all over in the heat. More and more Cubans were asking themselves how the Cuban Revolution could have been so endlessly fascinating and the Cuban revolutionary state so stultifyingly dull?

As the look and feel of the Eastern Bloc moved into and over Cuba, Castro very deliberately and systematically destroyed every remnant of the wicked past. Statues of former presidents were hammered to bits, books destroyed. When Castro's childhood friend Rolando Amador departed from his homeland in disillusionment, he left behind a library of twenty thousand books. The Revolution took them and made pulp of them. The bewilderment of men like Amador increased when the entire contents of an exceptional museum in Cárdenas, which included a world-class collection of shells, butterflies, and Roman coins was either destroyed or sent to Russia. Learning about this "new Fidel," Amador explained to me years later, was "like hearing about a man I'd never known surrounded by people who have nothing to do with the Cuban people."

At one point the angry Russians warningly slowed the crucial Cuban oil deliveries to a virtual standstill. The situation got so bad that sympathetic European Communists stepped into the chasm, with men such as Spain's Santiago Carrillo telling Castro, "You've broken with the U.S., with China . . . a rupture with the Soviet Union would be catastrophic." Then, suddenly and without warning, on August 20, 1968, Soviet troops crossed Czech frontiers and the world awoke to find two hundred thousand troops and Russian tanks poised in the exquisite old city centers of Prague. Cubans waited for professional "noninterventionist" Castro's explanation. Castro sat at a desk that night -- always at a desk as though he were a teacher -- facing a television studio. In his two-and-a-half-hour, thirteen-thousand-word "speech," he wove into his complex genuine and tactical message the basic wrongness of invading another country -- "the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak State has been violated." But then he accepted fully the Russian contortion that the invasion was "justified" because of the "beginning of a 'honeymoon between the Czech liberals and imperialism."

Thus, Castro placed himself inexorably on the side of the "Brezhnev Doctrine," which allowed the Soviet Union to take action if another socialist state was "threatened by capitalism." But Castro would not give away what he could sell; he used the occasion to call for a redefinition of Soviet-Cuban ties, and to demand that the same "protection" the Soviets had given Czechoslovakia be extended to North Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, should they be similarly endangered by "human face" invasions from within. It was the diplomatic prologue to the Missile Crisis all over again.

Almost immediately (how amazing!), Soviet assistance to Cuba expanded and oil supplies flowed smoothly again, just in time for what was now becoming Castro's real obsession: his beloved "Ten-Million-Ton Harvest."

Although almost entirely unrecognized by the outside world, Castro's dreams about the economy of Cuba were turning out to be blood brothers of his dreams of world conquest. Building on the ancient Spanish Catholic and Moorish heritage of contempt for money, he talked now of demythologizing money, indeed of abolishing it, and even of creating a wondrous "civilization without money." Ideas like this popped up in Castro's mind like mushrooms after the rain. A Camembert better than that of Normandy's was to be produced in Cuba. A campaign was launched to eradicate all weeds -- a "weed-free Cuba" became the call of the day. Another day, Castro got the idea of planting an entire "cordón" of coffee in a circle of land around Havana. Immediately workers were dispatched as if to still another displaced Bay of Pigs "battle." But the soil there was no good for the delicate coffee plants; within a year, unrelenting nature had destroyed that particular dream of Cuba's premier dreamer.

Oscar Mori, Castro's "impresario" at the treasured Varadero Beach, has vivid memories of his boss during these years.

One time, they were driving out at the very end of the Varadero peninsula, remote and windswept, where "the people" could not go. They were riding along the road when they came upon a cut pine tree. "At this, Castro went crazy," Mori recalled. "He got out and told his guard to give him a machine gun. He was enraged that anyone should cut a pine tree there. I said, 'Comandante, this pine tree was cut by the man who is about to install telephones here.' He insulted me. Then he took the gun and shot at the cables. He hit one, and it fell. Then he turned to me and said, 'I should kill you.' I said only, 'Comandante, I am not to blame for this.' " That was Castro, too, shooting at telephone cables with a machine gun, like a mad Cuban Don Quixote.

The prominent Cuban biology professor José Roque León recalled that when Castro appeared at a plant, "he would be surrounded by people who were not genuine advisers but executors of his caprices, a choir of resonances. When he would come to the biology laboratory, he would only give orders. He would walk in and look around and say, 'The microcopier should not be by the window, it should be in the shade.' And they would move it, even though that was wrong." What did the professors think? "It was as though they wore masks," León told me. "They did not speak much in private. You see, Castro does not have to be in agreement with science, science has to be in agreement with him."

Castro was becoming the Cuban version of the Bolsheviks' Trofimo Lysenko, inventing new genes; he was Moses parting the Red Sea; he was the Thai king as rainmaker. He was, according to Rafael del Pino, who became one of his leading air force officers, a man who dreamed "like Snow White," a man who got into his head on any one day "to make students into professors, to build a new airport five miles south of the present one, which already had only three or four flights a day."

But it was cows that truly riveted him, cows that became the fulcrum of his obsession to control every living thing on his island, if not the world; for it was with cattle that his "special plans" were carried to new and truly "undreamed-of" levels of genetic engineering. With his cows, Castro would improve on nature, substituting his planned artificial reproduction for the notably haphazard but still dependable natural process. His intent, as always, was not subsumed in modest dreams; he intended nothing less than to create a new human creature, a new animal that would carry his name to new heights. He had created a revolution against all the odds and beyond any man's dreams; now he would create new life beyond other odds. The whole program became so obsessive that even his close and eerily devoted friend Gabriel García Márquez (whose entire literary life was devoted to writing about the patriarchs and macho caudillos of Latin America) suggested lovingly, making a literary pun on his famous novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, that he would write a new work about his friend Castro and entitle it El Dictador de las Vacas, or "The Dictator of the Cows."

Cuba would become a center of genetics and Castro the new "Father of Genetics." How? By crossing the Cebú and the Holstein cow to create a wholly new bovine, the F-I, which would uniquely provide Cuba with more milk and more meat and dazzle the world. When an English scientist told him that, yes, he could cross Cebú and Holstein and it would work for one generation but that "the second generation will have the worst defects of the father and the mother," the man was immediately expelled from Cuba. The scientist was right, of course. One cow worked, Castro's Hollywood "star of cows," Ubre Blanca, or White Udder." She became so famous that, when she died, a distraught Castro stuffed her and placed her in a museum, where "future generations could admire her magnificent udders."

In many ways, his cows became more real, and more personal to Castro, than human beings. At the farms, he called the animals by name. ("But, is it good or bad to know the cows by name?" amused and bewildered onlookers like Carlos Alberto Montaner wondered.) Not only the cows but all the farm animals (like the restricted people) had "animal passports" or tiny metal plates identifying what the creature was, when it was purchased, and by whom. Some bulls had air-conditioned stables. When an animal died, there fell upon the farm manager the sad task of going to the police station to report the demise so the animal could be taken off the police lists.

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