The Dictator of the Cows (continued)

Analysts and visitors fretted in these years over what to call Castro's system. They came up with terms like "protosocialism with national bureaucracies' . . . romantic paternalism" . . . a Moncada assault mentality and a Sierra Maestra complex" . . . revolutionary maximalism, in which he seeks strategic breakthroughs" . . . charismatic hardship Communism" . . . Whatever the social scientists thought, as they searched for words to describe the phenomenon of political nature that was Fidel Castro, in the end it all came down to "will, will, will." And when he linked his stalwart, incredible will to economics, he fully believed that the results would be "scientific," or, playing on the Soviets' sacred "Scientific Socialism," a kind of "Scientific Caudilloism."

Even in failure, Castro seemed triumphant. He came out of the 1960s as the single and only chief, with a personal power unsurpassed even in the other Communist countries. He was first secretary of the Communist party, commander in chief of the armed forces, president of both the Council of State and the Council of Ministers; he held the top leadership post in the party, state, and armed forces. His power seemed supreme.

Castro himself would spend time at Varadero Beach during this period, and he saw to it that his top men had beautiful villas there. Unpredictable as always, Castro would simply arrive unannounced at Varadero, but the small, witty, adaptable Oscar Mori was always prepared. "There was the garage, Mori told me, describing Castro's hideaway, "and a small kitchen. There was a sofa in the living room where he sat a lot and looked at the sea. It had three bedrooms upstairs. He slept little, very little . . ." Mori paused, and laughed. "He didn't have discipline in this, either. It was the same for him to be sleeping at six in the morning as at three in the afternoon. There were nights when we had parties and we would have some drinks, but I never saw him drinking too much. He liked Courvoisier cognac. There were days when he was happy and went to a cabaret at the hotel. The women of the comandante were always about. There were times when they went to Fidel's house. But only when Fidel sent for them. They never just went. That, nobody could just do."

The women? The dancer at the Tropicana, a favorite of americano tourists in the "old days" and a nightclub still booming under Castro, said he read while he made love. The French actress said he smoked. The European woman complained he never took his boots off. The young American woman who went happily and expectantly off to the beach one promising midnight with him complained he sat there for three hours and "only talked" (surprising) "without stopping" (not surprising) about agricultural reform. A "gorgeous" Cubana named Amparo, whom José Pardo Llada had introduced to Castro, had a similar complaint. The two went to the beach, too, where they spent a few hours on a particularly lovely Cuban night. When Pardo Llada asked Amparo about it later, he told me she said that it had been very strange because "I started caressing his hair and he only talked. . . "

Castro's affairs became quietly known. Flowers would suddenly appear on the woman's birthday, and her mother, on her birthday, would receive the rare paella and lobster -- all dispatched, in the strange fullness of her relationship with the same man, by the ever-efficient Celia Sánchez. Occasionally a boy in some school would see a picture of Castro and blurt out, "That is my papa." Since Castro was surely the "father" of the country, this disconcerted few.

During this time, however, Castro did become involved with a woman who was to give him as close to a "real" family as he was to have. Known by certain insiders simply as "la mujer de Trinidad," the "woman from the city of Trinidad," Dalia Soto del Valle Jorge was still another of those beautiful, black-haired, green-eyed "Cubanas" that Fidel liked so well. Dalia came from a well-to-do family, her father Enrique having been associated with a large cigar factory. She had worked as a secretary for the sugar workers' union, where she probably met Fidel. In earlier days, she had gone to a fortune-teller, who looked at her strangely and told her, "You will have the love of a great man." When their affair started in 1962 or 1963, Dalia's family, like Naty's, considered her a "prisoner" of Fidel's, and her father told friends that he had "lost a daughter." As the affair achieved some permanence, his neighbors in Trinidad infuriated him by calling him "the father-in-law," and then, on top of that, by expecting him to gain favors for them from Castro.

By the early 1970s, Dalia had five children by Castro, all of them boys and four of them bearing Fidel's middle name of Alejandro somewhere in their own name. Like Fidelito, they would be educated in the Soviet Union, and one in particular was described as having all of Castro's habits, temper tantrums and all -- and thus being Castro's favorite child. Despite the fact that it was "known" in certain "in" circles that Dalia's boys were Fidel's children, Dalia herself remained largely unnoticed. It was Raúl's wife, Vilma, who paraded in public as Cuba's reigning first lady -- and even long after she was no longer Raúl's wife.

Despite all the accoutrements and trappings of power in his hands, the enormous failure of the "Ten-Million-Ton Harvest" left Castro dangerously vulnerable to attack in the one area he neither understood intrinsically nor grasped as the looming new power in the world -- economics. In December of 1970, the husky, sloe-eyed Carlos Rafael Rodríguez left for Moscow as the head of the Cuban commission for trade with the U.S.S.R., with the intent of renewing the five-year economic treaty with the Soviets. It was the intricate dance, the political minuet, the Kabuki over this renewed treaty that showed more clearly than anything else the Soviets' disillusionment with their "tropical" Communist revolutionary, and it gave to the Soviets, for the first time, the definitive decision-making voice in Cuban economic affairs. In effect, the Russians now took over the planning of the Cuban economy through the setting up of a "Cuban-Soviet Commission of Economic, Scientific, and Technical Collaboration," with the ever-patient survivor, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, as its head.

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