The Dictator of the Cows (continued)

This was little realized in a Washington now obsessed with antiwar tumult at home and with negotiations in Paris to get the United States out of Vietnam. Furthermore, on the surface, relations between Cuba and Russia looked rather good. In reality they were not. For example, when Alexander Soldatov, the "tough" and "no-nonsense Russian who had replaced the smiling Alexeev as ambassador to Cuba, was sent home by Castro in late 1970, the Russians were furious. "Relations fell to one of their lowest points," Arkady Shevchenko, the high-ranking Russian official, related after he had defected to the United States. "Soldatov recalled to me afterwards that his mission was 'mission impossible.' He had been sent to them to squeeze them and cut economic aid. . . .What happened was that Castro didn't even receive him for a long time. When he returned from Cuba, there was a whole year when he was unemployed. He was attached to the office of Gromyko, but he had nothing to do. He used to come to me, wanted to chat. It was pathetic. Cuba was the end of his career."

But the world did not see these private intra-Communist world spats, and in particular, the American intellectuals, journalists, radicals, and liberals who continued to flock to Havana in these years chose doggedly not to see them. How assiduously -- and how successfully -- Castro wooed these people! What "privileges" he was regally willing to grant them in his society without privilege! What fantastic Potemkin Villages of the body and mind he erected for their theoretical minds and spirits! They, in turn, also had their job -- they would serve to build sympathy for Cuba in the United States, thus tinging still another protective wall against any American action against him, while also serving as a long-term neutralizing factor in America's capacity to act anywhere in the world.

One of the most unbelievable events of Castro's entire courtship of these Americans occurred in 1977, during the days of the Jimmy Carter administration, when talk was in the air in Washington about a new opening to Cuba. Castro caught the spirit of the moment and sent a message to Senator Frank Church, then head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that if he came to Cuba, the U.S. administration would be "pleased with the results of the visit."

After meeting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Senator Church and his team drew up a list of items they wanted from Castro, which included the release of thirty Americans from Cuban jails and assurances that Cuba would withdraw from its African adventures. Then they boarded the backup plane for Air Force One, the same plane that had carried John F. Kennedy's lifeless body and the hopes of the American nation from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, and flew off to Havana. They considered the deliberate choice of this plane as a kind of gift of high respect for Castro.

Once in Cuba, Castro duly submitted the group to the usual evocative spots, like the guilt-provoking Bay of Pigs, and to the usual lengthy harangues about his days in the Sierra Maestra. There was an "almost boyish sense of 'we won' " about him, Mrs. Frank Church recalled. Senator Church had a moment of déjà-vu when he swam with a wet-suited Castro at one of Fidel's private islands; it reminded Frank of all the CIA plots to do Castro in in his wet suit. Finally, Castro suggested that he come aboard the American plane -- he wanted to see it.

Once on board, they sipped piña coladas, and Church aide Mark Moran took a picture of Castro sitting in the president's chair, because "Fidel specifically wanted his picture taken while he was sitting in the chair." While there, Moran recalled, "Fidel was shown the phone with the red button for war, and the green button used to call the president in the White House directly." Cuba was never more surreal than at the moment when the Cuban leader, whose involvement in the death of John Kennedy has never been seriously dismissed, sat in the American president's chair in the plane that had so mournfully carried John Kennedy's dead body!

Castro's seemingly warm embrace of his visitors, however, could suddenly become lethal, once he knew of his total power over them. Journalist Herbert Matthews, who persisted in thinking and saying that he was the only one Castro ever really talked to, was treated more and more shabbily by Castro, who derided him at every turn. Finally, Matthews's professional career was ended by his involvement with Castro. The Times "declined" to publish his articles on Cuba anymore. Times editor Turner Catledge finally decided, "Matthews, despite certain obvious changes in judgment, had lost his credibility as a reporter on Castro.

In 1971, Castro launched out on still another and different cycle of revolutionary transformation. On the surface, when he arrived in Santiago de Chile on November 10, he was merely visiting his "good friend," the Chilean president Salvador Allende. But he stayed almost a month and there was much more to the trip beneath the surface. Castro had alluded to its importance in a press interview as he left Havana, when he said clearly that this was a "symbolic visit . . . between two historical processes.

"Two historical processes" -- Cuba and Chile. Cuba, with its barbudos, had supposedly traveled the, or at least a, Marxist path. Chile was just beginning on another, more traditional Marxist road, with the first elected Marxist president, the dapper and bourgeois Allende, who was offering to the world "the first nation on earth called to fashion a new model of transition to a socialist society." The two "Marxists" and "Marxisms" could hardly have been more unlike each other and the two men did not really even like each other very much, but Castro's trip was a huge success as the Cuban leader roamed about the beautiful country of Chile like a modern Caesar, speaking to enchanted crowds, visiting, and everywhere employing his brilliant, mesmerizing techniques. When he spoke in Santiago, he requested the "permission" of the crowd. "Maybe you'd be interested in hearing the opinion of a visitor who is a tourist?" he whimsically asked. "Do I have your permission to express it?" To exclamations of "Yes, yes," Castro's Cuban "direct democracy now arrived full blown in Santiago. "Well, in view of the permission granted me in this sort of plebiscite . . ." he went on, smiling now, to the shouts of "Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!"

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