The Dictator of the Cows (continued)

Castro had fun in Chile, at times he even relaxed. Agence France Presse correspondent Michel Tourguy made the astonishing observation that "there were times when he sat back and spoke as a normal person. One night in Santiago, he was tired. That night, he sat talking, at his side a barbudo and two priests with beards. I took a photo of them, and when I looked at it, it was as if it were Christ with his disciples."

But Castro was not in Chile for the carefree joyride he seemed to be having. He was there to cement certain relationships that were of crucial long-term importance. One such relationship was with the new "Christians for Socialism," a group of Christian-Marxists who would form the very spine of the "theology of liberation." This group would support the Nicaraguan Sandinistas when they took over in 1979. Thus, part of the future that would bedevil the United States in the 1980s in Nicaragua was being carefully laid in Chile in 1971.

Actually, if Castro's trip had been more closely studied at the time and not covered merely for its "color," it might have been seen that important new markers were being set. Asked, for instance, whether the Marxists and the Christians would form a "tactical alliance" for the future, Castro responded, interestingly, "No, a strategic alliance in order to realize the social changes that would be necessary for the poor." He also wanted to influence Allende, and his advice to the Chilean president presaged the advice he would later give to the Sandinistas. He told Allende to continue to sell copper in the dollar area and to discourage skilled technicians from leaving Chile, and he told him that good relations with the military were essential until he consolidated support. Castro was becoming more practical, more purely tactical, and less "ideological."

But there was an overarching reason for the trip, as there would be and must be for anything in which Castro invested so much energy and time. That reason was no less than his intent to see and use Chile as the next venue for fighting the United States. He was focusing on the peripheries, challenging the United States from there. Fidel Castro and the United States had met again, on another stage, in a drama he fully intended to turn into a series of endless appointments around the globe. In an extraordinary admission, he told Chilean diplomat Jorge Edwards, "With Cuba and now with Chile, whose example is contagious, the periphery of the Yankee empire has been seriously dented for the first time."

Castro would see to it that revolutionaries everywhere poured into Chile. As the imperialists were also wide awake, Chile was doomed to become the setting for a latter-day Spanish Civil War, where international Fascism and revolution would try out their weapons. Jorge Edwards feared the worst for his homeland. Most probably the country would go through a bloodbath. Had Che not said that it was necessary to create "one, two, many Vietnams" in Latin America? Chile, then, would have the enormous "privilege" of becoming "the first Vietnam in South America."

"In Chile, the problem to us was not Allende but Fidel Castro," CIA chief William Colby revealed to me years later. Fidel's visit? "We took it as rather clear evidence of an alliance between the two countries to carry on the revolution." So the United States now involved itself further in Chile, which became the next cause célèbre for the American Left. The CIA aided the truckers' strikes in Chile and aided the Christian Democrats -- to the great criticism of the world. But as The Frank Church congressional committee later verified, it did not in truth take any direct part in Allende's overthrow, as so many on the Left alleged.

When Allende was overthrown by the conservative Chilean army in 1973 -- thus affirming Castro's belief that you cannot make a revolution with the army intact -- socialism died in Chile, and tragically, so did democracy. Under attack in the presidential palace, Allende wore a helmet, gas mask, and bulletproof vest as he ran wildly through the emptied rooms; finally, as the soldiers closed in upon him, he shot himself with a submachine gun that had been a gift from Fidel Castro. On it were engraved the words "To my friend and comrade in arms, Salvador." The country was plunged into Rightist military dictatorship; Castro had failed to create socialism in Chile, but he had managed to play a crucial role in the destruction of Chilean democracy.

None of these setbacks, interestingly enough, set back Castro, for the hemispheric Left simply refused obstinately to believe that "utopian socialism" could not work. So, all trough the early 1970s, Castro's foreign policy showed a new and more complex sense of elaboration, of proliferation, and of evolution. He was no longer only fighting dictatorships, he was now offering his aid to fight democracies, not only in Chile but in Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay, and particularly in Jamaica. He also forged impressive fraternal links with still other "revolutionary" states: the Leftist military dictatorship that had taken over Peru in 1968, and Forbes Burnham in Guyana, when Burnham in the early 1970s declared Guyana a "cooperative republic" and nationalized its foreign-owned enterprises. At the same time, a different revolutionary language began to appear. Panama, for example, was a "progressive" regime, one with a "gradualist" approach that might allow the "progressive forces" gradually to build coalitions that could challenge American influence. Castro's tactics were becoming far more sophisticated than his early, almost exclusively militarized, guerrilla ideas.

The luxuriant neighboring island of Jamaica became an obvious choice of place for Castro to exercise his new, more complex foreign policy when his "friend," Michael Manley, became prime minister in 1972. Tall and handsome, lean as a greyhound and with dark, charismatic eyes that fixed upon the person, Manley started out with all the stars hovering about him. He was the son of the founding father of his country and he was a man who could move people to tears by his every word. Religious Jamaicans called him Joshua after the beloved leader of the Old Testament. But this Joshua soon turned his back on the ineffable dullness of Jamaican economics, to play happy jester at the modern Third World court. Like Castro, he seemed to think that wealth was manna from Heaven, and that his God-sent mission was simply to divide it up. And he began to pop in and out of Cuba, often secretly like an adoring cork. In one visit, he said ecstatically, in what would become a famous quote, that he would go "all the way to the mountaintop with Fidel."

For his part, Castro soon had an astonishing amount of influence and power in Jamaica. The Cuban embassy became the center of activity for what was to be the transformation of the island from British-style parliamentary democracy to Jamaican socialism. Cuban planes and officers began flying in and out of Jamaica through their own private airports, unknown and unseen by the people of Jamaica. Manley began ignoring the regular police and army and training a twenty-thousand-man "Home Guards." A Financial Intelligence Unit was set up, ostensibly to deal with economic "crimes," but, with its Cuban advisers, the unit began to target "unconvinced" people in the ministries. Poor and ambitious Jamaican boys were sent to Cuba and came back as brigadistas to wait for the uprising. A Suppression of Crime Act gave special powers to the security forces, its intent being to take power away from the judiciary, just as Castro had effectively done in Cuba. Parallel structures were being formed for the day when these structures would become the new legitimacy.

When Manley went back and forth to Cuba in the first half of the 1970s, he would attend all of Castro's meetings and behave like a member of the Cuban Politburo who had an external responsibility. "He was just like one of Castro's lieutenants or emissaries," Sir Edgerton Richardson, the Jamaican diplomat who almost always accompanied him, told me. Manley would wait for almost a full day while Castro went on with his fulminations about people, and at the end of the day he'd have a chance to speak. Never, however, did Manley disagree with Castro, and indeed how could he? A paradigm of the other leaders, Manley saw himself as another Castro. To Richardson, it appeared that Manley was looking for a "transfer of techniques from one to the other." A transfer of psyches also, perhaps? He smiled when I asked him that, then nodded yes.

In those days, "Joshua" and his friend "Fidel" had some good times together. They would fly off to Africa, for example, for one of the big Non-Aligned Movement meetings and stop in Trinidad to have dinner with the Trinidadian prime minister, Eric Williams. Soon Guyana's Forbes Burnham, newly transformed as a Leftist, would join them in fraternal dining. Then Joshua and Fidel would board another plane, talking like two avid schoolboys -- about South Africa, about the dynamics of Soviet -- U.S. tension, about cows -- until suddenly they saw from their strange vehicle in space the green and inviting African coast of Conakry glistening in the early sunlight. Meanwhile, Manley's son was living well in Havana: he had a town house, servants and a chauffeur, all provided in "Communism."

But Jamaica didn't "work," either. After eight years of Third Worldism, instructed by Cuba, things only grew stranger and stranger on the island. Instead of more independence and more riches, Jamaica just got poorer and poorer. Charismatic Michael Manley, under his Cuban spell, was coming perilously close economically to killing his country. He didn't mean it; he never said, any more than Castro did, that economics was his long suit; it just happened. All this while, other leaders -- less dramatic, less lean, less charismatic, less blessed, with degrees in economics -- were getting their countries going. But they didn't get anywhere near the notice that Joshua -- and Fidel -- got in the world. Those others were not so much fun. They didn't go to the mountaintops, they only worked the valley. Dull, dull, dull.

In the end, the violence of the Cuban-trained Jamaicans began to turn into street massacres. The bauxite industry collapsed. Jamaicans became so angry at the widely disliked Cuban embassy, with all of its artifices and all of its dictates, that they perched in trees around the embassy's yard to spy on what was going on. What they didn't know was that, just before it all fell apart and Edward Seaga became the Conservative prime minister in 1980, Castro had planned to move the Americas Section of Cuban Intelligence to Jamaica, an extraordinary move that would have indicated a further and very specific expansion of Cuban influence throughout the Caribbean. It never happened. But even that failure had virtually no effect on Castro's global plans. There was always a "next time" in his socialism.

Castro's charismatic control of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in 1976, in Algiers, was superlative; he totally rejected the idea, put forward by moderates, that there were "two imperialisms," the Soviets and the Americans, thus endearing himself once again to the Russians. Indeed, that meeting was the beginning of his effort to transform the Non-Aligned Movement into a more radical and anti-imperialist (read anti-Western and anti-American) posture, in preparation in great part for his hosting of the next NAM conference in Havana in 1979. Castro was now trying to establish himself as a clear broker between the Soviet camp and the Third World.

In the year before the Algiers meeting, Generalisimo Francisco Franco died. Had anyone really been studying Castro's reaction to the death of the Spanish dictator, instead of merely listening to what he said, they would have noticed one of those rare moments when the Cuban leader revealed his inner self.

To many people it seemed "natural" that Castro and Franco would have hated each other; one was a Communist, the other was a Fascist Falangist who had defeated the classic Marxist threat in the Spanish Civil War and then ruled his country with the iron hand of the Catholic caudillo. But such neat ideological classifications most often lie. As a matter of fact, the two twentieth-century strongmen with nineteenth-century roots in Galicia had been filled with admiration for each other for many years. They had yearned to meet, and when Franco died, Castro decreed a full week of official mourning in Cuba.

There had been hints of their "odd caudillo" relationship. Franco never participated in the American embargo of Castro, and kept his Iberia Airlines, the only direct air link between Cuba and Western Europe, flying to Cuba. Indeed, Cuban-Spanish trade under the leadership of two men who were supposed to "hate" each other boomed. Even in the very first year of the Revolution, when the Cuban ambassador to Madrid, José Miró Cardona, met with Franco, he reported to friends that the austere little Spanish generalissimo at the end had asked him, "How is Fidel doing?" Then Franco told him, his voice rising, "Tell Fidel to give hell to the Americans!"

Speaking of Castro, Franco repeatedly told the Spanish journalist Antonio Orlani that "your friend is very intelligent," and a "great strategist," and that "everything he did was that of a good military man and that "Cuba really had needed a change." For his part, Castro told Orlani that "Franco was right because Franco knew the war and the guerrilla perfectly, and that Franco knew at every moment during the Sierra Maestra where the Fidelistas were but in all moments refused to give the information to the Batista government."

The two men's mutual fascination with the old Spanish war of the guerrillas was the key to their fascination with each other, as was that mutual hatred for the United States that had been running through Spanish blood since before "the disaster" of 1898. Franco had been the youngest general since Alexander the Great -- Castro was the next youngest. Franco was an abysmal conversationalist, with a squeaky voice, who looked straight ahead in a fixed way at his interlocutor and stared coldly -- Castro was the world's most endlessly expressive and antic speaker.

But it was la guerrilla that forged the link between the two. Franco admired three men in contemporary history: Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, and all three were adepts at the war and trade of guerrillas. Finally, when Franco died, Castro was filled with ever more admiration -- Franco, the consummate military man, had died in bed.

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