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EL-HE We dared to command the sun and moon to bring a new day. . . I curse the flux of time. - Mao Tse-tung From 1983 on, although again the world did not or could not grasp it, all Castro could do was to fight to hold position. Cuba's economic situation worsened to the point where the island nation was unable to produce enough sugar for its quota to Russia. Castro was forced even to buy cheap sugar on the world market and to resell it to the Soviet Union. In 1985, Castro tried to recoup by cleverly seizing upon the issue of Third World debt to the United States and to the Western banking network to stoke the fires of his guerrilla fight against the imperium of the north. In the spring and summer of that year, no fewer than five international conferences were held in Havana on "the debt," which for the region had reached an astounding $420 billion. Delegates arriving at José Martí Airport were met by Cuban schoolchildren singing the rousing song "The Debt of Latin America and the Third World Must Be Canceled," but the underlying message from Castro was not economic; he was simply once again mobilizing Latin America's classic resentment against the United States, using whatever complaint, complex, or song that was at hand. That same year, 1985, things grew even worse for Castro, if they could, as an "unknown," the insufferable Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in Moscow. So it was that in t986, Castro's "Year of Rage," he struck back, and back, and back. He threw veritable tantrums -- against waste, against mismanagement, against individual entrepreneurs, against both the United States and (the new element) the Soviet Union alike. At the Third Congress of the Cuban Communist party that year, his mood was bitter, his predictions downbeat, his visage dark and angry. At the central committee meetings, he would talk somberly for hours, as he paced back and forth, canceling a free market here, dismantling experiments with private farmers' markets and the sale of housing there. Before thirty-five hundred party and administrative leaders, he berated a garlic farmer making fifty thousand dollars a year by privately selling garlic, and he literally rained all the fire and brimstone of his volcanic personality down on the heads of certain enterprising local lads in one Cuban town who had bought the whole supply of toothbrushes and melted them down to produce plastic necklaces. That was what the Revolution had come to, screaming at garlic farmers and the producers of illegal plastic necklaces! Never mind, he would now step in to "rectify" things at home so he could continue his expansionism abroad. The "Campaign of Rectification of Errors" was his first answer to the glasnost or openness and perestroika or restructuring reforms that Gorbachev was trying to make within Communism -- or perhaps at the expense of Communism. It was to be an "exciting" new program for a people who had already known nothing but a full twenty-seven years of bruising austerity so that one man could fulfill his dreams of grandeur as he worked out his personal complexes. And if they wanted to know their future, they had only to read a little book, published in 1987 by Castro and called Por el Camino Correcto, Compilación de Textos or By the Right Road, a Collection of Texts. Much like Mao's Little Red Book and Qaddafi's Green Book, Castro's book instructed his people to fight against everything "that is the incorrect," to fight even harder against the "old system." He tediously warned them once again that "This fight is going to be long." And finally, "It is possible that we commit errors in the process of rectification . . . but if we commit errors . . . we ought to have the valor to rectify the errors that we commit in this process too." He then actually added (yes, he actually did), "Sí, Señor !" Just when he would seem to be pulling the reins of power back to himself, something else happened that revealed far too much of him to the outside world. On May 28, General Rafael del Pino, deputy chief of the Cuban Air Force and hero of the Bay of Pigs, defected to the United States he had so avidly fought in 1961. On June 6, 1987, an important Cuban intelligence chief, Major Florentino Aspillaga, escaped from the Cuban embassy in Czechoslovakia to Vienna and proceeded to lay bare the entire Cuban intelligence system for the West. Not only that, but Aspillaga titillated American public opinion with the information that, on Castro's last birthday, one Cuban agent had presented him with $4.2 million, which the agent carried personally to be deposited for Castro in a Swiss bank account to "finance liberation movements," for the bribery of leaders, and for any "personal whim of Castro." Even the secretive ways in which he financed his worldwide movements were now becoming known. Like so many dictators in their waning years, as their power falls away from them, Castro sat now surrounded by his little court of fulsome -- and now ever-changing -- courtiers, who could be identified by their Rolex watches and foreign cars (gifts and insignias of Fidel's grace). While the world spoke trustingly of a Cuban Communist apparatus -- a politburo, a central committee, a collective leadership -- all of that was by then a mirage. Cuba was now being run by Castro's tight little "Group of Coordination and Support," or simply "the team" of fourteen to fifteen persons who hovered ever around him at his beck and call. Each one had his or her finger on the control of one major unit of power, like the courtiers of a king or lord, and they reported to him privately on what was happening in the factories, in the industries, and in the long and sullen lines on the streets where people whispered incessantly now about the mayimbes or the privileged party classes. And they made very sure never to tell Castro anything that did not please him. To arrive at this point of guarded inner circle perfection, Castro had to purge, and purge, and purge; and then to replace, and replace, and replace, all of his old and most "trusted" comrades in arms. If Cuba had had one truly exemplary military officer, it was Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez, a hawk-nosed, handsome, Rommel type who would have stood out for excellence and honor in any army. He had served in the Sierra Maestra with Castro, he had studied at the famous Frunze and Voroshilov military academies in the Soviet Union, he spoke perfect Russian. He had fought at the Bay of Pigs, in Venezuela with Castro's first Marxist guerrillas, in the Congo, in Angola, in Ethiopia, and in Nicaragua, finally becoming the top commander of troops in Fidel's favorite foreign war, Angola. But when the Soviets began forcing Castro to bring home his fifty-seven thousand troops from Angola, Ochoa became not only a threat to Castro but the threat. Ochoa's house became a gathering place for war veterans frustrated by the quagmirish bureaucracy and the hopelessness of the Cuba they returned to. That thirtieth-anniversary spring, anyone could see the disaffected soldiers shuffling restlessly about outside Ochoa's house; discontent and disaffection were palpable, and discontent was something that Fidel never countenanced. He lost no time in acting.
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