EL-HE (continued)

The drama began, then speeded up dizzily early in June of 1989, when Raúl Castro delivered a strangely rambling and surreal speech to the armed forces he commanded. As Fidel had started doing with las masas, Raúl now railed at his officers, instead of praising or inspiring them. Tense and ill at ease, the caustic Raúl told the officers that they must remember that "Fidel is our papa!" and that, if they were unhappy in Cuba, he could easily arrange for them to get visas "to Hungary or Poland." At one point, he insulted them gratuitously, shouting at them, "Do we have democracy here?" And they all yelled back, mesmerized, "Yes!" He smiled a strange smile. "Did you say that because I forced you?" he demanded, as if the original humiliation were not enough. "No!" they all shouted back. Then he looked at them with an expression of utter disgust and said, "You are behaving like schoolchildren."

The Ochoa "trial" that ensued shocked awake a world that had refused, before, to look with any seriousness at the way Castro used courts, trials, and his own forms of "justice." The handsome, gallant Ochoa, with his black curly hair and his long, aquiline nose, sat impassively in the courtroom in his light gray dress uniform. He looked like a man stunned, or drugged, as he stared vacuously at the floor. When Castro accused him of drug-running, Ochoa could only say finally that, even if he faced execution, "My last thought will be of Fidel, and the great Revolution he has given our people."

It was the Moscow trials of the early 1930S all over again, when Stalin's closest and most innocent associates had stood up in court and veritably demanded their own deaths. But it was more than that: it was another one of Castro's personally devised "trials," in which he had since Moncada changed, and transformed, and again changed legality. In the surrealistic world that Castro had turned Cuba into, the military tribunal that tried Ochoa was even actually a legally nonexistent body. (The law on military tribunals, article 5, establishes only three jurisdictional bodies, and this was not one.) But, then, the tribunal was also composed of members ineligible for service and the testimony that convicted Ochoa, his own, was legally inadmissible. In the end, Arnaldo Ochoa, like the Moscow trial defendants, was more willing to die than to admit that his life had been lived in the services of a false ideal -- and, of course, there was the question of whether he wanted his children to live. . .

Cuban revolutionary hero Arnaldo Ochoa and three other high-ranking officers in key positions were executed by firing squad at dawn on July 13, 1989, after being found guilty not even formally of drug-smuggling but of creating "hostile action against foreign nations" through such smuggling. The major foreign nation was, ironically, the United States. Fidel had made his point -- there was going to be no post-Angola rebellion, and in fact no rebellion at all, against him. He had purposely involved his men in the drug trade for his own security in the early 1980s, and he had as well made some money through it. Now the tactic, like all his Machiavellian tactics, served him well.

But it didn't end there. General José Abrahante Fernández, the powerful interior minister who had replaced Valdes and was now the third most influential man in Cuban politics (after Fidel and Raúl), was sent to jail for twenty years. With that, Osmani Cienfuegos, Castro's right- hand man in managing the economy, took refuge in the Venezuelan embassy. The santeros, meanwhile, began ominously to move away from Fidel -- one of the men executed with Ochoa was a twin, and in Santería it was a sign of evil to divide twins. What Castro had done to Batista through the power of the santeros was now being done to him.

Actually, the situation was even more serious than it looked; for the Ochoa trial and its psychic environs represented on the larger scale the very end of his cunningly employed "Fidelista internationalism." The boys were coming home, and not in victory but in ambiguous defeat, in a twilight of dreams gone wrong and battles half-fought. Castro for so many years had so brilliantly subsumed harsh reality at home in those faraway dreams of glory; now that was all over and how well he sensed, and knew, that his charisma at home could no longer mask the shabby social and economic realities that were no longer hidden by the glories of "Angola . . . Ethiopia . . . Vietnam." Now, the masses in Havana and Santiago and Cienfuegos, in the clear light of their growing exhaustion, for the first time in three decades "knew."

Then, just five months later, America invaded Panama, and still another of Castro's carefully constructed parallel or alternate military organizations was revealed. The very day of the invasion, December 20, 1989, Noriega's Defense Forces crumbled and Castro's mysterious "Dignity Battalion" appeared. Wearing bandannas, with faces often covered, this shadowy parallel "army" violently took over the streets. The invasion of Panama switched from being a clear military attack against Noriega to fighting against a new, seemingly unstructured army, which slipped through the streets like quicksilver flowing, and whose objective was to bloody the United States for as long as possible in order to make the war unpopular in the States and to mobilize the hemisphere against the Americans.

In the long run, however, it didn't work either. Noriega was far from the hero Castro had hoped for in the crucial Panama zone. He finally only walked disconsolately into the Vatican embassy in red underwear to ward off voodoo charms. Within a few days, Castro's "Dignity Battalions" were defeated, and on January 3, 1990, Noriega walked out of the papal nuncio's -- and straight into the arms of the waiting American army, leaving Castro ever more alone in the Caribbean and with the enemy Americans now in full charge.

With the "loss" of Panama, Castro had only Nicaragua left for consolation, but it was nowhere near the economic prize Panama had been, for the Sandinistas were even more inept at running an economy than he was (they had had 33,000 percent inflation in 1988). But, most important, there was no assurance in this age of Gorbachev (Time magazine that Christmas of 1989 named him not only their "Man of the Year" but their " Man of the Decade") that the Soviets would continue to support or even to suffer these obstreperous colonies that no longer belonged to them even by spurious reason or feigned ideology. It was even worse than that because in the same tumultuous year of 1989, Eastern Europe "freed" itself from Soviet rule and renounced Communism completely. Castro's ideological and material hinterlands were completely gone -- his Eastern Europe military lifeline and his personal PX had vanished in a matter of mere months. Where would he go now for the arms that used to come from Czechoslovakia? For the intelligence and its mysterious apparatuses that had come from East Germany? For the help for the Sandinistas and the Angolans of the world that had come from Bulgaria, Romania, the Soviet Union?

And then there came the knock-out blow: the Nicaraguan elections of February 25, 1990. The Sandinistas had been lured into these elections by the long and sinuous machinations of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and his famous Central American "peace plan." But they only allowed them to take place because they were absolutely sure they could control them and win them. This would make them look good among the Europeans, from whom they desperately needed money and investment, and they would finally legitimize Sandinista rule before the world. In truth, there seemed no danger.

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