For Fidel, an enemy was anyone who displayed the merest disagreement with his ideas. Captain Borrego, who had run the Sugar Ministry, warned him at the beginning of 1970 that ten million tons of sugar simply could not be harvested that year. Fidel went into a fury. "Ten million tons there will be," he shouted. "There have to be." The harvest that year was well over eight million, but Fidel had "given his word" that ten million tons of sugar would be produced, and so the extraordinary collective effort seemed a failure. I had decided that those imprudent acts of Fidel's were an exacerbated manifestation of his optimism, but experience showed us that in fact they were a reflection of his contempt for others and his egotism.

Luckily, two years before, I had been able to read the Diary of the Cuban Revolution by Carlos Franqui. It was being passed from hand to hand throughout the country, a clandestine book. I had read the first section of the book when Franqui and Valerio Riva, the director of Feltrinelli, were putting together materials for a book to be signed by Fidel himself. In his essay "Concerning Cultural Dissension in Cuba," Valerio recounted in detail the work sessions that had taken place in the Feltrinelli castle in the Piedmont region of Italy. Valerio emphasized in his memoir the effort that had to be made to bring order to Fidel's speeches and writings so that a democratic orientation would prevail over his authoritarian tendencies. They were trying to show Fidel's better side. But when I was finally able to read all of Franqui's Diary and I read the letters Fidel had written to his wife and to his friend Nary Revuelta from Batista's jail cell, I finally understood that his Marxism was probably inevitable, since Marxism was the most suitable vehicle for him to create an authoritarian regime in which he would be recognized as Supreme Chief.

Napoleon was one of his idols. "The speeches of Napoleon are true works of art," he would write. "How well he understood the French! In each sentence he is able to play on each one of their emotional strings; he is playing with them . . . and how great he was with his enemies. I have already read much about him and yet I never tire of reading about him. There is no doubt that he was an Alexander without his disorder, Caesar without the personal vices, Charlemagne without massacring whole towns, and Frederick II with lots of guts and a soul open to friendship. I always considered him peerless. It should be remembered that Alexander received from his father, Philip, the powerful throne of Macedonia, and Hannibal received from his father, Hamilcar Barca, his army. Caesar owed much to his patrician blood. Napoleon, on the other hand, owed everything to himself, to his genius and to his will."

In another letter Fidel would say: "Robespierre was an idealist and honorable until his death. With the Revolution endangered, the frontiers of the nation surrounded by enemies, vacillators obstructing the way, it was necessary to be hard, inflexible and severe. It is better to sin through excess than through default, which can only lead to failure. A few months of terror were necessary to do away with a terror which had lasted centuries. We need many Robespierres in Cuba."

For more than twenty years, that was Castro's policy. The man who had spent his youth in a quest for power had little to say to me. He was in the place he had sought. From the wars he had read about when young, he took that impeccably pressed uniform, the big belt, the large pistol, and the laurel leaves next to the star of Commander in Chief on his epaulettes; his salt-and-pepper beard was something none of his legendary heroes from the past could boast of. How different Fidel seemed to me now from the man I met when I was young, during that far-off time spent at the Varadero beach and during the electoral campaign in which he harangued the people with that inflection that was a mixture of Eddy Chibás and Pardo Llada, standing on a podium or shouting from the back of a truck, in his sloppy dress, in shirt sleeves, sweating profusely.

Why hadn't he been "hard, inflexible and severe" in my case? He let Pedro Luis Boitel die in prison during a hunger strike; Paco Chavarri, who had been Vice Minister of Foreign Relations and a militant in the 26th of July Movement, was sent off to prison because of Fidel's rage over his criticism. Jorge Valls was sentenced to twenty years for having testified in favor of Marcos Rodríguez in the trial which sought to implicate the militants of the old CP. I, on the other hand, had expressed my ideas in a book of poems, Fuera del juego, and in a novel, but I spent only thirty-seven days in the custody of State Security and as a patient in the Military Hospital. The cells where Boitel, Martha Frayde, Jorge Valls, and Chavarri were imprisoned were the worst anyone in Cuba could have been in at that time. Fidel describes the one he was held in in March of 1954:

Can you possibly imagine the solitude of this cell? Since I am a good cook, once in a while I entertain myself fixing up something. A few days ago, my sister sent me from Oriente Province a small ham; I fried up a slab of it with guava jelly. But that's nothing; today the boys sent me a little pot of stew with pignoli nuts in syrup. I'm telling you I'll conjure up these things for you by thought alone! Tomorrow I'll have more ham. What do you think? I also do spaghetti sometimes with different sauces or sometimes a tortilla. They are really good. Of course, the repertory is not limited to that. I brew luscious coffee, too. No problem about tobacco-I have a box of Upmanns thanks to Dr. Miró Cardona, and two boxes from my brother Ramón, a bunch from another friend, and even a little box of small ones which came along with some books, one of which I am lighting right now.....

That was the cell which General Fulgencio Batista reserved for his principal adversary after the assault on the Moncada Barracks.

"I saw him a year ago."

Before going on, Fidel asked Chomi for coffee and water for the three of us.

"I know that García Márquez has worried a lot about your case. Besides, he is someone who says exactly what is on his mind. As far as you are concerned, your wife has been told right here in this office to let us know how we could improve your living conditions, that you should ask for anything you needed. But she answered by saying that your only wish was to leave Cuba. Some excesses were committed by us in your case, but I do not believe that is the true reason why you want to leave. I think that you still feel the way you did before. Your friend Alberto Mora blew his brains out, but you prefer to flee the country."

Then, driven to ask a question that he must have wanted to ask me for a long time, he shouted out, "Isn't there anything in the cultural sector of the Revolution that you find admirable?"

He waited impatiently for my answer.

"All the state publishing houses that have been created are admirable," I said.

"Nothing more?"

"The film industry also. Cuba now has its own films, and some of them have been excellent."

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