The New York Review of Books

Wayne Smith saw Elizardo Sánchez this morning and told him that I hoped to call on him this evening. At lunch the head of the Cuban delegation told Smith that his visit had been most imprudent; there was great popular indignation against Sánchez, and there might have been trouble. Evidently an “act of repudiation” by the Rapid Response Brigades is scheduled.

After adjournment, the three delegations hold a press conference. Fidel vanishes, but he has invited McNamara and me to meet privately with him afterward. The press conference opens with a long wrangle over the no-invasion guarantee that Kennedy offered shortly after the resolution of the missile crisis. Kennedy’s offer, however, was conditioned on Castro’s acceptance of UN inspection to assure the removal of the missiles. Since Castro rejected UN inspection, the guarantee never went into effect⁷—or at least not until Henry Kissinger proclaimed a unilateral guarantee in 1970. The Cubans insist that there was a moral if not a legal guarantee from 1963 on. The whole argument is pointless because no American administration has planned to invade Cuba.

McNamara again expresses his hope for normalization of relations. A Cuban responds that Cuba is all for rapprochement; the problem is the lack of “political will” in the United States. This gives me the opening I have been looking for. I am, I said, an advocate of rapprochement. I am against the embargo; I am for the restoration of diplomatic relations. I do not believe that the US government should subject Cuba to more severe human rights tests than those it has applied to other countries—China, for example, or Turkey, or Pinochet’s Chile. I subscribe to the traditional doctrine that diplomatic recognition does not imply moral approval of a country’s internal arrangements.

But speaking practically (I continue), there is strong opposition to normalizing relations. One reason for this is that Cuba does not observe civilized standards with regard to political and intellectual and artistic freedom. (I say “civilized” with some emphasis, expecting the word would sting Castro, who, I was sure, was listening to the press conference somewhere else in the building.) Every time a human rights activist is arrested or harassed, it strengthens the opposition to normalization. It would greatly facilitate the task of those who favor rapprochement if Cuba pursued a more generous and honorable course with regard to human rights.

These words provoke an outburst from Carlos Lechuga, who, as Cuban ambassador to the United Nations in 1963, had worked with William Attwood in exploring rapprochement. Lechuga is a seemingly urbane fellow, and I am surprised by the crudity of his response. “Waste no sympathy,” Lechuga says, “on these so-called poets and engineers and intellectuals. Almost all of them are agents of the CIA. I think the CIA must have a department of literature set up to recruit such people.” And so on.

The press conference ends on this sour note. I supposed that after my remarks Castro might cancel my invitation to the private meeting. But we—McNamara, Bob Pastor, Jim Blight, and I—are ushered into a room where Fidel, flanked by Carlos Aldana, José Antonio Arbesu, chief of the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, and two other Cubans, greets us cordially. He talks about his only meeting with Hemingway when, during the spring of 1960, in his second year as premier, he won a marlin fishing contest and Hemingway presented the prize. “I’m not a good fisherman,” Castro says, “but the captain of my boat knew where the marlin were running and all I had to do was to throw my line in the water.”

“I no longer play baseball or basketball,” he goes on, “stationary bicycling is too boring; all I have left is scuba diving.” He then tells about a wonder drug called PPG that has been devised in Cuba’s biotechnology laboratories. According to Castro, PPG lowers cholesterol, lowers blood pressure, relieves circulatory troubles, improves memory, and accounts for his apparently unlimited energy.

About the future of Cuba, he says that Cuba’s oil supply in 1992 will be one third of what it was in 1989. Factories are closing down. Public transportation is impaired. Food is rationed. Oxen are replacing tractors. He emphasizes self-reliance as the means by which Cuba will overcome its troubles. “Everything served at the reception last night,” he tells us, “was homegrown—except for the Chilean wine…. Nothing is free in this world, so we have to depend on our own efforts.” Volunteers from the city are laboring in the fields. Tourism, medical biotechnology, sugar: these will earn foreign exchange.

“We have thousands of people working together in cooperation. In a market economy they would be in destructive competition with each other.” Look at the Soviet Union: the government and the Party have lost all authority; they have no capitalists, only speculators; everything is in disarray; the result is chaos; “Russian nihilism has prevailed.” China is doing a far better job in handling its economy.

“If we don’t meet our test, then we will blow up”—said with a broad smile. “Our people are very much aware of that.”

At last the conversation turns to human rights. I observe that it is surely essential to distinguish between non-violent and violent dissent. It is a great error to equate human rights activists with terrorists from Alpha 66. Opposition does not equal treason. It is very hard, Castro replies, to sustain such a distinction. The human rights groups are in contradiction with the basic interests of the country. Because they prepare the way for the terrorists, they are in effect partners of the terrorists. We are in a life and death struggle and can take no chances. “Look at the Soviet Union! I predicted that perestroika would lead to disintegration.”

“You can’t imagine how tolerant we have been. There is great popular anger toward these dissenters. My people criticize me for excessive tolerance…. After all,” he continues, gesturing toward me, “you have slandered our country. You have said that we aren’t civilized. But we haven’t arrested you!”—again the laugh.

I point out that his hard line exacts severe political costs in Europe as well as in the United States. “We have taken that into account,” he says. “But we must defend our Revolution.” I urge him to help the friends of Cuba abroad by being more tolerant of dissenters at home. He says coldly, “I will take your views under consideration,” cutting off that part of the conversation.

We part amicably after a couple of hours. As we leave, Pastor tells Castro that he and I plan to call on Elizardo Sánchez later in the evening. Castro turns to Carlos Aldana and says, “Will that be all right?” Aldana says after a moment that it will. We take it that if an “act of repudiation” is scheduled, it will be postponed.

At about 9:30 PM Bob Pastor, Wayne Smith, Alexandra Schlesinger, and I arrive at Elizardo Sánchez’s tidy, high-ceilinged house on a quiet (at least this night) street in the suburban La Playa section of Havana. He is not there but is expected shortly. We meet his mother, a strong-looking woman with snow-white hair. His wife and children are living in Miami, where they are subjected to harassment by the right-wing Cubans of the Cuban American National Foundation. A single photograph hangs in the front room: Elizardo Sánchez and Senator Edward Kennedy, signed by Ted.

Soon Sánchez arrives. He is a sturdy, quiet man in his forties, with a round face and closely cropped black hair. He has spent eight and a half of the last ten years in prison. He recalls the night of November 22, 1991, when the mob broke into the house and terrified his mother. This house, he tells us, has been raided by the police more often than any other house in Cuba. He says he admires the Revolution’s achievements in health, education, and housing, but emphasizes that the time has come for political freedom. Castro, he says, is trapped by “the absolute solitude of power.”

Sánchez believes in national reconciliation. He wants a country where many ideas can live side by side, where groups from right to left can have a part in the nation’s political life. He is a modest man and makes no great claims for his own group; but he detects pluralist tendencies among young people and says many small groups like his are scattered around the island. Still, he is pessimistic about the future, citing the failure of the Fourth Party Congress in October to propose serious reforms and recent menacing speeches by Carlos Aldana and Raúl Castro.

We ask what would help the cause of human rights in Cuba. His first answer is, “Visits like this.” He goes on to say that a relaxation of tensions, including a loosening of the embargo, would be of the greatest help. He wrote recently in the Miami Herald, “Increased US pressure on Cuba may impede rather than encourage the kind of reforms that we need.” He is scornful of the “pseudo-democratic, ultraconservative Cuban exiles in the United States who want nothing so much as to intensify the US-Cuban cold war.” They think I am a Communist, he ruefully says, and Castro thinks I am an agent of the CIA.

We depart, troubled by what may lie in wait for this intelligent, reasonable, very brave man.

On the following Thursday, January 16, a Rapid Response Brigade—as many as three hundred people—surrounded, besieged, and battered the house of Elizardo Sánchez. As of this writing he has not been arrested. However, another human rights activist, Sebastian Arcos, was arrested in mid-January and charged with “rebellion.” On February 18, the Miami Herald quoted Sánchez as saying that, while Yndamaro Restano and Sebastian Arcos are “not being treated badly,” María Elena Cruz Varela was serving her sentence “under very adverse conditions. She is being held in a small cell with three other women who are dangerous common criminals. One of them is a child killer, another is in prison for beating her husband, and a third one is mentally deranged…. That cell is hell.” Sánchez also warned against a new wave of mass vigiliantism allegedly directed against thieves and gamblers but “we know that the main motivation is political.”

Earlier, on January 19, Sánchez, Restano, Gustavo Arcos of the Cuban Committee on Civil Rights, Osvaldo Paya of the Christian Liberation Movement, and Lazaro Loretto of the Association for the Defense of Political Rights issued a Declaration of Good Will reaffirming their rejection of violence and “their aspiration to reconciliation among all Cubans.” The declaration emphasized that “isolation and deprivation [i.e., the current US policy] shall not be instrumental in enabling the Cuban People to take, in freedom and peace, the steps they desire and need to overcome the crisis which they are enduring” and called on the United States to initiate talks with the Cuban government and thereby “to contribute to the achievement of a tension-free environment which would allow Cubans to carry out peacefully any changes which the Cuban people themselves may decide upon.”⁸

On January 14, Granma, the Communist Party newspaper, said that so long as the United States maintains an “aberrant and obstinate policy to destroy the Cuban Revolution…there cannot be the slightest tolerance or flexibility.” Does this imply that a relaxation of the blockade might lead to a relaxation of repression, as Sánchez has suggested? Democratic leaders in Latin America, while pressing Castro to undertake reforms, also call for the end of Cuba’s isolation and its read-mission to the Organization of American States. Carlos Andrés Pérez, the heir of Betancourt in Venezuela, sees no point in continuing the US embargo: “It has been there for thirty years. That says it all.” Caribbean states, including Barbados and Trinidad, also advocate an end to the embargo. In one sense, the embargo can be said to protect Castro’s Revolution. Flooding Cuba with US tourists and US consumer goods would do a great deal more to subvert the revolution than anything ever figured out by the CIA.

Some small changes are quietly taking place—quietly, Gillian Gunn of the Carnegie Endowment surmises, because of “Castro’s reluctance to be perceived as giving in to pressure.” The encouragement of foreign private investment may be of special significance, even though largely confined so far to tourist facilities. Castro himself speaks of “socialism with joint ventures.” Such subversion of socialism by capitalism would seem much in the US interest. Yet, Wayne Smith says, “In case after case, the United States has threatened potential third-country investors with reprisals if they go through with their deals in Cuba.”

Our opportunities for observation were limited, but we did not get the impression of a country on the brink of explosion; and if the melancholy and desperation one found in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe in the 1980s are present in Cuba, we did not sense it. Perhaps a million Cubans—10 percent of the population—have fled the country. But among those who remain Castro seems to retain much of his old popularity—though without free speech, free press, free elections, how can one tell? The police are ever ready to suppress public protest and dissidence.

Castro’s strength is ultimately rooted not in his doctrinaire socialism but in his passionate nationalism. Social advances are important too. Cubans value their schools, their doctors, their houses. Memories of the disparities between rich and poor under Batista linger, at least among the older generation. Young people—and almost 60 percent of the Cuban population was born after Fidel came to power—resent belt-tightening and censorship and envy the consumer society ninety miles away; they would like freedom of speech and freedom to move in and out of Cuba. But few, I suspect, wish to abandon the social gains of the Revolution.

In particular, few Cubans want to turn their country over to the Cuban American National Foundation, the Miami organization described by Ernesto Betancourt, the Cuban exile who was the first head of Ronald Reagan’s indignantly anti-Castro Radio Martí, as “dominated by former collaborators of the hated Batista dictatorship.” Its self-aggrandizing chairman, Jorge Mas Canosa, who claims the support of the Bush administration, is said to see himself as president of a post-Castro Cuba and has already sponsored a post-Castro constitution. When Mas Canosa recently attacked the Miami Herald as “Nuevo Granma,” the publisher of the Herald received bomb and death threats from right-wing fanatics.

However repressive Castro’s rule is, many Cubans, including dissidents, regard the alternative offered by the Cuban American National Foundation as worse; indeed, dread of the return of the Miami exiles represented by the foundation is a major source of Castro’s continuing strength. The Bush administration’s supposed support of the foundation, Betancourt says, leads dissidents within Cuba to “perceive Mr. Castro’s removal as more threatening to their interests than his staying in power. They fear that the US intends to impose on Cuba the advocates of revenge and restoration of the past…. It is in the US interest to encourage the internal solution”—i.e., to support those inside Cuba who are working for political freedom and democracy.

In fact, the Cuban American National Foundation is not the only alternative to Castro; nor does it represent all Cuban exiles in the United States. Among the other exile organizations, for example, is Cubans for Independence and Democracy (CID), which espouses social democracy and is led by Huber Matos, who was with Castro in the Sierra Maestra; after he showed signs of independence, he spent twenty years under horrible conditions in Castro’s jails. The Democratic Platform Coalition was founded in 1991 by Carlos Alberto Montaner and supports human rights activists inside Cuba. Liberal Cuban exiles recognize that the succession to Castro will have to come from within Cuba, not out of Miami.

A Republican administration haunted by an exaggerated fear of its own right wing is not likely, above all in an election year, to recast its policy toward Cuba. It lies within the US government’s power, though, to stop the paramilitary raids undertaken in violation of the neutrality laws by Cuban exiles trained in the environs of Miami by Alpha 66 and other right-wing outfits. And it lies within Castro’s power to stop the persecution of dissenters, to carry out reforms in the economy, and to move toward political and cultural freedom.

Whether Castro is ready to seek rapprochement is not clear. He remains a puzzle—a tyrant and a bully capable of gloating over one-time comrades he has sent to prison, yet also a leader capable of humor, charm, and limitless energy. The question that lingers is whether this eloquent, witty, and intelligent man, who once seemed the most flexible and resilient of the world’s Communist leaders, will end, along with Kim Il Sung, as the last of the neo-Stalinist dinosaurs.

—February 27, 1992