Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [49]
Maria was alive. He found her, moaning, in a thicket not far from him. She had been wounded twice. There was a bullet in her abdomen; another bullet had shattered her left leg. She moaned and cursed in Spanish.
He put a splint on her leg. He dug out the bullets from her body, bandaged her wounds. He lit the campfire again and made some soup for her but she refused to eat. He tended her, trying to make her comfortable.
She died around midnight. He sat alone by the fire, smoking a cigarette he had taken from one of the corpses. He was alone, the last remnant. He—the doomed man, the man who had to die. He was alive.
It seemed unfair.
It was late when he fell asleep. In the morning he awoke when the sun struck his eyes. He got to his feet, made himself a quick breakfast, and left the area.
The last survivor. Now he had to go on, to kill and kill and kill. The cancer was a strong pain over his heart—it would not let him live long, and soon he could stop killing and fighting and running. Soon the cancer would kill him, or the Castristas would kill him. From one side or another, death would come.
When it did, it would be a release.
TEN
No man in history ever had an easier time taking power than did Fidel Castro when Batista fled the country leaving him the keys to the kingdom. Castro had, from the beginning, the one ingredient Batista never attained in all his years of despotism. He had the people behind him.
There were dissident elements. The political henchmen who had grown fat under Batista did not welcome the bearded rebel, certainly. And the very rich—the large landowners, the growers of tobacco and sugar—knew that Castro’s regime would mean a financial loss to them. But the people of Cuba, the lawyers and the doctors and the shopkeepers and the students and the workers and the peasants, backed the revolution all the way. Castro was their leader and they were his people.
It is not easy to become hated by people who love you. It is not a simple matter to switch positions entirely, so that those who supported you once now seek to destroy you. Castro did not do this all at once. He did not even manage it entirely.
American support went first. The United States was quick to distrust Castro—and with good reason. His several reforms too soon became just another form of oppression. True, some peasants did get land, some efforts were made in the direction of combating the problem of poverty. But with those reforms came oppressions and seizures of people and property that equaled Batista’s earlier brutalities.
Fidel could have changed American popular opinion, but the years in the hills had not made a subtle compromiser out of him. Charging forward like an enraged, clumsy bull might work in guerrilla warfare, but he tried to apply that method to international diplomacy.
The United States was used as the excuse and cause for every failing in Cuba, the germ responsible for every last one of the island’s ills. Castro shouted that Batista’s men had held power at the wheels of American tanks, firing American guns and dropping bombs from American planes. He brought truths, half-truths and lies together in such a way that Cuban popular opinion quickly turned anti-American. But the price of this was the friendship of the United States, which he lost.
The United States cut the Cuban sugar quota, a fairly drastic move which could have wrecked the Cuban economy. Castro traded with Russia. The confiscated American refineries were used to process Soviet oil, and the Russians bought the Cuban sugar—at a drastically reduced price. Castro ordered the staff of the American Embassy in Havana cut to one-tenth, overnight, and the inevitable result was a break in diplomatic relations between the two nations.
In Fidel Castro’s mind, all of this was desirable, all of it justified. He was moving toward paranoia,