Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [50]
He moved on, further and further from reality, leaving former supporters behind along the way. The middle classes grew disillusioned first. Hard and fast supporters of Castro in the beginning, the educated professionals were quick to realize that the man they had backed in the fight against Batista was simply a tyrant of a different sort. These Cubans wanted freedom, but they did not want radical economic changes leading to a socialistic economy, nor did they want to see Cuba take her place at Russia’s side.
Cuba’s middle class was small. The economic order that Batista had fostered had little place for the bourgeoisie—there were rich men and there were poor men, with few in the middle. But the Cuban middle class had raised money for Castro, had helped him when he most needed help. Now they were running out on him.
They went to Miami, to Tampa. They went by boat or by plane, with legal visas or as secret refugees. And Castro rationalized their desertion by moving further to the left. The bourgeoisie had no place in a true socialistic order, he argued. Cuba was better without them.
Other revolutionaries followed in their footsteps. Men who had fought at Castro’s side, men who had been willing to give their lives in the fight against Batista, now saw they had made no great bargain. Some of them were hopeless idealists, men who would be content with nothing less than perfection, men who would rebel against any established order. But still more of them were honest men who could not live with their conscience while Castro was at the helm.
Some of these, too, went to Miami and Tampa and New York. Some gave up on Cuba, divorcing themselves entirely from Cuban politics and applying for citizenship in the United States. But others refused to give up. They raised funds for a second revolution, trained secret armies in Florida and in Guatemala just as Castro had trained his band of eighty-two rebels in the fields of Mexico.
Members of Castro’s government deserted him. Newspapers printed articles and editorials of which he disapproved, and he retaliated by suppressing those newspapers and silencing their editors. Batista had done this, branding the editors as Communist party hacks. Castro did the same thing, calling the editors the lackeys of American imperialism. The catch-words were changed but the facts remained the same. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech were on the way out. Despotism was there to stay.
And the resistance began.
It was an intelligent resistance, a keen-edged resistance. The men who were sick of Castro had learned from Castro. They knew how guerrilla warfare worked. They understood the junction of a metropolitan underground. They knew just what to do and how to do it in order to bring about the end of a man named Fidel Castro.
Once again, men with guns stole into the hills of Oriente Province, shooting Castro’s soldiers from ambush, burning cane fields and spreading discontent. Once again men touched off bombs at night in Havana. The people had not yet risen against Castro. A great many Cubans still supported him. His aura was still visible to some eyes, and his halo, though fading rapidly, was still discernible to the diehards.
But the process had begun.
There was an invasion. It was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, and it was also supported by former Batistianos—but Castro crushed this invasion. The precise details may never be known, but the invasion was a masterpiece of poor planning on the part of the invaders and the American government. The propaganda value for Castro was immense. For months he had been shouting about an American-sponsored invasion, and now it had happened.
But the tall bearded man had not learned. He offered to trade prisoners for tractors, a move that showed a total disregard for human life.