The double life of Fidel Castro: my 17 years as personal bodyguard to El Líder Máximo

213 Pages·2015·1.21 MB·English

by  Juan Reinaldo Sánchez

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To my mother, the light of my life, shining example of humility and
devotion. To my children Aliette and Ernesto. To their mother, who so
often played the role of father in my absence. To my uncle Manuel, that
“dad” who passed on extraordinary ethical values to me. To my
grandparents Ángela and Crespo, guardian angels whose presence I still
feel. To my grandchildren and to my brother. And to all those who
supported me in difficult times. May God bless you all.
1
CAYO PIEDRA, THE CASTROS’
PARADISE ISLAND
Fidel Castro’s yacht was sailing in the Caribbean Sea, on the azure waters off the
southern coast of Cuba. We had weighed anchor just ten minutes earlier, and
already white dolphins had come to join us. A school of nine or ten of them were
patrolling on the starboard side, right next to the hull, while another group
streamed along in our wake, thirty yards or so behind the rear port side, looking
for all the world like the motorized escort of a head of state on an official visit.
“The reinforcements are here—you can go and relax,” I said to Gabriel
Gallegos, pointing to the multitudes of dorsal swimmers cleaving through the
water at high speed.
My colleague smiled at my quip. Three minutes later, however, the
unpredictable creatures changed direction and moved off, disappearing into the
horizon.
“No sooner do they get here than they leave! What lack of
professionalism…,” Gabriel joked in his turn.
Neither of us were strangers to professionalism. We had both joined the
personal security team of the Commander thirteen years earlier, in 1977—and in
Cuba, nothing is more “professional,” more developed, or more important, than
the protection of the head of state. Fidel had only to make the smallest excursion
out to sea on a simple fishing or underwater hunting trip for an impressive
apparatus of military defense to come into operation. And so Aquarama II—
Fidel Castro’s yacht—was unfailingly escorted by Pioniera I and Pioniera II,
two powerful, virtually identical fifty-five-foot-long speedboats, one of which
was kitted out with every form of medical care to deal with the slightest health
problem that might arise.
The ten members of Fidel’s personal guard, the elite corps to which I
belonged, were divided among these three vessels—just as, on land, we were
divided among three cars. The boats were all equipped with heavy machine guns
and stocks of grenades, Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles, and ammunition to prepare us
for any eventuality. Since the start of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro had
lived under the threat of attack: the CIA admitted it had planned hundreds of
assassination attempts, involving poison or booby-trapped pens and cigars.
A bit farther out to sea, a lifeguard patroller was also deployed, providing
maritime and air radar surveillance of the zone and with instructions to intercept
any boat coming within at least three sea miles of Aquarama II. The Cuban air
force was also involved: at the Santa Clara air base, sixty or so miles away, a
fighter pilot in combat gear was kept on red alert, ready at any moment to jump
into his Russian-made MiG-29 to take off in less than two minutes and reach
Aquarama II at supersonic speed.
It was a sunny day. Nothing surprising about that: it was the middle of
summer, 1990, the thirty-second year of the reign of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz,
then sixty-three years old. The Berlin wall had come down the previous autumn;
the American president George W. Bush was getting ready to launch Operation
Desert Storm; and, for his part, Fidel Castro was sailing toward his private, top-
secret island, Cayo Piedra, on board the only luxury yacht in the republic of
Cuba.
Put into service in the early 1970s, Aquarama II was an elegant vessel with a
ninety-foot white hull, a larger replica of Aquarama I, the racing yacht that had
been confiscated from someone involved in the regime of Fulgencio Batista—
overturned on January 1, 1959, by the Cuban Revolution that had begun two and
a half years earlier in the jungle of the Sierra Maestra by Fidel and sixty or so
barbudos. In addition to the two double cabins—one of which, Fidel’s, was
equipped with a private bathroom—the vessel could sleep twelve other people.
The six armchairs in the main sitting room could be converted into beds, and
there were two berths in the radio communication room and four more in the
cabin reserved for the crew, at the bow. Like all self-respecting yachts,
Aquarama II had all mod cons: air-conditioning, two bathrooms, a toilet,
television, and a bar.
Compared with the playthings of contemporary Russian and Saudi Arabian
nouveaux riches who cruise across the Caribbean or the Mediterranean,
Aquarama II, however handsomely done up in its “vintage” style, would
probably seem outdated. But in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, this luxury yacht,
entirely decorated in exotic wood imported from Angola, could hold its own
against any of those moored in the marinas of the Bahamas or Saint-Tropez.
Indeed, it was even clearly superior, because of its power. Its four engines, given
to Fidel Castro by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, were identical to those fitted
on Soviet navy patrollers. At full throttle, they propelled Aquarama II at the
phenomenal, unbeatable speed of forty-two knots, or about forty-eight miles an
hour.
Hardly anyone in Cuba knew of the existence of this yacht, its principal
mooring a private creek invisible and inaccessible to ordinary mortals on the
eastern side of the famous Bay of Pigs, around ninety miles southeast of Havana.
Since the 1960s, Fidel’s private marina had been hidden here, in the middle of a
military zone and under close surveillance. The site, named La Caleta del
Rosario, also housed one of his numerous vacation homes and, in an extension, a
small personal museum devoted to Fidel’s fishing trophies.
It was a journey of forty-five minutes from this marina to Cayo Piedra, the
paradise island—a trip I made hundreds of times. Each time I was struck by the
vivid blue of the sky, the purity of the water, and the beauty of the marine
depths. As often as not, dolphins would come to greet us, swimming at our side
and then leaving again as their fancy took them.
We often used to play a game of seeing who could spot them first: as soon as
somebody shouted ¡Aquí están!, there they were. Pelicans would often follow us
from the Cuban coast as far as Cayo Piedra, and I loved watching their heavy,
rather clumsy flight. For other members of this Cuban military elite, that
crossing of three-quarters of an hour constituted a welcome break; protecting
someone as demanding as Fidel required constant vigilance and afforded no
opportunity for letup.
El Jefe (the chief), as we privately called him, generally stayed in the plush
atmosphere of the main sitting room, usually in his large black CEO chair, in
which no other human being had ever sat. A glass of his favorite drink of whisky
on the rocks in one hand, he would immerse himself in the summarized reports
from the intelligence services, go through the review of the international press
prepared by his cabinet, or scour the telegrams from Agence France-Presse,
Associated Press, and Reuters.
El Jefe would also take the opportunity to discuss current affairs with José
Naranjo, the faithful aide-de-camp known as Pepín, who shared almost every
moment of his boss’s professional life until his death from cancer in 1995.1
Dalia was also there, of course. Mother of five of Fidel’s children, Dalia Soto del
Valle was the woman who had secretly shared his life since 1961—although
Cubans did not learn of her existence until the 2000s. Finally there was Professor
Eugenio Selman, Fidel’s personal doctor until 2010, whose professional
competence and political conversation were highly valued by El Comandante.
The primary function of this elegant, considerate, and universally respected man
was obviously to look after the chief’s health—but Fidel’s personal doctor also
ministered to the whole of his entourage.
*
Guests—company directors or heads of state—rarely came on board. On the few
occasions when that occurred, El Comandante would invite his guest to
accompany him onto the upper deck from where the panorama of the Cuban
coast, particularly the famous Bay of Pigs from which we had just set sail, could
be admired. As Aquarama II moved off, Fidel—an incomparable raconteur—
would regale his guest with an account of the tragic landing on that now
celebrated bay. We would watch him from the rear deck, launching into great
explanations and pointing to different parts of that swampy, mosquito-infested
area, a teacher dispensing an open-air history lesson to his erstwhile student.
“You see down there at the bottom of the bay—that’s Playa Larga! And
there, at the eastern entrance to the bay is Playa Girón! It was there that at
exactly 1:15 a.m. on April 17, 1961, the contingent of fourteen hundred CIA-
trained Cuban exiles landed in an attempted invasion aimed at overthrowing the
nation. But nobody here surrenders! The people resisted heroically, and after
three days the invaders had to withdraw to Playa Girón and hand over their
weapons.”
Planned by Dwight Eisenhower and launched at the beginning of John F.
Kennedy’s presidency, the operation was a complete fiasco: 1,400 members of
the expeditionary unit were taken prisoner and 118 killed. On Castro’s side there
were 176 deaths and several hundred injured. It was a total humiliation for
Washington. For the first time in history, “American imperialism” suffered a
crushing military defeat, and Fidel Castro established himself on the
international stage as the undisputed leader of the developing world. Now openly
allied with the USSR, he could deal with the great powers on an equal footing.
Fidel was without question a participant in History with a capital H, and his
captive guest, standing on the top deck in the scorching heat, would be hanging
on to his every word, enthralled. It was almost as though he, too, were now
experiencing history firsthand; he would doubtless treasure for the rest of his life
the memory of those few hours of holiday spent on Fidel Castro’s yacht.
Afterward, the two men would return to the sitting room to join Dalia and
Professor Eugenio Selman. That is when the captain of Aquarama II slowed
down and the water began to turn emerald green: we were approaching Cayo
Piedra.
*
Few people know that, in an irony of history, Fidel Castro indirectly owed the
discovery of this vacation home to the American invasion launched by JFK.
In the days following the failed Bay of Pigs landing in April 1961, Fidel was
exploring the region when he encountered a local fisherman with a wrinkled face
whom everyone called El Viejo Finalé. He asked Old Finalé to give him a tour of
the area and the fisherman immediately took him on board his fishing boat to