Fidel Castro Part 7: Che Guevara in the Jungle

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It's June the 29th, 1964.

In Mexico City, a young woman walks nervously into a crowded room.

At the opposite end, several microphones are being placed on a table.

As the woman approaches, all eyes turn towards her.

Her name is Juana.

Though most people know her as Juanita,

there's something familiar about her.

A gently sloping nose, her prominent cheekbones and small chin, her soft brown eyes.

A chair is dragged up to the table.

Juanita takes a seat.

She places a piece of paper on the desk in front of her.

She flattens it with her hand.

Head down, her eyebrows fix into a slight frown.

She silently mouths a few words to herself.

She looks up.

Directly in front of her is a television camera and several expectant journalists.

She takes a deep breath and begins to speak.

I can no longer remain indifferent to what is happening in my country, she says, her voice wavering, her eyes brimming with tears.

My brothers have made it an enormous prison surrounded by water.

The country she speaks of is Cuba.

Her brothers are Raul and Fidel Castro.

Seven years younger than Fidel, Juanita had once been his staunch supporter.

When he was leading his army of guerrilla rebels, she had traveled to the US to raise funds for him.

She'd even smuggled weapons up to his mountain hideout.

Now

she's fleeing her homeland, never to return.

In the USA, just 90 miles from Cuba, the 1960s is a decade of experimentation and radical change.

In its own inimitable way, something similar is happening in Cuba.

There, the creation of Castroland.

is well underway.

The island is in the grip of a full-on communist revolution.

It's also becoming a laboratory for Fidel's most eccentric ideas and his most authoritarian tendencies.

Juanita has had enough.

Her brother, on the other hand,

well, he has barely started.

From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is part seven of the Fidel Castro story,

and this

is Real Dictators.

Back in the spring of 1963, Fidel Castro sets off for a five-week tour of the Soviet Union.

The trip is of global significance.

In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, relations between Cuba and the USSR are strained.

There's also a strong personal element at play.

When Castro learned he'd been cut out of a deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev that removed Soviet missiles from Cuba, he felt personally affronted.

In the coming weeks and months, he licks his wounds.

He grows sullen and remote.

The invitation from Khrushchev is a timely ego boost, and the tour proves to be a roaring success.

Castro is fated wherever he goes.

The affinity between him and Khrushchev is restored, and in front of the watching world, ties between Havana and Moscow are reaffirmed.

Of course, the very opposite is true of Cuba's relationship with the USA.

Yet, unbeknownst to the public, there are efforts to build bridges.

Shortly before Castro leaves for his Russian tour, an American journalist arrives in Havana.

Her name is Lisa Howard.

A former B-movie actor, in 1958, Howard turns her back on Hollywood and sets herself up as a journalist.

She has no training, but infinite reserves of tenacity.

Her rapid success is startling.

Working as an unpaid volunteer for a radio network, in 1960 she pulls off an amazing coup by landing an interview with Nikita Khrushchev.

Peter Kornblau is senior analyst at the National Security Archive.

With access to Lisa Howard's unpublished letters and diaries, he's revealed previously secret details of her astonishing story.

Lisa Howard was a woman ahead of her time.

Real journalists were like, who is this woman?

And from there, she ended up getting a job with ABC News and became their first female full-time correspondent.

And that started her short but extraordinarily consequential career.

She was the first woman to be given their own news show.

It was called News with a Woman's Touch.

And then she was given special interviews.

And of course, she eventually set her sights after the Cuban Missile Crisis on Fidel Castro and spent a year pushing and shoving, coercing, coaxing Cuban authorities to give her permission to go to Cuba and interview him, which she finally did in 1963.

When Howard first arrives in Havana, she encounters nothing but frustration.

Fidel is too busy for an interview, she's constantly told.

He's also not as open to American journalists as he had been in years gone by.

Fidel Castro had an extremely suspicious view of corporate U.S.

media.

The media had, of course, accused him of being a mass murderer.

They had circulated footage of prisoners being executed after the revolution.

They had obviously sided with U.S.

corporations who had been expropriated by the Castro revolution, and Castro basically saw the media as being unfair to him and didn't believe he was going to get a fair shape.

After three weeks, an intermediary steps in.

Fidel is told that Howard is no ordinary journalist, but an extremely beautiful one.

Appealing to Castro's machismo does the trick.

A meeting is arranged.

Late on a Sunday evening, Howard makes her way across the Malecon, Havana's picturesque seafront promenade.

She arrives at the Riviera Hotel.

This is one of those decadent Havana night spots, beloved by American tourists before the Revolution.

Built by the notorious mobster Majelensky, it now belongs to the state.

Howard crosses the marble floor of the hotel lobby.

She's not headed for a private suite, but for the Copper Cabaret, the hotel nightclub.

When the venue opened in 1957, Ginger Rogers was the headline act.

There are still dancing girls here.

In sequins and feathers, they sway to the swinging Cuban rhythms.

Only now they tend to do it while denouncing the Yankee imperialist swine.

It's around midnight before Castro makes an appearance.

Sat across a table, they start to talk and talk.

For six hours, Fidel and Howard discuss everything from the U.S.

Constitution to existentialist philosophy.

By the time they part, the sun is rising over the Malecon.

The conversation is serious but flirtatious.

Howard declares herself charmed by Fidel.

Clearly, he's equally enchanted.

An on-camera interview is arranged.

When it eventually airs on May the 10th, 1963, it causes quite a stir.

She interviewed him very forcefully.

She pressed him on all the key issues that were of concerns to the United States, the amount of people who were leaving Cuba, the repression in Cuba, Cuba's support for other revolutionary movements in Latin America and elsewhere.

But she also asked him his opinion of better relations with the United States, and he surprisingly said, I think we could have better relations with the United States.

There's nothing that Cuba won't discuss with the United States.

Negotiate with the United States.

And that part of the interview became headline news.

As she's leaving Cuba, Howard writes Castro a letter.

In it, she showers him with praise.

She senses within him what she calls a spark of divine fire.

She then begs him to slam the brakes on his revolutionary juggernaut.

She's been captivated by Fidel's smiling charisma and the words he says about wanting justice for the poor and the marginalized.

Yet, she's horrified by the brutal consequences of his power.

The expropriations, the silencing of critics, the state-sanctioned violence.

Her entreaties fall on deaf ears.

By this point, Fidel has an unshakable conviction that anything can be justified if done in the name of the revolution.

And it's he who decides what the revolution is and is not.

An example is his treatment of gay people.

His homophobia is deep-seated.

Castro labels homosexuality as a threat to the revolution.

Across the late 1960s, Thousands of gay people, mainly men, are banished to labor camps.

Once, his stated aim for the revolution was restoration of the old constitution, of democratic politics, of Jose Mati's dream of a free independent Cuba.

Now, in 1963, he's talking of the revolution as an altogether more utopian project.

It is to make a new type of Cuban, a new type of human being.

For the national revolution to succeed, there must be an individual revolution within every single citizen.

The whole population of the island must be reshaped and in the image of its premier, the man now known to some as the maximum leader.

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To mold his new nation of new people, Fidel starts with the most malleable clay.

At schools across the the island, a fourth R makes its way into the syllabus.

Now there's reading, writing, arithmetic, and revolution.

Professor Carlos Ayer of Yale University was a schoolboy in Castro's Cuba in the early 1960s.

The young Carlos belongs to a well-to-do family.

He's educated at a leading private school.

Everything changes under Fidel.

He abolished all private private schools and created state-run schools which were turned into indoctrination centers.

My parents refused to send me to school once the state took over, and we were getting ready to leave anyway.

But I got to see my friend's textbook, and here's a math problem.

Jose Gomez used to pay his scumbag landlord so many pesos per month for rent.

Now that our glorious revolution has implemented the urban reform, he only pays this much.

What percentage savings has our glorious revolution given Jose Gomez?

And every math problem was like that.

Fidel's reforms, not only to education, but healthcare too, are crucial to the revolutionary project.

Michael Bustamante, associate professor at the University of Miami.

Education and healthcare are always singled out as kind of singular achievements of the revolution in power.

I think objectively speaking, there can be little doubt that the Cuban revolutionary slash socialist government over at least 30 years from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s built a public education infrastructure and a public health infrastructure that had very positive results.

But there are a couple of asterisks there.

If you want to talk about education, the literacy manuals are incredibly politicized.

I mean, literally, it's F is for fusil or rifle, R is for Revolucion, R is for Raul, F is for Fidel, right?

So

there's a kind of a political project of education about indoctrination that's part of that at least initial educational drive.

Slogans, billboards, all the billboards in Cuba that formerly advertise products are now filled with revolutionary slogans.

You walk into a classroom, the slogans are there for the kids.

It's not so much as in Orwell's case, toying with the language and creating this new speak, but filling people's heads with slogans which are intended to short-circuit real thinking.

Pantrio Muerte, that's the worst one.

Fatherland or death.

And that's everywhere.

That slogan is everywhere.

Revolutionary education sweeps the nation.

Around 300,000 citizens sign up to teach literacy to those in poorer rural areas.

The backbone of this volunteer force are young middle-class women.

The cause of the revolution is dear to some.

others are lured by the prospect of adventure.

For many of these youngsters, this is their first time away from home, a chance to experience life outside the traditional family environment.

Ileana Yatza is one of them.

As a young woman, Ileana hears Fidel hold court.

From that moment, she's a devout adherent of Fidelismo.

the thoughts and beliefs of Fidel Castro.

In time, she will work for the Castro government.

But first,

she signs up for the army of volunteers who spread Fidelismo far and wide.

I became a revolutionary after meeting Fidel.

I became integrated in all the mass organization, and I did a lot of what they call street duties.

I participated in campaigns against illiteracy.

I participated in campaigns for the vaccination of children.

Those are called grassroots tasks.

During that time, 10, 12 years, I had four babies.

So I was very busy

working in things for the revolution.

If the revolution had not jumped, and Batista would have stayed in power, or maybe another dictator put by the United States, would be my life.

Oh, like my mom's, going to the club to play canast all the weekends.

complaining about the maids and about the mistresses that our husbands had.

That was the lives of the middle people before the revolution.

I became a useful person for my country.

And that is because of Idem.

Over in New York City, Lisa Howard is energized by the success of her interview.

She devotes herself to a new objective.

to restore diplomatic relations between the U.S.

and Cuba.

It's an ambition of castro-like proportions.

The CIA is dead against it.

Far too risky.

Implausible.

Which is perhaps a bit rich coming from them.

Their ideas for dealing with Castro have thus far involved assassination via exploding seashells and poisoned cigars.

What Howard's suggesting is less spectacular.

She wants to use her relationship with Castro to act as a direct conduit.

between him and the White House.

Some Washington figures are intrigued.

Slowly, the idea gains traction at the highest levels.

In November 1963, Howard hosts a cocktail party at her Swiss Manhattan townhouse.

Unbeknownst to most of the guests, it's the scene of top-level diplomacy.

Huddled in a corner, deep in conversation, are two men.

the U.S.

Ambassador to the United Nations and his Cuban counterpart.

They agree to pursue Howard's idea.

The next step is for her to reach out to her man in Havana.

Late on November the 18th, she makes her move.

Tonight she will attempt to put Castro's senior aide in direct contact with a U.S.

government official, a man named William Atwood.

Atwood arrives at Howard's home, braced for a conversation with the Cuban government.

Dressed in her nightclothes, Howard picks up her telephone and dials the number for Castro's office.

It's a test of her access.

Her credibility is on the line.

The call goes through, but there's no answer.

A little while later, she tries again, and again.

The phone rings and rings.

but Castro's aid proves elusive.

It's only at 3 a.m.

that he finally picks up the receiver.

Howard puts Atwood on the line, and the deal is done.

A meeting has been agreed to, in principle.

The first baby steps have been taken towards restoring US-Cuba relations.

Three days later, Fidel Castro is having a working lunch.

He's being interviewed again.

The subject turns to President Kennedy.

Prime Minister Castro has some surprisingly kind words to say about a man he recently described as a pirate.

The conversation is interrupted.

There's a phone call for Fidel.

Kennedy has been shot.

For the rest of the afternoon, Fidel sits with aides listening to news updates.

Eventually, it's announced

the president is dead.

When Fidel hears an American reporter describing First Lady Jackie Kennedy, her clothing spattered with her dead husband's blood, he professes to be appalled.

For us Latin Americans, he tells the journalist,

death is sacred.

It imposes decency, dignity, respect.

Strong stuff from a man who has had dozens of people executed on live television.

television.

Fidel moves on to his next thought.

They'll try to blame this on me.

On that point, he is undoubtedly correct.

Over the decades, numerous conspiracy theorists have cited Castro as the author of the Kennedy assassination.

This is just one of many outlandish hypotheses.

The president's death sends Lisa Howard's plan into a tailspin.

In early 1964, she returns to Cuba.

Ostensibly, it's for a new ABC special.

This one about what the Cuban people make of Castro and the revolution.

But on the quiet, there's also the topic of how to engage with the new U.S.

president, Lyndon B.

Johnson.

Howard tours the island.

Again, she's discomforted by what she sees and hears.

In her diary, diary, she writes that Fidel has inflicted pain and suffering on his people.

Yet she believes that she can be the one to change him.

It's the maximum leader who needs to be transformed into a new man, not the Cuban people.

She interviews Castro for a second time.

In his scratchy English, simultaneously faltering and insistent,

He asserts that Cuba, rather than the United States, is the home of real freedom.

The people, he reiterates, are wildly in favor of his government.

The interview ends.

They retire to her hotel suite and end up in bed together.

Tonight will be the last time Howard ever speaks to him.

On her return to the United States, she's dealt a double blow.

First, the new president makes it clear that her idea of a back channel to Cuba has no future.

Not long after, she's dismissed from ABC.

It seems news of her secret political dealings play a part in the decision.

In July 1965, a year and a half after her final Castro interview, she dies of a drug overdose.

There is no record of Fidel's response to the news.

The episode with Fidel Castro reflected Castro's commitment to pursue normalization of relations between the two countries.

There was a sense of common ground and shared goals.

And it showed that he was willing to move forward.

And when she passed from the scene, he found other intermediaries that would help pursue the same goal.

The commitment that Lisa Howard had to dialogue and discussion in place of bombs and covert operations is a significant part of the short, fleeting, but significant and important legacy she leaves behind.

It may be that Howard dies still believing that Castro is capable of change.

His own little sister has come to the opposite conclusion.

After Juanita leaves Cuba in June 1964, Fidel releases a written statement.

If I were one of those rulers who make millionaires out of their relatives, I would not have suffered this problem.

This act, for me is personally very bitter,

but I understand that this is the price of being a revolutionary.

Yet creating the new Cuba isn't simply the burden of one man.

It's a team effort from the grassroots up.

Professor Lillian Guerra of the University of Florida.

It is not a question of simple popularity.

Oh, the popularity, Fidel, people are just going to go along with stuff.

No,

it is grassroots because those who were in favor of this kind of a regime were working at the very basic level in all these different locations, all at the same time, in order to create an authoritarian state.

Grassroots dictatorship is the term that I would use because once you have a dictatorship that is so rooted in so many locations where there is no space between the state and the press, between the state and the union, between the state and your chess club, between the state and the Boy Scouts.

When you have that kind of situation, then you have something that is almost unique in the world.

The beating hearts of this grassroots dictatorship are the CDRs.

The committees for the defense of the revolution.

The CDRs are like neighborhood watch if run by the Stasi.

They are community surveillance committees staffed by ordinary people, school teachers, bus drivers, hairdressers.

It's their duty to snoop and inform on everyone, including their own children.

There's one in every street and in every block of flats.

They monitor levels of revolutionary fervor.

They police behavior.

Every questionable attitude, every suspect activity, every seditious syllable, is all noted.

Reports are filed, copies are forwarded to people's workplace, university or school.

Judgments are made, punishments delivered over the tiniest infractions.

Frequently the guilty can't be sure what they've been disciplined for.

You might turn up at work one day to discover your holiday's been cancelled.

or some small privilege has been suddenly taken away.

Nobody will explain why.

You're not meant to ask.

And punishments could be much worse.

A stint behind bars, a late-night visit from the authorities, a beating.

The CDRs are Fidel's eyes and ears.

If you're going to have more than five people in your house who don't live in that house, you need to get the permission of the Committee for the Defense Revolution in your apartment building or on your block.

If you are carrying a package across the street, you can be stopped at any time and have that package searched.

These committees for the defense of the revolution literally don't exist in the Soviet Union.

We don't have those in China.

We don't have them in any communist society besides Cuba.

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In the early 60s, Carlos Ayers' family lives next door to the local CDR.

In time, Carlos will leave Cuba.

In the USA, he will become an academic, an expert on 16th century Geneva.

Another place, in some ways, of surveillance, conformity, and repression.

I knew how Geneva worked because I had lived in a place just like Geneva where you were carefully watched and severely punished if you broke any rules.

This is one of the laws in Geneva.

Everyone is supposed to go to bed at 9 p.m.

except for informers.

I lived that.

The informers lived next door to us.

Our neighbors vacated.

They left for the U.S., our next door neighbors.

And the house was filled by a family that was not just pro-Fidel.

They became the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution.

If we wanted to talk freely in our house, we had to close our windows.

In Cuba, after Castro, there are informers everywhere.

By the late 1960s, the CDRs have wedged Fidel Castro into every crevice of Cuban life.

If you're not a member of the CDR, you're an opponent.

And so all of a sudden, everybody has to be a member, everybody joins.

Fidel prestaged this by saying, you know, one day we won't need the Ministry of the Interior because everybody will be an intelligence officer.

They will surveil themselves and surveil others.

So that kind of dream, in many respects, never quite came true.

But he did, through the CDRs, create a mini Fidel in every individual.

A woman who was attending a national conference of leaders of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution stood up and said, I feel as if I am Fidel.

And when she said that, she was speaking not just for herself, but for probably all of those exemplary members of this state surveillance network.

And that woman's statement, you know, I feel like Fidel.

Well, yes, she did, because without the CDRs, there would be no Fidel.

The effort to create seven million mini Fidels is not without its difficulties.

Not least because there are those around Cuba's leader who insist on being themselves.

One of them is a legendary figure, Ernesto Che Guevara.

In some ways, Guevara personifies the spirit of the new Cuba better than Fidel himself.

His ruthlessness can be terrifying.

He's in his element when punishing enemies.

In his mind, it's revolutionary justice.

To others, it's brutal vengeance.

But as the revolution beds in, Fidel wonders, where does Che fit in?

For a time, Fidel makes him the head of Cuba's national bank, despite his knowing virtually nothing about finance or economics.

That experiment is short-lived.

Che's real future lies not in maintaining the revolution, but exporting it.

In the 1960s, Che spends great stretches of time outside Cuba.

As a diplomat, he goes everywhere from New York to North Korea.

But what he yearns for is a return to the good old days, to lead a band of guerrilla warriors.

In early 1965, Che heads to the Congo.

With a contingent of Afro-Cuban soldiers, he is to support leftist rebels.

in an armed struggle to establish a People's Republic in Central Africa.

From Fidel's point of view, it kills two imperialist eagles with one stone.

Historian and author Alex von Tunselmann.

Fidel Castro did have ideas about global revolution, which, while not necessarily quite as doctrinaire communist as some more theoretical communists would have liked, were probably sincere.

But I think when you see him send Che Gabara out on the series of kind of journeys around the world, that it was also that Che had become a very difficult person to work with, become a great irritant.

One thing that had happened by the kind of mid-60s is that Raul Castro was pretty loyal to Soviet communism, to Moscow and so on.

Che Guevara had become much more interested in Chinese communism.

Now, by this point, you had had this real division between the Chinese and the Soviets.

And that was mirrored somewhat in Havana, that these two kind of crucial communist figures in that regime were going in very different directions.

And Fidel Castro was always going to prefer Raul over Che, who was not very conducive to the kind of regime that Fidel Castro wanted to put in place, which, of course, by that point had to be dependent on the Soviet Union.

Guevara's guerrilla activities are kept under wraps.

He leaves Cuba in complete secrecy, and his absence is never addressed by Fidel.

For the next several months, Cuba is rife with gossip.

Nobody knows where Che

is.

Perhaps it's just as well.

His efforts at leading a guerrilla offensive in the Congo end in resounding failure.

The rebel forces are riven by infighting and indiscipline.

Martial calamities are compounded by ill health.

Kievara succumbs to repeated asthma attacks.

Ultimately, he's forced to flee.

But his commitment to revolution is unchanged.

He's especially keen to spread communism across Latin America.

In November 1966, he gets his chance.

Once again, he leaves Cuba in secret, this time disguised as a bald, middle-aged man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses.

He boards a plane on a forged Uruguayan passport.

His destination is the Bolivian jungle.

It's drudgery and disappointment from the off.

The jungle is forbidding and inhospitable.

Guevara and his band of 120 men are encased in dense undergrowth.

They're plagued by mosquitoes.

They swelter in the heat.

The torrential rain soaks them to the bone.

Food is pitifully scarce.

They scavenge what they can.

Before long, they're reduced to eating their own horses.

But, distant and remote as he is, Guevara has not been forgotten.

Washington learns of his whereabouts.

A cohort of CIA agents is dispatched to hunt him down.

Eleven months into his Bolivian ordeal, His force has dwindled to just two dozen men.

One October morning, Guevara instructs his exhausted guerrillas to rest in a ravine.

It's a fatal mistake.

Guevara has been spotted by a group of American-trained soldiers.

Quietly, the predators encircle their prey.

The soldiers attack

and instantly overwhelm the rebels.

Guevara is shot in the leg.

He returns fire, but is soon out of ammunition.

It's a lost cause.

He has no option but to surrender.

Dragged off to a nearby school, Guevara is tied up.

Next, he's interrogated by Cuban exiles, veterans of CIA efforts to oust Castro.

Throughout questioning, Guevara remains steady and defiant.

But soon, he's taken outside.

A Bolivian firing squad awaits.

Guevara is shot dead.

His hands are cut off and placed in formaldehyde in order that his fingerprints can be retained for future identification.

His body is then buried in an unmarked grave.

Back in Havana, the news filters through the Castro.

He locks himself in a room.

Outside, people hear banging and thumping as he pounds the walls.

The loss is deeply personal, but it's also political.

The death of Che Guevara represents the idealism of the revolution smashing into reality.

It's hard enough trying to create a new Cuba, never mind revolutionizing the rest of the planet.

At Guevara's funeral service, One million people crowd into the Plaza de la Revolución.

In his eulogy, Fidel cites his fallen comrade as the model Cuban citizen.

Let them all become Che, he says.

At last, Guevara has found the perfect role in the Castro regime, an emblematic hero who will never be compromised by growing old.

One particular photograph assists this reinvention.

It was taken by the photographer Alberto Corda in 1960.

It captures a 31-year-old Guevara, unsmiling and defiant, his dark hair tumbling down from his beret.

Everybody will know what this photograph of Je Guevara looks like because it's the one you've seen everywhere on posters, on hats, on bags, on everything.

You know, that it's been reproduced so many times.

And it was only discovered really in 1967 when it was then picked up by American protesters who were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam in favor of civil rights.

And that became this kind of universal symbol from that point.

In Corda's picture, Guevara has the look of a late 60s rock star.

Che was no hippie.

He had no time for the individualism of John Lennon or Jim Morrison.

But complicating ironies are pushed aside.

Corder's portrait captures Guevara as the ultimate romantic fantasy of an anti-establishment rebel.

And that gave Fidel Castro's government an iconography that they hadn't really previously had.

So Fidel Castro is quite interesting among dictators for the fact that he didn't put his own face everywhere.

You would see quotes from him, but you wouldn't see a physical representation of him.

What you would see everywhere is that picture of Che Cuevara.

That became very useful to Fidel Castro because once Che Cuevara was dead, he could be reinvented as a figure who had been this kind of very powerful, emotional figure of the Cuban Revolution who'd now been martyred.

And that allowed all his difficult edges to be sanded off and for him to be turned into a figure who could be used to whatever ends Fidel Castro wanted.

Guevara becomes a spiritual icon for the revolution.

In the new communist Cuba, there's little space for traditional religion.

Fidel expects the revolution to be the sole focus of faith and devotion.

At the beginning of the revolution, 59, 60, 61, 61, there was a kind of industry that was not controlled by the state of people manufacturing images of Fidel Castro that made him look just like a messiah.

This wasn't a problem until really 62 when Fidel has to become an atheist and he has to promote atheism.

Atheism became promoted by the state.

Old people kind of were given a pass, you know, people who were over the age of 40 by 59, you know, that's okay.

But younger people, there's something really wrong with you, you know, if you believe in God.

After Guevara's death, the grandmother of the writer Orlando Luis Pardo Lasso lights candles for Che, as she once did for Catholic saints.

Elnesto Che Guevara was terrible for my country.

He was presiding over firing squats.

But that was at night.

He was also working with workers in factories.

He was a very very inspirational figure for many people.

You see a young man full of life with a speech of social justice and maybe allowing for some medical health care for the elderly.

And that figure becomes like

a myth.

Ernesto Sequevara did hurt people, but my grandma didn't hurt anybody.

She needed figures.

She needed God probably.

And God was...

found nowhere anymore in the country.

It was hidden and somehow she could express in public a devotion, well, for the homeland, for the Nestos Chequevara, and it was safe to do it.

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In 1968, Fidel channels the legend of Che Guevara in sweeping new measures.

He announces the so-called revolutionary offensive.

58,000 small businesses are nationalized.

Barbershops, cobblers, market stalls.

Everything now belongs to the state.

Entire industries are decreed undesirable.

Fidel states that 95% of hot dog vendors are counter-revolutionaries.

Lobster fishing is outlawed altogether.

Food and agriculture is a vexing issue.

The revolution's agrarian and economic reforms have caused immense disruption, exacerbated by the continuing U.S.

trade embargo against Cuba.

There are shortages of many foods, while fruit rots in warehouses.

Fidel is convinced that scientific innovation holds the solution.

It will liberate the nation from foreign assistance and make Cuba the envy of the world.

Touring the island in his jeep, he talks with farmers and overwhelms them with the facts and figures he's memorized.

He develops certain obsessions, none greater than the dairy industry.

The government distributes free milk to every child in Cuba.

It's among the most straightforwardly popular achievements of the revolution.

But in Fidel's mind, that's only the beginning.

One day he says, Cuba will produce more cheese than France.

On television, he lectures the nation for hours on end about how exactly this will be achieved.

Somewhat ironically for a Marxist, he claims the key is superior breeding.

A huge government program begins.

The goal is to produce the Cuban super cow, a breed capable of submerging Cuba in gallons of milk.

New cattle for the new people.

of the new Cuba.

Numerous cows become national celebrities.

The press hails their lactational capacities.

They are heroes of the revolution.

The star of the show is a cow named Hubreblanca, White Udder.

By some reports, she can produce more than four times the milk of an average cow.

So every children in my generation, I would say every adult, know what Ubre Blanca is.

Fidel and many presidents visiting from foreign countries went there and visited Hubre Blanca as a token of how efficient the socialist economy could be.

We could create better breeds of cows and bulls and chicken than America, than Europe.

We can be better in everything that we work hard, that we sacrifice again and work hard.

Ubre Blanca's life is charted in the media, as is her demise.

It was was in the television, you could see the records, she's producing more, she's producing less, she's a little ill, she's recovering, she's getting ill and more ill and more ill, and eventually Ureblanca died, probably, because of overexploitation.

Upon her death, Ubreblanca is embalmed.

She's put on public display.

Eventually a statue is erected.

On the surface, it's a monument to a massive cow.

Really, it's a monument to one one man's obsession.

Not so much with dairy as with bending reality to his will, irrespective of the outcome.

His policies were disastrous.

They were disastrous.

They destroyed the dairy industry.

But he has to be right.

So how does he show he's right?

He makes a monument to the one cow that was productive.

And then the other thing he also did at the height of the scarcities in the 60s was to inaugurate a massive ice cream facility called Copelia.

So while there's no milk in the whole country, you could stand in line for four or five hours, I'm not exaggerating, and go to Copelia in Havana and have ice cream that was like 26 different flavors.

A lot of the technique of serving the ice cream famously speaks to the lie behind Copelia, like the lie behind ubreblanca.

And that is that when you scoop the ice cream, you scoop it in such a way that each ball has like a hollow spot.

So it looks like you're getting double the ice cream of what you're actually getting.

If you understand that states can create false realities and claim truth behind the falsehoods, these are the examples that you have in Cuba, and they surround you.

On the 10th anniversary of the revolution, Fidel attempts an epic inversion of reality.

This one involves every man, woman, and child on the island.

Fidel's plans for Cuba's glorious future rest on supersizing the economy.

A decade after his tanks rolled into Havana, he's growing impatient.

On January the 1st, 1969, he addresses a huge crowd in the capital.

It's the usual sprawling speech, but then comes a special announcement.

Fidel is setting the nation a target, a test of their metal.

He wants the forthcoming sugar cane harvest to smash all previous records.

Nothing less than a hole of 10 million tons.

To do this, two things must happen.

First,

1969 will officially be a year of 18 months.

1970 New Year celebrations are postponed until July.

Christmas is cancelled too.

Nobody knows it yet, but it won't return until 1997.

Second, every fit person of working age will be called on to volunteer.

Volunteer, he says.

But everyone knows what he means.

It's an economic goal.

But it's part of a grand moral project.

An examination of the Cubans' revolutionary worth.

People across the island pick up machetes and take to the fields.

Ballet dancers and bartenders, bureaucrats and builders, everyone is pulled in.

It creates a sense of camaraderie, not unlike the way Londoners talk about the Blitz.

Many Cubans recall this time of hardship and sacrifice with a sort of affection.

But nobody underestimates the effort required.

Cutting sugar cane is hard work.

It requires fitness, strength, and skill.

Most of the new cutters are dreadfully inefficient.

The work is dangerous, too.

People lose fingers and scar themselves for life.

Fidel himself gets stuck in.

He seems to relish his time in the fields.

Naturally, there's always a camera close by.

Photos of him, machete in hand, are plastered all over the pages of the state press, which, by this time, is the only one that exists.

The drive to the 10 million ton target receives blanket coverage.

By May 1970, the result is in 8.5 million tons.

Close for no cigar.

Fidel breaks the news to Cuba in a formal address before a crowd of supporters in the Plaza de la Révolución.

It is said that he offers to resign.

The crowd wails in disbelief.

They urge him to stay on.

That's the official account, at least.

There is no audio recording of the address to prove it.

The outcome, however, on a national level to the failure of the 10 million ton harvest and the way in which so many people had been forced, convinced, persuaded to participate was a kind of national strike where on any one day in 1971, 20% of the labor force was not there.

In some locations, it was as high as 70%.

So the economy basically had been at a standstill.

There's no production other than sugar.

And then it fell back even more because of this massive worker abandonment.

Backed into a corner, Castro reaches out for help.

In 1972, Cuba joins Comic Con,

the economic alliance governed by the Soviet Union.

In return for sugar, Cuba receives oil at a very favorable rate.

It's a boon for the island's economy, but it represents another blow to Fidel's dream of Cuban self-reliance, and he knows exactly whose fault that is.

What he did was blame the people.

All of the problems in the economy he attributed to the bourgeois mentality.

He saw the people as the source of error, the source of problems.

And that's what he continued to do with deepening commitment in the 70s, probably through the rest of his life.

It was never his fault.

It's not communism's fault.

It's not the fault of the policies.

It's either the United States or it's the Cuban citizens.

For more than a decade, he's labored to create new men and women, a nation of millions in his image.

They've done their best, and it's just not good enough.

Turns out there's only one Fidel Castro.

In the next episode,

Castroland goes international.

Fidel sets off on a globe-trotting mission, meeting Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and dispatching troops to Angola.

But as his global ambitions extend, domestic problems persist.

And when a bus driver rams his vehicle through the gates of an embassy, Fidel will encounter a problem unlike any he's faced before.

That's next time.

Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early and ad-free by subscribing to Noiser Plus.

Hit the link in the episode description to find out more.

Yo, this is important, man.

Uh, my favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pacebreakers, the ones with all the pockets.

Well, I just got back from vacation and I think I left them in my hotel room.

And dude, I need to replace these shorts.

I wear them like every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.

Could you send me the link to where you got them?

Thanks, bro.

Talk soon.

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