Who Is Raúl Castro?
A tyrant only a brother could love.
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
So who is Raúl Castro? While Western
experts speculate that he may plan on shifting Cuba toward collective leadership
and democracy, thats nothing but wishful thinking. To be sure, I wish they were
right, but Raúl has transformed a paradise on
earth into a shambles, and there is good reason to
believe that he will turn Cuba into an even worse tyranny.
I met
Raúl many times, both in Cuba and in Romania. He had coordinating responsibility
for the Cuban intelligence service (the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or
DGI), and in the early 1970s he entered into a drug venture with my former
service (the Departamentul de Informatii Externe ,or DIE). Whenever he was not
in Havana or Moscow, he was in Bucharest. We worked, talked, fished, and
snorkeled together. We challenged each other at the firing range; he was an
excellent shot. Together we raced our identical Alfa Romeo cars. I saw nothing
in him suggesting he might ever want to democratize Cuba.
Raúl was
always under the influence of alcohol and self-importance. My Cuban
intelligence counterpart in those days, Sergio del Valle, who was Raúls closest
associate going back to their early days in the Sierra Maestra, used to call his
boss Raúl the Terrible in a semi-serious allusion to the first Russian to
crown himself tsar. Raúl was Cubas uncrowned tsar his official title was
Maximum General. Fidel gave the speeches, hour after hour. Raúl
ran Cubas economy, her foreign policy, her foreign trade, her justice system,
her jails, her tourism even her hotels and her beaches.
Raúl is
generally perceived as a colorless minister of defense, but he has also been the
brutal head of one of Communisms most criminal institutions: the Cuban
political police. I met him in that capacity. He was cruel and ruthless. Fidel
may have conceived the terror that has kept Cuba in the Communist fold, but Raúl
has been the butcher. He has been instrumental in the killing and terrorizing of
thousands of Cubans, and there is no question in my mind but that he would fight
tooth and nail to preserve his powers. Otherwise, sooner or later Raúl would
have to account for his crimes, and I do not know him to be
suicidal.
Before meeting Raúl in the flesh, I had gotten a general
picture of him from Nikita Khrushchev and General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the
creator of Communist Romanias intelligence structure, and by this time head of
the Soviet foreign intelligence service, the PGU (Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye).
That was in 1959. Both Soviets had arrived in Bucharest on October 26 for what
was billed as a six-day vacation in Romania. Never before had Khrushchev taken
such a long vacation abroad, but neither was his visit to Romania a vacation. He
was there to discuss the on-going Cuban revolution with the current Romanian
leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, until then the only Communist tyrant ruling a
country of Latin heritage.
Khrushchev dreamed of going down in history as
the Soviet leader who had installed Communism on the American continent, and he
was prepared to go to any lengths to see that dream come true. But Khrushchev
did not trust Fidel, believing he was a stranger to Marxism. The leaders of
Cubas Communist party were convinced that Fidel was a dangerous adventurer, and
the Soviet party bureaucracy was also reluctant to endorse
him.
Khrushchev did trust Raúl, though. According to Sakharovsky, who had
secretly brought Raúl to Moscow in the mid-1950s, it had been love at first
sight. Both Nikita and Raúl loved vodka. Both were fascinated with Marxism. Both
hated school, religion, and discipline. Both considered themselves military
experts. Both were obsessed with espionage and counterespionage. And both liked
to sleep with their boots on. Sakharovsky considered the warm relationship
between the two men to have convinced Khrushchev to throw himself entirely into
the Cuban revolution.
At Khrushchevs order, Sakharovsky had given Raúl
an intelligence adviser: Nikolay Leonov, the PGUs best expert on Latin America.
Leonov (today a retired KGB lieutenant general and member of the Duma) provided
Raúl with intelligence on the military forces of the then Cuban dictator,
Batista, and helped Raúl plan his guerrilla war. In June 1957, Leonov gave him
documents and photographs showing that Washington was providing weapons and
logistical support to Batista, and he suggested that Raúl take a few dozen
Americans hostage to force Eisenhower to withdraw from the conflict. Raúl did
so. On June 26, 1958, his guerrilleros kidnapped fifty American and Canadian
military and civilian personnel working in Cuba. Fearing for the lives of the
hostages, Batista declared a cease-fire. That enabled the Soviets to bring new
weapons into Cuba.
The course of the Cuban revolution was changed
forever. The era of political kidnappings was also introduced.
On the
night of December 31, 1958, Batista fled Cuba, and the Castro brothers took over
the country. During the following month, Raúl organized the execution of
hundreds of police and military officials of the Batista regime. The prisoners
were shot and the corpses buried in mass graves outside of Santiago de
Cuba.
A year later, Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan landed in
Havana. He was welcomed by Fidel, Raúl, and the countrys new KGB adviser,
Aleksandr Shitov. The latters task was to help Raúl create a Cuban KGB and a
Soviet-style army. In 1962 Khrushchev took the unprecedented step of appointing
Shitov as ambassador to Cuba. Soon, Moscow started secretly building rocket
bases in Cuba.
Khrushchev, Raúl, and Shitov not Fidel pushed the
world to the brink of nuclear war.
In April 1971 I visited Cuba as a
member of a Romanian government delegation attending a ten-year celebration of
Castros victory at the Bay of Pigs. A couple of days after the ceremony, Raúl
invited me to go ocean fishing on his boat, together with Sergio del Valle. The
other guest was a Soviet civilian who introduced himself as Aleksandr Alekseyev.
Thats Shitov, del Valle whispered into my ear. Hes now Allendes advisor.
(The Marxist Salvador Allende had been elected president of Chile the previous
November.) There, on that boat, it hit me more clearly than ever before that it
was Raúl, not Fidel, who was holding the reins of the Cuban revolutionary
wagon.
In 1972 I prepared an official Ceausescu visit to Havana, and I
was also at his right hand during it. Fidel was the figurehead, Raúl the
factotum. The Cuban first lady was not Fidels wife, but Raúls. Elena Ceausescu
wrinkled up her nose at that, but eventually the two first ladies hit it off
splendidly. Both Elena and Vilma Espin Guilloys were school dropouts, both
pretended to be chemists, both had acquired phony doctoral degrees, both had
joined the Communist party before it had come to power in their countries, both
became members of the Council of State, and both were presidents of their
countries Federation of Women organizations.
During that visit, the
Castro brothers and Ceausescu laid the foundation for a bilateral drug venture.
They wanted to flood the world with drugs. Drugs could do a lot more damage to
imperialism than nuclear weapons could, Fidel pontificated. Drugs will erode
capitalism from the inside, Raúl agreed. I never heard the word money
pronounced, but I was already administering the money Romania was making from
its own drug trafficking. All of it was going into Ceausescus personal bank
account. By 1978, when I left Romania for good, that account, called AT-78, held
a balance of some $400 million in spite of the substantial dents Elena made in
it when she bought furs and jewelry for herself.
In 2005, Fidel was
furious when Forbes Magazine estimated his fortune at $500 million.
This year, the magazine upped his worth to $900 million. Particularly in view of
Cubas penury, this amount is surely more than enough for Raúl to bribe his
political cronies and buy any new allies he needs.
In 1973 I spent a
working vacation in Havana. Raúl gave me a tour of a huge factory
manufacturing double-walled suitcases and other concealment devices for secretly
transporting arms and explosives for terrorist purposes. By then Raúls DGI was
working around the clock to expand Cubas political influence in South America
and the Third World. In particular, they were striving to consolidate the
Sandinistas power in Nicaragua, to foment a bloody war in El Salvador, and to
help the Soviet/Cuban-backed MPLA (Movement for the Liberation of Angola) to
rise to power in Angola. Raúls DGI and his military also had advisers and
instructors in Palestine Liberation Organization bases and had established close
cooperation with Libya, South Yemen, and the Polisario Front for the Liberation
of Western Sahara. In the mid-1970s my DIE was working jointly with Raúls DGI
to support the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist,
anti-American insurgency organization whose task was to spread Communism to
South America.
In December 1974 Raúl came to Bucharest to request
intelligence and political support for his new National Liberation Directorate
(DNL), a party/intelligence group tasked to coordinate Cubas guerrilla and
terrorist training camps and to prop up national liberation movements and
anti-American governments such as those of Nicaragua and Grenada. He got
both.
Of course I no longer have inside access to information about
Raúls export of terrorism and revolution, but I note that in 2001 his FARC took
credit for 197 killings in Colombia. On April 11, 2002, the same FARC kidnapped
13 Colombian lawmakers from a government building in Cali and held Colombian
presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt hostage. On February 13, 2003, FARC
shot down a CIA plane
carrying out electronic intelligence-gathering in southern Colombia, taking
three CIA officers hostage. Now Raúls FARC is seeking to overthrow the
pro-American government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose father was
assassinated by FARC in 1983. I also note that the Communist president of
Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who idolizes the Castro brothers, has threatened to stop
exporting oil to the U.S. and intends to start a conventional war against
neighboring Colombia, the main U.S. ally in the region.
Neither within
Cuba nor in the outside world does anyone have a clear picture of Fidels health
physical or political. Yet perhaps there is something else going on there that
Raúl may have learned from his KGB masters. Leonid Brezhnev died on November 10,
1982, but the KGB chairman, Yury Andropov, managed for a few days to keep his
death secret from the public, to gain time for maneuvering himself into the
drivers seat. Once settled into the Kremlin, the cynical Andropov hastened to
portray himself to the West as a moderate Communist and a sensitive, warm,
Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of scotch, liked
to read English novels, and loved listening to American jazz and the music of
Beethoven. Andropov was none of the above.
Raúl may try to also portray
himself as a peaceloving angel. But Andropovs age of secrecy is gone. I pray
that others who know Raúl as well as I knew Ceausescu will come forward and
disrobe the Cuban tyrant, allowing the world to see
him naked, the way he truly is: an assassin and international terrorist who made
a fortune from the illegal sale of arms, drugs, and human beings.
Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the
highest-ranking official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. On Christmas Day of 1989, Ceausescu
and his wife were sentenced to death at the end of a trial where most of the
accusations had come almost word-for-word out of Pacepas book Red
Horizons.
An aristocratic title is not enough to ensure a noble behaviour. A person's greatness comes from acknowledging the mistakes and agreeing to correct them.
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." (Jimi Hendrix)
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