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 soAquarama 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 Cayo Piedra, a little "jewel" situated ten miles from the coast and known only to the local inhabitants. Fidel instantly fell in love with this place of wild beauty worthy of Robinson Crusoe and decided to have it for his own. The lighthouse keeper was asked to leave the premises and the lighthouse was put out of action, and later taken down.
In Cuba, a cayo-the Spanish word for key-is a flat, sandy island, often thin and narrow. There are thousands of them off the Cuban coast, and many are today visited by tourists and deep-sea diving enthusiasts. Fidel's island stretched over a mile and was slightly curved in shape, oriented north to south. On the eastern side, the rocky coast faced the deep blue sea. To the west, sheltered from the wind, was a fine, sandy coastline and turquoise water. It was a paradise surrounded by glorious ocean, all as virtually untouched as it had been in the time of the great European explorers. Pirates might once have broken their journey, or buried treasure, there.
To be precise, Cayo Piedra consists of not one island but two, a passing cyclone having split it in half. Fidel had, however, rectified this by building a seven-hundred-foot-long bridge between the two parts, calling on the talents of the architect Osmany Cienfuegos, brother of the Castrist revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos. The southern island was slightly larger than its northern counterpart, and it was here, on the site of the former lighthouse, that the Castro couple had built their house: a cement-built, L-shaped bungalow arranged around a terrace that looked out to the east, onto the open sea. The house was functional and devoid of any showy luxury. Other than Fidel and Dalia's bedroom, it comprised a dormitory bedroom for the children, a kitchen, and a dining-cum-sitting room that looked out onto the sea-facing terrace with its simple wooden furniture; most of the pictures, drawings, and photos on the walls represented fishing or underwater scenes.
From the French windows of this room, to the right, one could see the heliport and about three hundred feet or so further on, the house reserved for us, Fidel's bodyguards. Opposite that was the garrison building that accommodated the rest of the staff-cooks, mechanics, electricians, radio officers, and the dozen armed soldiers permanently stationed on Cayo Piedra. A hangar adjoining the garrison housed a gas storage depot, supplies of drinking water (brought from the mainland by boat), and a miniature generating station.
On the west side of the island, facing the setting sun, the Castros had built a two-hundred-foot-long landing stage. It was situated below the house on the little beach of fine sand that lined the arc-shaped interior coastline of the cayo. To allow Aquarama II and the Pioniera I and II to dock, Fidel and Dalia had also had a half-mile-long channel dug; without this, their flotilla would not have been able to reach the island, surrounded by sand shoals.
The jetty formed the epicenter of social life on Cayo Piedra. A floating pontoon, twenty-three feet long, had been annexed to it, and on the pontoon stood a straw hut with a bar and barbecue grill. This was where the family ate most of their meals-when they were not served on board the yacht. From this floating bar and restaurant, everyone could admire the sea enclosure in which, to the delight of adults and children alike, turtles (some three feet long) were kept. On the other side of the landing stage was a dolphinarium containing two tame dolphins that livened up our daily routines with their pranks and jumps.
The other island, to the north, was practically deserted, housing only the guest quarters. Larger than the master's house, this one had four bedrooms and a large sitting room; it also had an outdoor swimming pool as well as a natural whirlpool carved out of the rocks and fed with seawater via a sort of aqueduct cut into the stone that would fill with water with each new wave. The two houses were connected by a telephone line. We would travel the five hundred yards between them in one of Cayo Piedra's two convertible Volkswagen Beetles; a Soviet-manufactured army vehicle was used for the transport of equipment and goods.
* * *
All his life, Fidel has repeated that he owns no property other than a modest "fisherman's hut" somewhere on the coast. As we have seen, the fisherman's hut was really a luxury vacation home that involved considerable logistics in terms of its surveillance and upkeep. In addition, there were twenty or so other properties, including Punto Cero, his huge property in Havana near the embassy quarter; La Caleta del Rosario, which also houses his private marina in the Bay of Pigs; and La Deseada, a chalet in the middle of a swampy area in Pinar del Río province, where Fidel went fishing and duck hunting every winter. Not to mention all the other properties reserved, in every administrative department of Cuba, for his exclusive use.
Fidel Castro also let it be understood, and sometimes directly stated, that the Revolution left him no possibility for respite or leisure and that he knew nothing about, and even despised, the bourgeois concept of vacation. Nothing could have been further from the truth. From 1977 to 1994, I accompanied him many hundreds of times to the little paradise of Cayo Piedra, where I took part in as many fishing or underwater hunting expeditions.
In the high season, from June to September, Fidel and Dalia went to Cayo Piedra every weekend. In the rainy season, on the other hand, Fidel preferred the house in La Deseada, where he hunted duck. The Castros would spend the month of August on their dream island. When duty called or a foreign VIP obliged the Commander of the Revolution to go to Havana, no problem-he would climb into the helicopter that was always ready and waiting at Cayo Piedra when he was there and make the return trip, sometimes in one day if need be!
It is extraordinary that I am the first person to reveal Cayo Piedra's existence or describe it. Other than the Google Earth satellite images (in which Fidel's house and the guesthouse, the jetty, the channel, and the bridge connecting the two islands can all be clearly seen), no other photo of this millionaire's paradise exists. Some people might wonder why I didn't film the place myself. The answer is simple: a lieutenant colonel in the security service charged with the protection of an important figure walks around with an automatic pistol in his belt, not a camera slung over his shoulder! What is more, the only person authorized to immortalize Cayo Piedra was Fidel's official photographer, Pablo Caballero-but he was naturally more concerned with photographing the Commander's activities than the landscapes around him. That is why, as far as I know, there are no images of Cayo Piedra or Aquarama II.
* * *
The private life of the Comandante was the best-kept secret in Cuba. Fidel Castro has always made sure that information concerning his family is kept private, so that over the course of six decades we have learned almost nothing about the seven brothers and sisters of the Castro family. This separation between public and private life, a legacy of the period when he lived in hiding, reached unimaginable proportions. None of his siblings was ever invited to or set foot on Cayo Piedra. Raúl, to whom Fidel was closest, might have gone there in his absence, although personally I never encountered him. Other than the closest family circle, in other words Dalia and the five children she had with Fidel Castro, those who can pride themselves on having seen the mysterious island with their own eyes are few and far between. Fidelito, the oldest of Fidel's children from a first marriage, went there at least five times; Alina, Fidel's only daughter born from an extramarital relationship (who today lives in Miami, Florida), never set foot there.
Other than several foreign businessmen whose names I have forgotten and several handpicked Cuban ministers, the only visitors to the island I can recall were the Colombian president Alfonso López Michelsen (1974-1978), who came to spend a weekend there with his wife, Cecilia, around 1977 or 1978; the French businessman Gérard Bourgoin, aka the Chicken King, who came to visit in around 1990 at the time he was exporting his poultry producing know-how to the whole world; the owner of CNN Ted Turner; the superstar presenter of the American channel ABC Barbara Walters; and Erich Honecker, communist leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1976 to 1989. I will never forget the latter's twenty-four-hour visit to Cayo Piedra in 1980. Eight years earlier, in 1972, Fidel Castro had rechristened Cayo Blanco del Sur island Ernst Thälmann Island. Even better: in a show of symbolic friendship between the two "brother nations," he had offered the GDR this morsel of uninhabited land, nine miles long and five hundred yards wide, situated an hour's sailing from his private island.
Ernst Thälmann was a historic leader of the German communist party under the Weimar republic, ultimately executed by the Nazis in 1944. In 1980, during an official visit by Honecker to Cuba, the leader of East Berlin gave Fidel a statue of Thälmann. Very logically, Fidel decided to put the work of art on the island of the same name-which is how I came to be present at that incredible scene in which two heads of state turned up on Aquarama IIand disembarked in the middle of nowhere to inaugurate the statue of a forgotten figure on a deserted island, witnessed only by iguanas and pelicans. The last I heard, the immense statue of Thälmann, six and a half feet high, had been toppled from its pedestal by Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
In fact, the only two really frequent visitors to Cayo Piedra other than the family were Gabriel García Márquez and Antonio Núñez Jiménez. The former, who spent a good part of his life in Cuba, was doubtless the greatest Colombian writer, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. The second, who died in 1998, was a historic figure of the Cuban Revolution, in which he participated with the rank of captain and in remembrance of which he sported a bushy beard all his life. A respected intellectual figure, anthropologist and geographer, he also belonged to the very limited circle of Fidel's close friends. These two were the main users of the guesthouse on Cayo Piedra.
* * *
On Cayo Piedra, wealth did not consist of big houses or yachts in the moorings. The real treasure of the island was its fabulous underwater life. Totally free from tourism and fishing, the waters that stretched out around the island constituted an incomparable ecological sanctuary. Fidel Castro had a personal aquarium of more than 125 square miles right in front of his house! It was an underwater playground unknown to millions of Cubans, as well as to millions of tourists who came every year to take part in deep-sea diving around the cayos run by the Ministry of Tourism.
Other than the famous French commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who came on a special mission on board theCalypso with Fidel's express authorization, nobody else was ever able to marvel at the incredible animal and vegetable treasure house to which he enjoyed sole rights. Moonfish, squirrelfish, catfish, butterfly fish, boxfish, flute fish, trumpet fish, hamlet fish, cardinal fish, striped surgeonfish, pumpkinseed sunfish, tuna, sea bream, lobster-every imaginable variety of yellow, orange, blue, or green fish swam in and out of the red and white coral and the green, black, and red algae. Dolphins, tiger sharks, hammerhead sharks, swordfish, barracudas, and turtles completed the enchanted scene in this silent world.
Fidel Castro was an excellent diver. I am in a good position to know: throughout the years I spent in his service, it was my job to assist him during underwater fishing expeditions-in order, principally, to protect him against attacks by sharks, barracudas, and swordfish. I am sure that many envied me this aquatic mission, much more than my other duties such as keeping his diary or organizing security during his trips abroad. There was no greater privilege for one of Fidel's escorts than accompanying him on his underwater expeditions and I went on many of them.... Though he liked basketball and hunting duck, deep-sea diving was his real passion. Fidel, six-foot-three and weighing 209 pounds, had an impressive lung capacity, able to free dive thirty feet below the sea without the least difficulty.
He also had a very particular way of practicing deep-sea fishing. The only thing I can compare it to is Louis XV's royal hunts in the forests around Versailles. At dawn, when the sovereign was still asleep, a search party of fishermen led by Old Finalé would go out to find the places richest in fish in order to satisfy the monarch's expectations. Mission accomplished, the team would return to Cayo Piedra during the morning-Old Finalé still in attendance-where they would wait for Fidel, who rarely got to bed before three in the morning, to wake up.
"So what have we got today?" Fidel would ask before climbing on board Aquarama II.
"Comandante, skipjacks and dorados should be around. And if we're in luck, lobsters will also show up."
The Aquarama II would cast anchor. On board, it was preparation time, and we would get the masks and snorkels ready while Fidel sat, legs astride, waiting for somebody to kneel in front of him to put on his flippers and gloves. When I was equipped, I would go down the staircase first, followed by El Comandante. Underwater, I swam at his side or just above him. My working tool was a pneumatic rifle shooting round-tipped arrows that bounced back from their target, acting like punches to the head; they would see off any sharks or barracudas that came dangerously close to Fidel.
I also carried the chief's hunting rifle so that he did not have to weigh himself down with it; when Fidel caught sight of prey and wanted to use the rifle, he would hold out his arm in my direction without looking at me. I knew what I had to do: immediately place the weapon in his hand, ready in shooting position. Fidel would shoot his harpoon and then immediately give it back to me. Whether he hit his target or not, I had to reload the rifle or go back up to the surface to place Fidel's catch in the dinghy floating above us.
When the monarch decreed, we would return to Cayo Piedra. The ritual on our return was immutable. Fidel's numerous catches would be lined up on the jetty and sorted into species: breams together, lobster together, and so on. The fish caught by Dalia, who hunted separately under the protection of two combat divers, were arranged next to them, she and Fidel then reviewing the ensuing feast to the admiring, amused commentaries of their entourage.
"Comandante, ¡es otra una pesca milgrosa! [another miraculous catch!]," I would say, certain that my comment would win me the smiles of the main party concerned as well as of all those present.
Then, the barbecue coals already glowing bright red, Fidel would indicate which fish he wanted grilled immediately; those he was magnanimously giving to the garrison; and those, finally, that he wanted to take in iceboxes to Havana to eat at home within forty-eight hours. Then the Castros would sit down to eat in the shade of the family beach restaurant.
* * *
This dolce vita represented enormous privilege compared with the lifestyle of ordinary Cubans, whose already Spartan way of life had gotten considerably harder since the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Subsidies from Moscow, which had maintained a certain level of prosperity, had dried up. The Cuban economy, which derived almost 80 percent of its external trade from the Eastern Bloc, was collapsing like a house of cards and households were surviving on the breadline while the GNP had decreased by 35 percent and electricity supplies were seriously inadequate. In 1992, in an attempt to tackle the dramatic decline in exports and imports, Fidel decreed the start of the Special Period in Time of Peace that marked the official beginning of the era of shortages and of mass international tourism.
* * *
Until the turning point of the 1990s, I never asked myself too many questions about the way the system operated. That is one of the flaws of military men.... As a good soldier, I carried out my mission to the best of my ability, and that was enough for me. What is more, my service record was impeccable: I was a judo black belt, a karate black belt, and a tae kwon do black belt, and also one of the best elite marksmen in Cuba. In 1990 I was declared sniper champion on fixed and mobile targets at twenty-five meters (about twenty-seven yards) in a two-day competition organized by the Cuban Ministry of the Interior. I was even the very first person to be awarded the honorific title of gun expert. At the same time I had earned my master's degree in law and climbed every rung of the hierarchy to the rank of lieutenant colonel. I was given more and more onerous duties-organizing, for example, the security arrangements during the head of state's international trips. Fidel himself was happy with me. More than once during these trips abroad, I heard him say as he walked down from the airplane to the runway, "Ah, Sánchez is here! Everything is in order...." I could say that professionally I had succeeded. Socially also, come to that: in Cuba, there was virtually no more prestigious or enviable job than that of devoting one's life to the physical protection of the Líder Máximo.
However, it was at that time that a crack began to appear in my convictions. It must be pointed out that in Cubans' collective memory, 1989 corresponded less to the year in which the Berlin wall fell than it did to that of the so-called Ochoa Affair. This Castrist Dreyfus Affair will always remain an indelible stain on the history of the Cuban Revolution. At the end of a televised Stalinist trial that still haunts all our memories, Arnaldo Ochoa, national hero and the most respected general in the country, was sentenced to death and executed as an example for the crime of drug trafficking, along with three other members of the highest military echelons. Now, from my privileged position of intimacy with the country's figurehead, I was well placed to know that this trafficking, designed to rake in funds to finance the Revolution, had been organized with the express approval of the Comandante, who was therefore directly mixed up in "the affair." To divert attention from himself, Fidel Castro had not hesitated to sacrifice the most valiant and faithful of his generals, Arnaldo Ochoa, hero of the Bay of Pigs, of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and of the Angolan war against South Africa.
A little later I realized that Fidel would use people for as long as they were useful to him, and then dispose of them without the slightest qualms.
In 1994, a tad disenchanted with all I had seen, heard, and experienced, I wanted to retire. Nothing more than that: simply retire two years early and withdraw peacefully into the background-while obviously remaining faithful to the oath I had sworn to keep secret all the information to which I had been party over the seventeen years spent in the private circle of the Líder Máximo. For the capital crime of having dared say I wished to stop serving the Commander of the Revolution, I was thrown into a cockroach-infested prison cell like a dog. I was tortured. They even tried to poison me. For a time, I thought I would die there. But I come from a tough breed. During my imprisonment from 1994 to 1996, I swore to myself that the day I managed to escape Cuba (as I did in 2008, after ten unsuccessful attempts), I would write a book revealing what I knew, what I had seen, and what I had heard-telling the story of the "real" Fidel Castro as nobody had ever dared to do. From the inside.
Copyright © 2014 by Juan Reinaldo Sánchez
Translation © 2015 by Catherine Spencer
