Vendetta!: Fidel Castro and the Kennedy Brothers

1

Terrorist Plot: Blow Up New York

Arosy Winter Sun was peeking over the Washington Monument and starting its ascent into a clear blue sky on the crisp Saturday morning of November 17, 1962. Lights had been burning all night in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters where Alan H. Belmont, assistant to Director J. Edgar Hoover, had been orchestrating a manhunt in New York City to track down a ring of pro-Fidel Castro terrorists before they could blow up or torch several major targets.

Through one or more moles, the FBI had learned that the Cuban group was plotting to explode bombs with timing devices in Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and Bloomingdale’s when these huge department stores were packed with shoppers during the Christmas season. Also on the sabotage target list were several U.S. military installations in the region and oil refineries across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

Since early Friday morning and all through the night, Al Belmont’s office had taken on the trappings of a military command post. Using a battery of telephones, he was in contact with the FBI field office in New York and also with the automobiles of special agents who were charging around the city in search of the wanted Cubans.

As is the case in most manhunts, operations were tricky and had to be delicately timed. Belmont’s plan was to make the arrests of the three ringleaders simultaneously. Two of them had been located during the night, but Belmont instructed the FBI agents not to pick them up for fear that the third one would learn of his cronies’ arrests and go deep undercover or even flee to Cuba.

Keeping the two Cuban subjects under physical surveillance all night without their knowing they were being watched put an enormous burden on the New York field agents, W. Raymond Wannall, then chief of a section in the Intelligence Division in Washington, would later recall. They managed to do this with great skill, however.¹

Wannall had been in Belmont’s office during most of the thirty-six hours of the manhunt, providing intelligence information to help locate the terrorist ringleaders. By dawn, both men were haggard and weary. The FBI agents scouring New York were nearly exhausted after twenty-four hours. Mr. Three was still at large.

At 9:00 A.M., John F. Malone, SAC (special agent in charge) of the New York office, telephoned and asked Belmont for a reconsideration of his decision. Mr. Three could not be located, so why not apprehend the two Cuban subjects still under surveillance? Belmont, feeling unspoken pressure from director Hoover, whom he had briefed periodically during the night, stuck to his guns, realizing that if Mr. Three was not found soon, the arrest of the other two subjects might be aborted.

Those of us in Al’s office discussing each problem as it came up supported him completely, Ray Wannall remembered. But we were happy that we were not the ones making this tough call. If things didn’t turn out right, Mr. Hoover would not have been too happy.²

An hour later, Belmont received another telephone call from John Malone in New York: Mr. Three had been spotted. Belmont gave the order to arrest all of the ringleaders.

Taken into custody first were the two Cubans the FBI agents had been surveilling all night. They were José Garcia Orelanno, who operated a costume jewelry store, and an employee at his firm, twenty-two-year-old Marino Antonio Estebán Del Carmen Sueiro y Cabrera.

When cornered, Mr. Three, twenty-seven-year-old Roberto Santiestebán Casanova, was belligerent, resisted arrest, and had to be physically subdued by FBI agents. He was carrying a fully loaded Mauser semiautomatic pistol. While being handcuffed, he loudly cursed the FBI men and tried to swallow a piece of paper on which were written notations of formulas for explosives. After arriving at FBI headquarters on Foley Square, Santiestebán kicked a newspaper photographer.* While being questioned by Malone and other FBI men, Santiestebán ranted that he was being illegally detained, claiming that he was an aide to Carlos Lechuga, Fidel Castro’s ambassador to the United Nations, and therefore had diplomatic immunity.

Santiestebán had arrived in New York from Havana only six weeks earlier on the same plane with Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, an attorney from a wealthy family whom Castro had appointed as a figurehead president of Cuba. Dorticós ostensibly had come to address the United Nations General Assembly. Although the Cuban government had requested diplomatic status for Santiestebán after his arrival, the U.S. Justice Department held that his papers were being processed, and therefore his safeguard from arrest was not yet effective.

* Latins list their father’s name (Santiestebán) before their mother’s name (Casanova). Hence, Roberto Santiestebán Casanova’s last name was Santiestebán.

As soon as the three Cubans had been collared, FBI agents swooped down on José Garcia’s costume jewelry firm, Model-Craft, at 242 West 27th Street, and discovered a large cache of explosives, detonators, grenades, and incendiary devices. Also found were papers explaining how a detonator affixed to an incendiary device and a pushed button would cause an intense flame to erupt in sixty to seventy-five minutes. In a steel safe there were diagrams of areas of ships and railroad freight cars that would be most vulnerable to explosives and incendiary devices.

Hidden in the jewelry store were documents belonging to Santiestebán, who Vincent L. Broderick, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, declared was right at the heart of the sabotage conspiracy.³

Broderick added, We are dealing with a man who is a violent revolutionary, charged with exercising aggressive acts.⁴

José Garcia and Marino Sueiro, the other suspected ringleaders, had extensive backgrounds in pro-Castro organizational life in New York City. They both frequented the Casa Cuba Club at 691 Columbus Avenue, identified by the FBI as a hangout for Castro sympathizers. The two men were said to have been active in the Movimiento del 26 de Julio (26th of July Movement), the label Fidel Castro had given to his revolution. They also belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which a Senate Internal Security Committee had been investigating as a subversive organization.

A few weeks before his arrest by the FBI, Sueiro had sent his pregnant wife back to Cuba because he said he did not want the child to become, by birth, a U.S. citizen. When he was apprehended at Third Avenue and 24th Street, a beautiful, twenty-six-year-old woman with him was taken into custody and held as a material witness. A U.S. citizen, she was described as a schoolteacher and recreation supervisor at the Hudson Guild on West 27th Street, only two blocks from José Garcia’s costume jewelry store.⁵

U.S. Attorney Broderick also charged José Gomez Abad, age twenty-one, and his wife, Elisa Monterio de Gomez Abad, twenty years old, with complicity in the terrorist conspiracy. They were suspected of having provided weapons and explosives to the would-be Cuban saboteurs. Because they were attachés in the Cuban delegation at the United Nations, the Gomezes were immune from arrest.

Ten other Cubans connected to the UN were suspected by the FBI of operating a sabotage school and were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in New York City. John Malone asserted that the school conducted informal training in the use of explosives and incendiary devices.⁶

Cuban UN Ambassador Carlos Lechuga was irate over the wave of arrests. He complained bitterly to the media that the FBI agents had been guilty of brutality against Roberto Santiestebán, who had emerged with a black eye after violently resisting arrest.

Santiestebán’s attorney, Leonard B. Boudin, charged that the FBI was guilty of a crime, that his client had diplomatic immunity and therefore had a right to resist.⁷

Twenty-four hours after the smashing of the terrorist conspiracy was announced in Washington by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, an urgent alert went out over the New Jersey State Police radio network. Information had been received that three or four carloads of Cuban revolutionists were en route to the huge Esso Bayway oil refinery in Linden and other refineries in New Jersey.⁸

Either the alert was a prank or the quick action of New Jersey law enforcement officers and the FBI headed off sabotage of the refineries. At the same time, military installations in the New York City region stepped up security against rumored sabotage plans by the pro-Castro Cubans.

In Washington, meanwhile, thirty-seven-year-old Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy publicly praised the FBI. He said that Hoover and his men had acted in continuation of a record that had saved the United States from a widespread Nazi espionage and sabotage network just prior to and during World War II.⁹

In Havana, thirty-six-year-old, bearded Fidel Castro, who had seized control of the Cuban government on January 1, 1959, roundly condemned the arrest of the three Cuban conspirators in New York. He claimed that the arrests were without foundation and an unjustified retaliation for the arrest in Cuba a week earlier of Miguel Angel Orozco Crespo, whom Castro charged with being operations chief in Cuba for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Orozco, Castro declared, was plotting to blow up the large Matahambre mines and murder four hundred Cuban workers.¹⁰

The cuban sabotage plot was yet another machination in an ongoing vendetta between Fidel Castro and the Kennedy brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Supreme headquarters for the United States in the undercover conflict was the CIA complex located in a cluster of World War II Navy buildings off Ohio Drive near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The operations center of the Agency, called Quarters Eye, was housed in a large barracks once home for WAVEs (Women’s Navy Auxiliary). It was from Quarters Eye that CIA clandestine missions were coordinated and directed around the world.

Advance headquarters for covert actions aimed at Cuba was the CIA station in Miami code-named JM WAVE. For a decade, it had been small in scope, but in the early 1960s, the station mushroomed into the largest CIA post in the world. Although the funding for JM WAVE was a closely guarded secret, estimates were that its annual budget was about $55 million (equivalent to $550 million in 1997).

JM WAVE was a good-sized city within a city. Its operations center was located in a former U.S. Navy blimp structure on the campus of the University of Miami. The cover name given to the closely guarded, two-story frame building was Zenith Technical Enterprises.

There were more than fifty dummy corporations to conceal CIA activities: real estate firms, a detective agency, charter fishing boats, ocean research vessels, and private yachts, among others. A warehouse stored an amazing array of items for use in clandestine operations, from machine guns and incendiary grenades to walkie-talkies and two-way mirrors.¹¹

JM WAVE had a psychiatrist and a polygraph (lie detector) expert to evaluate agents and agent prospects. When medical attention for illnesses or injuries was required, regular civilian clinics were used after doctors and nurses had undergone strict security checks.¹²

At JM WAVE, a group of Spanish-speaking agents wrote instructions in invisible ink and mailed them to undercover operatives inside Cuba. The recipients had previously been told to bring out the writing by placing lemon juice on the paper. Several U.S. military officers were assigned to JM WAVE for specialized tasks, such as training agents in survival techniques and maritime skills.

Most of the four hundred U.S. employees were case officers directly responsible for covert operations. They recruited and controlled perhaps four thousand Cubans, largely recent anti-Castro exiles in southern Florida, as well as many secret agents inside Cuba. A case officer was responsible for seven or eight Cubans (known as PAs, or principal agents). Each PA, in turn, was in charge of between ten and fifteen covert operatives.

JM WAVE had more than one hundred automobiles used by the Americans. Operatives who traveled mostly on the back roads and in the remote regions of southern Florida drove Fords, Chevrolets, and Plymouths, so as not to be conspicuous. Agents in the upper echelons tooled about the Miami area in Pontiacs and Buicks. Theodore Ted Shackley, the station chief, drove an Oldsmobile.¹³

One of the most secretive aspects of JM WAVE was the existence of militarylike bases dispersed throughout the Florida Keys: coral island after coral island, with harbors, inlets, and beaches—all facing Cuba. In these secluded camps, relatively free from hostile eyes, a special breed of American agents, under contract to the CIA and known as PM-ers (paramilitary officers), trained Cuban exiles and mounted covert missions against Cuba.

During World War II, General William J. Wild Bill Donovan, founder and chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, described his PM-ers as hellraisers who are calculatingly reckless, of disciplined daring, and trained for aggressive action.

Typical of the JM WAVE PM-ers was William Rip Robertson, a forty-eight-year-old adventurer who had been a CIA operative behind enemy lines during the Korean War. Six-foot-three, lanky, with a weatherbeaten face, he was a maverick of sorts, disdaining a military appearance. He wore a baseball cap and sloppy clothes. But he was loved by his Cuban exiles, who regarded him as the epitome of the good and the courageous in the United States.¹⁴

Almost every week for over a year, Cuban teams led by PM-ers departed from the Keys for secret missions in Cuba. When we didn’t go, Rip would feel sick and get very mad, recalled one of his Cuban exile leaders.

Some of these secret operations were to secure intelligence, others took weapons and ammunition to the Cuban underground, but mostly the insurgents were to perpetrate mayhem, much of it intended to crimp Cuba’s already fragile economy. Dressed in green fatigues like those worn by Castro’s militia, the men carried machine guns with silencers, recoilless rifles, and plastic explosives.

The covert missions were orchestrated with the meticulous planning associated with British commando raids across the English Channel against Nazi-held France prior to Normandy D-Day in World War II. Drawn up by experienced U.S. guerrilla warfare officers assigned to JM WAVE, the operational plans accounted for every minute, from departure in Florida to landing in Cuba to returning to the home base. Most of the intelligence was secured from satellites.

Raiding parties were briefed by CIA case officers on weather forecasts over the Florida Straits and the targeted region of Cuba; they were also shown current aerial views taken by supersecret U-2 reconnaissance airplanes. The U-2s were piloted by U.S. Air Force officers who had been transferred to the CIA payroll, ostensibly as civilians, after an administrative separation procedure known in the espionage trade as sheep dipping.

The U-2 was a strange bird compared to modern aircraft built for more routine functions. Its stubby fuselage was only 49.5 feet long, its tapering wings stretched 80 feet across. It could fly up to 4,000 miles at altitudes of 14 miles or better on less than 1,000 gallons of fuel. Its vision was better than that of a hawk. Its incredible cameras, aimed through seven portholes in the belly, could photograph a swathe of earth 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long (a distance equivalent to that between New York and London). The photographs came in 4,000 paired frames, each slightly overlapping the other, resulting in a stereoscopic effect. Photo interpreters from the CIA analyzing the developed and greatly enlarged pictures could make out a newspaper headline 10 miles below.

Because it was loaded with such heavy paraphernalia, the U-2 had no room for a landing gear. So the plane took off from a detachable dolly. On landing back at its base, the wings were shortened by bending down each tip. The pilot then skidded in along the reinforced belly of the plane.

Contingency plans were created for the paramilitary-led ground raiders in case a mission was detected or went awry. If captured, each insurgent had a cover story, weak as it was. Many were furnished phony papers identifying them as employees of a civilian firm (a CIA front) in Florida. If captured, they were to tell Castro’s interrogators that they were on a maritime research project and collecting data for that company (which was listed in Florida telephone directories).

Many missions to Cuba were pinpricks, intended to annoy Fidel Castro (which indeed they did) and to keep his regime in a state of semijitters in anticipation of an invasion by U.S. forces. Steadily, however, the infiltration raids grew in scope. The intruders blew up key bridges, set fire to sugarcane fields, and sabotaged Cuban army vehicles. Attacks were made on a huge Texaco refinery (which Castro had stolen from its American owners), a diesel plant at Casilda, a sulfuric acid facility at Santa Lucia, and two Soviet ships unloading materials at a port in far eastern Oriente Province.

Concealing JM WAVE and helping to mask its activities required the cooperation of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the State Department, the Coast Guard, and the Treasury at the federal level. Also secretly collaborating were nineteen law enforcement jurisdictions in southern Florida, elements of the media, state political leaders and agencies, and civilian financial institutions.

Most of the JM WAVE agents carried false identification papers and used aliases. Each time one of them obtained a driver’s license, a passport, or a bank loan (all legitimate transactions), he illegally used the fake identification and nom de guerre (war name), and the institution with whom he was doing business knowingly ignored the violation.

If police officers halted a JM WAVE agent for a minor traffic violation and found a machine gun or explosives in his car, he would be quietly released once his CIA connection was established. Trusted reporters from the Miami Herald were given regular access to Ted Shackley and other top JM WAVE officials, who briefed them confidentially on current covert activities. The journalists made certain that they published nothing that might expose CIA operations or endanger lives.¹⁵

JM WAVE’S reach extended around the world. Each CIA station in a foreign country had one or more case officers who focused exclusively on the Cuban situation. In Europe, all intelligence concerning Fidel Castro and his regime was sent to Washington. In Central and South America, each CIA station had specialists to collect information on Castro’s extensive efforts to export his Communist revolution to countries there.

The roots of the often violent vendetta between the Kennedy brothers and Fidel Castro had been planted in Mexico seven years before the Cuban terrorist scheme to blow up New York City. From that time, both Cuba and the United States had created vast espionage and sabotage networks to duel with one another, not only in Latin America but also in other locales around the world.

2

Machinations in Mexico

Acubana Airlines British-made Britannia glided to a landing at the airport in Mexico City after a 1,000-mile flight from Havana. Among the debarking passengers was twenty-nine-year-old Fidel Castro, a tall, husky, curly-haired man who was coming to Mexico, a historic haven for left-wing dissidents from many countries, to form a trained and disciplined group of guerrillas to invade Cuba and overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar. It was July 7, 1955.

Twenty-two years earlier in 1933, the swarthy, coarse Batista, then a thirty-one-year-old army sergeant with a fifth-grade education, had led a successful revolt against a corrupt ruler, Gerardo Machado y Morales. Batista promoted himself from sergeant to colonel and emerged as Cuba’s newest caudillo (strongman). In the years ahead, he made and broke presidents.

Ironically, Castro owed his freedom to Batista, a man he despised. On July 26, 1953, Castro had led a foolhardy attack by a small band of his rebels on an army installation, Moneada Barracks, in Oriente Province in eastern Cuba. The raid to capture arms and ammunition resulted in disaster. Most of the rebels were killed, and the remainder captured, including Fidel and his younger brother, Raúl.

After a short trial in early October, Fidel received a fifteen-year term while Raúl was given a thirteen-year sentence. The prisoners were confined in the national penitentiary on the Isle of Pines off the southern coast of western Cuba. On May 15, 1955, Fulgencio Batista, in the monumental blunder of his life, released Fidel and Raúl in a general amnesty.

Within a week of gaining his freedom, Castro began blasting Batista and other Cuban officials in two Cuban newspapers, La Calle and Bohemia. Soon word reached Castro that the police in Havana had targeted him for an early demise. According to one account, an automobile had been riddled with bullets—ready for Castro’s body to be found within, killed while fighting police.¹

Spawning upheavals and engaging in lethal violence was nothing new to Fidel Castro, beginning with his enrollment at the University of Havana at the age of nineteen. Although his wealthy father, Angel, gave him an allowance of the equivalent to U.S.$500 per month (a princely sum for a teenager at the time), Fidel wore shabby trousers and soiled shirts and largely ignored barber shops. His indifference to clean clothing earned him the campus nickname bola de churre (dirt ball).

Castro managed to get himself elected president of the University Students Federation, a small but militant clique said to espouse Communist beliefs. Almost at once, he seized on a relatively trivial matter, a slight rise in Havana bus fares, to bring his group into the streets in a noisy protest march.

If Castro’s goal was to trigger a confrontation, it succeeded. Police beat the demonstrators, although none were badly injured. Castro emerged unscathed.

Hours later, Castro displayed his sophistication in manipulating public support by wrapping his head in swathes of white gauze and then visiting newspapers and radio stations to disclose the brutality of the government.²

After Castro announced that the Students Federation would take to the streets again with a much larger number of marchers, Dr. Ramon Grau San Martin, who had defeated Batista’s handpicked candidate for president of Cuba in 1944, invited a student delegation to visit the Presidential Palace to discuss bus fares.

At the conference in Grau’s fifth-floor office, whose balcony overlooked a plaza, the president was called briefly from the room. Castro, his head still swathed in bandages, whispered to his comrades, I know how to take power and get rid of that old son of a bitch. When he comes back in the room, let’s pitch him off the balcony. When he’s dead, we’ll proclaim the student revolution and speak to the people on the radio.³

The spontaneous plot collapsed. We came here to discuss lowering bus fares, one horrified student declared, not to commit murder!⁴

Later, Castro confided to cronies that his goal was to be elected president of the thirteen-thousand-member student body. In pursuit of that objective, he decided that Leonel Gomez, the highly popular president of the student body at Havana High School Number One, was a threat. Castro reasoned that Gomez was a cinch to enroll at Havana University after graduating.⁵

Castro told his friend Rafael Díaz Balart that Gomez would have to be eliminated before he became an obstacle, and he asked Díaz Balart to join him in a scheme to murder the high school senior. Aghast, Díaz Balart rejected the request.⁶

Undaunted, Castro enlisted two other young Cubans, and the three men lay in ambush for Gomez outside the Havana University stadium where a soccer game was in progress. When the contest ended and Gomez neared the three men, Castro allegedly fired a pistol shot, striking the high schooler in the lung. Although seriously wounded, Gomez eventually recovered.⁷

Fearing arrest, Castro holed up in the home of General Juan Rodriguez, an exile from the Dominican Republic, who was hatching a plot to sail from Cuba with an armed force and oust Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, the right-wing dictator who had seized power in the Dominican in 1930.⁸

Castro eagerly accepted an offer to join the general’s Caribbean Legion, consisting of some fifteen hundred Cubans, Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Guatemalans. Trained by Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War, the Legion had $2 million worth of weapons stored at the estate of a conspirator, José Aleman, the Cuban minister of education, who had allegedly dipped into his agency’s till for the funds.

The Dominican invasion force would consist of two ships, fourteen warplanes, artillery, bazookas, and hundreds of rifles and machine guns. Aleman’s chief agent for the arms buying and smuggling was twenty-five-year-old Manolo Castro (no relation to Fidel), who had been codirector of the dominant political group at Havana University, the Socialist Revolutionary Movement. Police had once accused him of murdering a professor at the university, but he was released for lack of conclusive evidence.

Manolo Castro set up shop in a large luxury hotel in Miami, Florida, bought a large number of arms, and took virtually no precautions to hide his actions. He boasted in bars of his revolutionary activity. Consequently, the Miami Herald exposed the invasion scheme.

The U.S. government put heavy heat on President Grau (who reputedly had long known of the scheme). Cuban soldiers surrounded the training camp of the Caribbean Legion and seized most of the guerrillas and eleven planes. Fidel Castro was not among the captives. Eel-like, he had managed to escape.⁹

In the uproar that ensued in Cuba, Minister of Education José Aleman resigned but was not charged with stealing the $2 million. He fled to Miami, where he would die years later, reportedly leaving an estate of $10 million.¹⁰

Less than a year after his Caribbean Legion adventure, Castro, now twenty-one years of age, and a friend, Rafael del Pino, were in Bogotá, Colombia, where delegates from twenty nations in the Western Hemisphere were attending the Inter-American Conference to discuss mutual problems. Intelligence gained by U.S. secret agents disclosed that Communists planned to ignite bloody riots, force the delegates to flee for their lives, and overthrow the duly elected government of President Ospina Pérez.

Although it was learned that riot leaders planned to murder U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who would speak at the conclave, this information was not passed along to Washington by the American Embassy staff in Bogotá.¹¹

Like a well-oiled military operation, the Bogotazo (Bogotá uprising) erupted on April 8, 1948. Mobs armed with weapons, explosives, and Molotov cocktails marauded through the city, firebombing, sacking, looting, and killing.

When the violence was finally brought under control, hundreds were dead or wounded. Once beautiful Bogotá resembled the war-torn big cities of Europe.

That situation delighted Joseph Starobin, a reporter for New York’s Communist Daily Worker, who exulted in print: Interruption of the Foreign Ministers’ parley is a sock in the jaw to the big business men of the [U.S.] State Department. The world has suddenly seen America’s feet of clay.¹²

A few days after the bloody rioting, two Colombian detectives went to the Claridge Hotel to interrogate Fidel Castro and Rafael del Pino, who had been staying at the facility for two weeks. But before the students could be arrested for having been among the instigators of the armed uprising, they had taken refuge in the Cuban Legation, where arrangements had been made to fly them back to Cuba.

Between revolutionary escapades, Fidel Castro found time to pay serious court to Mirta Díaz Balart, a beautiful blonde from one of Cuba’s wealthiest families, who was studying philosophy at the University of Havana. She was the sister of Fidel’s good friend Rafael Díaz Balart. It was a quite proper courtship: Mirta was always chaperoned when with Fidel.

Soft-spoken, slightly built, with flashing black eyes, Mirta fell deeply in love with the charismatic Fidel. On October 10, 1948, they were married in a lavish ceremony in a Roman Catholic Church in the city of Banes, where her father was the mayor. Mindful that he had generated many enemies and that one or more might try to kill him as he stood at the altar, Fidel had a loaded pistol in his pocket.

As had been the case throughout Castro’s life, someone else had to pay his bills. Rafael Díaz Balart Sr., Mirta’s father, gave Castro $10,000 (the equivalent of $100,000 in 1997) for a three-month honeymoon in Miami and New York City.

On September 14, 1949, Mirta bore a child who was christened Felix Fidel Castro Díaz—called Fidelito by his parents. After receiving a law degree in 1950, Castro plunged even deeper into revolutionary activities. In the city of Cienfuegos, he was arrested and jailed on charges of inciting high school students to launch protest strikes.

Castro had never had to concern himself with money because it was always provided by his doting father. So on reaching Mexico City in mid-1955, he was shocked to learn that financing a revolution in Cuba would be far more costly than he had anticipated. Weapons and ammunition were very expensive and would have to be bought on the black market. Moreover, because Castro had come to Mexico on a six-month tourist pass, he would have to bribe officials in the Interior Ministry to prevent his deportation after his visa expired.

Writing to a member of the 26th of July Movement in Cuba, Castro complained bitterly: We don’t have one centavo. We have spent everything for stamps, printing, etc. To finance the [revolutionary] campaign through the pittances sent or brought from Cuba has proved impossible.¹³

In countless pitches for money, Castro had boasted that his revolutionary movement did not have a single millionaire or country-club type. Rather, its strength was in the common man and woman. It’s a matter of morals and principle, he declared. Now he cast aside these lofty traits in favor of ready cash and assumed the role of beggar of wealthy Cuban exiles.

Castro met secretly with Justo Carrillo, a former president of the Development Bank in Havana, in a small town near the Guatemalan border. Carrillo said that a