Cuba After Castro: Legacies, Challenges, and Impediments: Appendices

Abstract

operations. 13 But the severity of Ochoa's sentence suggests the real reason for his elimination: He posed a potential threat to the Castro brothers because of his popularity within the officer class, his ties to the Soviets, and his support for Gorbachev's reforms. 14 The purging of allegedly corrupt officials did not stop with the execution of Cuba's most-decorated field general, which had a chilling effect within the ranks of the officer class with respect to expressing any criticism of the Castro brothers. The Ministry of Interior was purged of hundreds of its top officers and placed under the control of Division General Abelardo Colomé, one of Raúl's top generals, and other raulista officers--a shake-up that further ensured the loyalty of the FAR to the Castro brothers. Meanwhile, the líder máximo also ordered the conviction and imprisonment of two government ministers and the dismissal of 13 other ministers, vice-ministers, and state enterprise directors. Surmounting the Crisis of the 1990sThe collapse of the Soviet Union, and the accompanying shock waves felt in Cuba starting in 1991, intensified internal divisions within the regime, causing Castro once again to clamp down on those who dared stray too far afield. The first to go was a tough but pragmatic Communist leader, Carlos Aldana, who was expelled by the Central Committee in 1992 after he had confessed months earlier that he had been a supporter of perestroika until Fidel had made him see the errors of his ways. 15 ____________ 13 Ochoa may have been freelancing when having made contact with Pablo Escobar of the Colombian Cartel, while de la Guardia reportedly was in charge of the Cuban government's drug operations. Thus, both men had been arrested, tired, and shot in order to expunge evidence of the government's complicity in drug trafficking. See the inside account by Fuentes (2002).14 Ochoa had received military training in the Soviet Union and, to Castro's irritation, had demonstrated an annoying streak of independence in running the FAR's combat operations in Namibia. Together with De la Guardia, he had also come to admire perestroika and glasnost, which he had wanted to see emulated in Cuba. According to Jorge Massetti, de la Guardia's son-in-law, the latter proved to be the final straw for Castro and was the reason why both men were executed. See Massetti's memoir, In the Pirate's Den--My Life as a Secret Agent for Castro (2003). 15 According to Aldana's mea culpa of December 27, 1991, "more than a few comrades of ours became perestroika fans and Gorbachev fans" in the 1987-1989 period. But then the Revolution had been saved because "if we escaped that confusion, we owe it to you, Comrade Fidel." He castigated others in the regime who lacked "the intellectual honesty