    12

    12

    ant

    i-Castro leaflets.  Fidel's officials said that the plane had

    machine-gunned the city.  One of Fidel's top revolutionary fighters

    resigned his post in disgust over the pro-Communist direction things

    were taking.  Fidel had him arrested and committed to a 20-year prison

    term.  Fidel gathered a crowd of a million Cubans in Havana and

    announced that these new gestures had been part of a massive

    counter-revolutionary plot engineered by the fiendish Americans.  The

    answer?  The creation of massive militias, the restoration of the death

    penalty, and the reinstatement of "revolutionary tribunals" to ferret out

    conspirators and send them to a string of concentration camps.

    The ultimate result of these measures, of course, was to help

    Fidel banish the old ideal of democracy and to move the country firmly

    into the grip of the one man capable of "defending" it from its hulking

    enemy to the north.17

    Later, America played into Fidel's hands by plotting Castro's

    assassination and launching the pathetically bungled invasion of the

    Bay of Pigs.  These U.S. maneuvers provided the Maximum Leader

    with an indispensable political tool.  If people complained about the

    food shortages the Castro government had brought, if they were

    disturbed by the crippling of the sugar industry or noticed the virtual

    elimination, through incompetence, of the beef industry, Castro could

    blame the problems on  America.

    As Fidel often confided, there was one extremely useful device

    for "keeping the spirit of revolution alive."  That tool: an external

    enemy.18

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