    10

    10

    Fidel needed to distract his constituency from a mind-boggling

    string of broken campaign promises.  In the days before Castro seized

    power, the bearded leader had stirred up popular support for his

    revolution by posing as a political moderate, a champion of democracy

    and of an open society.  The guise was a deception.  Castro had been

    studying Lenin, Marx and the Argentinean despot Juan Peron for

    years.  His real goal was a dictatorship, a form of government that

    would put every last scrap of power in the hands of only one man.

    Selling the idea of totalitarianism to the Cuban population,

    however, might have been a difficult proposition.  Instead, Fidel

    played on the island's dreams of freedom.  While he was still fighting

    his guerrilla war in the mountains, Castro appointed as president of his

    provisional government a patriotic, well-meaning, pro-democratic

    judge from Santiago named Manuel Urrutia.  Urrutia's presence gave

    Fidel's movement an unmistakably democratic flavor.  Fidel went even

    further.  In an interview with Look Magazine and an article he penned

    for  Coronet Magazine, Castro declared passionately that his goal for

    Cuba was the liberty of its people, civil rights, free enterprise and the

    privilege of electing officials.16  These statements were a sham.  Now

    that he'd toppled Batista, how could a leader who had sold his

    followers on a freely-elected government get away with imposing a

    despotic political system?  Through the adroit use of an enemy.

    This technique was embodied in Castro's manipulation of an

    unsuspecting pawn, president Urrutia.  When Fidel first came down

    from the mountains in triumph and took over the reins of authority, he

    filled his cabinet with figures of indisputably moderate credentials.

    Then he secretly established a shadow government.  In this clandestine

    group were the "real revolutionaries," committed Marxist-Leninists like

    himself, figures determined to implement a program of "social justice"

    that would entail snatching land from the peasants, establishing

    state-controlled collective farms, drafting the populace into militias,

    seizing all businesses (eventually even the hot dog carts owned by

    scuffling members of the lower class), shutting down the free press,

    and shifting all control into the hands of a bureaucracy answerable

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