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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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