The World

It started in early 1960, when the Belgians had suddenly lost control of Congo. After the Force Publique shot demonstrators in the streets, they held elections and King Baudouin (great-grandson of Leopold II) praised Belgium’s ‘civilizing mission’ as he conceded independence in June 1960. Meanwhile Belgium, hoping to keep control of military and resources (Congo possessed uranium among other mineral treasures), organized the overthrow of the elected first premier, Patrice Lumumba, thirty-five – a talented pan-Africanist but also a Soviet ally – by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, Force Publique officer, now chief of staff. Mobutu was the first of many politicised generals who demonstrated how often in the new African states, conglomerated by the colonial powers into huge new entities, the army emerged as the embodiment of the nation. Astonishingly, the Belgians ordered Lumumba’s ‘

elimination definitive’, their agents seizing, torturing then shooting him before dissolving him in acid. A Belgian agent took one of his teeth home as a trophy. Khrushchev was infuriated as Mobutu, backed by the USA, established a baroque, kleptocratic dictatorship of Zaire that lasted for thirty years.^*

JFK had promised in his inaugural address that ‘In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom’ – code for fighting Communism – ‘in its hour of maximum danger. I don’t shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.’ Khrushchev too sought a way to raise the stakes, but unexpectedly he found his opportunity in the Americas when another pair of brothers took power just ninety miles from Miami.

BROTHERS: THE CASTROS AND THE KENNEDYS

On 9 January 1959, the thirty-three-year-old cigar-chomping, bearded Fidel Castro, El Comandante, assisted by his dourer brother Raul, who directed the military, rode into Havana. The Castros were illegitimate but well-educated sons of a sugar planter, a self-made Spanish immigrant who had amassed 25,000 acres; they had been taught by Jesuits, imbibing St Ignatius’ ‘All dissidence is treason.’ Fidel became a doctor of law but embraced revolution (‘if I could be Stalin’), first joining an abortive coup in Bogotá, then, disgusted by Batista’s return to power, leading the attack on the Moncada Barracks, Santiago. The brothers were captured.

Castro became famous, treating the court to a grandiloquent oration – ‘History will absolve me’ – but the brothers only escaped being shot thanks to their connections: Castro’s wife was the sister of Batista’s interior minister. When he discovered after his imprisonment that she too had joined the Interior Ministry, he divorced her; politics was all. He was verbose and loquacious, even his brother Raul complaining that in prison he never stopped talking for weeks on end.

When American pressure forced Batista to release him, Fidel fled to Mexico City, where he met Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, a handsome, asthmatic doctor, son of a rich Argentine family. ‘Extraordinary’, said Castro, ‘a person of great culture, great intelligence … a doctor who became a soldier without ceasing to be a doctor’. The two talked all night.

In November 1956, the brothers plus eighty-one half-trained fighters boarded a leaky boat, the Granma

, and landed in Cuba. They were heavily bombarded, and only nineteen of the eighty-one survived, but the Castros and their barbudos – bearded ones – launched a guerrilla war in which they were three times almost annihilated but, aided by the remoteness of the Sierra Maestra, survived. Thanks to Batista’s corruption, arrogance and ineptitude, plus surprisingly some misguided CIA funding, the legend and successes of the Fidelistas grew. Castro himself met a young guerrilla, Celia Sánchez, a doctor’s daughter, who became his lover and aide. At the darkest moments, when they had just twelve fighters left, ‘Celia was with me.’

As Batista fled with millions, in January 1959 Castro set up headquarters in Havana’s Hilton Hotel, ruling with Raul as war minister, Che as education minister and Celia, in whose tiny apartment he lived, as secretary of the council of ministers. Those on a death list of enemies were shot. ‘We’re not executing innocent people,’ Fidel insisted, just ‘murderers and they deserve it’. American fruit tycoons and Mafia kingpins were driven out.