What He Saw at the Revolution

How could Enrique Oltuski’s well-written memoir of his double life during the Cuban Revolution not be compelling? The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, his relatives consumed in the Holocaust, the young Oltuski chafes at his comfortable middle-class life in Havana and, still a teenager, burning with nationalist fever, finds himself drawn into the revolutionary conspiracies against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. From the outset, he’s living on parallel planes. During a stint at the University of Miami, his public persona has him dating the exotic daughters of the Latin American oligarchy while in his “underground” life he’s trying to buy arms for the revolution back home.

After college he takes a high-ranking day job with Shell Oil Co. but devotes his real passions to organizing the guerrilla movement in Havana and to collaborating closely with Che Guevara and, of course, Fidel Castro. Right up until the day of the revolution’s triumph, neither the police authorities nor even Oltuski’s parents know of his secret role as “Sierra”--a key organizer of the rebellion.

This memoir’s greatest strength is in leading the reader deep behind the scenes into the rivalries and alliances that arose between Castro’s Rebel Army fighting in the mountains and the often chaotic network of insurgents in the less glamorized urban underground. The factional divisions that would soon after the revolution erupt in blood and betrayal and leave Castro standing alone and unchallenged are all sketched here in their embryonic state. But in those heady days of the late ‘50s, the cream of Cuban youth was united against a Batista regime that they viewed as a clumsy and repressive extension of the foreign (namely, American) domination of their island nation.

Oltuski’s crisp recounting of the dreams and ideals that drove the Fidelista revolt abruptly ends with his being seated as a cabinet minister at age 28 in the first revolutionary government. “I swung around in the giant chair to look out the large window,” he writes of his first day in office. “Life went on, and I thought, ‘What the hell do I do now?’ ”

Least satisfying about this book is that it covers only the period of the revolutionary war. Oltuski went from his position as minister of communications to working five years at the side of Guevara. And he’s spent the last 31 years as deputy minister of fisheries, where he continues at age 72. This begs a second volume of memoirs, one that details how those early passions wound up ossifying into the sort of regime under which he holds the same high post for three decades and the jefe maximo is shooting for a neat half-century alone in power. What stories Oltuski could tell us about compromise, disillusionment and realpolitik!

Today’s Cuba, of course, doesn’t permit that sort of writing, especially from within its own borders and certainly not from one of its government ministers. In the most inauthentic passage of the book, Oltuski writes: “People also always ask me what will happen to the Cuban government and society when Fidel dies. The answer is nothing. Nothing will happen....” Fat chance.