Fidel Castro: a critical portrait.

• Author: Geyer, Georgia Anne

Fidel Castro: A Critical Portrait,

Tad Szulc, Morrow, $19.95

Eversince 1959, when a young and bearded Fidel Castro marched on Havana--and, symbolically, much of the world--one of the quintessential liberal vs. conservative arguments of our time has been over this question: Did the United States "push' Castro towards communism? Or was he always a Marxist? In this biography, Tad Szulc, the talented former Latin American correspondent for The New York Times, has provided a clincher that is going to be hard to challenge.

Szulc lived in Cuba during 1959;when he returned in 1985, he received an unusual amount of cooperation from Fidel's folks because they assumed he was doing an authorized biography. Old communists like Fabrizio Grobart, Alfredo Guevara, and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, talked for the first time--freely--about what really happened that crucial first year.

They told him that even beforeCastro marched on Havana, the revolutionaries were operating on two levels. The "respectable' Democrats of the Old Order were put forward by Fidel as the ostensible leaders of the country, while Fidel, Raul Castro, and Ernesto "Che' Guevara were holding allnight meetings in secret beach houses with the communists, planning a step-by-step restructuring of Cuba into a communist state.

There's another scoop in Szulc'srevelation that the CIA sent aid to Castro in 1957 and 1958. There have long been murmurs about this aid--apparently money and armaments --but no proof. Szulc names names, citing the American consul general in Cuba as the CIA agent who made the contact. He wisely does not make too much of this. It is presented as what it most probably was: the CIA covering its bases by backing, minimally, the bearded incognito in the mountains at the same time the U.S. military was beginning just barely to phase out its aid to the increasingly hated dictator Fulgencio Batista.

There are weaknesses in thisotherwise immensely valuable book. The sourcing is horrible; the reader almost never knows what should be attributed to whom. With such controversial material, one needs the greatest possible documentation. There are odd errors. One of the classic stories about Castro describes the night he was...