The Cuban presenter Carlos Otero revealed in a podcast the episode that convinced him to leave Cuba: a meeting in 2002 where Fidel Castro recounted, in unsettling detail, the execution of what he described as the first traitor to the Cuban revolution, which took place in the Sierra Maestra.
According to Otero, that night he was walking along the Havana Malecón when a Cubanacán Mercedes Benz taxi stopped beside him, the window was rolled down, and an officer showed him the State Security ID: it was a mandatory summons to a reception at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, in honor of a foreign president's visit.
Alongside four or five other figures from Cuban television, Otero was taken to a protocol room where he found a table filled with delicacies that, in his own words, neither he nor the Cuban people had access to during the height of the crisis.
It was there that Castro, seemingly without reason, began to recount the story of a man who had been sleeping beside him in the Sierra Maestra and who had attempted to assassinate him. The rebels discovered the treachery in time, removed the bullet from the suspect's rifle, and when he tried to carry out the act, they captured and executed him.
What chilled Otero's blood was the way Castro described the moment of the shot.
“The moment we fired the shot, there was a flash of lightning that illuminated the entire scene,” said the dictator, adding that he had always wanted to find a painter who could capture that moment in a painting.
“I was literally scared,” Otero recounted.
The presenter recounts that at around one or two in the morning he arrived home, hugged his son, and said to his wife: “We’re leaving.”
The presenter, who left Cuba on December 8, 2007 through Canada, described Castro's account as that of "a cruel madman" and "a sarcastic narcissist," and asserted that at that moment he realized there was no possible way out within the system.
The incident was not the only indication of the surveillance that the regime exerted over him.
The State Security had previously intercepted him on the Malecón after they saw him greet the dissident poet Raúl Rivero in a restaurant.
On another occasion, agents forced him to sign a document committing to report if he heard any plans against Castro's life. Otero signed it to be left alone, but he admits that he would never have betrayed anyone.
The cast of Sabadazo, the program that dominated Cuban prime time with an 82% audience share during the Special Period, was also summoned to perform for Raúl Castro at the San Antonio de los Baños airbase, without receiving a penny and with no option to decline.
"It was mandatory, no ifs, ands, or buts. I'm informing you that you have to do this. They would disappear, you wouldn’t see them on television anymore," Otero recalled.
Castro's account of the "first traitor" historically corresponds to Eutimio Guerra, a peasant who was executed on February 17, 1957, for betraying rebel positions to Batista's army.
According to Che Guevara's diary, it was he who executed him, although Castro spoke in the first person plural before Otero, narratively appropriating the scene.
After 15 years at América TeVé"La Hora de Carlos," his own program on YouTube, on Mondays and Thursdays at 11 PM.
«Fidel Castro deceived us. I grew up believing in the Cuban revolution. I thought I was living in paradise,» Otero confessed, whose father was a founder of INDER and who admits it took him years to understand the true nature of the regime that monitored, controlled, and used him at will.
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