Known as El Mulato, he had been admitted several weeks ago to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital for brain trauma following a fall
14ymedio, Havana, 28 November 2024 — “Carlos Aldana was the ideological secretary of the Party and a rising star in the Castro firmament.” The phrase, by the writer Norberto Fuentes, was enough in 1989 to define the then third man of the regime, who was ousted by Fidel Castro in 1992 and who died this Wednesday in Havana after pneumonia, at the age of 82.
Known as El Mulato, Aldana had been admitted several weeks ago to the Hermanos Ameijeiras hospital for brain trauma after a fall. He also suffered from Parkinson’s and other ailments related to his age, according to Fuentes speaking to Café Fuerte. The novelist also said that the fall had caused Aldana to have a stroke and that he had undergone surgery.
Born in Camagüey in 1942, Aldana held various positions in the regime’s nomenklatura and was a protégé of Raúl Castro. In his chronicle of the high political and military spheres of the regime, Dulces guerreros cubanos, Fuentes – who was a friend – describes him as the Castros’ right-hand man in a decade that ended with the execution of high-ranking Army officials and the announcement that the Soviet Union was about to fall.
Like two of those sentenced to death – General Arnaldo Ochoa and Tony de La Guardia – Aldana was one of the regime’s key men in Africa. He acted as negotiator and spokesman for Cuba in Angola and Namibia. After his dismissal, he was erased from the official account and his name only appears once in the Ecured encyclopedia: where it is misplaced in the list of participants in the Third Congress of the Communist Party.
In 1992, at the age of 50 and with an extensive record of service in the Central Committee, Aldana was ousted for “serious defects in the performance of his duties” and his “serious personal errors,” two accusations that the regime continues to use as an alibi to cover up the real causes of its “movements of cadres.” In addition, he was accused of corruption for his links with Eberto López, manager of the importing company Caribbean Audiovisuales, who ended up being sentenced to 15 years in prison for fraud.
After his dismissal, he was erased from the official account and his name only appears once in the ’Ecured’ encyclopedia.
Abroad, Aldana was regarded as a sort of reformer and natural successor to the so-called historic generation. He had met privately with Mikhail Gorbachev and was considered open to the changes proposed by the Russian leader. But Castro, faced with the dissolution of Soviet communism and an international environment against which he preferred to entrench himself, dismissed El Mulato, replacing him with José Ramón Balaguer, the former ambassador to Moscow.
By this time, Aldana was the one who had the last word in the Party in terms of ideology, international relations and education, an accumulation of powers that Castro could not tolerate in the hands of any party leader other than himself.
Castro and Aldana had also had a high tension episode when, in 1987, El Mulato organized a meeting with journalism students from the University of Havana. The exchange failed, since the leader interpreted the critical comments about the island’s press and the management of the staff as out of place. It was Aldana who, on Castro’s orders, purged the Faculty and recalibrated teaching and communications, and also extended the purge to the editorial offices of the official media where Glasnost was beginning to take hold.
His ouster was followed by three decades of ostracism and silence, which he broke only once, when the newspaper El Sol de México interviewed him about his departure from office. Not deviating one iota from the official version, he attributed his departure to his “mistakes” and “carelessness,” and declared his loyalty to Fidel. He had been sent to work in tourism, in a minor management position, in Topes de Collantes, Trinidad.
In Dulces guerreros cubanos, Fuentes offers a detailed portrait of Aldana. He describes him as an official who was “weak in contradicting the Commander.” He recounts his meetings with Raúl Castro, of whom he was a confidant and companion in his almost daily drunken binges, and he assesses his role in the investigations that led Ochoa to the firing squad.
The most recent information about Aldana’s activities which 14ymedio had access to dates back to a few years before the Covid-19 pandemic when he worked as a professor of Marxism and political economy in a classroom for senior citizens located in the facilities of the Parque Zoológico on 26th Street in Havana. His students were mostly disillusioned former Communist Party militants and disgraced former officials.
Not deviating one iota from the official version, he attributed his departure to his “mistakes” and “carelessness,” and declared his loyalty to Fidel.
Aldana’s dismissal was one of many that Castro carried out to cut off the succession of the historic generation by those who grew up with the Revolution. Seven years later, another “rising star” of the nomenklatura, Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina, also fell. Personally protected by Fidel, he was expelled from the Party in 2001 and ended up dedicating himself to art.
He was succeeded by Felipe Pérez Roque, who along with Carlos Lage, vice president between 1993 and 2009, was also removed from office. “The honey of the power for which they had known no sacrifice awoke in them ambitions that led them to an unworthy role,” Castro wrote at the time.
As with Aldana, at that time Raúl Castro washed his hands of the matter. He argued that it was not he who had chosen that series of leaders about whom “the enemy was filled with illusions.” There was not going to be a substitution of “Fidel’s men” by “Raúl’s men.” However, power – at least virtually – did eventually remain with one of Raúl Castro’s favorites.
With Miguel Díaz-Canel, a mediocre survivor of the purges of his generation, the regime found the longed-for “continuity” without reform that it failed to achieve with El Mulato Aldana.
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