Caridad Mercader

Early years

Eustacia María Caridad del Río Hernández was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1892 into a wealthy family. Her father, Ramón del Río, was originally from the Spanish province of Santander, but when the family decided to return to Spain, a few years before Cuban independence, they settled in Barcelona, where they became part of the city's social elite. Caridad had at least two brothers. Although Caridad later claimed that her father had been governor of Santiago as well as the first planter to free his slaves on the Antillean island, none of this is true. Nor, contrary to what Caridad asserted, had her mother sympathized with the Cuban independence movement.

Caridad studied at the Catholic school of the Sacred Heart of Sarriá, also spending time in the centers that the congregation had in Paris and London. As a result, she spoke French and English perfectly. Apparently, during her adolescence she felt the call of a religious vocation, although she did not choose it.

When Caridad was barely 16 years old, on June 13, 1908, the Barcelona press announced the engagement of Caridad del Río to Pablo Mercader Marina, seven years older than her and a member of a prosperous family in the textile business. Pablo's father, Narciso Mercader Sacanella, had started his business with a factory in Badalona, expanding it with several more factories in Barcelona. The engagement was a bond that united two wealthy families of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. Both of the fiancés were equestrians. Caridad herself later stated that she fell in love with Pablo Mercader for his mastery as a rider. On January 7, 1911, the wedding took place. Mercader had an affable character, politically aligning himself with conservative Catalan nationalism and having been a member of the somatén. At that time, Caridad "was a beautiful teenager with a round face and pleasant features with a sweet look [...] in her green eyes that were always her most distinctive feature." The couple settled on Illas i Vidal street, in the upper-class neighborhood of Sant Gervasi de Cassoles. The young wife adopted her husband's surname and would thereafter be known as Caridad, or Caritat, Mercader. The couple had five children: Jorge (b. 1911), Ramón (b. 1913), Montserrat (b. 1914 ), Pablo (b. 1915) and Luis (b. 1923). Shortly after Pablo's birth, Jorge fell ill with poliomyelitis and suffered paralysis of both legs.

Breakup of the marriage and move to France

The marriage was unhappy, beginning to fail after the first years of living together. According to his wife, Pablo Mercader, ostensibly a devoted family man in private, showed some unconventional sexual proclivities. As their son Luis described in the documentary Asaltar los cielos, Caridad had told him that her husband took her to brothels to incite her to new sexual experiences. There, he forced her to observe through peepholes hidden in room partitions the sexual encounters between the prostitutes and their clients. These episodes created in Caridad a deep contempt for her husband, as well as for her social class.

Until this point in time, Caridad had lived according to the conventions of her social circle. At the beginning of the 1920s, however, she began to display an attitude that clashed with bourgeois customs. According to the journalist and writer Gregorio Luri—who recounts what was reported by Isaac Don Levine and included testimonies from Enrique Castro Delgado and Pablo Mercader, Caridad's first husband—Caridad began taking painting classes with the Valencian artist Vicente Borrás y Abella, in whose studio she was able to establish contact with intellectuals and bohemians. Thus began her personal transformation and, little by little, Caridad began to frequent unconventional circles and use morphine. According to her son Ramón, Caridad was secretly addicted to opiates for many years. At the height of "Pistolerismo" (hired assassins that targeted proletariat groups) in Barcelona, Caridad frequented anarchist circles, even going so far as to provide them with information with which to attack the business interests of the Mercader. Since her brother, José del Río, was a municipal judge and knew which magistrates were in charge of a specific case, Caridad informed the anarchists of the identity of the judges who were handling each trial for terrorist acts against their comrades. These in turn used the information to threaten the magistrates and obtain the freedom of the accused. The decline of the couple's economic position began around this time, which also influenced Caridad's metamorphosis. When the Mercader family patriarch died in 1921, his first-born son, Juan, the primogenitor (or hereu in Catalonia), was left in charge of the family businesses. However, Juan Mercader's administration was ruinous, the business collapsed, and he finally fled with his family to Argentina. The rest of the Mercader family was left in a precarious economic position, and the Mercader-Del Río couple had to move to a more modest apartment on Ancha Street, in the Gothic Quarter, next to the Basilica of La Merced. According to the journalist and researcher Javier Juárez, Caridad had to start teaching classes to contribute to the support of the family economy and it was that—and not her relationship with Borrás and Abella's studio—that made her begin to interact very differently from those of her social class. Pablo Mercader worked as an accountant, primarily for small publishing companies.

Return to Barcelona and participation in the Spanish Civil War

After being expelled from France, Caridad settled in Barcelona and joined the Communist Party of Catalonia (Partido Comunista de Cataluña, PCC), the tiny Catalan branch of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista Español, PCE), in which her son Ramón was already active. She participated in the process of confluence of almost all the Catalan workers' parties that gave rise to the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), and at the beginning of July 1936 she was appointed by the PCC, along with Pere Ardiaca, a member of the Treball editorial team, which would be the organ of expression of the new party. At the same time, in mid-1936, Caridad was part of the secretariat of the Press Services of the Popular Olympics, the multi-sports event that was going to be held in July of that year in Barcelona in response to the Berlin Olympic Games. Luis said that during that time, when he lived with his father, he rarely saw Caridad.

In the early morning of July 18–19, 1936, the Barcelona garrison revolted. Caridad actively participated in the fighting against the rebel troops, notably in the assault on the Captaincy General of Barcelona, spearheaded by the leader of the rebels in Barcelona, General Manuel Goded, who had arrived from Palma de Mallorca a few hours before. By account, on the evening of the 19th, it was Caridad Mercader who convinced the militiamen, after the soldiers' surrender, to take Goded before the president of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, instead of executing him on the spot. Once before the president, Goded agreed to broadcast a message recognizing the failure of the uprising in Catalonia and asking those who still resisted to surrender. The role of Caridad Mercader in the episode was narrated by the French journalist André Jacquelin in his work Espagne et liberté: le second Munich (1939): "Militiamen and militiawomen were grouped around him [General Goded], and among the latter we must highlight the examples of [Catalan] Louise Michel as well as Caridas [sic] Mercader, with her clothes in tatters but sublime in her ardent faith. At the risk of her life, she had saved the famous rebel general Goddet [sic] (Governor of Barcelona) from massacre to deliver him alive to the people's court." The story also was published on July 26 in La Dèpêche de Toulouse.

After the failure of the uprising in Barcelona, Caridad became actively involved in the organization of the first columns that were formed in the city to put down the rebels. Sources differ regarding the assignment of Caridad Mercader: according to several sources, she left for the Aragon front in the column led by Durruti and Pérez Farrás—the Durruti column— although it is also possible that instead it was to the Trueba-Del Barrio, formed by communist militia. Her sons Ramón and Pablo also joined their mother's column, while her daughter Montserrat and her son-in-law, Jacques Dudouyt, arrived in Spain as volunteers. Montserrat worked as secretary to André Marty, who led the International Brigades with an iron fist. A few days later, Caridad was seriously injured in an air attack. Some sources affirm that it was in Tardienta, where the Carlos Marx column operated, while others suggest Bujaraloz, belonging to the sector of the Durruti column. The shrapnel caused eleven wounds, some of them quite serious, so she had to be evacuated to Lérida, where she underwent surgery and was treated for her wounds. Although she recovered almost completely, she had some chronic sequela, such as an intestinal ailment. Eight weeks after being wounded at the front, Caridad left the hospital.

NKVD agent

The information available in the former Soviet archives on Caridad Mercader has not been systematically explored. It is known that she was recruited at the beginning of 1937. An episode narrated by Luis Mercader refers to him and his mother, shortly after returning from Mexico in the winter of 1937, visiting Ramón in the Madrid front where he was located. Luis did not specify the date. Ramón and Caridad had a long conversation, the purpose of which, according to Luis, was to convince Ramón to also join the NKVD. Months later, in April, Luis would have drawn his conclusions: "...I found out that my mother was affiliated with the Soviets (we called them that). Later I understood that my brother Ramón was affiliated with them." Through Caridad Mercader, the NKVD also recruited other Spanish communists, such as África de las Heras, or Carmen Brufau, a friend of Caridad.

As to who introduced Caridad into the Soviet espionage apparatus, two options have usually been suggested: Erno Gerö and Leonid Eitingon. Gerö, who used the pseudonym Pedro, was a Hungarian communist who was in Barcelona as a delegate of the International Communist (Internacional Comunista) in the PSUC. Since 1932 he had been in the PCC—and head of the NKVD mission in Catalonia. According to Luis, Gerö was a person very close to his family, who "could have been [...] a link between the Soviets and my family in those years." Caridad was "very fond of him." However, the responsibility for recruiting Caridad Mercader has traditionally been attributed to Leonid Eitingon, whom she may have met years before in France. The documentation available in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, successor to the KGB) confirms that this was Caridad Mercader's recruiter. Eitingon, a prominent officer in the Special Operations Department of the NKVD, was sent to Spain a few weeks after the start of the war, as deputy to Alexander Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain. He lived for several seasons during the war in Barcelona. In fact, it was Eitingon who had Luis Mercader taken to the Soviet consulate to protect him while the fighting in May 1937 lasted. After Orlov's defection in 1938, Eitingon, who acted under the pseudonym General Kotov, was in charge of the NKVD mission in Spain. There has been frequent speculation about whether Caridad Mercader and Eitingon—seven years her junior—were lovers. Gorkin stated this emphatically. Historians such as Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas spoke in the same vein, while Sudoplátov, head of the Special Operations department of the NKVD during the Second World War, denied it: "... this would have gone against professional good practice. [...] they were good friends but not physically intimate, despite Eitingon's well-earned reputation as a man of numerous affairs with women." Her son, Luis, also denied this: "I do not believe that my mother and Leoníd were lovers. [...] They maintained simply friendly, fraternal relations, typical of communist comrades. That is also exactly the opinion of Eitingón's children." For her part, Mary-Kay Wilmers emphasizes that Eitingon was a womanizer. In any case, Eitingon was responsible for Ramón and Caridad Mercader within the NKVD.

Intervention in the assassination of Trotsky: Operation Utka (Duck)

In March 1939, Sudoplatov, already director of the Special Operations Department, received an explicit order from Stalin to assassinate Trotsky. Eitingon, who had just arrived in Moscow, planned Operation Utka (Duck) on Sudoplatov's orders. The plan was not outlined until July and only in early August was it personally approved by Stalin. Operation Utka comprised several operations made up of Spanish and Mexican communists recruited during the Spanish Civil War. One of them was led by the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros and had the objective of assassinating the exiled leader; the other was made up of Caridad and Ramón Mercader. This was to be responsible only for surveillance and information collection. The participation of mother and son was anticipated from the first version of the plan.

In the early summer of 1939, Eitingon traveled to Paris, accompanied by Sudoplátov from the Soviet Union, and spent a couple of months training Caridad and Ramón. Both traveled to New York at the end of August. The outbreak of World War II caused orders to be given from Moscow to suspend the transfer of Eitingon and the Mercader to America, but these orders were not followed. From New York, it is believed that Caridad traveled to Mexico via Cuba. Ramón stayed a few weeks in New York before moving to Mexico in early October, from where he convinced Sylvia Ageloff to join him—although it is not really known when he actually arrived in Mexico, since there is little information about the period from December 1939–May 1940.

From documentation in FSB possession, it is known that Eitingon, after spending some time in New York, also traveled to Mexico, and that Caridad, who was also in Mexico, left the country and temporarily returned to New York with a stopover in Cuba after having been recognized. The trip happened on May 21. Early in the morning of May 23 to 24, a group of gunmen, led by Siqueiros, attacked Trotsky's house in Coyoacán without even wounding him.

Eitingon had to report the failure of the operation. The news reached Moscow through a message carried by courier to New York and relayed in code from there to the Soviet capital. Upon receiving the message, Stalin became enraged and sent for Sudoplátov and Beria, who explained to him that the alternative plan would be implemented. However, Caridad Mercader's role in the new operation appears secondary, and it is unknown what specifically her part was within the operation. Ramón had been in Mexico for several months, under a false identity and as Sylvia Ageloff's boyfriend, and had dedicated himself solely to collecting information, without having personally met Trotsky. A few days after the failed attempt carried out by Siqueiros' group, Ramón Mercader finally met Trotsky through his relationship with Ageloff. At the end of June, he traveled to New York for ten days to receive instructions. A few days after Ramon returned to Mexico, Caridad also returned. After several months in which Ramón cultivated the relationship with the exiled leader, on August 20, 1940, Ramon entered Trotsky's house and managed to meet alone with him, on the pretext of Trotsky's reviewing an article Ramón had written. There Ramón struck Trotsky on the head with an ice axe. According to Sudoplátov, initially Eitingon and Caridad Mercader had planned an attack on Trotsky's house at the time Ramón was inside. Ramon would take advantage of the confusion to shoot at his target. Ramón disagreed with the plan and decided to take it upon himself to assassinate Trotsky alone.

In the Soviet Union

Caridad Mercader and Eitingon traveled to Cuba from Mexico and remained there in hiding. Versions of documentation from the FSB and the Sudoplátov archives differ on some points, such as on the route that Eitingon followed after leaving Cuba, but agree on Caridad. According to Sudoplátov, both remained in Cuba for 6 months, which is consistent with the time it took to arrive in the Soviet Union. From there they maintained contact with Ramón through the lawyers who were in charge with his defense. Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, a Cuban jurist, writer and communist activist, was part of Ramón Mercader's defense team in Mexico. According to her 1971 memoir, 50 años de mi vida (50 Years of My Life), she was secretly hired in Havana by a mysterious Spanish woman who could have been Caridad Mercader herself. However, from this point on, the versions differ. The FSB documentation states that Eitingon would have left Caridad in Cuba and arrived in the Soviet Union with a stopover in Europe. Sudoplátov, on the other hand, narrated that both left Cuba heading to New York, that they crossed the country to California, where Eitingon contacted the agents he had recruited during his mission in the United States, and who from San Francisco crossed the Pacific by boat and arrived in Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The route followed by Caridad according to the FSB files is similar.

On June 17, Lavrenti Beria, the director of the NKVD, organized a grand reception during which the president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin, decorated Caridad Mercader with the Order of Lenin. She was the first foreign woman to obtain it. The star of Hero of the Soviet Union was reserved for Ramón. Caridad received an apartment that, by Moscow standards, was a luxury; She lived there with her son Luis, who had been in the country for almost 2 years. However, they were only able to be together for a few months because, when the German invasion of the Soviet Union occurred, they had to separate again. Luis enlisted in the Red Army after acquiring Soviet citizenship, necessary to join the militia.

Despite the persistent requests made by the exiles to enlist and thus defend the Soviet Union, the homeland of socialism, the initial response was negative, both because they were foreigners and because of the future need to use these cadres in their countries of origin. At the insistence of the exiles—not only the Spaniards—in July 1941, they were allowed to enlist in a military unit under the Special Operations department of the NKVD: the Independent Motorized Brigade of Specially Designated Shooters (OMSBON), which eventually reached 20,000 members. This unit comprised volunteers from different countries and was one of the units in charge of the defense of Moscow, as well as maintaining order in the city. Within the OMSBON, a company was created, the Fourth, made up of just over 100 Spanish volunteers. During the siege of Moscow, the "Spanish" company protected the center of the city, without actually engaging in combat. Luis Mercader, who in August was assigned as a transmission officer, and several Spanish exiles—among them Lena Imbert and África de las Heras—enlisted in this company. Caridad spent a few weeks with them at the company's training camp, but, according to the memoirs of Sebastià Piera, a PSUC activist, she disappeared before the end of the battle of Moscow. Her son Luis had several assignments but returned to the capital on several occasions—at the beginning of 1942 and during the summer of that year. According to his testimony, his mother continued living in his apartment. In February 1943, Luis was demobilized and began to study engineering in Moscow, returning to live with Caridad.

Return to México: Operation Gnome

During 1943, Stalin decided to try to get Ramón Mercader out of prison and ordered an operation to be prepared to achieve this. The first references to the plan date back to May 30 of that year. At the end of the year, the Soviet Union opened an embassy in Mexico, which provided legal cover for the NKVD station—rezidentura, in Soviet terminology—in that country. Its main objectives were two: to provide cover for the espionage operations that the Soviets were developing to obtain the secrets of the American atomic bomb and to get Mercader out of prison. The operation, Code Name Gnome, the name assigned to Mercader, studied various strategies for Mercader to escape from prison, in which Soviet agents and Mexican and Spanish communists exiled in the country had to intervene. In the summer of 1943, before the opening of the diplomatic legation, Jesús Hernández—code name "Pedro"—was sent to Mexico along with Francisco Antón. In addition to the tasks related to the reorganization of the PCE in the American country—also part of his attempt to take control of the party, succeeding the recently deceased José Díaz as general secretary—Hernández also worked for the NKVD and aimed to reinforce the work of the rezidentura in Mexico and the operations it carried out.

At the end of 1943, the Soviet rezident (resident spy) designed a plan by which Mercader could escape during one of the releases from prison to testify in court. Taking advantage of a reduction in the guards that were to guard him, Mercader would be put in a car and taken out of the country. Eitingon, under the code name "Tom", was to coordinate the plan. The operation, which took place during 1944 and early 1945, was a fiasco. Added to the incompetence, mistrust, and quarrels among the Soviet, Spanish, and Mexican agents was the unexpected arrival of Caridad Mercader to Mexico in March 1945. She personally embarked on a series of negotiations with Mexican authorities to obtain her son's the freedom. According to Ceniceros, mother and son were even able to see each other in person outside the prison. From the beginning, the NKVD made clear its discomfort with Caridad's presence in the country. Among the first messages between Mexico and the Soviet Union, assigned the code name "Klava", dating from March 1945: "From now on, consider that the presence of Klava [Caridad Mercader] in the CAMPIÑA [Mexico] greatly complicates Project Gnome." Gorkin goes further, stating that the NKVD field team made two attempts to kill her—whether real or fake is unknown—in order to scare her into leaving the country.

The appearance on the scene of Caridad Mercader and her efforts would have alerted the Mexican authorities, who tightened Ramón's prison regimen, thus attempts to achieve his escape would have been unsuccessful. As Luis explained, "[Caridad] knew many important people there [...] and, probably, she went appealing from one to another. But what she did was raise hell, and as a consequence, everything that had been organized collapsed." As a result, the Soviets ordered Caridad to leave Mexico immediately, and no further attempts were made to free from prison Ramón Mercader, who had to serve his full sentence of 20 years. Almost all the authors who have dealt with the subject, like Ramón himself, attributed the failure, in whole or in part, to Caridad's presence there. Ramón never forgave his mother for her interference in the operation and considered her responsible for the additional period he had to spend in prison: "I had to spend 16 years in prison because of her." However, he never blamed her to her face.

Relationship with her son

Numerous historians and publicists have presented Caridad Mercader as a fanatical person who pushed her son to murder. Leonardo Padura described Caridad in the following way:

Caridad del Río had not only been the one who indoctrinated her son in hatred and put him in contact with the officers of the gloomy Soviet NKVD, in charge of conceiving and executing the murder, but she encouraged him, and he continued his mission until that same afternoon of August 20, when aboard a car and in the company of the creator of the plan, she saw Ramón Mercader enter Trotsky's house and into the sewers of the history of the century.

Gorkin made a similar analysis when he first stated that "a dark police apparatus turned Caridad into a terrorist, the mother of a murderer," adding that Ramón was sacrificed to the "blind fanaticism she professed." The description would be corroborated with the confidences that, according to Castro Delgado, Caridad had made to him during her stay in the Soviet Union: "I have made Ramón a murderer."

Luis Mercader, however, provided a totally different version. According to the youngest of the Mercader, Caridad would not have had a great influence on Ramón or on any of her children, because, in reality, she lived with them for a short time. He also cited how his brother had told him that it was he who volunteered to commit the murder, simply to help Eitingon accomplish his mission.

For his part, Gregorio Luri points out a novel thesis to justify Caridad's recruiting her son, which ultimately put him on the path to committing an assassination. According to Luri, Caridad recruited her son to keep him away from the front so that he would not suffer the fate of his brother Pablo, who died in combat action a few weeks earlier.

Final years

Caridad left Mexico in November 1945, and received authorization to settle in Paris, where she lived with a Cuban passport until her death. She settled in an apartment at 25 Rennequin Street, near the Arc de Triomphe and received a pension from the Soviet government throughout her life. Her children Jorge and Montserrat, whom she saw regularly, also lived in the French capital. There are photos of Caridad giving a baby bottle to Jean, Montserrat's son, in 1963.

After the Cuban Revolution, musician Harold Gramatges was appointed Cuban ambassador to France and hired Caridad Mercader to direct public relations at the Cuban embassy in Paris. She worked there between 1960 and 1967. According to her son Luis, "she organized receptions, protocols, and received dignitaries from France and other countries," as Gramatges himself told him in 1978. However, in his memoirs, Vidas para leerlas (Lives to Be Read), the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who was sent to Brussels in 1962 as a cultural advisor to the Cuban embassy, mentions her, alluding to a "dry and unpleasant old woman" who had replaced the previous "beautiful Habanera" embassy receptionist. According to Cabrera Infante, Gramatges told her that "Cachita"—alluding to her birth in Santiago de Cuba—was "more Stalinist than Stalin." Luis Goytisolo, who collaborated with the Cuban Revolution at that time, met Caridad Mercader at the Parisian embassy before traveling to Cuba during the Missile Crisis. According to Goytisolo, it was Martha Frayde, Cuba's representative to UNESCO between 1962 and 1965, who revealed to him the identity of the embassy receptionist, asking him to communicate it to the Cuban Minister of Foreign Affairs Raúl Roa. Goytisolo added that Roa, upon learning of the matter, had Caridad return to Cuba. Although there is a photo of Caridad Mercader in Cuba in 1962, Luis Mercader's testimony does not mention that his mother had moved to Cuba for any length of time or that she had been fired from her job at the Cuban embassy.

On May 6, 1960, Ramón Mercader completed his sentence and was able to travel to Moscow with a Czechoslovak passport. There, where his brother Luis continued to live, he settled with his wife Roquelia. From that time Caridad would travel sporadically to the Soviet Union to visit her children and grandchildren. According to her son Luis, she was never able to adapt to life in the Soviet Union and attributed to her the phrase "[I] only serve to destroy capitalism, but I am not useful to build communism." Efforts by her children to make Caridad's visits more comfortable were always to no avail. Luis believed his mother was never able to recognize the failure of communism and that she believed they had fought "for a Utopia". He also added that "[she] returned to Paris sick, completely discouraged and disillusioned". But she stubbornly continued to be a communist, worshipping Stalin and believing in his doctrine.