A
WARNING TO THE READER
No one wants
you to know the story this novel tells.
It’s a story about Cuba and the United States
during the reign of Fidel Castro.
In the last days of 1958 Castro, a
thirty-something prodigy of politics, came from out of nowhere to
vanquish the régime of longtime U.S. ally General Fulgencio Batista.
Once in power Castro not only punished his
enemies but also proceeded to destroy most of his friends – people who
had helped him to victory.
A group of Cubans, who saw the fate Castro was
preparing for them, determined to topple him. They tried to make common
cause with the U.S. government because they knew that American
officials, for their own reasons, also wanted Castro gone.
These resistance fighters were quite different
from other Cubans who had fled to the U.S. Many of the exiles were
Batista supporters, while the anti-Castro fighters in Cuba were
revolutionaries who had actively opposed Batista – and who had thereby
incurred the displeasure of the U.S. government.
When the revolutionaries went to the U.S. for
help in their fight against Castro, American officials were loath to
support independent minded people who a short time earlier had helped
overthrow America’s ally. U.S. officials chose instead to support the
exiles and other Cubans who would do as the U.S. told them.
In April 1961 the CIA sent a military force of
Cuban exiles to destroy Castro with an invasion at the Bay of Pigs, a
remote place on Cuba’s southern shore. Meanwhile, the CIA gave almost
no help to the rebels inside Cuba. U.S. agents in Havana refrained from
warning those rebels that an attack was on the way. As a result, Castro
was able to surprise his internal opponents with mass arrests and
cripple their movement decisively.
The Bay of Pigs was, for Castro, a victory of
the most far-reaching kind. It solidified opinion in Cuba, in Latin
America, and in much of the world behind his régime. It allowed him to
bring a mortal threat to the U.S. in the form of Cuba-based Soviet
missiles. And it paved the way for Castro’s rule across half a
century.
Castro and his comrades were well aware of the
extraordinary gift they had received. At an international conference in
Uruguay, comandante Ché Guevara went so far as to thank the United
States for sponsoring the failed invasion.
*
* *
In decades to follow, Castro’s régime handed the United States one
debacle after another – even as it continued to draw sustenance from
the idea that socialist Cuba was a victim of the U.S.
The aging leader, who wanted to keep his image
as a rebel and an underdog, had no wish to emphasize how he repeatedly
trumped the U.S. – while America’s officials and opinion leaders,
rather than draw attention to their successive defeats at Castro’s
hands, downplayed or ignored the damage.
Castro often spoke about the efforts at
sabotage against his régime by Americans and Cuban exiles. Not so
noticeable, and far more vital, were Castro’s own initiatives in
sabotage. For decades he spread irregular warfare throughout Latin
America, while also welcoming guerrillas from around the world to train
in Cuba. He continuously threatened other Latin governments and in
places he helped overturn them. His activities also went beyond the
region. Only months before September 11, 2001, Castro traveled to the
Middle East and spoke with leaders of Islamic states about attacking the
U.S.
Through Castro’s reign, a single false idea
held unwaveringly in the public mind: a mutual fiction whose
protagonists were mighty America and vulnerable Cuba. The actuality,
meanwhile, stayed as unnoticed as the falling tree that makes no noise
because people aren’t in the woods to hear it.
Written histories of Cuba and America during
the Castro period have largely concurred in the mutual fiction, while
the present work of fiction points the way back to the forest where a
hidden history dwells.
Reader, beware.
You have entered the forest just as a mighty tree is about to fall.
I
THIS
IS HOW YOU DIE
Rodrigo gripped
the iron bars of his cell, his hands in fists, his shaven head bowed.
Seconds passed like hours, hours like seconds – each one of them
unbearable and precious.
Why am I
not dead? Why are these people keeping me alive?
It was
dusk, the loveliest hour of day and the worst for prisoners.
This hour bore memories of homecoming, of
children and women, of nights bursting with music and laughter and love.
For men in prison it was the hour of deepest sadness, crawling with the
stench of other men and the joy of well-fed fleas.
Rodrigo knew he might die at any moment. They
could take his life in the next thirty minutes or they could let him
live another thirty years. Those whom they had sentenced to death, they
often kept alive. As for the man they reprieved – the moment he drew
breath with a free man’s attitude was the moment he might lose his
life.
He was dancing with a paradox that reached into
infinity.
How many angels can sit on the head of a
pin? How many human lives can
palpitate under a sword?
Rodrigo
knew the sword was over him. His was not the every-day sentence of death
which all humans face. It was an exceptional sentence befitting his
exceptional life. Not good, not bad, he thought. Just
exceptional.
Be an exception. Join the conspiracy.
He
repeated that phrase to himself like an advertising jingle.
What a ridiculous thing his humor was! At times
he felt he had no right to it. He had had no special aptitude for
quotidian life. He had never quite managed to hold a regular job. Much
of the time he had had no idea what to say to his wife. His sense of
direction was so poor he often lost himself in neighborhoods he had
known since childhood.
Still, he had become a conspirator – and in
situations that would make most people die of terror he didn’t simply
survive, he fooled around.
If you don’t tell us what we want to
know, we will send you to the firing squad! the chief interrogator
screamed at him.
To which he had answered: Sir, you have
threatened me with death so
often that if you put me in front of the firing-squad and ask how I
feel, I will tell you what the Chinese gentleman said: “Una
’peliencia má!”
As
a boy Rodrigo had heard Chinese vendors along the Malecón, Havana’s
ocean boulevard, speaking in their peculiar accents. When he addressed
his interrogators and said Una experiencia más – “One more
experience” – in that pidgin accent, the interrogators grew cold
with fury.
It seems you do not care about saving your
life at all, the chief interrogator declared. We have nothing
more to discuss. The sessions are over.
How
insane to resort to humor at that moment! How could he have been so
cavalier with his life? Even if he wouldn’t protect him-self, how
could he have been so thoughtless to his wife and kids?
No! He mustn’t think like that. Saving his
life was not the game he had chosen to play. If that were his game he
would now be wearing a grey suit, working in a yanqui law firm.
He reflected back to the moment that defined
his life and prefigured his death.
It was a clear night in April 1961, pleasantly
cool, with enough and not too much of a moon. He was sitting stone-quiet
in a fisherman’s shack, a hand on his rifle, an eye on the grenades
and machine guns to make sure they were in reach. His comrade Alejandro
was asleep on the floor beside him. They were waiting for their target
to appear across the river. The trap was perfectly set.
In a while Rodrigo would sleep and Alejandro
would watch. It was their third night in the shack. The prey might
arrive any moment or might not come for three days more.
That man’s movements were unpredictable. For
almost a year, in vain, Rodrigo had tracked him. Then, by luck born of
industry – as luck nearly always is – Rodrigo had learned of his
very private, very brief, and rather regular meetings along this quiet
stretch of river in Havana.
When security guards arrived to prepare the
meeting-place, Rodrigo would see their faces. If some of them happened
to cross the river they would see Rodrigo’s. He and Alejandro would
fire, and those guards would take the bullets and bombs for the one they
were protecting.
With a bit more luck the guards would not come
across.
For the one about to conquer, it had been a
thrilling and terrible ride to this place. He had fought for seven years
to undo a tyrant, only to see that his risks and pains had served to put
another tyrant in power. So he began to fight again.
Through these two wars he had killed other men.
He had caused the deaths of people close to him. His constant exposure
to danger had brought grief and despair to the ones he most loved.
Now, with a gunshot, he would redeem the
suffering – all he had caused, and all he had borne. He would put
himself, his family, and his country to rights again.
The idea unsettled him.
How simple it ought to be, this trigger-pull.
He had lived past the rough stuff – the missions he would never have
accepted had he known how arduous they would turn out. All that was
over. He was about to win. He should feel triumphant. Why didn’t he?
What was churning inside him?
“Hey! Remember us?” a host of feelings
cried out from within. “We’re your friends!”
Some friends!
Here he was on the verge of a new life, and the
expiring one pulled at him more insistently than ever. Faces living and
dead, situations that had been or might have been, feelings he’d
admitted and others he’d ignored were dragging him under water.
His oxygen was gone. He was drowning. As the
waters closed over his head he put his mind’s ear to the tumult and
the waves brought him a clear, unvarying message: “This is how you
die.”
II
ENEMIES
AND FRIENDS
By
morning it was warm, and yesterday’s icy snow had turned to city
sludge.
It was a case of Washington weather. In this
fickle climate, it could be the depth of winter one day and springtime
splendor the next. After that could come a blast of tropical heat or, if
the weather wanted, a return to freezing cold.
On this perplexingly bright morning of December
1959 the monumental quarter of the U.S. capital, under its coat of
snow-dirt, looked like a grimy unwashed animal.
After a visit with his parents who had just
begun a new life in exile, Rodrigo had one item of business before
joining his friend Antonio Moreno for the return trip to Cuba. He must
make a stop at the FBI.
In Rodrigo’s brain-stem the carrier of yanqui
power was the FBI. Through seven years of fighting against Batista,
fear of America’s police had been a taste on Rodrigo’s lips and a
constant nagging in his insides.
Cuba was an American protectorate, Batista was
America’s man and the Americans, with their indecently vast power,
stood behind Batista’s régime. Rodrigo and his fellow plotters had
taken great pains to dodge America’s FBI as well as Batista’s SIM.
If either police force got evidence against Rodrigo and his comrades
they would be off to the SIM’s torture chambers, where they must hold
their tongues and let themselves die unspeakable deaths.
As it happened, neither the FBI nor the SIM
ever got a clear fix on Rodrigo but both agencies knew who he was –
and the FBI would remember him still. It was less than a year since
Batista had made his astonishing flight from Havana in the face of
Castro’s advancing Rebel Army. To the Americans the fall of their man
in Cuba had been a bitter setback, and they were bound to dislike
Rodrigo for his part in it.
Now Rodrigo made his way among Washington’s
granite monoliths toward the FBI’s front door on a mission unthinkable
only a year ago. He would show his face to this most awesome of enemies
and ask the enemy to consider him a friend.
*
* *
Rodrigo was wearing business clothes, with a camera slung over his suit
jacket. In the front lobby of the FBI building he joined some sightseers
for a guided tour. When the group returned to the lobby and broke up,
Rodrigo stayed put.
“Can I help you?” an attendant asked
suspiciously. In this austere official place, people were quickly seen
as loiterers.
“I would like to speak to someone in
authority,” Rodrigo stated.
Three or four more employees queried him with a
rising sense of urgency. He repeated his answer, each time with more
insistence.
A pair of uniforms appeared with an older man
in a rumpled suit and bow tie. A small man with curious eyes and a
strangely pleasant smile, he had the air of someone who had holed up in
a box for years and then stepped out for this occasion.
“Is there something you want to talk
about?” the man said to Rodrigo with evident sincerity.
“May we speak in private?” Rodrigo asked as
the uniforms watched closely.
The other man clasped Rodrigo’s arm behind
the elbow and led him into an office area. They entered a sparsely
furnished room. The man did not sit behind the desk. He informally took
a chair facing the desk and motioned to an adjoining one.
“Please sit down,” the man said. “My name
is Ungerleider.”
Rodrigo sat and quickly said: “Thank you, Mr.
Ungerleider. I am here today because I am a Cuban, and because I have
serious concerns about what is happening in my country.”
“May I know with whom I’m speaking?” the
American asked.
Rodrigo sprang back to his feet. “How rude of
me! I beg your pardon, sir. Here is my card.”
It was a simple calling card in script, giving
his name and under it the word Abogado.
“Mr. Núñez,” Ungerleider said,
pronouncing the foreign syllables perfectly. “I am pleased to meet
you.”
“And I am pleased to meet you, Mr.
Ungerleider!” Rodrigo ex-claimed as he gave Ungerleider’s extended
hand a vigorous grip.
“I see you’re a lawyer but you seem rather
young for that,” the American said. “I am twenty-six years of
age,” Rodrigo answered as he sat again. “I have been an attorney for
three years. And I see you speak Spanish.”
“I recognize a few words. Tell me. What is
your specialty?”
“Civil litigation,” Rodrigo answered with a
perceptible lack of interest.
“Well, I suppose it’s not a legal matter
you’ve come about, is it,” Ungerleider said.
“I have come to speak about relations between
our countries.”
“Really? In what regard?”
“I believe that your government and my
colleagues may have a mutual interest,” Rodrigo said, trying to sound
more sure than he felt.
“Who are your colleagues?”
“We are people who fought for change in Cuba.
We felt a change was necessary. And now we do not like the change that
has resulted.”
“May I ask what has made you unhappy?”
“It’s a bit awkward to explain,” Rodrigo
began. “As you have noted, I am a lawyer. You see, Mr. Ungerleider, I
became a lawyer because I care about the law.”
Rodrigo looked squarely at the other man and
kept on. “I also care for justice and reason and fairness. It happens
at times that justice, reason and fairness are luxuries the law cannot
afford. By the same token, I am sure we would agree the law must always
uphold itself. Am I speaking correctly?”
"You are.”
“Tell me, Mr. Ungerleider. Did you by any
chance follow the trial, earlier this year, of Batista’s air force
officers?”
“I did but not closely. Perhaps you would
explain why you think it important.”
“I would be glad to,” Rodrigo said, hitting
stride. “The situation is that some officers from Batista’s air
force – a group of some forty men – went on trial for bombing Rebel
Army positions during last year’s battles. In this trial the defense
was able to show that, during the attack in question, the airmen dropped
their bombs on empty terrain so as not to harm rebel forces. Quite
sensibly the jury found the officers not guilty.”
“Wasn’t there a second trial?” the
American asked.
“That’s just the point!” Rodrigo
exclaimed. “Castro rejected the jury’s verdict. He went before the
masses and said: ‘Revolutionary justice is based not on legal precepts
but on moral conviction.’ Those were his words. And the masses cheered
them!”
Rodrigo took a breath and went on. “Of course
Castro knows better than that. He himself is a lawyer, but his purpose
is not to uphold the law – not common law, not revolutionary law, not
law of any kind. His purpose is to expand his power, and if law gets in
his way he pushes it aside. So in plain violation of every legal custom
he ordered the judge to convene a new trial. For a second time the
airmen faced the same charges. The government showed no new evidence but
all the officers got heavy sentences.
“That
is the kind
of thing which led us to change our minds about Castro! It doesn’t
matter to us how popular Castro is. It doesn’t even matter what kinds
of programs he puts into effect. What matters is that he makes a
government not of laws and rights but of arbitrary will and force. And
we reject that!”
The other man waited for some moments, then
said: “What is it that you want from the United States?”
“Mr. Ungerleider, please excuse me if I sound
presumptuous. The day may soon come for a partnership between ourselves
and your government.”
“In that case,” Ungerleider said in an
official tone, “I am not the person with whom you should be talking.
Another agency now has the primary responsibility in this area.”
“You mean the Central Intelligence Agency,”
Rodrigo said.
“Exactly – but if you knew that, why did
you come to us?”
Rodrigo smiled. “From my father, who is a
politician, I have heard of the FBI’s interest in Cuba ever since I
was a boy. So let’s say I came here for sentimental reasons.”
“In that case,” the American said, smiling
back, “it has been my pleasure to receive you.”
That was the signal to leave. Rodrigo stood up.
“Thank you, Mr. Ungerleider. I have already
taken too much of your time.”
They shook hands and the visitor made an
abrupt, theatrical exit.
*
* *
Striding up to the Capitol, pacing himself to arrive on the stroke of
twelve, Rodrigo chewed over every nuance and detail of the meeting.
The
Americans used to be merely our enemies. How will it be when they look
at us as friends?
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