Island that Dared (31 page)

On the Malecón little fish were being flung across the road and seaweed was piled below my favourite bar’s steps and spray drenched me as I drank
and wrote. The longer this wind blows, the higher the waves build up in the Straits of Florida.

Are the Cubans neurotic about slight temperature variations? That day I saw many dogs wearing coats, not the sort of tailored canine jackets fashionable in Kensington/Chelsea but improvised garments: men’s
underpants
, children’s T-shirts, women’s tights and, memorably, two oversize bras encasing an extra-long dachshund. My woolly white terrier friend on San Rafael, for whom I had felt pity in November as he panted through the noon heat, was now guarding his doorstep swaddled in towelling tied on with a string. No wonder so many concerned
habaneros
were stopping me in the street, sympathetically exclaiming ‘
Frio
!’ – then being astonished, on feeling my bare arms, to find me not ‘
frio
’.

My visa contretemps left Candida guilt-stricken. She had provided me with the essential document, signed by us both, to prove my place of residence but had assumed I would know about the stamps. And she’d got the timing wrong, the office opens at 8.00, not 9.00. I hugged her to wipe out all that guilt. We in the reserved West should make more use of hugging.

Next morning, to be sure of a place in that day’s queue, I set off when the streets were empty of all but cats. Havana’s energy-saving street lighting is adequate but, given the hazardous state of Centro’s pavements, one has to move cautiously before dawn. As I watched my step, a mild electric shock was administered to my scalp. Looking up, I saw an illegal cable suspended between a pole and a ground-floor flat at just the height to shock your average Cuban (not a very tall person). The cable was still in place on my next visit to Havana.

No less startling was a hazard on a busy footpath where someone had covered a deep hole with the top (or bottom) of a tar barrel. This had been knocked off-centre so that it presented the equivalent of a sharp rusty knife to the shins of oncoming pedestrians. Anyone watching out for dangling cables would certainly have been gashed.

Twenty-eight stood ahead of me outside Immigration’s one-storey
prefab
buildings on a ridge unprotected from Atlantic gales. Soon even I was
frio
– chilled through, hands and feet numb. All morning the sun tried to shine but the clouds won. Wistfully I remembered the bank’s easy chairs and wondered why Internal Security took asceticism to such an extreme, not even providing wooden benches for people (many of them elderly) who had to stand for four or five hours – four hours and twenty minutes in my case.

The monotony was broken only by two litters of tiny frolicking kittens and, as time passed it became clear that their entertaining presence was no
accident. These were not feral families; at a little distance, watching them, sat two teenage girls with cardboard cartons. All ten kittens were tame and very tempting and several in the queue gradually gave way to temptation – an interesting process to observe, winning ways overcoming practical considerations. Two couples disagreed, loudly and at length, about their household’s need for another animal. In both cases victory went to the tempted. I wondered if this solution to the ‘good homes’ problem would work in Ireland – but then, we don’t have five-hour alfresco queues.

When the office opened, twenty minutes late, the queue exceeded one hundred and fifty (we counted to amuse ourselves). Only two women were on duty, each in a little doorless office minimally furnished – camp chairs on either side of a table hardly big enough to hold a computer. A sharp-tongued man, wearing an Internal Security peaked cap, monitored us, opening a gateway at intervals to admit eight and, should a ninth try to slip in, banishing him/her to the end of the queue. When my turn came, the rest of the octet registered changes of addresses or relatives visiting from abroad, applied for tourist taxi licences or permits required to receive parcels from the US. Such matters are time-consuming but, after all that stamina-testing, my visa-renewal procedure took less than ten minutes.

Some Cubans insist that the Bay of Pigs invasion pushed the depressive and alcoholic Ernest Hemingway over the edge, that he shot himself three months later because it seemed he could never return to Finca La Vigia, his beloved home for twenty-one years. Everywhere nostalgia is a tourist asset and the Havana authorities have restored this villa at a cost of more than 2.5 million. Here, too, the embargo operated. The Boston-based Hemingway Preservation Society wished to donate but were informed, ‘Any contribution would violate trade sanctions by boosting tourism’. Then a compromise allowed Boston’s enthusiasts to help conserve and catalogue the bulky archives found in the villa’s mouldy cellar.

Cuba’s tourist bosses have recently given a tincture of romance even to the Batista era. In the celebrated art deco Hotel Nacional, opened in 1930 on a high bluff above the Malecón, I was startled to be offered a tour of ‘the suites where Al Capone and Meyer Lansky lived’. This trend worries me in the first decade of the twenty-first century when real, live Mafia types abound in our financial, corporate and political worlds – some of their schemes making the Cosa Nostra look like tyros.

In 1929 another art deco spectacular arose near the Presidential Palace
at a cost of one million dollars. This was Edificio Bacardi, a new
headquarters
for the rum company, built of pink granite and coral limestone with terracotta tiles around the windows and the Bacardi symbol (a bat) perched on the pyramidal roof. On 9 January 1959, when
el comandante
led his victorious guerrillas into Havana, they saw something astounding. High above the street, extending the full length of this dominant building, hung a banner saying ‘GRACIAS, FIDEL’. For all their business acumen, the Bacardi tribe had misjudged Fidel and helped in a small way to fund his army, believing that its main aim was to get rid of Batista – an aim then shared by most Cubans, rich or poor. Who could take seriously all those impractical promises made to the masses? When the young rebels came to power they would surely behave like sensible politicians, providing only enough marginal reforms to placate their followers while they secured for themselves lucrative positions in the new government.

One Bacardi manoeuvre had been thwarted in mid-December. When the dictator’s defeat seemed assured, he received a visit from Earl Smith, the US ambassador, who instructed him to put in place a junta, to begin to organise elections – and then to leave, for good. Smith had already chosen the junta and Pepin Bosch was a senior member. However, Batista ignored his would-be boss and no junta impeded the Rebel Army’s swift take-over.

On 7 January a group of businessmen, including Pepin Bosch and Daniel Bacardi, met in Havana and sent an urgent message to President Eisenhower pleading for immediate US recognition of the new regime ‘because this government appears far better than anything we had dared hope for’. So influential were these men that the State Department granted diplomatic recognition that very day.

Fidel kept his promise to organise a calm transition to reform by appointing former Judge Manuel Urrutia as President and José Miro-Cardona (once his professor at Havana’s Law School) as Prime Minister. This interim cabinet contained only three guerrillas (rtd) but Fidel appointed himself as Commander-in-Chief of the Rebel Armed Forces.

Then the Revolution’s glory was tarnished by the execution of four hundred of Batista’s most loyal and brutal SIM military police – ‘Special Service’ torturers. Their trials in Havana’s sports stadium were shown live on TV with vengeful crowds demanding instant executions and Che signed more than fifty death sentences. In Santiago Fidel’s brother Raúl supervised the machine-gunning of seventy-one soldiers. When international outrage flared – the US pouring petrol on its flames – Fidel angrily pointed out, ‘We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing
murderers … Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.’

In his biography of Fidel, Leycester Coltman, former British
ambassador
to Havana, comments:

When Fidel first visited the US in April 1959 President Eisenhower hardly noticed – he had a golf date to keep. Cuba’s Revolution left him unbothered; perhaps it was veering too far left but when the Guatemalan government did likewise in 1954 it had been easy to get rid of Jacobo Arbenz: one crisp Presidential order to the CIA and regime change was effected.

During a three-hour meeting with Vice-President Nixon Fidel and his team of economic advisors – including Felipe Pazos, president of Cuba’s National Bank – discussed and disagreed about land reform. Fidel, as he had expected, found himself in a minority of one though his plan to limit private ownership to four hundred hectares (about one thousand acres) seemed not unreasonable. When the Land Reform law came into force in June, the US sent a note of protest, fulminating about the compensation offered. It was based on the landowners’ own assessments of value, as recorded on their tax forms over the years – an impeccably correct legal procedure. This hoisting of the super-rich on their own petard must have tickled Fidel’s sense of humour while sparing Cuba’s coffers – almost emptied by Batista and his entourage before they fled.

In July 1960 Law 851 led to the nationalisation of the Bacardi
Company
’s Cuban assets, by then only a tiny fraction of their wealth. Eventually most foreign companies (Mexican, Canadian, British, Swiss, French)
accepted
that Castroism had arrived to stay and took whatever was on offer, always calculated on the basis of taxes previously paid. To this day, however, the Bacardis and the US government have refused compensation on Cuba’s terms.

A fortnight before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Bacardi donated a small ship to the Miami exiles’ Christian Democrat Movement and she promptly set sail for Cuba with José Ignacio Rasco on board – the CIA’s choice to lead the hoped-for puppet government. Two and a half years later, when a Kennedy/Castro rapprochement seemed a possibility in the week before President Kennedy’s death, Adlai Stevenson resentfully noted that ‘the CIA is still in charge of everything to do with Cuba’.

Soon after the Brigade 2506 debacle, Pepin Bosch began to organise a second invasion, more carefully planned. According to Álvaro Vargas Llosa, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) spokesman, Bosch was determined ‘to gather a group of exceptional people, prominent men of the Cuban republic, and subject them to a referendum in order to create a world representative body of exiles who would be mandated to carry out actions in favour of the freedom of Cuba’. A National Security Council (NSC) memo, dated 28 May 1963, reveals that Washington knew of this plan.

By the beginning of 1964 Pepin Bosch had found five ‘exceptional people’ to lead the Miami-based Cuban Representation in Exile (RECE its Spanish acronym). The CIA provided its main funding but Vargas Llosa records that ‘Bacardi gave the organisation $10,000 per month and paid each of the five leaders $600 per month’ – even then not lavish sums, by Bacardi standards. Soon RECE ranked amongst the Western hemisphere’s most deadly terrorist groups and Luis Posada Carriles (who was still making global headlines in 2006) held a dual position as its chief planner and a CIA ‘special operative’. In 1985 US Congressional investigators obtained an FBI document exposing CIA funding for a RECE sabotage attack on a Cuban ship in the Mexican port of Vera Cruz. Other revelations came in 1998, with the release of a report on Congressional probings into President Kennedy’s death and concurrent CIA plans to assassinate certain foreign political leaders, Fidel being first on the list. The letter attached to this report merits quotation in full:

McGeorge Bundy, the Special National Security Assistant to President Johnson (and formerly to President Kennedy), was responsible for the administration’s relations with the CIA.

The eight-point memo passed by the CIA to their director, Richard Helms, noted that Pepin Bosch had offered $100,000 of the $150,000 demanded by the Mafia and their Cuban-American underworld links for ‘taking out’ Fidel, his brother Raúl and Che. (A bargain, some might have thought – only fifty thousand dollars each!)

Richard Helms, whose wealth had been considerably diminished by Fidel’s nationalisations, ended his report on the plot: