by Peter Hey
After taking a shower, Fangio had come down to find Stirling Moss checking in at reception with his new Canadian wife. The two drivers exchanged greetings in the few phrases available to them given their lack of a common language, and then a tall young man with a narrow moustache and wearing a leather jacket barged forward and pulled out a big automatic pistol. At first Fangio thought it was a joke, but when the second man, the man outside now, lifted a machine gun from under his coat and shouted, ‘Nobody move!’ the deadly seriousness became clear. It was all too quick for Fangio to be frightened, and he agreed to go with the men to avoid any bloodshed amongst the stunned bystanders. He was grabbed by the collar and taken outside to be stuffed into the back of a black car, which drove off into the Havana night. The men squeezed either side of him immediately reassured him he was in no danger; they had no intention of hurting him; there was to be no ransom; he would be released as soon as the next day’s race was over. They apologised for their actions and explained they were members of M-26, the 26th of July Movement, and their objective was to show the world that Batista’s grip was weakening and he was living on borrowed time.
Fangio was taken to a safe house where he met the leader of the operation, one Faustino, who again apologised and pledged M-26’s good intent. Fangio did not doubt the sincerity, but could not help wondering what such desperate people might do if he tried to escape.
There was a badly injured man, an engineer burnt whilst experimenting with a flame-throwing device, being cared for in that first house, and the rebels decided it would be safer to transfer their involuntary guest to a different location. Two hours after the kidnapping, Havana was echoing with police sirens, and the man at the wheel of the next car was nervous and driving too quickly. He felt a hand on his shoulder and the fastest driver in the world suggested he slow down. ‘It’ll be okay,’ said Fangio reassuringly and everyone laughed. The tension was broken and a bond began to be established. They drove to the middle-class Vedado district of the capital, a bold move as it was also home to many government officials.
There, Fangio found himself in the house of a mother and two teenage daughters. He was fed steak, salad and chips followed by peaches and cream cheese, and given the older woman’s bedroom, complete with its own bathroom. He slept well and awoke the next day feeling calm. He just had to sit out his ordeal until the grand prix was finished, when he would be handed over to the Argentinian Embassy. Batista would be humiliated and no doubt seek terrible revenge, but by then Fangio would be on a plane and these hot-headed Cubans could continue with their revolution. Perhaps the rebels would prevail, but he wondered if one despot would simply be replaced by another, as was so often the case in the bloody history of Latin America. His own country seemed to stagger from one coup to the next, and he himself was still having his business interests investigated because of his presumed closeness to the deposed Peron and his poor, dead wife, Evita.
In the morning before the race, one of the young daughters brought Fangio his breakfast and stayed to chat. She told him he had a fellow countryman fighting in the Oriente mountains alongside M-26’s leader, Fidel Castro, and his brother Raúl. Fangio claimed ignorance of the Castros, saying he was only interested in cars and driving, not politics. It was largely true. The men also talked to him of their cause and the suffering of the Cuban people: the divided society, poverty and unemployment, closed universities, a police force with carte blanche to beat and torture, and 20,000 killed or disappeared by the regime. Fangio listened with heartfelt compassion and the respect grew between captive and his captors. They saw in him what so many others had seen: a humble, charming, fundamentally decent man.
They offered to let him watch the grand prix live on TV, but he declined. It seemed painful if he could not be there. And perhaps it was a small protest, an expression of discontent at being denied the opportunity to take part and maybe win for the second year in a row. They kept him updated and told him the start had been delayed as the police still hunted for the star attraction, still hoping he could be produced like a rabbit from a hat to show that the president remained dominant over the militant few who challenged his authority.
The race finally got going more than an hour late and was scheduled for 500 kilometres, 90 laps round the streets and seafront of Havana. The previous year, it had lasted just over three hours, at an average speed of nearly 100mph. The man who had taken the chequered flag was sat in the study, trying to read, when one of the kidnappers came in, looking agitated.
‘It’s been stopped,’ he said.
‘But they haven’t been driving for 30 minutes yet.’
‘There has been an accident, señor. One of the cars drove into the crowd. People are dead. Many injured…’
That had been some time ago. They had watched footage of the crash on a TV news bulletin. A young Cuban driving a Ferrari had hit some oil and careered into spectators standing unprotected by the roadside, ploughing through them and knocking several into the air like skittles. The driver was shown being carried away semi-conscious on the bonnet of a teammate’s car, bodies strewn all around. The accident was replayed and Fangio saw more than the news reporters. He saw the moment of decision: continue towards the petrol station on the right, risking an explosion and firebomb, or try to steer the car away and towards the spectator area on the left. It was a terrible choice, but he hoped he would have had the skill to wrestle the car onto a different path, perhaps sacrificing his own life, but saving those who weren’t knowingly putting theirs on the line.
Batista’s propaganda exercise had gone disastrously wrong: first the kidnapping of Fangio and now this. To avoid total, potentially ruinous, embarrassment, he would need someone else to take the heat of the damning publicity. The kidnappers felt they knew how he would be compelled to respond. For sure, he would want to hunt them down and kill them. But more than that, he would need to blacken the reputation of their movement. He would murder their hostage as well and blame M-26 for the crime.
Fangio heard a sharp knock on the front door followed by what sounded like a woman’s voice, giving instructions. He went to the door of the study and opened it to see what was going on. Several faces turned towards him, including one which looked familiar from somewhere in his past. It took him several seconds to place it.
‘Señora, it is nice to see you again,’ he said in faltering English before reverting to Spanish. ‘It is you, is it not? From the hotel casino last year? When I was being shown around by that awful gangster?’
The man with the machine gun flashed an angry look at the woman. ‘He knows you?’ he said aggressively. ‘What the hell are you doing coming here if he knows you?’
Fangio interceded. ‘Gentlemen, don’t worry. I may or may not recognise this lady. But I meet so many people every day. I will not remember her tomorrow. Just as I won’t be able to remember any of you. You have treated me well and I respect your courage. I will not be responsible for handing any of you over to Batista’s brutes.’
He was asked to go back into the study. The muffled, anxious voices resumed, and a few minutes later the woman entered, shutting the door behind her.
‘Señor Fangio,’ she said, ‘they are still angry with me. I really didn’t think you’d remember. It was such a brief meeting. Faustino sent me because he thought no-one would suspect a foreigner of being involved in all this.’
‘It was your accent, I suppose. And I meant what I said. There can’t be many English girls in Havana. They’d soon track you down. I don’t think my friend Stirling would ever forgive me if I betrayed one of his fellow countrywomen to the authorities. I know what they would do to you. That is not who I am.’
‘I know. Thank you,’ she said. ‘I came here to explain what has been arranged.’
‘I am not a stranger to danger, or to fear,’ replied Fangio, ‘but I confess I am no longer enjoying this experience. I hope you have a good plan.’
‘We were going to take you to your embassy. But it’s surrounded by police
and soldiers. We wouldn’t get through. We could send you on your own…’ Her eyes dropped. ‘We would be sending you to your death, trust us. We have managed to contact the ambassador. One of his staff has an apartment here in Vedado. We have men watching it and it appears safe. We will hand you over there. It will be too dangerous for the ambassador to go himself – he would be followed – but he will send some of his officials. It should work. It should be fine… Faustino, our leader, again wanted to apologise to you, and your family, for dragging you into this.’
‘Faustino, it is the only name I have heard. Who is he?’
‘He is second in command only to Fidel Castro. He sailed with him from Mexico, escaped the slaughter on the beach and fought with him in the mountains. He now runs M-26’s clandestine operations. The police know he will be behind this.’
‘Don’t tell me, he was active in student politics before all that?’ The man who had left school at 13 to work as a mechanic didn’t disguise the disdain in his voice.
The young English girl nodded. ‘I assume so. He is a medic, I think.’
Fangio grimaced. ‘I understand his role in this... revolution or whatever you want to call it. And I understand those men outside. But why you? For the love of God, what are you doing here?’
‘It’s a long story. I got a job in that hotel. My best friend there was working for the movement. Two policemen caught him. To this day I’m not sure if what they did... You see, Manolo was… Well, the Americans call them faggots. He liked boys, not girls. And it was obvious, you know?’
Fangio shrugged his answer and Pat continued her explanation.
‘Those policemen did terrible things to him. Who can say if they were doing it because of what he was or what he believed in. Anyway, it was in an alleyway at the back of the hotel. Another friend heard the screams. He carried a gun and shot them. I was surprised because he’d never been very tolerant of… Well, he taught me that word, faggot. He was forced to run. He should have caught the first boat to Miami, but instead he went to join the rebels in the mountains. Did I say he was American? He’d been a soldier, a GI. He knew he’d be useful to Castro. Amazing how people do things you don’t expect of them.’
Fangio shook his head slowly. ‘A piece of fatherly advice – beware of men, young men, looking for excitement. Danger, risk, it makes them feel alive. I see them on the race tracks. All too often I see them being carried away in ambulances. It was something I used to feed on too. Now…’ He paused. ‘And now, you are a rebel yourself, running messages for this Faustino?’
‘This is the most involved I have been. But I have seen what is happening in the city, in this country. You have to take sides. Things have to change. The revolution will build a new Cuba, where people won’t live in poverty and fear. My American can come home from the mountains. People like Manolo will be able to live their lives without hiding who they are.’
The car arrived around 11:00 pm. Fangio was nervous and tried to disguise himself with a hat that proved too small. His captors instead gave him glasses, and he climbed into the back seat with two women members of Faustino’s group. The English girl had not been trusted with this final stage in the operation. On their way to the diplomat’s apartment block, they stopped at traffic lights alongside a police car and Fangio sank back into the shadows. He was not seen and they managed to reach their destination without further incident. There, he was successfully handed over to three stern-faced Argentinian officials. The next day, a relieved Fangio was shown to the world’s press. He talked of a friendly and luxurious kidnapping and how it was another story to tell in an already exciting life. He expressed doubt that he would be able to identify any of the men who had abducted him.
The regime’s days were numbered. By the end of the year, the USA had withdrawn its support, and Castro’s guerrillas had inflicted decisive defeats on the much larger but poorly motivated Cuban army. At 3:00 am on the first day of 1959, Batista boarded a plane for the Dominican Republic, taking with him a personal fortune of over 300 million dollars. He lived out his life in comfortable exile, dying in 1973 near Marbella in Spain. He was 72 and in apparent robust health until succumbing to a heart attack, though there were rumours he was being targeted by assassins from the island he had once ruled.
After the revolution, Fangio was invited to return to Cuba but only did so in 1981, when he met Castro and the remaining kidnappers. There were warm greetings and nostalgic tears. No-one chose to remember the young, Spanish-speaking Englishwoman who had risked her life for a country and a people that were not her own.
Memories and history
Hi Jane
Sorry for not coming back to you sooner. Hayley’s team had a bit of a crisis at the bank. The main server crashed and the backup didn’t cut in properly. The switchover code was based on proprietary software, and a recent update had introduced a rather subtle bug that was slowly corrupting the database. It’s an application where the sums of money potentially being lost are quite scary. The bankers told Hayley she had to work round the clock to fix it, then promptly went down the wine bar! We eventually managed to isolate the problem and come up with an algorithm for rolling things back. We’ve got to keep an eye on it, but hopefully it’s stable now.
Glad your trip to North Wales went well. The fact that his aunt was adopted and largely estranged explains how Alan could have forgotten to mention her. I guess.
Thanks for attaching scans of those cards and letters Alan’s mother sent in the late 1950s. They paint an intriguing picture, though like you, I wonder if there are some gaps, things she wrote home that somehow got lost, or thrown away, either at the time or over the intervening decades.
Pat’s declaration that ‘We have won!’ after Castro’s troops entered Havana could imply she had some part in the revolution, or she could just have been someone who supported its aims, like the armchair football fan who claims personal ownership when their team triumphs: ‘We won the cup!’ and all that. I have found no trace of a Patricia Shaw in any contemporary reporting.
You talked about her relationship with Fangio, so I focused in on events around the 1958 Cuban Grand Prix. I’ve been through the various accounts from news sources at the time, Fangio’s own story and the recollections of surviving kidnappers published more recently. There are inevitable discrepancies, certainly in terms of exact details, but it was 60 years ago. People’s memories can be selective and filtered by whichever side of the political fence they sit. What seems clear is that Fangio was treated well by his captors and did not help the Cuban authorities identify them. A subsequent degree of friendship may indeed have occurred, and one of the kidnappers visited Fangio in Argentina when he was more or less on his deathbed. Women from the 26th of July Movement were involved in the kidnapping, but I can find no record of a non-Cuban.
In her 1959 Christmas card, Pat says she did meet Fangio the previous year and declines to explain the circumstances. He flew in two days before the kidnap, so the most logical explanation is that she met him during practice or at his hotel. Her postcard sent soon after refers, cryptically, to meeting a friend and that he was ‘kind’. It could well be a reference to Fangio, but why wouldn’t she say so? I suspect the police were clamping down so ruthlessly in the immediate aftermath that she thought it best to avoid any explicit association. As to the kindness, he was a big celebrity and simply taking the time to talk to someone would in itself be an act of graciousness.
So, we’re left with a young, impressionable woman who sees how badly ordinary Cubans are being treated under Batista and buys into at least the idea of revolution and change. She gets swept up in the initial euphoria. Then… she gets pregnant and decides to come home. Maybe, by this stage, the cracks are showing and Castro isn’t everything she’d hoped for. But Pat seems to have ended up a life-long socialist, so it’s tempting to think she could only have been encouraged by the direction Castro was taking his country. Maybe she just left Cuba because she didn’t fancy being a single mother so far away f
rom the support of her family, even though they hadn’t always been on the best of terms.
The racing goggles on Alan’s bookshelf say Pat met Fangio at least once more, at an event somewhere in the UK. He was kind again, with his time and with the goggles themselves. They had previously met just before one of his greatest adventures, so you can imagine he was happy to see her and reminisce. And she did speak Spanish after all. Probably not many of the British racing fans clamouring for his attention did.
You commented that Fangio had lost his hair and so has Alan. I know there were paternity suits after Fangio’s death, but adding Alan to that list is a bit of a stretch. There are *lots* of bald men around and Alan was conceived in 1960. Fangio stayed well clear of Cuba from February 1958 until 1981.
So, in summary, I’m leaning towards more mundane explanations. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I think that’s where the balance of probability (always) lies. That said, the backdrop is definitely intriguing, and as usual, I could be missing something. I will keep looking.
Tommy x
PS Hayley and I are still getting on well. Thank you for asking.
The maternal line
Jane decided she had reached a dead end in revolutionary Cuba, certainly until Alan’s DNA results came through. She therefore returned to his primary focus, tracing his mother’s ancestral background. It took some time, but names, dates and places slotted into place and a detailed and informative picture emerged. There were the inevitable gaps, missing offshoots to the tree, but the last two centuries were reasonably complete. There were strands that went back further, and Jane found one ancestor whom another researcher claimed to have connected all the way to King Alfred the Great in the 9th century. In Tommy’s view, that lineage was an exercise in optimistic creativity rather than balanced reasoning, and Jane decided to present it as no more than a maybe, a bit of fun. After all, Alan had said he didn’t need to go back very far. He was starting from virtually nothing and just wanted to find out what made his mother, what made him, who they were. Mathematically, over the course of a millennia, Alfred the Great would have so many millions of descendants that just about the entire population would be included; the only challenge was proving it. The last few generations, their trials, triumphs and tragedies, they were what moulded the people that moulded us. From the Victorians onwards, their lives also tended to be more fully recorded than their predecessors. Nonetheless, each individual’s nature and character – what Jane supposed Alan was really looking for – had to remain supposition, little more than guesswork based on a summary of events, occupations and the places they called home.