RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  Even though the country was not yet officially communist, it was clear within six or seven months after Batista fled that Fidel was headed in that direction. Red’s grandfather was against this, and apparently had no problem speaking his mind.20 In the summer of 1959, he was jailed on trumped-up charges that he had denounced Fidel personally.

  It was a lie, since her grandfather still somehow revered Fidel, thinking the new government’s actions were merely mistakes perpetrated by ignorant comrades. He was sent to the notorious Isle of Pines prison, where he died in the mid-1960s.

  “They killed him?” Sean asked.

  “They fed them maggots in handfuls of sugar swept from the mill floors. The amount of flour and corn for one man each week would not feed a baby for one day. They did not put a gun to his head, no,” said Red. “But they killed him as surely as if they had put two hands around his neck and choked him.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sean. “I didn’t know.”

  “Most Americans don’t,” said Red. “They hear of Fidel and they think he was a hero. They don’t know the rest.”

  “Don’t go by Sean,” said Doc. “He’s just a dumb shit.”

  Sean turned red.

  “No, it’s not your fault, Sean.” Red touched his hand, which made him turn even redder, though for a different reason. “Cuba is not important to most Americans. Why should it be? Just a small island, yes? But with great suffering.”

  And with that, she got up and went to the bar for another drink.

  Our lesson in Cuban history complete, we set our plans for the next day. Sean briefed us on the security arrangements around our target area, ran down some of the preparations he’d already made—renting cars, bicycles, some safe rooms at hotels and a house outside of town—then gave me some DVDs with photos and videos of the area where Fidel’s office was.

  “Your Spanish must be improving,” said Doc when he finished. “You’ve done pretty damn well.”

  “There’s only one word you need to know here: Cuánto? As in: How many dinero are you going to take from me?”

  Sean wasn’t just being cynical. The country was poor, and money talked loudly enough to get many things done. In most cases overtly bribing someone was completely unnecessary; the business arrangement was itself a bribe.

  The government was often in on it. Rental car companies, for example, were all owned by the same government agency. It charged a fixed rate, payable in convertible pesos, the official government money for travelers. (Fifty-five a day for a Hyundai Athos, when we were there.) But in some instances—the house, for example—payments on the side in “real” pesos, the money regular Cubans spent, definitely helped things along, even though in theory it was illegal. Euros, though in theory worth much more than either, were not always accepted, because of the hassle some folks had using them. But everyone needed money, even the best-off government workers.

  Sean had picked up a variety of information in his travels. There was a veritable army of Chinese businessmen in town, trying to arrange different deals. There were even more pickpockets around; Sean had grabbed one fellow the day before just as he was about to take off with his wallet.

  “But that turned out to be my lucky day,” said Sean, taking out a pair of cigars from his pocket. “Right after that, I ran into this guy whose brother worked at a Partagas factory. I got ’em cheap.”

  Red glanced at the cigars and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Sean.

  “Those aren’t Partagas. Someone rolled them at home.”

  “You sure?”

  She took one, running her fingers over it quickly. “The roll is good, but the leaf has too many veins. It would never be used at the factory.”

  “They smell good,” said Sean.

  “Well, they are Cuban.” She got up and went over to the bar.

  “I also found this great place for breakfast,” Sean told us. “I’ll take you there in the morning.”

  “You’ll be out of here before then,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “I need you to get this back to the States,” I told him, sliding Fidel’s last will and testament DVD to him. “I want you to bring it directly to the admiral.”

  Sean looked like I punched him in the gut.

  “Make us a copy, too,” I added, ignoring the hurt-puppy look. “I’ll have Junior rig some sort of copy thing up.”

  “Can’t he take it?” Sean glanced toward the bar, where Red was getting her drink. “Cuba was just getting interesting.”

  “History lover, huh?” Doc chuckled, then drained his glass.

  ( IV )

  Getting into Fidel’s office was about as hard as getting into an American submarine complete with nuclear missiles.

  No wait, I’m wrong. The submarine was a little tougher. Not much, though.

  Getting out was a different story.

  Our hotel was near the Capitolio, the fancy former government building that looks somewhat similar to our Capitol building in D.C. The building is now a museum, Internet café, and tourist attraction. The Cuban national congress, called the National Assembly,21 meets to rubber-stamp everything Fidel, or lately his brother Raul, tells it to in a big building a few miles to the southeast called the Havana Convention Center. The real seat of government is at the Communist Party Headquarters, or Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Cuba, the large, pretentious, but fitfully air-conditioned building at the south end of the Plaza de la Revolución at the center of town.

  But I digress.

  The Capitolio dome looks out over the harbor area, the old part of Havana, and by far the prettiest part of the city. It’s a must-stroll for tourists; if you don’t like the old buildings, you’ll at least appreciate the old cars you can see here. Like all of Havana, there are pockets of poverty and plenty of disrepair a block or two away, but I wasn’t on the island to institute social justice, and neither are most tourists.

  Fidel has a number of homes spread out in Havana and across the island, and even more offices. In fact, if you want to get a glimpse of one of his houses, open up Google Earth on your computer and go to these coordinates:

  23°04’48.99” N

  82°29’07.07” W

  That one is on the west side of Havana, on the outskirts of town. Note the tanks parked about a half mile away. And the armored personnel carriers.

  According to the admiral’s intelligence, Fidel’s favored working office of late—along with a small apartment for him to rest in—was located in the Miramar area of Havana, west of the Old City near the water. Prior to the Revolution, this was the exclusive area of Havana, the place where well-off families would build their dream homes. A few large apartment buildings dot the edges now, and there are traces of the steady dilapidation that you see throughout the rest of the city because of the country’s extreme poverty. But most of Miramar remains an exclusive area. It’s where most countries locate their embassies, and where the highest-ranking Communist Party members have their homes. When the windows break here, they replace them with glass, not cinder blocks like they do in much of the rest of the city.

  According to the information Ken’s people had given me, Fidel’s “secret” working office was a five thousand square foot modernistic house overlooking the beach (though not on it). Sean’s initial recee showed the information was very likely correct; he had spotted six guards in the vicinity, along with at least two video cameras. The house also matched with the general description the barber had given me.

  Our first order of business was site surveillance. Driving through the immediate area was impossible unless you had an extremely good reason to be there, but the front of the building could be seen from the roof of an apartment complex about a mile and a half away. Shotgun and Mongoose went there an hour before daybreak, lugging a bird-watcher’s telescope that Sean had purchased two days before.

  The apartments had been informally subdivided so that several families could live in each unit. This is common in Cuba,
especially in the cities. If there were three bedrooms, there would generally be three families sharing everything. While the building itself was in need of repair—the cement at the front entrance was crumbling, and there were rust stains all along the windows—Sean had reported that the halls and stairway were clean enough to eat off.

  The reason became apparent as my two shooters were met by a sudden flood of warm water and a scent somewhere between ammonia and fresh pine needles.

  “What!! Ruining my floor with your big, muddy shoes?” bellowed a Cuban grandmother from down the hall as they walked in.

  Mongoose started to apologize, but the woman would have none of it. She scooped up two rags from the pail and walked over to them.

  “You will clean it,” she demanded. “And take off your shoes before you go any farther. Where are you going?”

  Sean had given them the names of some of the people who lived in the building. Mongoose, forgetting momentarily which family was on the top floor, rattled them all off together.

  The woman looked at him suspiciously, but before she could ask exactly what he was up to, Shotgun intervened.

  “Fame?” he asked, trying to say “hungry” in Spanish.

  His pronunciation was off, but the package of Twinkies he held up in his right hand made his meaning crystal clear. The woman glared at him, but cast a friendlier eye toward the snack.

  “Here you go.” Shotgun tossed her the pack.

  The woman snagged it with the prowess of a Pro Bowl free safety. Mongoose explained that he and his friend were bird-watchers from Canada, and were here hoping to catch a glimpse of the very rare red-breasted black heron, which they had heard could only be seen from certain roofs in the vicinity.

  “You have any more of these?” asked the woman, finishing the cake.

  Two Twinkies and ten minutes later—they had to wipe up and re-mop the part of the floor they’d walked on—Shotgun and Mongoose set up their telescope on the roof. The rare red-breasted black heron declined to put in an appearance, but the security team at Fidel’s offices made very punctual rounds, sweeping around the outer perimeter of the property at precisely ten minutes past every hour. They did this in two-man teams. One man carried a long wand, presumably a device to detect electronic surveillance equipment; the other had an Uzi. The sweeps were always preceded by the appearance of a third guard on the roof, whose expression indicated either that he was bored or jealous of the other guard, who after all got to play with a real submachine gun instead of the AK47 he was assigned.

  The Cubans spent almost precisely seven minutes surveying the perimeter of the property—something Trace calculated by watching from a small sailboat to the east of the house a mile and a half out to sea.

  The CIA intelligence, including the satellite data Junior surveyed, failed to turn up any reserve security force, but we knew from Fidel’s other sites in the city that there must be one. It took a while, but Trace—who was sailing the rented boat with Red and Doc—finally doped out their location in a second building about a block away. A pair of armored cars were kept in a garage there, hidden from the satellite. A dozen or so security people came and went in a little more than an hour’s time. We estimated that there were no less than eighteen people assigned to Fidel’s security, and very possibly more.

  Six against eighteen? We had them outnumbered by a mile.

  And where was moi while my employees were bird-watching and sailing?

  I had the glamorous part of the operation: I was scouting garbage trucks.

  The local television news had a big update that night on Fidel’s health. Except for some stock footage, there were no pictures of Fidel; the station made do with some pictures of the outside of the hospital where he was.

  But according to the reports, Fidel was in good shape. Excellent, even. The heart attack had been a false alarm. He’d had angina, heartburn, agita—but no heart attack.

  You’d think a crack medical team would know the difference between a coronary and eating too much spicy food. There certainly were enough doctors to make the call: the commentator listed the doctors taking care of him, going on for several minutes.

  “What’s he doing, reading from the phone book?” said Doc sarcastically.

  After the health update—and with no apparent irony—the newsman said that Raul had scheduled a special meeting in two weeks for a vote on the possible succession.

  “Gee, I wonder who’s going to get chosen,” said Doc. His irony, or rather sarcasm, was apparent.

  I smelled a rat. Fidel might not have had a heart attack, but the report had not been released without some sort of thought. Undoubtedly, the government was trying to prepare the people for Fidel’s demise.

  Red agreed.

  “Nothing happens on the news by accident,” she said. “We may not have all that long to get this done.”

  She was right, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. If Fidel had the bad grace to die that night—well, that would just be Mr. Murphy’s way of pulling down his pants and mooning us all.

  Garbage trucks are beautiful in their ugliness. They are perfect creations, absolutely Zen-like in their perfection. Their form is at one with their function. A large box, a convenient crusher, and enough horsepower to pull a battleship up Mount Rushmore.

  They do stink, however. At least the one I drove through Miramar the next morning did. Mongoose and I had borrowed it from the yard about a half hour before.

  That’s another good thing about garbage trucks. Most people never expect them to be stolen, and don’t do much to prevent thieves.

  Mongoose drove. I worked in the back, lifting cans from the curb and dumping them into the truck. I dragged a garbage can across the pavement and waited a second before hoisting it. Then I sighed heavily, placed it once more on the curb, and checked my watch.

  Five minutes to seven. We were running three minutes ahead of schedule.

  A Cuban yuppie down the street gave me a dirty look. I watched as he got in his brand-new Chinese rice box of a car and drove toward us. Since we were blocking the street, he had to wait until Mongoose moved forward. Which Mongoose wouldn’t do until I knocked on the side of the truck. Just before I was about to, the driver rolled down his window and began telling me that I was a pimple on the ass of progress, and that in the war between socialism and death, I had chosen the side of death.

  I wrinkled my nose and grinned. Then I walked—slowly—to the side of the street and dumped the can I had already tossed into the back. Only then did I pat the side of the truck.

  Mongoose lurched forward, barely out of the way. The Cuban (clearly a very high-ranking government or party official, for otherwise he wouldn’t have lived here) stepped on the gas and sped around us, no doubt considering whether the egalitarian society was the ideal it was cracked up to be.

  We proceeded up the hill until we came to Fidel’s house. A single plastic can of garbage had been placed at the curb. I picked it up, dumped the contents in the back of the truck, then returned it to the curb. I was just about to give Mongoose the double tap when a plainclothes security officer emerged from the house and whistled at me to stop.

  “You! Wait! Wait! Do you hear me?”

  I stopped.

  “The lady needs you to help her. Come. Now.”

  I took a few steps out from the back of the truck and glanced at Mongoose. He shrugged. I shrugged back.

  The lady in question—one of Fidel’s personal cleaning women—appeared behind the security officer and began haranguing him.

  He rolled his eyes, then turned to me and whistled again.

  “Let’s go, come on. Christo—today, before she chews my ear off. She’s worse than my wife.”

  Probably he meant to say these last few words under his breath, but his breath was a little too strong. The lady told him that it was quite incredible that he was married at all, and she would remember to say a prayer for his poor wife, because obviously she had to put up with incredible suffering and pain
far beyond what any woman had to endure, and women as a general rule had a great deal to endure, since they had to live with men, especially beastly imbeciles of which the man was specimen number one, the very worst of all time.

  This went on for the sixty seconds or so it took for me to reach the steps, whereupon the critique was turned from the security guard to yours truly.

  “Look at your shoes! You wipe those shoes before you come into this building. Do you understand? Those hands! Those hands touch anything except for the bags I have for you, and I shall break them. What is this country coming to?”

  The cleaning lady was Red, who had arrived with Trace a few minutes before. The guards had proven more conscientious than most, not only checking the IDs—obtained from the real cleaners—but also calling over to the public works department headquarters to make sure that the women were legitimate. Anticipating that this might happen, we’d finessed the problem by intercepting the guard’s telephone’s radio signal, transferring it to our satcom line, and having Junior reroute it to one of Ken’s people in Miami.

  (You’ll remember that the sweeps for electric devices were conducted at ten minutes past the hour. The guards believed that the checks made them safe from eavesdropping or any sort of electronic surveillance the rest of the time as well—a very natural assumption. The device we used to intercept the call worked by blocking all transmissions in and out, and then transferring our line for the legitimate one. Doc, who had it in his rental car, simply moved on once the call was made.)

  I was about to follow Red up the steps into the building when the guard ordered me to stop and empty my pockets.

  I turned them inside out for him, and held up my hands to allow him to pat me down, which he did. Then he ordered me to take off my cap.

  “What is the delay?” demanded Red.

  “We have procedures, miss.”

  “The hell with your procedures. You come and help me with the garbage.”