by Norman Lewis
I refused to do this, but told him that one of the interpreters might oblige him, and in the end, Benjamin did.
There was a bar in the port just out of sight of what was happening, and I sat there and listened to the sound of the train shunting, the clash of bumpers, the pig-trucks rattling over the points, and the train’s whistle as it pulled out.
The three interpreters came in out of the rain.
‘Any trouble?’ I asked.
‘Not a peep out of anybody, not even the mullah,’ Benjamin said. ‘They’re going to be shot. Most of them anyway.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I had a chat with the Major. He turned out to be quite a character. Full of jokes. Took a great fancy to Golik’s coat. “Whatever happens,” he said, “I’ll see to it they don’t spoil that.” Russians have a funny sense of humour. It may have been one of his jokes, but I don’t think it was.’
18
A Mission to Havana
I MET IAN FLEMING in 1957 at a party given by our mutual publisher, Jonathan Cape, which Fleming had attended with ill-grace. A shortage of space at the Cape headquarters in Bedford Square made it necessary to spread the occasion over successive days. We found ourselves immersed in this rump of the party, reserved, Ian suspected – though certainly without justification in his case – for Cape’s less prestigious authors, and he retired, disgruntled, to a corner, where I shortly joined him. He asked if I wrote poetry, and when I said I did not, he seemed disappointed.
Although already famous as the creator of James Bond, Fleming seemed to extract less pleasure than one would have expected from the writing of successful thrillers. He craved the society of what he thought of as ‘serious’ writers, above all poets, like William Plomer, who had introduced him to the firm of Jonathan Cape, and through whom all his business with Cape was done. Jonathan Cape himself much disliked Ian Fleming’s writing, and refused to meet him, and could only be persuaded to publish his books by a united front established in Fleming’s favour by the firm’s other directors, and by William Plomer, their reader. Michael Howard, the junior director, told me that the decision to publish Casino Royale gave him sleepless nights, and a bad conscience.
The acquaintance made at the party developed into friendship, and Fleming and I saw something of each other over several years. I found him genial and expansive, although many people did not. His habitual expression was one of contained fury, relieved occasionally by a stark smile. He seemed to wish to inspire fear in others, and on several occasions said of some person under discussion, ‘he is afraid of me,’ a conclusion seeming to give him satisfaction. Another habit, which did not endear him to women, was frequently to explain in their presence that he had only taken up writing ‘to make me forget the horrors of marriage.’
For some reason I could not at first understand, Fleming showed much interest in the fact that I had travelled in Central America, more particularly in Cuba, which I had visited a number of times. At that time he was Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times, and one day he asked me to come to his office to discuss a potential article for the paper.
He wanted me to visit Cuba for him, to see as many people as I could, including some to be named by him, and investigate the possibility of the success of the Fidel Castro revolt, of which little at that time had been heard in this country. It seemed that Fleming’s desire for information was not only on behalf of the Sunday Times. It was generally known that he had been assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during the war, so I assumed that he was still involved in one or other of the intelligence organisations, probably in a department concerned with Latin American affairs. He said that he was unhappy with information about the progress of the revolt received through the Foreign Office, and also with the reports from his personal contact, Edward Scott, who lived in Havana. He showed me Scott’s most recent letter. The revolt, said Scott, was contained in a small mountainous area, the Sierra Maistra, near the far-Eastern tip of the island, and should give no cause for concern. He predicted that with the United States solidly behind the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the revolutionaries would shortly be rounded up, and massacred to a man in local style, while the world turned its back. Fleming said, ‘I simply don’t believe it.’
For some reason he was convinced that Ernest Hemingway, who had been living outside Havana for several years, was in close touch with the rebels, and he was most anxious to have Hemingway’s views on the prospects of their success. He made it clear that Hemingway was one of his heroes. Not only did he regard him as among the great writers of all times, but he had come to the conclusion through analysis of his writings, in particular his novel dealing with the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, that Hemingway had been in his day an extremely subtle and successful undercover agent, and probably still was one. He had written to Hemingway, but had received no reply, but, uncharacteristically, Fleming had forgiven him, and still hoped that contact could be made.
Hemingway’s oldest friend in England was Jonathan Cape himself, who had been successfully publishing his books for thirty years, and Fleming, unable to make a direct approach to Jonathan, suggested that I should do so and persuade him to write to Cuba and ask Hemingway to see me. Jonathan agreed, and a favourable reply was received. There was a personal interest for Jonathan in this introduction, because Cape and the literary world in general had been waiting some years for any signs of a new book from the Maestro, after the long pause in production following what had been hailed as his masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea.
At the beginning of December, Fleming and I had a farewell lunch at the White Tower, after which we retired to his office for the briefing. Fleming said that it would be convenient for me to travel as a journalist, and the necessary accreditation was arranged with his paper. I was to take all the time I needed, and above all get out of Havana, and go into the country and see what was happening. He wanted to hear the viewpoints of Cubans of all kinds, from generals to waiters, and he still hoped that I might find some way of wheedling the fullest possible report out of the great Hemingway.
A few days later I flew to Havana, and, as suggested, took a room in the Seville Biltmore Hotel, in which Fleming’s contact Edward Scott occupied a penthouse flat. We met within minutes of my arrival in the dark and icy solitude of the hotel’s American bar. Scott was short, pink and rotund with a certain babyish innocence of expression that was wholly misleading. His manner, at first wary in the extreme, became congenial after he had read Fleming’s letter.
Scott was the editor of the English language newspaper, the Havana Post, but appeared to have other, somewhat mysterious irons in the fire. He was a man Fleming much admired. Ian liked to have his friends ask him if his character James Bond was based upon any living person, and although he almost certainly believed Bond largely reflected his own personality, the standard reply was that he was a composite of a number of men of action he had known. When I asked the question that was expected of me, he agreed that Scott had contributed his share of the inspiration for his hero, while admitting that physical similarities were excluded in Scott’s case.
I mentioned to Scott that Fleming had asked me to see Hemingway and he seemed flabbergasted. The reason for his amazement was that of all persons, as he told me, he had just challenged Hemingway to a duel, following a fracas at a party given by the British Ambassador. Scott said that Hemingway had arrived in the company of the film actress Ava Gardner, who in a moment of high spirits had taken off her pants and waved them at the assembly. Scott, an ultra-patriotic New Zealander, had objected to what he saw as an insult to the Crown, and, following a bellicose scene with Hemingway, the challenge had gone forth.
Leaving the situation aside, Scott’s view was that Hemingway had withdrawn from the political scene, and no longer bothered himself with such uncomfortable things as wars and the rumours of wars and that, this being so, his views on the Castro revolt would have little value. Nevertheless, the briefing being what it was, I telepho
ned Hemingway’s home to be told that both Hemingway and his wife were ill with influenza, and were expected to be out of action for some days. I left my address and telephone number.
There seemed to be some uncertainty as to whether or not Hemingway would take up the challenge when he was on his feet again, and Scott, with whom I spent the first evenings in Havana, seeming to assume that any duel would be fought with pistols, always set aside a few minutes for target practice in a room fitted up like a range over his office. He used a pistol employing CO2 gas as the propellant for lead slugs. This fascinating and presumably lethal weapon was quite silent. We took turns to shoot at various small targets, but rarely hit anything.
Havana, most beautiful city of the Americas, had quite suddenly become a dangerous place. Until the middle fifties, life there – at least as a tourist saw it – had seemed like a permanent carnival, but, by the time of my visit in 1957, the spectacle of violence was commonplace. There was a good view from the hotel window of the Presidential palace, and the garden-filled square in which it stood. The roads round the palace had been closed since March that year when twenty-one students had died in an attempt to shoot their way up to President Batista’s office on the second floor. Now there were armed men everywhere.
I was standing at the window on the second evening of my visit, studying this scene, when machine-guns in the square and on the palace roof opened fire, aiming it seemed in no particular direction, for a man standing on the balcony of a building across the street was hit, and fell, this being the first and last time in my life I had actually seen anyone struck by a bullet. Such nightly alarms had become part of the existence of Havana. That same evening I had just returned from a visit to the city morgue arranged by a reporter on the Diario de la Marina, where we saw the bodies of five murdered students recovered from the streets during the previous night. It was an only slightly grimmer harvest than average, the victims being members of one or other of the left-wing groups opposed to the dictatorship. Several had been savagely handled either before or after death, in one case the victim’s eyes having been gouged out. Batista’s police were held responsible for these outrages. Outside Havana, the situation was worse, and in the province of Oriente, a private army, led by Rolando Masferrer, was busily torturing and extirpating ‘Reds’ – in other words any members of the peasantry objecting to the feudal conditions in which they lived.
The Batista regime was in its death throes. This ex-army sergeant who had taken over power twenty-three years before, had shown himself the most capable, and in his social measures the most progressive president the country had ever known. The labour legislation he had enacted had established Cuba as one of the most advanced nations in Latin America. He had fought big business over his social security laws, and still had the support of the trade unions and the organised urban workers, whose wages were at this time the highest in Cuban history.
But now, old and tired, he governed by force rather than flair, and he was losing control. He had forfeited the affection of Cubans as a whole by his destruction of civil liberties, by press censorship, by the massive corruption he closed his eyes to, and the ferocious repression of dissenters.
I was in Cuba to gather information, a task providing simple rules to be followed to obtain the best results. In all countries there are sections of the population who know more than most about what is going on, and are usually happy, and often eager to discuss their experiences and opinions with anyone showing interest in them. These include most of those in positions of responsibility and power, and on a lower level, members of the legal and medical professions, journalists, and above all priests – who know of everything that happens in their parish.
In Havana I had excellent contacts including Ruby Hart Phillips of the New York Times who had arranged Herbert Matthews’s visit to Castro in the Sierra, and who shared an office with Scott. Through Ruby, Scott, and others, I met bishops, disaffected senior officers, disgruntled politicians, student revolutionaries, a Batista torturer, the two legendary generals, Loynaz and Garcia Velez, both in their nineties who had led the last cavalry charges in the war against Spain, but above all those great capitalists, including Julio Lobo, Chief of the sugar barons, without whose favour Batista’s cause was lost.
From these encounters one certain fact emerged – that Castro’s revolt, so far from being a proletarian revolution, knew nothing of Marxism and took little interest in the industrial workers. This was the middle class in action, and the hundred or so sons of good families who had taken to the mountains were not only not Communists, but they were at daggers drawn with them. How was it possible to believe, as our American friends had succeeded in believing, that Castro, who was receiving financial support from half the sugar magnates of Cuba, could have been the advocate of world-revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat?
It was a moment when the United States was about to repeat its classic error in Latin America by renewing its assumption that any movement opposing a right-wing dictatorship must take its orders from Moscow. But in the case of Cuba this was not so. How was one to explain why the Cuban Communist Party should have sabotaged Castro’s 26th July Movement in every possible way?
The antipathy shown at this time by Communists for the Castro movement sometimes took extreme forms, and was returned in full measure. The chief concern of a Castro agent from the Sierra Maestra I met in Havana was that any of his former comrades who had become Party members might spot him and denounce him to the police. It was an attitude that provoked talk of reprisals among Castro’s men, including serious discussions as to whether or not the Communists should be granted legal existence after the Castro victory.
I found that three-fourths of the Cuban people were either openly or passively behind Castro, and it would have been logical for the United States to have thrown its weight behind him, too, in those days when every declaration from the Sierra was underlined by assurances of the wholly democratic intentions of the rebels, their respect for private property and for foreign investments, and of their determination to hold elections within weeks of taking over power. As it was, other decisions were taken, and the tottering figure of the dictator was supported by the Americans until the last. What little the majority of Castro’s followers knew of Communism in December 1957, they distrusted or disliked. Three years later, largely through the success of the economic boycott organised by the United States, they had been herded into the Communist fold.
Fleming had said, ‘go into the country,’ and I did so, travelling by bus from one end of the land to the other. The first discovery was that the mental attitudes of the countrymen were radically different from those of Cubans who worked for their living in the towns. The industrial worker had been converted to a kind of conservatism through his expectation of fairly steady employment the year round. The countryman enjoyed no such security. One fourth of Cuba grew nothing but sugar; and the single fact overshadowing the life of the Cuban peasant was that the sugar harvest occupied five months, to be followed by seven months of unemployment. He was ready therefore for a revolution of any kind that would help to fill his stomach in the seven lean months, and relieve him from such feudal bullies at Masferrer and his thugs.
Santiago, capital of the sugar country, was of necessity, where the action was, and I went there to talk to cane-cutters and sugar magnates, and also on a strong recommendation from Havana to make contact with a famous clairvoyant, Tia Margarita, said to be consulted on occasion by Batista himself, and to know as much about what was going on as anyone in eastern Cuba. The astonishing statistic had been offered that one person in three in Cuba, regardless of colour, was a secret adherent of one of the cults introduced by the Negro slaves; and Tia Margarita happened to be high-priestess of Chango, Yoruba god of war, most powerful of the deities of the African jungles.
She proved to be a comfortable-looking middle-aged black lady of compelling humour and charm, living in a small suburban house with a garden full of sweetpeas, attached to the
usual straw-thatched voodoo temple. Women of her kind were to be found in every town in Cuba, combining in their operations all the exciting mumbo-jumbo of horoscopy and divination with the real social service performed in solving personal problems of all kinds, and in treating the sick from their wide repertoire of herbal remedies.
Tia Margarita ushered me into a chamber cluttered with the accessories of her profession, the skulls of small animals, the withered bats and the dusty salamanders, gently kicking aside the live piglets and cockerels that would provide the material for future sacrifices. A faint culinary odour suggested the preparation of her celebrated remedy for nervous tension – a thick soup made from the bones of dogs. I added my contribution – a pair of dark spectacles – to the homely offerings, including roller skates, tubes of toothpaste, and a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream, stacked under the war-god’s altar. I noted the framed autographs, offered in gratitude by famous personalities: senators, baseball-players and motor racers who had come here with their troubles.
The mild maternal eyes scanned the print in the open book of my face, and her expression was one of slightly puzzled amusement. She expected to be called upon to demonstrate her speciality by forecasting the exact date of my death; instead of which I asked her what the people of Santiago thought about the war, and its likely outcome. If that was where my interest lay, she said, who better to discuss the matter with than Chango himself – surely the final authority on all such matters – who spoke through her mouth at seances held at the temple every Saturday night? Unfortunately this was a Monday, and when I asked Tia Margarita for an opinion off the cuff as to the way things up in the Sierra were likely to go, she was oracular and obscure. ‘Chango says victory will be to whom victory is due,’ she said. Still, something came out of the interview, because Tia Margarita went into a kind of mini-trance, lasting perhaps ten seconds, then said that the war would be over in a year – which, give a few days, it was.