Killing Castro

by Lawrence Block

  “How about the underground? Aren’t they average Joes, Turner?”

  “No. Maybe they’re rebels, sharp guys with a yen for more and better. Maybe they want power on their own. Hell, maybe they’re crooks or nuts or cranks or rapists or—”

  Hines pointed to the driver.

  “Forget him. He doesn’t understand English. None of the gang at the cave understood English.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I tested them last night. I told them all to go home and drop dead. They didn’t even frown. We’ll be getting into Havana pretty soon. What do you think of the setup?”

  “It sounds okay.”

  “Yeah? Maybe it does, I don’t know. The way it looks from here, we got quite a little game to play. Our boy’ll be guarded six ways and backwards. I don’t know about you, but I want to get out of this alive. I’m in it for the dough.”

  “I’m in it for revenge.” said Hines. “But it’s not revenge if you get yourself killed in the bargain. Ever read The Cask of Amontillado by Poe?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” Hines said. “It’s a short story. About revenge. One guy seals another guy in a wall in a wine cellar, just seals him in alive and leaves him there. Anyway, one of the lines says that in order to make revenge come off you have to get away with it.”

  “I’ll go along with that,” Turner said. “But I don’t think we can seal our boy in a wine cellar. How are you with a gun?”

  “I don’t know. I never used one.”

  “Not even in ROTC?”

  Hines colored. “I managed to cop out of that. I brought a note from my doctor telling them I was a bed-wetter. I’m not, really, I just—”

  Turner laughed out loud. “Oh, to hell with it,” he said. “I used to be fair with a rifle but it’s been a long time. And you have to be lucky. There’ll be a crowd around and taking a pot shot at Castro would be like buying a lottery ticket. That much chance of it working. I was thinking about a bomb.”

  “A bomb?”

  “The homemade kind, the kind you throw. We’ll blow him to hell and then figure out a way to get home. How does it sound?”

  “It sounds fine,” Hines said. “I guess.”

  Turner rolled down the window next to him and flipped out his cigarette. Hines said something, some conversational feeler, but he didn’t bother listening or answering. He didn’t feel like talking any more. They were hitting the outskirts of Havana now, passing through middle-class suburbs. Turner saw Morro Castle on the right, La Cubana fortress on the left. Then there was the bridge, a wide modern span across the strait separating Havana Bay from the ocean.

  And they were in the city.

  It was a city, he thought. It could have been part of New York or Philly or Charleston or San Diego. It didn’t feel foreign. The people in the streets were Cuban and the signs were in Spanish, but there were neighborhoods like that all over the States—Spic Harlem in New York, Ybor City in Tampa, Mex Town in San Diego. Hell, the neighborhood here was a little poorer, the people were more down at the heels. But Spanish Harlem and Ybor City weren’t exactly the Ritz. He noticed a prostitute soliciting, a cop ignoring her.

  “I heard Castro closed the whorehouses,” he said to Moreno in Spanish. “Made hustling against the law.”

  “There are still prostitutes,” Moreno said.

  “I figured there were. She didn’t look like a nun.”

  Moreno managed a shrug, an expressive one. “There will always be putas,” he said.

  “Yeah. Well, thank God for that.”

  “You wish to meet a girl?”

  He laughed. “No,” he said. “I’m just a sightseer. This place of yours much farther?”

  It wasn’t. Moreno turned a corner into La Avenida de Sangre and pulled up at the curb. The Avenue of Blood, Turner thought. And Matanzas meant slaughter. Christ on wheels.

  The house Moreno led them to was a two-story frame dwelling. It needed paint. There was a front porch, and an old man rocked on it in silence, a thin black cigar in his mouth. His eyes looked up sleepily, then looked away.

  “He is old and quiet,” Moreno said. “El Viejo, the old one. Toothless and harmless, no? You may see that his hand is inside the jacket of his suit. There is a gun in his hand. He knows me. Otherwise you would have been shot before you entered this house.”

  “I’m impressed,” Turner said.

  The door opened. A woman, stout and matronly, smiled benignly at them. She stepped inside, murmured something polite and let them pass. She had hair the color of a gray flannel suit. A thin scar ran from the corner of her mouth halfway to her eye. It looked to Turner as though it had been made by a knife. Moreno introduced her as Señora Luchar. She mumbled something pleasant again and went off to find coffee. She brought a tray of demitasse cups that were small without being dainty. The coffee was very thick, very hot, very black. Turner liked it.

  Moreno finished his coffee and left. He took a long time to finish the coffee and a longer time to leave. He kept speaking in Spanish to the woman, telling her how important the task of the two Americans was, telling her to render them all possible assistance. The woman—Señora Luchar—listened to all of this with no expression. Finally Moreno was gone. Señora Luchar followed him to the door, bolted it, watched the man drive away.

  “Un momento, Señora—”

  She turned to Turner. “Let’s speak English,” she said briskly. “Your accent is impossible. What’s on your mind?”

  “Uh—”

  “Moreno’s a fool,” she said. “A useful fool, but still a fool. You didn’t know I spoke English? I lived in Miami, for five years. Political exile. My family didn’t get along with Batista. His men pulled out my old man’s fingernails. They cut off his testicles, gouged out his eyes, raped my mother and slit her throat. They raped me, too, but they let me go.”

  “And now you want to kill Castro?”

  “I don’t like dictators. Fascist or Marxist, I don’t like dictators. You two sleep in the cellar. Want to see your room? Follow me.”

  They followed her.

  FOUR

  July 26, 1953.

  With his briefs ignored by Batista’s courts, with freedom of speech and freedom of the press forcibly suppressed throughout Cuba, Fidel Castro decided that only revolution would settle the issues at stake—the issues of freedom and liberty. He began meeting with friends in an apartment house in the Vedado district of Havana, planning a military operation which would excite the common people of Cuba and spark a revolt to send Fulgencio Batista running from the island.

  The revolutionaries were a small group, a tiny band of idealists and heroes, and, some say, Communists. Ambassador William Pauley has stated on the Jack Paar Show that he heard Castro, very early in his career, proclaim that when it came it would be a Communist revolution. The capital at their disposal was minimal. The men themselves mortgaged their homes, sold their furniture, pawned their watches and their wives’ jewelry, gave up whatever they had in order to place as much money as possible at Castro’s disposal. They armed themselves with pistols and knives; some carried rifles and shotguns. They had no grenades, no explosives. They were, in all, a total force of one hundred seventy men. Their objective, initially, was the fortress at Moncada at Santiago, a fortress quartering somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred armed troops.

  Castro set out for Santiago by automobile and stayed at a friend’s house in the center of the city. On July 25th, more of the revolutionaries began drifting east, converging on the city. Fidel met with them at ten that night, coordinating the attack, synchronizing plans.

  The attack commenced the next morning. The revolutionaries moved through Santiago in groups. One task force was dispatched to capture the radio station, preparing to call upon the people of Santiago to join in the revolt and take arms against the government. Another group moved to occupy the Santiago hospital, to hold it in preparation for the care of wounded on both sides. The major group launched an onslaught ag
ainst the Moncada Fortress.

  But the uprising, nobly conceived and fearlessly put into execution, was smashed almost at once. Castro’s little band was undermanned and under-equipped. The radio station was not taken, and the bulk of the citizens of the town were not aware that a rebellion was in progress until it had already been put down.

  At Moncada, Castro’s followers fought staunchly in the face of impossible odds, but they were too thoroughly outnumbered to have much effect. Batista’s army retained control, and the rebels scattered for their lives.

  Many were killed in the fighting. Others, captured, never reached prison; they were killed on the spot by Batista’s troops. Fidel himself, and his younger brother Raul as well, narrowly missed execution in this manner. Only because the army officer who captured him had been a classmate of his at Havana was he delivered to the civilian authorities instead of being put to death at once.

  Castro acted as his own attorney in the trial held that September. He told the court that an attorney appointed by the Havana Bar Association had not been permitted to see him while he was in jail, that he himself had been denied access to documents important to his defense. Nevertheless he made an impassioned and eloquent plea to the court, lashing out against the excesses of the Batista regime, presenting his projected reforms, criticizing the inequality and oppression which he saw around him throughout Cuba. His defense, doomed from the start, since the courts were in Batista’s hands, was not successful. It had no chance.

  But his speech was successful. People listened to the tall young man with the firm voice. People who had never known Castro existed began to take him into their hearts as a leader. The trial, designed by Batista to squelch the resistance forever, had an opposite effect. It increased Castro’s following. And Fidel himself saw with greater confidence something he had already learned at the University of Havana: when he spoke, Cubans listened.

  “I end my defense,” he told the court, “but I shall not do it as lawyers always do, asking for the defendant’s liberty. I cannot ask for this when my companions are already suffering imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. Send me to join them and to share their fate. It is inconceivable that honest men are dead or jailed in a republic unless the President is a criminal or thief.

  “As for me, I know that jail will be hard as it has never been for anyone else, pregnant with threats and with cowardly ferociousness. But I do not fear it as I do not fear the fury of the wretched tyrant who has already torn away the life of seventy brothers.

  “Condemn me! It does not matter! History will absolve me!”

  The judges may or may not have been impressed; there is no way to tell. But, whether or not history would absolve Fidel Castro, they had no intention of so doing. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the Isle of Pines.

  Prison can be an end or a beginning. For Fidel, the time spent on the Isle of Pines was not time to be wasted. With Raul and his other comrades in arms, he maintained strict revolutionary discipline, sang songs of rebellion and planned for the future. Castro organized a school in prison, teaching his fellow prisoners history and philosophy. The cheers and loyalty of followers was something he was accustomed to now, something he needed. He would drive himself to impossible extremes to serve those persons who, he felt, were counting on him.

  But his activities with his fellow prisoners only aggravated the government. He was isolated, made to serve what amounted to solitary confinement. Still the young man from Oriente refused to waste his time. He read constantly, poring over every book he could get on Cuban history and the age-old fight for Cuban independence. He waited for his release from prison and planned a rise to power.

  It was May of 1955 before Batista ultimately gave in to outside pressure and granted amnesty to the political prisoners on the Isle of Pines. At last Castro was released, returned with Raul by boat to Havana. He prepared to enter politics once more. Batista was attempting to preserve a front of honest elections while holding the reins of power as tightly as ever, and friends presumed that Fidel could now climb to power by legal means. But Castro knew better.

  He tried to make speeches, and found that radio time was closed to him. He sent letters to the newspapers and they were never printed. Throughout Cuba he saw nothing but oppression, nothing but the hand of a dictator. And he decided once more that he had been right the first time, that revolution was the only method of ridding Cuba of a dictator.

  He went to Mexico. His wife, the sister of an ardent Batistiano, had already deserted him; now she divorced him. He had no money and little support, only his image burning in the hearts of silent Cubans. He found a man named Bayo who had led guerrilla forces in the Spanish Civil War and persuaded Bayo to help him train an army of rebels. He went through Spanish America, through the United States, struggling to raise money and forces.

  He had failed once, attacking Moncada. He did not intend to fail again.

  FIVE

  Earl Fenton sat with his back against a scrub pine and his Sten gun across his knees. He sat still, very still, and he wished for a cigarette. A little tube of paper filled with rolled tobacco, a little paper-and-tobacco affair that you could light with a match and smoke quickly. In his mind he could taste the brisk jolt of strong smoke taken deep into his sick lungs. He could taste it and feel it.

  There was a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his field jacket. There were matches, too. All he had to do was take a cigarette, scratch a match, put the two together and smoke. But you didn’t smoke when the Castristas were less than fifty yards away. You didn’t send up gray clouds to tip your hand. Instead you put your back against the trunk of a tree, set your gun across your knees. And you waited.

  The soldiers—five of them, maybe six—were at the shoulder of the road on the other side of a dense growth of shrubbery. They had come in a noisy, gear-grinding Jeep and they were looking for rebels. Fenton could not see them from where he sat, but he had caught glimpses of them before, one with a full Fidel-style beard, one young and crisply smooth-shaven, a driver wearing opaque sunglasses, two or three others. And now it would be very easy to take a step or two and put the Sten gun to use. He could get one, two, maybe three of them before he was shot.

  But that wasn’t good enough. Manuel, leader of the group, had explained all that. If you killed three men and then were killed yourself, you had the worst of the bargain. And they didn’t know for sure that the soldiers were looking for these particular rebels. Maybe somebody had tipped them off, maybe not.

  “We must first survive,” Manuel had said. “They are many, we are few. To risk a life is not to be a hero. It is enough to be here, to be a hero. They can afford to have fifty, a hundred, five hundred men killed. When they kill a single one of us, it is a big loss.”

  So self-protection came first. They would make no move until the soldiers made it necessary. They would sit quietly by and if the Castristas drove away, so much the better. Their job was to kill Castro, not his followers. That’s what they were being paid for. Even the Cubans with them realized this made good sense.

  Fenton breathed shallowly and thought about cigarettes. How long had it been? Two days, five days? Somewhere in the middle, and he could not be sure of the time, could not tell because time moved differently here. It was not measured in eight-hour shifts as it had been at the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook. It was tricky.

  Time. Fenton looked over at Garth, his great bulk crouched in the shadows of twisted, bright-leaved trees. Garth, too, held a Sten gun. Garth had killed before, he knew. And now he, Fenton, was a killer also. They had stumbled into Castristas before and Fenton had killed, had sent bullets screaming into bodies. He still remembered vividly the Sten gun bucking like an unbroken horse in his hands, but in the end the men had gone down with bullets in their flesh. And, by God, Fenton had outlived them. Fenton, Earl Fenton, a dying man—

  Footsteps. He heard movement, the soldiers poking at the roadside brush with their rifles, getting ready to move around. Any moment now. He lo
oked from Garth to Manuel, cool and sharp and aware. Then to Taco Sardo, the sixteen-year-old who spoke only Spanish and rarely spoke that. And then the girl, Maria, the one Garth was constantly bothering, the silent broody-eyed girl who accused the world with her voiceless stare. Strange that her name was Maria. Like the girl in the Hemingway novel, the novel about the bridge. She was not at all like that fictional Maria. And yet the exterior trappings were similar.

  More footsteps. He saw Garth straighten up, saw Maria raise her gun and brace herself. Manuel was moving to a vantage point and Taco was following his lead. Fenton knew the procedure. Manuel would fire the first shot if the searcher got too close, and then the rest of them would begin. Manuel would wait for the right moment.

  The tension was flooding his limbs now, tension and excitement that spread through his cells as cancer had spread through his lungs. Fenton got to his feet silently, crept forward, propped himself up on a boulder and sighted over the top. He could see them now. There were six. Three of them poked at the brush like idiots. The bearded one was looking in another direction through a pair of binoculars. The driver with the dark glasses was behind the wheel of the Jeep. A sixth crouched in the road. He was tying his shoelaces.

  Slowly, silently, the rebels moved in. The gap was closed by ten yards, fifteen yards. The Sten gun, handy as it was, worked poorly at long range. You did better in close.