Over the course of the war, Castro and his lieutenants grew increasingly impatient with all the other revolutionary groups operating against Batista. Some promised support, and some even joined M-26-7. Few matched the competence and daring of men such as Frank País and Oscar Lucero. The sierra felt that most of the llano groups were working harder at outmaneuvering Castro than they were at fighting Batista. As the SIM and the police killed off the llano’s best commanders, the guerrillas demanded control of the national movement. In the end, the sierra swept across the island, and in time many key figures of the llano movement flew away, crossing the Straits to Florida, a state with no mountains at all.
We talked about the Revolution, and I asked for an example of Cuban Marxism’s ability to adapt to new circumstances. The professor praised the army. “It’s a very well-run organization,” he said. “When something doesn’t work in Cuba, we’ll sometimes say, ‘I wish the army would take charge of that.’”
Pérez praised Raúl Castro, who has been head of the armed forces for more than forty years. “He is a superb organizer, a very wise organizer.” And when I asked again for a specific example of Marxists coping with change, he stayed with the military.
“Cuba has had to adapt its theory of defense to very serious changes. For instance, Cuba’s army started as a guerrilla army, and had to become an army in the true sense of the word. It did so, with Russian help, with Soviet armaments and equipment, and with Soviet theory about military doctrine. Then the Soviet Union disappeared … and the Cuban army had to change all its doctrines of defense overnight.
“It’s now working—and this that I’m telling you is not secret; if it were, I would not be telling you—it’s now working on the basis that Cuba could be invaded and occupied, and that would only be the beginning of resistance.
“We decided on this different doctrine of Cuban national defense at least fifteen or more years ago, but it’s what the Iraqis are doing now.”
It was November 2005, and what the Iraqis were doing was defeating the world’s most powerful military by making the war unwinnable. Insurgency. Ambush and retreat. Car bombs. Assassinations. Losing the battles but owning the city streets, the villages.
Asymmetrical warfare. La lucha clandestina. David’s sling.
The professor’s smile had disappeared. “If you come here, it will be much worse than Iraq.”
This wasn’t paranoia. Back in October 2003, the Bush administration had created the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. It was hard to ignore the commission’s resemblance to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an NGO founded by Bush administration friends and future officeholders to tout the invasion of spring 2003. The CLI’s formal report was a preemptive endorsement of White House plans for war. The Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba was an arm of the government directed by a panel of cabinet secretaries chaired by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and including the Secretaries of Homeland Security, Commerce, and the Treasury. If there were any question about what such a committee would recommend, it was answered by the May 2004 publication of a report decrying Castro’s crimes, recommending still-more-stringent sanctions, and endorsing regime change.
Though the report hadn’t explicitly recommended acts of terrorism or an invasion, the Bush administration seemed to underscore its between-the-lines intent by the July 2005 appointment of Caleb McCarry as the commission’s “Cuba Transition Coordinator.”
McCarry’s former employers included the Center for Democracy, a self-styled “bipartisan” nonprofit that specialized in bringing U.S. Agency for International Development money to bear, in its own words, “at critical moments in democratic transitions abroad,” most often in Latin America. After helping the Center for Democracy support Violetta Chamorro’s conservative comeback in Nicaragua, McCarry moved on to congressional staff work, eventually serving as staff director of the House Committee on International Relations’ Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
In this powerful post, he helped funnel USAID money to anti-Aristide forces in Haiti, this time through the International Republican Institute. McCarry and other Republican operatives helped diehards from the Duvalier regime and U.S.-funded “resistance” movements create enough violence and chaos in Haiti to give political cover to the February 2004 coup by American forces who snatched Aristide from Haiti and handed the country back to reliable kleptocrats.
So the new Cuba Transition Coordinator was a specialist in modern, USAID-funded Caribbean filibustering, from bankrolling regressive candidates to helping arm faux freedom fighters.
Not surprisingly, Cubans saw McCarry’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba as a sign that the Bush administration was building a case for regime change in Havana.
“If you come here,” the professor said, “it will be much worse than Iraq. We are way ahead of them. We have been able to look into the future, into changing situations when we might not be able to get any help from the rest of the world and would have to continue the struggle alone.”
The poet Waldo Leyva insists that Santiago is not a geographic and architectural fact but a hope based in the persistence of courageous and generous spirits. In “For a Definition of the City” (Para una definición de la ciudad), he offers a series of propositions, or maybe warnings:
Si encuentras alguna piedra
que no ha sido lanzada contra
el enemigo
If you find a stone
that hasn’t been thrown against
the enemy
Should you find a window closed against the music of guitars … If all these terrible negations should come to pass, the poet says, then
puedes decir entonces que Santiago no existe
you can say that Santiago does not exist
But this Santiago of the spirit can never die. Every Santiago schoolkid learns this poem by which, with Leyva as a medium, the city explains itself to itself. Santiagueros know that Santiago is only what they believe it to be, and nothing without memory. The city sees itself in defiance, hears itself in melody and rhythm, talks through open windows, sweeps the dust of five hundred years’ memories out the door into the gutter and tracks it right back in again.
So it’s not surprising that memories of santiagueros such as Frank País and Oscar Lucero are very much alive, even in the twenty-first century.
The first time Maricel brought the chorus down to Santiago, I went along as a newspaper reporter covering the human-interest angles. There was her dramatic family story, of course. And there was lush, Communist Cuba as experienced by a delegation from granite-ribbed, liberals-and-libertarians northern New England.
On their fourth night in Cuba, the chorus was scheduled to participate in a concert in Santiago’s ornate Sala Dolores, or “Hall of Sorrows.” The concert hall is on one end of a small park called the Plaza de Dolores, fronted by a church called Nuestra Señora de los Dolores; the word dolor means both sorrow and pain. The plaza’s other landmark is the crumbling façade of the Colegio de Dolores, a long-shuttered prep school for boys from Oriente’s elite families, including Fidel Castro.
As participants in Santiago’s international choral festival, the women from New Hampshire and Vermont had sung for an audience every night. Venues included a sweltering concrete recital hall on the University of Oriente campus; the elegant, carved-wood salon of the Consevatorio Esteban Salas, Santiago’s state-run music conservatory; and the altar steps of gorgeous and gloomy El Cobre Cathedral, a shrine to the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint.
They sang a different assortment of songs each night, though they always started with a wordless doo-wop round—“doobie, doo-wah, doobie doo-wah”—to swing themselves onstage. Then it might be any mix of pieces from their repertoire, which included British Isles ballads, Cuba’s own “Guantánamera,” and Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.” They’d been welcomed, applauded, and often overwhelmed by Cuban hospitality.
But their fourth night was very different.
Visa troubles had trailed Maricel through that trip, forcing her to spend hours with immigration officials, trying to straighten out a problem that had almost stopped the trip at Antonio Maceo Airport. On the afternoon of the Sala Dolores concert, Interior Ministry officials informed Maricel that her unresolved problem would prevent the chorus from taking the stage.
It was a double disappointment. The chorus had practiced for days with young women from the music conservatory to offer a combined piece for tonight’s program, highlighting each chorus in turn. And as they arrived in buses for a concert at which they’d only be spectators, the Americans heard that the hall was packed with friends, well-wishers, and members of Maricel’s family.
Aunt Lilia was there with her sisters, the seventy-two-year-old twins Aunt Rosa and Aunt Yolanda, along with innumerable cousins and connections. Rosa told Maricel, “If it was just the conservatory choir, this place would be half empty. These people are here for you!”
But unlike the less formal settings of their previous performances, the Sala Dolores is a state-run showplace, and the chorus couldn’t go on without state permission.
Maricel was livid, but the chorus tried to shake off its frustration by enjoying the show. Halfway through the program, however, one of the Cuban guides representing the Canadian-Cuban tour agency that had booked the chorus’s trip brought Maricel out to the lobby for a talk. “If you want to sing, just wait until the end,” he said. “Then just stand up and start. If the audience wants you to, keep singing!”
When the conservatory choir finished its last number, Maricel stood up. She blew her pitch pipe, and the chorus started singing its show-starting doo-wop round.
The audience cheered, and Maricel decided to lead the chorus onstage. “I don’t know what got into me, to tell the truth,” she said later.
The hall was suddenly tense. The conservatory director, a woman who had been a cheerful collaborator for the past two days, looked afraid. Defiantly, Maricel introduced the group as a chorus “from the United States,” which hardly needed saying. Both singers and audience took note of her choice for the first song, “a song about cowboys living on the open range”: “Don’t Fence Me In.”
They sang Cole Porter’s manifesto, and two beautiful British laments, “Turtlesdove” and “Greensleeves.” But during these songs, teachers from the conservatory and unfamiliar men—plainclothes police?—started hustling conservatory students out of the hall. As “Greensleeves” ended, the conservatory director marched up to Maricel and snapped her fingers, saying, “Stop! You must stop right now.”
Maricel turned to the audience and said, “We have to stop. If anyone wants to hear us sing, we’ll be singing outside.”
The group was hustled offstage and out of the hall. Out in the street, people from the audience, including the many Lucero family members, were waiting to hear them sing. Also outside, waiting to be led back to the conservatory, were students the group had befriended, their faces pale with fear, expressions blank.
One of the conservatory students told the chorus that there was someone in the audience who saw what was going on and stopped it. “They’re everywhere,” she said.
Maricel suddenly realized the seriousness of the situation she’d created. “In the United States, none of this would have mattered. We would have sung in the park, and everything would have been fine.” But in Cuba, there’s an overriding fear. “I just totally forgot where I was.”
Still, she was about to lead the chorus to the park when a cousin, a Cuban lawyer, said, “Don’t do it. It’s going to be construed as a demonstration.”
“That did it,” Maricel said. “But for a while there, I was getting driven by something inside me. It’s like this demon of defiance.”
Tomas, the guide, found Maricel and hissed, “I never told you to go onstage.”
Later that night, Maricel apologized to the chorus at a meeting in their hotel. “I felt terribly guilty for having put them through that.” And she wrote a formal letter of apology to the conservatory director, which seemed to mend fences. “The conservatory is a state-run institution, and they were just afraid that the school would suffer if the authorities got mad.”
But in those long minutes of confrontation outside the Sala Dolores, when Maricel was realizing that what she’d started mustn’t be pushed any further, she was approached “by several Cubans who knew who I was, who knew my family. And they said, ‘You know, you’re just like your father.’”
Chapter 8
CHARGING (HALFWAY) UP SAN JUAN HILL
Never charge San Juan Hill at rush hour. I was only walking up the ridge’s Santiago de Cuba side, a longer but much gentler rise than the steep pitch Teddy Roosevelt mounted 105 years before. Somewhere not too far ahead, the map promised, I’d arrive at a hilltop historical park and be able to look down on Teddy’s Olympus, the height that gave American artillery command of Santiago, city and bay. I wanted the perspective: great views in every direction, topographic insights into moments I’d been wondering about all my life. All that was just a little further on. But I was seriously thinking of turning back.
The map said that la loma San Juan was not much more than a couple of kilometers from my hotel. That seemed an easy and pleasant hike, especially since, while I made my way back across town, Santiago had still been offering passive resistance to the midafternoon heat, its motor traffic thin and almost hushed. But by the time I’d returned to my room and come downstairs with camera and tripod—imagining the famous ridge in long, day’s-end light—the rush hour struggle had begun.
Since Fidel made his medicine-for-oil trade pact with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Cuban cars, buses, trucks, and motorcycles have become rolling smudge pots, dispensing a vapor so charged with soot you can actually watch the tarry grains swirling on the asphalt like tiny black autumn leaves. The gritty fumes are unpleasant at any time of day. A brisk walk at rush hour can take your breath away.
Literally. There’s a little, choking cough you hear in Cuba now, one that wasn’t around a few years back. You hear it in the houses you pass at night and in the morning line for espresso at the cafeteria. Doctors at the people’s clinics are no doubt hearing their fellow Cubans cough up Chávez’s dirty oil.
It’s a dirty shame that Cuba’s fine doctors have so little medicine to dispense. Much of what they have must be reserved for Venezuelans who fly to Cuba for treatment—another condition of Castro’s bargain. It’s doubly dirty because, somewhere along the line, someone is saving by skimping on refining, or maybe adding cheap adulterants. The product is bad enough to have inspired yet another sardonic, rhyming Cuban dicho:
Bueno, mal o regular,
la calidad no caminar.
Premium, regular, whatever the claim,
the quality stays just the same.
The fuel burns so foul that narrow streets in rush hour fill with a bronze-black haze that screens out color and blurs the next block, as if the present were fading into a poorly exposed nineteenth-century daguerreotype. The Avenida de Raúl Pujol, which climbs and dips and climbs again through Santiago’s easternmost neighborhoods, isn’t narrow, but it’s busy all day long with cars, motos, camiones, and buses bringing workers to and from all the towns to the southeast, from Siboney on the sea and even up into the Sierra de la Gran Piedra. At rush hour, even the avenida’s open stretches are tinted by fumes. From just yards away, the knots of people at the paradas, the bus stops, are washed with an airborne sepia that mutes the women’s hottest colors.
I maneuvered through clumps of patient people, our polite footwork complicated by the sidewalk’s all-terrain disrepair. Typically, for off-the-main-drag Cuba, the concrete pavers were tossed up by tree roots, crumbled to sand, jacked up, seesawed, or just plain gone. Still, I was keeping a pretty good pace until I came to a hollow at the bottom of what I hoped would be the final rise.
On my side of the avenue, wrought-iron palings and thick, dull greenery guarded the Parque Zoologico, where an unseen anim
al brayed in protest. Across the street, a little playground offered ice creams, refrescos, and even bocaditas, little sandwiches. But there were no kids at play, not so much as a teen couple holding hands at one of the concrete tables. Engines down-shifted to take the hills on either hand, puffing especially thick gouts of airborne tar, and each cloud rolled back down into the bowl, staining the distance between me and the playground’s forlorn counterman a leaden gray. No mother would bring her kids here. No sane grown-up would choose to linger, not for hours more, not until the poison dissipated in a hoped-for evening breeze.
My lungs and head ached, my eyes stung. Why not give this up, come back tomorrow—maybe in an air-conditioned taxi?
I’d wanted to walk up San Juan Hill almost as far back as I could remember: since September 1963, when my parents took me to Watertown, Massachusetts, to visit my great-grandfather on what I did not understand was his deathbed.
I was only six, and the details of the day are undeniably iffy: Did Papa O’Brien tell the old story, the one that older siblings and cousins assure me we’d all heard many times before? I can’t actually remember him speaking, or even stirring in his vast, dark bed, but his stillness didn’t diminish my childish faith in his vigor.
After all, my only other clear memory of him is his round head rising and disappearing in the gray swells of Long Island Sound on a stormy winter day. Perhaps it was New Year’s Day, and by visiting us in Connecticut he was missing out on the L Street Brownes’ ritual plunge into Boston Harbor. In any case, he insisted on swimming, so we—his granddaughter—that is, my mother—and her husband and children walked the beach in long wool coats, in scarves and hats, watching the patriarch prove himself keener than cold brine, more stubborn than the pounding tide.
Like many an American, especially in the late-nineteenth-century heyday of immigration and expansion, Thomas O’Brien was a self-invented man, his identity an act of willful separation. As his great-grandson, I knew him not so much by his forceful but infrequent presence as by stories and overheard adult conversations. His willpower was the stuff of family legend.
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