Holding up a red folder, Castro snorted, “that woman—Oodolstone—la jefa [chief] of the SINA, is a problem.” He couldn’t get the H quite right and tried again, slowly pronouncing each letter: “H-U-D-D-L-E-S-T-O-N.” Then he triumphantly proclaimed “Hoodlestone” and announced that I, the new chief of the US Interests Section, was “putting on a show to undermine the revolution.” Rather than referring to the US Interests Section by its correct title, Castro called our mission the Sección de Intereses Norte Americano (North American Interests Section) so that he could make a play on the Spanish initials, SINA, which almost rhymed with CIA in Spanish. With that clever twist, it sounded as if the Interests Section was itself the CIA. This clever name change allowed Castro to create the impression that I was in charge of—as he would often say—“a nest of spies.”
I had to admire his strategy and performance. Castro paced about the stage, talking about my misdeeds and those of my country, beginning with the embargo, the Cuban Adjustment Act, and our occupation of Guantanamo. Then he retreated to a small desk where he flipped through a dossier recounting my actions—which one would have thought were directed at him, since he seemed personally offended. Uncle Sam, he said, had sent him a “troublemaker.” He wagged his finger, and then laid out the case against me. Holding high in the air the red folder that held the supposed incriminating evidence, he charged that I was instilling bad ideas in the minds of human rights activists. I had arranged for them to meet publicly with Ryan and had encouraged them to disrupt the upcoming summit. It seemed that an even greater sin than my barging into a meeting of Cuban officials was the fear that I was organizing a demonstration that would take place during the summit. This apparently had incited Castro’s very personal and spiteful public condemnation of me.
Castro warned Cubans to avoid me, telling them that he kept track of every visitor to my residence. Cubans who visited might miss the cameras strategically placed along the wall that protected one of Fidel’s principal residences, but they would certainly see the Cuban military guards taking notes from a guard house adjacent to my front gate. And most Cubans would not be visiting, anyway, because they were already barred from the beautiful Cubanacan neighborhood where diplomats and foreign businessmen lived and where Cuba hosted important visitors in government “protocol houses.” Only Cuban diplomats, dissidents, and artists visited my residence. The diplomats were there on business, the dissidents were already outcasts and had nothing to lose, and Cuban artists were allowed to visit, most likely because they were trusted by the government. Castro’s ploy was to emphasize that official Americans—not just me but my staff—should be avoided. I did wonder what Castro had in mind by spelling out my name, until some months later when I signed a hotel register, the clerk turned pale and quickly picked up the telephone—undoubtedly to report the presence of “that woman, Hoodlestone.”
I found Fidel’s overreaction troublesome and disappointing, especially as it was directed solely at a few members of my staff and me. Fidel had thought that Ryan’s visit would be a great coup for Cuba. The first US governor to visit since the revolution, a Republican from an important state who could persuade his peers to weaken the embargo and normalize trade with Cuba. Instead Ryan had stumbled, telling the media that “the trouble with Cuba is Castro.” But rather than blaming Ryan, Castro blamed me because I had arranged the meeting with dissidents. Despite that one moment of truth, Ryan—like so many others before him—had been awestruck. The most important event for him and those with him was the dinner with Fidel, and the box of cigars each had been given that had Castro’s autograph scrawled across the lid. They could go home and tell their stories, but I would have to stay here and clean up the mess.
The Diario de las Americas headlines shouted, “Gobierno de Castro Amenazas Sección de Intereses de EEUU” (Castro Government Threatens the US Interests Section). The spokesman for the Foreign Ministry accused us “of sabotaging, torpedoing, and attempting to ruin Governor Ryan’s visit” and accused five staff members and me of mounting a escaramuza provocativa (provocative skirmish) because we had arranged for the dissidents to meet with Ryan in public. This wasn’t true; it was just another mistake, but it indicated how paranoid Castro was about the dissidents. We unexpectedly ran into the Ryan party when we took the dissidents to lunch in a nearby restaurant, thereby sparking Castro’s anger for violating his prohibition on public meetings with the dissidents. It seemed that everything I touched in Cuba turned to ash.
Two of my staff members who were mentioned by name were fearful that Cuban security would play nasty tricks on them. Their concerns were valid. In the past, some staff members’ pets were purposely killed and left on their doorsteps. Others found feces smeared on doorknobs or a cigar burning in an ashtray in their supposedly empty house.
Cuban Americans were ecstatic. They loved that I was standing up to their archenemy. President Clinton’s point person on Cuba, Wendy Sherman, wanted to know why Castro had reacted so strongly. I didn’t make excuses and she refrained from criticism, but I felt that she was disappointed. Lino Gutierrez, a Cuban American career diplomat and senior officer, was delighted. “Way to go, Vicki,” he exclaimed.
Ryan’s visit had been a total disaster for me. It had confirmed the worst fears of the Cuban hierarchy, giving the impression that I didn’t respect them, the vilest of all faults in their eyes. If I were to succeed at my job, I would have to overcome this calamitous first impression. I did not have any regrets about arranging for Ryan to meet the dissidents privately—not publicly, as Fidel claimed was wrong of me to do. And I still chuckled about Ryan’s initial and frank observation that Castro was the trouble with Cuba. I thought that it must have amused a lot of Cuban Americans and Cubans; it certainly delighted me, though Castro managed to have the record corrected in his favor by blaming the dissidents.
A few days later, the Ibero-American Summit went off smoothly. The dissidents did not protest or appear anywhere near the summit, as Castro had so feared, but some of the visiting foreign ministers did meet with a few of them, and this too annoyed him.
I would never have advised the dissidents to act against their government. I felt strongly that they must take responsibility for their actions. I did not want to lead them into danger. I was happy to listen to them, arrange for them to meet with American officials, and bring them together so that they could network and protest when they were mistreated. These activities would boost their status with visitors and help keep them safe. But I never told them what to do, and never suggested what actions they might take.
A fitting epilogue to the governor’s visit and Castro’s charade came a few weeks later, just as life appeared to be returning to normal. At a party I had held for Ryan’s delegation, the governor had presented me with a bust of Abraham Lincoln that was to be displayed in the residence. As I descended the circular stairway carrying the bust, I tripped. Lincoln dropped from my arms, shattering on the black marble steps. It couldn’t have been more appropriate, as Ryan had deleted from his speech at the University of Havana a quote from President Abraham Lincoln, “Do not silence those who are not in agreement with you. No man is sufficiently good to govern another without his consent.”
I had a lot of pieces to pick up, not only of Lincoln but in repairing the damage inflicted by the Ryan visit. And it turned out that life was not about to return to normal, because on Thanksgiving Day 1999 a five-year-old child named Elián González was found floating on an inner tube in the Florida Straits.
CHAPTER 5
FIDEL IS CUBA
FIDEL CASTRO RUZ, A PUGNACIOUS LAW STUDENT WHO CAME FROM a prosperous if unimpressive farm, exploded into Cuban history on July 26, 1953. His ill-planned attack on the Moncada Barracks in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba was an unmitigated failure; Fidel and a handful of comrades were captured and imprisoned, the others rounded up and executed. Two years later, hoping to quell popular discontent against his rule, Fulgencio Batista freed Castro and his rebels who then went int
o exile in Mexico City. Cuban congressman Rafael Díaz-Balart, Castro’s former friend and onetime brother-in-law, warned the Cuban dictator that if he pardoned Castro it would result in “Many days of mourning, of pain, of bloodshed, and of misery.”
The Díaz-Balart family became the nucleus of Cuban American opposition to Castro’s revolution. Rafael’s son Lincoln—born on August 13, the same day as Fidel—and his brother Mario both became US congressmen and undying enemies of their uncle Fidel. Thus, the Cuban Revolution is not simply a story of overturning a dictator, forcing out the elite, and imposing a new order; it is also a family clash between the Castro Ruz and Díaz-Balart families. Nor is this the only family feud. Many of those who left in the 1960s and 1970s never again contacted their relatives, who in their eyes had become collaborators with the regime by remaining in Cuba.
In 1956 Fidel Castro and eighty rebels sailed from Mexico in an overloaded secondhand yacht named Granma—in honor of the former owner’s grandmother—to the isolated province of Niquero, Cuba. By the time they had reach the Sierra Maestra, where they established their base, most of the rebels had been killed by Batista’s army. Yet in just over three years Fidel and his key aides Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara, Celia Sánchez, and Haydée Santamaría had accomplished the unimaginable. On January 1, 1959, the rebels entered Havana and Batista fled. Two years and two days later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, convinced that Cuba was becoming a beachhead for communism shuttered the American embassy. Three months later, President John F. Kennedy approved a CIA-organized invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, but he withheld air and sea support to the exile invaders in a doomed effort to preserve the myth that the operation was not the CIA’s handiwork. Commanding the new Cuban Army, Castro repelled the attack, blocking the only road that led out of the exiles’ beachhead at Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs). Today billboards and a small museum at the Bay of Pigs proclaim this battle to be the “first defeat of imperialism in North America.” Castro’s surprise victory reinforced his revolution. The Cuban people rejected the idea of what might become yet another US occupation, and this in turn undermined the internal armed resistance, which Castro’s forces soon rounded up and jailed. The exile invasion also triggered the Soviet Union’s decision to supply Castro with advanced weaponry.
The Cuban Revolution succeeded and endured because Fidel Castro proceeded to mold the country to reflect his vision and desire for international acclaim as the leader of the developing world. To accomplish this he turned Cuban society upside down, throwing out Batista and the American Mafia, while at the same time obliterating Cuba’s elite and professional classes. In exchange for providing the resources for Castro’s overseas military and diplomatic adventures, he transformed the country into a satellite of the Soviet Union.
Castro was always intolerant of dissent. In the early years, he jailed two of his closest allies, Gustavo Arcos Bergnes and Jesús Yáñez Pelletier, each of whom had raised money and bought arms that supported the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Arcos, a true hero of the revolution, had been with Castro when he and his audacious militants attacked the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953, the date celebrated as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Arcos served Cuba’s new government as its ambassador to Belgium. But Castro turned against him for objecting to the killing of Batista’s supporters and the revolution’s turn toward communism. Released from prison in 1979, Arcos and his brother Sebastían joined Elizardo Sánchez, a former university professor, to establish the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, which has been a steadfast advocacy of democracy, freedom, and human rights.
I first met Arcos—a wiry man with intense and sad eyes—in 1989 at the home of the deputy chief of the US Interests Section. Photos of my visit were taken by Cuban security and distributed to the dissidents, a not-so-subtle warning that their visit with an American official had been monitored. In 1999, when I became chief of the Interests Section, I visited Arcos at his home, where he was surrounded by the pet birds he loved. On one visit, he described an acto de repudio (act of repudiation) to which he had been subjected: as he approached his home he was pushed, punched, and scorned by a group of people he didn’t know. But Cuban officials claimed that these acts of rejection were spontaneous demonstrations by neighbors disgusted with dissidents’ criticisms of their revolution. As we both knew, the perpetrators were regime thugs ordered to intimidate and frighten the dissidents into more submissive behavior.
Yáñez Pelletier is known as the man who “saved Fidel Castro’s life.” He was the supervisor of the Boniato Prison on the Isla de los Pinos, where Castro was jailed after his attack on the Moncada Barracks. When Yáñez Pelletier received orders from the Batista government to poison Castro, he publicly denounced the plot. In retaliation, he was expelled from the Cuban Army and later became one of Castro’s security personnel. But it wasn’t long before he was incarcerated for being “pro-Mafia and pro-American.” Although he died a year after I arrived in Havana in 1999, I remember Yáñez Pelletier as a man of absolute integrity.
Since the revolution there had been successive waves of dissidents, but none have threatened or weakened Castro and his government. The first wave of dissidents emerged from the rebel movement and its new institutions. One of the most impressive was Raúl Rivero, a poet and journalist. As Cuba’s chief correspondent in Moscow during the 1970s, he discovered that “Russia was dogmatic, schematic, and secretive.” In 1991, after returning to Havana, the man who had become known as the poet of the revolution resigned his position and signed a letter to Castro asking him to release political prisoners. He summed up his feelings about Cuba as a “fiction about a country that does not exist.” In 1995 he formed Cuba Press, one of the first—and certainly most impressive—groups of independent journalists.
The earliest dissidents, like Arcos, Rivero, and Yáñez Pelletier, had been participants in or strong partisans for the revolution. The first time I visited Rivero, Cuban security was ostentatiously removing a portable antenna from the roof of a car parked next to his apartment. This was their not-so-subtle way of warning me that they would be keeping track of my visits. It also reflected their belief that Rivero’s writings could embarrass if not undermine the regime. Yet it seemed to me that all Rivero wanted was to live quietly, write, and remain in Cuba. The next time I met with him, a black sedan—undoubtedly Cuban security—remained parked outside the gate of my residence.
Castro had no rivals of any importance for power; he removed all those from within the hierarchy who potentially would have been most threatening to him sometime before they even knew they were his rivals. In 1989 General Arnaldo Ochoa was executed; in 1992, Carlos Aldana, the regime’s number three official, was forced from power; and in 1999, Roberto Robaina, a foreign minister, was accused of corruption. Raúl Castro, like Fidel, continued to purge high-level party members who’d loyally served for years, including Carlos Lage, vice president of the Council of State, and Felipe Pérez Roque, a foreign minister, and Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly.
The Cuban hierarchy controlled every aspect of the political process through the parallel structures of government and the Communist Party. Women, youth, and labor groups determined those who were fit to be candidates for the Municipal Assemblies. Members of these groups not only knew each other but knew who was a good communist and deserving of a political position. Generally, no more than two candidates were selected and the voters would decide between them, both having been vetted. Those elected to the local Municipal Assemblies then elected from their members those who would represent them in the Provincial Assemblies, and they in turn selected the members of the National Assembly, the principal legislative body of which Ricardo Alarcón—my regular interlocutor—was president. To complete the picture, the National Assembly in turn selected the members of the Council of Ministers and the Council of State. Fidel was president of both government councils and the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party until Raúl assu
med these positions in 2008. Most elected government officials were party members, and many, like Fidel and Raúl, held positions in both state and party organizations.
The only independent institution in Cuba is the Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Havana, Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, was an independent thinker who stuck by his belief that he could best help the people of Cuba by slowly and cautiously creating within the church a place for reflection and independent thought. The Catholic Church was an important part of Cuban life, providing solace, entertainment, and medicine and care to the ill and the elderly. Bishops and priests throughout the country were allowed to determine the degree to which they would support dissidents and independent thinkers. Ortega himself did not encourage dissent, but a number of his bishops and priests provided dissidents sanctuary. He never took a stand against Castro or the government; if he did, Castro might have shuttered the Catholic Church. The Cuban hierarchy tolerated religion, especially the Baptist Church, which Castro used to undercut the Catholics. Still, Castro enjoyed the papal visits, which provided a measure of protection to believers and dissidents alike. Ortega had to shoulder the disdain of the diaspora who disparaged him for not advancing the cause of human rights. But had he done their bidding, he would have incurred Castro’s wrath, which inevitably would have diminished the church and its ability to comfort its adherents.
The cardinal told me that Fidel respected the church because of his Catholic education by Jesuit priests in Santiago de Cuba. Ortega felt that he had limited ability to influence the way Fidel governed. Their conversations were principally related to issues regarding the reestablishment of the Catholic Church. He had to tread carefully; after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, over a hundred Spanish priests were forced to leave the country. Believers of all faiths were discriminated against and prohibited from joining the Communist Party or holding important government posts. After the collapse of Soviet subsidies, the government could no longer provide social services. The desperate situation of the young and the elderly forced Castro to permit the gradual revival of religion and the reopening of Catholic and Protestant churches throughout the country. By distributing medicines and food, and caring for children and seniors, the churches helped to ameliorate the poverty and deprivation that were widespread during the Special Period in Time of Peace. When I occasionally attended services at the cathedral or other churches, there was always a warm and welcoming atmosphere; they were oases of silence far from the eyes of neighbors and the security forces.
Our Woman in Havana Page 7