Our Woman in Havana

by Vicki Huddleston

  Castro made sure he was safe from attack; it was not an unwise maneuver given the numerous assassination attempts directed at him. His principal residence was located in front of the American residence, although he had several more houses across Havana. According to the Canadian ambassador whose residence was located across the street from Raúl Castro’s house, this was a tactic copied from the Soviets, who believed that it was prudent to keep your enemies close. Any attack against the Castros would spill over and harm the Americans and the Canadians as well. In today’s world of drones and precision bombing, the tactic is outdated, but there are still advantages to the arrangement, like enhanced opportunities for surveillance—with guards at the Castros’ residences keeping watch on ours as well.

  Fidel’s compound was part mansion and part military barracks. The barracks, which faced the American residence where I lived, was enclosed by a crumbling mud wall and big trees. Along the wall cameras recorded all those who dared to approach either residence. Next to the gate of my residence, a Cuban guard stood duty in a small hut, rather like an outhouse. In a small building on Castro’s side of the pitted, half-paved, lane between our houses, cameras peered out of small, dirty windows.

  Fidel’s compound was approached on a paved road in good condition along the far side of my residence; he didn’t use the alley between our houses. As his black limousine approached, a guard raised and lowered a flimsy wooden barrier. When my official car drew near, a spotlight flashed, warning me to turn right toward my residence. I could always tell when Castro was home because the guards were reinforced and considerably more nervous, repeatedly blinking the spotlight as I approached. When I myself was driving (my driver would not have dared this), I sometimes taunted Castro’s guards by driving up the road fast, making it appear that I had no intention of turning. Then the spotlight would flash, an alarm would blare, and soldiers would appear.

  In June 2000 when Fidel collapsed in front of television cameras while giving a speech in one of Havana’s barrios he was taken to this residence. Security was immediately tightened, so much so that when the Turkish ambassador—the only other diplomat permitted to live on the same street—stopped his car to discuss the drama with me as I was walking my hound dog named Havana, several spotlights went on and a loudspeaker blared instructions to move on, even though the ambassador’s car was headed away from Fidel’s house and Havana and I couldn’t possibly pose a danger. Once, when I was turning into the principal avenue, Fidel’s motorcade came whizzing by. I followed, as his security detail frantically waved at me to back off, almost falling out of the windows of their small Ladas.

  Castro’s residence could not be seen from the principal streets. It was hidden from view by a once-elaborate and elegant mansion that had formerly been the home of Brazilian ambassadors but was now vacant, having fallen into an advanced state of decay. Before the revolution it had been one of the most elegant homes in Havana, even rivaling and perhaps surpassing the American residence, where I now lived. After those opposing the revolution in the early years had taken refuge in its vast gardens, Brazilian and Cuban relations deteriorated. The counterrevolutionaries were freed—among them my friend Tony Navarro, with whom I had worked on TV Martí—but the mansion lay neglected for the next three decades until the famous author James Michener visited Havana. He lamented the beauty and tragedy of this great house in the book Six Days in Havana, which apparently inspired the Cuban government to begin the massive repairs required to make it again livable. It was under construction when I first arrived in Cuba, and I kept track of the progress by sometimes sneaking on to the grounds with my special assistant, Peter Corsell. A few months later, when it was finally restored to its full glory, it was used to house Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez on his frequent visits to Cuba.

  The Portuguese residence, which was considerably more modest than Brazil’s, also abutted the grounds surrounding Castro’s compound. The Portuguese ambassador, a trusted friend of Castro’s sons, could walk from his residence to Fidel’s. But this relationship turned perilous when the allure of the revolution contributed to his falling in love with one of Che Guevara’s daughters. His beautiful wife left him, and some months later both the affair and his diplomatic tour ended. He was sent away to Africa, presumably for his sins.

  As the principal representative of the US president and Cuba’s number one enemy, I received special attention from Fidel himself. And with good reason: the eleven American presidents that served during Castro’s rule represented the only serious threat to his absolute power in Cuba. Had any one of them succeeded, the Cuban diaspora would have returned to the island, restoring itself to power and replacing Castro, his revolution, and the communist system he had put in place.

  I knew that if I misbehaved, Fidel would be the first to know. I would be the second—I would be confronted with “evidence,” which would be used to blackmail me. Our marine guards were targeted by beautiful Cuban women; if they succumbed, they were sent home. Cuba was the only country where the US government still had a nonfraternization rule in effect. But I wasn’t worried; I was well ensconced in my life. My husband, Bob, lived with me in the residence and my children, Alexandra and Robert, visited often. We all enjoyed observing the mystery of Fidel’s residence across the street and his occasional comings and goings. Nor were we especially bothered by surveillance, which was a part of life in Cuba. I liked the code name the Cubans gave me—Golindrina (the swallow). Although a swallow isn’t a very impressive bird, I liked the sound of the name and took note of the fact that swallows are known to return.

  Initially I think Fidel enjoyed targeting me, and perhaps he thought I might be easily intimidated. When the Cubans learned that I would be selling American cake mixes at the ambassadors’ wives’ Christmas bazaar, they informed the group’s president—the wife of the ambassador from India—that either I must stand down or the bazaar would be canceled. Like everyone else, the wives had no choice but to do as they were told. I didn’t mind; it seemed to me that the Cubans had made fools of themselves by stooping so low. I kept in mind what the Polish ambassador had told me. He believed that the Cuban government’s control of every aspect of life on the island exceeded that of the Soviets in Eastern Europe. I didn’t doubt him. The smallest detail seldom escaped the notice of state security who kept my minders at the Foreign Ministry apprised of my every action and various misdemeanors.

  Like the three chief diplomats who preceded me, I did not formally meet Castro while living in Havana. I didn’t know what he thought of me, but I was impressed by his overwhelming charisma and struck by his need to always win and to be the center of attention. He expected to be the unequivocal overseer of everything that took place on his island. Everyone, including foreign diplomats, were expected to follow his rules. He didn’t appreciate my boldness in confronting him on his turf, and he made me aware—through proxies—that he was unhappy about it. But I wasn’t about to stop. Initially I had been appalled at his reaction to our confrontation over Governor George Ryan’s visit, but even then it seemed to me a good thing that someone in the country was willing to challenge Fidel’s absolute control.

  Our next confrontation took place because I dared to promote Cuban exile artists. The State Department’s Art in Embassies program allows every chief of mission to select works of art to decorate the American residence. I asked that they provide me with paintings and photographs produced by Cuban artists living abroad. The collection was impressive, and included works by the photographer Arturo Cuenca and the painter José Bedia. One painting that I personally selected was by Suzanne Lago, whose mother had been my Spanish teacher at the State Department. Suzanne printed below her painting of two young boys, “I cannot return to the house of my childhood,” which perfectly expressed her feelings and those of many Cuban Americans. I realized that the collection might be considered a political statement about those who had been forced or had chosen to leave. But I liked to point out that it also included a photograph of Che Gue
vara; certainly no other US government building displayed his image.

  To celebrate this extraordinary collection I invited diplomats and local Cuban artists to view it at the residence. The local artists had never seen the works of their contemporaries who had left the island—some of whom had become famous. I was very pleased until the next morning, when I was summoned to the Foreign Ministry. It was a Saturday, and most Cuban bureaucrats didn’t work over the weekend, so I knew that once again I had committed yet another diplomatic violation of the unspoken and unwritten rules. When I arrived at the Foreign Ministry I learned that my transgression was to have disrupted the treasured Biennial Art Festival by creating a counter exhibition of exile art. Smilingly, my composure unshaken, I reassured my interlocutors that my exhibit was meant to complement the Biennial. But I knew that Fidel wouldn’t be fooled.

  The best description of Castro’s mania for absolute power was provided by Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible and onetime husband to the actress Marilyn Monroe. In an article titled “My Dinner with Castro” he wrote that “[Fidel’s] endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well.” Then Miller in one line caught the essence of the Cuban Revolution: “The focus of these contradictions was Castro himself; the man, in effect, was Cuba.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE LAST BATTLE

  ON NOVEMBER 25, 1999, THANKSGIVING DAY, PRESIDENT BILL Clinton’s hopes for an opening with Cuba were shattered by five-year-old Elián González, who was found floating on an inner tube in the Florida Straits. The ensuring custody battle between the Cuban diaspora and Fidel Castro had as momentous an impact as the failed CIA-backed exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs. In that earlier debacle, Castro captured twelve hundred American-backed exile invaders, whom he then ransomed back to the United States for $53 million in baby food and medicine. And in its wake, the Soviet Union sent missiles to Cuba, leading the world to the edge of a nuclear crisis.

  In 2000, with the help of President Clinton, Castro handed a humiliating defeat to the Cuban diaspora when Elián was sent home to Cuba and his father. In return, the Cuban diaspora extracted revenge by denying Al Gore the presidency in the closely contested 2000 election. Their voto castigo (punishment vote) and protests cost Gore the crucial state of Florida and ultimately played a decisive role in the election of George W. Bush, whose victory underscored the electoral power of the Cuban American community.

  From the deck of their cabin cruiser, fishermen Sam Ciancio and Donato Dalrymple spotted a child tied to an inner tube floating in the open sea on Thanksgiving Day 1999. Ciancio jumped into the water, rescuing the five-year-old boy from Cárdenas, Cuba. The US Coast Guard rushed Elián to the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, where he was found to be in amazingly good health and able to provide his father’s phone number in Cuba. When told of his son’s plight, Juan Míguel González contacted his uncle Lázaro who lived in Miami’s Little Havana and asked that he care for Elián until he could arrange to come to the United States and pick up his son. But within hours, Lázaro (who was under pressure from the Cuban American community) had changed his mind, deciding that he and his family would keep the child. A pro bono attorney stepped forward to represent Lázaro, and claimed with great bravado that Elián was “perhaps the last hero in the twentieth century battle against totalitarianism.” It turned out he was half right. To Cubans on the island he would become a hero of the revolution, but to the Cuban diaspora he would become yet another stinging reminder of their losses.

  On Saturday, November 27, Dagoberto Rodríguez Barrera, the Cuban official responsible for dealing with the Interests Section, called me at home to inform me that a Cuban child had been rescued at sea and was now in Miami. He emphasized, “This is a very important issue. President Castro is interested.” I told him I hadn’t heard anything and probably wouldn’t because this was the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. He insisted, “You must inform Washington. We want the child returned immediately.” Although surprised that Dagoberto was so pushy, I promised to let the State Department know. “Please do it today,” he said.

  I had taken the call from Dagoberto in my wood-paneled study, where the photos of former ambassadors and principal officers lined one wall. At the far end of the room stood a beautiful Chinese partition with a long golden dragon painted on black lacquer across three panels; it had been given to the last US ambassador for safekeeping when a Cuban family fled during the early days of Castro’s revolt. Prior to my arrival, Charles Shapiro, the new director of Cuban affairs at the State Department, had met with dissidents in this room. It was his meeting that convinced the Cuban government to mistakenly believe that I would lead the dissidents in disrupting the Ibero-American Summit; their information was gleaned from listening devices implanted in the room. One or two of the dissidents, along with the residence staff, undoubtedly supplied additional and probably contradictory reports. Cuban dissidents liked to say that if two people met, one would inform the government. It was perhaps a slight exaggeration, but in any group, there was bound to be an informant. Now, one month later, I was still trying to repair the damage created by Castro’s misinterpretation of Shapiro’s remarks, and by my own missteps during Governor George Ryan’s controversial visit.

  Hoping to convince Dagoberto that I was taking his concerns seriously, I called the State Department’s seventh-floor, twenty-four-hour, Operations Center in Washington, DC, which monitors messages from our embassies around the globe. If there is a crisis anywhere, our diplomats can send the latest information along with their analysis to the secretary of state at any time, in a matter of minutes. But this wasn’t a crisis—at least not yet. The Operations Center connected me to Shapiro, who agreed to contact the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t hear back. He would have found it difficult to find anyone who could answer his queries over the weekend, and by Monday it was too late; the curtain had risen on the Elián saga.

  Elián should have been playing with his classmates, not drifting in the sea. He lived in Cárdenas, about an hour’s drive east of Havana. It is the closest port in Cuba to the United States, but no ships docked at its long wooden ramp because bilateral trade with Florida had vanished decades ago. The substantial homes and offices that bordered the principal street had fallen into a state of disrepair. An occasional horse and buggy rambled by, and perhaps an ancient American Ford, its original motor likely replaced by one from a small Lada. Elián’s father, Juan Míguel, lived in a small house on a quiet backstreet a mile or two from the port. He worked at a modest and very plain Italian restaurant, patronized principally by visiting Cuban exiles who would treat their relatives to dinner. Elián was fortunate not to live in the large Soviet-style concrete-block housing project where clothes dried on the small, walled-in balconies and rusting climbing bars sat in a field of dried weeds.

  Elián’s mother, Elizabet, had divorced Juan Míguel, her childhood sweetheart, because he was said to be a mujerago—a man with many romantic dalliances. She worked in a hotel at the Varadero Beach Resort that was reserved for foreign tourists. Although Elizabet and Juan Míguel both earned the government-dictated peso salary equivalent to ten to fifteen dollars a month, she could count on tips in dollars and cast-off clothing or other items left behind. These hotels, built in the early 1990s, catered to the low-end Canadian tourist market. The rumor was that an all-inclusive two-week package for a vacation in Varadero was equal to a Canadian unemployment check for the same period. Cubans could work in these hotels but not stay in them; it would be another ten years before Raúl Castro’s reforms allowed Cubans to be permitted as guests at hotels visited by foreign tourists. But it wasn’t the lifestyle of these tourists, their clothes, and ability to travel that pressured Elizabet to leave. According to neighbors, Elizabet fled Cuba because she was madly in love with Lázaro (Rafa) Munero, a hands
ome man with few skills, no job, and little prospect of finding one. He, like so many other young men, had no future in Cuba. His greatest desire was to make his way to a new life in Miami. Elizabet was willing to go with him, but didn’t want to leave her son behind.

  It was a dilemma. If she left Elián with Juan Míguel, she would not see him for years—perhaps never again. She would not be with him as he grew from a child into a man. If she took him, they might create a new and better life with a good job, money, and perhaps a house and a car of their own. If they were lucky, the fifty-horsepower motor on Rafa’s clandestinely built boat of aluminum and rusty scrap metal would deliver them to the beaches of South Florida in about thirty hours. Once they reached American soil, they would be allowed to remain and build new lives.

  Having made her decision, Elizabet and Elián squeezed into the overloaded boat. This was a family affair, of which Rafa was the organizer: on board were Rafa’s father, mother, brother, uncles, and a young couple Nivaldo Fernandez and Arianna Horta who had brought along her baby daughter. A half hour after setting sail, the boat’s motor quit, forcing Rafa to return to Cárdenas. This gave the passengers a last chance to reconsider setting out in an overcrowded boat with a bad motor. Arianna took her baby daughter home, returning to make the journey with her lover Nivaldo. Thirteen souls set out once more; if the seas were calm, they would reach Florida within a day and a half. Then they could begin to live their dream.