Trained to Kill

by Antonio Veciana

  Lacking any military experience, I expected such a powerful weapon—capable of lobbing rounds with a lethal blast radius into the midst of a gathering hundreds of yards away—would be ideal. The target, the north terrace, to me appeared to be a perfect platter serving up the highest-ranking heads of the regime.

  The Presidential Palace itself was a soaring spectacle of stately excess, part fortress and part cathedral. Built in 1920, it stood as a baroque revival monument to Cuba’s days of lavish affluence, when it bathed in a shower of money from the United States and, soon after, the mob. It had an arcade façade with fake Corinthian columns and towering arches, repeated like a hall of mirrors around every side. Ornate turrets stood at the corners of the rooftop, and a massive dome sat on top. It was exemplary in its somber pomp, its superfluous self-importance, its grandiose pretensions.

  Most important to me, though, was that wide, flat terrace stretching over the north porte cochere. It sat under a relief of Cuba’s coat of arms, shielded only by a waist-high balustrade, and it was where Fidel and his puppet president would bask regularly in the adulation of the crowd, often for hours on end.

  It was perfect, I thought.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Not with a mortar. The blast would be perfect, but the trajectory problematic.

  We would have, at best, one shot. A good mortar crew could fire off many more rounds, up to thirty in a minute. But there would be no time to adjust the aim. If we missed with the first round, Castro would be able to scramble inside to safety, and our chance would be gone forever.

  Plus there was the problem of the angle of fire. A mortar pitches a shell in a high arc. It’s perfect for hitting targets behind walls, or in trenches. It’s terrible for aiming through an apartment window at a target seven stories below. And while being barely over a hundred yards away would be an advantage for most weapons, that put us close to the minimum range of the 60 mm mortar. Overshooting the target was a very real, and troubling, possibility.

  All this I would learn after I pulled together the team to carry out the operation.

  At the moment, though, all I could think about was having the very clear opportunity of doing away with Castro and giving Cubans a chance to freely choose their future.

  Bishop, and members of my own group, however, saw things differently. Killing Castro was one thing. Killing Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, was another altogether. Gagarin had done nothing wrong, and he was, as the American astronauts who formed the Mercury 7 were already coming to be seen, a hero. He had gone where no human had gone. He had floated above the planet—above every other human being—and returned to tell about it. It didn’t matter that the American Alan Shepard had matched his feat within a matter of days. Gagarin was, in the world’s eyes, a star: our first starman.

  To kill him was wrong. And, as Bishop would argue, it would be disastrous for the group responsible. It had the very real potential to spark the outrage of not only the Soviets, but also the world. He didn’t say it, but he surely must have imagined the consequences if the CIA wound up linked to the killing of Gagarin. It would surely ignite an international incident and, in the already touchy reality of Cold War relations, ratchet up tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union to a dangerously precarious level.

  So, no. Gagarin would not die. And neither would Castro. Not then, anyway.

  Gagarin made his visit. I bided my time.

  Gagarin stepped off an Ilyushin Il-18 aircraft on July 24, 1961, in what the press described as “a lashing rain”—what we in Havana called “summer.” He was, as the Associated Press reported, given “a hero’s welcome.” Of course, a crowd was summoned, a national holiday declared. Instead of work, the people were told to gather in the plaza and show their admiration. For Gagarin. For Castro. What went unsaid, but largely understood, was that there were those—union bosses, neighborhood committee members, loyalists—who would note a person’s absence. And not in a favorable way.

  My Cuba was changing. Fast. Now the people fell into camps, those filled with passion and those with fear.

  So they gathered in the plaza that day. A military band played the Cuban and Soviet national anthems as the smiling twenty-seven-year-old “exchanged greetings with Castro, President Osvaldo Dorticós, and the hundreds of diplomats and high officials on hand.” At least, that is how the wire services would describe it.

  I knew, as always, Gagarin would next visit the Presidential Palace, and, knowing Castro, it was practically inevitable that the regime would muster a crowd to cheer enthusiastically from the plaza and that Fidel would bring the world’s first spaceman out for one of his agonizingly loquacious, impromptu speeches.

  Mercifully, I was wrong. Castro brought Gagarin to the Presidential Palace. And they appeared on the terrace, together with Dorticós and a cluster of other dignitaries. And the gathered populace roared appreciatively. But Castro didn’t speak. Not that day.

  Two days later, on July 26, the eighth anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack that gave Fidel’s revolution its name, “hundreds of thousands of cheering Cubans gathered in José Martí Square.” Gagarin, wearing a milk-white short-sleeved military uniform and a crisp officer’s dress white hat, railed against the United States with words that were surely music to Fidel’s ears.

  As the Associated Press report from that day continued, Gagarin called the Cuban revolution “one of the biggest pages of history of the liberation of the Latin American continent.” He said the Soviet Union “heard with indignation the news of the bandit attack by mercenaries of North American trusts” at the Bay of Pigs. And, the AP announced, he “pledged ‘the armed help of the Soviet people’ in what he called Cuba’s fight for independence.” The crowd roared.

  They roared again as Fidel, wearing his customary fatigues and his by then famous unkempt beard, embraced the cosmonaut.

  President Dorticós presented Gagarin with the order of “Playa Girón,” a medal, the AP explained, “created only 10 days ago as the highest Cuban decoration.” Already, the regime had turned the calamitous Bay of Pigs assault—“Playa Girón” to the Cubans—into a badge of honor for itself and a public relations weapon against the United States.

  I watched and gritted my teeth. So did Bishop. Kennedy’s refusal to send in support for the CIA-trained exiles caught on the beach during the invasion rankled him. It was, to Bishop, a betrayal he could never forgive. He grumbled about it repeatedly as spring gave way to summer, and summer gave way to fall.

  By October, life had changed dramatically. I sent my wife Sira and our children into exile in Spain for their safety. I stayed behind, more determined than ever.

  It had been an eventful year—in Cuba and around the world. After the Bay of Pigs invasion failed, tensions between the United States and Castro’s Communist regime escalated.

  The Berlin Wall went up in August.

  Freedom marchers and police clashed across America’s south.

  I cared only about Cuba, and about ridding my country of Castro and his Communist stain.

  Repression and reprisals were on the rise. And I expected only worse. Dorticós wrote the law authorizing death by firing squad against enemies of the state, and the regime showed no hesitation in using it. So, when Bishop finally said that it was clear that the only way to eliminate Communism in Cuba was to eliminate Castro, I took him at his word.

  And now, Dorticós was about to give me another chance.

  History may see Dorticós as Fidel’s puppet, and I sometimes call him that myself. In some ways he was. But more than that, he was Fidel’s pawn. Dorticós was a believer, as was, I’m convinced, El Che. That was their strength, and that was their weakness. In ways I’m sure only Fidel knows completely, they were used.

  Dorticós may have seemed an unlikely president when Fidel named him to the post in July 1959. As one writer put it, “the only thing he had ever presided over before becoming Cuba’s chief executive was the Cienfuegos Yacht Club.” In his book Cuba: Th
e First Soviet Satellite in the Americas, Daniel James called Dorticós “a curious kind of ‘bourgeois’ Communist which Cuba seems to have produced in some quantity.”

  Dorticós was born to a wealthy family in Cienfuegos, on the island’s southern shore. Founded by French settlers from Bordeaux, the city is known as the Pearl of the South. It boasts an unparalleled collection of nineteenth-century architectural treasures in its downtown. For that reason, it is now recognized as a World Heritage site, with more than three hundred neoclassical buildings that went up between 1819 and 1900. It is the birthplace of the legendary Cuban singer Benny Moré and, later, of a man I would align myself with in the fight against Castro, a one-time CIA operative who I and many others are convinced was responsible for the bombing of Cubana de Aviación flight 455 and the deaths of all seventy-eight people on board, Luis Posada Carriles.

  It is, in short, a place of culture and contradictions, and perhaps, then, both an unlikely and a highly suitable birthplace for a socialist attorney descended from someone who in his time was one of the richest men in the hemisphere.

  Dorticós worked for a short time as a teacher, then studied law and philosophy at the University of Havana. He got his law degree in 1941, four years before Fidel began his studies there. It was there that he joined the Popular Socialist Party, which had originally been called the Cuban Communist Party, and served as secretary to its founder.

  During the 1950s, Dorticós built up a prosperous law practice in his hometown and, as Daniel James would later remind us, served as commodore of the Cienfuegos Yacht Club. He was also known as a prominent fencer and an oarsman. Nonetheless, he opposed the government of Fulgencio Batista and helped provide arms and supplies to the rebel forces fighting against it. That led to his arrest in 1958, and to his exile in Mexico.

  When Batista fled and Fidel took power the following New Year’s Day, Dorticós returned to Cuba and was named Minister of Revolutionary Laws. It was a good choice. He was instrumental in rewriting the Cuban Constitution and in drafting the Agrarian Reform Act that nationalized cattle ranches and expropriated and redistributed large agricultural landholdings. It was Marxism at its basest—from each according to the regime’s wishes, to each according to its needs.

  And when Fidel’s first puppet president, Manuel Urrutia, had the audacity to go against him, Dorticós was the natural choice to replace him.

  On becoming president on July 17, 1959, Dorticós again showed he was a true believer in the ideals of the revolution—at least in the professed ideals. He refused to live in the Presidential Palace, and continued to live with his wife in his Havana apartment.

  But the palace continued to be used for state events. And Dorticós tackled his duties as chief executive admirably. Plus, his disdain for the United States equaled Fidel’s. There’s no telling how long that had been the case, but he may have even come to suspect the feeling was mutual when the Bay of Pigs invasion landed on his birthday.

  So the chance to prove Cuba’s newfound place of importance, and its new allegiances, must surely have been welcome. It gave Dorticós—and Cuba, and Castro, of course—an opportunity to shine on the world stage. More important, and more troublesome for the United States, it gave the Revolution a chance to become a beacon for other countries in Latin America to similarly “rise up against their oppressors,” i.e., the gringos.

  Dorticós knew it. So did the Soviets.

  And both knew the power of the press.

  Dorticós primed the pump at the Summit of Non-Aligned Nations in Belgrade with what the New York Times called “the most violent speech heard here since the twenty-four-nation parley opened.”

  Capitalizing on Cuba’s position as the only Latin American country with full status at the meeting, the Cuban president, the Times reported, “urged the conference of uncommitted countries today to condemn United States ‘imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism’ in Latin America.”

  He “pressed for a resolution asserting that the United States was not an appropriate host country for the United Nations.” Instead, he insisted, the U.N. headquarters should leave New York for “a country where human dignity is better protected.” He also called on the United States to abandon its base at Guantanamo and, in a deliberate echo of Soviet interests, came out in favor of “an immediate German peace treaty ‘recognizing the existence of two Germanys.’”

  Dorticós got a visibly chilly reception from other representatives at the summit, but that couldn’t have mattered to him. The story didn’t make the front page of the Times, but close enough—it played as the lead story on page 3, devoted entirely to his comments.

  If Tito, Nehru, and Nassar “displayed expressions of annoyance as the Cuban President attacked the United States,” they were nothing compared to the grimaces that must have spread through Washington as they read the article there.

  But Dorticós was just warming up.

  Right after the summit, he made a visit to the Kremlin. The trip lasted ten days. The media followed his every move. The cameras were there when Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev greeted him at the airport, and as the Cuban president was honored with a twenty-one-gun volley of anti-aircraft guns. They filmed as the Cuban entourage was greeted by Muscovites in the Russian capital, and as Dorticós laid a wreath at the tomb of Lenin. The film crews followed him as he visited the Soviet science pavilion and captured pictures of him with the first satellite, and as the rector of Moscow State University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. They watched as he visited Leningrad, Volgograd, and Kiev, as he met with young Cubans studying in the Soviet Union—including Fidel’s son.

  If the Americans weren’t steaming yet, Dorticós gave them more to fret over. Instead of flying back to Cuba when he left Moscow, he went to Beijing for a face-to-face meeting with Chairman Mao.

  Four days into that trip, he got a chance to address a crowd estimated at one hundred thousand by the Chinese news agency Xinhua and used the chance to poke the United States yet again. He told the cheering crowd that Cuba would kick the United States out of Guantanamo and reclaim the land as its own “through a resolute and tenacious prolonged struggle; the imperialists will have to give up these territories.”

  Then, with words that surely must have caused more than one case of heartburn in Washington, D.C., and raised an eyebrow or two in Moscow, he added: “Both the Chinese and Cuban peoples are struggling to wipe from the earth the exploitation of man by man. History and destiny have already linked us together and no storm of imperialism can undermine our unity and friendship.”

  Dorticós came back to Cuba triumphant. He had successfully boosted Cuba’s prominence in world politics, irked the United States, and, on his way home, signed a much-needed trade deal with the Soviets and Chinese. The Communist countries had agreed to buy five million tons of sugar a year from Cuba for the next three years. It was a lifesaver for the desperately cash-strapped revolutionary regime in Havana. That was what he was about to announce on the north terrace of the Presidential Palace on that October night.

  Some ten thousand people filled the plaza in front of the palace as Dorticós and Castro stepped out to speak. The assassination team in the apartment peered out. All three belonged to counterrevolutionary groups active in the resistance against Castro: Bernardo Paradela, Luis Caicedo, and a man I knew only by his nom de guerre, Freddy.

  I wasn’t there. I knew that sooner or later, Cuban security forces would trace the attack back to the eighth floor apartment across the street. It would be impossible for my mother-in-law to escape interrogation, or worse. The apartment was undeniably in her name. What she knew, or didn’t, could be painfully costly for her. I would never forgive myself if anything happened to her.

  The men, I expected, would be OK. They had no link to the apartment, except for me. Inside it, they had all the tools they needed to escape. Along with the bazooka, I had stashed an M1 carbine with three fully loaded ammunition clips, two Czech 9 mm semi-automatic pistols, one of the Tommy
guns, five loaded magazines, and five fragmentation grenades. In the closet with the weapons, I also left them their disguises for their escape: three Cuban militia uniforms, with olive green berets, and one rebel army uniform.

  They also had two rounds for the bazooka. The crowd was sure to panic as soon as the first hit its target and exploded. To further fuel the mayhem, though, more of our men in the crowd would throw their grenades in different directions. A few random pistol shots would only add to the confusion and send the crowd running wildly in every direction, with no idea where the first blast had come from.

  While that pandemonium played out in the plaza, the men in the apartment would slip on the uniforms and make their way down to the street. No one would suspect, or stop, a security official rushing through the bedlam. The men then had designated safe houses where they could discard their uniforms, don civilian clothes, and filter quietly back undercover.

  That was the escape plan. For them. But I knew that sooner or later Cuban intelligence would figure out where the bazooka blast had come from. They would find the discarded weapon in the abandoned apartment. And they would come looking for the person who lived there—my mother-in-law. Then they would come looking for me.

  So, the night before the planned assassination, after dropping off the bazooka, I had taken my mother-in-law to the coast to meet a waiting boat that would whisk us to safety, and exile, in the United States.

  Bishop had urged me to leave. He said things were getting hot. He said he had learned that Castro’s intelligence agents suspected me of subversive activity. That coincided with information I had gotten shortly before.

  Cuban politics and Cuban families could be—and still are—a complicated tangle of loyalties. One of my cousins, Guillermo Ruiz, held a ranking position in the regime’s intelligence agency, the DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia, in Spanish). He asked to see me one day.