Trained to Kill

by Antonio Veciana

  “You were seen,” he said when we met. “At the American Embassy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  It was hard to read his intention. His tone betrayed no emotion. I couldn’t tell if I was being offered a warning by my cousin, or if I was about to be arrested by an official with DGI.

  “What were you doing there, Antonio?”

  “I went to see about visas,” I lied, “for friends.”

  He folded his hands on the desk.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I lied again. “Really.”

  He studied me for what seemed like a very long moment. Then he unfolded his hands and leaned toward me.

  “Then you are using the wrong entrance,” he said.

  I left thinking that I hadn’t really been lying. I had gone to the embassy looking for visas for friends. I just didn’t tell my cousin why.

  According to a CIA memo uncovered later: “(Deleted) to help in an assassination plot against Castro. Veciana asked for visas for ten relatives of the four men assigned to kill Castro and also requested four M1 rifles with adapters for grenades plus eight grenades. (Deleted) did not encourage Veciana and subsequently checked with (Deleted) who reported that Veciana had made similar ‘wild-eyed’ proposals to him.”

  I didn’t tell Bishop about the meeting with my cousin. But when he told me he had information that I was being watched, I knew he had very good sources in very good places.

  Still, my plan was to put my mother-in-law aboard the boat and go with her to Miami, where I expected my organizational skills would be needed in the ensuing chaos after Castro’s demise.

  When we got to where the boat was supposed to be waiting, though, we were told that the area was under surveillance. The captain refused to come to the dock. I knew I had to get my mother-in-law off the island, but I didn’t know how. She couldn’t swim.

  I could.

  Barely a sliver of moon angled overhead as I pushed her into the water and started swimming, towing her to the boat. I didn’t have to tell her to hold on tight. She had no choice. It was slow going, but finally we reached the boat bobbing on the waves in the near dark.

  The captain pulled my mother-in-law aboard, then put out his hand to help me out of the water. I hesitated.

  “Well?” he asked.

  I looked back at the lights on shore, thinking about what was due to occur at the Presidential Palace. This was a historic night, and although I would not be there to pull the trigger, I knew I had served my country, and my people. I had put the pieces in place to give them their freedom, to do with as they chose. Someday soon I hoped to return to Cuba and share it with them.

  I took the captain’s hand and climbed aboard.

  The captain had a small transistor radio. I kept listening as we pulled away from Cuba, as the lights of my homeland disappeared behind me. I listened the next day as we were spotted by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, and after we were taken aboard for questioning and processing.

  I heard nothing. I couldn’t understand. I kept asking myself how Castro could have been killed and there could be no word. I kept asking myself what could have happened.

  The CIA record says: “October 7, 1961, Veciana entered U.S. at Key West. Had passport, no visa. Came via small boat, received $100 a month refugee assistance.”

  It didn’t mention my involvement in the plot to kill Fidel and Dorticós.

  Yet, coincidentally—or not—the same day that the bazooka attack was to occur, President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, sent a top-secret memorandum to the secretary of state, with copies to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, and Richard Goodwin, director of the president’s Cuban Task Force. The memo clearly indicates that the Kennedy administration was preparing for Castro’s imminent removal from power.

  It read:

  Washington, October 5, 1961.

  SUBJECT: Cuba

  In accordance with General [Maxwell] Taylor’s instructions, I talked to Assistant Secretary Woodward yesterday about the requirement for the preparation of a contingency plan. He told me on the telephone he would be leaving for two weeks and, therefore, his Deputy, Wymberley Coerr, would have to take this project on.

  I then met with Mr. Coerr and outlined the requirement to him. I said that what was wanted was a plan against the contingency that Castro would in some way or other be removed from the Cuban scene. I said that my understanding was the terms of reference governing this plan should be quite broad; we agreed, for example, that the presence and positions of Raul and Che Guevara must be taken into account. We agreed that this was an exercise that should be under the direction of State with participation by Defense and CIA. I also pointed out to Mr. Coerr that Mr. Goodwin had been aware of this requirement.

  Mr. Coerr said he would get his people started on this right away. As to timing, I said that I did not understand that this was a crash program but that it should proceed with reasonable speed. He then set Monday as a target date for a first draft.

  …

  On the covert side, I talked to Tracy Barnes in CIA and asked that an up-to-date report be furnished as soon as possible on what is going on and what is being planned.

  Barnes was way ahead of him. The very next day, October 6, he sent a memorandum to Jake Esterline, Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, instructing him to prepare a contingency plan based on the assumption of the unexpected removal of Castro from power. The memo was titled: “What Would Happen If Castro Died?”

  The timing was curious, to say the least. Bishop knew fully about the planned assassination attempt with the bazooka. He had to. He had arranged for the apartment to conveniently come available. He had arranged for me to get the weapons I needed. What none of us knew yet was why it had failed.

  Much later, after he got out of Cuba and joined me in exile, Bernardo Paradela told me.

  The night of the planned attack, the people had filled the square as expected. Castro and Dorticós had stepped out onto the north terrace, as expected. What we had not anticipated, Paradela told me, were the lights.

  Whether it was a security measure, or merely an effort at affording dramatic stage lighting for the speech, we may never know. But as darkness fell on the plaza, Castro’s technicians turned on giant floodlights, like the searchlights aimed at the sky during the Academy Awards. Instead of aiming them at the sky, though, they shined them on the surrounding buildings and let the bright reflection off the building façades help illuminate the plaza.

  One or more of the lights shone directly on the building at No. 29 Avenida de las Misiones where the men with the bazooka waited. The bright light poured through the window into apartment 8-A. Even if they had been able to steady their aim without being spotted, and fired the shot without Castro being pulled to safety first, there was no way they could have escaped. Or so they thought.

  I don’t know. And I can’t say what I would have done if I had been there with them. Others might say they would have taken the chance anyway. Some might have. But I don’t know. It’s easy to be brave when you’re safe in your own home. It’s much harder when you have to decide if you’re willing to die for a cause.

  They decided they weren’t.

  It didn’t matter.

  Cuban General Fabián Escalante, who eventually rose to be the head of Cuban intelligence, later said that the government’s security forces had learned of the planned attack ahead of time. The night of October 5, he swarmed the area with his men. The hit men in the apartment spooked and fled.

  In some versions of the story, the security forces were only minutes behind them. They crashed into the apartment and found the weapons stashed in the closet, along with the uniforms. They had already arrested other members of the resistance, including one they claimed had connections to the CIA and had brought in the plans for the bazooka attack. However it happened, Cuban intelligence quickly uncovered the other weapon
stashes. They found the 60 mm mortar and the other Tommy guns, the two light Browning machine guns, and all twenty M1s. And, within days, they captured Paradela and the others.

  Maybe I was supposed to leave when I did. Escalante later said they had already identified me as the head of sabotage for the MRP, the People’s Revolutionary Movement, and already linked me to David Atlee Phillips and the CIA.

  Maybe Escalante was telling the truth. Just days after I arrived in the United States, Cuban intelligence arrested Reynold González, the head of the MRP. I didn’t know it when it happened. All I knew was that the attempt to kill Castro had failed.

  But I would try again.

  chapter 2

  AN UNLIKELY TERRORIST

  I WAS AN unlikely terrorist. I was skinny, asthmatic, and plagued with insecurities.

  The last came as a consequence of the first two, and of my experiences growing up.

  I was born on the cusp of the Great Depression. Many think of this as an American event. It wasn’t. It was global. As the saying goes, “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.”

  This time, America had pneumonia.

  A year and a day before I was born, Pan Am made its first international flight, from Key West to Havana. It was symbolic. We had arrived. We were connected through the most modern technology to our neighbor, friend, and benefactor to the north, heralding our heyday.

  Eleven days after my first birthday, the New York stock market crashed.

  Then, like a tidal wave rushing out from the epicenter of a great tremor, the effects of Black Tuesday thundered around the world. It broke economies and broke people. Cuba, which had prospered magnificently thanks to its privileged relationship with the United States, now crumbled along with it.

  The cornerstone of our island economy, the sugar industry, collapsed. Between 1929 and 1932, the price of sugar dropped from roughly two cents a pound to barely half a cent. Together, the “big four”—sugar, tobacco, cigars, and fruit—brought in $363 million to the Cuban economy the year I was born. After the depression hit, prices dropped so much that even though Cuba exported three-fourths as much in goods, it brought in barely one-sixth as much revenue, just $57 million.

  The result was a downturn as devastating, or worse, as what happened in the United States. It was, in short, a time of hardship, hunger, and uncertainty. Families lived together because that’s what they could afford. Ours was no different. We lived together with my uncles and aunts and cousins—thirteen of us in all—on our little finquita. Calling it a farm, even a “little farm,” is perhaps a bit too generous. It was a plot of land in what is now one of the most populated neighborhoods in Havana.

  My neighborhood was, and is, known as La Víbora. It means “the viper.” But there’s nothing sinister to the name. Supposedly it comes from the 1700s, when La Víbora was a way station where caravans changed horses on the long trip between Güines and Havana. It was also home to a pharmacy, which identified itself by displaying a medical caduceus, with the twin serpents intertwined. The easy reference to the spot, or so the story goes, was as la parada de la víbora, or “the viper stop.”

  By the time I came along, La Víbora was no longer a separate place from Havana. It kept its uniquely irregular sloping streets and the staircases linking the sidewalks along the thoroughfares, but the one-time highway stop had been absorbed into the capital city much the way New York City swallowed up once-detached areas like the Bronx and Greenwich Village.

  My parents were immigrants from Spain who arrived in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. They met on the island and were married. I was their only child. I was ugly and sickly, but I was their world.

  My father, a bricklayer, made 6.50 a day. Pesos, not dollars. When he could find work. Often enough, there was none to be found. He might work a couple of weeks, then be off for several more, waiting for the next job. He tried to hide it, but I could feel his anxiety as the desperate, idle days of no work and no income stretched into weeks.

  Eating meat in Cuba at that time was a privilege. Still, my parents made sure I ate what they could not afford for themselves, once a week. They didn’t. They worried about my health. I was frail, skeletally thin, and seized by recurring bouts of asthma that left me wheezing and fighting for air. There was no medicine to be had. So they did without, and my mother served me meat every week, to strengthen me.

  It didn’t stop the asthma. The attacks came with frightening and exhausting frequency, leaving me gasping for breath. To alleviate the symptoms, my father would take me down to the Malecón, Havana’s famous seawall. We would look out across the moonlight splintering on the waves, and I would suck in the salt air. The sea breeze was the best remedy. My airways opened and my rasping eased as the warm, moist air soothed my inflamed passages.

  When I was nine, my life changed. By then, Cuba had already seen its first dictator since gaining its independence, and its first coup. Fulgencio Batista, who would come to be known as the man who lost Cuba to Castro, led the “Revolt of the Sergeants” as I was turning five and held on to power through a series of puppet presidents as Cuba crawled out of the doldrums of the Great Depression. This was all a backdrop to my childhood, to which I, like most children, remained oblivious. I was as ignorant about politics and presidents as I was about the concept of scarcity—in the same way that a fish is unaware that it lives in the sea. It was my world. I knew no other. I played with my cousins and friends and, when I was old enough, went to school. And that is how my life changed.

  While my neighborhood friends went to public school, my mother decided she wanted something different for me. The public schools in Havana weren’t very good. But La Víbora was home to one of the most respected private institutions on the island. The Colegio Champagnat–Hermanos Maristas was part of the worldwide network of schools established and operated by the Catholic order of Marist Brothers. Ours, like many, was named after the order’s founder, St. Marcellin Champagnat, and provided schooling from pre-school to pre-university.

  It also provided—and demanded—religious training in the Catholic tradition. That meant going to mass every day, from 8:00 to 8:30 a.m., followed by a half hour of catechism.

  The school was exceptional, but it was also private, and, to my family’s humble means, expensive. My mother, however, would not be dissuaded. She went after the school’s administrators with the same single-minded determination that would mark me. The school wanted six pesos a month for tuition. My mother argued for three months until they finally agreed, perhaps just to be free of her, to reduce it to four.

  And so, starting in the third grade, I began a life of discipline that would mark me forever.

  When Castro took over, the Communists closed the school. They looted its contents and took the teachers’ personal property. They stripped away the religious trappings and turned the school into a training ground for the “new men and women” of the Revolution.

  It remained, however, a massive and stately building, with great Doric columns framing the entrance and lining the wings surrounding the grand center courtyard. It was, to me, a majestic place, a true institution of learning and faith, standing regally on a steeply slanting road overlooking the city stretching out below. It was a place that seemed to demand respect, and that is what I gave it.

  Every morning, as I said, we gathered in the large and imposing chapel for morning mass. It stretched past rows and rows of dark pews to the altar and its ornately decorated apse with a life-sized Christ on a crucifix rising above it all. As I sat pressed in among the other students, the reverberating thrum of the priest’s voice seemed like heaven’s thunder, inspiring awe and obedience.

  The brothers taught us the practice of “the treasure.” Every week we wrote down the sacrifices that we had made during the days before. I would only eat half of my desert, or not go out at playtime. It taught me discipline. Every week, I wanted to be the one deemed “the most religious.” Nearly every week, I was. And later, when I was older, I
was the only Marist selected as one of the directors of the National Federation of Cuban Catholic Youth. It was, as its name implied, a union of young faithful, calling on us to partake in a life of intense spirituality, prayer, and retreats. I’m sure it’s only a coincidence that it was founded the year of my birth, with a motto that might have been my own: “Faith, Study, and Action.”

  Still, it seems appropriate to note here that later in my life, after Castro came to power, I lost my faith—not in God, but in religion. I stayed home and meditated, practicing my faith that way. But I stopped believing in religion.

  While I was in school, though, I took pride in being more religious than my schoolmates. I found pleasure in adhering to the rules and rigid order imposed by the brothers.

  I fit right in. I was a timid youth, incapable of overstepping the bounds adults set for me. I was more inclined to sacrifice diversion for my studies or work. I loved sports, but my asthma prevented me from participating. So I poured myself into my schooling, striving continually to be not only the favorite among the brothers because of my dedication to religion, but also to be the best among my peers academically. Especially in math. I discovered I had a talent for numbers and a knack for organization. Together, those skills served me well. They led me to a career in accounting and management and, in what was then a completely unforeseen fashion, in my anti-Castro efforts.

  Despite that, I felt that my classmates looked down on me. They called me a laborer’s son—effectively, a commoner, someone less worthy who had somehow managed to slip past the guards and into a classroom where he didn’t belong.

  I later realized that the combination of the asthma that kept me from joining in any strenuous physical activities with the other boys, the sense that I was viewed as not being good enough, and the strict demands of my school gave me an inferiority complex that pursued me into adulthood.

  My constant struggle with illness, though, ended up strengthening me. My unbreakable will came as the result of that long and sometimes agonizing fight to achieve health. It taught me I should never say never. Especially when, at seventeen, my asthma miraculously disappeared.