Shortly after, I graduated from the Marist school and enrolled in the school of business at the University of Havana. The university had a long history of strident student political activity, and political violence. Students had risen up in rebellion against President Gerardo Machado and his repressive government. Rival political gangs regularly carried guns and didn’t hesitate to use them. While I was there, it was no different. And while I was there, so was Fidel. He studied law. I studied accounting. I knew him, but we moved in different circles. He was very aggressive, with strong political aims, even then, and he always surrounded himself with people who were prone to violence.
I did not. I studied. And I fell in love. We met at a party. I was twenty. She wasn’t yet fifteen, but she looked twenty. Not just her body, but her face, and her demeanor.
The party was at her cousin’s house. The instant I saw her, I was taken with her. I was afraid to speak to her, but I did. Her name, she told me, was Sira. She had been born in Sitges, Spain, a beach town near Barcelona. Her father had died, and her mother had brought her and her sister to Cuba. They had been there less than five years when we met.
After that, we started to go out. In 1953, she became my wife. We had five children and stayed together for nearly fifty years, until she died in 2002. She was an exceptional wife and a sensational mother. I knew she would be even before I married her.
I had taken a position as an accountant with the architectural firm of Arrellano and Batista while Sira and I were dating. I was still studying at the university when I started, dividing my time between my classes at the university’s campus in the Vedado district and the firm’s office across town, near the famed Bodeguita del Medio restaurant. She never complained about the long hours I spent away from her. Not then, nor later, when the hours I neglected her grew even longer, while I was preparing for a position at the National Bank. Nor later, when my anti-Castro work would take me away from her for days or even weeks at a time.
We were betrothed but not yet married when I graduated from the university and left the architects’ office to take a job at the relatively new Banco de Fomento Agrícola e Industrial de Cuba, the Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank. It meant a promotion and a jump in salary of more than a third over what I was making.
BANFAIC’s purpose was simple. Cuba, at that point, existed largely as a sugar economy. BANFAIC was created to facilitate credit to non-sugar agriculture and industries and, thereby, to stimulate economic diversity and expansion. Rural credit associations in various parts of the island served as the bank’s affiliates, offering low-cost credit for a wide range of endeavors.
When Batista took over in 1952, he saw its potential immediately. At the time, BANFAIC was a little over a year old. It held a portfolio of approximately $720,000 in outstanding loans. In the year that I was there, that amount exploded, to $5 million.
The impact of the increased activity soon became obvious. The total area of land planted with rice nearly doubled, and output shot up over 150 percent. Potatoes, dairy products, beans, tomatoes, and other food commodities also received assistance.
It wasn’t just a farm assistance plan, by any means. With an eye on increasing tourism (and, surely, currying favor with Batista’s casino-running mobster friends), funds went to developing hotels. Among the projects, for example, was the remodeling of the jewel of Havana’s accommodations, the Hotel Nacional.
Batista had political aims, naturally. He wanted to win over the populace, and what better way to gain the support of a poor and hungry people than by increasing food production and creating jobs?
But all was not well under Batista. Corruption and graft kept much of the population in abject poverty. Horrible slums—row upon row of decrepit shanties thrown together from whatever scraps their owners could cobble together—swelled within sight of the very same opulent hotels and casinos that were supposed to boost the economy and improve living conditions.
When Sira and I first married, Batista had returned to the presidency. He had been elected once before, in 1940, and peacefully relinquished the reins of power when his term ended. In 1952, he ran again. When it was clear that he was going to lose, some three months before the election, he staged a coup d’état, ousting then-President Carlos Prío Socarrás, and took the presidency by force.
The repression grew from there. So did the resistance. Me included.
I had graduated with my CPA and started work when Batista seized power. But I have a bit of a rebellious spirit in me. His blatant disregard for our country’s Constitution and the rule of democracy inspired me. I, like so many others of my generation, became involved in the resistance movements against Batista.
Fidel took up arms. But he needed money to buy food and weapons and bullets. That is how I could help. I founded a magazine for accountants and worked with the professional groups to sell bonds to raise money for the anti-Batista fighters. With the help of other bank employees, we funneled money under the noses of the government’s overseers to finance the Second National Front of Escambray. The rebels attacked from their mountain strongholds. I worked against Batista from within the system, lending both clandestine and, on at least one very public occasion, overt support.
That incident came, indirectly perhaps, as a result of Castro—because of the rebel attack he led against Batista’s army at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago.
Sira and I were married May 15, 1953. My best man was Boris Luis Santa Coloma. Two months later, he was dead.
Boris and I were born just weeks apart but didn’t meet until we enrolled at the University of Havana. Both of us majored in business or, as it was called in the school at the time, commercial sciences. We became fast friends, and so when the time came, it seemed only natural that it would be he whom I would ask to stand as my groomsman as I took Sira’s hand in marriage. I knew Boris was a man of honor, and I was honored to have him by my side.
I also knew he was vocally opposed to Batista. He was active in the student movement aimed at ousting Batista, and on July 26, he joined with Fidel in the attack on Moncada. It began at 6 a.m. and quickly turned into a disaster. When it became obvious that the assault had failed, Castro ordered the 135 or so rebel fighters to retreat.
From what we were told afterward, Boris went into the hospital behind the barracks to search out other members of the rebel force who had been sent to take it. He never made it back. He was captured, tortured, and killed. Photographs released afterward showed his shirtless, bullet-riddled body lying on a tile floor. His boyish face, with the thin wisp of mustache he had grown before the wedding, was smeared with blood. He was twenty-four.
I was stunned, and angry. I seethed for a year, as things worsened in Cuba. On the anniversary of his death, I organized a memorial service in Boris’s honor at the university. I knew the risk. Batista’s police were thugs and assassins who wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone they saw as an enemy—or anyone else for that matter. And Batista unleashed them against whomever he pleased.
Standing up publicly to pay my respects to someone who had been involved in the first armed uprising against Batista would surely be seen as opposition to him. It had the very real potential of marking me as an enemy of the government. And that, in Batista’s Cuba, could surely bring repercussions. Possibly lethal ones.
I didn’t care. One of my core personality traits is a strong sense of loyalty and responsibility. So, on July 26, 1954, I stood before a group of Boris’s friends, students, activists, and, I’m sure, Batista’s undercover watchdogs and said that I was proud to have known him, and proud of him.
Curiously, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, nothing happened. No one threatened me. No one even came to question me. In fact, despite the fears others close to me surely felt, I continued without any difficulties at my job in the most important government bank on the island.
The year of the Moncada assault was my last year with BANFAIC. I spent six months studying and preparing myself to be accepted for a posit
ion at the Banco Nacional—in effect, Cuba’s Federal Reserve. Sira again proved herself to be the ideal wife and partner. We were newly married, but she never complained as I filled all my waking moments outside of my full-time work by burying myself in books and study.
I can never repay her devotion, nor the time I stole from our new marriage, but some small reward came at the end of that half-year. I was accepted as a bank inspector at the Banco Nacional as 1953 came to a close. I was twenty-five years old. It was a prestigious position, especially for someone so young, and it brought a hefty increase in salary. Our income shot from three hundred pesos per month to five hundred.
That same year also saw a massive surge in Batista’s oppression, and in the opposition to him. After Moncada, more organizations joined with what was now known as the July 26 Movement. It was no longer just students, political opponents, and the disenfranchised. Now support involved people from all walks of life—lawyers, doctors, and, like me, accountants.
It was a long, frustrating, and bloody fight. Batista responded to the opposition against him with increasing brutality. He suspended constitutional protections and strengthened the oppressive apparatus. Eventually, he closed the university and turned the country into a police state. Young men my age were tortured and publicly executed, left hanging from lampposts throughout the city as a warning to others.
In an often-quoted John F. Kennedy speech, made twelve days before my thirty-second birthday and while he was still a young senator campaigning for the White House, Kennedy put the number murdered by Batista’s forces at twenty thousand in the seven years of his stolen presidency.
It was, the young senator noted, “a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars.” Batista, Kennedy continued, “turned democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty…. Yet, our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror.”
They were dark days for Cuba. And it was hardly limited to Havana. The oppression spread across the island, in cities and villages alike. As the opposition grew, Batista’s brutality escalated. “His men were out to stamp out opposition and end a revolution,” the Associated Press reported. “Civil rights meant nothing in Cuba …”
The number of deaths attributed to members of Batista’s regime was staggering, and hardly restricted to Havana alone. “One man alone, Maj. Jesus Sosa Blanco, was accused of responsibility for 108 victims,” according to the AP. Witnesses later testified that five of Sosa’s soldiers executed nineteen villagers suspected of supporting Castro’s rebels, including nine members of a single family lined up and machine-gunned together.
A priest sent out to search for four university students tortured and hanged just four days before Batista abandoned the island said he found their bodies “heaped in a mound and covered by about four inches of dirt.” During the search, he said, he discovered other mounds “containing groups of 30, 50 and 80, all victims apparently of the inhuman repression at Pinar del Rio …”
Castro, and the July 26 Movement, only grew stronger. They burned sugar cane fields, destroyed mills. They attacked the Belot oil refinery and even, once, entered the Banco Nacional and took a group of employees hostage. I was no longer with the bank when it happened. The rebels didn’t hurt anyone, but they set a fire and burned the previous day’s checks and bank drafts.
Despite having American-supplied planes and weapons, Batista’s military showed itself to be dismally ineffective against the rebels in the Sierra Maestra and Escambray. By the end of 1958, the “Bearded Ones,” as the scruffy revolutionaries came to be known, had defeated Batista’s military in a series of battles and were advancing steadily through Santa Clara province, west of Havana.
The reign of terror ended January 1, 1959. Batista fled the country.
We soon learned the truth behind the old saying: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”
chapter 3
THE BEARDED ONES
WHEN FIDEL CASTRO came to power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, David Atlee Phillips was already there.
In fact, the man who just months later would introduce himself to me as Maurice Bishop takes credit as “the first American intelligence source in Cuba to report the departure of Batista.” In the somewhat fanciful memoir Phillips penned of his CIA exploits after retirement, The Night Watch, he wrote:
Helen [his wife at the time] and I had been at a New Year’s Eve party, bidding adios to 1958, and, returning home, we had a final glass of champagne while relaxing in lawn chairs outside. A large airplane flew over the house about 4 a.m. I telephoned my case officer.
“Batista just flew into exile,” I said.
“Are you drunk?” he asked.
“Feeling okay,” I admitted. “But I know there are no scheduled air flights in Cuba at four in the morning. And a commercial airliner just took off and headed out over the ocean. If Batista is not aboard I’ll eat your sombrero.”
Bishop was right, of course, and when Fidel Castro marched into Havana seven days later, he claimed to be among the crowds welcoming the conquering hero. He might’ve been glad to see Batista’s brutality at an end, but he had other, more personal, reasons as well. After serving briefly in a CIA posting in the Cuban capital a few years earlier, the man I knew as Bishop had recently resigned from the agency and returned to the island as a private businessman, with a plan.
David Atlee Phillips had a colorful background. A World War II vet with a smooth radio announcer’s voice and dreams of acting, Phillips had taken the earnings from a play he wrote about his experiences in a German prisoner-of-war camp and moved his young family to Chile in 1948. He bought an English-language newspaper and some printing equipment. That caught the attention of the local CIA station chief, and, two years after his arrival in Santiago, Phillips began his career with the agency as a part-time operative.
Over the following decade, he went on to serve in Washington, D.C., Guatemala, Havana, and Beirut. In late 1958, he became convinced that Fidel Castro would win and Batista would be deposed. The change in government, he felt, would create a need for a Spanish-speaking American public relations firm that could act as a bridge to smooth connections with the incoming administration.
So, according to his account of events, Phillips resigned from the CIA, relocated his family back to Havana, and established his new business, David A. Phillips Associates. He might have resigned officially, but he didn’t quit entirely. In his own words, he offered to help the CIA’s Havana chief of station in a part-time capacity. And that is how we came to meet.
I had left the Banco Nacional before Fidel declared victory. I went to work for Julio Lobo, the richest man in Cuba. Lobo was Cuba’s first millionaire and, at the time of the revolution, its richest man. His personal fortune was so immense, people in Havana and Miami still wistfully exclaim, “To be as rich as Julio Lobo!”
Born in Venezuela, Lobo was, in his time, considered to be the most powerful sugar broker in the world. He was much more than that. In 1959, his holdings reportedly included fourteen sugar mills—six he owned outright; he held the controlling interest in eight more—and more than three hundred thousand acres of surrounding sugar cane fields and land. In addition, he owned 23 percent of the shares in the giant U.S.-owned West Indies Sugar Corp., twenty sugar warehouses, an insurance company, a telegraph and telephone company, a shipping line with four subsidiaries, an oil company, three refineries, and an airline.
He also owned, as the writer John Paul Rathbone noted in The Sugar King of Havana, “the largest collection of Napoleonic memorabilia outside France.” It included, among other things, the emperor’s death mask and one of his teeth. His personal art collection included works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Goya, Diego Rivera, and Salvador Dalí.
And he owned a bank, the Banco Financiero, with more than $12 million in deposits, t
hirteen branches, and eighty-six employees—including, beginning in 1958, me. I was his vice president and comptroller. I worked in the bank’s main building, a stunning colonial classic of solid stone block standing formidably on a corner of Obispo Street, in the heart of Old Havana.
Lobo paid me what was then the lofty sum of seven hundred and fifty pesos a month—a full 50 percent more than my previous job at the Banco Nacional had paid. It was a lot to me, but surely nothing to Cuba’s so-called “Sugar King,” estimated to be worth more than $200 million. Then. That would equal more than $5 billion today.
The Banco Financiero was exactly what its name suggested: a finance bank, a lending bank that helped fund the great expansion of private investment in Cuba during the 1950s. Those were heady days in Havana. Tourism was booming. The island became the destination of choice for Americans looking for a sunny, exotic getaway that was closer than Las Vegas was from the Eastern seaboard cities, with their gloomy wintertimes.
Havana first gained its notoriety as a playground for the rich in the Roaring Twenties, but the prosperous years after World War II brought a new rush of entertainment-hungry tourists from the American middle class. It was cheap, warm, and welcoming, with unfettered gambling and liberal laws. American investors, too, took notice. The history books give the most attention to mobsters like Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Santo Trafficante, Jr., but the mafia bosses were hardly the only ones to seek development opportunities in Cuba.
By the time I went to work at the Banco Financiero, “U.S. financial interests included 90 percent of Cuban mines, 80 percent of its public utilities, 50 percent of its railways, 40 percent of its sugar production and 25 percent of its bank deposits—some $1 billion in total,” according to Smithsonian magazine.
Trained to Kill Page 4