“I’ll make a note of it. Thank you,” he said. “I’ve been using cortisone to relieve the suffering, but I know the side effects are dangerous.”
“It’s truly a challenging disease,” I said. “I would wish it on no one. But the truth is, dealing with asthma has taught me discipline and willpower.”
His face softened. El Che had been chilly and businesslike until then. Now, he smiled.
“Very true,” he said. “It is an extremely severe teacher, but the lessons are valuable.”
At that point, Guevara began to comment on aspects of the national economy. As he explained his theories and suggested the solutions he believed were necessary, I grew increasingly perplexed, and concerned. The suspicions that had begun nagging me when he was put in charge of the bank were now confirmed. El Che was renowned as a bold and daring man, but he was clearly illiterate in matters of economics.
I could tell he had a special interest in me. I just didn’t know what. He had a reputation as a frank man who liked telling the truth, but on this occasion, he continued to withhold his reasons for summoning me. He suggested that I should cooperate with the revolution.
“We need capable and trustworthy people,” he said. “You’re president of the accountants’ association. You enjoy good relations in economic circles. You have ample connections within banking circles. And you are a member of the inner circle of Julio Lobo’s organization.”
Now I understood. He wanted to use me in the regime’s efforts to confiscate banks, businesses, and industries. I thought it better to let him continue without letting on that I suspected his purpose.
“Veciana, you’re a young man,” he said. “The same age as me. You belong to the middle class, but you mustn’t forget your humble beginnings. Speaking frankly, I don’t understand how you use your knowledge and your capacity to enrich those who exploit the people, especially the poor.”
He paused, gauging my reaction. I made an effort to keep my face blank.
“I find it even more incomprehensible that you’re religious,” he continued. “Religion is the opiate of the masses. Its only purpose is to enslave the poor.”
Again, he waited for a response. Again, I gave none.
“I know,” he said. “My mother studied in a Catholic school. I lived the hypocrisy of the clergy. In this life, paradise is for the rich, and hell for the poor. The God that religions show us is an invention whose predetermined purpose is to dupe the gullible.
“It’s a myth,” he continued, gathering steam. “Life begins when we’re born and ends when we die. Humans live with the false illusion of eternal life after death. Religion lulls the poor so that they’ll accept their misery in this life. It’s a tool of the rich and powerful to pacify the masses.”
He continued this way for a while. I didn’t interrupt.
“Jesus Christ is not the Son of God,” he said. “He was merely a great revolutionary who wished to reform the corrupt society of his age. His first followers were valiant rebels who paid with their lives in defense of their ideals.”
He seemed finally to have exhausted his discourse. He waited for me to respond.
“Comandante,” I said, “I was raised a Catholic. I was taught to venerate a God who so loved the world he made himself flesh and bone. They made me believe God is an eternal being. I sought protection in his power.”
El Che listened intently.
“But,” I continued, “what I saw in the world around me made it difficult for me to believe in the God I had been taught about. I began to doubt. My faith faded, little by little, until none was left.
“After that, I only pretended to believe, to please my friends and relatives who still believed in that God. I came to the conclusion that blind faith is not wanting to accept the truth.”
He seemed even more interested now. The hint of a smile played at the corners of his mouth.
“In the end, I concluded that the only truth is reality,” I said.
More than two hours had gone by. El Che still hadn’t told me why he asked me to meet with him, or what he wanted to propose. Just when I thought he would, his phone rang. The call apparently came from the Presidential Palace.
“My apologies,” he said as he hung up. “I’m needed.”
He pulled out his appointment book and scanned his agenda. “Can we meet again in two days?” he asked. “At ten?”
“At ten in the morning?” I responded. “Of course.”
“Ten at night,” he said. “The days are busy, and long. The revolution’s needs demand it. But you are very important to me, and I would hate to put our meeting off longer than I have to.”
“Of course,” I said, hiding my dismay. “At ten, then, night after tomorrow. I’ll be here”
I arrived promptly for our second meeting. He didn’t. I waited in the bank’s lobby until he marched in an hour later. He made no apology for the delay, or for his dirty uniform. By the looks of it, I guessed it was the same one he had worn to our meeting two days before, and had worn ever since.
This time, El Che appeared tired. He went straight to the point.
“Veciana, I need a list of approximately one thousand accountants willing to volunteer their time for the revolution.”
“May I ask what kind of work, and for how long?”
“Let’s say for six months,” he said. “Administering enterprises.”
I inhaled. I was right. The regime intended to seize private enterprises throughout the country and put them under government control. The other thought that struck me almost simultaneously was about the peculiar absurdity, and irony, of the situation. It appeared that even if I had not been working actively in the underground against the new government, I seemed to be unable to avoid confrontations with it.
Castro had been in power little more than a year, and here I was again faced with having to say no to a request from a government official. And not just any official: El Che himself. I answered as diplomatically as possible.
“Comandante,” I began carefully, “you present an extremely difficult situation. I doubt that my colleagues would be able to assume even such an important responsibility for free. Their patriotism notwithstanding, the challenges of maintaining their families create inescapable demands.”
His face darkened as I continued.
“I’m afraid it would be impossible for me to find that number of accountants under those conditions,” I said.
His face hardened.
“I knew I couldn’t count on the accountants for help,” he said. His tone became icy. “How curious the contradictions of life, don’t you think? You, a common laborer’s son, a child of the working class who was poor himself until just a few years ago, surrenders his intelligence and his ability to that dinosaur, Julio Lobo. I can assure you that there is no room in the new socialist Cuba for your master, Julio Lobo. Nor any of his ilk.”
Yet again, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how clumsy the members of the regime were. How quickly they resorted to threats to force cooperation. They preferred intimidation to invitations.
“We are greatly interested in Julio Lobo’s extensive enterprises, Veciana,” he continued. “Your cooperation would be extremely valuable. Providing us with inside information about the true extent of his operations and how they are administered would be greatly appreciated.”
“It’s a very interesting proposition, Comandante,” I said. “Please allow me a few days to think about what I can do.”
“Good! Good!” he said. “It’s up to us all to do what we can for Cuba.”
“How right you are, Comandante,” I said. “How right you are.”
chapter 6
CHANGE OF STRATEGY
SOMETIMES YOU PLAY with fire and nothing happens. Sometimes horrible things do. After Bishop left, both did.
I became an irresponsible risk-taker. After the meeting with Che Guevara, I took it upon myself to warn the owners of the private banks about what I expected to be the imminent government confisca
tion plan. It was dangerous, I knew. The regime was tightening its grip, and to be accused as a counterrevolutionary meant a summary trial followed, almost surely, by a firing squad.
I went ahead anyway.
I stuck to the rules I’d been taught, never meeting with more than two at a time. I was as cautious as possible, never giving my real reason for wanting to see them until after we were behind closed doors. Only then would I explain my purpose, and offer my warning. Never stating where I had gained the information, I told them that I believed that the government was about to step up its program of nationalization.
The warning signs had come throughout the summer. They appeared, at first, to be part of a dangerous tit for tat between the United States and Cuba. As tensions escalated, Shell, Esso, and Texaco refused to refine shipments of Soviet oil arriving on the island. Cuba responded by nationalizing their oil refineries.
At the beginning of July, Cuba upped the ante, taking control of all U.S.-owned businesses and commercial property.
I warned the bankers that the same was coming for Cuban companies. Once it happened, I told them, it would be too late. I suggested that they leave the country and withdraw the funds they maintained in foreign accounts. From my perspective, it would serve a dual purpose. It was a way for them to avoid losing their capital, and at the same time, a means of denying those funds to the Cuban government.
They all listened intently, nodded sagely, and then ignored me. I’m sure they each had what they saw as very good reasons, which none of them shared with me. I’m sure that later, they each had their own regrets.
I probably should not have hoped, much less expected, that my actions would escape the attention of the government. I know that El Che found out in fairly short order. An indiscreet banker mentioned it to one of his employees. He didn’t know that the man’s son had fallen ardently under the sway of the revolutionary ideology and had then succeeded in convincing his father of its merits. The employee told El Che.
However, as Guevara himself had noted, “How curious the contradictions of life.”
For reasons I might never understand, El Che did nothing. Perhaps, since nothing had come of my suggestions to the bankers, he felt there was insufficient evidence to accuse me. Perhaps, since nothing had come of my telling them, he allowed me to remain free so that I could serve as an example of how futile counterrevolutionary efforts could be. Perhaps he took some sadistic pleasure in thinking that I would spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder, wondering when my arrest would come. Perhaps all of those reasons played a part.
I think it might’ve been something else, though. I honestly believe that in the course of my two lengthy meetings with El Che, we actually established a rapport. I think the fact that we both suffered from asthma, both knew its pains and woes, and both had become stronger because of it gave us something in common. I think, perhaps, my admission that I had lost my faith in religion showed that we shared other things, as well.
Whatever the reason, my actions were of absolutely no importance to Guevara. He didn’t lift a finger. El Che was never known for being generous with his adversaries. He was with me.
But, as I had anticipated, the government began nationalizing Cuban-owned enterprises in September. In mid-month, it seized sixteen cigar factories, fourteen cigarette plants, and twenty tobacco warehouses. Two days later, it nationalized all the U.S. banks on the island, including the First National City Bank of New York, First National Bank of Boston, and Chase Manhattan Bank.
Then came what I had warned the Cuban bankers about. On October 13, the government announced laws 890 and 891 authorizing the official takeover of all but two private banks and 382 industrial and commercial companies, along with all of their factories, warehouses, depots, property, and rights. The list included 105 sugar mills, eighteen distilleries, six alcoholic beverage companies, seven food processors, two oil and fats companies, three soap and perfume factories, five dairies, two chocolate factories, nine packaging manufacturers, sixty textile and clothing companies, three paint producers, three chemical companies, seven paper mills, six basic metallurgical companies, one flour mill, sixteen rice processors, forty-seven household goods warehouses, ten coffee roasters, three drug companies, thirteen department stores, eight railroad companies, one printer, eleven movie theater chains, nineteen construction companies, one electrical company, and thirteen maritime shippers.
I struck back that same month.
The run on banks had been successful. It taught me an effective formula. These were volatile times in Cuba. The people’s apprehension was palpable. The streets buzzed with gossip and rumors about what the government might do next. The anxiety they felt about their pesos losing value had given me the idea for the fake monetary law. Now many Cuban parents worried openly about their children, about what the government might be planning for them.
They saw worrisome signs that their kids were being indoctrinated. Every classroom now had a picture of Fidel Castro on the wall. By decree. Teachers taught the kids about the glory of the revolution, about the heroic sacrifices of the fighters in the Sierra Maestra, and how they freed the people from a brutal dictatorship. The basic elements of the history lessons were fact, but the form of the instruction exalted the “Supreme Leader” in distressing ways.
Parents grew nervous that their children were being brainwashed. They wondered why. They worried about the government’s intentions.
And they were primed to believe anything.
I went to an accountant I knew, Andrés Cayón, and told him what I had in mind.
“Andrés,” I said, “I want to bring out a law that says the government is going to terminate parental rights. That they’re going to take this authority away from mothers and fathers and assume legal custody of their children.”
“What will you accomplish with that?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, honestly. I didn’t. But I knew that good horror movies don’t scare people—they prompt them to use their imaginations. People scare themselves. That’s why they’re afraid of the dark. They don’t know what’s there, or what might happen. A law that said the government was going to take control of the children, but didn’t offer any specifics, would have the same effect.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “Let’s find out.”
We did it the same way as we had with the monetary law. Cayón got two people to draw up an official-looking piece of legislation. We printed thousands of copies and let the underground network filter it onto the streets.
The impact was enormous. It sparked “Operation Pedro Pan,” the exodus of more than fourteen thousand unaccompanied children sent out of Cuba by their parents with the help of the Catholic Church. Monsignor Bryan Walsh, the head of the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Miami, worked with the State Department to secure visas for the children and provided care for them when they arrived.
In his account of the program’s history, Walsh wrote,
Purported copies of a new decree circulated throughout underground circles. According to this decree (as rumored) “all children will remain with their parents until they are three years old, after which they must be entrusted for physical and mental education to the Organización de Circulos Infantiles” [state day-care centers]. Children from 3 to 10 would live in government dormitories in their home provinces and would be permitted to visit their parents “no less than two days a month.” Older children would be “assigned to the most appropriate place” and thus might never come home.
I did not tell Bishop of my plan before it was in motion. I didn’t have to. The CIA’s Radio Swan, under David Atlee Phillips’s direction, helped fan the flames. As soon as the Patria Potestad “law” began circulating, it began broadcasting a message: “Cuban mothers, don’t let them take your children away! The Revolutionary Government will take them away from you when they turn five and will keep them until they are eighteen.”
The message aired repeatedly in the coming days and weeks.
> An explosion of terrifying rumors followed. Walsh later enumerated them: “… that children were picked up off the streets and never seen again; that orphanages, such as ‘Casa Beneficencia,’ had been emptied and all the children sent to Russia for indoctrination; that in the town of Bayamo, fifty mothers had signed a pact to kill their children rather than hand them over to Castro; etc.”
Castro himself decried the law as a forgery but only helped further the rumors when he sent his own twelve-year-old son, Fidelito, to Russia. Then, when the government started the Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) and Pioneros (Rebel Pioneers) programs, it fed parents’ fears even more.
Pedro Pan began with a trickle. The first two kids, a brother and sister named Sixto and Vivian Aquino, arrived at Miami International Airport aboard Pan American World Airways flight 422 at 4:30 p.m. on December 26, 1960. By the time commercial flights between Havana and Miami stopped, ending the exodus in October 1962, the flow had become a flood, with hundreds of children arriving every month.
It had been named fancifully, a play on the tale of Peter Pan, who fled the world of grown-ups with his crew of Lost Boys for the freedom of Neverland. The sad parallels, however, went far beyond fiction. Many of the children that took part in the Pedro Pan exodus never saw their parents again. Mothers and fathers remained trapped on the island, denied exit visas by an increasingly capricious, and vindictive, Castro. Most of the children never saw their homeland again.
Most, though, went on to lead productive, even successful, lives in their new land. Their ranks include judges and journalists, singers, and at least one U.S. senator. Among them, too, was Miguel Bezos, the stepfather of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
It had not been my intention to divide families. I am sorry for those who were hurt. My goal had been only to deepen the discontent with the government, to sow more instability, and, hopefully, to create the conditions for its downfall. I succeeded in the first two; I failed in the last.
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