By 1967, I had expanded into operating the concessions at Hiram Bithorn Stadium, an eighteen-thousand-seat open-air facility that served as San Juan’s principal venue for everything from major league baseball and wrestling matches to concerts. The beer, food, and soda sales I controlled yielded $10,000 a month.
Near the end of that year, however, it came to an end.
I got an urgent message from Bishop. The Communists had discovered my intelligence activities, he said. He feared they would kidnap me and try to pry secrets out of me. According to his sources, Bishop said, one of my moles had been discovered and might have divulged my name. Cuba had ordered the head of the notoriously violent Los Macheteros to have me watched. They had a reputation for bombings, bank robberies, and murder. Kidnapping would be one of their lesser crimes.
I began carrying a gun and always went around in the company of another person, to make an abduction more difficult. Cuba found another way.
Funny, the way memory works. I remember the day distinctly, a clear and sunny Saturday, under a great blue sky. I don’t remember the date.
There was a wrestling match coming up that evening, so I went to the stadium early to make sure everything would be ready for that night. I came through the ticket gate and into the big lobby where the concession stands stood. On one side there were large freezers where we kept our beer and food. We handed it out from there to the independent vendors, who would sell it and bring back our profits.
On the other side lay the way to the locker rooms, where the baseball players and wrestlers changed before and after events.
The locker room was divided into two parts. You came through one door into the first section. Then there was another door, leading to the room where the lockers were. That’s where the athletes changed clothes. The wrestling match was still hours away, so the locker room was empty.
I was directing work at the concession stand when a stylishly dressed young woman came up to me.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Mr. Veciana?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“You’re needed in the locker room,” she said. “They need to see you.”
She was very friendly and very polite, but I didn’t recognize her.
“Who?”
“Ramón,” she said. “He said it’s urgent.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said. Ramón was the code name for one of my “assets,” a way for me to know that it was really him sending the message. If he needed me urgently, it had to be important.
I put one of my employees in charge of the concession stand and headed into the locker room. What happened next might have been plain luck, or a miracle.
I stepped through the first door and was just about to push open the second one when a bomb went off inside the main locker area. The blast threw me back and away from the inner door. I landed on my back on the floor, staring at the closed locker room door, too stunned to move. That turned out to be another piece of luck. About fifteen seconds after the first explosion, a second bomb went off. It was clearly timed to finish the job.
If I had been on the other side of the second door, inside the locker room, it probably would have. The second one seemed more powerful than the first. It tore the lockers to shreds and turned chunks into shrapnel that left gaping holes in the walls. The second door leaned off its broken hinges. The heat from the blast started a fire. I continued to lie there, dazed but, astonishingly, uninjured, as smoke rolled out and over me and began to fill the room.
One of my workers found me there. He had come running at the sound of the blast. Now he lifted me up and led me out. I refused to go to the hospital. I just wanted to go home.
Later, a friend told me, “You’ve got more lives than a street cat.”
I laughed, but in my heart I knew that even street cats don’t live forever. I had been lucky, but I knew they would try again. So did Bishop.
He came to see me a short time later. He said what we both knew.
“You need to leave Puerto Rico.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I’ll go back to Miami. I’ll be with my family there.”
“Or,” Bishop said, “you could try someplace new. South America.”
“Doing what?”
“I have something in mind I think will be good for both of us.”
chapter 8
THE MYTH OF EL CHE
THERE WAS AN opening, Bishop said, in Bolivia. Working for the U.S. government. It meant going back to my banking roots, as an economic consultant for the Bolivians. It paid what was then a prodigiously satisfactory salary—$30,000 a year—in a place where a couple of hundred dollars a month put a family in the upper class.
It seemed perfect. It would take me away from Puerto Rico and reunite me with my family, in a place where we all could live comfortably once again.
It was also a place, I would soon find out, that would lead me to cross paths with Che Guevara once again and give me a second chance to kill Fidel.
When Bishop first suggested it, though, I wasn’t so sure.
“Bolivia?”
“Yes, Bolivia,” he said. “I think you’d be perfect for the job.”
“Bolivia?”
He must have read the look on my face. I’m sure it looked something like shock, disappointment, or bewilderment. Maybe all three.
“Look,” he said. “They want to meet you. Go for the interviews, see what you think. I think you might be surprised.”
“What about the travel restrictions?” I asked. “I’m still not supposed to leave Dade County.”
“That hasn’t stopped you before.”
“Yes,” I said, “but flying around the United States is one thing. This …”
“It won’t be a problem,” Bishop said. “Believe me.”
He was right again. I arrived at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz without any trouble, got through the interviews easily, and had a chance to look around the city a little bit, too, before leaving. It was a totally different world for me, and breathtaking—in more ways than one.
La Paz is strikingly picturesque. It rises from a canyon in the wide Altiplano of the Andes, spreading like moss over the surrounding slopes. It is one of South America’s oldest cities and, at the time, was Bolivia’s largest. It is also one of the continent’s most culturally diverse, with three official languages—Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish—reflecting its ancient roots. Descendants of the Incas still travel the city on foot with babies slung in colorful blanket wraps called aguayos, draped in their distinctive billowing skirts and bowler hats.
It’s also one of the highest cities in the world. A fact especially noticeable to someone like me, who lived his entire life in places where the ocean waves lapped the shore. The thin air at thirteen thousand feet in La Paz left me gasping and dizzy. Everyone told me to rest as much as possible and assured me that I’d get used to it. But they didn’t warn me that the change in altitude would affect me in both directions and that I’d feel uncomfortably ill on my return to Miami, as well.
I told Sira, my wife, “Look, compared with here, we’d be going to a country that’s fifty years behind.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. There’s no television.”
That made her pause a moment, I could tell. It was only 1968; television wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today. But between living in Miami and Puerto Rico, it was already somewhat hard to imagine life without it. There was even television in Cuba—from before the kids were born. Tony was now turning thirteen; Ana, twelve; and Victoria, ten.
“That’s OK,” she said. “We should go. I prefer for you to be at ease, and safe, there than to be here and never come home.”
“What about the kids?” I asked. “It’s going to be quite a change.”
“They’ll be fine. We’ve moved before,” she said. “It’s a chance for us to be together as a family.”
I STILL DIDN’T say yes to the job right away. The salary and the benefits
were alluringly attractive; the position, prestigious. I would be working out of an office in the U.S. Embassy itself, representing the American government as an official USAID advisor to Bolivia’s Central Bank—effectively, its Federal Reserve.
It would be a triumphant return to my banking roots, in an arguably even higher and more responsible position than I had held working for Julio Lobo in Cuba. I had certainly gone far afield of that in the interim. When I tallied all the guns, bullets, boats, fuel, and food I had purchased for my exile warriors, my current life seemed a barely distant cousin to those earlier accounting days.
And that was what troubled me.
It seemed odd that a federal agency would hire me for such a prominent and important position after such a gap. I hadn’t done anything close to certified public accounting, much less economic analysis or banking administration, in seven years. It seemed even odder that my government employers hadn’t done a background check. Because, surely, if they had, they would have discovered that I was a known terrorist. I had founded an organization that had launched repeated paramilitary attacks on British, Cuban, and Soviet ships and personnel, and been condemned publicly for it by the United States government.
“I can’t imagine they would hire me,” I told Bishop.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
HE WAS RIGHT again. I was hired formally in April 1968 and given airplane tickets for the entire family, with all our moving expenses paid.
Funny thing, though—I don’t remember ever signing any employment papers. And later, when House Assassinations Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi looked into my past, he couldn’t find any employment papers I had signed either. He found proof I had worked at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, as I said I had, doing what I said I had been hired to do. But no official employment records signed by me.
LA PAZ WAS extraordinarily cheap to live in, compared to Miami or San Juan. Especially making what would be equivalent to, as this book is being written, almost $210,000 a year.
We lived like royalty. We rented a large five-bedroom house in the posh Plaza Abaroa district, with three servants. One cooked. One cleaned. One helped with the children. Sira paid them $15 a month. And people we got to know there asked her, “Sira, why do you pay your servants so much?”
We traveled often, ate well, and enjoyed life. The kids went to school with the children of wealthy Bolivians and government officials, and it was just a ten-minute cab ride to work. It cost forty cents.
My job, as an advisor to the Central Bank, was to examine the country’s banking system, auditing and accounting methods, and other matters related to sound fiscal practices. I was amazed. Television wasn’t the only thing missing in the country’s development.
I was accustomed to life in Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States. Compared to banking as I knew it, the Bolivian system was so backward, so behind the times. The Bolivians’ rules of accounting, looked at through the lens of what were then current standard accepted practices, were archaic.
I made manuals. I created tutorials. I went with my Bolivian associates as they performed audits at banks in cities large and small throughout the country, making suggestions and trying to educate them in modern methods everywhere we went. I got to know the entire country.
Bolivia’s general economic policy was no better. When I arrived in Bolivia, a ten-thousand-peso bill was worth, maybe, ten. They finally took the extra zeros off. But when I got there, if you wanted to buy something beyond a pack of gum, you could easily be counting into the millions. People on the street would have to pull out big fat rolls and peel off bills to buy groceries. And all the transactions were done in cash. Only the incredibly large and extremely important businesses didn’t do transactions with wads of bills. They would pay in checks. Everybody else paid cash. It didn’t matter if they were paying for cigarettes or a sofa. Cash.
Working with the Central Bank put me in a position to develop extensive relationships with tremendously influential members of the business community. In the government, too. High-level people. Working for the American Embassy was very important.
It also allowed me the freedom to do what Bishop had really put me there for. USAID is just a front for the CIA. It put people like me in positions where they had a good reason to be asking a lot of questions, learning a lot about the internal workings of foreign governments and corporations, and developing valuable connections.
So, in my job with the embassy and the Central Bank, I came and went as I pleased. I had no supervisor. I worked, for the four years I was there, without ever having to tell anyone what I was doing. When I had to go to Peru, or Chile, or wherever it might be, I just went. And when Bishop called me at home one day and asked me to meet him in Lima, I got on a plane.
“We’ve got a Guevara problem,” he said.
“But he’s dead,” I said.
“Only his body,” Bishop hissed.
Che had died the previous October, killed in Bolivia while trying to spark a “people’s revolution.” Instead of that being the end, though, Che was becoming more powerful. The tales of his exploits, his bravado, and his resolve were making him larger than life. He was becoming the stuff of legend. And that, Bishop and I both knew, was dangerous. That would help Communists do with him in death what he had not been able to do in life: win.
By any objective evaluation, Che was a failure. His time as head of Cuba’s National Bank and its ministry of industries was a total fiasco. His ineptitude forced his removal. His dream of emancipating the developing nations of Africa ended in ruinous defeat. His vision of liberating the poor countries of South America proved no less calamitous. His effort in Bolivia was moving precipitously toward the same sorry end, when he met his own.
My job was to kill the myth of El Che. Or at least to stop it from growing.
The question was how.
Bishop was an expert in propaganda. He had taught me the power of misinformation. As I had proven with my fake monetary and parental rights “laws,” rumors and gossip can be tremendously potent—if people don’t know the truth.
Maybe, I thought, El Che could tell them.
WE KNEW THAT Che had arrived in Bolivia almost a year before his death. On November 3, 1966, to be exact, on a flight from Uruguay. He had shaved off his famous beard, along with much of his hair. He dyed what was left gray and slipped through customs using a fictitious name.
He came to spread Cuba’s revolution.
It didn’t work. Not just because he died. It was failing long before that. It failed because he had overlooked a key factor: this wasn’t Cuba.
The same thing had happened in Africa. As he described it in his Congo Diary, he had gone there in early 1965 with the same vision. The continent seemed ripe for revolution, in his view, with rampant poverty and an oppressed people held down by colonial rule.
He was right that they opposed their foreign rulers—England, Holland, France, Portugal, and Spain. But he was a foreigner. He didn’t speak any of the languages of the people there. He said so himself in his diary.
He had been warned. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser told him the local populations would think he was trying to be “Tarzan, a white man amongst blacks, leading and protecting them.”
He didn’t listen. He went. He fought. He failed.
And he fled.
A year later, he turned up in Bolivia, ready to lead another revolution.
He chose Bolivia for reasons that theoretically appeared right. It shares borders with five different countries. That allows a lot of freedom of movement for guerrilla fighters. The country had experienced a socialist revolution, which included nationalizing the mines, but the military had seized control just two years before Che’s arrival. It was a country with a large, disastrously poor population, composed primarily of downtrodden indigenous groups. So, theoretically, El Che chose well. Theoretically. But, practically, he was a foreigner.
More than half the population spoke Quechua or Aymara. C
he didn’t. He surrounded himself with Cubans and complained in his diary that when he went preaching Marxism to the Bolivians, they didn’t listen to him.
Once again, he had been warned. Mario Monje, the head of Bolivia’s Communist Party, had been to Cuba several times. He praised their revolution. But when El Che came to Bolivia and met secretly with Monje, the Bolivian told him, “Yours is not a revolution for Bolivia.”
He didn’t listen. Because El Che was a know-it-all. I saw it when I met him in Havana, when he wanted to convince me to give him the names of one thousand accountants to “volunteer” for the revolution. He was arrogant. He was conceited. And he was blinded by it.
He was so sure that everything he said was right that he thought he could do no wrong. I saw it when he was put in charge of the National Bank without being an economist or knowing anything about it. He had such stupid ideas. But nobody could tell him that.
So it was hardly surprising that he didn’t listen when he came to Bolivia. He was going to give them a revolution, whether they wanted him to or not.
El Che believed that the victory that he and Fidel had scored in Cuba was a result of the guerrilla fighters’ ability. That’s true, to a degree. But the victory in Cuba was won under different circumstances from those he faced in Bolivia.
Che Guevara had wanted to be a guerrilla fighter for years before he found the opportunity in Cuba. In the Sierra Maestra, he threw himself into the armed struggle with single-minded purpose and passion. He was one of the bravest of the fighters in the Cuban Revolution. There is no question about that. He was one of the most disciplined. He was one of the best prepared.
But Cuba was a unique situation. In Cuba, he and his comrades were fighting Batista.
The sorry truth is, Batista was a greedy man. That was his undoing. The rebels fought with their hearts, not just their guns. They gave it everything they had. Batista set a budget for his counterinsurgency battle. Then he siphoned funds from the fight into his own pocket. That was business as usual in Cuba. Batista took a slice of nearly everything, or business didn’t get done. His bagmen showed up every night, often still wearing their police uniforms, to carry away his cut from the casinos. Others paid up front.
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