Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  During those ninety days he came to terms with himself. He decided that he could not expiate the sin he had committed against an innocent man until he had undertaken a great and heroic task of redemption. What this would be, he did not know. Meanwhile, although he would never condone Fidel Castro’s perverse decision to assassinate Blanco Rico, the job at hand was to depose Fulgencio Batista, and to give Fidel Castro an opportunity to rebuild Cuba.

  By the fall of 1958 there were fewer and fewer references, in Castro’s camp, to “Dr.” Cubela, more and more to Major Cubela. He was an important aide to Castro, especially in his role as principal in charge of the pro-Castro student movement. He communicated with covert student revolutionary leaders mostly through intermediaries, but occasionally he would depart the mountains and meet with them personally. He was known to them only as Padrino, Godfather. Padrino had organized the students for a major strike early in January 1959. It proved not necessary: On January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba.

  Rolando’s job became now not the organization of an insurgent student movement, but the coordination and direction of an organization of student leaders explicitly and in most cases devoutly pro-Castro. His technical superior was Haydée Santa-María, sister of the brave man tortured to death during the Moncada fiasco of 1953, when Castro led the quixotic charge against the well-fortified barracks at Santiago de Cuba, at the time co-leader, with Castro, of the anti-Batista movement. But mostly Rolando Cubela was whatever Fidel Castro wished him to be, doing whatever Fidel wished him to do at an administrative level. He was widely envied as one of the true intimates of the supreme leader.

  And one of Castro’s requests—it came in the spring of 1962—was that Cubela go to the penal colony on the Isla de Pinos, 100 miles south of central Havana, to talk with Cubela’s old medical tutor, Alvaro Nueces. Dr. Nueces had turned against Castro in 1960, protesting the communization of the 26th of July Movement. He had narrowly escaped the firing squad at La Cabaña, and was sentenced instead to thirty years’ imprisonment. Alvaro Nueces had been recognized as the leading administrative pharmacologist in Cuba. During the late fifties he had devoted himself to the task of accurately estimating Cuba’s need for special drugs and accumulating inventories sufficient to cope with any national emergency that might arise. It was Dr. Nueces who had begun to organize, through a data processing system, tables of reserves, not only of drugs but also of blood. His card system permitted the flow of drugs to go as required from hospital to hospital, always making him aware where and by what amount reserves could be tapped.

  With his imprisonment this system had collapsed, refusing to respond to unfamiliar, let alone inept, hands. The ensuing shortage of critical drugs had become not merely acute but the cause of festering public dissatisfaction as, day after day, Cubans died for want of drugs prescribed for their care. Haydée Santa-María, who regarded the people’s medical care as a primary revolutionary portfolio, the responsibility of the entire Cabinet, finally went to Fidel. She had known him longer than anyone in his entourage save his brother, had sheltered him in her house before the Moncada affair, and always spoke to him forthrightly.

  Her message was that they needed the cooperation of Alvaro Nueces, and that the likeliest person to get it was Rolando Cubela, who not only had known and studied under Nueces, but had indeed entered the revolutionary movement in part under Nueces’s sponsorship. Above all, she emphasized, they needed Nueces now. It had been decided, in an early negotiation with the American lawyer James Donovan, that the ransom Cuba would demand in return for the liberation of the Bay of Pigs prisoners was a large shipment of drugs in scarce supply in Cuba. It was exceedingly important that the drugs be intelligently selected, with reference, for instance, to what could not readily be gotten from the Soviet Union or from other countries with which Cuba continued to trade. Nobody knew the field like Nueces.

  So, at ten one morning, Rolando Cubela was aboard one of the biweekly transport planes to the Isla de Pinos carrying supplies, as well as forty guards sent to relieve counterparts.

  It was a very hot day and the ocean wind blew sand into their faces as they drove from the apron at the little airport at Nueva Gerona to the great iron gates leading into the circular prison. Cubela shielded himself with a handkerchief. With his right hand he lowered the visor on his military cap.

  Entering the headquarters building of the prison with the returning guards, he indicated to the official at the desk that he had a message for the prison’s commandant, Major Almandriz. He displayed his credentials.

  The commandant’s office was twenty degrees cooler than the suffocating temperature within the prison. Rolando Cubela gulped the cool air greedily, taking off his hat and wiping the sweat from his face. The commandant crossed the room to extend a limp hand. He was short as a gnome, dark-skinned and bleary-eyed. He indicated a chair and rang a bell at the side of his desk. An attendant in stiff white jacket appeared. “You will have coffee, Major Cubela?” Cubela nodded. Almandriz raised two fingers. Coffee for two. The attendant nodded his head and withdrew.

  “I am here on orders from the Revolutionary Government to interview the prisoner Dr. Alvaro Nueces. The Government desires him to cooperate on an important medical problem. I have been deputized to attempt to secure that cooperation in return for a conditional pardon.”

  “May I, Major, examine your papers?”

  “Of course.” Cubela handed the letter from Haydée Santa-María, stamped with the approval of Interior Minister Ramiro Valdés, among other things, superintendent of the prison system.

  Major Almandriz was clearly disturbed. He cleared his throat protractedly, as if accumulating phlegm to expel. He said nothing, but pulled open a deep drawer in his desk, flicked through the contents, withdrawing a sheet of paper which he studied. While reading he said only, “The main files on the prisoners are kept … elsewhere. I have here only the … well, bare outlines.

  “I am afraid,” he said, clearing his throat, “that you cannot see the prisoner Nueces today. He is sick. You should have given me a few days’ notice.”

  Rolando Cubela stood up. He hadn’t liked his host from the moment he set eyes on him. “I do not give a shit what you say Dr. Nueces is suffering from. I am not here to discuss your convenience in this or in any other matter. Take me directly to Nueces or put in a call in my name to the Minister of the Interior.”

  Almandriz bit his lips, said nothing. There was a moment’s silence. Then he depressed a buzzer on his desk and a sergeant, first knocking lightly on the door, entered the room.

  “Sir?”

  “Take our guest to the prisoner Alvaro Nueces. He is”—Almandriz looked down again at his paper—“in Galera sixteen.”

  Cubela gave a slight nod of the head and followed the sergeant, who had to dodge the steward coming in with the tray of coffee.

  They walked down iron grate steps two flights, then through a long, dank corridor. To the right and left were cell doors with small apertures at eye level. The only sounds were occasional moans and what sounded like somnambulists’ soliloquies. Cubela looked directly ahead, concentrating on the sergeant’s methodical movement toward his destination.

  They turned a corner into a similar corridor, again with cells at either end. The lighting from bare electric light bulbs every twenty or thirty feet was dimness itself, but there was enough light to illuminate the number 16. The sergeant signaled to a guard sitting at a table under one of the lights, and motioned to the door. “Open it.”

  The door to number 16 was unlocked.

  The sergeant called out: “Prisoner Nueces, present yourself.”

  A voice frail of sound but resonant of purpose came from the black void.

  “Whoever wants to see me can see me here.”

  The sergeant said, “Prisoner Nueces, there is an official visitor to see you. Come out immediately or I shall need to have the guards escort you out.”

  The voice said, “Do as you like. My visitor can see me here or not at all.”r />
  Rolando Cubela at that point yanked the flashlight from the sergeant’s belt, switched it on, and walked into the cell. He stepped into a mound of human feces. He could barely discern the bodies, to his right and to his left, lying, crowded, on wooden shelves, it seemed. There were others on the floor, some lying, some squatting. He ran the light around the bearded faces that peered blinkingly back at him—there was no light in the Galera save a shaft that came in obliquely from a small circular opening, high above, illuminating a bucket-sized circle at one end of the cell.

  Cubela called out hoarsely. “Alvaro, it’s me, Rolando Cubela.”

  A hand directly on his right reached out, touching him on the sleeve. “Rolando.”

  Cubela reached down and circled his arms under the shoulders of the prisoner and strained to raise him to his feet. He half-pulled, half-dragged him toward the door. Reaching the corridor, he snapped to the sergeant. “Get a stretcher. Quick!” The sergeant relayed the order to the guard, and presently two men appeared with the stretcher. Nueces was placed on it.

  “Take us to the clinic,” Cubela said. Obediently, they marched off. During the walk Nueces said nothing. Turning a corner, a guard opened a door with the key and entered what seemed a floodlit room. A medical dispensary. Nueces was placed on an examining table. Cubela looked down and examined his old proctor for the first time. He took a deep breath.

  At once, Rolando Cubela was an intern again. He put on a lab coat, took bandage scissors, and slowly cut off the patient’s sweat- and mud-stained prison uniform with the black “P” on the back, the designation reserved for political prisoners. He ordered warm water and soap. A half hour later, after washing and cleaning the naked body from head to toe, he ordered a straight razor and shaving soap. He then took the pulse beat, listened to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope, and looked into Alvaro’s eyes.

  He eased the older man off the examining table on which he had been deposited and sat him down in the only armchair in the room. There were now five people in attendance, including the prison doctor, who had at last appeared. They followed Cubela’s orders. Early on he had grunted, “I am, in addition to a major attached to the Directorate, a medical doctor.” He ordered a blood workup and chest X ray and electrocardiogram. He then told a nurse to bring hot soup and bread.

  Nueces was conscious throughout the hour but said nothing. When the tray was brought in, Cubela addressed the prison doctor. “Take us into a private room.”

  “You may use my own office, Major.”

  “Thank you.”

  They sat there together behind the closed door for two hours.

  A knock on the door by the second-in-command of Los Pinos finally interrupted them. “Major Cubela, you must come. The aircraft is due to leave in twenty minutes.”

  Rolando Cubela emerged from the doctor’s office. He was pale. The prison doctor was hovering outside.

  “What is your name, Doctor?”

  “Angel Salvador, a sus órdenes, Major.”

  “I hold you personally responsible, Dr. Salvador, for the return of Dr. Alvaro Nueces to good health. You will be hearing from me. Or from Ministro Ramiro Valdés.”

  Without further word he walked out.

  Three hours later he stormed into the office of Haydée Santa-María. He spoke angrily. “First,” he said, “let me tell you what Nueces said in response to our request. What he said was that he would not cooperate with—with Castro’s regime in any way, at any time, under any circumstances.”

  Haydée Santamaría said nothing. “That’s all there is to report, Rolando?”

  “No, that isn’t all there is to report. What there is to report beyond that I am going to report to Fidel. What there is to report is that Pinos is a disgrace, a hideous scar on the integrity of our movement. The comandante—Almandriz—should be executed. A new set of guards should be sent there with explicit instructions.”

  “You must calm yourself, Rolando,” Haydée said, herself attempting calm. “Of course, you have a point. Why don’t you write a careful report—a careful report.” She repeated and caressed the word. “Go ahead, do it now. There is a typewriter in the room you can use. Then we will concentrate on the problem. It is very disappointing news that Nueces will not cooperate, very disappointing news.”

  Cubela was about to say that he could hardly blame Dr. Nueces, but suddenly he stopped. It was as though that shaft of prison light had reached him here. Here, after all, in the office of the ministry directly in charge of all the prisons in Cuba, it was hardly conceivable that Haydée Santamaría was entirely ignorant of what life was like at the Isla de Pinos.

  He sat down methodically to write out the report he had officially commissioned. As he tapped out his message, the epiphany crystallized. He found himself using now the detached clinical vocabulary of the pathologist, rather than expressing the rage of the reformer. As he progressed, a great clarity came. He found himself taking grim satisfaction in the words he was now composing. He typed as if his fingers were ice picks. “My conclusions are that there is only one way in which to deal with the prisoner Nueces, who has refused to come to the aid of his country in these critical circumstances. I recommend that he be tried, and forthwith executed.” He had done it to Blanco Rico and now he had done it to Alvaro Nueces. But it was the kindest deed he could perform for his old, sick, tormented professor: give him peace. And Rolando Cubela was guided by a single light. His redemptive mission was incandescently clear. He, Rolando Cubela, would kill Fidel Castro.

  17

  Castro, returned from Moscow, gave his political intimates, on the night after his arrival, an account of his trip. He preceded it with the exhibit of a 16-millimeter film assembled by his hosts, a roundup of The Fidel Castro Visit. There were scenes of Fidel arriving at the airport at Murmansk, of Fidel riding in a motorcade side by side with Khrushchev, right into the sacred, mysterious walls of the Kremlin; scenes of Fidel standing between Khrushchev and Malinovsky in the most honored spot, atop the Lenin Monument, surveying the May Day Parade, mile after mile of Soviet military strength parading before the camera’s adoring eyes; scenes of Fidel visiting the great Space Center, of Fidel peering into the prototype of the Sputnik that first circled the globe that electric day in 1957; scenes of Fidel visiting happy Communist communes in the Ukraine, factory workers in Kiev, schoolchildren in Leningrad; scenes, finally, of Fidel at the airport, toasting to the success of the Soviet revolution, “a revolution which, like that of Mao Tse-tung, will inspire others for years, for centuries ahead.”

  There was scattered applause among the dozen intimates Fidel had invited to his personal screening of a documentary that in a matter of hours would flood Cuban television. The following morning he would give a major speech on continued Soviet-Cuban amity, and Castro had alerted Radio Havana to set aside three hours, as he “would have a good deal to say.”

  It was Che Guevara who asked the first question. “How did Khrushchev react to your mention of Mao Tse-tung?”

  Fidel was delighted. “Ah, Che, you have, as always, the keenest political ear. It was, of course, my—Cuba’s—declaration of independence. Five weeks of intensive wooing of Castro by Khrushchev, and then—that! In all the sessions we had together, no direct allusions were made to our overtures to China. But I thought all along that if I merely mentioned China—merely made a single tribute to the noble socialist experiments of Mao—I would make my point, my point being”—Fidel Castro had clutched his speech into oratorical gear. It might as well have been tomorrow, speaking to the thousands of Cubans packed into the Plaza de la Revolución—“that the Cuba of Fidel Castro honors the great socialist endeavors not only of the Soviet Union, but also of the People’s Republic of China.”

  He paused now, and his voice lowered. “Of course, we need to be aware of the continuing special contributions by the Soviet Union to Cuba. In private conversations I did not disguise this. To Khrushchev I said that the embargo by the United States needed to be compensated for, so t
hat Soviet purchases of Cuban sugar, at an … agreeable … price were very welcome, as also, of course, continued Soviet investments in defensive weapons.”

  Che interrupted him. “Did you get into the subject of Khrushchev’s unilateral actions last October on the missiles?”

  Castro was now Professor of International Diplomacy, conducting a seminar for graduate students. “No, Che. After all, the invitation issued to me to go to Moscow came after the publication of my interview with Le Monde, and that interview was, to use a popular American legal expression, a ‘brooding omnipresence’ during my visit. Khrushchev knew that he had behaved without fraternal concern for Cuba’s independence when, without consulting with us, he agreed to withdraw the missiles. He knew that I disapproved of that action, knew that I would always disapprove of that action. So what, really, was there to discuss? I mean, why suddenly appear in Moscow and repeat what I had publicly stated?

  “But my genial reference at the airport to the work of Mao Tse-tung made my point as distinctly as it could ever be made. What my speech at the airport said was: Khrushchev, we are admiring of the Soviet Union, we are grateful for the aid you are giving us to realize our own socialist revolution, but we cannot be conscripted into the ranks of your sectarian wars against Mao. I think”—Castro spoke at this moment in his self-effacing mode, into which he infrequently lapsed, though never without full confidence that the full significance of his political artistry would be appreciated by his audience—“I think that I accomplished both purposes in my trip: proper credit to the Soviet Union, together with a subtle reminder that Cuba is an independent socialist entity.”

  The effect of this peroration was slightly marred by Che’s aside, directed not so much at Castro directly as to the assembly. “Well, our independence would perhaps be more convincing if we relied less completely than we are forced to do on Soviet economic and military favors.”

  Castro ignored this, and informed his guests that he would need to spend a little time preparing his speech for the next day, and therefore he wished them to stay a half hour to partake of the refreshments ready for them next door in the dining room, after which he would need to excuse himself, which was Fidel’s way of announcing that in one-half hour, they should all be gone.