Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  “Most important,” Larry said, “is sustaining the plausibility of the original deception: Why she went to Miami. Remember: When María went to Miami, all she knew was that she couldn’t stand him any longer, and that, to avenge her friend Doña Leonarda, if she could, she would kill him herself. She wanted, needed to be, out of town. She was ripe, from our point of view: the right person, all set, who just needed recruiting. Our people picked up the scent. Our guy—Pano—got to her, and from there on it was only a question of: How do we do it?

  “She’s a hell of a bright lady, and nothing WB proposed was okayed without her closest attention. The one thing we had to go on was her assurance that Fidel wanted her back, and would tolerate unanticipated delays in her getting back. The problem always was the plausibility of her prolonged absence. WB has done a pretty good job here, as far as I can see. María has a folder full of legal documents, records of appearances before the probate judge (who is one of ours). Letters written to her asking for birth certificates, asking for every conceivable detail about her mother, where she was married, hospital records, baptismal records. Then there are copies of letters written by María to her lawyer in Havana (also one of ours), copies of that lawyer’s answers—all of this consuming a hell of a lot of time, all of it strung out with fierce-sounding judicial deadlines for answers that would have made it impossible for María to return to Havana for an extended visit.

  “Then there are intentionally obscure notes in the folder—when exactly she wrote her little love notes to Castro about the reasons for her protracted absence. Inscrutable to anyone reading the file who was unaware of the context of those notes. But just the kind of thing that would pass inspection if any of Castro’s agents, or even Castro himself, was examining the file to see if everything fitted. For instance, María wrote to Castro on March 30, 1962, saying that the unexpected judicial delay necessitated her taking a job, since she couldn’t afford to just sit in Miami and wait for lawyers in Havana to answer letters providing the information the probate people in Miami were insisting on.

  “It’s been over a year since she left Havana, and she’s heard personally from Castro a total of three times. Twice was indirectly, by telephone. A Castro agent in Miami called María and said that he had a message from ‘your friend.’ These messages didn’t amount to much. All he said was that his ‘client’ hoped all was going well, and did she need any help in order to get passage back to Havana? She did get one letter from Castro. She has that, and it isn’t a part of the file she is keeping, but she has that letter, and it is—I haven’t actually seen the letter, nor has WB, but he told us María reported it was just a ‘routine love letter.’ But in the letter he reiterated his ardent desire that when she returns, she bring ‘your little secret film.’

  “She answered that letter by saying that Trafficante had promised her that if she finished the year as the manager of his restaurant, he would give her the film. She promised that just as soon as she completed the legal formalities in Miami, she would have the film and would be free to return to Havana.”

  “What about the money? The money she is supposed to inherit? Is WB planning to give her the money, or will the story be that the probate court wasn’t satisfied with her identity?”

  “Wild Bill wrestled with that one with the people upstairs. He was resolute on the point—that the money must actually be turned over to her. Makes the whole enterprise feel legitimate. The Agency wasn’t all that happy about putting that kind of dough in her private account, but WB insisted. And after all, if there is a happy ending to all of this, she is expected to give the money back. WB managed to get from her a will—he has the only copy—leaving the money, in case of her death, to a gentleman called Ulysses Sameron, a.k.a. Uncle Sam.

  “Anyway, next week, April twenty-ninth, the probate is scheduled to rule in her favor, and ninety-five thousand eight hundred dollars will be deposited in her account at the Barnett Bank. She will of course have a record of that deposit, and a copy of her letter to the bank instructing it to buy U.S. bonds. That’s when she writes Castro and says: ‘Hooray hooray, the First of May/ Outdoor fucking begins today!’ Then she drops just a little hint of Do-you-really-want-me? dear, as I am so anxious to see you, but you are so busy with world affairs. I mean, I know all about your visit to Moscow and everything that must have piled up for you.…

  “The scenario obviously calls for him telling her, either in a personal letter or through his telephone spook, ‘Yes, darling María, I want you back in my bed not because you are now worth one hundred thousand dollars more, or because you have a 16-millimeter film of wonderful home entertainment, but because I desire you almost as much as I desire the nationalization of Havana’s kiosks.’ What we assume will happen then is that she will make reservations to go back to Havana, that she will get the visa in Mexico City—yes, returning Cubans actually need a visa to go to Cuba. At some point she is likely to be put through the grill, we figure. I doubt it will be in Miami, though God knows Castro has enough people there to do it, but obviously it’s harder there. They may do it in Miami just the same, on the grounds that it would be easier to check the American end of her story: easier to check the bank account, the probate judge, etc. Or they may do it in Mexico—in which case there would be a delay while she cooled her heels there while they checked. Or? They may wait until she gets to Havana, do the check there. We don’t know. But it shouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Is it your guess,” Ruth probed, “that Castro would shrug his shoulders if she got miffed? Suppose she got through to him and said, ‘If you don’t trust me, to hell with you. And you’ll never get to see my movie, or to play the part of Romeo.’”

  “María is a professional. I mean, nobody since Nana has had more experience than she at knowing just what she can say to a lover: when and exactly what. WB thinks it best to leave that to her instincts. What we worry about—what I worry about (Wild Bill doesn’t worry about anything except maybe a total eclipse when he’s about to shoot a hole in one)—is just that one thing.”

  “The cold cream?”

  “The cold cream. And what’s in the cold cream.”

  Ruth paused. “I know you say WB has told you the pills are guaranteed to work. Tasteless. Dead-four-hours-after-swallowing-them, yet no-sensation-of-any-kind-for-three-hours. But what else is involved? I mean, she’s in that suite of his, she arrived with her little packet of toiletries. No surprise there; she’s been doing that every time since her first visit. So he isn’t surprised. So they go to the bedroom and do it. So then she goes to the bathroom and pulls out the Big Pill. So what’s she actually supposed to say then? ‘Fidel, darling, you sound hoarse. You’ve been giving too many speeches. Here are some wonderful pills they’ve invented in Miami for people who give three-hour speeches’?”

  Larry smiled, not without a trace of anxiety. “María tells us that after lovemaking he inevitably drinks something. Sometimes it’s a shot of rum and Coca-Cola, sometimes it’s plain Coca-Cola—which by the way was becoming pretty scarce at the time María left Havana, she told us, but Castro had his own private supply and presumably it’s inexhaustible. Sometimes he drinks just plain water. And sometimes he rings for hot coffee. Still other times he reaches into the little refrigerator that sits in the dressing room and grabs a cold beer.”

  “That doesn’t sound good, if sometimes he fends for himself.”

  “María has a plan. At the appropriate moment she says, ‘Fidel, I feel like a cold beer, a beautiful Havana beer. I haven’t had one in almost a full year. Can I have one, and get you one while I’m at it?’ Her guess is he’ll say sure—Yes, the power of suggestion. She will go into the bathroom, where she’s headed anyway, grab the pills out of the cold cream jar, wash them off, pour a little hot water into a glass, stick the pills in until they melt—less than fifteen seconds, TSD promises; then pour Castro’s beer into the glass, pour herself a glass, and go back into the bedroom. The whole operation has been carefully timed. It doesn’t
take more than a minute and a half, and normally she is in the bathroom for a couple of minutes.”

  “Is Castro a Byzantine type who might suggest exchanging glasses?”

  “No, he’s never done that. But if he did, she would drink his beer, and within five minutes go back into the bathroom and take a solution which will be in her toilet bag. As long as it’s taken within fifteen minutes, the poison will—what’s the right word for it, Ruthie?”

  “Abort?”

  “No, not quite right—”

  “Neutralize?”

  “Yes. It would neutralize the poison.”

  19

  Rolando Cubela had had enough experience with Fidel to put great store by the leader’s sixth sense, an intangible about which Fidel was never willing to speculate; maybe the only subject he did not enjoy discoursing on, with the possible exception of Mirta, his former wife, about whom nothing—ever—was said.

  Cubela remembered the day in the Sierra Maestra after a long, zigzag retreat from persistent Batista military mountaineers egged on by the huge bounty put on Castro’s corpse. At eleven in the evening, exhausted, the tattered band of fewer than thirty guerrillas put down under a jagged rocky overhang that provided shelter something like a grotto, especially welcome in the sultry rain.

  They had eaten—no fires permitted, no smoking even, and all conversation was whispered and exclusively utilitarian (“More bread, please.” “I need at least one .32 cartridge for my pistol. Am completely out.” “We must get some penicillin”). After their cold gruel and bread the men began to stretch out, covering their heads with whatever scrap of clothing they could dig up from their field packs.

  Suddenly the word was whispered about.

  “Fidel says assemble.”

  There were the low moans, the soldier’s special tender, but never any thought of recalcitrance.

  The narrow mountain path guided them around the mountain hollow and two hours and twenty minutes later they were settled opposite their old grotto, one mile away as the crow flies. They were numb with fatigue. At two-thirty they were awakened by the sound of machine-gun fire—they could see the tracer bullets from three sides firing into their camping ground of a few hours ago. If they hadn’t decamped, there’d have been no survivors.

  How had Castro known?

  He gave no explanation. And after several other such escapes, no one asked anymore. “It would be bad luck to ask,” Raúl Castro had said to Valdés. “But it’s been that way with Fidel since he was a boy.” Back when Raúl was a boy, he’d have explained it as his mother was given to explaining the phenomenon, that Fidel’s guardian angel was looking after him. But of course there being no such thing as guardian angels in the July 26th crusade, Raúl had now to say only that it was mere “luck.” He had for a while, en route from the guardian angel to luck, dabbled with the term “sixth sense,” but gave it up after being informed by a schooled Marxist that sixth senses were a bourgeois neuro-biological superstition.

  So that when Rolando Cubela concluded that he had the mandate—to execute Fidel Castro—he was prepared to be ever so cautious in his plans. Nothing reckless. Nothing that would heedlessly challenge the fabled Castro luck. He was profoundly respectful, never mind Marxist dogma, of Fidel’s guardian angel and his protective ways. The desirable end was obvious: There was first the end, second the appropriate sequence of events leading to its realization. After a month’s deliberation, Cubela had it down on paper—in his mind:

  1) Castro’s death—it must be absolutely assured.

  2) A plausible new Cuban government—instantly promulgated.

  3) A leader of that government put forward with an unassailable record as an opponent of Batista; indeed, he should at one point have been a close confederate of Castro, against whom Castro had turned because he had objected to the suppression of freedom in Cuba. Cubela having disqualified himself other than as a broker, there were several candidates for the position of the Leader. Huber Matos or Commander Guillermo Morales would each qualify. Both of them were in prison. Both had fought with Castro at Sierra Maestra.

  4) Indispensable to the successful political outcome of the coup would be instantaneous recognition of the new government by foreign governments. Best not to begin with the United States, else it would appear that the United States was the new regime’s procreator. The best place to look for immediate recognition, Cubela reasoned, was Venezuela. Rómulo Betancourt was the key—the adamant socialist who had opposed Batista so vigorously. He, along with Costa Rica’s José Figueres, was a grand figure of Latin American democracy. Betancourt, who (like most people) had early on sided enthusiastically with Castro and his insurgency, was by now volubly disgusted with what Castro had done to his country. As President, his influence with the ruling party, Actión Democrática, was definitive. And if Venezuela moved to recognize the new Cuban government, so, almost reflexively, would Costa Rica. The two should act within hours of the assassination. Only after that should the United States move.

  5) The cooperation of the United States, Cubela mournfully acknowledged, was quite simply indispensable. Perhaps even to consummate the deed itself—the execution, as he persisted in thinking of it. The United States would need to be involved, however, surreptitiously. And the U.S. would need to provide channels for timely exchanges with Betancourt and Figueres.

  6) Although Cubela was prepared to act alone on the execution, he would need to establish lines of communication with the anti-Castro resistance forces, estimated at about two thousand strong.

  They were centered in Camagüey, and were fast dwindling in size, owing to Raúl Castro’s successful campaign against them. Cubela would need, acting through a cutout, as the spy people call agents not identifiable as such by either of the participating adversaries, to be in touch with Jesús Ferrer, the young anti-Castro rebel leader. The rebels’ job would be to effect the immediate execution of Raúl Castro, Ramiro Valdés, Osvaldo Dorticós, and Che Guevara.

  With those four figures gone, Cubela reasoned, Castro’s cadre would be thrown into anarchy. Of almost equal importance would be the takeover of La Cabaña prison where at least one of the prospective successors to Castro was imprisoned. To storm La Cabaña would be time-consuming, bloody, and possibly lethal to the chosen successors.

  No, the Commandant of La Cabaña—the gruesome American, Captain Herman Marks—must surrender. This would most likely be effected by radio communication offering him amnesty provided he opened the gates of La Cabaña and turned himself in within thirty minutes, and provided no prisoner under his command was harmed. In return he would have safe passage to Miami. Otherwise, he would be shot that same day.

  And—Cubela asked himself, bluntly—what if it does not work? He subdivided that question into two parts. The first supposed that he would succeed in killing Castro but the revolution against Castro’s regime would not succeed: that, twenty-four hours later, Raúl Castro would be as firmly in charge of Cuba as his brother had been twenty-four hours earlier.

  But even if that were the result, Cubela consoled himself, the enterprise would by no means have been a failure. His personal commitment, made that night when he left the Isla de Pinos, was relatively modest. He must kill Fidel Castro. The rest—the liberation of Cuba from Castroism—was greatly desirable, but it was not the primal imperative that drove him.

  And what if he failed in his attempt to kill Castro?

  Either way, he would need to make provisions for his own survival. Rolando Cubela, naturally introspective and studiously so since his month with the psychiatrists, knew himself well and was not reluctant to acknowledge that his resolve to assassinate Castro was not to be confused with a presumptive indifference to his own life. Rolando wanted to live a long, full life, with Felipa (preferably) at his side and, eventually, with grandchildren, whose tonsils he would come out of medical retirement personally to remove.

  So?

  He would need to arrange for his own escape from Cuba. But, also, he would need to ar
range for his mobility—his independence—on arriving elsewhere. He had no appetite for the prospect of landing, via a fast speedboat, in Miami, being awarded some secret medal or other by the CIA, speaking at a testimonial dinner in his honor by the Cuban liberation group Alpha 66—and finding himself without the means to pay a hotel bill, let alone the means necessary to establish himself in Colombia or Peru, to resume his career as a practicing medical doctor.

  One trouble with the anti-Castro underground was that one never knew what was, and what was not, accurate. One began by assuming that most of what one heard was inaccurate. And what one heard was by no means limited to rumor propagated by the resistance. Quite the contrary, the regime was far gone in paranoia. And the resistance aimed for implantation of their rumors (many of them made up out of whole cloth) in the mind of the highest levels of Castro’s government. This was done by various means.

  The most audacious had been the five-minute broadcast on Havana Radio by Jesús Ferrer. Cubela was not listening to the radio when it happened, and the daily press made no mention of the momentous incident, but everyone knew about it, and everyone spoke of it. It was especially dramatic because the young rebel Ferrer had begun his broadcast—the regular announcer was sitting three feet away in the studio, tied to a chair, gagged, a pistol aimed at his head—by saying that exactly ten years ago, at this very spot, young Fidel Castro had seized this very microphone, occupying this identical studio, and had spoken for ten minutes before fleeing the lowering policemen of Batista. Quite remarkably, Ferrer had managed to dig up a recording of Fidel Castro’s broadcast on that memorable day in the spring of 1953. “The voice you will now hear,” Ferrer had said to the radio audience, “is easily recognized by you. It is the voice of Fidel. Of Fidel Castro. Here is what he said ten years ago from this studio.”