Cubela considered doing it from the beach. Hiding the rifle in one of the dressing cabins (there were a dozen of these, built when the reef had been an attraction for hotel guests), and drilling a hole at eye level. There were two special difficulties. The first was that in order to accommodate the telescopic sight, there would need to be a second hole, two inches above the first. And to use both—one for the bullet, the other to spot the target—would impose a rigidity in the rifle’s arc inconsistent with the kind of lateral mobility a rifle required, tracking an active swimmer and prepared to fire the moment the head bobbed above the water. Carving in the old wood, something on the order of a half-moon to allow the rifle sufficient compass, might attract attention.
And, then, the dressing cabin was not deep. He could saw the rifle stock down to minimum length and thus attempt to maneuver behind the half-moon opening without the rifle protruding. Yes, but there would be some noise from the rifle crack, even through the silencer, and any guards in the area would descend on him quickly. He considered sawing the back of the bathing cabin so as to construct a swinging door, allowing him to escape from the rear. But there would still be a stretch of beach before reaching his car. He abandoned it.
Still another possibility was: Castro in a Motorcade. Rolando Cubela had been almost set on this plan when—once again—he ran into April 1963, the assassination speech. The Security Office at that point decreed: No more motorcades in open cars. A flat prohibition. Castro acquiesced, upsetting weeks of work by Rolando Cubela.
The fourth situation was—Castro At Work. Cubela had constant access to Castro in the three offices he mostly used. Two of these would not permit a view of him from anything like the distance Cubela needed in order to effect a getaway.
The third did. The office on Cuba Street in Old Havana. It was an old monastery, a square building constructed around a courtyard, the cloistered garden where monks once strolled and said their offices. There were still benches to sit on. And tables had been placed about. When the weather was good, some of the staff would elect to take their trays outside to eat lunch.
The room across the courtyard from the entrance, on the second floor, above what used to be the chapel and was now the printing office from which Castro’s instructions flowed out to his subjects, had been the monks’ refectory. It was a large room in which one supposed that eight or ten tables, each feeding a dozen monks, once stood. Now it housed one large rectangular table, long enough for twenty to sit around, and straight-backed chairs placed side by side against the wall. The beauty of it, from Cubela’s point of view, was that although the old refectory windows were of old glass, one could discern through them, especially with the aid of a telescopic lens, the features of the men and women seated around the table.
Directly opposite, on the other side of the courtyard, was the office of the chief guard, familiarly referred to as “the cockpit.” Rolando Cubela had cultivated a friendship with Tati Gaspar, the master sergeant who regularly presided over the one-man cockpit, HQ for the guards. Tati moonlighted as a gunsmith. He loved to look at, and assemble and disassemble, firearms of every kind: to fix this bolt, adjust that trigger, polish a dried-up stock. Rolando Cubela feigned an identical interest in guns, but modestly laid claim to none of the skills of a gunsmith such as Tati. At one point, to establish a precedent and test the waters, he brought in a rusty rifle from his father’s collection. It dated back to the 1898 war with Spain and the United States. “Just think, Tati, this gun could have fired at Theodore Roosevelt!”
“I’d like to lay my hands on the rifleman who missed him. Not, Captain, your father, I assume? Grandfather?”
“I honestly don’t know. My father never spoke of it when I was young, and now, with his stroke, he cannot speak at all.”
Tati laid the rifle on his desk, which served him also as a workbench. He picked it up, snuggled the stock to his shoulder, and looked down the barrel, out the window of the cockpit, across to the Cabinet Room. Tati could look directly out over the courtyard. To his right was a microphone through which Tati might, if he wished, bellow orders to the courtyard or to the barracks—a device he never used, preferring to walk down the stairs and over to the guards’ barracks room to the left, where he would give orders calmly and succinctly.
Most Saturdays, at about ten in the morning, Castro met in the grand hall, the old rectory, a kind of sub-Cabinet Room, with a dozen subordinates always including Rolando Cubela. Castro’s place was at the center of the table, Last Supperwise, facing the courtyard. The old glass windows were almost always open to let in air. From the cockpit, directly opposite, he could be seen clearly. A schedule of meetings for the next few weeks was regularly issued by Castro’s adjutant.
There would be such a meeting at ten o’clock on Saturday, November 9. On that day, and in that way, Cubela would execute Fidel Castro.
Cubela had improvised nothing. On his way to the Saturday meeting, at fifteen minutes before ten, he brought the Russian Mosin-Nagant, appropriately muddied and in disrepair. He carried it in his right hand, as a hunter might carry a shotgun returning from the field, without any attempt at disguise. “I’m taking this to Tati to fix,” he told the guard, who would in any case have admitted Captain Rolando Cubela if he had been carrying a machine gun.
Cubela walked up the flight of stairs. Tati was seated, reading a newspaper and sipping from a cup of coffee.
“I’ve really got something for you, Tati. I bought it yesterday from a soldier just back from a campaign at Escambray. He picked it up after a firefight with the guerrillas. It’s probably Czech.” Tati had stood, and was examining it. “The scope sight is missing and also the bolt, and God knows what caliber it is: I can’t read it off the barrel. Could you look at it while we’re having our meeting?”
Tati was ecstatic. He said he had never seen that model, but that it wasn’t Czech, it was a Russian Mosin-Nagant.
There was the single hazard—that Castro would unaccountably leave between 11:30 and 12. At over thirty such meetings Cubela had attended, he never had. Nor had Tati ever failed, at exactly 11:30, to go down to the mess hall for the early lunch served to the cadre of the cuartel general: others ate at 12. When Tati went down, he was regularly relieved by Staff Sergeant Manzi, who had often seen Tati and Major Cubela together engaged in informal conversation, and so was never surprised when Cubela walked into the cockpit.
During the preceding week, Rolando Cubela practiced doing three things, one after the other. The first was slipping into place the rifle’s telescope. He had, with a chisel, made reciprocating little nipples and indentations so that, blindfolded, he could insert the scope, turn by hand the wing nut he had made to replace the regular screw, and tighten it instantly in place. He practiced with his eyes closed. At first the operation took him thirty seconds. By the end of the day he could do it in less than five.
Then there was the silencer. In less than four seconds, it could be screwed on.
After that, the “missing” bolt. Again he practiced with his eyes shut. Removing it from his pocket, he probed with his thumb the breech into which it should slide and snapped shut the hinged bevel that kept it in place. Then he inserted the cartridge clip and, with a thrust of the bolt, slid a 7.62 x 54R cartridge into the chamber. He had not been able to better sixteen seconds for the entire operation; but on the other hand, he had done it in sixteen seconds sixteen times, with his eyes closed.
How long to line up Castro? The scope was set exactly to the right distance—48 meters, across the courtyard, between the cockpit and the Cabinet table. To sight Castro, thirty seconds; conceivably one minute.
The deed done, he would let the rifle down, open the door, walk down the stairs and out the main entrance. His confederate, in the car, would be waiting for him.
At 11:35, Cubela would inconspicuously leave the meeting. His seat was fairly near the door, and from time to time, especially when meetings would go on for several hours, as they frequently did, there were such departures
—the washrooms were nearby. He would walk past the men’s room, down the staircase, cross the courtyard, climb up the stairs, and open the door to the cockpit. No knock on the door—in his case—would be needed.
Time? One minute forty-five seconds. He would say to Sergeant Manzi that Manzi was wanted by Lieutenant Gallardo, and that he, Major Cubela—since his presence was no longer needed at the meeting—would gladly sit in Manzi’s seat until he returned, or until Tati did. Lieutenant Gallardo was in charge of the little coterie of bodyguards that surrounded Castro wherever he went. He would be stationed outside the Cabinet Room at his desk in the corridor, with two guards standing, or sitting, by him. A summons by Lieutenant Gallardo would be obeyed unblinkingly.
Rolando Cubela would then take the rifle. It would probably be lying on the workbench, though possibly Tati would have put it in the rifle locker alongside. And proceed.
Had he left anything out?
Yes. Because Tati had itchy fingers, Cubela had to tell him please just to study the rifle, but not to disassemble or fiddle with it. The soldier from whom Cubela had bought it confessed he had saved a pile of “bits and pieces” he had picked up in the little tent that had evidently served the guerrilleros as a spare parts armory, and would bring them to Cubela that very night. “Conceivably, our missing parts are there. So let’s wait before we try to improvise anything.”
Tati had nodded his head, adding only that there was no reason, was there, not to go ahead and clean and oil the rifle?
“None”—Cubela smiled, in acknowledgment of Tati’s obliging offer.
It was 10 A.M. Saturday, November 9, and they were all at their stations. Castro was late. But then Castro was always late. The only question was whether he would be ten minutes late or one hour late. For Rolando Cubela it did not matter, so long as he wasn’t two hours late, moving into the cockpit’s lunch schedule.
He was surprised by his relative calm. He put it down to the long training he had at hospital operating tables, where blood was simply another commodity. That, together with his hardened resolve ever since leaving the Isle of Pines. And then, always, there was the face of Blanco Rico. First that surprise. Then the horror. Then the insensate look … Castro’s tutelage of seven years ago was paying off.
Castro appeared at 10:20. Everyone stood. He motioned them to sit down, put on eyeglasses, lit a cigar, and pulled toward him the typewritten sheet with that day’s agenda.
At 11:24, to Cubela’s relief, Castro was engaged in a discussion with a representative from the Ministry of Agriculture. Castro was being sarcastic. He wished to know how physically it could happen that coffee would become scarce on the island of Cuba. “If I were to empty my pockets in a field, in a month it would be a coffee farm …” This would go on for a time.
Rolando Cubela got up and walked quietly out. He did not turn his face as he passed Castro, following the protocol of inconspicuousness, as was natural when someone needed to go to the bathroom.
Now his heart did begin to pound. But he did not allow his pace, setting out to cross the courtyard, to quicken. One step at a time, he repeated to himself, one-step-at-a-time. In one minute and fifteen seconds he had crossed it, and now he walked toward the staircase, passing by the mess hall, whose door was open. He climbed the twelve stairs and opened the door. Sergeant Manzi was leaning back in his chair, his legs on a crossbeam underneath the workbench. He quickly stood up.
“At ease, Sergeant. Lieutenant Gallardo spotted me coming this way—my part of the agenda is finished, and I want to confer with Tati. Anyway, he asked me to summon you. He is at his regular station. I’ll wait here until you get back. In fact, I’ll be here until Tati gets back.”
Sergeant Manzi nodded. “Sí, mi mayor.”
He made a gesture to comb his hair with his fingers and walked out of the room.
Cubela moved quickly. The rifle, cleaned and oiled, was there on the workbench as anticipated. He lifted it and very nearly shut his eyes out of nabit, simulating three days’ practice. Eyes open, he inserted the telescopic sight he had pulled out of his deep jacket pocket and tightened the wing nut. From another pocket, he took the silencer and screwed it on. Then, from a hind pocket, the bolt, clamping down the lock. Now the cartridge clip, snapped in.
For the first time, he stole a look across the yard. Not easy to make out human figures at this distance. But in a moment he was examining the scene through his perfectly focused telescopic sight. His left elbow on the desk, he lowered his right elbow and eased the rifle down until he saw the crystal window frames. He was viewing the left end of the table, staring at Ingenio Tamayo. Ease it to the right, just a little.
He was staring now at the face of Fidel Castro, who was talking animatedly. Cubela lowered the cross hair. It was now squarely in the middle of Castro’s forehead. His right finger began to tighten, ready to squeeze slowly—
The door flung open. A glance. Tati. Cubela, shaken, pulled the trigger. There was the Whsst of a shot fired through a silencer. Tati stared at him. For just a moment. A second later his pistol was drawn and he fired into Cubela’s left arm. Cubela fell forward. Tati seized the microphone and bellowed out a general alarm. Already Castro was surrounded by his associates and bodyguards. The bullet had knocked the cigar from his hand, as he was bringing it to his mouth. Three guards, summoned by Tati, rushed up to the cockpit.
Tati nodded toward Cubela. “Handcuff him.” Only when they had done so did he let down his pistol. He went to the telephone and dialed a number, quickly related what had happened, and asked for instructions. Within a few minutes, Rolando Cubela was in the back of a police van; destination, La Cabaña.
In the crowded cockpit, something like a summary court-martial was going on. Why had Cubela been there alone? Tati explained—Sergeant Manzi had filled him in on the details. What had brought Tati up to the guardroom? “I saw Captain Cubela walk past the mess room, so I gulped down my soup to go tell him that I knew where I would locate the right bolt for his rifle. I discovered that during the morning. He left the rifle with me.”
Raúl Castro had materialized, breathing heavily after running up the stairs. He heard the last part of the exchange. He was pale. Everyone became silent in his presence.
“I do not believe it! The assassin leaves his rifle to be looked after by the sergeant of the guard!”
“Comandante … I know … there are irregularities. But, sir, I saved his life.”
“Perhaps he will save yours. I doubt it.” Raúl motioned to the guards to take him away.
In minutes, Tati was directly behind Rolando Cubela in the processing room at La Cabaña.
28
Che Guevara, Raúl, and Ramiro Valdés had seen Fidel Castro confront danger. Twice, Che recalled while sitting in the large living room in Fidel’s suite in the Habana-Libre-Hilton where Fidel worked and slept two, sometimes three nights a week, Castro had very nearly been killed by Batista’s army, once at an ambush from which he narrowly escaped. His stamina and resilience were legendary. After intuiting the ambush that prompted Castro to lead his men around Pico Turquino in the Sierra Maestra, a perfectly calm Castro had begun, at three in the morning, in the wet, bleak, cold air, to reminisce, of all goddamn things, about his school days. It was a good deal safer, in those days, to say, “For God’s sake, Fidel, would you please shut up and let us get maybe one hour’s sleep before we’re next shot at?” The official Castro of tonight, Che reflected, bore little resemblance to the imperturbable private Castro of Sierra Maestra.
Fidel Castro was raging mad.
“I know,” he said, “I know the operation was American! Where would Cubela have got a Russian sharpshooter’s rifle?—just to begin with?” Che observed that the existence of that rifle was hardly conclusive proof of U.S. involvement, that after all there was a flow into Cuba of myriad Soviet and East Bloc ordnance—
Castro simply glared at Che, spit into the wastebasket, and walked toward the door. He turned: “What in the name of God can be delaying
them at Cabaña? Tamayo is there to supervise the interrogation. That ought to be enough. It is”—he looked at his watch, and was disgusted at having to use a bandaged right hand to move up his left sleeve so that he could see it—“eight forty-three. They began to go to work on him at three. He is either dead, or he has talked. There is no other possibility. Not when Ingenio Tamayo is in charge. I am going upstairs to eat. I wish to eat alone. Raúl,” he nodded at his brother, “get food for”—he pointed vaguely at the three men. “I wish you all to wait.”
He slammed the door shut.
Che, smoking one of his little cheroots, began to wheeze. An asthma attack. They were all familiar with the symptoms. He gulped down two of his pills, walked into a deep closet, and there, from a standby tank, inhaled some oxygen. The asthma had been especially bad during the last three months, so he kept tanks not only in his own office and house, but also in the three offices most often used by Fidel. He emerged, in a minute or two, visibly better. He lit another cigar and told the steward who had come in to take orders that he would have soup and a ginger ale. Raúl said simply, “Steak and beer. And a daiquiri now.” Valdés nodded: he would have the same.
They found conversation difficult. Valdés spoke: “Fidel wants action.”
“It didn’t help,” Che said, “that our people missed my old friend Oakes in Miami.”
“And again in Mexico,” Raúl added. “Killed the wrong man. I say the wrong man, but that lawyer was not out on that mountain range talking to Oakes about how to make tamales.”
“No,” Valdés, to whom the Cuban Embassy had reported, said: “—the lawyer, Morales, was obviously up to something, and most probably up to something involving Cuba. But what it was we’re not going to know. The driver has recovered and the police have worked on him. He refused to talk, demanding to be taken to the Cuban Embassy. He’s not there yet, but my guess is the Mexicans will just deport him back here. After all, he didn’t shoot anybody.
Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 24