Vintage Didion
Page 3
We did not speak, and it was only later, down the mountain and back in the land of the provisionally living, that it occurred to me that there was a definite question about why a man and a woman might choose a well-known body dump for a driving lesson. This was one of a number of occasions, during the two weeks my husband and I spent in El Salvador, on which I came to understand, in a way I had not understood before, the exact mechanism of terror.
—1983
THE METROPOLITAN CATHEDRAL IN SAN SALVADOR, 1982
During the week before I flew down to El Salvador a Salvadoran woman who works for my husband and me in Los Angeles gave me repeated instructions about what we must and must not do. We must not go out at night. We must stay off the street whenever possible. We must never ride in buses or taxis, never leave the capital, never imagine that our passports would protect us. We must not even consider the hotel a safe place: people were killed in hotels. She spoke with considerable vehemence, because two of her brothers had been killed in Salvador in August of 1981, in their beds. The throats of both brothers had been slashed. Her father had been cut but stayed alive. Her mother had been beaten. Twelve of her other relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins, had been taken from their houses one night the same August, and their bodies had been found some time later, in a ditch. I assured her that we would remember, we would be careful, we would in fact be so careful that we would probably (trying for a light touch) spend all our time in church.
She became still more agitated, and I realized that I had spoken as a norteamericana: churches had not been to this woman the neutral ground they had been to me. I must remember: Archbishop Romero killed saying mass in the chapel of the Divine Providence Hospital in San Salvador. I must remember: more than thirty people killed at Archbishop Romero’s funeral in the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador. I must remember: more than twenty people killed before that on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral. CBS had filmed it. It had been on television, the bodies jerking, those still alive crawling over the dead as they tried to get out of range. I must understand: the Church was dangerous.
I told her that I understood, that I knew all that, and I did, abstractly, but the specific meaning of the Church she knew eluded me until I was actually there, at the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador, one afternoon when rain sluiced down its corrugated plastic windows and puddled around the supports of the Sony and Phillips billboards near the steps. The effect of the Metropolitan Cathedral is immediate, and entirely literary. This is the cathedral that the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero refused to finish, on the premise that the work of the Church took precedence over its display, and the high walls of raw concrete bristle with structural rods, rusting now, staining the concrete, sticking out at wrenched and violent angles. The wiring is exposed. Fluorescent tubes hang askew. The great high altar is backed by warped ply-board. The cross on the altar is of bare incandescent bulbs, but the bulbs, that afternoon, were unlit: there was in fact no light at all on the main altar, no light on the cross, no light on the globe of the world that showed the northern American continent in gray and the southern in white; no light on the dove above the globe, Salvador del Mundo. In this vast brutalist space that was the cathedral, the unlit altar seemed to offer a single ineluctable message: at this time and in this place the light of the world could be construed as out, off, extinguished.
In many ways the Metropolitan Cathedral is an authentic piece of political art, a statement for El Salvador as Guernica was for Spain. It is quite devoid of sentimental relief. There are no decorative or architectural references to familiar parables, in fact no stories at all, not even the Stations of the Cross. On the afternoon I was there the flowers laid on the altar were dead. There were no traces of normal parish activity. The doors were open to the barricaded main steps, and down the steps there was a spill of red paint, lest anyone forget the blood shed there. Here and there on the cheap linoleum inside the cathedral there was what seemed to be actual blood, dried in spots, the kind of spots dropped by a slow hemorrhage, or by a woman who does not know or does not care that she is menstruating.
There were several women in the cathedral during the hour or so I spent there, a young woman with a baby, an older woman in house slippers, a few others, all in black. One of the women walked the aisles as if by compulsion, up and down, across and back, crooning loudly as she walked. Another knelt without moving at the tomb of Archbishop Romero in the right transept. “LOOR A MONSENOR ROMERO,” the crude needlepoint tapestry by the tomb read, “Praise to Monsignor Romero from the Mothers of the Imprisoned, the Disappeared, and the Murdered,” the Comité de Madres y Familiares de Presos, Desaparecidos, y Asesinados Politicos de El Salvador.
The tomb itself was covered with offerings and petitions, notes decorated with motifs cut from greeting cards and cartoons. I recall one with figures cut from a Bugs Bunny strip, and another with a pencil drawing of a baby in a crib. The baby in this drawing seemed to be receiving medication or fluid or blood intravenously, through the IV line shown in its wrist. I studied the notes for a while and then went back and looked again at the unlit altar, and at the red paint on the main steps, from which it was possible to see the guardsmen on the balcony of the National Palace hunching back to avoid the rain. Many Salvadorans are offended by the Metropolitan Cathedral, which is as it should be, because the place remains perhaps the only unambiguous political statement in El Salvador, a metaphorical bomb in the ultimate power station.
—1983
MIAMI ONE
Havana vanities come to dust in Miami. On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas. Gerardo Machado is buried now in a marble crypt at Woodlawn Park Cemetery in Miami, Section Fourteen, the mausoleum. On the March night in 1952 when Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had helped depose Gerardo Machado in 1933 and had fifteen years later become president himself, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him his foreign minister, his minister of the interior, his wife and his two small daughters. A photograph of the occasion shows Señora de Prío, quite beautiful, boarding the plane in what appears to be a raw silk suit, and a hat with black fishnet veiling. She wears gloves, and earrings. Her makeup is fresh. The husband and father, recently the president, wears dark glasses, and carries the younger child, María Elena, in his arms.
Carlos Prío is now buried himself at Woodlawn Park Cemetery in Miami, Section Three, not far from Gerardo Machado, in a grave marked by a six-foot marble stone on which the flag of Cuba waves in red, white, and blue ceramic tile. CARLOS PRÍO SOCARRÁS 1903–1977, the stone reads, and directly below that, as if Carlos Prío Socarrás’s main hedge against oblivion had been that period at the University of Havana when he was running actions against Gerardo Machado: MIEMBRO DEL DIRECTORIO ESTUDIANTIL UNIVERSITARIO 1930. Only then does the legend PRESIDENTE DE LA REPúBLICA DE CUBA 1948–1952 appear, an anticlimax. Presidencies are short and the glamours of action long, there among the fallen frangipani and crepe myrtle blossoms at Woodlawn Park Cemetery in Miami. “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba,” Carlos Prío once said to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., during a visit to the Kennedy White House some ten years into the quarter-century Miami epilogue to his four-year Havana presidency. “That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.”
Many Havana epilogues have been played in Florida, and some prologues. Florida is that part of the Cuban stage where declamatory exits are made, and side deals. Florida is where the chorus waits to comment on the action, and sometimes to join it. The exiled José Martí raised money among the Cuban tobacco workers in Key West and Tampa, and in 1894 attempted to mount an invasionary expedition from north of Jacksonville. The exiled Fidel Castro Ruz came to Miami in 1955 for money to take the 26 Julio into the Sierra Maestra, and got it, from Carlos Prío. Fulgencio Batista had himself come back from Florida to take Havana away from Carlos
Prío in 1952, but by 1958 Fidel Castro, with Carlos Prío’s money, was taking it away from Fulgencio Batista, at which turn Carlos Prío’s former prime minister tried to land a third force in Camagüey Province, the idea being to seize the moment from Fidel Castro, a notably failed undertaking encouraged by the Central Intelligence Agency and financed by Carlos Prío, at home in Miami Beach.
This is all instructive. In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country, el exilio, the exile, meetings at private houses in Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counterrevolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year’s morning in 1959 when Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana (for this flight, to the Dominican Republic on an Aerovías Q DC-4, the women still wore the evening dresses in which they had gone to dinner) a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, over-built on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogotá and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp.
—1987
MIAMI TWO
Guillermo Novo was known to FBI agents and federal prosecutors and the various personnel who made up “terrorist task forces” on the eastern seaboard of the United States as one of the Novo brothers, Ignacio and Guillermo, two exiles who first came to national attention in 1964, when they fired a dud bazooka shell at the United Nations during a speech by Che Guevara. There were certain farcical elements here (the embattled brothers bobbing in a small boat, the shell plopping harmlessly into the East River), and, in a period when Hispanics were seen by many Americans as intrinsically funny, an accent joke, this incident was generally treated tolerantly, a comic footnote to the news. As time went by, however, the names of the Novo brothers began turning up in less comic footnotes, for example this one, on page 93 of volume X of the report made by the House Select Committee on Assassinations on its 1978 investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy:
(67) Immunized executive session testimony of Marita Lorenz, May 31, 1978. Hearings before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Lorenz, who had publicly claimed she was once Castro’s mistress (Miami News, June 15, 1976), told the committee she was present at a September 1963 meeting in Orlando Bosch’s Miami home during which Lee Harvey Oswald, Frank Sturgis, Pedro Diaz Lanz, and Bosch made plans to go to Dallas…. She further testified that around November 15, 1963, she, Jerry Patrick Hemming, the Novo brothers, Pedro Diaz Lanz, Sturgis, Bosch, and Oswald traveled in a two-car caravan to Dallas and stayed in a motel where they were contacted by Jack Ruby. There were several rifles and scopes in the motel room…. Lorenz said she returned to Miami around November 19 or 20…. The committee found no evidence to support Lorenz’s allegation.
Guillermo Novo himself was among those convicted, in a 1979 trial that rested on the demonstration of connections between the Cuban defendants and DINA, the Chilean secret police, of the assassination in Washington of the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and of the Institute for Policy Studies researcher who happened to be with him when his car blew up, Ronni Moffitt. This conviction was overturned on appeal (the appellate court ruled that the testimony of two jailhouse informants had been improperly admitted), and in a 1981 retrial, after the federal prosecutors turned down a deal in which the defense offered a plea of guilty on the lesser charge of conspiracy, plus what Guillermo Novo’s attorney called “a sweetener,” a “guarantee” by Guillermo Novo “to stop all violence by Cuban exiles in the United States,” Guillermo Novo was acquitted.
I happened to meet Guillermo Novo in 1985, one Monday morning when I was waiting for someone in the reception room at WRHC–Cadena Azul, Miami, a station the call letters of which stood for Radio Havana Cuba. There was about this meeting nothing of either moment or consequence. A man who introduced himself as “Bill Novo” just appeared beside me, and we exchanged minor biography for a few minutes. He said that he had noticed me reading a letter framed on the wall of the reception room. He said that he was the sales manager for WRHC, and had lived in Miami only three years. He said that he had, however, lived in the United States since 1954, mostly in New York and New Jersey. He was a small sharp-featured man in a white tropical suit, who in fact spoke English with an accent that suggested New Jersey, and he had a way of materializing and dematerializing sideways, of appearing from and then sidling back into an inner office, which was where he retreated after he gave me his business card, the exchange of cards remaining a more or less fixed ritual in Cuban Miami. GUILLERMO NOVO SAMPOL, the card read. Gerente de Ventas, WRHC–Cadena Azul.
That it was possible on a Monday morning in Miami to have so desultory an encounter with one of the Novo brothers seemed to me, perhaps because I was not yet accustomed to a rhythm in which dealings with DINA and unsupported allegations about Dallas motel rooms could be incorporated into the American business day, remarkable, and later that week I asked an exile acquaintance who was familiar with WRHC if the Guillermo Novo who was the sales manager there was in fact the Guillermo Novo who had been tried in the Letelier assassination. There had been, my acquaintance demurred, “a final acquittal on the Letelier count.” But it was, I persisted, the same man. My acquaintance had shrugged impatiently, not as if he thought it best not mentioned, but as if he did not quite see the interest. “Bill Novo has been a man of action,” he said. “Yes. Of course.”
To be a man of action in Miami was to receive encouragement from many quarters. On the wall of the reception room at WRHC–Cadena Azul, Miami, where the sales manager was Guillermo Novo and an occasional commentator was Fidel and Raúl Castro’s estranged sister Juanita and the host of the most popular talk show was Felipe Rivero, whose family had from 1832 until 1960 published the powerful Diario de la Marina in Havana and who would in 1986, after a controversy fueled by his insistence that the Holocaust had not occurred but had been fabricated “to defame and divide the German people,” move from WRHC to WOCN, there hung in 1985 a framed letter, the letter Guillermo Novo had mentioned when he first materialized that Monday morning. This letter, which was dated October 1983 and signed by the president of the United States, read:
I learned from Becky Dunlop [presumably Becky Norton Dunlop, a White House aide who later followed Edwin Meese to the Justice Department] about the outstanding work being done at WRHC. Many of your listeners have also been in touch, praising your news coverage and your editorials. Your talented staff deserves special commendation for keeping your listeners well-informed.
I’ve been particularly pleased, of course, that you have been translating and airing a Spanish version of my weekly talks. This is important because your signal reaches the people of Cuba, whose rigidly controlled government media suppress any news Castro and his communist henchmen do not want them to know. WRHC is performing a great service for all its listeners. Keep up the good work, and God bless you.
[signed] RONALD REAGAN
At the time I first noticed it on the WRHC wall, and attracted Guillermo Novo’s attention by reading it, this letter interested me because I had the week before been looking back through the administration’s arguments for Radio Martí, none of which, built as they were on the figure of beaming light into utter darkness, had alluded to these weekly talks that the pe
ople of Cuba appeared to be getting on WRHC–Cadena Azul, Miami. Later the letter interested me because I had begun reading back through the weekly radio talks themselves, and had come across one from 1978 in which Ronald Reagan, not yet president, had expressed his doubt that either the Pinochet government or the indicted “Cuban anti-Castro exiles,” one of whom had been Guillermo Novo, had anything to do with the Letelier assassination.
Ronald Reagan had wondered instead (“I don’t know the answer, but it is a question worth asking….”) if Orlando Letelier’s “connections with Marxists and far-left causes” might not have set him up for assassination, caused him to be, as the script for this talk put it, “murdered by his own masters.” Here was the scenario: “Alive,” Ronald Reagan had reasoned in 1978, Orlando Letelier “could be compromised; dead he could become a martyr. And the left didn’t lose a minute in making him one.” Actually this version of the Letelier assassination had first been advanced by Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who had advised his colleagues on the Senate floor that it was not “plausible” to suspect the Pinochet government in the Letelier case, because terrorism was “most often an organized tool of the left,” but the Reagan reworking was interesting on its own, a way of speaking, later to become familiar, in which events could be revised as they happened into illustrations of ideology.