by Gjelten, Tom
Facundito was returned to his parents unharmed, but the story was not over. When the soldiers showed up at the Moncada with Echevarría in custody, a crowd of angry townspeople attacked him. Only the intervention of the soldiers saved him from being lynched on the spot. The Bacardi chauffeur, already in custody, was not so fortunate. Colonel del Río Chaviano, the army commander responsible for the execution of the moncadista prisoners just a few months earlier, promptly reported that Rodríguez had been shot “while trying to escape.” Bacardi family members learned later that he had been tortured and killed while in police custody. The relief they felt at the return of Facundito and their appreciation for the outpouring of sympathy from their fellow santiagueros were tempered by their disgust with the conduct of the police command and by the reminder that Cuba had become a violent and dangerous country.
On the Isle of Pines, Fidel Castro used his prison time to read history, write letters to friends and allies, and plan the national insurrection he had long envisioned. One of his major projects was to reconstruct the oration he had delivered extemporaneously during his trial in Santiago, an elaborated version of which he wrote as an essay titled “History Will Absolve Me.” Though it had limited circulation at first, the tract was read widely in the coming years and taken as the definitive statement of Castro’s program.
No document better illustrates the brilliance of his political thinking. On the one hand, he was careful to remain within the ideological parameters of conventional left-wing Latin populism. The movement Castro saw himself representing encompassed anybody with a grievance, including “Cubans without work... farm laborers who live in miserable shacks ... industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled... small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs... teachers and professors who are so badly treated... small businessmen weighed down by debts... [and] young professional people who finish school anxious to work and full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end.” Castro’s perspective, moreover, was reformist rather than revolutionary. He said he was committed to the restoration of Cuba’s 1940 Constitution and wanted to see his country return to the time when Cuba had a president, a Congress, and courts, when there were political parties, public debates, and free elections.
On the other hand, no Cuban who read “La historia me absolverá” could have doubted that Castro stood for sweeping social and political change. Under the program he proposed, agricultural land would have been transferred to the tenant farmers who worked it, and workers in industrial enterprises would have been given the right to share in 30 percent of their firms’ profits. It was as if Castro was determined to lay out the most radical political program conceivable that could still attract popular support. In that regard, he was largely successful. Among those who ultimately endorsed Castro’s progressive analysis and vision for Cuba, at least in principle, were the Bacardis.
By the time he was released from prison under a general amnesty in May 1955, Castro was seen as a noble and charismatic figure, and he reentered public life in dramatic fashion. A crowd gathered on the docks to await the boat that ferried him and his fellow moncadista prisoners from the Isle of Pines, and, as always, Fidel rose to the occasion.
“Do you plan to stay in Cuba?” a reporter asked, as Castro stepped off the boat, dressed in a baggy, double-breasted suit with an open-collared white shirt.
“Yes, I plan to stay in Cuba and fight the government in the open,” Castro answered, “pointing out its mistakes, denouncing its faults, exposing gangsters, profiteers, and thieves.” He had grown a mustache in prison, but his appearance was otherwise unchanged by nearly two years behind bars. He had been kept in a good-sized private cell, with his own toilet facilities and a hot plate on which he could cook.
“Will you remain in the Orthodox Party?”
“We will struggle to unite the whole country under the flag of Chibás’s revolutionary movement.”
“Would you accept a solution through elections?”
“We are for a democratic solution. The only party here opposed to peaceful solutions is the regime. The only way out of the Cuban situation, as far as I can see, is immediate general elections.”
By his own later admission, however, Castro was moderating his public positions in order to broaden his appeal and disguise his more extreme intentions. In 1965 he told a visitor that when he filed to run as a parliamentary candidate in the 1952 elections, it was with the intent of “using the parliament as a point of departure from which I might establish a revolutionary platform and motivate the masses in its favor.... Already then I believed I had to do it in a revolutionary way.” From the time he began organizing his followers politically, there is no sign that Castro ever considered himself accountable to anyone but himself. Behind the indisputable brilliance of his strategic analysis were early signs of the narcissism and megalomania that would later characterize his rule. While still in prison, Castro ordered one of his collaborators, Melba Hernández, to organize a rally in support of him and the other imprisoned rebels. His written instructions to her were chilling for what they foreshadowed: “Show much guile and smiles to everyone. We will have time later on to trample underfoot all the cockroaches.”
Castro’s declaration upon leaving prison that he would pursue “a democratic solution” proved hollow. Within days of his release from prison, he was telling his followers that he intended to build a new revolutionary organization called the Movimiento 26 de Julio, the M-26-7, in commemoration of the Moncada attack on that day. It would take time, however, and he figured it would be unsafe to do it in Cuba. In July 1955, Castro left for Mexico, just two months after promising to stay on the island and work “in the open.”
Chapter 13
A Brief Golden Age
After a day of writing and maybe some fishing, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway liked to stop in Old Havana for a few drinks at his favorite bar, El Floridita, on Calle Montserrat. The saloon had a feeling of worn but cozy grandeur, with a magnificent mahogany bar and red velvet curtains, a place where the food was cheap but good and the drinking was serious. Hemingway always went directly to a stool on the far left side of the bar, in what the regulars called “Papa’s corner.” Hemingway brought the Floridita a certain fame as a bar where visitors might see or even have a drink with the celebrity writer, who on most days was gracious to those who came up to shake his hand.
Hemingway had seen and written about war up close, and his fondness for bullfighting, big game hunting, and beautiful women enhanced his reputation as a hairy-chested adventurer. At the Floridita, he always drank daiquiris, a cocktail often chosen by women, though he favored a double-rum version. In Hemingway’s heyday, Constantino “Constante” Ribalaigua was still presiding over El Floridita, as he had been in the 1920s when the British writer Basil Woon was impressed by his cocktail talents. Constante’s special “Papa Doble” daiquiri was so dear to Hemingway’s heart that it made an appearance in his novel Islands in the Stream: “He had drunk double frozen daiquiris, the great ones that Constante made, that had no taste of alcohol and felt, as you drank them, the way downhill glacier skiing feels running through powder snow. ...”
Arguably, Hemingway did more than anyone else to popularize the daiquiri, and by so doing he also promoted Bacardi rum. Much of Hemingway’s writing was inspired by his years living and drinking in Cuba, and in his novels he mentioned Bacardi products by name. In August 1956, about a year and a half after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Bacardi Rum Company hosted a reception for him and his wife, Mary, at its Hatuey brewery, not far from the Hemingways’ home. He had been offered parties at exclusive private clubs, but he agreed only to the event at the brewery, because he knew he could bring his fisherman friends, even if they came barefoot and in shorts—as they did.
The event was held in the brewery garden, with abundant supplies of Bacardi rum and ice-cold Hatuey beer, served with roast suckling pig, tamales, boiled yucca, fried bananas, and rice wi
th red beans. A wooden stage was erected at one end of the garden, with a banner across the back reading, “Bacardi Rum Welcomes the Author of The Old Man and the Sea,” which was Hemingway’s most recently published novel. The master of ceremonies was Fernando Campoamor, a famous Havana journalist who specialized in coverage of the social scene and was one of Hemingway’s regular drinking buddies. The guest of honor seemed a bit uncomfortable under the crush of attention. “I am gratified and moved by this undeserved honor,” he said, speaking in heavily accented but fluent Spanish. Hemingway had brought along the Nobel gold medal, and he held it in his hands. A year earlier, he had said the prize belonged to Cuba, because his work was created there. “I have always been of the belief that writers should write and not speak,” Hemingway said, looking at Campoamor. “I am donating this Nobel Prize medal to the Virgin of Charity [Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre], the patron saint of this country I love so much.” And then he handed the medal to Campoamor. The Virgin of Charity represents the spiritual soul of Cuba, and no act could have endeared Hemingway more to the Cuban people. “Cuba loves you like a mother loves her son,” Campoamor said. The medal was taken to the shrine of the Virgin of Charity in Cobre, the small mining town outside Santiago, where it would remain.
It was the summer of 1956, and Cuba was in a magical era, or so it seemed. With Hemingway as one of the attractions, Havana was a compulsory stop for jet-setters and movie stars. At the Finca Vigia (or sometimes at El Floridita), Hemingway and his wife entertained Marlene Dietrich, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Ava Gardner. Havana nightclubs in those days were featuring the best American and foreign entertainers, with Nat King Cole at the Tropicana, Tony Bennett at the Sans Souci, Maurice Chevalier at the Montmartre, and Frank Sinatra at the Hotel Nacional. Jazz musicians like Cab Cal loway, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, Sarah Vaughan, and Benny Goodman appeared regularly at hotel bars and clubs. For a rum company like Bacardi, Cuba in the mid-1950s appeared to be an ideal place and time to be doing business.
Cubans themselves, however, were growing increasingly uncomfortable in their country. The good times came at a cost. Havana nightclub owners could afford to hire classy entertainment only because they were making so much money in their casinos. Havana had become the Las Vegas of the Caribbean, and the high living depended, in the end, on gambling profits. It was actually worse than Las Vegas, in fact, because the country was in the hands of a profoundly corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who had essentially sold Cuba to the American Mafia. Batista put Meyer Lansky on salary as his “gambling adviser,” even though Lansky had been identified as one of the six top gangsters in the United States. At Lansky’s urging, Batista had changed the gambling laws in 1955 to allow the sale of a gaming license to anyone investing a million dollars in a new hotel, no questions asked. Lansky had the high-end Montmartre casino, and he was building the new Riviera Hotel. His brother Jake ran the casino at the Hotel Nacional. Gambling at the Sans Souci was overseen by Santo Trafficante Jr., the Tampa-based mobster. Most of the financial arrangements surrounding the gambling activities in Havana were under the table; the official price for a gaming license was twenty-five thousand dollars, but the secret payoff to Batista and his friends could be ten times that amount. The casino owners also had to be sure the construction contracts went to Batista’s friends and relatives. The police responsible for overseeing the casinos had to be paid, as did the government bureaucrats and legislators who made sure the rules got bent when necessary. The rule of law had become virtually meaningless; protection could be purchased.
Along with gambling came more marijuana and opium bars, heroin trafficking, brothels, and pornography. The Shanghai Theater in the Chinatown section of Old Havana featured live sex shows that outdid even the most sordid X-rated clubs in the United States. Many of the women who found work there came from towns and villages in the Cuban countryside, which remained largely untouched by the wealth on display in Havana. Cuba had become a nation of stunning contrasts: 87 percent of urban housing units had electricity, but only 9 percent of rural homes; only 15 percent of the rural population had running water, as opposed to 80 percent of city residents. While the country as a whole still had the fourth-highest literacy rate in Latin America, nearly half the people in the countryside could not read or write. Poverty and unemployment in the rural areas drove desperate residents to Havana and contributed to the growing crime and prostitution in the capital.
Ordinary Cubans were disgusted by all the crooked politicians and their mobster allies and yearned for a government of which they could once again be proud. Some Cubans took heart in an effort by an esteemed independence war veteran, Cosme de la Torriente, to unite the opposition behind a demand that Batista hold free elections. Fidel Castro refused to support the initiative, however, and from exile in Mexico he issued a declaration denouncing the “cowardice” of those who were willing to negotiate with Batista, including his former Orthodox Party colleagues. Castro’s own M-26-7 organization, however, was by then just one segment of the anti-Batista movement. University student groups were in the forefront, and they were repeatedly targeted by Batista’s brutal police, both in Havana and in Santiago.
Among the santiagueros rallying behind the anti-Batista struggle was Vilma Espín, the daughter of Bacardi executive José Espín, the former labor negotiator and assistant to Enrique Schueg. Very smart and very pretty, with delicate features, dark eyes, and a lissome figure, Vilma was a well-bred, upper-class Santiago girl with a rebellious streak, as had been seen when she jumped for joy over the Moncada assault. At the University of the Oriente in Santiago, she had majored in chemical engineering, one of the first women to do so. One of her instructors was the young Bacardi engineer Juan Grau, Fidel Castro’s old friend, by then working at the Bacardi distillery as well as teaching part time. The two knew each other already—Grau’s father associated with Vilma’s father—and they became good friends at the university. After failing to persuade her to come work with him at Bacardi, Grau urged Vilma to continue her engineering studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had gone to school, and he even called the director of admissions and secured her acceptance.
José Espín also pressed his daughter to go to MIT. Still, she resisted. After her university graduation in 1954, she took a job in a laboratory at a sugar refinery near Santiago but continued to get together with friends and former students who shared her political interests. One day a colleague slipped her a copy of Fidel Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” while she was working on a lab analysis. “I couldn’t put it down,” she recalled in a 1985 interview with Castro biographer Tad Szulc. She immediately threw herself into clandestine work in Santiago in association with one of her old chemistry professors, a Spanish Communist.
Her father was displeased by her increasingly radical views. “He started insisting all the more that I go to MIT,” Vilma said. “He knew what I was getting involved in, and he wanted me out of there.” José Espín, after all, was an executive at a big capitalist firm, and he had spent much of his professional life at Bacardi battling leftist labor leaders. Finally, in late 1955, she gave in to her father’s urging and headed to Boston for graduate studies.
She lasted only a few months. Having marched in demonstrations and participated in secret revolutionary activities back in Cuba, Vilma felt totally out of place among her apathetic MIT classmates and decided to end her studies and return. On the way home, she stopped in Mexico, having arranged through friends to meet Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl. The two met her at the Mexico City airport, and she spent three days with them, heading back to Cuba with a bundle of letters from Fidel to his followers.
Vilma returned to Santiago ready to be a revolutionary. While most colleagues in her old Bacardi world shared her antipathy for the Batista regime, some were a bit uncomfortable with her militancy and self-righteousness. Juan Grau noticed that she had developed a n
ew hostility toward the United States during her stay in Massachusetts. “She had been somewhat anti-American before she left,” Grau said, “probably under the influence of that professor from Spain. I had thought going to MIT would change her attitude, but it seemed to make it worse.”
In fact, resentment of the United States seemed to be growing in Cuba, in tandem with the broadening anti-Batista sentiment. A U.S. proposal to dig a canal across the island so as to facilitate trade with South America outraged Cubans of all political persuasions. Some Cubans even blamed Americans for the increased crime and vice in their country. They pointed out that Americans introduced racetrack betting to Cuba and opened the first casinos, ran the best-known bars, patronized the brothels and sex shows, and were generally the biggest drunkards.
Cubans active in the movement against Batista also resented the way that the United States was propping him up. The U.S. government had recognized Batista as Cuba’s president just seventeen days after he took power in 1952 through unconstitutional means. In contrast, the United States never recognized Ramón Grau San Martín’s 1933 government, though he was freely elected and held office for four months. Whereas Grau had been seen as unfriendly to U.S. business and security interests, Batista catered to Washington. With U.S. funding, he created a special intelligence unit called the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities. Vice President Richard Nixon came to Havana to toast the Batista regime’s “competence and stability” at a black-tie reception in February 1955, and CIA director Allen Dulles came a short time later. The U.S. ambassador to Cuba at the time, Arthur Gardner, was so friendly to Batista that it embarrassed the dictator, who knew the issue of U.S. interference in Cuban affairs was a sensitive one. “I’m glad Ambassador Gardner approves of my government,” Batista once said, “but I wish he wouldn’t talk about it so much.”