Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  The Immigration Section of the Department of Internal Security (open 9.00 a.m.–3.00 p.m.) is a brisk ninety minutes walk from No. 403. At 10.30 I joined a very long queue only to be told I must return next morning because that queue was the day’s quota. No special office caters for tourists; they must merge with the multitude. I then discovered that cash is not acceptable. One has to buy special visa stamps at a particular guichet in a particular (distant) bank and get a signed and sealed statement from another guichet guaranteeing that you, personally, have bought those stamps. Yet Cuba’s London consulate can deliver a visa in seven minutes!

  In the bank I queued for more than an hour; as customers accumulated, three of the eight guichets closed. There were however easy chairs and sofas scattered between the pillars, leading me to suspect ‘a joint venture’; the ascetic Revolution, left to itself, would never authorise such sybaritism. One’s time of arrival seemed irrelevant; a gorgeously uniformed six-foot-six security officer decided who would go to which guichet when. The etiquette for my second queue, to acquire the guarantee, required me to stand – beside an empty chair – for what felt like another hour.

  Next stop – Cuba’s Central Post Office, by way of an experiment undertaken without much hope. In this enormous building I entrusted a fat envelope to the only person in sight, an amiable middle-aged black woman sitting behind glass at a bare desk. (Her isolation suggested a basis for my lack of hope.) When I asked ‘How much?’ she frowned anxiously, then made a soothing sound and disappeared with the envelope. Returning six minutes later she said, ‘CP0.85’ – which, given the letter’s weight, seemed absurd. The four stamps eventually found at the back of a drawer celebrated ‘Gatos Domesticos’ – a mother carrying her kitten – which would delight the Trio should this letter ever arrive. Carefully the clerk licked each stamp and took pains to place them symmetrically in the four corners, giving the impression that this was not an everyday task. Then that anxious frown reappeared: the stamps were not sticking. Another soothing sound and off she went on a nine-minute search for glue. Clearly she was committed to my envelope’s welfare. Having delicately applied the glue, she pounded each stamp with a fist, looking resolute. As I counted out the centavos in small coins, to get rid of a surplus, the stamps took anti-glue action – curled up at the edges. Distraught, my friend (as I now thought of her) removed them, produced a new set, applied glue only. She then used eloquent sign language to convey her theory that saliva and glue are chemically incompatible. That letter arrived in Italy seven weeks later.

  On the Malecón little fish were being flung across the road and seaweed was piled below my favourite bar’s steps and spray drenched me as I drank and wrote. The longer this wind blows, the higher the waves build up in the Straits of Florida.

  Are the Cubans neurotic about slight temperature variations? That day I saw many dogs wearing coats, not the sort of tailored canine jackets fashionable in Kensington/Chelsea but improvised garments: men’s underpants, children’s T-shirts, women’s tights and, memorably, two oversize bras encasing an extra-long dachshund. My woolly white terrier friend on San Rafael, for whom I had felt pity in November as he panted through the noon heat, was now guarding his doorstep swaddled in towelling tied on with a string. No wonder so many concerned habaneros were stopping me in the street, sympathetically exclaiming ‘Frio!’ – then being astonished, on feeling my bare arms, to find me not ‘frio’.

  My visa contretemps left Candida guilt-stricken. She had provided me with the essential document, signed by us both, to prove my place of residence but had assumed I would know about the stamps. And she’d got the timing wrong, the office opens at 8.00, not 9.00. I hugged her to wipe out all that guilt. We in the reserved West should make more use of hugging.

  Next morning, to be sure of a place in that day’s queue, I set off when the streets were empty of all but cats. Havana’s energy-saving street lighting is adequate but, given the hazardous state of Centro’s pavements, one has to move cautiously before dawn. As I watched my step, a mild electric shock was administered to my scalp. Looking up, I saw an illegal cable suspended between a pole and a ground-floor flat at just the height to shock your average Cuban (not a very tall person). The cable was still in place on my next visit to Havana.

  No less startling was a hazard on a busy footpath where someone had covered a deep hole with the top (or bottom) of a tar barrel. This had been knocked off-centre so that it presented the equivalent of a sharp rusty knife to the shins of oncoming pedestrians. Anyone watching out for dangling cables would certainly have been gashed.

  Twenty-eight stood ahead of me outside Immigration’s one-storey prefab buildings on a ridge unprotected from Atlantic gales. Soon even I was frio – chilled through, hands and feet numb. All morning the sun tried to shine but the clouds won. Wistfully I remembered the bank’s easy chairs and wondered why Internal Security took asceticism to such an extreme, not even providing wooden benches for people (many of them elderly) who had to stand for four or five hours – four hours and twenty minutes in my case.

  The monotony was broken only by two litters of tiny frolicking kittens and, as time passed it became clear that their entertaining presence was no accident. These were not feral families; at a little distance, watching them, sat two teenage girls with cardboard cartons. All ten kittens were tame and very tempting and several in the queue gradually gave way to temptation – an interesting process to observe, winning ways overcoming practical considerations. Two couples disagreed, loudly and at length, about their household’s need for another animal. In both cases victory went to the tempted. I wondered if this solution to the ‘good homes’ problem would work in Ireland – but then, we don’t have five-hour alfresco queues.

  When the office opened, twenty minutes late, the queue exceeded one hundred and fifty (we counted to amuse ourselves). Only two women were on duty, each in a little doorless office minimally furnished – camp chairs on either side of a table hardly big enough to hold a computer. A sharp-tongued man, wearing an Internal Security peaked cap, monitored us, opening a gateway at intervals to admit eight and, should a ninth try to slip in, banishing him/her to the end of the queue. When my turn came, the rest of the octet registered changes of addresses or relatives visiting from abroad, applied for tourist taxi licences or permits required to receive parcels from the US. Such matters are time-consuming but, after all that stamina-testing, my visa-renewal procedure took less than ten minutes.

  Some Cubans insist that the Bay of Pigs invasion pushed the depressive and alcoholic Ernest Hemingway over the edge, that he shot himself three months later because it seemed he could never return to Finca La Vigia, his beloved home for twenty-one years. Everywhere nostalgia is a tourist asset and the Havana authorities have restored this villa at a cost of more than 2.5 million. Here, too, the embargo operated. The Boston-based Hemingway Preservation Society wished to donate but were informed, ‘Any contribution would violate trade sanctions by boosting tourism’. Then a compromise allowed Boston’s enthusiasts to help conserve and catalogue the bulky archives found in the villa’s mouldy cellar.

  Cuba’s tourist bosses have recently given a tincture of romance even to the Batista era. In the celebrated art deco Hotel Nacional, opened in 1930 on a high bluff above the Malecón, I was startled to be offered a tour of ‘the suites where Al Capone and Meyer Lansky lived’. This trend worries me in the first decade of the twenty-first century when real, live Mafia types abound in our financial, corporate and political worlds – some of their schemes making the Cosa Nostra look like tyros.

  In 1929 another art deco spectacular arose near the Presidential Palace at a cost of one million dollars. This was Edificio Bacardi, a new headquarters for the rum company, built of pink granite and coral limestone with terracotta tiles around the windows and the Bacardi symbol (a bat) perched on the pyramidal roof. On 9 January 1959, when el comandante led his victorious guerrillas into Havana, they saw something astounding. High above the street, extending the f
ull length of this dominant building, hung a banner saying ‘GRACIAS, FIDEL’. For all their business acumen, the Bacardi tribe had misjudged Fidel and helped in a small way to fund his army, believing that its main aim was to get rid of Batista – an aim then shared by most Cubans, rich or poor. Who could take seriously all those impractical promises made to the masses? When the young rebels came to power they would surely behave like sensible politicians, providing only enough marginal reforms to placate their followers while they secured for themselves lucrative positions in the new government.

  One Bacardi manoeuvre had been thwarted in mid-December. When the dictator’s defeat seemed assured, he received a visit from Earl Smith, the US ambassador, who instructed him to put in place a junta, to begin to organise elections – and then to leave, for good. Smith had already chosen the junta and Pepin Bosch was a senior member. However, Batista ignored his would-be boss and no junta impeded the Rebel Army’s swift take-over.

  On 7 January a group of businessmen, including Pepin Bosch and Daniel Bacardi, met in Havana and sent an urgent message to President Eisenhower pleading for immediate US recognition of the new regime ‘because this government appears far better than anything we had dared hope for’. So influential were these men that the State Department granted diplomatic recognition that very day.

  Fidel kept his promise to organise a calm transition to reform by appointing former Judge Manuel Urrutia as President and José Miro-Cardona (once his professor at Havana’s Law School) as Prime Minister. This interim cabinet contained only three guerrillas (rtd) but Fidel appointed himself as Commander-in-Chief of the Rebel Armed Forces.

  Then the Revolution’s glory was tarnished by the execution of four hundred of Batista’s most loyal and brutal SIM military police – ‘Special Service’ torturers. Their trials in Havana’s sports stadium were shown live on TV with vengeful crowds demanding instant executions and Che signed more than fifty death sentences. In Santiago Fidel’s brother Raúl supervised the machine-gunning of seventy-one soldiers. When international outrage flared – the US pouring petrol on its flames – Fidel angrily pointed out, ‘We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers … Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction.’

  In his biography of Fidel, Leycester Coltman, former British ambassador to Havana, comments:

  Most Cubans accepted and indeed welcomed Castro’s position. It increased their sense of liberation. He was liberating them not only from the tyranny of Batista, but from the tyranny of a legal system which had rules and codes and procedures, but did not deliver justice. Under the old system money, influence and clever lawyers would enable a man to get away with murder while the poor found no redress. For years the American mafia had run huge gambling and prostitution rackets, in collaboration with corrupt Cuban police officers, and had enjoyed impunity from the law. Most Cubans had more confidence in Fidel’s moral conviction.

  When Fidel first visited the US in April 1959 President Eisenhower hardly noticed – he had a golf date to keep. Cuba’s Revolution left him unbothered; perhaps it was veering too far left but when the Guatemalan government did likewise in 1954 it had been easy to get rid of Jacobo Arbenz: one crisp Presidential order to the CIA and regime change was effected.

  During a three-hour meeting with Vice-President Nixon Fidel and his team of economic advisors – including Felipe Pazos, president of Cuba’s National Bank – discussed and disagreed about land reform. Fidel, as he had expected, found himself in a minority of one though his plan to limit private ownership to four hundred hectares (about one thousand acres) seemed not unreasonable. When the Land Reform law came into force in June, the US sent a note of protest, fulminating about the compensation offered. It was based on the landowners’ own assessments of value, as recorded on their tax forms over the years – an impeccably correct legal procedure. This hoisting of the super-rich on their own petard must have tickled Fidel’s sense of humour while sparing Cuba’s coffers – almost emptied by Batista and his entourage before they fled.

  In July 1960 Law 851 led to the nationalisation of the Bacardi Company’s Cuban assets, by then only a tiny fraction of their wealth. Eventually most foreign companies (Mexican, Canadian, British, Swiss, French) accepted that Castroism had arrived to stay and took whatever was on offer, always calculated on the basis of taxes previously paid. To this day, however, the Bacardis and the US government have refused compensation on Cuba’s terms.

  A fortnight before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Bacardi donated a small ship to the Miami exiles’ Christian Democrat Movement and she promptly set sail for Cuba with José Ignacio Rasco on board – the CIA’s choice to lead the hoped-for puppet government. Two and a half years later, when a Kennedy/Castro rapprochement seemed a possibility in the week before President Kennedy’s death, Adlai Stevenson resentfully noted that ‘the CIA is still in charge of everything to do with Cuba’.

  Soon after the Brigade 2506 debacle, Pepin Bosch began to organise a second invasion, more carefully planned. According to Álvaro Vargas Llosa, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) spokesman, Bosch was determined ‘to gather a group of exceptional people, prominent men of the Cuban republic, and subject them to a referendum in order to create a world representative body of exiles who would be mandated to carry out actions in favour of the freedom of Cuba’. A National Security Council (NSC) memo, dated 28 May 1963, reveals that Washington knew of this plan.

  By the beginning of 1964 Pepin Bosch had found five ‘exceptional people’ to lead the Miami-based Cuban Representation in Exile (RECE its Spanish acronym). The CIA provided its main funding but Vargas Llosa records that ‘Bacardi gave the organisation $10,000 per month and paid each of the five leaders $600 per month’ – even then not lavish sums, by Bacardi standards. Soon RECE ranked amongst the Western hemisphere’s most deadly terrorist groups and Luis Posada Carriles (who was still making global headlines in 2006) held a dual position as its chief planner and a CIA ‘special operative’. In 1985 US Congressional investigators obtained an FBI document exposing CIA funding for a RECE sabotage attack on a Cuban ship in the Mexican port of Vera Cruz. Other revelations came in 1998, with the release of a report on Congressional probings into President Kennedy’s death and concurrent CIA plans to assassinate certain foreign political leaders, Fidel being first on the list. The letter attached to this report merits quotation in full:

  The White House

  Washington

  June 15, 1964

  MEMORANDUM FOR MR BUNDY

  Subject: Assassination of Castro

  1. Attached is a memorandum from the CIA describing a plot to assassinate Castro, which would involve US elements of the Mafia and which would be financed by Pepin Bosch.

  2. John Crimmins is looking into the matter. He is planning to talk to Alexis Johnson about it and feels that it should be discussed in a Special Group meeting. John’s own inclination is that the government of the United States cannot knowingly permit any criminal US involvement in this kind of thing and should go all out to stop the plot. This would involve putting the FBI on the case of the American criminal elements involved and intervening with Bosch.

  I have not yet thought this through and respectfully withhold judgement.

  Gordon Chase

  McGeorge Bundy, the Special National Security Assistant to President Johnson (and formerly to President Kennedy), was responsible for the administration’s relations with the CIA.

  The eight-point memo passed by the CIA to their director, Richard Helms, noted that Pepin Bosch had offered $100,000 of the $150,000 demanded by the Mafia and their Cuban-American underworld links for ‘taking out’ Fidel, his brother Raúl and Che. (A bargain, some might have thought – only fifty thousand dollars each!)

  Richard Helms, whose wealth had been considerably diminished by Fidel’s nationalisations, ended his report on the plot:

  Note: It is requested that this agency be informed of any action con
templated in regard to the persons mentioned in this report before such action is initiated.

  Who knows why such action never was initiated? Possibly because the CIA failed to co-ordinate the four hundred or so counter-revolutionary cells then vying for their support.

  Pepin Bosch was active on many fronts. After the nationalisation of Cuba’s oil refineries he resolved to bomb them, throwing the island into the chaos of darkness. In the ensuing anarchy, Castro’s victims would surely rise up against Communism. This bombing was to be launched from Costa Rica, that favourite CIA base for covert activities. As Pepin Bosch’s second-hand B-26 lacked rockets, he visited Venezuela’s arms bazaar, found it temporarily out of rockets and hurried to Brazil where the dictatorship presented him with a pair of left-overs from a dodgy consignment. Back in Costa Rica, Nature intervened. Weather delayed the bombing run, some alert journalist investigated the mysterious B-26 with the uncommunicative pilot – and then spotted an international ‘celeb’ (as Pepin Bosch would now be known) lurking nearby. When the New York Times published a photograph of the plane, with a questioning caption, the Costa Rican government made haste to avert a major scandal by confiscating this embarrassing Bacardi possession.

  Castroism’s twenty-first-century harshness towards US-funded and trained subversives is rooted in Cuba’s exposure to terrorism before its security services acquired the know-how to outwit CIA agents and RECE saboteurs. William Blum reviews the 1960s in Killing Hope, a book described by John Stockwell, a former CIA officer, as ‘the single most useful summary of CIA history’.

  Throughout the decade, Cuba was subjected to countless sea and air commando raids by exiles, at times accompanied by their CIA supervisors, inflicting damage upon oil refineries, chemical plants and railroad bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and sugar warehouses; infiltrating spies, saboteurs and assassins … anything to damage the Cuban economy, promote dissatisfaction, or make the revolution look bad … taking the lives of Cuban militia members and others in the process … organising pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships … The commando raids were combined with a total US trade and credit embargo so unyielding that when Cuba was hit by a hurricane in October 1963 and Casa Cuba, a New York social club, raised a large quantity of clothing for relief, the US refused to grant it an export licence on the grounds that such shipment was ‘contrary to the national interest’ …