Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  Every half-hour from 8.00 a.m. an ancient flat-bottomed motor-boat, carrying a hundred or so standing passengers, crosses the bay from Old Havana’s Muelle de Luz to Regla on the east coast. This ferry is the equivalent of a local bus yet the security checks in the rickety little embarkation shed recalled Heathrow. Inside the door a wand-wielding policeman checked each body – and not casually – though he did ignore the frantic bleeping provoked by my pocketful of coins. Then, at a long counter, every bag, box, bucket and sack was thoroughly searched by two young women in smart brown uniforms. This time-consuming routine must bewilder tourists uninformed about the notorious Regla ferry hi-jacking which had such momentous consequences in 2003.

  On 1 April eleven men armed with a pistol and knives hijacked the day’s first crossing. There were twenty-nine other passengers aboard including one child and four tourists: two Frenchwomen, two Swedish women. The gang-leader was, as we say in Ireland, ‘known to the police’, having appeared in fifteen criminal (non-political) court cases and been jailed four times. As the hijackers veered towards the open sea in a vessel designed for inland waters the authorities decided against an interception but as usual notified the US Coast Guard. Soon after, the hijackers talked ship-to-shore on the marine band radio and demanded – while holding knives to several of the hostages’ throats – a fast boat to take them to Key West. If denied this request they would throw a few hostages overboard, beginning with the tourists.

  At this stage (mid-morning) Fidel was informed – less than twenty-four hours after he had brought to a safe conclusion the hijacking, on 30 March, of an AN-24 plane carrying forty adults and six children from the Isle of Pines to Havana. That hijacker pretended to be armed with a hand-grenade, sham but realistic-looking, and negotiations were extremely convoluted, prolonged and tense. On 19 March, two hours before the invasion of Iraq began, another Isle of Youth-Havana flight had been hijacked by six men armed with knives who forced the pilot to fly to Key West. On the eve of the Regla hijack news broke that those six had been released on bail in Miami, where anti-Castro terrorists habitually enjoy ‘soft landings’.

  When the ferry’s tank ran dry she stood more than twenty miles out and a ten-knots wind was raising a sea heavy enough to endanger her. The hijackers agreed to a tow and Fidel directed the Minister of the Interior and the border patrol chief to oversee the rescue from Mariel. Three boats and a tug were deployed. By the time the ferry had been moored to the pier with a line several yards long, Fidel was on the scene. The hijackers continued to demand a faster boat while keeping knives to the throats of several women. It was then midnight and Special Forces, intent on freeing the hostages, had replaced the Coast Guard. But Fidel ordered them to take no action lest lives be lost. Through a police cruiser’s radio, he and his colleagues then tested the gang-leader’s state of mind and concluded that he was a genuine hazard, unlike the solitary hijacker with the mock grenade. At intervals he held his pistol to a Frenchwoman’s head, the safety clip off and the hammer cocked.

  At dawn the gang leader sent one of his men to the pier to open negotiations which continued all day, the troops ever alert on the dockside. Then the Frenchwoman who had had the pistol to her head sent an almost imperceptible signal to an officer. By now the leader was showing signs of exhaustion and stress; as part of this psyops, all communication with him had been cut for more than an hour. As the two Frenchwomen suddenly jumped into the water, a hostage simultaneously grabbed and disarmed the leader, both men falling overboard as they wrestled. The pistol went off, but harmlessly. And near-tragedy became farce when everyone else – passengers and hijackers together – jumped ship. As the curtain fell on this bloodless drama, Fidel congratulated the Frenchwomen – ‘Very brave, very daring!’ Havana friends showed me film footage taken at Mariel during the final hours – harrowing shots of the little boy’s terror and a stupefied look on one Swedish woman’s face as she stood in a parody of an embrace with a long knife being held to her throat. But nothing justifies the execution of three of the hijackers nine days later.

  The Regla trial and the thirty-seven trials of the seventy-five ‘dissidents’ arrested in March 2003 (not all were tried individually) came close together – close enough to thoroughly confuse the Vatican which described the hijackers as ‘dissidents’ rather than ‘terrorists’. Many of Castroism’s most distinguished friends (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Eduardo Galeano, José Saramago) also angrily condemned ‘Cuba’s recent violations of human rights’ – referring to the three hijackers’ summary executions on 11 April.

  In Cienfuegos my legal friend Alberto (by no means an uncritical fidelista) had gone on the defensive about those death sentences. He recalled that Regla had followed on a spate of US-condoned aeroplane and boat hi-jackings, and other destabilising provocations. Therefore the government, a few weeks after the illegal and apparently successful ‘regime change’ in Iraq, was asking ‘Which regime next …?’ All eleven Regla hijackers were convicted under the Law against Acts of Terrorism (December 2001), hastily passed by the National Assembly in reaction to 11 September and extending the death penalty to include armed hi-jackers.

  I am only ninety-nine per cent anti-death penalty (after the Rwandan genocide it seemed to me appropriate) but I found Alberto’s excuse wholly unacceptable. As was Fidel’s feeble and disingenuous defence of the executions, wrapped up in his 2003 May Day speech. Even after forty-four years of active US antagonism, el comandante cannot have been gripped by a real fear of US invasion – although he was said to have been genuinely rattled on 25 April when Cuban diplomats were officially informed that Washington saw the numerous recent hijackings as ‘a serious threat to the national security of the United States’. (Another through-the-looking-glass statement, since the US courts declined to prosecute those hijackers who landed safely in Florida, whatever the degree of violence used en route.)

  As I was often reminded by fidelistas, the US per capita rate of executions far exceeds Cuba’s and in the National Assembly the death penalty provokes angry debates. ‘Soon it will go,’ Alberto had assured me. ‘Our Supreme Court President [Ruben Remigio-Ferro] argues nothing justifies it; it’s against the Revolution’s humanistic ethos.’

  In the context of Cuban dissidents, the US Penal Code of 2001 makes interesting reading:

  An organisation is subject to foreign control if it solicits or accepts financial contributions, loans, or support of any kind, directly or indirectly, from, or is affiliated directly or indirectly with, a foreign government or a political subdivision thereof, or an agent, agency or instrumentality of a foreign government … Whoever prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the US is guilty of a crime.

  The Cubans jailed in 2003 were guilty of such crimes. In reaction to the international outcry against their convictions Havana moved fast. On 24 June 2003 the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Felipe Perez Roque, launched a volume entitled The Dissidents. It had been put together in ten days and was based on sixty hours of interviews conducted by two well-known professional writers assisted by twenty-four researchers. The interviewees were twelve State Security agents who had infiltrated some of the groups from which the contentious convicts emerged. When the agents gave evidence in public their secret careers ended; most were not sorry to resume normal life and be reconciled with families who for years had been distressed by their apparent betrayal of the Revolution.

  The Dissidents is valuable despite the high speed, high-tech manner of its production. It provides a verbal and pictorial record of the experiences of ‘amateurs’ (ordinary citizens from varying backgrounds) who because of chance contacts became spies for Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. All concerned seem to have been amateurish. The US Special Interests officials happily handed out open passes to any Cuban who presented him/herself as a counter-revoluti
onary. Thus equipped, such people could and did wander in and out of the Special Interests building, together with up to three companions, using its computers and snooping at will. One almost feels sorry for those obtuse US officials, so sure of the Revolution’s unpopularity that any apparent counter-revolutionary was assumed to be genuine and made welcome not only in their offices but in their homes.

  This Mickey Mouse scene in no way resembles the bad old commando days when many lives were lost and huge damage was done to Cuba’s vital installations. As the spies infiltrated numerous small dissident groups they found ideological squabbles, jealousy about who gained what from the Special Interests hand-outs, fierce personality clashes and a rapid turnover in memberships as coveted ‘refugee’ visas rewarded not very tangible achievements. Few projects with genuinely destabilising potential were uncovered. Going by the letter of the law, those subversives jailed in 2003 were undoubtedly guilty and needed restraint – but surely not imprisonment? When I said as much to Alberto he argued rather implausibly that their sort could become a menace if used by McCarry’s threatening ‘Commission’.

  In his launch speech, Felipe Perez asked, ‘Will this book be known beyond the borders of Cuba? Will it enjoy the same front page coverage as the media campaigns waged against Cuba? We will have to wait and see if newspapers print reviews, if television networks come to seek the truth and interview the people who have revealed this truth.’ As far as my observation goes, The Dissidents is virtually unknown outside Cuba. Yet in another political context it might have become a bestseller, given its extraordinary blend of ‘human interest’ and the tensions that go with spying – however amateurish. The narrative has a peculiarly Cuban flavour; it is light-years away from the noxious world of CIA/KGB activities. As Felipe Perez notes, ‘This is not the story of a repressive regime that obtained confessions through torture … The Revolution has used the method of infiltrating the enemy; it has used intelligence, shrewdness, covert activity, but within certain limits … ’ He also points out that Revolutionary Cuba is the real ‘dissident’, its counter-revolutionaries the conformists allied to ‘savage capitalism’, seeking ‘to impose a single system on the world, a single way of living, a single model of conduct’.

  I was crossing the Bay of Havana to visit Normando, a genuinely independent dissident to whom I had a letter of introduction from my Pinar friends. During that twelve-minute ferry ride early clouds glowed rose-pink and old-gold above the two fortresses – Castillo de Moro and Castillo de la Punta – massively guarding the deep channel linking bay to ocean. Here one fully appreciates Havana’s contribution to Spain’s empire-building. This wide, sheltered bay might have been custom-built to protect treasure fleets from well-armed pirates. Now an occasional cruise liner, defying the blockade, moors briefly at an Old Havana terminal near the Plaza de Armas while freighters regularly deliver cargoes of containers – some brightly painted and variously logo’d, seeming alien amidst the drab dilapidation of the docks.

  Many of my fellow passengers were cyclists who pedalled away on the narrow wooden pier. Across the road stands a small, recently restored early nineteenth-century church dedicated to Nuestra Señora de la Virgen de Regla, who has a dual personality. She is also Yemaya, the Santería patroness of the sea and mother of all men. This statue arrived from Spain in a hermit’s luggage in 1696 and fourteen years later was appointed patroness of Havana and of all Cuban fishermen; nobody knows its origin. Two black hands hold a fair, pink-cheeked Infant Jesus on the Virgin’s lap and her shrine is surrounded by a bank of white and blue artificial flowers – Yemaya’s colours. Each Santería orisha has his/her own combination of colours. (In West Africa’s Yoruba religion orishas are spiritual messengers from Olofi/God.) I sat for a little time in the comparative coolness of this agreeably simple church, watching Yemaya’s worshippers offering half a cigar, a banana, a bunch of blue and white wild flowers, a sprinkle of rum. Two old men came together, and three young men wearing dockers’ uniforms, and a few women on their way to the market.

  Regla is a compact, attractive, tranquil town, founded as a fishing port in 1687. It grew with the sugar industry; colossal warehouses dominate the shore south of the pier. Many freed slaves settled here and the Santería ambience is perceptible as one strolls on broken pavements through quiet pot-holed streets lined with paint-hungry eighteenth- or nineteenth-century houses, often handsomely tiled, not grand but suggesting a sufficiency. Some tourist dollars must percolate through from Havana, but not enough to trigger economic renewal. No householders were selling coffee or buns or ham-rolls from their doorways, no pizza stall catered for the long bus queue on a neglected plaza – its flowerbeds empty, its fountains dry and littered. The bus, when it came, was not Chinese. As Normando put it, ‘Regla stays stuck in the Special Period’. The Municipal Museum, said to provide a particularly interesting exposition of Santería, was closed for repairs. Likewise the Liceo Artistico y Literario where Martí delivered one of his most famous and stirring speeches on Cuban independence. However, the natives were friendly and cheerful. A lanky black youth went out of his way to guide me to Normando’s home on a low hilltop where a ten-foot-high Lenin (a guru not often commemorated in Cuba) surveys the port from a rocky inset.

  Normando lived alone in a newish two-roomed clapboard dwelling built on the site of a bohio; young banana plants formed a ‘hedge’ around two organoponico beds made of timbers salvaged from a derelict warehouse. We sat indoors, on either side of a revolving fan, and I mopped with an already sodden sweat-rag while Normando gave me news of our mutual friends in Pinar.

  My host, I had been warned, liked an argument; with fidelistas he tended to excoriate Castroism’s failures, with anti-fidelistas to praise its successes. His ‘CV’ was remarkable. The Revolution orphaned him – a mother killed by Batista’s bombing of the Sierra Maestra in 1958 when he was a toddler, a father killed four years later during the Escambray ‘civil war’. Grandparents reared him, the Revolution educated him, he grew up a loyal fidelista, graduated as a biochemist, then came to resent ‘Sovietisation’ and migrated. In the US he was employed for twelve years by a biotechnology company listed on the stock exchange and found it hard to take the influence of commercial pressures on his own and his colleagues’ work. Post-Comecon, he chose to leave his secure job and return to experience the Special Period. ‘I always believed in the Revolution,’ he explained, ‘and now we Cubans had got it back.’ A Miami-born wife and twin sons were abandoned without, it seemed, too much heartache on Normando’s part. In the mid-1980s he had heard about the discovery, by Havana’s Finlay Institute, of an effective meningitis B vaccine – a world first. This breakthrough inspired the establishment in 1986 of the Centre for Biotechnology (CIGB) and Normando’s homecoming coincided with the government’s decision – at once reckless and shrewd – to invest vast amounts in those biotechnology industries generally presumed to be the preserve of Minority World scientists.

  In 1994 the Centre for Molecular Immunology (CIM) was opened and quickly justified its existence. ‘By 1999,’ said Normando, ‘we were exporting medical products to India, China, Russia, Latin America – over fifty countries. The First World of course locked us out – an alliance of US blockaders, pharmaceutical bullies and complicated drug protocols. Then Canadians came to the rescue, helped us develop international clinical trials for six products now selling all over North America and Europe. An English friend who often visits’ [Professor Michael Levin, head of the Paediatric Unit, St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington] ‘says our doctors, scientists and laboratories are world-class in spite of a crashed economy. This year Chinese oncologists are using CIM’s Theracim Hr3. Two other CIM therapies are being manufactured in India and China under Cuban supervision. And guess what – the State Department has allowed one US company [Cancervax] ‘to carry out clinical trials for the US market! Still the Yanquis can’t focus on our advantage … it’s not true you only get monkeys if you pay peanuts.’

  Cuba’s on-a-shoe-string
successes (twenty-six discoveries, more than a hundred international patents granted) rile those who lavish billions of dollars on medical research with, proportionally, far less impressive results. According to Normando, this outcome should baffle nobody. ‘In the First World, accountants decide whether or not new formulae are developed as medications.’

  The dread word ‘accountants’ gave me an opening to moan about the calamitous role of that breed in the twenty-first-century publishing world where full-time professional editors (‘not cost-effective’) are threatened with extinction.