Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Needless to remark, paranoia has not lessened in the Frente. Distrust of the U.S. abounds. The leaders may be in Mexico at our request, but the body of their movement remains in southern Florida; hence, they claim our concealed motive is to elevate them into figureheads for world opinion, even as we remove them further from the real and future leaders who command the invasion force. Working against this premise, Howard has had his hands full at more than one ugly meeting. For a further complication, Barbaro is not there now. He went back to Miami a month ago on an errand, and the others can talk about little else but Faustino’s failure to return. Hunt has been importuning me to get on Toto’s tail.

  Barbaro, when I do see him, swears that he will go back to Mexico as soon as he can get his affairs in order, but is strangely wistful about it. I think he would really like to, but is trapped. Howard is convinced that Barbaro is engaged in a criminal caper involving considerable money. Howard says we need a Miami-based agent to get the goods on Toto, and I have been chasing through stacks of three-by-fives. Sad to relate, the most promising of the candidates, if I can recruit him, is not even a Cuban but a former Uruguayan Communist who used to work for me in Montevideo. I was instrumental in having him flown out to Miami one step ahead of the local cops and his former Party associates. His name is Eusebio “Chevi” Fuertes and he now works in a Miami bank that launders some of our money for the exiles. Barbaro, incidentally, uses the same bank, which fact brought me to consider bringing Fuertes into this.

  I must tell you that I hesitate to employ him. I had a reunion with Chevi last night and it gave me pause. He is all but pro-Castro, so if I did not know him well, I would not go near him. In Montevideo, however, he acted in much the same manner, forever deriding the possibility that America, being capitalist, could ever have a decent motive. Yet, no agent was more valuable to us in Uruguay. When it came down to it, he hated the Communists even more than he hated us. Of course, if you have some agent you would prefer, well, so would I.

  Incidentally, Fuertes has already provided me with one extraordinary piece of local news. It seems everyone in the Frente, Barbaro most of all, is terrified of a wealthy Cuban millionaire named Mario García Kohly who is a devout Batistiano, considers Castro equal to Satan, and sees the Frente leaders as concealed agents for Castro, and therefore prime subjects for assassination. Kohly has ties with a former Cuban senator named Rolando Masferrer who maintains an army of thugs and killers from the Batista days; they are holed up in a place called No Name Key which Kohly owns. Via Fuertes, I hear that some of our Agency people (certainly unknown to me) have been trying to put together a private invasion army for Kohly, and provide him with boats. If successful, it would be a disaster, I think, since such an adventure would produce a civil war. (Of course, I may be seeing too small a part of the picture.) Fuertes, whose instinct for gossip impresses me as salient, adds that the deepest rumors in the exile community assert that Kohly’s support comes from the White House. Not the top, but awfully close to it.

  I must say that with Hunt gone, I have been so busy that I did not expect this letter to prove as enjoyable as it did. I persist in hoping that some of my stuff has stance for you.

  One looks forward to your next visit.

  Your health,

  Harry

  26

  Sept. 29, 1960

  Dear Dad:

  It appears that I do enjoy writing to you, since here is another letter on top of yesterday’s, and I am keeping my lady friend—about whom I will tell you one of these days—waiting. She is not a lady to cool her heels.

  I want, however, to say more about my meeting with Fuertes. I need your reaction to his trustworthiness.

  First, a word about Chevi’s appearance. When recruited three years ago in Montevideo he was an exceptionally handsome fellow, slim, rather muscular, and a knockout with the ladies. Becoming an agent altered him drastically. He ballooned in weight, grew an extra-long, down-raked handlebar mustache (semicomic), and was otherwise a slob.

  Here in Miami, he is still much overweight but has become a dude. Wears tropical three-piece suits in off-pastels. Panama hats. He smokes Havanas with Habanero aplomb, and looks more Cuban than the Cubans.

  While I will make no claims to Bob Maheu’s powers of recall, I believe that what I will offer you here is substantively accurate (90 percent). I did take notes as Fuertes spoke.

  I must say that it is disconcerting how much he knows about us and what we’re up to. He is a born coffeehouse type and frequents all the Cuban restaurants, from Versalles on down to the lowest hangouts on Calle Ocho. He not only sweeps in gossip, but, a born intelligence man, evaluates it. On the day I invited him over to a safe house, he knew, for example, that September 19 was the date we set for completion of the Guatemala training camp, and the site is called TRAX and will train an exile brigade of 400 men.

  With no difficulty, he lays out the sociological components of TRAX. Ninety percent of Brigade trainees, he tells me, are students and professionals of middle-class background. Ten percent are workers, peasants, and fishermen. (That is certainly correct—I’ve been at the recruiting stations.) He can even specify trainee garb and weapons, to wit, combat fatigues with black baseball caps, and grease guns. All correct, Chevi. Where do you get it? But we know. To Cubans, revolution is a family matter, and everyone talks to everyone in the family.

  Chevi did surprise me with his next statement. “I calculate,” he told me, “that on the day of the invasion there will be no more than 1,500 men.”

  I smiled back at him. I didn’t have a clue myself. I decided, however, to play devil’s advocate, and said, “It’s impossible. That number of men could not take Cuba.”

  “They could,” Fuertes told me, “if Castro is truly detested by the masses. After all, Batista was hated, and Castro required less than a thousand barbudos. Of course, now the realities are different.”

  He proceeded to give me a lecture. When Castro was still in the hills, there was but one doctor for every two thousand people. “There’s an old Cuban saying,” he informed me: “Only the cattle are vaccinated.” Then came a somewhat leftist presentation. (I believe his statistics, but distrust something in the liturgical aspect. Still, his figures did startle me.) Under Batista, 4 percent of the Cuban peasantry ate meat regularly; 2 percent ate eggs; 3 percent, bread; 11 percent, milk. No green vegetables. Rice and beans everywhere. Half of the homes on the island were without toilets of any kind. Yet, in Havana, there were traffic jams and TV sets. To be a Habanero was to believe that Cuba was an advanced Latin American country. Havana, not Cuba,” he remarked, “is the spiritual center of your exiles. They are all middle class.”

  “You sound like a man who is for Castro,” I said to him.

  “No,” said Fuertes, “as always, my heart is divided.” I must warn you that he is not without a Latin penchant for metaphysical bluster. “The man who spends his life engaged in a contest between his right hand and his left hand is always choking within,” he said solemnly.

  “Why are you not for Castro?” I asked.

  “Because he destroyed the liberties. A man like me, placed in Havana, would be dead or in the underground.”

  “Then, why are you not against him?”

  Right here he began an interesting, if long-winded, disquisition on the nature of revolution and capitalism which is guaranteed to irritate the hell out of you.

  Capitalism, says Fuertes, is essentially psychopathic. It lives for the moment. It can plan far ahead only at the expense of its own vitality, and all larger questions of morality are delegated to patriotism, religion, or psychoanalysis. “That is why I am a capitalist,” he says. “Because I am a psychopath. Because I am greedy. Because I want instant consumer satisfaction. If I have spiritual problems, I either go to my priest and obtain absolution, or I pay an analyst to convince me over the years that my greed is my identity and I have rejoined the human race. I may feel bad about my selfishness, but I will get over it. Capitalism is a profound sol
ution to the problem of how to maintain a developed society. It recognizes the will-to-power in all of us.”

  As you must have gathered by now, he is in a state of beatitude when he can sit in a chair, drink an añejo, and pontificate. So he posed a dichotomy I had never thought about before—the fell difference between the dumb and the stupid. “It is a profound difference,” he said. “The dumb are weak mentally, and that is sad, but final. The stupid, however, have made a decision to be stupid. They exercise a willful negative intelligence. Their need-to-power is gratified most easily by obstructing the desires of others. Under Communism, where the present is presumably sacrificed for the future, the stupid stop up all the industrial pores. Slovenliness and inefficiency are their secret pleasures. Under capitalism, however, a greedy but stupid man is faced with a painful choice. So long as he remains stupid, he cannot satisfy his greed. Often, therefore, he is obliged to open his mind to be large enough to find some way to thrive. So, men who would be obstructive under Communism become instead, under capitalism, successful pricks and rich shits.”

  Not resting for a moment there, Fuertes next said, “On the other hand, the Communist cadres are indispensable to Castro. Without them, his revolution would be wholly disorganized. With them, he has a bureaucracy capable to some degree of running the country.”

  “Then you are not saying that Communism is bad for Cuba?”

  How hard it is to bring him to focus. “No,” he says, “I am not certain. I paid a visit six months ago. The women impressed me. You should see how they look in their red blouses and black skirts when they march and sing in unison. Communism is solidarity for them.”

  I must say that I was thinking at this moment of Howard’s description of the same ladies. If I recollect, Howard called them “as cacophonous as a tribe of she-goats.”

  “Indeed,” said Chevi, “these women are profoundly moving to me. They have a sense of their own existence that they never had before. Castro has a visceral sense of how to provide theater for the masses, magnificent, grandiose, political theater. Why, when Batista fled Cuba at the end of 1958, Castro did not rush to Havana. He started from the Sierra Maestra, and stopped in each major city on the route to make a four-hour speech. Overhead would be a large black helicopter. It was a sensational choice. The angel of death above, and equal to the liberation. Death was a fundamental part of his revolution. Of course, the women understood. The Spanish mentality perceives us as here on earth to bleed and to die—that is the given. If there happen to be more doctors, more education, more decency in the economic details, well, what a trinity—blood, death, and progress—a revolutionary program for Latins.”

  “Why,” I ask him, “isn’t that equally obtainable with the exiles? They are far to the left of Batista, but they are also for freedom as well.” (I must say—having been around the Frente—that I sounded a little undercooked to myself.)

  “Yes,” said Fuertes, “but can any radical improvement be accomplished in a poor nation’s economy without a reign of terror? Castro answers in the negative. The only human motive more powerful than greed, he suggests, is terror. If the exiles take back Cuba, the corrupt who are among them—most numerous, I promise you—will form a network of greed. They will triumph over the idealists.”

  “So you are back with Castro?”

  “I am with neither, I am with both. I am for myself.”

  We discussed pay. He wants a great deal, $300 a week. Plus bonuses. I believe he is worth it. Fuertes obviously likes to inhabit two worlds at once, but I think I can manage him if he is inclined to work a double game.

  Please advise.

  Harry

  My father’s answer came the next day. The envelope read: EYES ONLY ROBERT CHARLES.

  Communication of Sept. 29 received:

  Your Uruguayan sounds like a sophisticated Communist to me, and a complete double-dealer. He is so corrupt, however, that the money may keep him in line. I will approve if you obey certain basic procedures:

  1) No more political discussions with him. He could be probing your attitudes and passing them on.

  2) Keep to limited objectives always. I will send you specific assignments. Do not stray. He will give you the kitchen sink when all you want is one washer. Get him down to the washer. I will, of course, test his take by whatever corroborative opportunities are available to me.

  3) Never get to like the guy too much. I don’t care if you did save his life.

  4) Absolute case-officer protocol. Never connect him to anyone in Zenith or Quarters Eye without advising me in advance.

  5) The first objective to use him on is the fat Cuban you took to dinner. Call the fat Cuban RETREAD.

  6) Let’s choose BONANZA as the saddlebag for your windbag friend.

  HALIFAX

  27

  BEFORE I COULD HAVE ANOTHER CONVERSATION WITH CHEVI, HOWARD Hunt flew back abruptly to Washington, and obtained permission from Quarters Eye to return the Frente to Miami. Since it was Cal who authorized the move, I assumed my letter had contributed to the decision, although as I later learned, one of the safe houses in Mexico had been discovered by the Mexican police, and given the general situation our other safe house would probably prove useless.

  So, Howard brought the gang back to Miami. He was gloomy. He could receive no kudos on his record, and Dorothy was hardly pleased at the disruption this had caused in the lives of their children. Schools would have to be changed once more. Besides, Howard would have to use his living quarters in Miami for working situations. To protect Don Eduardo’s cover, was he to ask his daughters to take on other last names as well? It was hopeless. The Hunts had to suffer a temporary separation. Dorothy rented a house in the environs of Washington and Howard kept his apartment in Miami. Of course, they now needed new fictions to explain to relatives in America why they were living apart.

  His woes did not sweeten his temperament. If I had been under any impression that I was covering his absence with efficiency, he soon set that vanity packing: My record-keeping was exposed for what it was, passable, and when it came to the laundering of exile funds, Howard was not pleased with the number of transactions I had assigned to couriers (in the hope, as I tried to explain, that payment by hand rather than by check would cut the trail). The problem, of course, was that there were few available couriers we could trust with large sums. It usually came down to me, and I had enjoyed wearing money belts with sums as large as a hundred thousand dollars in them. Indeed, part of the pleasure revealed itself one night when I managed to have the money belt on, even as I was undressing for Modene. The knowledge that her slightly mysterious lover was carrying wads of cash managed to ignite new afterburners in Modene and in me—yes, I liked being a courier.

  Hunt would have none of that. It was irresponsibly dangerous. Let word get out, and one could get robbed or killed. There were ways to transfer funds by written order that could still confuse the record. For that, he had a more experienced intermediary, a fellow named Bernard Barker. He would introduce me to him.

  I had made other mistakes as well. The lesser members of the Frente with whom I had been dealing in Howard’s absence had begun to work out some military plans. They went into considerable development of detail and in the course of that, I had looked at many a map of Cuba, all eight hundred miles of the island, and began to enjoy various problems in logistics and strategy. Hunt, however, explained to me that military discussions with the Frente had to be seen as a harmless exercise, entertaining to one’s sense of irony. “I recognize,” said Hunt, “that it is tragic for some of these Cubans to remain innocent of their tactical impotence, and I am going to have no pleasure in explaining this condition to them when the time comes, but, Harry, face up—the key factor we confront is the DGI agents sent in by Castro. They are bound to pick up Frente plans and pass them back to Havana. So keep tipping your input toward disinformation. This operation is too important to leave it to Cuban generals.”

  “I know you’re right,” I said, “but it doe
s get to me.”

  “Ethics, Harry, has to be subservient to the mosaic.”

  I was thinking of the boatmen. A portion of my labor had gone into calling various boatyards from Maryland down to Key West and across the Gulf from Galveston to Tampa; we were in the business of buying used powercraft. Each night, boats were going out with Cuban exiles, some to plant explosives, others to infiltrate a few people back into Cuba where they could link up with underground organizations. A boatman might be getting killed right now as we spoke. I sighed. It was hard to know whether history was a chart you could study, or a tide.

  One morning not long after Hunt’s return, I received a call from Dix Butler. He was coming to Miami for a short visit. Could we have dinner?

  My first thought on hearing his voice was that Modene must not meet Dix. Love, I decided, was all too determined to explore one’s courage or the lack of it. I actually moved a supper date with Modene over to a later date in order to keep her away from Dix.

  Butler, however, came off the airplane in a flat mood, and did not get around in any hurry to explaining his mission in Miami. In fact, we did not leave the airport. We drank in the nearest lounge.

  “How long here?” I asked.

  “Two days. I’m looking a couple of people over.”

  “Can I ask who you are working for?”

  “Negative.”

  We drank for a while. We barely talked. Neither of us brought up Berlin. We were acting like men between whom nothing much had ever taken place. All the same, his flat mood menaced the air.