As we were walking toward the plane, trapped between my congenital fear of flying and my desire to see Cuba, I asked the pilot with a thread of a voice:
“Captain, do you think we’ll make it?”
“We might,” he answered, “with the help of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre.”
* * *
—
IT WAS a rickety old twin-engine plane. The legend circulated among us that it had been seized and flown to the Sierra Maestra by a pilot who deserted from Batista’s air force, and sat abandoned to the sun and the dew until that night of my misfortune when they sent it to look for suicidal journalists in Venezuela. The cabin was narrow and badly ventilated, the seats were broken, and there was an intolerable smell of sour urine. Everybody made themselves comfortable however they could, some even sitting on the floor of the narrow aisle between the luggage and the film and television equipment. I felt airless, cornered against a little window in the tail, but I was comforted a little by my comrades’ self-assurance. All of a sudden, someone among the most tranquil ones murmured in my ear between clenched teeth, “Lucky you not having a fear of airplanes.” Then I reached the extreme of horror, for I understood they were all as frightened as I was, but they were also all pretending like me with a face as undaunted as mine.
In the center of the fear of flying there is an empty space, a sort of eye of the hurricane where one achieves a fatalistic unawareness, and which is the only thing that allows us to fly without dying. On my never-ending and sleepless nocturnal flights I only achieve that state of grace when I see that little orphaned star that accompanies airplanes over lonely oceans appear in the window. In vain I searched for it on that terrible Caribbean night from the soulless twin-engine that cut through stony clouds, crosswinds, abysses of lightning, flying blindly on just the breath of our startled hearts. At dawn we were taken by surprise by a burst of ferocious rain showers, the plane turned sideways with an interminable grinding of a capsizing sailboat, and landed trembling with shivers and with its engines bathed in tears at an emergency airport in Camagüey. Nevertheless, as soon as the rain stopped a spring day burst forth, the air became glass, and we flew the final stretch almost level with the perfumed sugar-cane plantations and marine pools with striped fish and hallucinatory flowers in the depths. Before noon we landed between the Babylonian mansions of the richest of the rich of Havana: in the Campo Columbia airport, then baptized with the name Ciudad Libertad, the former Batista fort where a few days earlier Camilo Cienfuegos had camped with his column of astonished peasants. The first impression was rather comical, for we were greeted by members of the former military air force who at the last minute had gone over to the revolution and were keeping to their barracks while their beards grew enough to look like old revolutionaries.
For those of us who had lived in Caracas for all of the previous year, the feverish atmosphere and creative disorder of Havana at the beginning of 1959 was not a novelty. But there was a difference: in Venezuela an urban insurrection promoted by an alliance of antagonistic parties, and with the support of a broad sector of the armed forces, had brought down a despotic coterie, while in Cuba it had been a rural avalanche that had defeated, in a long and difficult war, a salaried armed forces who fulfilled the functions of an occupation army. It was a deep distinction, which maybe contributed to defining the diverging future of the two countries, and which at noon on that splendid January day was noticeable at first glance.
To give his gringo associates proof of his dominion of power and of his confidence in the future, Batista had made Havana into an unreal city. The patrols of recently shod peasants, smelling like tigers, with archaic rifles and war uniforms too big for their age, strolled like sleepwalkers between astonishing skyscrapers and marvelous automobiles, and the almost naked gringas who arrived on the ferry from New Orleans captivated by the legend of the bearded ones. At the main entrance of the Hotel Habana Hilton, which had barely been inaugurated those days, there was a gigantic blond man in a uniform with tassels and a helmet with a crest of feathers of an invented marshal. He spoke a blend of slangy Cuban crossed with Miami English, and carried out his sad custodian’s job without any qualms. One of the journalists of our delegation, who was a black Venezuelan, picked him up by the lapels and threw him into the middle of the street. The Cuban journalists had to intervene with the hotel management so they’d allow free entry to those invited who were arriving from all over the world without distinctions of any kind. That first night, a group of kids from the rebel army, dying of thirst, went into the first door they found, which was that of the bar of the Hotel Habana Rivera. They only wanted a glass of water, but the bar manager, with the best manners he was capable of, turned them back out into the street. The journalists, with a gesture that then seemed demagogical, made them come back in and sit down at our table. Later, the Cuban journalist Mario Kuchilán, who heard about the incident, communicated his embarrassment and rage:
“This can’t be cured except with a real revolution,” he told us, “and I swear to you we’re going to have one.”
January 1977, Revista de Casa de las Américas, Havana
The Sandinista Heist. Chronicle of the Assault on the “Hog House”
The plan seemed like overly simple insanity. The idea was to take the Palacio Nacional in Managua in broad daylight and with only twenty-five men, hold the members of the Chamber of Deputies hostage, and obtain as ransom the liberation of all the political prisoners. The National Palace, a dull, old building with monumental pretensions, occupies an entire city block with numerous windows on its sides and a façade with the columns of a banana-republic Parthenon facing the city’s desolate central square, the Plaza de la República. As well as the Senate on the main floor and the Chamber of Deputies on the second, the Treasury Department, the Interior Ministry, and the Revenue Department are all headquartered there, so it is the most public and most populous of all official buildings in Managua. That’s why there is always an armed police officer at every door, two more at the stairs up to the second floor, and lots of pistol-packing ministers and parliamentarians everywhere. During office hours, between employees and the public, in the basement, offices, and corridors, there are never fewer than three thousand people there. Nevertheless, the leadership of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) did not consider that the assault on that bureaucratic market was actually overly simple insanity, but just the opposite, a masterly piece of madness. In reality, the veteran militant Edén Pastora had conceived and proposed the plan back in 1970, but they only put it into practice this hot August, when it became too obvious that the United States had resolved to help Somoza remain on his bloody throne until 1981.
“Those who speculate about my health should not be mistaken,” the dictator had said after his recent trip to Washington. “Others have it worse,” he’d added, with very characteristic arrogance. Three loans of forty, fifty, and sixty million dollars were announced shortly afterward. Finally, President Carter, in his own handwriting, went even further overboard, with a personal letter of congratulations to Somoza for a supposed improvement in respect for human rights in Nicaragua. The national direction of the FSLN, stimulated by the noticeable rise in popular agitation, then considered that an emphatic reply was urgent and ordered the frozen plan, so often postponed during the last eight years, to be thawed out and put into action. Since it meant kidnapping parliamentarians of the regime, they gave the exploit the code name Operation Chanchera. That is: the attack on the hog house.
ZERO, ONE, AND TWO
The responsibility for the operation fell to three well-tried members. The first was the man who had come up with the plan and would command it, and whose real name sounded like a poet’s pseudonym in the land of Rubén Darío: Edén Pastora. He is forty-two years old, twenty of them spent in very intense militancy, and with a decisiveness of command that does not manage to hide his stupendous sense of humor. Son of a conservativ
e household, he studied with the Jesuits and then did three years of medical school at the University of Guadalajara, in Mexico. Three years in five, because he interrupted his classes several times to return to the guerrilla battles of his country, and only when they were defeated did he return to medical school. His oldest memory, at the age of seven, was the death of his father, murdered by Anastasio Somoza García’s National Guard. As the commander of the operation, according to a traditional custom of the FSLN, he would be distinguished with the name of Zero.
Second in command was Hugo Torres Jiménez, a thirty-year-old veteran guerrilla fighter, with a political training as efficient as his military training. He had participated in the famous kidnapping of a party of Somoza’s relatives in 1974, had been sentenced in absentia to thirty years in prison, and since then lived in Managua in absolute clandestinity. His name, as in the previous operation, was Number One.
Number Two, the only woman in the commando team, is Dora María Téllez, twenty-two years old, a very beautiful, shy, and committed young woman, with an intelligence and good judgment that would have served her well for any great project in life. She also studied three years of medicine, in León. “But I gave up in frustration,” she says. “It was very sad spending so much work on curing malnourished children, only for them to come back into the hospital three months later, even more malnourished than before.” Stationed on the northern Carlos Fonseca Amador Front, she had been living in clandestinity since January of 1976.
NO LONG HAIR OR BEARDS
Another twenty-three muchachos completed the commando unit. The leaders of the FSLN chose them very rigorously from among the most resolved operatives with proven records in guerrilla warfare from all the regional committees of Nicaragua, but the most surprising thing about them is their youth. Omitting Pastora, the average age in the commando was twenty. Three of its members are eighteen.
The twenty-six members of the commando got together for the first time at a Managua safe house just three days before the anticipated date of the action. Apart from the top three numbers, none of them knew each other, or had the least idea of the nature of the operation. They had only been warned that it was an audacious act entailing an enormous risk to their lives, and they’d all accepted.
The only one of them who had ever been inside the National Palace once was Comandante Zero, when he was a very young boy accompanying his mother when she went to pay their taxes. Dora María, Number Two, had an idea of the Blue Room where the Chamber of Deputies met, because she’d seen it on television occasionally. The rest of the group not only didn’t know the National Palace, even from the outside, but the majority of them had never even been to Managua. However, the three leaders had a perfect map, drawn with scientific skill by an FSLN doctor, and several weeks before the action they knew the details of the building by heart as if they had lived in it for half their lives.
The day chosen for the action was Tuesday, August 22, because the debate on the national budget assured a high attendance. At 9:30 on the morning of that day, when the surveillance services confirmed that there would be a meeting of the Chamber of Deputies, the twenty-three muchachos were informed of all the secrets of the plan, and they were each assigned a precise mission. Divided into six squads of four, by means of a complex but efficient system, each one was designated by a number, which allowed them to know which squad they belonged to and what their corresponding position was within it.
The ingenuity of the action consisted of passing for a patrol of the National Guard Basic Infantry Training School. So they dressed in olive-green uniforms made by clandestine seamstresses in different sizes, and they put on military boots purchased the previous Saturday in different stores. Each was given a campaign bag with a red and black FSLN bandanna, two pocket handkerchiefs in case of injury, a flashlight, gas masks and protective glasses, plastic bags to store drinking water in case of emergency, and a bag of bicarbonate of soda to help them face up to tear gas. In the commando’s general supplies there were also ten five-foot lengths of nylon rope to tie up hostages and three chains with locks to secure all the National Palace doors from inside. They didn’t take medical equipment because they knew there were medical services and emergency medicines in the Blue Room. Last of all, they distributed the weapons that in no way could be any different from those used by the National Guard, because almost all of them had been captured in combat. Their complete arsenal consisted of two Uzi submachine guns, a G3, an M3, an M2, and twenty Garand rifles, a Browning pistol, and fifty grenades. Each of them had three hundred rounds.
The only resistance they all put up came at the moment of cutting their hair and shaving off their beards, which had been so carefully grown on the front lines. However, no member of the National Guard could wear their hair long or not shave, and only officers were allowed moustaches. There was no choice but to cut it all off, and anyway, since the FSLN didn’t have a trustworthy barber, at the last minute they had to cut each other’s hair. A resolute compañera sheared off Dora María’s beautiful combat mane in two snips, so no one would notice that she was a woman under her black beret.
At eleven fifty that morning, with its customary delay, the Chamber of Deputies commenced the session in the Blue Room. Only two parties take part: the Liberal Party, which is Somoza’s official party, and the Conservative Party, which plays the game of loyal opposition. From the huge glass door of the main entrance, the liberal benches are on the right, and the conservative benches on the left, and at the back, on a platform, the long presidential desk. Behind each bench there is a balcony for each party’s supporters and a press box, but the balcony for the Conservative supporters has been closed for a long time, while the Liberals’ balcony is open and always very crowded with salaried followers. That Tuesday it was more crowded than usual and there were also about twenty journalists in the press box. Sixty-seven deputies were in attendance, and two of them were worth their weight in gold for the FSLN: Luis Pallais Debayle, Anastasio Somoza’s first cousin, and José Somoza Abrego, son of General José Somoza, who is the dictator’s half-brother.
HERE COMES THE CHIEF!
The budget debate had begun at 12:30, when two Ford trucks painted a military green, with green canvas tarps and wooden benches in the back, stopped at the same time in front of the two side doors of the National Palace. At each of the doors, as expected, was a policeman armed with a rifle, and both were accustomed enough to their routine to notice that the green of those trucks was much brighter than that of the National Guard. Rapidly, in strict military order, three squadrons of soldiers descended from each of the trucks.
The first to get out was Commander Zero, in front of the eastern door, followed by three squads. The last was commanded by Number Two: Dora María. As soon as he jumped to the ground, Zero shouted with his loud voice full of authority:
“Stand aside! Here comes the chief!”
The policeman at the door immediately stepped to one side, and Zero left one of his men standing guard beside him. Followed by his men, he ran up the wide staircase to the second floor, with the same frightful shouts as the National Guard’s when Somoza is approaching, and got to where the other two policemen were stationed with their revolvers and truncheons. Zero disarmed one and Number Two disarmed the other with the same paralyzing shout: “Here comes the chief!”
Two other guerrillas stayed posted there. By then, the crowds in the corridors had heard the shouts, had seen the armed guards, and had tried to escape. In Managua, it’s almost a social reflex: when Somoza arrives, everyone flees.
Zero had the specific mission of entering the Blue Room and keeping the deputies at bay, knowing that all the Liberals and many of the Conservatives were armed. Commander Two had the mission of covering that operation in front of the big glass door, from where she could see down to the building’s main entrance. On both sides of the glass doors they had expected to find two policemen with revolvers.
Below, at the main entrance, which was a wrought iron gate, there were two men armed with a rifle and a submachine gun. One of them was a captain of the National Guard.
Zero and Two, followed by their squads, made their way through the terrified crowd to the door to the Blue Room, where they were surprised that one of the policemen had a rifle. “Here comes the chief!” Zero shouted again, and snatched the weapon away from him. Number Four disarmed the other, but the agents were the first to comprehend that this was a deception, and escaped down the stairs and outside. Then, the two guards at the entrance fired on Number Two’s men, and they returned fire. The National Guard captain was killed on the spot, and the other guard was wounded. The main entrance, for the moment, was unguarded, but Two left several armed men lying on the floor to cover it.
EVERYBODY ON THE GROUND
When they heard the first shots, as planned, the Sandinistas who were guarding the side doors chased the disarmed police officers away, closed the doors with the chains and locks, and ran to reinforce their comrades among the crowd running in all directions, hounded by panic.
Commander Two, meanwhile, went around the front of the Blue Room to the end of the corridor, where the deputies’ bar was. When she pushed open the door with the M1 rifle, ready to fire, all she saw was a heap of men crowded together lying on the blue carpet. The deputies there had thrown themselves to the ground as soon as they heard the first shots. Their bodyguards, believing it really was the National Guard, surrendered without any resistance.
Zero then pushed open the big frosted glass door of the Blue Room with the barrel of the G3, and found himself facing a fully paralyzed Chamber of Deputies: sixty-two livid men looking at the door with an expression of astonishment. Fearing that he might be recognized, because some of them had been classmates of his at the Jesuit College, Zero unleashed a burst of lead into the ceiling, and shouted:
The Scandal of the Century Page 19
