“National Guard! Everybody on the floor!”
All the deputies threw themselves to the floor behind their desks, except for Pallais Debayle, who was speaking on the telephone at the presidential desk, and froze. Later they would explain the reason for their terror: they thought the National Guard had staged a coup and overthrown Somoza, and were coming to shoot them.
In the east wing of the building, Number One heard the first shots when his men had neutralized the two police agents on the second floor, and he was heading to the end of the corridor, where the Ministry of the Interior had its offices. Unlike Zero’s squads, Number One’s entered in military formation, and stopped in their assigned positions to carry out their missions. The third squad, commanded by Number Three, pushed open the door of the Ministry of the Interior, at the moment when Zero’s burst of gunfire resonated throughout the building. In the ministry’s anteroom they met with a captain and a lieutenant of the National Guard, the minister’s bodyguards, who were preparing to leave the room having heard the shots. Number Three’s squad didn’t give them time to fire. Then they pushed open the door at the back, and found a padded and air-conditioned office, and saw behind the desk a very tall and somewhat cadaverous fifty-two-year-old man, who raised his hands before anyone told him to. He was the agronomist José Antonio Mora, minister of the interior and Somoza’s designated successor in the Congress. He surrendered without knowing to whom he did so, even though he had a Browning pistol on his belt and four full magazines in his pockets. Number One, meanwhile, had reached the back door of the Blue Room, jumping over the masses of men and women lying on the floor. The same thing happened to Number Two, who entered at that moment through the glass door, bringing in the deputies she’d found in the bar with their hands up. It took an instant before they realized that the hall looked deserted, because the deputies were all on the floor behind their desks.
Outside, at that instant, a brief exchange of gunfire was heard. Zero left the room again and saw a patrol of National Guard, under the command of a captain, who were shooting from the main door of the building at the guerrillas posted in front of the Blue Room. Zero threw a fragmentation grenade at them and put an end to the attack. A bottomless silence fell over the interior of the enormous building closed with thick steel chains, where no fewer than twenty-five hundred persons, chests to the ground, wondered about their fate. The whole operation, as planned, had lasted exactly three minutes.
ENTER THE BISHOPS
Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the fourth of the dynasty that had oppressed Nicaragua for more than forty years, heard the news as he was sitting down to lunch in the air-conditioned cellar of his private stronghold. His immediate reaction was to order an indiscriminate barrage against the National Palace.
That was done. But the National Guard patrols could not get close, because the Sandinista squadrons, as planned, held them back with intense fire from the windows of all four sides. For fifteen minutes, a helicopter flew over firing bursts of machine gunfire at the windows, and wounded one guerrilla in a leg: Number Sixty-Two.
Twenty minutes after he ordered the siege, Somoza received the first direct call from inside the National Palace. It was his cousin Pallais Debayle, who transmitted the first message from the FSLN: either cease fire, or they would start to execute hostages, one every two hours, until he decided to discuss the terms. Somoza then ordered the siege halted.
A short while later, another call from Pallais Debayle informed Somoza that the FSLN proposed three Nicaraguan bishops as intermediaries: Monsignor Miguel Obando Bravo, archbishop of Managua, who had already been an intermediary when the Somocista party was attacked in 1974; Monsignor Manuel Salazar y Espinosa, bishop of León; and Monsignor Leovigildo López Fitoría, bishop of Granada. All three of them, by chance, were in Managua for a special meeting. Somoza accepted.
Later, also at the suggestion of the Sandinistas, the ambassadors of Costa Rica and Panama joined the bishops. The Sandinistas, for their part, entrusted the tough job of negotiating to the tenacity and good judgment of Number Two. Her first mission, carried out at two forty-five in the afternoon, was to submit the list of conditions to the bishops: immediate liberation of the political prisoners on the attached list, diffusion over all media of a communiqué and extensive political declaration, all guards pulled back three hundred meters from the National Palace, immediate acceptance of the demands of the striking hospital workers, ten million dollars and safe passage for the commando and liberated prisoners to travel to Panama. So the conversations began that same Tuesday, continued all night, and culminated on Wednesday toward six in the evening. In this space of time, the negotiators were in the National Palace five times, one of them at three in the morning on the Wednesday, and there didn’t really seem to be any glimpses of an accord at all in the first twenty-four hours.
The request that all the military reports and a long political communiqué that the FSLN had prepared earlier be read over the radio was unacceptable to Somoza. But another was impossible: the liberation of all the prisoners on the list. In fact, on that list they had included, very intentionally, twenty Sandinista prisoners who had undoubtedly died in prison, victims of torture and summary executions, which the government refused to admit.
SOMOZA’S AFFRONT
Somoza sent three replies to the National Palace, all unsigned and written in an informal style plagued with astute ambiguities but impeccably typed on an electric typewriter. He never made any counterproposals, but tried to evade the guerrillas’ conditions. From the first message it was obvious he was trying to gain time, convinced that twenty-five adolescents would not be capable of holding at bay more than two thousand people suffering from anxiety, hunger, and exhaustion for very long. That’s why his first response, at nine on Tuesday night, was an utterly contemptuous affront asking for twenty-four hours to think.
In his second message, however, at 8:30 on Wednesday morning, he had exchanged that arrogance for threats, but he was beginning to accept conditions. The reason seemed clear: the negotiators had walked through the National Palace at three in the morning, and had verified that Somoza was mistaken in his calculations. The guerrillas had evacuated at their own initiative the few children and pregnant women, had handed over the wounded and dead soldiers to the Red Cross, and the atmosphere in the interior was orderly and tranquil. On the first floor, in whose offices they’d found auxiliary employees, many were sleeping peacefully in their chairs and on their desks, and others were involved in invented pastimes. There was not the slightest sign of hostility, rather the exact opposite, against the uniformed muchachos who inspected the place every four hours. Even more: in some of the public offices they’d made coffee for them, and many of the hostages expressed sympathy and solidarity, even in writing, and had asked to remain there in any case as voluntary hostages.
In the Blue Room, where the most valuable hostages were concentrated, the negotiators had been able to observe that the atmosphere was as serene as it was on the first floor. None of the deputies had offered the slightest resistance, they’d been disarmed without difficulty, and as the hours went by they noticed growing rancor among them against Somoza for the slowness of the agreements. The guerrillas, for their part, were polite and sure of themselves, but also resolute. Their reply to the ambiguities of the second document was categorical: if there were no definitive responses within four hours, they would begin to execute hostages.
Somoza must have then understood that his calculations were in vain, and conceived the fear of a popular insurrection, the symptoms of which were beginning to be seen in different places around the country. So at 1:30 on Wednesday afternoon, in his third message, he accepted the most bitter of the conditions: the reading of the FSLN’s political document over all the airwaves of the country. At six in the evening, two and a half hours later, the transmission was over.
FORTY-FIVE HOURS WITHOUT SLEEP
Although they had still not arrived at any accord, the truth seemed to be that Somoza was ready to capitulate from noon on Wednesday. In fact, by then the prisoners in Managua had received orders to pack their bags to travel. The majority of them had been informed of the action by the prison guards, and many of these, in different jails, expressed their secret sympathies. In the interior of the country, the political prisoners were being driven to Managua long before any accord was in sight.
At the same time, the security services of Panama told General Omar Torrijos that a mid-level Nicaraguan bureaucrat wanted to know if he was prepared to send a plane for the guerrillas and liberated prisoners. Torrijos agreed. Minutes later he received a call from the president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was very well informed about the negotiations and considerably worried about the fate of the Sandinistas, and wanted to coordinate the transport operation with his colleague in Panama. That afternoon, the Panamanian government rented an Electra commercial airplane from the COPA company, and Venezuela sent an enormous Hercules. Both planes, ready to take off, waited for the end of the negotiations at the Panama airport.
Negotiations culminated, in fact, at four on Wednesday afternoon, and at the last minute Somoza tried to impose on the guerrillas a three-hour deadline to leave the country, but they refused, for obvious reasons, to leave at night. The ten million dollars were reduced to five hundred thousand, but the FSLN decided not to argue anymore, first because the money was a secondary condition anyway, but especially because members of the commando were beginning to show dangerous signs of tiredness after two days without sleep under such intense pressure. Commander Zero noticed the first serious symptoms in himself, when he discovered he could not think where in the city of Managua the National Palace was located. A short time later Number One confessed that he’d been the victim of hallucination: he thought he could hear unreal trains passing through the Plaza de la República. Finally, Zero observed that Number Two had begun to nod off and in the blink of an eye she was on the brink of dropping her rifle. Then he understood that it was urgent they conclude that drama that would end up lasting, one minute at a time, forty-five long hours.
JUBILANT FAREWELL
On Thursday morning at 9:30, twenty-six Sandinistas, five negotiators, and four hostages left the National Palace for the airport. The hostages were the most important ones: Luis Pallais Debayle, José Somoza, José Antonio Mora, and the deputy Eduardo Chamorro. At that hour, sixty political prisoners from all over the country were already on board the two planes that had arrived from Panama, where they would all request asylum a few hours later. The only ones missing, of course, were the twenty they never could have rescued.
The Sandinistas had put as final conditions that there should be no military presence in sight or any traffic on the road to the airport. Neither of the conditions was honored, because the government sent the National Guard into the streets to prevent any demonstration of popular sympathy. It was a vain attempt. A standing ovation accompanied the passage of the school bus, and people took to the streets to celebrate the victory, and a long line of cars and motorcycles, growing increasingly numerous and more enthusiastic, followed it all the way to the airport. Deputy Eduardo Chamorro was amazed by that explosion of popular jubilation. Commander One, who was traveling beside him, told him with the good humor of relief:
“You see: this is the only thing you can’t buy with money.”
September 1978, Alternativa, Bogotá
The Cubans Face the Blockade
That night, the first of the blockade, in Cuba there were 482,560 automobiles, 343,300 refrigerators, 549,700 radios, 303,500 television sets, 352,900 electric irons, 286,400 fans, 41,800 washing machines, 3,510,000 wristwatches, 63 locomotives, and 12 merchant ships. All these things, except for the wristwatches, which were Swiss, had been made in the United States.
It seems that a certain amount of time had to pass before the Cubans realized what those mortal numbers meant to their lives. From the point of view of production, Cuba soon found that it was not actually a distinct country but rather a commercial peninsula of the United States. As well as the sugar and tobacco industries depending entirely on yanqui consortiums, everything consumed on the island was made by the United States, whether in its own territory or in the territory of Cuba. Havana and two or three more cities inland gave the impression of the happiness of abundance, but in reality there was nothing that didn’t belong to someone else, from the toothbrushes to the twenty-story glass hotels on the Malecón. Cuba imported from the United States almost thirty thousand useful and useless articles for daily life. Including the best clients of that market of illusions, who were the same tourists who arrived on the ferry boat from West Palm Beach or the sea train from New Orleans, for they too preferred to buy the items imported from their own country duty-free. Papayas, which Christopher Columbus discovered in Cuba on his first voyage, are sold in air-conditioned stores with the yellow sticker of the growers in the Bahamas. The artificial eggs that housewives spurn for their languid yolks and pharmacy taste have the brand symbol of a North Carolina factory farm stamped on their shells, but some savvy grocers wash them with solvent and daub them with chicken poop to sell them at a higher price, as if they were local.
There was no consumer sector that was not dependent on the United States. The few factories making simple goods that had been set up in Cuba to take advantage of cheap labor were put together out of secondhand machinery that had gone out of fashion in its country of origin. The best-qualified technicians were Americans, and the majority of the few Cuban technicians gave in to the luminous offers their foreign bosses made and went with them to the United States. There were no storehouses of replacement parts, either, for Cuba’s illusory industry rested on the foundation of having replacement parts just ninety miles away, and a simple phone call was all it took to have the most difficult piece arriving on the next plane without any taxes or delays through customs.
In spite of such a state of dependence, the inhabitants of the cities carried on spending immeasurably when the blockade was a brutal reality. Even many Cubans who were ready to die for the revolution, and some who in fact did die for it, continued consuming with childish joy. More than that: the first measures the revolution took had immediately increased the buying power of the poorest classes, and they did not then have any other notion of happiness than the simple pleasure of consumption. Many dreams postponed for half a lifetime or even for entire lifetimes were realized all of a sudden. Only the things that sold out at the market were not replaced immediately, and some would not be replaced for many years, so the department stores that had been stunningly well stocked a month before were soon left stripped to the bone.
Cuba in those initial years was the kingdom of improvisation and disorder. Lacking a new moral—which would still need a long time to form in the conscience of the populace—Caribbean machismo had found its raison d’être in that general state of emergency. The national sentiment was so excited by that irrepressible gale of novelty and autonomy, and at the same time the threats of the wounded reaction were just as true and imminent, that many people confused one thing with the other and seemed to think that the shortage of milk could be resolved by gunfire. The impression of a phenomenal pachanga dance party that the Cuba of those days stirred up in the visiting foreigners had a true basis in reality and in the Cuban spirit, but it was also an innocent rapture on the edge of disaster. In fact, I had returned to Havana for the second time at the beginning of 1961, in my capacity of roving correspondent for Prensa Latina, and the first thing that caught my attention was that the visible appearance of the country had changed very little, but the social tension was beginning to get unbearable. I had flown from Santiago to Havana on a splendid March afternoon, looking out the window at the miraculous fields of that riverless country, the dusty villages, the hidden coves, and all through the long trip I had perceived signs of war. Giant red crosses within
white circles had been painted on the rooftops of hospitals to keep them safe from predicted bombardments. Also on the schools, the churches, and retirement homes there were similar signs. In the civilian airports of Santiago and Camagüey there were Second World War antiaircraft guns disguised under the canvas of transport trucks, and the coasts were patrolled by speedboats that had been recreational and were now destined to prevent the landing of troops. Everywhere you could see the havoc wreaked by recent sabotage: sugar-cane plantations torched by incendiary bombs dropped by planes sent from Miami, ruins of factories dynamited by the internal resistance, improvised military camps in difficult zones where the first groups hostile to the revolution were beginning to operate with modern armaments and excellent logistical resources. At the Havana airport, where it was obvious they were making an effort so the war atmosphere would go unnoticed, there was a gigantic announcement from one edge of the cornice to the other on the main building: “Cuba, free territory of the Americas.” Instead of the bearded soldiers of last time, security was the job of very young militiamen and women in olive-green uniforms, and their weapons were still those from the old arsenals of the dictatorship. There were no others yet. The first modern weapons the revolution managed to buy despite the contrarian pressures from the United States had arrived from Belgium on March 4 last year, on board the French ship La Coubre, which exploded at the Havana docks due to sabotage with seven hundred tons of weapons and ammunition in its holds. The attack killed seventy-five people and injured two hundred workers at the port, but was not claimed by anyone and the Cuban government attributes it to the CIA. It was at the funeral of the victims that Fidel Castro proclaimed the motto that would turn into the divisive maxim of the new Cuba: “Patria o muerte.” I had seen it written for the first time in the streets of Santiago, I’d seen it painted with a broad brush over the enormous billboards advertising North American airlines and toothpaste along the dusty highway to the Camagüey airport, and I found it again repeated without respite on little improvised pieces of cardboard in the windows of the tourist shops in the Havana airport, in the waiting rooms and at the counters, and painted with white lead on the mirrors of hair salons, and in lipstick on the windshields of taxis. It had achieved such a level of social saturation that there was no place and no moment when that furious motto was not written, from the drums of the sugar mills to the bottoms of official documents, and the papers, radio, and television repeated it pitilessly for entire days and interminable months, until it was incorporated into the very essence of Cuban life.
The Scandal of the Century Page 20
