Kingdom of Fear
Page 21
There are no charges, as yet, but speculation ranges from murder and treason to unlawful conspiracy and crimes against the Crown. All we know for sure is that Bernard Coard—ex-deputy prime minister of Grenada in the last days of the Maurice Bishop regime—holds the key to the cruel mystery of whatever happened here in the autumn of’83.
It was a strange time, a profoundly weird chain of events. The U.S. Marines invaded; a gentle and widely popular sort of Caribbean Marxist revolution destroyed itself in a fit of insane violence; a place that could just as easily have been invaded and conquered by a gang of Hell’s Angels got jumped on by the Rangers and the U.S. Marines and the 82nd Airborne and the Military Police and the U.S. Navy and Blackhawk helicopters and Psy-Ops and Night Vision scopes and concertina wire and huge explosions at all hours of the day and night and naked women brandishing machine guns.
We conquered Grenada. Even Morgan understood that. He had been in a cell on Row B when the first bombs hit. He is a mulatto, who appears to be about 40 with long blondish hair and a red headband. There is a touch of Woodstock in his bearing. Morgan looks like he was born, once again, on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the summer of’67. He was sitting peacefully in his cell, listening to other inmates howling and jabbering frantically at the sound of low-flying jets overhead, when “suddenly the whole place exploded,” he said. And after that, he fled.
. . .
I wanted to stay in Grenada for the funeral of Maurice Bishop, which was scheduled for Saturday, but when they still hadn’t found the body by Wednesday, I changed my mind and decided to get out of town.
It was raining hard in the morning when we drove over the mountain to Pearls Airport on the other side of the island. There are no speed limit signs along the roads in Grenada. You can drive as fast as you want to, or as fast as your car can stand it. The potholes are square now, since the Army moved in, but some of them are still six feet deep and even the small ones are axle breakers.
There are three ways to drive on these roads, and the first two usually depend on whether you own the car or rent it. A new Mitsubishi will run about $22K in Grenada, and people who own them tend to spend a lot of time in second gear, creeping through the potholes like snails in a minefield.
The renters like to get into third gear, ignoring the damage, and bash ahead like dumb brutes, at least until the kidneys start bleeding—and when the car breaks in half, turn it in for another one. The roads are littered with wrecks, ranging from Datsun sedans to Soviet military trucks, all of them stripped to the skeleton. The radio goes first, then the jack and the wheels and all the engine parts, and finally the engine block itself, which makes a fine dead-head anchor for an offshore fishing boat. Rearview mirrors can be mounted on the bathroom wall for shaving purposes, and the seats from a new Toyota will make a stylish set of porch furniture for the whole family.
I recognize when power moves.
—Richard J. Daley, Mayor of Chicago, 1968
The invasion of Grenada was one of those stories with an essentially Midwestern heart. It was a fine mix of show business and leverage and big-time political treachery, and even Abe Lincoln would have admired the move for its swiftness, if nothing else. This is, after all, an election year, and the President is not the only one who is running for re-election. The whole Congress is up, along with a third of the Senate, and it is bad business in an election year to go back home to the district and question the wisdom of an incumbent President who has pulled off the first successful U.S. military invasion since the Inchon Landing in 1950.
On my last night in the St. George’s Hotel I took a long-distance call in the lobby from a man who works on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. “Don’t come back here with any of your liberal bullshit about oppressing the Third World,” he said. “You drunken bastards have had your way long enough. It’s about time you told the truth for a change.”
Ambassador to Cuba
I have just received an invitation to visit Havana, from the head of the Cuban Film Commission, and my heart is full of fear. At first I was happy, but then I did some research and a feeling of queasiness came over me. I was more & more paralyzed by Angst en Walging, as the Dutch say. The more questions I asked, the more heinous became the answers. What had once seemed like a token of idyllic good fortune suddenly transmogrified itself, right in front of my eyes, into a guaranteed horrible experience in the dark underbelly of life in the tropics. Everything I learned convinced me that I was about to be fleeced, busted, and put in prison for treason.
MEMO FROM THE CUBA DESK: HST / MARCH 30, 1999
Dear Jann:
Liftoff for Cuba is at 0930 & I am very excited. You will be happy to know that I am sparing no expense in moving The Desk to Cuba for the next two weeks. We are finely organized. The job is well in hand & all the key signs are perfect. The moon is in Venus & Mescalito is rising. The nights are becoming almost perfectly dark, for our purposes. No moon at all, only starlight, and no light at all when it rains.
(THIS IS AN URGENT REMINDER TO SEND A FEW SMALL LITHIUM BATTERY-POWERED FLASHLIGHTS IN THE ROLLING STONE PACKAGE TO ME AT THE NACIONAL. TELL MIKE GUY.)
The weather forecast for Cuba calls for bright mornings, rain showers in late afternoon, and extremely dark nights with strange winds. That is good news for those of us who see by starlight or have single-cell Lithium spot/floods that can illuminate a naked figure running on a beach 1,000 feet away. Not many people have those advantages, and those who do will prevail. . . . Sic semper Tyrannus, eh? You bet. That is the simple secret of the Winning Tradition we have established & maintained (with a few spectacular exceptions) for almost 30 years.
Wow! Who else in Journalism can make that claim? Think about it. We should establish an annual award, with lavish ceremony, for the National Affairs Desk selection for Finest Journalism of the Year, as chosen by a dazzling jury of experts like Tom & Halberstam & me & Ed Bradley—
OK. You get the idea. So let’s get back to Cuba. I am leaving in a few hours and I still have to pack my Portable Ozone equipment, which is legal but very delicate. . . . That’s right. I forgot to tell you that I am getting into the Ozone Business, which is a sleeping giant in Cuba. Yes, and more on that later.
I have also learned that Hemingway was into voodoo & that Castro will live for another 50 years because of Ozone . . . Also enc. find my Journal notes, to date.
TO: BOB LOVE / ROLLING STONE JANUARY 29, 1999 FROM: HST
Bobby:
I have just been advised by recent travelers that having a Journalist Visa is, in fact, a very important & professionally desirable thing to have in Cuba. It confers a sort of VIP status & political access, as well as immunity to prosecution under the goddamn Helms-Burton Act.
The same immunity is provided, I’m told, to those who “bring medicine” into Cuba under the auspices of the U.S.—Latin American Medical Aid Foundation. (members.aol.com.uslamaf/)
A Journalist Visa also makes it “legal” (and thus easier) to conduct money transactions in Cuba. It also entitles you to drive a car with a Black license plate, which is important. Or maybe it’s Yellow plates that get you through roadblocks & cause thieves & pimps & traffic cops to give your car a wide berth.
In any case, I think I might need some help from You/RS in re: securing whatever documents, visas, letters of transit, etc., that are necessary or even helpful for me to do my job down there. As Michael says, people in Cuba are very wary of talking to people who might get them in trouble. . . . And that is why so many citizens turn strangers who don’t act right in to the police whenever they get pissed off.
Whoops. Never mind that. But all the same I trust you will investigate this matter and let me know ASAP. We are, after all, professionals.
Thanx, Hunter
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK///JANUARY 30, 1999 FROM HUNTER S. THOMPSON: HOTEL NACIONAL #6: HAVANA, CUBA 60606 TO JANN/RS/NYC
Okay. I guess that will be my forwarding address for a while. Either that (above) or th
e Swiss Embassy, or maybe that horrible Isle of Pines Prison where Castro put those poor bastards from the Bay of Pigs. Who knows? We seem to be heading into a void of some kind, a political Time Warp full of whores & devils & cops, where, for all practical purposes, there is no Law at all & everything you do is half-illegal.
Sounds like Washington, eh? Yessir. Mr. Bill is very big in Cuba, these days. Many people are counting on him to deliver the bacon. He is Dollar Bill, Mr. Moneybags, and he is about to make a lot of people rich.
But we’ll get to that later. Right now I want to tell you a few little things about my assignment in Havana & the relentless high-risk weirdness I am being forced to deal with. (Whoops, strike that. It is dangerous to use words like “force” and “deal” in Cuba. Almost everybody will turn you in to the police if you talk like that.)
“Bomb” is another politically unacceptable word, like “whores” & “guns” & “dope.”
SUNDAY NIGHT / AFTER THE SUPER BOWL JANUARY 31, 1999 / OWL FARM
The Cuban situation is deteriorating faster than it is coming together. There is a constant sense of angst about it, a sense of being bushwacked. Some people would call it paranoid, but they would be the dumb ones, the Incognocenti. Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance. The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.
But I am, after all, a suave gringo. I understand that many assignments are fraught with risk, personal danger & even treachery. Greed and human Weakness are ever present.
There is nothing funny, for instance, about having your passport & all your money stolen while traveling illegally in a foreign country.
Okay for that. The time has come to talk about Fun, about Victory and Victimization—about who has a sense of humor and who doesn’t.
TO: COL. DEPP / LONDON / FEBRUARY 2, 1999 FROM: DR. THOMPSON / WOODY CREEK SUBJECT: PUBLIC FLOGGINGS I HAVE KNOWN
Okay, Colonel—Good work on your brutal publicity. Kick the shit out of five or six more of those rotters & you’ll make the cover of Time.
Or maybe you want to come to CUBA this weekend & help me write my new honky-tonk song: “Jesus Hated Bald Pussy.”
Anyway, this act with the Plank might have legs. Let’s give it a whirl in HAVANA. We could both load up on Absinth & trash a nice suite in the Hotel Nacional. Invite 50 or 60 Beautiful People to a party/celebration in honor of Che Guevara, which then “got out of hand.” DEPP JAILED AFTER ORGY IN CUBA, PROSTITUTES SEIZED AFTER MELEE IN PENTHOUSE, ACTOR DENIES TREASON CHARGES.
Why not? And I do, in fact, have a balcony suite at the Hotel Nacional a/o February 4-14, and I could use a suave Road Manager. Shit, feed the tabloids a rumor that you have Fled to Cuba to avoid British justice. Yeah, crank that one up for a few days while you drop out of sight—and then we hit them with the ORGY IN CUBA story, along with a bunch of lewd black-and-white photos, taken by me. Shocking Proof.
Yessir. This one is definitely do-able, & it will also give me a story. You bet. And Sleepy Hollow will open in the Top Three. Trust me. I understand these things.
Meanwhile, you should be getting your finished album & 6,666 pounds (less my 10%) in coin from EMI very shortly. And I am going off to Cuba, for good or ill, on Thursday. Send word soonest.
DOC
MEMO ON WHY I AM GOING TO CUBA: WRITE THIS MESSAGE DOWN & REPEAT IT EVERY DAY. . .
I AM GOING TO CUBA TO PAY MY RESPECTS TO THE CUBAN PEOPLE & TO THANK FIDEL CASTRO FOR THE COURAGE OF HIS STRUGGLE & THE BEAUTY OF HIS DREAM. But I am mainly going for Fun. First, the Diary, then the Meaning . . . Remember that.
SATURDAY NIGHT, MARCH 27, 1999 NOTES
Today is not a good day for traveling to Cuba.
Hot damn, the White House is getting aggressive again.
(I understand it now. Clinton’s current behavior correlates with The Advanced Syphilis Syndrome.)
Maybe this is not the time for me to travel to Cuba & denounce my own country as Nazis & be quoted on the AP wire as saying “The President is entering the final stages of Terminal Syphilis. Nothing else can explain it.” (Note: Call my old friend Sandy Berger & ask him why we are bombing Yugoslavia.)
Ten thousand Serbs rioted in Grand Central Station yesterday, carrying signs that said NATO = NAZIS. U.S. embassies all over the world are on Red Alert & the president of Yugoslavia is on TV urging people all to strike now against American interests everywhere.
(5:33 A.M. Sunday morning): Jesus! Now CNN has a bulletin about a grenade attack on the U.S. embassy in Moscow: 2 grenade launchers & a Kalashnikov machine gun. Then the man fled in a white car. Who was it? Who knows? Police are rounding up the usual suspects . . . Stealth bombers blasted out of the sky over Belgrade, brave pilot flees in white car, Troops massed for invasion, WWIII looms . . . Yes sir, now is the time to go abroad & pass through many foreign airports. No problem. . . .
In the Hemingway Boat Marina, Havana, 1999 (Heidi Opheim)
Holy shit. This is insane. Now the official spokesman for NATO comes onstage & launches into a bleeding rave about War Crimes & Atrocities & a blizzard of bombs on all Warmongers who think they can get away with butchering innocent people as a way of life.
“Let me say, however, that if Yugoslavia had a democratic government, none of this would ever have happened.”
What? Who are we talking about here? Who is flying those planes that are carpet bombing civilian targets 6,000 miles away from home?
Don’t tell me, Bubba—let me guess. It must be the Hole in the Wall gang. No?
Well, his name ain’t Milosovich, Bubba. And Adolf Hitler has been dead for 50 years.
There is something happening here, Mr. Jones—and you don’t know what it is, do you? It sounds like a blizzard of Syphilis. Madness. Clinton, etc. . . .
These people are different from the others, Jack—they went to Yale, they play bridge, they fuck each other.
—CIA gossip, Havana
Right. That’s what they were saying about the CIA 40 years ago, back in the good old days when they were feeding LSD-25 to each other for experimental purposes in the name of National Security. The Agency was planning to drop LSD bombs on Moscow & other enemy cities when WWIII got going. That is where the phrase “bomb their brains loose” comes from. It was CIA jargon, top secret.
But the experiments got out of hand & WWIII never happened—at least not the way they were planning it—so the phrase was dropped from the secret agency codebook.
Until now. Now it is back in style. Spooks laugh when they say it to each other at lunch. “Yes sir, we are bombing their brains loose in Belgrade. They can run, but they can’t hide.” That is the way CIA men talk.
We were listening to three of them flirt with one another like brutalized Yalies do.
We ran into them in a lounge at Miami International Airport when the plane was delayed for three hours by a bomb scare. There was panic for a while, but the spooks paid no attention & kept drinking, so I figured I’d do the same. Why worry? I thought. The safest place to be in a bomb panic is close to police. Keep smiling & act like a deaf person. If you accidentally drop money on the floor, count to three before you reach down to grab it. They are trained to shoot anything that moves suddenly or starts talking to the bartender about Bombs.
. . .
I was killing some time in the smoking lounge at the Miami International Airport when I noticed a man waving to me from the other side of the room. I came alert instantly. It is not a good omen, in my business, to see a strange man pointing his finger at you in a crowd at the Miami airport. For many people it is the last thing they see before they are seized by police & dragged off to jail in a choke hold. Suspicion of Criminal Activity is all they need here to lock you up & do serious damage to your travel plans. . . . Being arrested in any airport is bad, but being arrested in the Miami airport is terrifying.
I tried to ignore the man as I saw him approaching my table. Stay calm, I thought, m
aybe it’s only an autograph seeker. . . . Then I felt his hand on my arm and he hoarsely shouted my name. I recognized the voice.
It was my old friend Rube, a rich cop from Oakland. He was on his way to Cuba, he said, to do some business and look for a woman to marry. “I have been in love with her for a long time,” he said. Now he was finally free to get married. His wife back in Oakland had frozen all his assets.
I knew at once that he was on the lam. There was a fugitive look about him, despite his appearance of wealth & confident suaveness.
. . .
Cuba is not a new story for me. I have been on it for 40 years, and at times I have been very close to it—too close, on some days, and I have never pretended to be neutral or dispassionate about it. When I was 20 years old I harangued the editors of the Louisville Courier-Journal to send me to Cuba so I could join Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains and send back dispatches about the triumph of the revolution. I was a Believer—not a Marxist or a Communist or some kind of agrarian Stalinist dilettante—but I was also a working journalist, and editors were not eager to pay my expenses to go to Cuba to fight with Castro in the mountains.
HAVANA (CNN): FEBRUARY 15, 1999— Cuba unveiled a two-pronged crackdown Monday, proposing harsh new penalties for common criminals and political opponents who “collaborate” with the U.S. government. The planned legislation, which would expand the use of the death penalty and introduce life imprisonment, follows a speech last month by President Fidel Castro in which he pledged to get tough on the growing crime problem on the Communist-ruled island.
“There are even irresponsible families who sell their daughters’ bodies and insensitive neighbors who think this is the most natural thing in the world. . . . There will be no escape for those who want to live like parasites at any price, at any cost, outside the law.”