—Fidel Castro, January 5, 1999
It is a straight shot from Cancun to Havana, sixty-six minutes by jet plane across the Gulf of Mexico with a Soviet-blonde stewardess serving free rum and synthetic ham and cheese sandwiches. It is an easy trip on most nights, and innocent people have nothing to worry about. As our plane approached Havana our mood was almost festive. Heidi filled out the visa forms while I jabbered in broken Spanish to the man sitting next to me, asking how much money I should pay for the food.
He nodded sympathetically and stared down at his hands while I fumbled with my wallet, then he turned to face me and spoke calmly. “I speak no English,” he said. “I want no United States dollars.” Then he signaled for the stewardess and spoke rapidly to her in Spanish while I listened nervously. Flying into Cuba is not a good time to start arguing with passengers about money.
Finally she looked over at me and smiled. “No problem,” she said. “We cannot accept your dollars. All service on this flight is free of charge.”
Other passengers were staring at us now, but she laughed and shrugged them off. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He misunderstood you. He thought you were trying to give him money.”
“Oh no,” I said quickly. “Of course not. I was talking about the sandwich. Money is not a problem for me. I have no money. I am a cultural ambassador.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and she went away. I had received detailed instructions about how to identify myself in Cuba, and I was well armed with credentials. “You are very famous down here,” the ambassador had told me on the telephone. “Your movie about Las Vegas was well received at the Cuban film festival recently, so you will enjoy a diplomatic status that will be very helpful, as long as you don’t bring any drugs.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “That movie was Hollywood propaganda. I am no longer a dope fiend. I gave that stuff up a long time ago.”
“That’s good,” he said. “A cultural ambassador enjoys many privileges in Cuba these days, but dope fiends are being rounded up and put in prison—sometimes for life, and we won’t be able to help you at all.”
I was thinking about this conversation as our plane approached the coast of Cuba, but I was not apprehensive. I was traveling officially this time and I knew I had nothing to fear. My nerves were calm and I leaned back. I was looking forward to some serious grappling with booze, which is still a very acceptable vice in Cuba. I was even considering an offer to become a distributor of Absinth on the island, but that was still in the planning stages and I was not in any hurry.
Cuba was going to be busy. My schedule was already thick with cultural obligations: dinner with the ambassador, lunch with the minister of culture, book signings at the Film Institute, judging the Water Ballet at the Hotel Nacional, marlin fishing with the Old Man of the Sea . . . The list was long, and I was already looking for ways to pare it down and make time for my nonofficial business, which was equally important and would probably involve meeting with people who had recently fallen out of favor with the government in the wake of the Crackdown that followed Castro’s ruthless denunciation of pimps and pederasts and collaborators at the beginning of’99.
There was also the matter of Johnny Depp’s arrival in three days, which I knew would attract some attention in cultural circles, and I understood that we would have to be suave and well liked in public. We needed government approval to shoot our movie in Havana. It was definitely not the time to be getting any criminal publicity.
As the lights of the city came into view up ahead and the stewardess said it was time to buckle our seat belts, I began to feel nervous and I decided to go up to the lavatory for a shave and a lash of the toothbrush before we landed. There was muttering when I stood up, but I felt it was necessary. An ambassador should always be clean-shaven and never have booze on his breath. That is a cardinal rule of the business.
I was fumbling around for a razor when I discovered the ball of hashish in my dopp kit. It was snuggled into a corner behind a bar of soap from the Four Seasons in New York, and I tried to ignore it. No doubt it had been there for many months or even years, unnoticed by anybody until now. The sight of it made me dizzy and weak. The razor fell from my fingers and I sagged against the tin wall as the stewardess hammered on the door and I felt the plane descending. For an instant I was paralyzed by panic, then my criminal instincts took over and I fired a blast of Foamy into my shaving kit, making a nasty mess on the bottom, but it was no use. The ball of hash still loomed up like a black iceberg, so I grabbed it and tried to flatten it out, then I dropped it in my coat pocket and tried to forget about it.
When I got back to my seat I said nothing to Heidi about the hashish, for fear she would go all to pieces. (I had sworn to be clean and she had trusted me . . .) Nor did I say anything to Michael Hals-band, our tour guide and confidential photographer from New York, who had been assigned to this visit at the last moment.
He was a total stranger, in fact, and I was leery of him from the start, but he met us in Cancun anyway and attached himself like a leech. . . . I didn’t know it at the time, but he would be with me for the rest of the trip. He was a swarthy little man wearing a seersucker coat and a goofy grin of a surfer on his face.
He introduced himself as a famous rock and roll photographer and almost immediately tried to sell me a used Rolleiflex camera. He was paying his own expenses, he said, and he had our letters of passage from the Cuban government and the prestigious Ludwig Institute—we would quickly become dependent on these people.
As our plane approached Havana, however, I saw no reason to upset him with my story about mysteriously finding contraband in my kit at the last moment. A lot of people have gone to prison in Cuba for telling stories like that to cops. So I fastened my seat belt and prepared for the ordeal of wading through a cordon of military police.
They were all around the jetway when the door opened, with Soviet submachine guns and angry dogs on leashes. “We have nothing to worry about,” I said to Heidi. “We are coming into a war zone. Pay no attention to these freaks. They will not bother us. We are innocent. Just follow Halsband and do what he does.”
Our fellow passengers fell silent as we were herded out the door and into a long white-tiled hallway with no exits. Finally we arrived at the Immigración gate and I noticed people being jerked out of line by men in black suits . . . Halsband was one of those. The sight of it put me into a panic, but I tried to stay calm and grin vacantly into the air and pretend like nothing was happening. Other passengers in line behaved the same way; nobody wanted to see anything weird, so they ignored it. What the hell? People are jerked out of line by police every day in airports all over the world—and we were, after all, coming into one of the few remaining Communist-ruled nations on Earth.
Heidi was next in line, and she too was seized for questioning. I could see Halsband emptying his pockets and babbling at cops while they searched him.
We found ourselves separated and taken off in different directions. Cuban security techniques are very sophisticated, they say. We were individually searched and questioned, then released in a maze of confused passengers.
It was at that point that I decided to break ranks and flee, but there was nowhere to run. All the escape routes were sealed off by cops with dogs, and our luggage was nowhere in sight. I looked around quickly and saw that the only place where a sick man could sit down was an ominous-looking enclosure where cops were interrogating suspects, including the man who’d been sitting next to us on the plane.
So that is where I went. It is a firm rule of behavior in times of emergency in airports: When you are guilty always move toward the police, never run away from them.
The cops eyed me warily as I sat down among them, but they said nothing. Well, I thought, this is it for me. I took off my hat and removed the huge black widow spider from it, then I lit a cigarette.
The Ludwig people were waiting outside, but we couldn’t communicate with them. All the other passengers had left the airp
ort, but not us. We were conspicuously detained like people on Devil’s Island while soldiers rummaged through my Kevlar luggage, one item at a time, and Heidi was taken away to the X-ray booth.
My first sense of real trouble came when I heard the sound of shattering glass from the search and seizure area. It was a rubber ball-peen hammer that exploded with the sound of shattering glass whenever you whacked something with it. It was not the kind of humor you normally want to bring to a Communist war zone.
I could see them over my shoulder, but I tried not to notice. The soldiers were demonstrating the hammer to each other, and finally one of them laughed. Thank God, I thought, at least these people have a morbid sense of humor. . . . They also laughed at the Retractable Stabbing Knife, which Heidi explained by jamming it into her chest.
I was rattled by the scene at the airport, and so was our welcoming committee. They were cultural-exchange people, ranking officials of the prestigious Ludwig Institute, a German art foundation that runs many of Cuba’s foreign-exchange programs. The Ludwig people walk tall in Havana and they are not accustomed to having their guests detained and ransacked at the airport. By the time our luggage was finally released, there was nobody else in the Arrivals terminal except cops, and I had already met most of them. They eyed us sullenly as we drove away in the darkness toward Havana. I had a queasy feeling that we had not seen the last of them.
Our host, a jovial man called Helmo, was eager to dismiss what he called “the unpleasantness at the airport” and to “refresh ourselves with laughter.” Halsband was mildly hysterical about his own ordeal with the Aduana police and Heidi was still crying. I tried to shake it off by drinking heavily from a bottle of rum.
I was feeling a little better about life when we finally arrived and pulled into the long, palm-lined driveway of the Hotel Nacional. There was something familiar about it, from a distance, and I had a weird sense of coming home, but I knew it was impossible. I had never been to Havana, never even dreamed about it—but I was extremely familiar with The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, and the Nacional looks exactly like it.
From a distance—but once you get inside, it is different, very different, and it takes a while to grasp this. We were met at the door by the same sharp-looking baggage handlers that you see at The Breakers. The air when you step out of the car is the same balmy breeze that you feel in Palm Beach, the same heady mix of salt air and romance and mystery. Even the vast lobby and the elevators and the hallways are exact replicas of The Breakers. The only real difference, at first, was that we were taken immediately to a special elevator and ushered straight up to the super-exclusive sanctuary of the Sixth Floor, where our oceanfront suites were prepared.
I have always hated The Breakers, in truth, and I will always hate the Hotel Nacional—but I hate a lot of places that look nice in the tourist brochures; I go to hotels for business reasons, not to relax and have fun. Sometimes it ends up that way, but you can’t count on it. The way I look at it, business is business, and the only things that really matter in hotels are privacy, fresh oysters, and good telephones.
The terrace bar at the Hotel Nacional was almost empty when we arrived. A lone bartender stared at us but said nothing. The walls were covered with signed photos of American celebrities from the forties and fifties: black-and-white glossies of people like Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, and Ava Gardner, along with political heroes like Winston Churchill and Meyer Lansky. It is a strange mix of people to run into at that hour.
It was in the deserted terrace bar of the Hotel Nacional that I first heard the story of Artie Diamond, the vicious convict from Sing Sing who intimidated the whole prison by biting off the ear of a con boss who called him a sissy. It was a Mike Tyson story, being told in slow motion by a hard-bitten man from New York who once fought for the middleweight championship of the world on an undercard with Tyson before he started carrying his Artie Diamond act too far.
We were all sitting outside in the darkness, huddled around a lumpy wicker table with a glass top that went sideways and spilled the drinks every time a breeze came up. A lone waiter scurried back and forth with trays of rum daiquiris and black Cuban coffee balanced crazily in the wind.
. . .
You can learn a lot of things just by hanging out in front of the Hotel Nacional in Havana. There is a heavy mix of criminals and foreigners and beautiful women with special agendas. Nobody is exactly what they seem to be in Havana, and that is especially true at the Hotel Nacional, which enjoys a worldwide reputation for the finest hospitality in Cuba.
The Malecon is the long, wide boulevard that runs along the waterfront in Havana. The harbor is badly polluted, but a mile offshore, where the Gulf Stream runs, the water is pure and fast. No islands dot the horizon. There is nothing between here and Key West except ninety miles of deep water and six million sharks. Some people go out there for fun, but not many. The Gulf of Mexico at night is strictly for business—commercial freighters, commercial fishermen, floating wreckage, and the occasional human skeleton.
The Malecon is different. There is life along the boulevard, strolling lovers and pedicabs and knots of police-affiliated hoodlums gathered here and there under streetlights, hooting at cars and tossing fish heads to crocodiles, which can surface like lightning and jump five feet straight up in the air when they think they see fresh meat. Cuban crocodiles are a special breed of beasts, famous for their athleticism and their cruelty. A croc in a fit of temper can swallow a small boy and two six-packs of beer in one gulp.
. . .
Bill Clinton has a long and ugly history involving Cuba. It goes back to the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when Castro emptied his country of “dissidents” by sending 125,000 “refugees” to Key West in a matter of weeks, many of them criminally insane. They were taken off the boats and shipped up U.S.A. 1A to detention camps in Miami, where many found work and refuge in the city’s vast and thriving anti-Castro Cuban community, but not all. About 50,000 of them were screened and found to be so vicious, violent, and incorrigible that they could never be assimilated into any culture, anywhere, and they could not go back to Cuba because of their status as “political refugees.” So they were sent off in chains to various prisons around the country, to maximum-security cages like Danbury, Lompoc, and Marion—where they immediately terrorized the existing prison population and even the guards and wardens. They were extremely bad people, the meanest of the mean, and also Criminally Insane. They were dangerous and utterly uncontrollable.
Some 18,000 of these savage incorrigibles wound up at a U.S. military prison in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, despite the vehement objections of the politically ambitious young governor, William Jefferson Clinton, then running for re-election. His Republican opponent, along with every newspaper in the state, denounced Clinton for allowing this dangerous scum to be funneled into central Arkansas, but Bill blamed it on Jimmy Carter, who had blatantly “double-crossed” him by sending those brutes to Fort Chaffee without his prior knowledge or consent.
Shortly before the gubernatorial election, a massive jailbreak sent 7,000 of the most violent “refugees” into the streets of one of our permanent army bases at Fort Chaffee, where they ran amok with machetes until the National Guard finally quelled the uprising after three days of tear gas and bloody hand-to-hand fighting.
The voters were not amused. Clinton was mauled on Election Day and moved ignominiously out of the Governor’s Mansion. It was the only election Bill Clinton ever lost. He waited two years, then ran again and won, and the rest is history. But he never forgot the nightmare inflicted on him by Jimmy Carter and the Cubans.
. . .
Skaggs was a free thinker and he had an active mind. He owned three boats in the Marina Hemingway and didn’t mind saying that he had come to Cuba to have fun and he had plenty of dollars to spend. That is a dangerous mix in Havana these days, with the government suddenly enforcing a crackdown on everything he stood for, but he said it didn’t bother him. “I have all my papers in order,” he explained a
s we careened along the Malecon at top speed in a new silver Z28 convertible with the Rolling Stones booming out of the speakers. “The police here are all Communists,” he added. “You have to remember that. They are Primitive people, but they are very sophisticated on a military level. You can’t put anything over on them. I was arrested three times on my way over to your hotel today.”
“What?” I said. “Three times? In one day? Jesus Christ, Skaggs. That’s frightening. Maybe this is the wrong night for us to be out on the streets.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “They know I have all my paperwork in order. I think they’re just queer for this car. They like to pull me over and fondle it while they check me out.”
Skaggs is a gentleman of leisure from Arkansas, a man of the sporting life who is also a good friend of Bill Clinton’s. I have known him for many years and consider him a good and honorable man, essentially, but he has a deep streak of the Arky and the boomer and the wild boy in him that is likely to go sideways on you and reach for a shotgun at any moment. He is a handsome man with suave manners and a relentless appetite for profitable business investments.
Cuba was one of these, he admitted, but his enviable position as a friend of the president was becoming an awkward burden on his sense of possibility. “I’ve had three or four federal grand juries on my ass for five years,” he said. “First they tapped all my phones, then they started following me everywhere I went. People I’d known all my life were afraid to be seen with me. I moved out of town to the duck lodge, but it was no use. Finally I said, ‘Fuck this, I’m getting too old for it,’ so I bought a goddamn boat and went to Cuba.”
. . .
The yacht harbor at Marina Hemingway on the outskirts of Havana was one of the first Enemy enclaves to be shut down completely. There were no more parties on the party boats tied up along the seedy-looking canals. Cuban girls were no longer allowed in the marina, and the only Cuban men in sight wore official police uniforms. It was like the Nazis had suddenly clamped down on the waterfront in Casablanca. Ernest Hemingway would have been shocked.
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