Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  María had distributed her substantial savings with some diligence in various banks, and when she moved from the apartment, she selected and paid for in cash a small house in the middle-class neighborhood of Santos Suárez, and, at age twenty-six, gave her profession to her neighbors as a drama teacher who until recently had taught in a private school. (She had, of course, a “letter” from the Mother Superior of that private school, regretting that budget problems made it necessary to let María go.) She was looking for another position, and meanwhile was happy to be able to live comfortably on a modest inheritance from her mother.

  She was befriended by her neighbors, most warmly by Señora Leonarda Sori-Marín, the proud but widowed and lonely mother of Humberto Sori-Marín, one of the closest comrades-in-arms of Fidel Castro. Her son Humberto had written the Agrarian Reform Law, promulgated by Castro as one of his most profound social achievements, and there was great excitement in the neighborhood one Sunday morning. The rumor was that he was coming again. And, soon after one, María saw the little motorcade drive up and stop next door. Out of it stepped Fidel Castro, Humberto Sori-Marín, and two or three companions, to have Sunday lunch with Humberto’s mother.

  It was on the next such visit—Castro & Co. were comfortable there—that Leonarda Sori-Marín told her son and his friends that her new neighbor, María Arguilla, was among the most beautiful young women she had ever laid eyes on and that in the three months they had known each other, Doña Leonarda had come to look upon María as her own daughter, and then, turning to her honored guest, asked might she, dear Comandante, invite her over to meet the great leader of the Cuban people? Fidel, in animated conversation with his friends, nodded his head vaguely between puffs of his cigar. Delighted, Señora Sori-Marín went to the telephone, rang her neighbor, and told her to come quickly to meet Comandante Castro, Primer Ministro de la República de Cuba. María answered that she would need a few minutes to make herself presentable, and Doña Leonarda said to hurry, hurry, and then went to the front door to tell the guards that she had permission to bring over for a visit the young lady next door.

  María arrived and was presented. She bowed in the courtly Spanish manner. Fidel Castro looked at her, pleasantly at first, and then inquisitively. He engaged in routine chatter, with just that touch of gallant that he used in the company of beautiful young women, and, for that matter, in the company of old hags whom he desired, back when his word was less than law, to attract to his movement. An hour later Fidel left, bowing in turn to Señora Sori-Marín and to her neighbor, María Arguilla.

  At ten that evening, an officer drove up to María’s door and knocked.

  María, dressed casually in a skirt and blouse—she had been watching television—opened the door, leaving the door chain in place.

  “Yes?” she said. “Who is it?”

  “I am Captain Gustavo Durango, a sus órdenes. I am from the personal guard of Prime Minister Castro. He desires to visit with you.” He squeezed his identification card through the crack in the door.

  María looked at the card with the photograph of the bearded young captain, and then looked him full in the face; she was experienced in these matters. She withdrew the chain and opened the door.

  “I am honored. For when is the Comandante’s invitation?”

  “For tonight, señorita.”

  She thought quickly. There was little point in declining to go. She said, “I shall have to prepare myself.” She motioned to a chair. “Can I bring you something while I am getting dressed?”

  “A beer,” said Captain Durango, “would be just fine. It is warm tonight.”

  In her room, María made herself up with professional skill. She dressed smartly, in soft-colored silk with pastel shades, and the discreetly applied perfume.

  The captain insisted that she ride in the back seat of the 1958 Buick sedan. Their conversation was mostly about the weather, though Captain Durango twice remarked the mounting hostility of President Kennedy, notwithstanding his humiliation early that year with the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and dwelt on the eternal hostility of the imperialists to the Comandante. They reached a house on a street María could not, passing the street sign at night, make out. A sturdy three-story house surrounded by a picturesque brick wall. The captain marched past a detachment of six guards and knocked on the door. Fidel Castro opened it and bowed to María, his right arm extended. He wiggled his index finger at Captain Durango, who, withdrawing, reacted dutifully: “I shall be on watch, Comandante.”

  How pleased he was to see her, he said, taking her by the hand up the stairs to the central living room, and indicating a couch. “I shall have a rum and pineapple myself. Will you join me?”

  She nodded. Castro, the two drinks in hand, sat down beside her. He smiled, and there was glitter and a leer in his eyes. “María, my dear, you know that I have seen you before.”

  “Of course,” she said, sipping. “At Humberto’s mother’s house. Today.”

  Castro chuckled. “I mean, before. I have seen you before today. Indeed, I have seen all of you. Indeed, a month has not passed since that day almost eight years ago, in July—at La Gallinera—when I fail to experience jealousy. A jealousy I felt in those days only for the authority of the Batista impostor government.”

  María permitted her hand to be drawn by his to his crotch. “If that night my fairy godmother had said, What would you most like to be this minute? I’d have said, the liberator of Cuba. If she had said, What is your second choice? I’d have said—” Castro stretched out his hand and pointed, his head turned up as if at a stage, “that man there—the man, María, who was making love to you on the stage.”

  María was accustomed to sexual overtures of a great variety, and in any event saw no purpose in being demure with a man who had seen her publicly perform her act when she was only eighteen.

  She said, soothingly and ardently, “And I, Fidel, wish that I might satisfy the greatest man to be born in this hemisphere in this century.”

  Fidel took the two glasses with them into the bedroom.

  A few months later, walking from the bus stop to her house, María came on Doña Leonarda rushing out of her house toward a waiting taxi. María, by now virtually a member of the household, hailed her. “Where are you going, Leonarda?”

  She turned and shouted out, “I will come to your house as soon as I get back. Before dinner, for sure.” Her eyes were wet. She had obviously been weeping.

  Without knocking, just before seven Doña Leonarda came into María’s house and collapsed on the couch, exhausted and breathing deeply. María went wordlessly to the cupboard, poured a glass of sherry, and turned on the stove to heat some tea. She walked over to her slender neighbor, whose lined face suggested an age greater than the sixty-one she acknowledged when making one of her frequent references to the precocity of her important son. She was dressed in black and wore a mantilla. She took the glass of sherry, but set it down on the coffee table.

  “I have been to see Fidel,” she said, her voice trembling. “He admitted me. I had to wait only a half hour, maybe less. I pleaded with him, on my knees—”

  “Leonarda, Leonarda, pleaded for what? What is the matter?”

  “Humberto. Yesterday he was arrested and charged with complicity in treasonable activity. Of course it is not true, not one word of it. It is the action of an anonymous informant, someone who wants his job. But the charge carries the death penalty, and he is to be tried this very afternoon.”

  She stopped for a moment, unable to go on.

  “Before I went in to see Fidel, I knew I could not go too far, I could not beg him to withdraw the charges against Humberto completely. That will come later. All I could safely do,” she began to sob, but there was a triumphant smile through the sobbing, “all I could safely do was to ask him to commute the sentence of death if it is meted out by the court.”

  She sat back in the chair, and her pose now was regal. “And, María, my pleading prevailed. He took his big hand and
stroked my head, over the mantilla. And he said, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to Humberto. I promise you, Doña Leonarda.’” Her smile was beatific, and now she took the glass of sherry, but before she had finished it, her eyes closed. María took it from her hand, and Doña Leonarda slept.

  Much later, after giving her some soup, María walked Doña Leonarda back to her own house. The following morning María flicked on the radio to hear the news. There was more of the same about the disposition of the survivors of the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The next item was that Humberto Sori-Marín, having been found guilty of treasonable complicity against the regime, had been executed by firing squad the night before at La Cabaña prison.

  María later realized that she reached maturity only that day, at that moment: she felt a concern entirely extrinsic to her own interests. She had not yet learned to love, but she had learned to hate, and, in doing so, felt ready for love.

  Two weeks later, Doña Leonarda having been sent off to live with her sister in Sagua La Grande, María’s plans were completed. They were drawn from the deep archives of contingency she had taken care to prepare. For this one, she had secured the cooperation of her old employer, Santos Trafficante, based now in Miami. Trafficante, six months before, had agreed, via one of the several agents who remained in Havana, to help her in the event María wished to leave. The plan was this: her grandfather, who fled Cuba when Castro arrived, had died, and in his will had repentantly specified a considerable bequest to his granddaughter, whose identity and whereabouts the grandfather did not know at the time he made out the document. He did not even know the name under which she went. But the estate’s executor, using the old family lawyer in Havana (also Trafficante’s), had developed leads that suggested that María Arguilla was indeed the heiress. She would need to satisfy an American probate court of her identity, and this would require that she go to Miami and be prepared to stay there for as long as six months, permitting the court independently to verify her representations. Worth the effort, however, since the bequest would amount to “at least one hundred thousand dollars.”

  María wrote Trafficante, and one week later received from a lawyer in Miami a letter detailing the fictitious situation and requesting that she travel to Miami.

  She had been seeing Fidel every week, though at irregular intervals. Always it was Captain Durango who would drive up. Sometimes his knocking at the door would wake her at midnight, and even later: Fidel worked, and fornicated, into the early hours of the day. When Captain Durango summoned her next, she brought with her the letter from Miami.

  She had pondered whether to make her request before or after he led her into the bedroom. She was experienced in male moods, and decided that Castro was better approached before than after, when his ardor was dissipated and instinctive suspicion coursed through his brain.

  It hadn’t, in fact, been difficult. Fidel was in an expansive mood. But he told her that he did not want her away from him for six months.

  In that event, she said, she would endeavor to schedule her meetings with the court over convenient intervals. There was the logistical problem. She could only go to Miami via Mexico, commercial traffic of course having long since been terminated between Cuba and the United States. No matter: Money, Fidel replied, was not an obstacle. She could go, stay a week or two, and come back via Mexico—he reached into a drawer and handed her a packet of bills, one thousand pesos. “That will do for several trips, Havana-Mexico-Miami-Mexico-Havana.” There would be no problem in getting a Mexican visa (he took out his notepad and scratched out a reminder on which he would act the following morning). She was to write him, telling him what progress she was making. He pulled a sheet of paper from his notepad, scribbled on it, and gave it to her. “That is a private post office number and an assumed name. Use them when you write to me.”

  “And now,” he said, smiling, “there is one condition.”

  “Yes?” she smiled, as he fondled her.

  “The movie. The movie you told me about. The movie Trafficante made of you at La Gallinera. I must have it. I wish to see again what I remember so vividly that evening before Moncada. We will watch it together, and then reenact the scene. You must find Trafficante. That will not be difficult. He is with the Mafia in Miami, and I am sure he will welcome revisiting his great star of yesterday. My star of today!” he added amorously.

  She promised to make every effort to secure the film. “If it exists, Fidel.”

  “It exists,” he said confidently. “People like Trafficante never destroy things like that. They are little capitalists, little hoarders. You will see.” He led her into the bedroom.

  Three days later, María had landed in Miami. Three days after that, she accepted the job as manager of La Bruja Vieja.

  16

  Major Rolando Cubela sometimes wondered ironically, as he sat at his desk at INRA—the Institute Nacional de Reforma Agraria, the ganglion of Fidel Castro’s administrative apparatus—whether if his neighbor at the adjacent desk cut his finger, Dr. Cubela would remember how to minister to him. For a year after Castro took power—eighteen months after Rolando Cubela had joined forces with him in the mountains, acting first as medical doctor but gradually more and more as aide—Cubela had thought from time to time of pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere to practice medicine. He enjoyed his frequent encounters with Che Guevara who, like Cubela, was a licensed medical doctor. Sometimes they would get away from the hectic demands of revolutionary thought, late in the afternoon, before an official function would absorb them both, to reminisce, or speculate, about one or another aspect of the practice of medicine.

  Che Guevara’s concern with medicine, however, was by now almost totally ideologized. He cared less how to cure someone suffering from a burst appendix than that the treatment should be the responsibility of the state; that no doctor should become wealthy by “the exploitation of human suffering.” Feeling argumentative one day, Rolando said to him, “Che, when is the Revolution going to get around to nationalizing the morticians? Don’t they also exploit human suffering?”

  Che had puffed on his cigar, a half smile on his face, looking like Cantinflas pondering a question by David Niven on the problem of getting around the world in eighty days. Eventually he answered, “You have something there, Rolando. I must think about that. Yes. I must think about nationalizing the undertakers. Quite right. They exploit human suffering.”

  But when he looked up at Rolando he knew that his fellow medical doctor was making sport of the whole question, and Che Guevara went on to deliver a diatribe against the American Medical Association which, he said, was notoriously reactionary.

  To husband his options, Rolando Cubela had kept free of enduring romantic alliances, which had been especially hard for him after he came to know Felipa Ojedra, the soft-spoken, modest, doe-eyed receptionist at INRA, who clearly welcomed Cubela’s advances but was just as clearly determined to let Major Cubela take all the initiatives. It was not in Felipa’s nature to act the vamp. But they kept company, frequently taking a quick lunch in the cafeteria and occasionally going out at night to a modest restaurant. On these occasions they never talked about the regime, and Rolando didn’t know whether Felipa was an enthusiast for the Revolution. Perhaps she was simply doing a job, a job that not only paid well but gave her important perquisites in Castro’s Cuba—access, for instance, to the Diplotiendas, where the select few could buy coffee and extra-conventional luxuries, such as a bar of scented soap imported from Canada, or a chocolate bar.

  During the last three months of 1960, Rolando Cubela had thought most seriously about devising means of leaving the country with Felipa, always assuming she was prepared to take the risk, and he felt certain she was. Going then perhaps to Mexico, perhaps to Colombia or even Chile, associating himself with a hospital for a year or so, so to speak relearning his profession; raising a family and forgetting all about politics; in particular, forgetting about Fidel Castro.

  Cubela suffered still
from the memory of his assassination of Blanco Rico, and back in 1957, although a whole year had passed since he had done the deed, he had so worked himself up over his deed that he reported himself sick at an asylum that gave psychiatric care. Fidel, only recently arrived at the Sierra Maestra to wage his long and successful guerrilla campaign that ended with his arrival in Havana in January 1959, was especially distressed to learn about Cubela’s incapacitation, relying on him as he did to minister medically to the 26th of July guerrillas but also to continue his work as one of the leaders of the Students’ Revolutionary Directorate, to which position Cubela had been appointed after he had proved himself a true soldier of the revolution by carrying out his assignment on that bloody Sunday.

  But Fidel had been reassured by Ramiro Valdés. Valdés reminded Fidel that Cubela was a young doctor, accustomed to hospital and city life. He had been moved to the mountains where he faced extreme physical hardships—traveling every day in jungle heat and freezing at night from the mountain cold, protecting himself and others from snakebite and maneuvering with Castro’s guerrillas to evade what so often threatened them, a terminal campaign against the Castro insurgents. You cannot, he lectured his comrade-in-arms, expect an essentially clerical man to get used to such a life automatically.

  Before going off to Sierra Maestra to fight with Castro, Cubela had, of course, taken great pains to hide his double life. As far as the hospital was concerned, with which now as a full-fledged doctor he had affiliated himself, he was simply Dr. Rolando Cubela, a private practitioner who was often away on extensive visits to Oriente Province where—who knows, he had other medical patients, family, a sweetheart, whatever; no one pried, and Rolando Cubela had no regular social contacts and no intimates. When he reported himself to the private clinic he was sympathetically and discreetly received, as all doctors suffering from mental stress were received, and ninety days later he was discharged, at his own request.