Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Castro’s denials were in direct conflict with everything I knew about the incident. When the Miami planes were shot down, the United States presented chilling evidence to the United Nations that Cuba had known it was firing on unarmed civilian planes. Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador, had distributed a transcript of the conversation between the Cuban ground controllers and the military pilots. From audio intercepted by American intelligence, the transcript proved that the ground controllers had informed the pilots four times that they had permission to shoot down the civilian planes. The transcript also showed that the pilots were gleeful about firing at the Cessnas. After the first missile was fired, the MIG-29 pilot shouted, “We hit him! Cojones! We busted his cojones!”

  MIG-23 pilot: “This one won’t mess around anymore.”

  After releasing the transcripts, Albright said, “Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice.” Many of her fellow diplomats were shocked at her language but the White House was impressed. She was certainly a lot tougher, and more colorful, than Secretary of State Warren Christopher. That single moment made her a hero in Miami, and helped her win the job of secretary of state in Clinton’s second term.

  Castro knew all of this, and that Albright would not be sympathetic to Cuba’s concerns if the dispute over Elian became a full-blown crisis. I wondered if the man who looked to Meet the Press for hidden messages from Washington was now trying to send signals back through me. By the end of the dinner at five in the morning, I was exhausted from the balancing act of trying to counter his arguments while being suitably respectful to his office and conscious of his hospitality. On subjects like his country’s attack on the Miami planes, Castro had his own set of facts, and we would never be able to agree.

  Bleary-eyed, I went straight to work on a story for the Today show. Mary called in from Cardenas that the immigration officials had in fact shown up to interview Elian’s father. We were the only network there, and were able to report exclusively that the logjam was broken. That night we broadcast the details and our exclusive video on Nightly News. Bone tired, we both fell asleep, with no idea what we had missed.

  The next day, we went to meet Fidel so that he could escort us to the medical school for our shoot.

  “Did you rest well?” he asked pointedly.

  I rode with him in his car, while Mary followed with his aides. She was mortified to learn that the palace had called the night before to ask us to come back for more conversation. In her sleep, she had answered the phone, said she was tired, and hung up—without remembering any of it.

  No one in Havana can recall Castro ever jumping through hoops for American television as he did that day at the medical school. He let us put a wireless microphone on him, had his entire medical team brief us on what the young doctors were accomplishing, and did a walking tour of the classrooms and laboratories while hundreds of students crowded around. Afterward, we did an interview about the medical school for a feature report and, more urgently, about Elian.

  In Miami, the boy’s relatives were showering Elian with gifts. The media were camped in the front yard in what could be described only as a carnival atmosphere. Compared to the child’s simple life in a small Cuban fishing village, it was very seductive. Deeply suspicious of American motives, Castro told us, “The Americans want to delay the return of the child, to be able to change the child’s mentality, to destroy his identity.”

  “Are you concerned that the child will say that he wants to stay in the United States, that he will be seduced by all these toys and trips to Disney World?” I asked.

  “They are trying to simply baffle the child with all these things. According to the father, the boy has been coerced. They feel that their boy is antinational.”

  “You know that some people in the United States say that the father is coerced by the government and can’t speak freely?”

  “And how could we prove that that is false? Would we have to take the father to Miami to prove that there is no coercion here?” It was clear that Castro had taken personal charge of the crisis, and was micromanaging the negotiations to get the child back.

  By the time we finished taping it was dark, and we were approaching yet another television deadline, this time for Brian Williams’s cable show. Fidel dropped me at my hotel and suggested dinner. I had to decline in order to file my story. He said he had never had anyone refuse a dinner invitation two nights in a row.

  For the next six months, I covered Elian’s story from Washington for all of NBC’s broadcasts, while anchoring a nightly cable show on MSNBC devoted to coverage of the 2000 political campaign. Throughout January, Elian’s Miami family fought to retain custody of the boy, and kept losing rulings from the immigration officials and Attorney General Janet Reno. The custody battle was a huge issue in Florida, and Al Gore was becoming increasingly worried about its impact on his candidacy. Elian’s grandmothers came to the States to appeal for the child’s return. Their arrival in New York was carried live on cable television. Thanks to Mary, who flew up with them, I got the only interview they granted while in the United States.

  The Miami family appealed to the courts to grant the boy political asylum. But how could you argue that a child whom Fidel had transformed into a Cuban national hero would face political punishment should he be returned home? Castro understood that Elian Gonzalez could serve as a symbol of Cuban nationalism, a rallying cry for a population eager for distractions from their economic privation. The case was a useful political safety valve for the government, and its leader made the most of it.

  In April, Juan Miguel Gonzalez and his new wife and child, along with Elian’s teacher and pediatrician, arrived in the U.S. Juan Miguel, an unsophisticated man with a privileged government job as a waiter in a seaside beach hotel, was emotional and angry. Fortunately for him, Cuban diplomats had retained one of Washington’s most skillful attorneys, Greg Craig, to navigate the corridors of power, defend the father’s legal rights, and in his spare time, make sure Juan Miguel presented a sympathetic face to the American media. Craig had gone to law school with Bill and Hillary Clinton. He’d worked for Ted Kennedy in the Senate. Now a partner in the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, he knew everyone in Washington, especially in the Clinton White House and Justice Department. If anyone could win an international custody case fraught with political overtones for the Democrats in a presidential election year, it was he. And he had American public opinion on his side: an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that most Americans favored returning the boy to Havana, by an overwhelming 62 percent to 24 percent.

  The final showdown between Miami and Washington took place in the early morning hours of April 22, on Easter weekend. INS officials stormed the house in Miami’s Little Havana. In an unbearable flash of light, a still photographer captured Elian’s terrified face as U.S. marshals took him, at gunpoint, from the closet in which he was cowering. The nation was transfixed. Juan Miguel was finally reunited with his son, but had to wait in Washington for two more months while the custody case worked its way up to the Supreme Court. Finally, on June 28, the High Court refused to consider the appellate court’s ruling. The boy who had arrived on an inner tube on Thanksgiving Day flew home on a Learjet to a hero’s welcome, and promptly disappeared, reabsorbed by his small village and protected from further scrutiny by Fidel Castro’s patronage.

  A year passed with no attention paid to Elian except for the occasional “whatever happened to” stories on key anniversaries—and speculation about how Florida’s critical presidential vote that November might have been influenced by Cuban-American anger at the decisions of the Clinton-Gore Justice Department in the Elian case. Then, in June of 2001, Cuba came back into my life suddenly, when I least expected it.

  Alan and I were going to an annual conference hosted by President and Mrs. Ford in Beaver Creek, Colorado. A group of senators and members of Congress were also flying out for the weekend, traveling, as we were, with the vice president and Mrs. Cheney. The C
heneys and Alan got their start together in government in the Ford White House. Their friendship is rooted in those shared experiences, and loyalty and gratitude to the Fords.

  When we arrived in Beaver Creek, it was already after dinner. We sat and chatted with the Fords and the Cheneys for a while, unpacked, and went to bed. After breakfast Saturday morning we all headed to the conference, where the vice president was to be the first speaker. I sat in the back of the room, in a row of spouses. No sooner had Dick Cheney begun to speak than my beeper went off. Dialing the network desk from a phone booth, I reached my editors, who conferenced me with Mary Murray in Havana. Fidel had collapsed during a speech delivered in a blazing sun, while wearing his heavy combat fatigues. He had already gotten back on stage to reassure the sobbing crowd of loyal Cubans that he was fine, and promised to complete his speech on Cuban television that night. Mary was sure it was simple heat exhaustion, but New York was afraid that he was seriously ill, a major story. They ordered me to fly immediately to Havana. I had been in Beaver Creek for less than twelve hours.

  It seemed terribly unfair: I had been looking forward to spending two free days with Alan. The last thing I wanted to do was leave before the weekend even started. We got back to the Fords’ to collect my things. Betty took one look at my face and said, “Sit down and visit with your husband while I pack your bag.” I was embarrassed and grateful, all at the same time. It was also hard to explain to my hosts why a fainting spell, even by Fidel Castro, was more important than a weekend with my husband, at the home of a former president, with the sitting vice president and his wife as fellow houseguests.

  I didn’t have a visa to go to Havana, and no time to negotiate for one. Mary talked to someone in the Foreign Ministry who said they’d let me in. It was immediately apparent that Fidel was fine, but we needed to show that to American audiences. It was also days from the first anniversary of Elian’s return. Could we capitalize on my unscheduled trip and score exclusive interviews on both stories?

  The next day, after filing a story from the satellite facility at Cuban Television, I noticed a lot of security around the building. Fidel was there for his nightly broadcast. Why not stake him out? Mary laughed and explained that reporters didn’t do “ambush” interviews in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. I was determined to try. We sent a note up the chain of command to see if he’d see us, without a camera, and waited for a response. Finally, they ushered us into an empty studio. A rush of security men signaled the Commandante’s arrival.

  “I’m going to punish you,” he teased Mary. “Why have you brought her back to bother me?”

  Turning to me, he asked, “What do you want this time?”

  I explained that I wanted two things: an interview with him to show America that he was still in charge. And an opportunity to show Cuba’s critics in the United States that, after a year, Elian Gonzalez was leading a “normal” life. Castro said any decision about Elian would be up to Juan Miguel, who was zealously guarding the boy’s privacy. We both knew that Juan Miguel would do whatever Castro wanted, but I promised that I would not question the child, only the father, as long as I could visit Elian at school and home and show how he was doing.

  With Castro’s permission, and a minder from the Foreign Ministry, we drove to Cardenas two days later. Per our agreement, first I met with Juan Miguel in the town’s new Elian Gonzalez Museum (so much for the simple life) and persuaded him that we would be sensitive to the trauma the boy had already experienced at the hands of the news media. With the father’s concurrence, we went to the Marcelos Celado Elementary School to see Elian. At first, I couldn’t pick him out of the lineup of seven-year-olds playing in the yard. Then I spotted him. He looked like a typical kid, playful, even mischievous. His teachers said he was getting good grades, and liked Spanish and math. His favorite pastime was playing baseball, practicing after school with his two-and-a-half-year-old brother.

  For all their celebrity, the family—including a new baby—still lived in a modest house. All shared the same bedroom. But could life ever be normal for a boy who had witnessed his mother die at sea? There were pictures of her around the house, and Juan Miguel said on Mother’s Day and her birthday Elian kissed her picture. He was not afraid of swimming, but never talked about what had happened in the water. Juan Miguel insisted that the decision to return to Cuba was his, not Castro’s. Most surprising, the father said his son’s readjustment had been relatively simple. Why did he think so? “Because the boy returned to what he has always been. He was not born to be a symbol.”

  In Cuba, there is no way to know what is real and what is staged, but the day we spent with Elian Gonzalez and his family persuaded me that his story had had the least “bad” ending.

  We drove back to Havana to put together our story. The next night, we stayed up waiting for word that Castro would deliver on the second part of his bargain, an exclusive interview with him. Though we stayed up for hours, with a chartered plane sitting at the airport ready to take us, and our tapes, back to the States for editing, nothing happened. We kept calling Castro’s aides, pleading for an answer, reminding them of Fidel’s personal commitment. Finally, we gave up and went to sleep.

  Early the next morning, our New York producer, Phil Alongi, took the tapes and left. The Cubans assumed I was with him. When Mary called them later that day, Roberto de Armas of the Foreign Ministry asked, “Was she very angry not to get the interview?”

  I grabbed the phone and said, “I’m back.”

  I could hear him screaming to his boss, in Spanish, “She’s still here!” I had become their worst nightmare.

  That night, Fidel came through. We were brought back to one of his many offices, where he usually worked until dawn. We talked for three hours, brief by Castro’s standards. Despite the awkwardness of asking him about his health after the fainting episode, I found him ready with details about his blood pressure, pulse (sixty per minute), cholesterol readings (375), and weight. Who would replace him? For the first time, he revealed his plans for succession. Cuba’s next leader would be his brother Raul, head of Cuba’s armed forces but only five years younger than he. Had he thought about having a younger generation carry on his legacy?

  He said, “Raul is very healthy. Undoubtedly, he’s the comrade who has the most authority after me, and has the most experience. Therefore, I think he has the capacity to succeed me.”

  He was even open about what had happened when he fainted. “Perhaps I was sweating too much. I was really drenched in sweat. All of a sudden, I don’t remember what happened. I did realize I was being carried away.”

  “You passed out?” I asked.

  “Yes, perhaps I passed out for fifteen seconds. It was like going to sleep, like falling asleep, like sometimes when you are watching TV. If instead of fainting, it had been a heart attack or a stroke, which is not very likely, not for the time being, because my blood pressure is between seventy and one-ten, which is very normal. But it is not something that I am worried about, my succession.”

  At that point Fidel Castro had antagonized ten American presidents, and was not worried about dying. Now he was ready to spar with George W. Bush, especially because of his family’s long connection with Florida’s anti-Castro Cuban-Americans. Did Fidel see any chance of better relations with this president?

  “He was not elected, he was appointed president of the United States,” was his response.

  I pointed out that Bush would say that Castro hadn’t been elected either. Castro was combative when I pressed him on Cuba’s lack of free elections and asked why he wouldn’t release political prisoners. I had clearly pushed him as far as I could. Behind me, I could hear his aides rustling papers. I knew that meant the interview was over. When we stood up, Castro asked me to join him across the hall to meet his young leaders, gathering in his cabinet room at midnight to give him a nightly report on “polling” in the provinces. For more than an hour, they each stood and gave him the public’s reactions to his nightly broadcast on Cuban t
elevision. More than a thousand people had been “questioned.” Who knew that Fidel Castro had his own focus groups!

  There was one more remarkable episode during that visit. After getting all of that exclusive material, just before we were to go live on Nightly News from the rooftop of Cuban TV the next evening, an enormous storm blew in. Within minutes, just before my report, it started pouring, threatening to knock us off the air. I could imagine all our efforts being washed away. Suddenly, the staff from Cuban TV started appearing on the roof, dragging poles, a ladder, brooms—anything they could get their hands on to help erect a tent. They’d been watching from the control room, had seen the storm blow in, and without being asked had raced to the roof to make sure I got on the air—fellow broadcasters who probably didn’t like what I was saying about their government, but knew the show must go on.

  I went back to Havana a year later to cover Jimmy Carter’s landmark trip to deliver a human rights lecture on Cuban television. He was the first American president, in or out of office, to visit Cuba since Castro had seized power in 1959. Carter and Castro had a long history. As president, Carter accepted thousands of boat people trying to flee Cuba, but Castro used the exodus to unload hardened criminals and mental patients. It embarrassed Carter, and contributed to his defeat in 1980. Now, on the eve of Carter’s trip, which the Bush administration approved only grudgingly, the State Department’s hard-line arms controller, John Bolton, charged that Castro was hiding a biological weapons program. And Cuban dissidents, emboldened by Carter’s trip, advertised their Varela Project, a drive to collect eleven thousand signatures petitioning for free elections. Castro was furious.