Hostage in Havana

by Noel Hynd

  “Do you still have contacts on the island?” Alex asked.

  He took several seconds to answer. “Not really,” he said. “It’s been a long time. There have been so many other fish to fry in the last few years. Colombia. Venezuela. Honduras. Nicaragua.” He shrugged. “I could make some phone calls if you want. I used to know a guy named Gilberto in Old Havana. Used to sell postcards and rum to tourists — and guns, Argentine passports, and black-market dollars to people who wanted to leave the country. I have no idea if he’s still alive. If he is, he’ll talk to me; if he’s dead he probably won’t. I could do some asking.”

  “If you would, that would be nice,” Alex said easily. “And look, maybe you could run the Guarneri name past a few of your old Playa Girón contacts,” she added.

  Sam laughed and grabbed the notepad in front of him. “What’s the full name?”

  “Joseph Guarneri,” Alex said. “G-U-A-R-N-E-R-I,” she continued, spelling it as Sam’s pudgy hand quickly wrote. “He could be down as ‘Giuseppe.’ Born in Italy.”

  “Why don’t you throw the name past your friends, the Feds?” he said, throwing a glance at MacPhail and Ramirez. “Or did you do that already?”

  “I always like to check the official version against the unofficial version,” Alex said. “That’s why I’m here. Can you blame me?”

  “No. Call me in a week,” Sam said.

  “I don’t have a week.”

  “Ah. I get it. Then I’ll put some zip on it. I’ll phone you when I have something. You working on a CIA assignment?”

  She was silent again. Another wink.

  “Foxy fox, aren’t you?” Sam said. “I like it. You got great legs too. Did I mention that? What do you do? Run? Swim? Gym? Tight shorts and a muscle T-shirt. I bet you look hot.”

  “Can I try another name on you?” she asked.

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  “Roland Violette.”

  Sam instantly knew the name. “Whoa. That snake! He’s been down there Havana-way doing his señorita and drinking rum for twenty years. That’s what I hear.”

  “Twenty-six years.”

  “I hear the man’s crazy,” Sam said. “Complete loony tune. Of course, he was always dealing with a deck that only had fortynine cards. He’s vermin, you know. Ratted out a lot of good CIA people. Why’s his name in play?”

  “A little birdie told me he wants to come home,” Alex said.

  “Ha! That shows you how crazy he is. The CIA has a price on his head. There’s bad, bad blood there. Be careful.”

  “May I speak off the record, Sam?”

  “Everything’s off the record. You see any record? There is no record.”

  “Violette is claiming he has a bag of goodies that he filched from the Cuban government,” Alex said. “He might be looking to trade them for a ticket out.”

  “Might be, eh? Who wouldn’t?” Sam snorted.

  “Do you think Violette was ever in a position to score some good intelligence?” she asked. “Does his story wash?”

  Sam pondered. “It might.” Sam then said, “Violette had access, if that’s what you’re asking. Who knows what he might have swiped?”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Violette.” Sam had a faraway look, then came back to earth. “Bloody Cubans,” Sam said. “They deserve better. As much as I hate Castro and his whole red crew, I can’t say he’s worse than Batista. It’s like Russia. Who was worse? Czar Nicholas II or Lenin?”

  “Depends which Russian you were.”

  “Yup. Just like it depends which Cuban you were. If you were mobbed up or the owner of a sugar plantation, Batista was your man. What did they call him? El Mulato Lindo? If you were a peasant in Santiago or if your sister had been turned into a prostitute by fat American tourists, then Fidel or Che were your guys.” Sam lightened. “My kid came home with a Che T-shirt when he was twelve. I ripped it off him and threw the lousy thing away. I said, ‘Che? You want to know about Che?’ Che performed the same role for Fidel Castro as Felix Drezhinsky performed for Lenin and Himmler did for Hitler. Guevara was Castro’s chief executioner. Under Che, Havana’s La Cabana fortress was converted into Cuba’s Lubianka. Know your Russians and Russian history, Alex?”

  “Reasonably well.”

  “Che was a Chekist: ‘Interrogate your prisoners at night,’ Che told his goons. ‘A man’s resistance is lower at night.’ I knew this Cuban prosecutor in the ‘60s who defected: José Vilasuso. José estimated that Che signed four hundred death warrants the first months in La Cabana. I knew a Basque priest named Iaki de Aspiazu who did final confessions and last rites. He said that Che ordered seven hundred executions by firing squad during the period. Some Cuban journalists who later defected claimed Che sent two thousand men to the firing squad. Ever heard of a CIA guy named Felix Rodriguez?”

  “No. What about him?”

  “He was the Cuban-American CIA operative who helped track down Che in Bolivia. He was the last person to question him. He says that during that final talk, Che admitted to a couple thousand executions. But he shrugged them off. Said they were all imperialist spies and CIA agents. That’s your heroic Che.”

  “You have your point of view, Sam,” Alex answered.

  “Well you came to listen, right? And to learn?”

  “I did indeed, Sam.”

  Sam finished his drink. He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes before three. “Hey. I got to scram,” he said. “I’ll ask around about Guarneri. My man in Havana. Wasn’t that a book?”

  “Our Man in Havana. Graham Greene,” she said.

  “Yeah. Brit writer. That’s it. I liked that one. Do you read a lot?”

  “When I have time,” she said.

  “Yeah, you look like you might. Your brain’s as sharp as your body.”

  They walked back along 57th Street, with MacPhail and Ramirez trailing behind. The sidewalks were crowded. Sam took a cell phone call but quickly dispatched it. When they reached the southeast corner of 57th at Fifth, Sam stopped again before going back to work. “There’s a couple of things that’d be good for you to remember.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “First,” Sam said, “it’s my personal feeling that the Kennedy assassination was organized by Castro. From the early sixties on, the CIA had tried to have Castro assassinated and had hired goombahs from the American Mafia to do the job. Bobby Kennedy was deep in it and so was the president. The Kennedys were trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to the Kennedys first. Payback. Oswald spent time in Cuba, remember?”

  “I know the theory, Sam.”

  “What do you think? Am I nuts?”

  “Like all the JFK assassination theories, it has its merits and its imperfections. What’s the other thing?”

  His dark eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance. “You know,” he said. “I forgot.” Then the meeting was over. Sam bounded through the doors of his retail employer and was back to work.

  Later that day the other zapato dropped.

  Señora Perez was in the lobby of her office building in Mexico City when three men in police uniforms approached her. They explained that there was some threat against both her and her husband and they’d been sent to protect her.

  Her first question: “¿Donde está Antonio?” Where is Antonio?

  “He’s gone to the airport to join your husband,” they said.

  “His flight’s probably in progress as we speak,” one of the men in uniform said.

  “May I call my husband?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  They waited. The call was unsuccessful.

  “Very well then,” she said.

  They escorted her to a pair of waiting Mexico City police cars. They then proceeded to the children’s school. Only after that second pickup did these men reveal that they were not police officers. Señora Perez also learned that her husband had lied to her over many years. He was involved with a business beyond the import and export of
fruits. She also learned that she and her family were in custody, as was her bodyguard. What she had no way of knowing, however, was who her captors were.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The next morning, the Department of Treasury approved Alex’s mission to Cuba. She advised Paul Guarneri, and they made tentative plans to meet in Miami before continuing on to Havana. He gave her an address in Miami where they would rendezvous. MacPhail and Ramirez’s duty would be to get her that far and probably to the sea launch to Cuba as well. After that, she was at the mercy of fate and the man with whom she would be traveling.

  “I’ll make arrangements to get us to Cuba by small plane and boat,” Paul said. “I’ve had a scenario set up for months. Now I just need to put it into effect.” He worked with some smugglers, he said. Not the most upstanding of citizens, but efficient people who got the job done.

  In the afternoon Alex went out for some air. Walter MacPhail accompanied her. They carried weapons. Ramirez walked about twenty feet behind. They stayed around Third Avenue and the Thirties. “We’ll be driving down to Washington tomorrow morning,” MacPhail announced as they walked. “You’ll have a conference at the CIA in Langley about Roland Violette. We’ll be in D.C. for one overnight, maybe two.”

  “Makes sense,” Alex said. “Got anything yet on Guarneri’s old man?”

  “Nothing yet. Still trying. Bureaucracy, you know …”

  “See if you can kick-start the request,” she said. “It’s not like a year from now will do any good.”

  “I’ll make another call.”

  Later, Alex went back to the table that supported her secure laptop. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, with the baby Glock on her hip, she clicked into her secure email account. Two items had arrived in the last hour.

  The first was an FBI summary on Paul Guarneri’s father, Joseph Guarneri. He had been born in Sicily in 1928, confirming what Paul had said. He had jumped ship in 1944 to remain in the U.S. Records were hazy, but two younger brothers eventually followed him to Cuba. This casual tidbit had been annotated many years earlier, presumably by an agent long since retired or deceased:

  Examiner’s note: Salvatore Guarneri, 1931 – 1959, was a pit boss and trainer of dealers at Meyer Lansky’s Riviera Hotel; Giovanni Guarneri, 1942 - ??, last known as an active but no longer influential member of the Cuban Communist Party. SpAg P.S.D., 10/17/1973.

  Noting the conflicting politics within the family, Alex continued to read. Joseph Guarneri, the file said, maintained houses in New York, Miami, and Cuba while Batista was in power and, it was believed, had two families, one official, one unofficial. The latter was obviously Paul and his mother.

  Guarneri controlled criminal operations in Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. He maintained links to the Bonanno crime family in New York but had been more closely allied with Sam Giancana in Chicago. In Guarneri’s day, the east coast of Florida and Cuba had been a tight conglomerate of New York family interests with links to Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. But Giancana, a former Capone associate while in Chicago, also had his fingers in the pie. So Guarneri had operated under Mr. Sam’s umbrella. This organization traced back to 1929 in Cuba and the outset of Prohibition in the U.S. Paying off members of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship, which had preceded Batista in Cuba, the New York underworld built huge rum factories on the island and contracted with Cuban sugar refineries to guarantee an endless supply of molasses, the main ingredient in rum. Upon such a firm foundation did a vast criminal enterprise rise to prerevolutionary glory.

  A separate Treasury Department document also indicated that Joseph Guarneri’s business interests had included parts of several legal casinos in Cuba, laundry and catering services to those casinos, a Havana drive-in movie theater, shares in La Sirena Gorda restaurant in Miramar, where Hemingway and the literary set liked to knock back booze, a racetrack in Havana, a catering service in Havana, and several other restaurants and bars in Tampa, Florida.

  Alex read the concluding sections carefully:

  Joseph Guarneri was frequently arrested on various charges of bribery, bookmaking, and loan sharking. He escaped conviction all but once, receiving a two-year sentence in 1954 for bribery of a judge, but his conviction was overturned by the New York State Supreme Court before he entered prison …

  In 1959, Castro’s revolutionary government seized the assets of Guarneri’s Cuban businesses and expelled him from the country as an “undesirable alien.” Thereafter, Guarneri came into contact with various American and expatriate Cuban organizations that opposed Fidel Castro. He later served in the military brigade that invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Captured and held as a prisoner after the failure of the invasion, he was ransomed by the United States. Guarneri either lost his taste for underworld life in later years or was forced out of his businesses and settled in Florida and New York …

  A fan of thoroughbred and standardbred horse racing, Joseph Guarneri would, when in Manhattan, have his driver stop in front of the sprawling newsstand that once stood at New York’s Times Square. Guarneri would emerge from the rear door, enter, pick up his reserved copy of The Morning Telegraph, hand three dollars to the clerk, climb back into his car and proceed to either Aqueduct or Belmont …

  He focused on real estate in his later years but still retained some old enemies. His execution took place one night when Guarneri was coming home from Yonkers Raceway in the New York suburbs. On the porch of his house, he was ambushed by three gunmen; two opened fire with pistols, a third with a shotgun. The hit was particularly brutal and was an exception to organized crime’s own rules about not hitting a victim in or near his home if he had family …

  An additional quirk: even in the New York underworld, there was consternation over the hit. No one knew who had arranged it or who had set it up, especially since Guarneri was believed to have been retired at the time. Yet, for a man with such a career, it wasn’t entirely incredible to have an enemy step out of the shadows of the past, bearing a grievance, either real or imagined, and effect a day of reckoning. The homicide inquiry was never resolved …

  Alex further noted a short addendum:

  Examiner’s note: FBI picked up the trail of a known Cuban operative named Julio Garcia who had covertly entered the United States in May 1973 with a Honduran passport. Garcia was a known “verdugo” or executioner for the Cuban Intelligence Serv ices. The FBI lost his trail in New York and had no record of him leaving the U.S., but he was believed to have been in the U.S. when Joseph Guarneri was murdered. Garcia was last known to be in Cuba as a member of Cuban State Security in 1981 and remains a member of the Cuban Communist Party … Notes between FBI and CIA were never compared or correlated at the time. SpAg J.N.H., 07/19/1993.

  Julio Garcia, Alex mused. How many Cubans had that name? Five thousand? Ten thousand? She proceeded to the next email. This one, from the CIA, was a series of briefs on Roland Violette. Alex made some coffee, then spent an hour reading the reports and reviewing surveillance photos, the most recent taken fifty-six days earlier.

  She noted that Violette had been stationed in Washington, then Madrid, which rang some loud bells for her. Within the last year she had worked out of the U.S. Embassy and the CIA office in the Spanish capital. She wondered if her contacts from those operations might be able to tell her things that might not be in the official summary.

  “Okay,” she told herself. Bringing Violette out of Cuba was the assignment. Can do, can do, can do, she told herself. As she started to ease into her new assignment, however, she realized how shaken she still was from the sniper’s near miss. Shock and trauma were like depression, she concluded; you don’t realize how bad it is until you’re past it.

  She wasn’t the only one whose brains felt like scrambled eggs these days, she realized. She read a pair of blurbs from a CIA contact with a Honduran passport who had encountered Violette in Havana by chance six weeks earlier.

  Examiner’s note: HW File 7-TF, 05/14/11: Roland Violette sits in Juanita’s Café o
n the Calle San Rafael … and he tells the old stories over and over. They frequently have no appearance of reality and bear not even a faint resemblance to the truth.

  But he has told them so often over his morning daiquiris that it’s obvious he’s come to believe them himself. Sad. His head has turned to mush with a destroyed spirit and body to match …

  This was followed by another examiner’s note from within the last two weeks.

  Ronnie the Violet, also known as Ronnie the Deep Purple Red [some recent sorehead had written while reviewing the file] remains a rat bastard. May he burn in hell forever over what he did to this agency in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

  She reread that one-line entry. It was fascinating that Violette still elicited such strong feelings. His defection had been a full quarter century earlier, and the damage that he had done went even farther back. But she was intrigued, too, that someone else had preceded her through this file within the last few days. She could feel someone’s hot breath on it. Were the fingerprints from this present operation or some other?

  Then she recalled that if Violette was looking to return to America, the file had undergone a Lazarus effect. It was back from the dead. She decided to do a little water testing of her own and threw a few keystrokes onto the computer, trying to make her own comments on the file. But the file was closed and refused to receive any new amendments. She looked at the initials following the examiner’s notation: HW.

  She didn’t know an HW, but she would now look out for one. HW was clearly senior enough to add his or her own notes to the file, which meant that HW carried some weight in the CIA.

  And since the file was closed to her but not to HW, that told her something too.

  Okay, she would double check this herself. Her fingers worked the keyboard. Via secure email, she fired an inquiry to a colleague she had worked with in Madrid. She asked for anything the Madrid office might give her on Roland Violette and his defection. He had worked at the CIA office there in the 1980s, she noted, and the office had been on the top floor of the embassy. So surely Madrid had files. And surely they could share, even if the files didn’t officially exist. Since she wouldn’t have time to read through entire documents, she asked for an overview.