See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  If the Comandante speaks for more than one minute, he will not speak for less than five.

  If he speaks for more than five minutes, he will not speak for less than thirty.

  If he speaks for more than thirty minutes, he will not speak for less than one hour.

  And if he speaks for more than one hour, he will not speak for less than two hours.

  Castro said how welcome was the latest visitor from the Soviet Union, that he came from a long line of distinguished friends of the people of Cuba beginning with Deputy Premier Minister Mikoyan who had visited all of Cuba in 1960 [Dorticós stole a glance at the second hand: 75 seconds], but that this was not the occasion in which to do other than to wish Comrade Adzhubei a wonderful visit in this beautiful country, that when he returned from his trip, on parts of which Fidel himself would be accompanying him, there would be a festive occasion [two minutes] and that he counseled Adzhubei in particular to experience the sense of freedom of the people of Cuba, liberated now from the fascist imperialism of the Yanqui era, which the imperialists had attempted yet again in April by military force to visit on Cuba but which had been bravely rebuffed by the Cuban people!

  Fidel raised his glass and toasted his guest. He had spoken for five minutes.

  Adzhubei rose, a tall, thin man, rather academic in manner. It occurred to him that this was not the moment to discuss the barbaric shortcomings of the American President who would be giving him an exclusive interview a few weeks hence, so he spoke instead about the brilliance of the Soviet example, and then about the light that irradiated from this great island of Cuba all over Latin America, which would surely soon experience similar progressive—he started to say “revolutions” but again thought better of it—“demarches,” but none would stand so conspicuously in the history of progress in the western hemisphere as that of Cuba. (Much applause.) Meanwhile he wished to relay the most cordial regards of the man all Russia hailed as leader, to whose daughter he had the honor to be married. (Much applause.)

  There were no other toasts, and Castro was preparing to bid Adzhubei goodbye for the time being when Adzhubei’s interpreter whispered something to Fidel’s interpreter. Castro looked puzzled for just a moment, but chewing on his cigar he waved his hand to part the milling crowd, and putting his arm over the shoulder of Adzhubei led him off, back to the car, with instructions to his aide to take them to the presidential office.

  Adzhubei, seated in the sanctum sanctorum, declined the offer of coffee and said that he had taken the liberty of asking for a totally private meeting right away because he had received only two days before, while in Mexico, confirmation, direct from Chairman Khrushchev, of what he had been briefed to report to Fidel Castro. Before leaving Moscow it had seemed quite certain, but now it was confirmed:

  The United States was bent on a fresh military expedition against Cuba.

  It would come in the late spring or summer. And this one would be unambiguously a U.S. military operation, not a ragtag affair involving a few thousand refugees. The objective was to replace the Castro government with a colonialist Yanqui-dominated government.

  Castro’s expression did not change as his interpreter spoke out the words, though he puffed more vigorously on his cigar.

  Adzhubei went on at some length describing the prodigies of Soviet intelligence, the high secrecy that was being attached to the invasion plan in the United States. And—his voice was dramatic—the proposal he was now authorized by his father-in-law to make to Fidel Castro. He leaned back in his chair, and lapsed now into a whisper.

  “We are prepared to give you a defensive strategic capability.”

  “Are you talking about missiles?” Castro bit on his cigar.

  Adzhubei closed his eyes. “The same.”

  “What is the Yanquis’ timetable?”

  “We have not yet ascertained exactly, as I say. The expectation is that they are thinking in terms of next spring.”

  “Surely not on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs,” Castro spit out his cigar cud.

  Adzhubei smiled. He wished Castro to know that he appreciated the jocularity of the suggestion. “We would not expect that they would celebrate that anniversary, Comrade Castro.”

  Castro stood up, and cursed. “There would appear to be little alternative than to welcome the Soviet offer.”

  “There is seldom an alternative to assuring one’s survival.”

  “What would be the, er, surrounding conditions?”

  “You understand, surely, that the missiles would need to be installed and manned by Soviet personnel, and that Soviet officials would of course be totally in charge of security in all matters having to do with their installation. There would need to be total secrecy in the matter.”

  “There is never total secrecy in respect of any matter.”

  “You have not been trained by my father-in-law.”

  “I will need to think over the implications of all of this.”

  “It is for that reason that I wished to make you the offer at the outset of my visit to your inspiring country. In two weeks when we confer for the final time you can let me have your consolidated reaction, which I shall report to my father-in-law on my return. After visiting with President Kennedy.” He confided to Castro his secret rendezvous later on in the month.

  “Be sure to give Mr. Kennedy my regards,” Castro said, rising.

  Thirteen

  At eight on Sunday morning Blackford walked out onto the beach as usual. The guard, who had become accustomed to the daily drill, had taken to lugging his own canvas chair from the porch of the beach cottage, together with his portable radio and of course his carbine, to about twenty yards inland from where Blackford and Velasco sat. Cecilio Velasco knew that Blackford took the opportunity of distancing himself from the cottage in order to talk with him where there was no chance of their being overheard, so he also took a chair, which he would place on the sand away from that of the guard, sitting down on it with his book until the swim was over. When Cecilio was outdoors in the sun he removed his tie, and if the sun was especially hot he would drape a towel over his head. Blackford no longer bothered with swimming trunks. At the water’s edge he dropped his undershorts and walked into the water.

  He swam out, conscious of the boundary the guard had set. Swimming on his back he could see no one at all on either side of him save, at a distance, the usual cluster of fishing boats. He swam lazily, describing a slow circle. He plunged then and swam underwater until his breath gave out. At the surface he then swam with ferocious energy toward the beach, arriving just slightly short of breath. He walked up out of the water and picked up the towel he had dropped with his underwear, dried himself, and put on his shorts.

  “Know what?” he said to Velasco, drying his hair, still laced with blond, with the towel, his skin almost uniformly tanned, “I expect that sometime this morning we will meet with Che Guevara.”

  “I hope you are right. Your deadline is this afternoon.”

  “We aren’t well situated to impose deadlines. But—what the hell. We’ll see.” They sat for a while in the sun, Blackford on the sand. There was never any hurry.

  Together they walked back to the cottage, followed by the guard. Blackford walked into his bathroom and took a freshwater shower. He was in it, absentmindedly, for several minutes, and was shaken out of his reverie by Cecilio Velasco who drew back the shower curtain and whispered, “He’s here.”

  Blackford dried himself, put on trousers, shoes, and a shirt, and walked out into the living room.

  Velasco was standing there, in conversation with Comandante Guevara and a woman. No one else was in the room, but Blackford could see instantly, through the windows leading out to the beach, that what had been a single guard was now a half-dozen men.

  Blackford extended his hand. “Comandante Guevara.”

  Che answered in Spanish, introducing his “colleague.” Cecilio translated. “This, Mr. Caimán, is my colleague who because she speaks English also serves as m
y interpreter. This is Catalina Urrutia.”

  Blackford bowed his head but did not extend his hand. “Señorita.”

  “You may call her Catalina. And you may call me Che.” Comandante Guevara was slighter than Blackford had imagined, weighing perhaps 160 pounds, five feet nine or ten inches tall. He wore his traditional beret and army fatigues. His regular facial posture was that of the half smile. And he directed his remarks to Catalina, closing his eyes during her translation into English as though evaluating its correctness. And indeed he understood much English, even as Blackford understood much Spanish.

  “We have a lot to discuss, Mr. Caimán.”

  “A pity we could not have begun earlier.”

  “Ah, yes. I seem always to be behind. I am certainly behind in the matter of rebuilding the economy of Cuba. You are not exactly behind in your efforts to prevent this from happening.” Catalina interpreted for Che, Cecilio for Blackford.

  “It occurs to me that I am the host in this cottage,” Blackford said. “Do you wish to proceed here in this sitting room?”

  “Why not?” said Che, sitting down at one end of one of the chairs, indicating to Catalina that she should sit down next to him. Blackford sat down opposite in the single chair, Cecilio in the remaining single chair. They composed a triangle.

  “You have a message for me, Mr. Caimán?—May I call you, simply, Caimán? We are very informal in socialist countries.”

  “I’ve noticed,” said Blackford. “Yes, of course, Caimán is fine. And yes, I do have a message”—Blackford would not avail himself of the egalitarian invitation to address the Minister of Industry as “Che.” But neither did he wish to appear to snub the invitation to familiarity. So he used nothing. This was made easier by the presence of a translator as intermediary. “I begin by conveying to you the greetings of the President of my country, who has instructed me to explore with you the suggestions you outlined to Mr. Goodwin in August in Montevideo.”

  Che Guevara drew on his cigar. “Ah, yes. Well, Mr. Caimán, it is of course sensible that we attempt to define what it is that furthers interests we have in common. I do not disguise, any more than I did in my conversation with Mr. Goodwin—a charming fellow, by the way. A pity his education at Harvard was so incomplete; he’d have made a good socialist.” It was easier for Blackford to suppress his inclination to a riposte, given that Che’s wisecrack came in framed by Catalina, and hence arrived a little attenuated. Her American accent was faintly Southern, her English entirely fluent. Blackford deduced that she had probably gone to school in Florida, or somewhere in the South. Her complexion was tan, her eyes hazel brown, her teeth white, her hair austerely arranged, tied loosely behind her head in a bun. She wore a braided gold necklace supporting a surrealistic little hammer and sickle. Her warm voice was without emotion, except that the words came in bursts, lending, no doubt unconsciously, dramatic effect to the sequence of thought. Her eyes were on Che when he spoke, on Blackford when she translated.

  Che continued by describing the necessary growing pains of a country that clearly needed to end its dependence on sugar, clearly needed to industrialize and to widen its markets, but obviously had difficulty in doing so during an economic season in which the United States was denying it such basic needs as dollars, spare parts, and all those other things “which you have in such prodigious quantity. Your law now says something on the order of, ‘No ship bound for Cuba can leave from an American port. No ship leaving Cuba can land at an American port. No goods made in America may be sold directly to Cuba, or indirectly to any country or company that intends to transship those goods to Cuba.’ Out of curiosity, Mr. Caimán, how much do you suppose you spent on your effort last April to invade my country?”

  Caimán thought it important quickly to establish a mature relationship with the legendary Cuban luminary.

  “Not enough,” he responded.

  Che’s eyes brightened. Clearly he enjoyed combative relations. “Ah, so you have no regrets about last April?”

  “No regrets you would welcome hearing about.”

  “Ah, then, so you wish you had succeeded in toppling Fidel and in reestablishing Yankee imperialism over the Cuban people?”

  Blackford rose. “Look, Comandante—”

  “Che.”

  “Look … Che—I am here representing the President. My own views are immaterial. I am charged to hear your views in precise detail on whether arrangements might be made—”

  “But I am interested in your views. Do you object to my having them? Did the President forbid you to express your own views?”

  “No, sir—”

  “No, Che.”

  “No … Che. The President did not forbid me to do anything. But the President obviously does not expect that I should waste your time with the recounting of my own views—”

  “Ah but Caimán, you do not have, not yet anyway, the authority to decide what it is that wastes my time. I am the sole judge of the question in two senses. First, I decide whether what I desire to talk about is a waste of my time; second, I decide whether I choose to waste my time.”

  Blackford thought what-the-hell, he may as well let it out. “It is also up to you to decide whether to waste my time.”

  Che was clearly delighted, and rose from the chair and spoke as if in monologue, scarcely giving Catalina the time to keep up with him.

  “Ah, how slow we are to lose our imperial habits. So you come to this country, having failed to conquer it militarily. You come, to be sure, as the result of an initiative taken by me. But that initiative was in response to your own initiative: your attempt to close down the economy of the Cuban people, to make our socialist revolution unworkable. Then when you arrive you expect immediate attention! Immediate attention! As though you were ringing a bell for a waiter to bring you a drink of rum and a prostitute.” He pointed to the bedroom. “I wonder how many Cuban women were fucked in there by American tourists in the ten years after this hotel was built? And not by handsome athletes like you but by bloated bibulous capitalists. Poor Caimán. Had to wait for one—whole—week! I waited two years in the Sierra Maestra before we could liberate the Cuban people from your puppet Batista. And circumstances were far less pleasant than your own. I did not have a daily swim in the ocean—”

  Blackford, seated downwind from Che, knew what intimates of Che—ex-intimates, some of whose diaries he had read—had meant about Che’s casual personal hygiene. Che Guevara clearly did not go in for regular bathing.

  “—and your royal presence here has perhaps met with less than the attention you would expect to have from a backward nation?”

  “Comandante—Che. Please, let’s not. I confess that I am everything you know me to be, and perhaps even a lot more. I confess I am not in sympathy with socialism let alone the kind of socialism being introduced into your country, and I also confess that my impression has been—and perhaps this is due to a misunderstanding of my superiors—that you were anxious to get on with it, I mean the business of an exchange of positions. It is obvious, under the circumstances, that it was … disappointing not to make contact with you more quickly.”

  “Ah, make contact more quickly. Yes. ‘Disappointing’”—he spoke the word in English. “Do you know that there is not an exact Spanish translation for that word? It is a distinctively English, meiotic expression. As in, ‘I was disappointed to have to sanction the military invasion of Cuba.’ I am sure that those words will appear, more or less in that form, in the memoirs of President Kennedy when he has left office. ‘Disappointed.’ Well, I am disappointed that the United States uses its economic muscle, its military muscle having proved insufficient, to frustrate the socialization of Cuba. But you will not succeed, my dear Caimán, you will not succeed, because we are in tune with history and you are not. You are merely engaged in backward efforts to shore up a dying order …”

  Blackford thought quickly. What should he do? He had not, in ten years, faced anything on the order of the current situation. Several times
, in those ten years, he had been forced to feign sympathy for views he held in profound contempt. That was relatively easy—so to speak, professionally easy, as if his fraternity at Yale had given him the assignment of penetrating the Harvard cheerleading team; in such situations, you shout out your enthusiasm for the other side.

  This was different. His identity, his affiliations, his loyalties, were well known to the professionals in the enemy camp, quite probably Che Guevara among them. But he could hardly risk his mission by entering with spirit into a dialectic with the man whom it was his job to bring around to concrete negotiations.

  Blackford waited until Che had come to a coda, and then blurted out: “Che. Do I understand you to be saying to me that you resent any effort by me to keep the subject confined to the matters formally on the table, namely the proposals you made to Mr. Goodwin in August?”

  “I consider it not only impolite but antisocial, not only antisocial but directly belligerent for you, Caimán, in my country, to decline to discuss with me, in terms I find agreeable and suitable, the differences between your country and my country. Exactly how we approach the direct subject at hand is something which, in my judgment, it is within my authority to determine. If I wish to approach it other than in purely conventional ways, I feel I have that prerogative. If you decline to accept that prerogative you are free to do so. You are, indeed, always free to leave Cuba. Oh yes, let us get that absolutely straight from the outset. You have merely to snap your fingers”—Che snapped his own to reinforce his point—“and you have my word for it that a plane will be put at your disposal to return you to Guantánamo. But as long as you elect to remain here, you will abide by my modes of exchange. By my way of doing things. Is that agreeable?”