See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  Che went over and leaned over the desk. Fidel asked, “What about the American? Caimán? Did he have anything to say?”

  “He gave us the name of a double agent, Fidel, I am checking on. The agent was very active while Caimán was in America, and he clearly did us much damage. He has not, in fact, been so active during the past period, but of course Caimán had no way of knowing this. He has given me clues which I am certain will lead to his apprehension.”

  “You think he earned commutation of sentence?”

  Che Guevara hesitated for just a moment. Then said, “But does that matter, Fidel?”

  “No,” Castro said, smiling as he looked at the end of his cigar. “No. I wouldn’t care if he revealed that we were going to be invaded at midnight. Get rid of him. And the girl. Oh—Che, listen. I was thinking yesterday about it. I want them to suffer. No torture. Just suffer. So I want her executed one day before he is executed. And I want her told she will be executed tomorrow morning, but don’t shoot her until Wednesday. Shoot Caimán Thursday. That way she will suffer a full twenty-four hours. He will suffer forty-eight hours, with double intensity the first twenty-four hours. Am I not a born central planner, Che?”

  Che decided to hazard one final attempt. “Listen, Fidel—” There was an interruption. A crowd outside, properly stimulated and instructed two hours before the broadcast in what would be the appropriate reaction to whatever President Kennedy said, had gathered and begun to sing the national anthem and to shout, “Viva Fidel! Viva Fidel!” Fidel had one ear on the outside noise, another on what Che was saying. “Listen, Fidel, I am really a little embarrassed by my signature’s appearing on the instrument that guaranteed remission of the capital sentence on the girl.”

  “That’s simple. Just say I overruled you. Oh yes, and by the way, Che, I place you in charge of the entire operation. You are responsible to me. I shall advise the Minister of the Interior of this. I feel there is poetic justice here; I hope you will agree.”

  Che drew his breath. “As for Caimán, I quite agree. But I think of him, a CIA spy, as guilty on another level from the girl, Urrutia. And besides, we never promised to remit his sentence.”

  “Did you hear that, Che? Did you catch the words? Listen …” But the crowd did not repeat them; they were extemporaneously babbling away. Fidel said exultantly, “They were singing:

  Fidel, Khrushchev,

  We love ’em both.

  Climb another rung:

  Long live Mao Tse-tung.

  “Wonderful! I had not heard that before. Tonight will prove to be a great night, those dumb Yanquis. Not as great,” he suddenly frowned, “as if we had completed the installations. But under the circumstances, fine.”

  Suddenly his mood changed completely. He lowered the cap on his head and looked Che Guevara directly in the face. His accents were slow and solemn. “Do not mention that girl traitor to me one more time.”

  Che Guevara executed a casual salute. “Understood, Comandante. Now I think I had better leave. There is much to do, and you will need to think about your address to the nation. You have less than an hour. You will find me if you need me.”

  “Come to me tonight after it is over, and tell me what you thought of my speech. Bring anyone you like. I think a modest little celebration is in order.”

  “I shall come unless duties detain me, Fidel.”

  En route to El Príncipe he found that his heart was pounding. That did not usually happen to Che Guevara. And then it occurred to him, for the first time, to conflate the speech of Kennedy with the bizarre silence of the Soviet Union throughout the preceding week. For the first time he wondered: Could the Soviet Union be planning to back out? He would greatly hope to be as far away from Fidel Castro as possible if that were to happen. He wondered whether he might decide to leave the country on a quick inspection tour of the Cuban missions in Mexico or Bogotá … But no: there was no way in which someone of his rank could absent himself from Cuba until after the crisis was past. He was struggling, he acknowledged to himself, to avoid what lay immediately ahead.

  He made up his mind. It was a risky business, but the odds were on his side. Because Colonel Gonzalo Citrón, commander of the military prison El Príncipe, had fought alongside Che in 1958. Together they had marched into Havana. And—Che knew—Citrón loathed and distrusted Aníbal Escalante, the communist opportunist who had displayed cowardice and sadism during the early months of Castro’s ascendancy and was now beginning to exercise influence on the military command. And Citrón knew that Che Guevara shared apprehensions about Escalante. On several occasions they had discussed him and the threat he posed.

  It would, then, not be difficult to talk personally with Citrón in confidence. There was the single problem that Citrón tended to take too much rum after working hours. And it was almost ten. Citrón would feel obliged to listen to Castro’s speech, and perhaps he had brought along members of the staff. In that event he would have stayed sober. But that meant that Che would not be able to talk with him until God-knows-when—when Castro had finished speaking. Well, he would see.

  There was a considerable flurry at the gates when Comandante Guevara arrived, even though for the third time in three days. The Duty Officer came running from the adjacent office, saluted, and advised the Comandante that he would instantly summon the camp commander.

  “Where is Colonel Citrón?” Che asked.

  “In the officers’ common room, Comandante. They plan to listen to the speech at ten.”

  It was fifteen minutes before ten. “Take me to the common room.”

  “Shall I first advise the colonel?”

  “No. Just take me there.”

  The Duty Officer saluted, dived into his own jeep, and led the way to the far end of the building compound. He jumped out and approached a door.

  “Permit me, Comandante. Follow me.”

  Up a staircase.

  Coming from the right was much noise and laughter. The Duty Officer did not wish to be the man who intruded on the privacy of the upper echelon of El Príncipe. He indicated to Guevara the appropriate door. Che walked over to it and turned the knob.

  The clamor died down only gradually, but came then to dead silence when it transpired who was there. Fifteen men—none of them wearing jackets, most with drinking glasses in their hands—stood at attention. Colonel Citrón walked over to Che and saluted. “My dear friend. What brings us this honor?”

  Che let the men continue at attention for a moment or two. “Oh, there are one or two things we need to discuss, Gonzalo. But” he looked rather vaguely about him, “I am interrupting something?”

  “No, Che, you could never interrupt anything. We gathered here to listen to the response of Fidel to Kennedy. He will be on in just a minute or two.”

  Che waved the men to be at ease. Rather self-consciously they resumed conversation, and (quieter) drinking. The boisterousness was gone and one of them turned up the radio. The announcer was talking about reactions against American imperialism in various parts of the world. He then said that word had come down from the Prime Minister’s office that the speech of the Comandante en Jefe, Fidel Castro, would be delayed by a half hour, pending attention to pressing official business. Che wondered what that was all about; but then Castro often delayed. He had been thirty minutes late in New York City at the reception given in his honor by Nikita Khrushchev. He was just that way about deadlines.

  He turned suddenly to Gonzalo. “Let us talk, then, before Fidel’s speech.”

  Gonzalo nodded, poured his glass full (one half CocaCola, one half rum), and beckoned to Che, leading him back into the corridor and down three doors. He was now in his own office. Twice the size of the room they had just left, the wall space mostly devoted to photographs of Fidel, of Che, and of other graduates of the Sierra Maestra campaign. Gonzalo beckoned to Che to occupy Gonzalo’s own large stuffed chair behind the desk. Che declined, taking a second chair at the side.

  “I have on my mind the prisoners Catal
ina Urrutia and Blackford Oakes.”

  “Yes. I have the reprieve.” He reached into his drawer and pulled it out.

  “Let me see it.” Che was lighting a cigar.

  Gonzalo Citrón reached across the desk and handed it to Che. Che took it with his left hand, moved his cigarette lighter under it, and watched while it slowly caught fire and reduced to ashes over the wooden floor. With his foot he damped the ashes, and shoved them more or less out of the way, under the colonel’s desk.

  Citrón had said nothing. But now he spoke. “It had Fidel’s signature, you know.”

  “Yes. I have just been with Fidel. He changed his mind.”

  There was an awkward pause. Gonzalo Citrón was a graduate of the Managua Military Academy. They had been taught there to regard written orders with some solemnity.

  “She is to be shot?”

  “She is to be shot.”

  “When?”

  “It is this that I wish to speak to you about. In confidence.”

  “I would treat anything you tell me, my old friend, as a confessor would treat it.”

  “One day, not very far away, I will explain it all. But Escalante is indirectly involved. What is needed now is an ‘abortive’ procedural drill. The objective is to effect the execution without the prisoner’s foreknowledge that Fidel recalled the reprieve. Advise me. One way would be for an order to be made out to inform her tomorrow morning that she will be executed the next day. Then there could be the confusion. At the time tomorrow when she is scheduled to be told she is to be executed on Wednesday, she should be led to the wall, as though she were being led to an administrative office—and then shot.”

  Colonel Citrón volunteered instantly that of course it would be as Che desired—Citrón’s only concern was simply to achieve that objective without appearing to have been unnecessarily careless about established practices.

  “You know of course, Che, that condemned prisoners follow a certain ritual, and that the captain who leads them to the execution wall knows what these rituals are. How are we to advise him to ignore these rituals?”

  “What about this …” Che was thinking out loud. “Suppose you tell him that you have had a telephone call—do not say who called you. A rumor has been picked up that the Resistencia might attempt an interference, and therefore a different execution site is to be chosen, and no official is to be made aware that an execution is imminent. The squad can be waiting casually for her arrival. She will arrive knowing nothing.”

  “Will that be the official story of why she was executed one day early?”

  Che thought for a moment. It would not work if Castro knew that Che had been involved in any way in the planning. He would need to repose his fullest trust in Citrón.

  “Yes. We will do it that way. You will have picked up the rumor about a possible demonstration or effort to interfere with the execution, and you will have decided to counter that plan, if indeed it is real, by proceeding to carry out the sentence along the lines we have discussed. Since Urrutia, along with the American, Oakes, has been made by Fidel my special responsibility, you will telephone my Ministry to secure my consent to the altered plans. But you will not succeed in reaching me. You will then proceed on your own authority. On Tuesday afternoon I will be advised what happened. And I will then make arrangements through Valdés’s office to secure an extra guard to surround the prison on Thursday morning, when the American gets executed, to guard against the Resistencia’s interfering.”

  “Understood. My telephone call to you will go out a few minutes before ten.”

  “A few minutes before ten I shall be unreachable.”

  “Anything new on Escalante, Che?”

  “Yes. But not now, Gonzalo. Not now. You must go now and listen to Fidel’s speech. Tell me, is Caimán—the American—still in the hospital?”

  “No. He is in his own cell.”

  “Give me a guard. Make that two guards. I wish to see him.”

  “Of course.”

  The area immediately about his upper lip showed traces of blue, and the lip was swollen. But Blackford Oakes, sitting at his primitive desk and writing a fresh letter to Sally, was feeling very much at peace. He yearned to know what it was that President Kennedy had said. The guards, while telling him they were themselves going to listen, did not then come back to say what it was they had heard. Never mind. The missile crisis was now open, official. “It is confrontational,” he was writing to Sally, “a word I doubt that Jane Austen ever used. How on earth did she get by without it?” He was interrupted. The clanging of his cell door about to open. He had not expected to see Che Guevara.

  The lieutenant said, “Do you wish us to stay, Comandante? If not, shall we handcuff him?”

  Che, standing, pondered the tall, strong American, his right arm in a sling. Che’s hand moved, not quite unobtrusively, to his pistol holster.

  “Never mind. Wait outside. I will knock on the door for you.”

  The lieutenant and guard left the cell, locking the door.

  Che moved to the small upright chair by the bed and sat on it.

  “I have come to tell you what is in prospect for you.”

  “I can guess that. What I can’t guess is what Kennedy said tonight. Would you tell me?”

  “He said the United States Navy would quarantine the island until the missiles were removed. No arms will be permitted to enter.”

  A different response from what Blackford had imagined. He felt a surge of disappointment.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.

  “You will be shot on Thursday morning.”

  “Why Thursday? Want to wait until my shoulder is better?”

  “That is the decision. Remember, Caimán: Your side and my side are at war.”

  “I will remember. And Catalina?”

  “You read the decree. Her new sentence is to be pronounced on or about November 1.”

  “So, Che, what is there to talk about?”

  “You may as well know that as far as it was possible to do, I opposed the substitution in Cuba of tyranny by the Soviet Union for tyranny by the United States.”

  “Maybe I believe you, maybe I don’t. But I hope you’ll be around for long enough to distinguish between tyranny under the Soviet Union and their little Stalin Castro, and what tyranny was like under the Chase Manhattan Bank.”

  “I simply wished you to know this. Have you read Eudocio Ravines?”

  “The Road from Yenan?”

  “Yes. In Spanish we call it La Gran Estafa.”

  “What does estafa mean?”

  Che hesitated. “It means deceit, treachery. In English I think it is ‘double cross.’ Ravines says ours is The Big Double Cross. That is not correct. He is an ex-communist, disillusioned. He does not know that in China Mao Tse-tung is accomplishing miracles for the people.”

  “He is certainly succeeding in reducing the population problem. When I last heard, Mao was trying to find all hundred of the flowers he sent out to bloom, and was wringing them by the neck until they were quite dead.”

  “My point is that Ravines may be talking about Stalin’s double cross. But the men I have fought with are, most of them, men of the people, true liberators. And in Montevideo I had hoped to contrive an understanding that would permit the best of Fidel Castro, and eliminate the worst of the Soviet Union.”

  “Well, for the record, Che, you failed.”

  “I can accept failure. Not dishonor.”

  “Oh? Well, what about the dishonor you’re surrounded by? Every one of Castro’s promises is shit. Elections, prosperity, fraternity, justice. Does that not affect your honor?”

  “I am not in charge of the Cuban revolution. I had a role in effecting the liberation of Cuba and I am proud of the role I played. I hope to play it elsewhere.” Che rose. “I wanted only for you to know that during those quite crucial months, this spring and early this summer, I still held out hope. That is all.”

  He went to the door and
knocked three times on it, and the clanking was heard and the door opened.

  He turned to Blackford. “Hasta luego, Caimán.”

  “No, Che. Adios.”

  “Very well. Adiós, Caimán.”

  “Para servirle,” Blackford said, turning back to his letter to Sally before even the door had closed.

  The following morning, just before ten, the telephone rang in the office of the Minister of Industry. An urgent call from Colonel Citrón of El Príncipe.

  “The Comandante is not in.”

  “Can he be reached?”

  “He has not called in. He may be with the Prime Minister.”

  “Is there any way I can reach him there?”

  “Oh, Colonel, I would not call him there. I would never do that. If you will leave me your number, I shall get to him as soon as I can.”

  The colonel left his number, and a substantial record of his frustration.

  Five minutes later, Catalina was told by a captain she had not seen before that she was wanted for interrogation at the adjutant’s office.

  Catalina took fifteen seconds to order her hair, and to dig her nails into her cheeks to bring out some color. She smiled at the captain. Why not? She’d also have smiled at him a fortnight ago when she was formally allied with the captain and the whole establishment that supported his authority, against which events had catapulted her.

  She followed him out and was not surprised that the handcuffs were put on, though she was slightly surprised that in addition, two guards followed her, the captain leading the way. No doubt since Cecilio Velasco’s ambush all her movements, and those of Caimán, were under heavy security.

  They walked through the main courtyard over toward the armory building, near the stone quarry, apparently abandoned. Her thoughts were on what it was she would be interrogated about. Anything Caimán had ever told her, she supposed. They rounded a corner and walked out a few yards from the barracks toward an old stone wall, an ancient part of the prison’s fortification, about eight feet high. To her right, apparently loitering there, were six soldiers. Suddenly the captain stopped. A large pad eye protruded at waist level from a spot in the wall. He signaled to the guard who removed one of Catalina’s handcuffs and refastented it behind her back, through the pad eye to the handcuffs on the other hand. Catalina did not understand, and said to the captain that whatever they had done to her manacles, it was hurting her left wrist.