Island that Dared

by Dervla Murphy

  ‘That’s why Bush should lift the embargo this minute,’ said Flora. ‘Anyway most Americans never wanted it. It’s been helping Castro for forty-four years, a lid hiding all his mistakes. Lift it and let’s see what’s underneath!’

  The Mazaparras disdained Miami’s CIA-aligned hard-liners; an unfortunate phenomenon, long since irrelevant. They themselves were quietly confident that a ‘democratic’ Cuba was nigh. ‘That guy’s had Parkinsons for years!’ (This was three and a half months before Fidel’s operation.) Not that they would want to leave Miami; their prosperity was deeply rooted in Florida’s soil. But it would be fun to have a holiday home on the island and to extend their numerous interests southwards. Vicente readily acknowledged that the Revolution had bred an uncommonly well-educated population, a great resource for incoming investors. In a liberated Cuba the educational system would of course need drastic modification to purge future generations of the Communist infection and give them an appreciation of ‘market mechanisms’. Flora quoted one Frank Nero, leader of the Beacon Council, a public-private consortium of four hundred Miami-Dade County businesses. According to Mr Nero, Cuba’s shortage of pretty well everything meant that ‘US construction firms are going to be very much in demand post-embargo’.

  Complacently, Vicente foretold that soon Cuba would be where it was in the 1950s – richer than any Latin American country, richer even than Italy! Mildly I recalled that most Cubans were then ill-educated, malnourished and unmedicated. My companions seemed not to hear. I noted their assumption that Cuba’s diaspora was entitled to take over the running of the island post-Fidel and would be welcomed home by a population most of whom were born since the Revolution. If you can only see a population longing to escape from a tyrant it’s logical to assume that those who have always opposed the tyrant will be greeted with shouts of grateful joy.

  The wide glass-roofed corridor to the loo had polychrome tiled wainscoting enlivened by dramatic bull-fighting moments and scenes from Don Quixote. In the dining-room – its square columns also tiled – a marble-topped console table supported a four-foot Virgin of Regla surrounded by porcelain and cut-glass. On one wall hung a large rococo-framed Sacred Heart, facing three life-size nudes by a celebrated Havana artist who has exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art but whose name escapes me (as all names do nowadays, unless written down on the spot). We sat close together at one end of a long mahogany table, its fourteen chairs mock-Chippendale, and enjoyed a meaty minestrone, red snapper, deep-fried pork steak stuffed with ham and cheese, fruit salad and/or ice-cream. Our table talk was of books and the environment. Vicente mentioned the possibility of completing the Cienfuegos nuclear power plant by way of celebrating Cuba’s ‘liberation’ and my reaction caused Flora – a veteran anti-nuclear power campaigner – to become overexcited. Suddenly she had identified me as the author of Race to the Finish? (published in the US as Nuclear Stakes) and we happily ganged up against Vicente, an ardent advocate for the revival of the US’s nuclear power industry.

  Back in the patio, now softly lit by ingenious copper lantern-chandeliers, my curiosity was piqued by the Mazaparras’ being so well-informed about recent ‘human rights abuses’ in Cuba, of which I had heard rumours en route. According to Vicente there had been a new surge of Actos de Repudio, ‘acts of repudiation’ involving mobs who harass the homes and persons of alleged counter-revolutionaries. He gave me a list of names and dates produced by his computer and coinciding with those rumours whispered to me in various places.

  In January Juan Carlos Gonzales Leiva, President of the Cuba Human Rights Foundation, had for several days been put under house arrest by a mob who prevented his family from entering their home, played music to torture level on the pavement and cut off his electricity, water and telephone.

  On 21 January a similar mob invaded the home of Juan Francisco Sigler Amaya, a member of the Alternative Option Independent Movement. Two of his brothers had been in jail since the March 2003 mass arrest of dissidents.

  On 3 February Dr Pedro Arturo Hernandez Cabrero, President of the Commission for Attention to Health had had his home searched and numerous books, letters, photographs and a radio confiscated.

  On 16 February Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello (released from jail in July 2004), was confined to her home for several hours while members of a Rapid Response Brigade shouted insults, played loud music and prevented anyone from entering or leaving the house.

  On 31 January Guillermo Farinas, who described himself as ‘an independent journalist’ began a hunger-strike to obtain access to the internet for all Cubans. About him, Vicente commented, ‘Remember what people said after Communism died in the Soviet Union? They said the fax machine killed it! And Castro knows the internet could do the same for Cuba!’

  I agreed that all those cases were deplorable – and, I believed, had been accurately reported. But when the State Department openly admits that it funds dissidents, is it surprising that some fidelistas get very angry and behave very badly? As my Pinar friends had pointed out, Cubans who should be sitting down together, arguing constructively about Cuba’s future, are pushed by US interference into destructive and embittering confrontations.

  Vicente’s riposte was a quote from John Bolton who had stated, when Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, ‘We believe that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort. Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.’

  Flora then asked, ‘Do you know that Cuba is listed in Washington as a “state sponsor of terrorism”? That’s why we must intervene to help the dissidents. It wouldn’t be right to leave them to fight alone!’

  In my ‘thank you’ letter to the Mazaparras, written from Ireland, I quoted Wayne S. Smith, Chief of the US Special Interests Section from 1979-82 and a vigorous anti-blockade activist:

  When the US says its objective is to bring down the Cuban government, and then says that one of its means of accomplishing that is by providing funds to Cuban dissidents, it in effect places them in the position of being the paid agents of a foreign power seeking to overthrow their own. Inevitably, that severely limits their effectiveness.

  Although the Mazaparras were so credulous about so many of Washington’s absurdities (‘rogue state’, ‘sponsor of terrorism’, etc.) they did rage against Bush II’s 2004 curtailing of émigré-island exchanges – reducing gift parcels, cash remittances and family visits. Indignantly Flora protested, ‘That’s punishing ordinary people, not the Party members who’ve never suffered a shortage of anything!’

  Weeks later I was informed by Washington’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs that the remittances restriction applied only to private individuals. ‘NGOs wishing to provide financial support to civil society or religious organisations or members of such groups can apply for a specific license from OFAC to do so.’ Such NGOs are mentioned in Caleb McCarry’s 2006 report as valuable conduits for funding dissidents.

  I was taking my leave, at midnight, when Flora decided that I must meet Paula and her parents. Despite the late hour she rang them and immediately I was invited to lunch next day. I sensed that as a protégé of the Mazaparras I would be welcomed into many local homes.

  ‘This family will give you another angle on the Revolution,’ said Vicente, doubtless hoping for a conversion. ‘They’re Mariel people, escaped in 1980.’

  As was comically obvious, the black chauffeur found my working-class destination very puzzling. He himself was an interesting character, a fourth-generation family retainer, a preacher in his parish church and a vituperative counter-revolutionary.

  In retrospect, the Mariel exodus is easily explained. A decade of increasing prosperity ended abruptly when plant diseases and bad weather wrecked the 1979 cane and tobacco crops. Belts had to be tightened while suspicions grew that too many Cuban pesos were being spent on Central American interventions. Also, the island had recently been exposed to a different way of life. In November
1978 Fidel decided, for multiple reasons, to allow Cuban-American families to visit their relatives (a freedom later limited by Washington) and restrictions on Cubans travelling abroad were eased, though never abolished. More than one hundred thousand Cuban-Americans flew into José Martí airport in 1979, injecting millions of dollars into the Cuban economy. They bore gifts of consumer durables, and circulated US magazines aglow with seductive advertisements, and showed photographs of their sleek new cars, parked outside brightly-painted homes surrounded by shiny swings and slides. Not all those photographs were genuine but that didn’t lessen their unsettling effect.

  Mariel’s dramatic genesis made a big international story – drew journalists who for years had been ignoring Cuba – and the story besmirched Castroism. When ten thousand besieged the Peruvian embassy in Miramar, claiming political asylum, a Cuban soldier on security duty was killed and the crowd’s unprecedented defiance of the Revolution brought out the worst in an angry Fidel. Echoing him, Granma denigrated the would-be migrants in disgraceful language – ‘criminals, lumpen, anti-social elements, loafers and parasites – never subject to political persecution, in no need of the sacred right of diplomatic asylum – scum lured by consumerism to betray their fatherland.’

  After much unpleasant confusion, an agreement was reached. Cubans who wished to leave could do so if someone sailed from Florida to fetch them. Relatives or friends then organised the six-month boat-lift, hundreds of small vessels arriving in Mariel harbour, not far from Havana, where the government opened special offices to ensure an orderly, documented departure. It also staged, for the benefit of foreign journalists, a singularly nasty series of jeering anti-migrant demos, calculated to prove that most Cubans despised those disloyal to the Revolution.

  Between April and October 1980 some 125,000 disillusioned or discontented Cubans sailed away. This stirred false hopes in Washington; the administration seemed to hear the rumble of crumbling foundations. Superficially it did look bad, so many wanting out when Fidel and President Carter agreed to make the exodus feasible. (A move, on Carter’s part, that contributed to his defeat by Reagan at the end of the year. Fidel had released several thousand would-be-émigrés from prisons and detention centres; six years later nearly two thousand were housed in Atlanta’s state jail.) Yet, 125,000 migrants, out of a population of nine million or so, was no more remarkable than the average annual migration from Latin American countries to the Land of (for some) Plenty.

  The Gomez family (Eugenio and Marisol and their daughter Paula) lived a few miles from the Mazaparras on a much less opulent though pleasant enough boulevard bisected by a line of tall pines. When they migrated their two sons were newly graduated as construction engineers and Paula, aged eighteen, had just left school, keen to become a journalist. Because the engineers had quickly found well-paid jobs their parents lived in a two-storey clapboard house with a compact flower-bright garden and a small swimming-pool. We lunched on the verandah, attended by two bossy Siamese cats and a neurotic miniature poodle. Paula’s husband had been drowned in 2002 (‘too much rum, then snorkelling’) and, being childless, she moved back to the parental home. But soon she’d be leaving again, with an unprepossessing local politician (pudgy, balding, self-important) who joined us after lunch.

  Eugenio had recently retired from his factory foreman job; Marisol was still working part-time as secretary to a CANF lobbyist. Eugenio spoke of 1958 when the Gomez and their two little boys were contentedly living in Marianoa, lamenting Batista’s corrupt tyranny but not often discommoded by it. At first the Revolution had felt acceptable but after the Missile Crisis of 1962 they began to resent its ‘bullying’. Living as they did in a close-knit community on the fringes of affluent Miramar, and conditioned to aspire to a US lifestyle, they were uninterested in the working-class and thus insulated against Revolutionary fervour. By 1963 Fidel’s radical reforms had obliterated their small family business, inherited from Eugenio’s father, and ‘redistributed’ half their six-roomed house. Castroism attacked their material and emotional security, reduced them from being an independent family, earning an honest living through hard work, to being, in Paula’s words, ‘the frightened slaves of Marxism’. Such families, then a significant minority of the urban population, detested the ruthless regimentation inseparable from the Revolution’s extraordinary achievements. ‘We had everything to lose,’ said Marisol, ‘and nothing to gain.’

  I ventured to ask, ‘Didn’t your sons gain? Could they have gone to university under the old regime?’

  Marisol shrugged, hesitated – left it to Paula. ‘Maybe not,’ said she, ‘but with their energy our business could have grown to give them good jobs. The Communists killed individuals’ initiative, took away every Cuban’s independence, tried to turn us all into zombies like the Russians.’

  On the bus to José Martí Park, to meet Merci and Eber, I wondered if Paula knew that the CIA was a main employer of the 1959–60 émigré influx. It might have been tactless to raise that subject in the presence of a local politician who boasted of powerful business connections in Brazil and Columbia. (Boasts which didn’t quite ring true.)

  In Miami Joan Didion recorded:

  … the CIA’s JM/WAVE station on the University of Miami campus was by 1962 the largest CIA installation, outside Langley, in the world, and one of the largest employers in the state of Florida. There were said to have been at JM/WAVE headquarters between three hundred and four hundred case officers from the CIA’s clandestine services branch. Each case officer was said to have run between four and ten Cuban ‘principal agents’, who were referred to in code as ‘amots’. Each principal agent was said to have run in turn between ten and thirty ‘regular agents’, again mainly exiles. The arithmetic here is impressive. Even the minimum figures, three hundred case officers each running four principal agents who in turn ran ten regular agents, yield twelve thousand regular agents, each of whom might be presumed to have contacts of his own. There were, all operating under the JM/WAVE umbrella, flotillas of small boats. There were mother ships, disguised as merchant vessels … There were hundreds of pieces of Miami real estate, residential bungalows maintained as safe houses, waterfront properties maintained as safe harbours. There were, besides the phantom ‘Zenith Technological Services’ that was JM/WAVE headquarters itself, fifty-four other front businesses, providing employment and cover for various services required by JM/WAVE operations. There were CIA boat shops. There were CIA gun shops. There were CIA travel agencies, there were CIA real estate agencies and there were CIA detective agencies.

  The inspiration for all this activity was a gentleman by the name of Fidel Castro Ruz. Overkill? But then it turned out to be underkill …

  At a Cuban restaurant near José Martí Park Merci and Eber joined me for a farewell meal, a ‘thank you’ for their hospitality. Soon they were reminiscing about their struggle to survive during the Special Period. Almost everyone lost weight, even some high government officials – but not all senior army officers … Eber insisted that the most gruesome of the teeming urban myths spawned by those years was not a myth. From personal experience he could confirm that just occasionally livers were removed from fresh corpses in hospital mortuaries and sold as ‘pig’s’ livers. ‘But only from accident corpses, not anyone diseased.’ Merci furiously reproved her husband for shocking their foreign guest – and during the meat course! To soothe her I explained that I wasn’t as shocked as she might think I should be. Very rarely, in remote places, I have been really hungry, to the point of exhaustion. And a really hungry purchaser of a providentially supplied pig’s liver wouldn’t quibble about that trade description. I forbore to enquire about the precise nature of Eber’s ‘personal experience’.

  After a certain number of neat rums and most of a bottle of Californian wine (Merci merely sipped) Eber revealed that what is generally known as the ‘the Ochoa case’ (though thirteen others were directly involved) had made his family’s migration easier.

  ‘We didn’t have
to feel too much guilty about betraying the Revolution,’ said Eber. ‘We felt like it was dying,’ added Merci.

  No one in Cuba would speak to me about Fidel’s insistence on executing one of his closest compañeros, and three other Pillars of State, after they had confessed to multiple misdeeds, which had brought shame on the Revolution but had not caused any deaths. In a few one-to-one situations, when I had dared to mention ‘Ochoa’ the reaction hurried me on to another topic.

  Division General Arnaldo Ochoa, commander-designate of the Western Army, Hero of the Republic of Cuba, had joined the Sierra Maestra guerrillas as an eighteen-year-old, stood at Fidel’s side (literally) at the Bay of Pigs, gone on to distinguish himself in most of Cuba’s internationalist military campaigns and led the victorious troops in the crucial battle for Cuito Cuanavale in Angola. Among his closest friends were the twin brothers, General Patricio de la Guardia, head of the Special Forces in Angola, and Colonel Tony de la Guardia, head of the Convertible Currency (MC) Department in the Interior Ministry. The MC was a blockade-busting unit which ran trading companies (their Cuban origin concealed) in Panama’s free-trade zone and brought much hard currency to Havana’s treasury through innovative commercial enterprises. Colonel Tony also laundered smuggled ivory and diamonds in MC’s Havana office before exporting them to Panama, to be swapped for weapons to arm the Cuban troops in Angola. General Ochoa regularly imported sugar to Luanda, sold it on the black market, then illegally bought those diamonds and ivory to equip (and sometimes to feed) his men. Between them, Graham Greene and John Le Carré couldn’t make it up.

  Eventually innovation was stretched too far – the MC allowed Columbian drug-dealers to use a military airstrip near Varadero for the transshipment of cocaine to Florida. Colonel Tony demanded a fee of $1,000 per kilo, not all of which went to the government’s coffers. From this evolved the scandal described by Richard Gott as ‘the Revolution’s most serious internal crisis in thirty years’. All the accused pleaded guilty. Yet many people, at home and abroad, scorned Fidel’s argument that only the deaths of Ochoa, Tony de la Guardia and two others could prevent that stain of corruption from spreading all over the island.