Havana Nocturne

by T. J. English

  In 1947 Fidel took part in the first of two major acts of political insurrection that would serve as precursors to his later attack on the army barracks at Moncada.

  In the nearby Dominican Republic, the ugly dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo was engaged in one of its periodic purges of political dissent on the island, with the imprisonment and mass slaughter of large swathes of the population. Political groups throughout the world were in opposition—with the exception of the U.S. government, which tacitly supported the dictatorship. In Cuba, a group of Dominican exiles rallied support for a plan to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship by force. A movement that crossed ideological lines and included a faction within the Cuban government backed the idea; they began to train for the invasion on a small islet off the coast of Camagüey Province known as Cayo Confites. Fidel Castro, age twenty, was among the force of twelve hundred men who, in blistering heat and under permanent mosquito assault, underwent armed guerrilla training on the islet for nearly two months.

  At the eleventh hour, the mission was aborted. Some of the men at Cayo Confites decided to attack anyway and sailed for the Dominican Republic. Castro was among this group. Ironically, also on the small coastal freighter heading due east was Rolando Masferrer, Castro’s primary rival among the political gangster squads at the university. This unlikely coalition was momentarily created by their desire to see Trujillo removed.

  Not far from the coast of the Dominican Republic, the boat was intercepted by the Cuban Navy and everyone on board was arrested. As the failed expedition was being escorted back toward Cuba, Castro realized that he was now surrounded by his political enemies, that is, Masferrer and his cohorts, who, with the Dominican expedition now terminated, no longer had a compelling reason to view him as a comrade in arms.

  Castro decided to jump overboard. Later he would claim: “I did not let myself be arrested, more than anything else, for a question of honor: It shamed me that this expedition ended by being arrested.” A member of the expedition who served as an intermediary between Castro and Masferrer thought it had more to do with self-preservation: Castro jumped overboard because he was concerned that Masferrer and his men would try to kill him. The intermediary felt Fidel made the right move: “I could guarantee his life while he was in the camps but not after the invasion was aborted.” Castro wound up swimming nine miles through shark-infested waters to reach the Cuban coast.

  Political action was its own kind of narcotic: Fidel detested politicians and so-called activists who were all talk and no action. His next foray into the arena of armed insurrection occurred just seven months later, in April 1948. In Bogotá, Colombia, thousands gathered for what was to be a convention of Latin American activists. The purpose of the three-day conference was to put together and deliver a unified statement against U.S. imperialism. Castro and one other member of the law school had been chosen as delegates from the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU), or University Student Federation.

  On the second day of his trip to Bogotá, Fidel set off to meet with a prominent politician who was popular with the progressive wing of the Colombian Liberal Party. Before he arrived for the scheduled meeting, Castro was informed that the politician had just been gunned down in the street. What followed was three days of explosive violence, a riot that would go down in history as the Bogotazo, the beginning of a sustained period of political violence in Colombia that continues to this day.

  In later years, Castro’s enemies would claim that he played a much larger role in the Bogotazo than he actually did. The fact that he was a witness to history in Colombia was mostly pure chance. He did, however, contribute to the upheaval. Police in Bogotá reported that the young Cuban law student was seen firing a tear-gas shotgun that had been stolen from a precinct. The situation was chaotic, so the cops were never able to ascertain what or whom Castro was firing at. Nonetheless, the police attempted to hunt down a group of students that included Fidel. After hiding out in Bogotá for a few days, Castro sought refuge at the Cuban embassy. He was flown home to Havana aboard a Cuban aircraft along with a shipment of bulls.

  As Castro would note in later years, the violence he witnessed during the Bogotazo was horrendous. He vowed that no such explosion of anarchy would take place in Cuba, no matter how justified the action might be.

  Mostly, the events in Bogotá—along with Castro’s earlier involvement in the aborted invasion of the Dominican Republic—elevated his status among those in Cuba who felt that direct action was the noblest form of political expression.

  Despite his adventurous nature, Castro settled down. He married, had a son, and graduated from law school in 1950. In Havana, he began his own legal practice, representing mostly the poor and indigent, often free of charge. Money was a constant problem, though in a pinch he could always borrow from his father. By the time Castro announced that he was going to run for political office, he seemed to have resigned himself to a middle-class existence: family, profession, politics—leftist politics, yes, but mainstream nonetheless. At this point, Fidel wasn’t even a communist; he represented a party—Ortodoxo—that worked within the boundaries of the Cuban system.

  Batista’s golpe changed all that. Some would say that Fidel’s strong reaction against Batista’s actions was solely the product of his thwarted ambition. This is a myopic point of view. If nothing else, Castro’s life up until this point had shown that he was a man willing to stand up for what he believed in. He had shown not only a willingness but also a strong desire to take action when the cause was right. In Fidel’s view, violence was justified—even necessary—in the face of violent repression. Even as a kid, he had believed that the worst sin a person could commit was to submit to a perceived injustice. Of course, it was also true that he was sometimes rash and impulsive in his reactions, which may have been the case with the attack on the Moncada army barracks.

  Although considerable thought and planning went into the attack, it is hard to believe that those involved could have placed much stock in their chances of success. One hundred and sixty men and women versus nearly two thousand well-armed soldiers does not make for good odds, even with a highly motivated squad of insurgents. After the fact, many of those involved in the Moncada attack—including Fidel—admitted that it was as much an act of frustration as of rebellion. Since taking over the government and suspending the constitution, Batista had successfully muzzled the opposition. The hope was that the Moncada attack would serve as a spark that would wake up the Cuban people and touch off an island-wide rebellion. In the weeks and months following the July 26 attack, whether or not it had achieved this goal still remained to be seen.

  WITH THE 1953–54 tourist season fast approaching, President Batista wanted to deal with the Moncada prosecutions as quickly as possible. The last thing the Havana Mob needed was intimations of discord and revolution in the air as the planes and cruise ships arrived for another successful season of sun, gambling, and showgirls. Consequently, the trial of Fidel Castro and his compañeros was put on the fast track.

  On September 21—just fifty-one days after the Moncada attack—122 defendants represented by 22 lawyers were dragged, bound and shackled, into the Santiago Palace of Justice. The tone of the proceedings was set not by the government but by Castro, who raised his manacled hands and addressed the chief judge: “I want to call your attention to this incredible fact…What guarantees can there be in this trial? Not even the worst criminals are held this way in a hall that calls itself a hall of justice…You cannot judge people who are handcuffed.”

  Fidel had fired the opening shot and the panel of judges backed him up. They declared a recess until the handcuffs were removed from all prisoners.

  Castro and his followers were charged under Article 148 of the Social Defense Code, which provided for a prison sentence of between five and twenty years for “the leader of an attempt at organizing an uprising of armed persons against Constitutional Powers of the State.” From the beginning, the rebels knew that they would be found gui
lty. Their legal strategy was not to contest the charge that they had taken part in the attack but to call into question the very legitimacy of the Batista regime. Castro posed the question: how could they be accused of violating the constitution if the government that was charging them was not a legitimate, constitutional government?

  The other key component of the defendants’ strategy was to expose the level of brutality on the part of the army following the attack. Within days of the trial getting started, it was revealed that seventy rebels were killed as a result of the July 26 attacks, but only sixteen of those had been killed in actual battle. Eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence showed that skulls had been crushed and bullets fired into the brains of prisoners at close range. During torture sessions, some rebels were castrated with straight razors and at least one had his eye gouged out with a knife. The government’s attempts to cover up the wholesale murdering of suspects following the insurrection suggested that the country was drifting back to the bad old days of the Machado regime in the early 1930s, when torture, government-sponsored revenge killings, and the unexplained “disappearance” of political enemies was the law of the land.

  Like a tropical depression, paranoia and the stench of death hung over the Santiago Palace of Justice. Although government-enforced censorship guaranteed that the trial would not receive coverage in the press, no government directive could stop la bola en la calle (the word in the street). Since the rebels were young people in their early twenties, it seemed as if the dictatorship was trying to wipe out the youth of Cuba. Castro, in particular, emerged as a leader with a strong sense of historical precedent. When asked who was the “intellectual author” of the attacks on Moncada, the young Galician answered firmly: “The only intellectual author of this revolution is José Martí, the apostle of our independence.”

  The Batista government knew a public relations disaster when it saw one. Just four days into the trial, it took the extraordinary step of moving Castro to a secret location and claiming that he could not continue to take part in the proceedings because he was suffering from a “nervous crisis.” His supporters were certain that he would be assassinated. The military police, in fact, had tried to poison his food. In court, a rebel supporter produced a letter from Fidel, which he had succeeded in getting to his comrades even though he was locked away in solitary confinement. In the letter, Castro declared that he was not ill; he was being held against his will. Nonetheless, his case was severed from the others.

  On October 16, after the other fidelistas had all been successfully prosecuted, Fidel was brought to a strange location, a tiny room inside a nursing school at a civilian hospital. Here, in near total secrecy, the leader of the Moncada attack was put on trial before a panel of three judges. The entire trial lasted four hours. Despite its brevity, the proceedings would go down as one of the most significant political events in Cuban history.

  For seventy-six straight days, Castro had been held in solitary confinement, but he had used his time well, reading books on world history and political discourse. By the time he appeared at trial, he had absorbed a staggering amount of political philosophy, which he applied to his already established penchant for action. The result was a new level of political understanding and radicalism for Castro. Representing himself at trial, his entire defense consisted of a two-hour opening statement that, drawing on much of the reading he had done over the previous two months in prison, was a lacerating analysis of political and social inequities in Cuba. The speech instantly became known as “History Will Absolve Me” and remains to this day the philosophical blueprint for the Cuban Revolution, a kind of scripture of the rebel movement.

  Castro delivered this speech wearing a heavy, dark-blue wool suit brought to him by a friend. He had lost so much weight in prison that the watch he wore kept slipping off his wrist. The speech began quietly, with a detailed condemnation of the illegalities surrounding the trial. Soon, he moved on to Batista, whom he referred to in Latin as monstrum horrendum. “Dante divided his hell into nine circles,” intoned the young firebrand. “He put the criminals in the seventh, the thieves in the eighth, and the traitors in the ninth. What a hard dilemma the Devil will face when he must choose the circle adequate for the soul of Batista.”

  Quoting from a wide range of philosophical antecedents that included Saint Thomas Aquinas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Paine, and, of course, José Martí, Castro put forth an argument for revolution. Citing “the infinite misfortune of the Cuban people who are suffering the cruelest, the most inhuman oppression of their history,” he addressed Cuban society’s most glaring failures: land distribution, housing, education, unemployment, civic corruption, political repression, and the economic plundering of the island by outside forces.

  Castro did not mention by name the Havana Mob, which was as yet an unknown and unquantifiable entity to the Cuban people, but he could well have been talking about Batista and his mobster friends when he said: “[This new regime] has brought with it a change of hands and a redistribution of the loot among a new group of friends, relatives, accomplices, and parasitic hangers-on that constitutes the political retinue of the Dictator. What great shame the people have been forced to endure so that a small group of egoists, altogether indifferent to the needs of the homeland, may find in public life an easy and comfortable modus vivendi.”

  Addressing his own predicament, Castro said: “I know that I shall be silenced for many years. I know they will try to conceal the truth by every possible means. I know there will be a conspiracy to force me into oblivion. But my voice will never be drowned; for it gathers strength within my breast when I feel most alone…I know that prison will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with threats, with vileness, and cowardly cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who snuffed out the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”

  With these words, Castro concluded his summation. The three judges and the prosecutor whispered among themselves for a few minutes. Finally, the chief judge asked the accused to rise, and then said: “In accordance with the request of the prosecutor, the court has imposed on you a sentence of fifteen years in prison…This trial has been concluded.” Fidel put out his hands to be handcuffed and was led away.

  In the weeks that followed, Castro secretly transcribed his famous courtroom oratory word for word onto tiny pieces of paper that were smuggled out of the prison. The speech was reconstructed by his revolutionary followers and printed as a pamphlet entitled “La historia me absolverá” by Fidel Castro.

  By the time busloads of tourists began arriving from the airport for the 1953–54 tourist season, Castro’s booklet had begun to circulate among the Cuban people in Havana. At taxi stands, along the Malecón, or in city parks, everyday Cubans could be seen reading “La historia me absolverá,” though they were careful to keep the book out of sight of the dreaded military police. To be seen reading Castro’s booklet would have resulted in immediate arrest.

  One place where Castro’s manifesto was rarely seen was in the tourist hotels, cabarets, or casinos where revelers gambled, danced, drank, and screwed the night away, oblivious to the political climate around them. The fact that the Cuban people were being surreptitiously radicalized by the writings of a dynamic new political thinker while at the same time hedonism reigned in the domain of the mobsters was a harbinger of things to come. Life in Havana was now on two parallel tracks: that of Castro and the Revolution, and that of the Havana Mob. The huge gulf between these two diametrically opposed forces could not be reconciled; they were one day bound to collide.

  MEYER LANSKY most likely never read “La historia me absolverá.” For one thing, he didn’t read Spanish, and in conversations with friends and associates he rarely exhibited much interest in Cuban sociopolitical affairs—except to the extent that they directly affected his business plans. Gnats like Fidel Castro were Batista’s problem. Lansk
y had a casino to run and an economic empire to cultivate, and he was not about to get sidetracked by the intellectual ramblings of a spoiled rich kid turned revolutionary leader.

  In November 1953, Lansky turned his attention to the Hotel Nacional. Ever since he’d first dreamed of setting up shop in Havana, Meyer had special plans for the Nacional. The Mob conference in December 1946 had established the place as legendary in the hearts and minds of American gangsters, whether they were at the conference or not. Lansky was determined to turn the place into a show palace for the Mob in Havana. His plans involved building an exclusive wing with luxury suites for high-stakes gamblers.

  For years, Lansky had owned a piece of the place, but that ended when the Prío administration briefly nationalized the casinos in 1948. Since then, the Nacional had been owned by the Cuban government. In recent years, the hotel had become a kind of expatriate club for foreign diplomats and the social elite. It wasn’t until Batista came along for his second go as president that the Nacional was placed under new management. International Hotels, Inc., a subsidiary of Pan American, the principal air carrier from the United States to Havana, announced that they would be refurbishing the hotel, complete with a luxurious new complex of rooms, a restaurant, and a cabaret. It seemed as though International Hotels, Inc. and Meyer Lansky were on the same page.

  As overall director at the Nacional, Lansky brought in an old acquaintance. Wilbur Clark was an experienced hotelier in his late fifties. He had built the famous Desert Inn hotel-casino in Las Vegas, with partial financing from Lansky and his Cleveland partners Dalitz, Kleinman, and Tucker. Clark was a master at promotion and knew how to get the most out of a dollar. His skills had even been admired by members of the Kefauver Committee. When Clark was subpoenaed to testify in Las Vegas, he was asked about his association with mobsters, particularly those who had floated him the money to finish the long-delayed Desert Inn: