by Peter Hey
Jane wiped her hands on her jeans and picked up her phone again.
Tommy
Hi Jane
Thanks for the update on what happened in Gloucester Docks yesterday. Alan sounds very unbalanced. I’d keep my distance, if I were you, not least because of what I’ve just managed to unearth. It shines a big light on Joe Kelly, the man I’m ever more certain was Alan’s father, and also explains the circumstances under which his mother left Cuba. I should have found it before. Sorry.
Many of the CIA’s records from that time have been released following Freedom of Information requests. We all know the agency was very active in trying to get rid of the Castro government. As well as organising and funding insurrection, there were numerous plots to assassinate Fidel himself. Famously, the schemes ranged from poison, exploding cigars and even trying to get his beard to fall out to undermine his image(!). To do the dirty work, they were willing to employ some very unsavoury people. I was digging around in what’s come out more recently and found the file for Joe Kelly. It doesn’t make happy reading.
As you already established, Joe had been a GI and fought in the Korean War. It was hushed up, but it turns out the reason he was sent home early was because he’d been doing nasty things to captive North Korean soldiers. It was suggested he might have been abusing civilians as well. The army didn’t want it to come out – they were supposed to be the good guys in the war against the depravities of communism – and quietly bundled him out of the service. He ended up as a Mafia enforcer in Havana, which was probably a good fit for a man with a penchant for cruelty.
In one of her letters home, Alan’s mother said that someone in her hotel had to run away after intervening when the police brutally killed her gay friend. It turns out Joe Kelly was responsible for the homophobic attack and was discovered by a police patrol. He later bragged about it to his CIA handler and said the incident was the reason he’d been forced to join the rebels. He denied ever having any political affiliation with the cause. Until he was – in his eyes – betrayed, the happiest period of his life had been in Korea, so he basically went in search of another war, another excuse to hurt and kill.
When Castro won, Kelly enjoyed being a victorious hero for a while, but then he got bored. And he’d developed a big grudge against his old commander, Camilo Cienfuegos, whom Castro initially appointed as head of the military. As you may remember, Cienfuegos died, or at least vanished, in a mysterious plane crash. Kelly claimed to have tampered with the fuel system, but the CIA assessment was that he was something of a fantasist. The file also describes him as outwardly charming but a ‘likely psychopath’ who needs to be managed with extreme caution. They cite mental illness in his family background. His mother had been confined to a mental institution after attacking a priest with a knife. She eventually hanged herself.
Encouraged by the CIA, Kelly joined the counterrevolution guerrillas fighting in the Escambray Mountains. He reverted to type, torturing captives, including men who had once been his comrades. When Castro’s forces got their hands on him, it’s not surprising they shot him then and there.
In a spirit of either loyalty or guilt, the CIA decided they needed to get Alan’s pregnant wife out of Cuba before the authorities arrested her as an accomplice. The file redacts her name, but says she’s English and the plan is to get her on a boat to Jamaica. Only they mess it up. Two of Castro’s men turn up at the same time as the CIA operative, and he ends up killing them. He and the English woman both flee to Jamaica, though the CIA guy goes on to have his throat cut two years later whilst agitating amongst exiled Cubans in Miami.
So now we have confirmation that Joe Kelly had a pregnant English wife who had to leave Cuba in a hurry. And I think we can see why she was reticent about her time there. She might have been a big fan of the Castro regime, but they wouldn’t feel the same way about her. Her husband and the CIA made sure of that. I don’t believe she was under any real threat of retribution back home, but you can understand why she wouldn’t want such a story to come out. It’s all rather ugly.
One final thought – the mental illness that affected Alan’s grandmother and probably his father. Alan’s life history will have had a definite impact on his current state of mind. That said, personality disorders can run in families and psychopathy is thought to have a higher genetic component.
Best be careful, Jane. Don’t take any chances with Alan.
Tommy x
Epilogue
‘What do you think about this horrible virus over in China?’
‘It sounds like another health scare, you know, like mad cow disease and SARS. We get them every couple of years. I’ve read it’s not much worse than flu.’
‘But the Chinese are building a huge new hospital in a matter of days. Would they do that if it was just flu?’
‘I don’t know, Mother. I just don’t think it’ll affect us much.’
‘Hmm. I’m sure you’re right. So, what is in that carrier bag, darling?’
They were sitting at a marble-topped table in her mother’s kitchen, looking out across the garden to Poole Harbour. The trees framing the view were bare of leaves, and the sea was a choppy mud-grey under a sullen sky. The small boats were still there, bobbing at anchor, but their skippers had abandoned them for the winter. Today, the rain had abated but an insistent wind rattled branches and made halyards clank a monotonous rhythm against hollow aluminium masts. The panorama was a sad copy of its blue-skied, glistening-watered summer self, but it held the promise of renewal. It was still to die for.
Jane looked down at the polished chrome legs of her chair and the supermarket bag-for-life resting against them. She thought about lifting it up, but resisted.
‘It’s not the most dignified of… It’s Daddy. I mean, my father.’
‘Darling?’
‘It’s his ashes.’
‘His ashes?’
‘His sister, Stacey—'
‘That awful woman!’
Jane sighed. ‘Stacey said my father wouldn’t want a funeral. He hated them apparently. The cremation was delayed because of the coroner. Stacey kept the ashes for quite a while, then gave them to me. It’s hard when you don’t really know someone. What do you do?’
Her mother offered only a scowl as an opinion, so Jane continued.
‘He asked about you when he was dying—'
‘Pfff!’
Jane ignored the exclamation. ‘I said you lived in Sandbanks and it seemed to make him smile. He’d obviously been down here, I don’t know, years ago. Maybe he had happy memories.’ She hesitated. ‘I can’t hang onto… I need to lay them to rest, sprinkle them – whatever the damn term is – somewhere. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to put them in the sea here.’
Jane’s mother looked out of the window and back again. Her face had mellowed. ‘Do you want me to come down with you?’ she asked.
‘Please, Mother. You knew him better than me.’
‘I’m not going to make a speech. Not for that man.’
‘I don’t think he wanted speeches.’
Jane had climbed out over the large stones that had been deposited along the water’s edge as a defence against the waves. She opened her father’s remains and crouched down with her back to the gusting breeze. She released them into the air and they scattered like a smoky cloud before sinking onto an ebbing tide. Jane carefully made her way back to the sloping grass lawn and stood silently with her mother, both of them wrapped in thick coats against the cold.
Eventually, the older woman spoke. ‘I was with him when he came to Sandbanks, of course. And, in a way, my darling, so were you.’
‘In a way?’
‘We stayed at the hotel by the chain ferry. It was the honeymoon suite, though he never bothered to marry me, as you well know. He was really smitten by this little peninsula, its conspicuous wealth and success. He said when he made it big, this was where he’d buy me a house.’
‘And I was there too?’
‘Nee
dless to say, I bought my own place. Maybe that’s what brought me back. I think it was. To fulfil his ambition, or at least his promise.’ Jane’s mother reached across and took her daughter’s hand. ‘When he and I were here, darling…’ She swallowed as she chose her words. ‘You were conceived here.’
Jane’s eyes drifted over the sea and she didn’t respond.
‘Well then,’ said her mother. ‘A eulogy for your father. He may have loved me once, but that kind of love, romantic love, is always ephemeral. Often fickle. But I truly believe he genuinely adored you, when you were a toddler, that pudgy, sweet, happy little girl. And then he abandoned you. Us. You have to say nice things of the dead. The best thing he could do for either of us was to get out of lives. And he did.’
‘He came back. He saved me,’ said Jane, her focus still lost in the distance.
‘Thank goodness,’ replied her mother, squeezing the hand that rested in hers. ‘And that one final act may define him. That’s your father’s ration of eternity – the man I knew never believed in God, or heaven or hell. How could he? You saved him, my love. I’m not sure he deserved it. He certainly didn’t deserve you.’
Acknowledgements
In 1958, the five-time world champion Juan Miguel Fangio was kidnapped by the 26th of July Movement on the eve of the Havana Grand Prix. That much is true. There are many accounts of the event, some contemporaneous and others having the benefit of hindsight. I found the most compelling to be The Driver and the Dictator, a 2017 BBC World Service documentary podcast from the BBC website.
In a locked-down, digital era, it is inevitable that most of the research for this novel was carried out online. That said, a recent holiday in Cuba was inspirational and two books are worthy of specific mention:
Our Man in Havana, the 1958 novel by Graham Greene. Greene made several trips to Havana in the 1950s, and Castro visited the crew when the 1959 film adaption was shot on location a few months after Batista’s fall.
Fidel Castro (Critical Lives), a 2013 biography by Nick Caistor. Fidel will always divide opinion, but this is a very readable balance between the ‘glowing hagiographies’ and the ‘critical rants’.
