Spy in a Little Black Dress

PART THREE

OUR WOMAN IN HAVANA





XIX



Jackie could not fathom what kind of sick joke this was. Why on earth did Fidel Castro have his close friend and an innocent woman abducted at gunpoint to this godforsaken rebel camp in the mountains? As she looked around at the men and women in fatigues stomping around the rugged terrain in mud-caked army boots or sleeping in hammocks slung between trees, Jackie was certain of only one thing: She was overdressed. She felt like a peacock in a henhouse. The organza evening gown, so elegant at the Mitchells’ gala dinner party, now seemed ridiculous, and the whole, crazy ruse infuriating. But when she saw tuxedo-clad Emiliano, who looked as absurd as she did, wiping his eyes from laughing so hard, Jackie’s anger dissipated, and she had to laugh too.

Fidel Castro beamed a smile at her that made her insides turn to taffy. “Ah, Señorita Bouvier, I trust that you have forgiven me for bringing you here in such an unseemly fashion,” he said in flawless English. Apparently, his fluency in the language had improved greatly since he had dashed off a schoolboy’s letter to the White House. Castro also cut a much more dashing figure tonight than he had when Jackie had first seen him at the Dance Academy. His tight-fitting army T-shirt and paratrooper fatigue pants showed off his tall, strapping physique, and his mass of wavy black hair and finely trimmed mustache set off his ruggedly handsome features. Up here in his heavily forested domain, he looked like a Cuban Robin Hood.

Jackie managed to find her voice. “ ‘Unseemly’ is hardly the word for it, Señor Castro. Terrifying is more like it.” She wanted answers, but seeing the rifle in his hand and knowing his reputation for hotheadedness, she was careful not to provoke him by sounding accusatory. “I’m sure you must have had a good reason for bringing us here like that.”

“A very good reason, Señorita Bouvier.” Castro turned serious. “I needed to inform the two of you about an urgent matter, but I couldn’t let it appear that you were coming here of your own volition. Mr. Mitchell is a good friend of President Batista’s, and it would be very bad for Emiliano if his benefactor knew that he was associated with me.”

“She already knows we have to keep that a secret,” Emiliano said with a trace of impatience in his voice. “So what is this urgent matter that you need to tell us about, Fidel?”

Suddenly, Castro’s jovial manner returned. “I’ll come to that, amigo. First, I’m sure you and Señorita Bouvier would like to change into something more comfortable. And then I’d like to show you what we’ve been doing here.”

Jackie wondered if the matter that had prompted Castro to kidnap them was not really all that urgent or if he was simply giving them time to recuperate from their harrowing journey before springing some bombshell revelation on them.

“This way, por favor,” he said as he motioned for Jackie to slip off her high heels and led them across the craggy, brush-covered grounds. As she looked out over the vista, even in the moonlight, Jackie could see that this was made-to-order guerrilla territory, virtually impenetrable. An advancing column of vehicles would have a hard time navigating the sharply curving ranges that dropped off into steep valleys at every turn, and a foot soldier’s one false step would send him plummeting to his death. But for Jackie, it was an alluring locale. The mountain air was invigorating, and the sound of numerous insects was a pleasant chorale. Even the stray goat chomping on a midnight snack looked quaintly bucolic.

“Here we are,” Castro said, inviting them into a sizable thatched-roof cottage. Jackie was surprised at how comfortable it looked compared to the other rebels’ tents and hammocks that she had seen in the camp. If she and Emiliano had to stay overnight, she was hoping it would be here. Sleeping out in the open, where voracious mosquitoes or other predators, animal or human, might prey on them, did not appeal to her.

Castro offered Emiliano a cigar, and while the men sat at a table smoking, Jackie went into a room to change into fatigues and boots that Castro had given her. She felt terrible that she could not return Stephanie Mitchell’s exquisite gown to her parents, but that seemed impossible under the circumstances. Slipping into the army clothes that, amazingly, didn’t fit her too badly, Jackie had a disturbing thought. She wondered whether she was destined to spend the rest of her life wearing hand-me-downs while her own designer wardrobe moldered away in a closet in Merrywood.

When she came out of the room, Jackie saw that Castro and Emiliano had been joined by a third man, and the three of them were standing together. The newcomer appeared to be about five years younger than Castro and a head shorter. He was Hispanic but had almond-shaped eyes that made him look Chinese.

“Señorita Bouvier, this is my brother Raúl,” Castro said, surprising Jackie with this introduction because the family resemblance between the two was so slight.

“So nice to meet you, Raúl,” Jackie said. She gave him a friendly smile, but the young man, apparently shy and no match for his older brother in the charisma department, mumbled, “Buenas noches, señorita,” and looked down at this feet. Then he said something to Castro in Spanish and hurried out the door.

Emiliano went off to change his clothes, and now Jackie was left alone with Castro.

“Have a seat,” he said, motioning to one of the barrels that served as dining room chairs around the rough-hewn table. “May I offer you something to drink?”

It amused Jackie that Castro seemed determined to play the gracious host, even in these makeshift surroundings and with some mysterious pressing matter waiting in the wings, but she went along with it.

“Yes, I could use a drink, if you don’t mind,” she said. She couldn’t resist adding, “Being abducted at gunpoint leaves one’s mouth rather dry.”

Castro ignored the jibe and went on fixing drinks. At least he didn’t get mad, Jackie thought, nervously eyeing his rifle, which was now resting against a wall.

“This should help,” he said, offering her a glass filled with an orange liquid. “It’s a fruit juice called prú. We make it ourselves.”

Jackie took a sip and recognized the sweet-tangy taste of mangoes. “I like this,” she said. “It’s very refreshing.” Actually, she would have preferred a healthy shot of the pungent rum that Castro was drinking, but she didn’t want to ask for it and appear rude.

Castro sat down at the table across from her, puffing on his cigar. Normally, Jackie hated the smell of cigar smoke, but like the earthy aroma at the cigar factory, this was not unpleasant.

She waited for him to speak, but he just sat there, puffing quietly on his cigar and staring at her. He seemed to be biding his time, mulling over something to say until Emiliano came back and Castro could divulge his big secret to them. The awkward silence made Jackie turn her head away from him, and her eye fell on a color photograph nailed to the wall. It was a picture of Castro and his bride on their wedding day. Jackie was struck by how American looking his beautiful, blond-haired bride was and how her bridal gown might have come straight out of the pages of Vogue. It certainly didn’t look like something stitched together by a poor Cuban seamstress or snatched off the rack in a local department store.

Deciding to break the ice with small talk, Jackie said, “Your wife is very pretty. What’s her name?”

“Mirta Diaz-Balart. And she is beautiful. One of the most beautiful women at the University of Havana, where I met her. She was a philosophy student.”

“The name Diaz-Balart sounds familiar to me,” Jackie said, furrowing her brow as she tried to remember where she had heard it. “I think someone with that name was at the Mitchells’ party.”

“You’re right, Jacqueline. Mirta’s father, Señor Rafael Diaz-Balart, was at the party,” Emiliano said as he rejoined them, Ricky’s stylish tuxedo having been replaced by baggy camouflage fatigues. “Mrs. Mitchell probably introduced him to you. He’s the main lawyer for the United Fruit Company and an ally of Batista’s.”

That’s strange, Jackie thought. She knew how much Castro hated the United Fruit Company for exploiting his country and its campesinos, yet his own father-in-law was a key player in helping the American company avoid Cuban labor laws and taxes by paying off Batista. She tried to hide her puzzlement, but Castro caught it.

“The Castros and the Diaz-Balarts were like the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet,” he said with a small smile. “They were two powerful families who lived a half hour apart from each other and were completely at odds, but the parents couldn’t stop their children from falling in love with each other and, in our case, getting married. Mirta’s father was politically connected but not wealthy, and my father made a lot of money as a landowner, but he was a guajiro from the countryside.”

Jackie was beginning to get the picture. Castro had married a society girl, but he would never be accepted by that class, nor did he want to be. Like Emiliano, he had grown up as an outsider, and now both men wanted to obliterate those class distinctions once and for all. She wondered how poor Mirta was holding up under all of this.

“How long have you been married?” she asked Castro.

“Four years,” he said, taking a long pull on his cigar and blowing out a stream of smoke.

“And what a honeymoon they had,” Emiliano interjected, looking at Jackie and rolling his eyes. “Fidel’s father paid for them to stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for a couple of weeks and at a luxurious hotel in Miami where the shah of Iran stayed. Not only that—his father gave Fidel money to buy a Lincoln Continental so he could drive his bride from New York to Miami in style.”

Jackie did a quick computation in her head and figured that the cost of the honeymoon and the car had to come to about twenty thousand dollars. Not bad for a guajiro. “That was very generous of your father,” she said to Fidel. Thinking of herself, she added, “A life of privilege can be addictive. I admire you for being able give it all up and fight for what you believe in.”

Castro smiled. “Knowing my middle-class childhood, no one would have predicted that I would turn out to be a revolutionary. My circumstances as the son of a landowner and my education in religious schools attended by the sons of the rich would have made it logical for me to be indifferent to the hardships of others. Living in Cuba, where all films and publications were ‘made in the USA,’ was another reason that I should have been a reactionary.” He gave his pointed remark a chance to sink in like a well-aimed dart, and then smoothly continued, “But I defied all the odds when I entered the university. Out of the thousands of students, I became one of only thirty who were anti-imperialist. At age twenty, I joined the fight to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, which your government tacitly supported, and wound up swimming nine miles through shark-infested waters to get back to Cuba.”

Jackie ignored the anti-imperialist barbs and said, “That was very heroic.” She was reminded of the stories she’d heard about Jack Kennedy swimming off an island in the Pacific to get help after his PT boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer.

Now Castro seemed to have found his niche talking about his favorite subject—himself. “Seven months after that, I joined thousands of Latin American activists in Bogotá, Colombia, for a conference to come up with a unified statement against U.S. imperialism. That ended in an explosive three-day riot. When the police came after the students who were active in it, the Cuban embassy gave me refuge, and I was flown home to Havana aboard a Cuban aircraft with a shipment of bulls.”

Jackie laughed out loud as she remembered hitchhiking a ride with Emiliano in a truck full of goats, but she desperately wanted to change the subject to something other than American imperialism. Looking around the room for something else they could talk about until Castro was ready to tell them why he had summoned them, her eyes traveled back to his wedding photograph. Not far from it was another picture of Castro and his wife in street clothes, posing with a cute toddler in front of them.

“Is that your son?” she asked Fidel.

“Yes, that’s my little Fidelito,” he said, beaming. “He’s three years old now. He and my wife are at our apartment in Marianao.” He sounded almost apologetic. “My wife is very supportive of me and is separated from her family because she doesn’t think Batista should have come back. But Mirta doesn’t want to get involved in politics. She would rather devote herself to being a mother and homemaker and let me do what I was born to do.”

Jackie sensed a red flag in a marriage where a husband’s immersion in politics has separated his wife from her family and even from the husband himself, but she said nothing. When is he going to tell us why he brought us here?

But Castro seemed stuck in the past and eager for Jackie to understand what made him so passionate about political activism. “Even in my grade school years, I spent most of my time standing up to authority. Whenever I disagreed with something the teacher said to me, I would swear at her and immediately leave school, running as fast as I could. One day, I was racing down the rear corridor, took a leap, and landed on a board from a guava-jelly box with a nail in it. My mouth was open, and the nail stuck in my tongue. When I got home, my mother said to me, ‘God punished you for swearing at the teacher.’ I thought that was true, but it didn’t stop be from becoming a rebel.”

Jackie cringed at the bizarre image of young Castro impaling his tongue on a nail, but his mother’s reaction to it made her laugh.

Her laughter at his story encouraged Castro to go on. “From grade school, I went to a school run by a Catholic order that believed in strict discipline, and I was always getting slapped. I was arguing with a kid one day when we were playing ball, and the priest came up behind me and hit me on the head. I turned on him, threw a piece of bread at his head, and started to hit him with my fists and bite him. I didn’t hurt the priest much, but that event became legendary at the school.”

“I can understand why,” Jackie said dryly, thinking that Castro’s mother must have had her hands full with such an unruly little son. “Were you that rough on your teachers in college?”

“No, things got better when I left Oriente and went to preparatory school in Havana. It was a Jesuit school with wonderful teachers who encouraged me in sports and public speaking. I thank those priests for instilling in me a thirst for knowledge and a sense of social justice that changed my life.”

Emiliano, who had been listening quietly all this time, suddenly chimed in. He looked at Jackie and sounded as if he wanted set the record straight for her. “You’ll hear some people say that Fidel Castro is only out for revenge against Batista for thwarting his political ambitions, but that’s not true. I can tell you that even at an earlier age, my friend here always said that the worst sin a person could commit was to tolerate injustice and that violence was justified, even necessary, to combat violent repression.”

Castro nodded. “Yes, violence is the only thing Batista will listen to now, and we’re getting ready to be heard. Let me show you something,” he said, rising from the table.

Jackie and Emiliano followed him to the room where they had changed their clothes. Castro pulled back a curtain that was serving as a closet door and said, “Look at this.”

Jackie gasped. A stockpile of weapons of every type imaginable, at least to Jackie, rose almost to the ceiling.

Emiliano let out a low whistle. “That’s quite a collection you have here, Fidel. “Rifles… tear-gas shotguns… machine guns… fifteen-shot Browning pistols…,” he enumerated as his eyes roved over the collection. “Where did you get all this?”

“Some we got from retired Rural Guardsmen, some were stolen from police precincts, some were left over from our gangsterismo days, some we bought from gun smugglers, and the rest we got any way we could,” Castro said with a note of pride. “The point is that we are preparing for the day when we can come down from the mountains and launch an attack that will wake up the Cuban people and set off a nationwide revolution. We are deadly serious about this rebellion and prepared to sacrifice our lives for it. Every day, more and more insurgents are joining us, but we can’t afford to lose a single one that we now have, which is why I brought the two of you here. We’re facing a crisis that only you can resolve.”

Jackie drew her breath in sharply. At last, we’re finally getting to the bottom of this ruse.

Eagerly, she walked back to the other room with Castro and Emiliano and sat down at the table.

It took a moment for Castro to prepare himself to deliver the news. Finally, with his eyes focused squarely on Jackie, he said, “I’m afraid that my attempt to rescue Gabriela and the others captured in the raid at the Dance Academy failed. The rescue team fled for their lives and came back with the news that all of the captives are being held for ransom by Colonel Sanchez. One of his spies is a movie aficionado. He found out from the projectionist at the Teatro de Cinema that you stole a reel of film, and he reported to Sanchez that it has a map of Cuba hidden in it. Sanchez figured that it must be a treasure map. He knows you’re hunting for that treasure, and he wants it in exchange for the hostages’ freedom. You have forty-eight hours to hand it over to him. Otherwise, they will all be executed.”

Jackie gasped and clutched her throat. Executed. The very word sent shivers coursing up and down her spine. She couldn’t bear to think of such a cruel and undeserved death being visited upon Gabriela, her own brave angel of mercy, and the other passionate revolutionaries who had flocked to Fidel Castro as their only hope of deliverance from tyranny.

Emiliano, pale and visibly shaken, spoke up. “We think we know where the treasure is,” he told Castro. “At least we have some idea of where it might be. According to a map we found, it’s probably right here in Oriente Province, on the southern coast somewhere between Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo Bay.” He drummed his fingers on the table and shot an urgent look at Jackie. “But we only have forty-eight hours to find it. We’d better get moving.”

Jackie was bone tired and would have liked nothing more than to catch a few hours of sleep, but with the clock relentlessly ticking down the minutes to their deadline, she shook off her fatigue. “I’m ready,” she said.

On the one hand, she wished that Castro had not taken so much time letting them unwind, but on the other hand, she appreciated learning about his personal history and plans for the future. Now Jackie’s mission to find the treasure went far beyond her own emotional reasons, strong as they were; they had a context in the larger, all-encompassing scheme of things for the Cuban nation.

When she returned to the States and reported to Dulles, she would be able to tell him that Fidel Castro was a force to be reckoned with. Contrary to Ambassador Beaulac’s disparagement of him as some hooligan in the hills who wouldn’t amount to anything, Jackie would let Dulles know that Castro was determined to free his people at all costs and was gathering the resources to do it. She would also warn him that unless things changed, American business interests in Cuba could be in jeopardy. The Cuban people were fed up with Batista’s corruption holding sway over them hand in hand with American imperialism (Castro’s word, not hers). Castro was a champion of human rights, but he was also rash and impulsive and something of an egomaniac. The situation was a powder keg ready to explode.

Jackie was getting ready to leave when Castro stopped her. “There’s something I want you to see,” he said as he picked up a copy of Bohemia magazine from the table, opened it to a page, and handed it to her.

It was an article about Castro’s public protest of Batista’s coup, accompanied by a photograph of him addressing a crowd. He pointed out some lines with his finger. “Why would anyone say something like that?” he asked her, his voice rising in indignation.

Jackie quickly scanned the lines, a quote from a U.S. observer of the rally whose assessment of Castro echoed the one made by Ambassador Beulac. The observer, a well-regarded political commentator, described Castro as “a young Cuban of wealthy background who, in a prolonged rebellion against the extravagances of his youth, has gravitated toward gangsterism and politically naive rabble-rousing that will probably not gain much headway.”

When Jackie looked at the photograph of twenty-seven-year-old Castro, she was struck by how much younger he appeared than his years. It occurred to her that it wouldn’t be hard for someone who didn’t know him to think that this was an overgrown kid who was playacting at being the leader of a national revolution.

Castro’s eyes searched Jackie’s face. “You’re an American journalist,” he said. “You know how your people form their opinions. What do I have to do to be taken more seriously in your country?”

“Grow a beard,” she said.