Hourglass  

Waiting for Fidel

by Robert H. Miller

“Fidel does not have cancer. I’m very well informed. . . . Nobody knows when Fidel is going to die.”

— Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela

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My mother, Ana María, died on July 14, 2000, at 78 years of age. For 40 years, ever since our flight from Cuba in 1960, she’d clung to the hope of outliving Fidel Castro Ruz, a man four years her junior.

Almost more galling than having Castro outlive her was having her saint’s day fall on the 26th of July, the anniversary and official title of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement. To a Cuban, one’s saint’s day — the birth date of the saint after whom one is named, in this case Santa Ana — is a personal holiday second only to one’s birthday. After our flight following the revolution, first to Mexico and then to the U.S., my mother never again celebrated anything on that day.

My family has deep roots in Cuba. My maternal grandmother, also Ana María, was a third generation Canary Islands émigré. John Maurice, my maternal grandfather, was a contractor in Aguascalientes, Mexico, when the Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910. He fled for Havana, where prospects for life seemed better. Both of my grandparents were stern and imposing figures; how they met and courted I can’t imagine. Nonetheless, it must have been love, for they married in 1914.

John Maurice was a massive man, a rigid disciplinarian, and a heavy drinker and gambler, with a streak of willfulness that could turn violent. He soon worked his way into Cuba’s biggest construction projects as a primary subcontractor. His first big commission, the capitol building in Havana, with rotunda and wings modeled on the U.S. Capitol, was completed in a scant three years. Begun in 1926 by the Purdy Henderson Co., it required the work of 8,000 men to complete it by 1929.

He then joined the big push to complete the Carretera Central, Cuba’s main trans-island artery, which was also built all at one go, between 1927 and 1931, by a consortium of the Associated Cuban Contractors, Inc. and the Warren Brothers Co. of Boston. The highway touches the coast at only three places: Havana, Matanzas, and Santiago de Cuba. It is an engineering marvel: it straddles the island’s spine — what is, in effect, the north-south watershed divide — thereby requiring an absolute minimum of bridge crossings. The entire roadway, 705.6 miles long and 20.66 feet wide, is asphalt-topped concrete.

My grandfather’s third big project, the Carcel Modelo, was the federal penitentiary on the Isle of Pines (the comma-shaped island off the southeast coast of Cuba). The design features four six-story round silos, later nicknamed the circulares, with 93 cells, designed for single or double occupancy, circling each floor. It was a new approach to an idea originally developed by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham and applied on a smaller scale in Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois. Under President Fulgencio Batista, the circulares housed only common criminals; political prisoners were kept in separate small apartments where many privileges, including conjugal visits, were allowed. Fidel Castro, captured after his abortive Moncada Army Barracks attack on July 26, 1953, spent time there — as did my cousin, Armandito, after the failure of the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Following the 1959 revolution, the Castro government — perhaps because it anticipated a decline in prisoners, since the regime was dedicated to social justice, or perhaps because it wanted to make a stay in prison more memorable — removed all but one toilet per floor in each circular and donated them for ballast on a Russian cargo vessel. Later, after the Bay of Pigs invasion and the prisoner-for-medicine exchange with the Kennedy administration, the prison was closed and the island was rechristened the Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth, so as to eliminate any vestige of the prison’s infamy.

When my mother turned 13 she was shipped off to a Louisiana convent to learn English. Back in Cuba, she put her new skills to use as a bilingual telephone operator. Sometimes she’d field long-distance calls from Ernest Hemingway, whom she always, after the first few calls, recognized by his unintelligible Spanish and his references to himself as “Papa.” Now, “Papa,” in Spanish, means “potato.” My mother, initially, had no idea who “potato” was. He insisted on using Spanish anyway. When my mother counter-insisted that he speak English so she could understand him, he showered her with profanity. With time these outbursts became more frequent. It seemed — to her anyway — that her imperious prudishness egged him on.

During World War II Ana María worked for the U.S. Office of Censorship in Miami. After the war she returned to Havana and got a job with the newly founded American International Company (now AIG). The Havana AIG branch was established by my father, Howard Wesley Miller, who had been a principal in the founding of C.V. Starr & Co., the parent company of AIG in New York. In need of a bilingual secretary, Howard was assigned Ana María. A trusting man of few words and a forced smile, he found her regal reticence attractive — not to mention, as they say in Cuba, that she was “más bella que pesetas,” more gorgeous than dollars. So he immediately fired her. Already married, he didn’t quite trust himself. When his wife unexpectedly died, Ana María was rehired. They were married in 1948.

Howard and Ana María settled in Alturas del Vedado, one of Havana’s poshest neighborhoods. They bought the mayor’s residence, and he built himself an even bigger house on the empty lot next door. Second in power only to the president, the mayor of Havana was also one of Cuba’s richest men. Nicolás Castellanos controlled the most lucrative sources of illegal income on the island. As a child, I’d often hang out at the Castellanos’ home, playing with whatever children of the large extended family were present. When the mayor’s daughter, Irma, got married at one of Havana’s colonial cathedrals, I was the ringbearer at the ceremony. Castellanos, head of the Nationalist Party, had been the principal power broker in the jostling for the presidency at the run-up to the 1952 election.

Cuban elections had always been relatively free — free, that is, when compared with elections in countries such as Mexico or Guatemala. Nonetheless, the most ambitious party could always find ways of digging up dependable votes: union leaders controlled their workers; businessmen squeezed their employees; ministries rewarded civil servants with illegal bonuses. A large percentage of voting cards lacked the requisite photographs; they could be used by anyone — and were. The system had produced only one laudable administration, the first one after independence, that of Arturo Estrada Palma; and only his first term was laudable. By his second term, he’d been soured by the lack of reciprocal idealism and turned vengeful, venal, greedy, and mad for power.

The 1952 election started out no differently from any other: in Cuban-cigar-smoke-filled rooms with Mayor Castellanos cajoling together a grand coalition of anyone and everyone who had a claim to a piece of the action. Together they would apportion power and spoils uncontroversially and multipartisanly. But this time Fulgencio Batista, one of the primary contenders, didn’t want to share.

Batista was a tragic figure. He was nicknamed “the okie from Banes” (el guajiro de Banes, a provincial backwater from an Habanero’s point of view) and “el negro” because of his modest education, lack of sophistication, and dark complexion. According to the scuttlebutt of the time, he was one of the last surviving mixed-blood, indigenous Carib Indians — a noteworthy claim, because the Spanish conquistadores had virtually annihilated Cuba’s entire aboriginal population. The Cuban people were now European, African, or mulatto. When Batista stepped into history in 1933, he had only risen to the rank of sergeant. In that year he led a popular, behind-the-scenes, intra-army “Sergeants’ Coup” that wrested power from the commissioned officers and, in an absurd reversal of the traditional logic of the chain of command, conferred it on the lower, noncommissioned ranks — the sergeants themselves.

Before this coup, the army had been kept out of politics through a spoils-sharing program in which politicians secured the loyalty of the higher officers by paying them off. The sergeants wanted a redistribution of the loot, and got it. Batista turned the government’s loyalty-buying racket into an overt army-extortion racket that benefited all ranks. Now that he ruled the armed forces, he promoted himself to colonel, then to general. Behind the scenes, he ruled Cuba. In 1940 he ran for president, won, and ruled more or less competently, by the standards of the time. By the end of his term in 1944 he had become immeasurably rich.

But his marriage was falling apart, his popularity was at an all-time low, and he still hadn’t been asked to join the exclusive Havana Country Club. More importantly, his party lost the next election. In the midst of a midlife crisis, the okie from Banes divorced his wife of many years, married a young socialite, and fled into retirement abroad, determined to enjoy his wealth and his newfound connubial bliss. In 1952, restless, ambitious, and more popular than ever in his own mind, he returned to Cuba to contest the 1952 elections.

Nicolás Castellano’s coalition could easily have defeated him; but, not one to cavil, the ex-sergeant launched a second military coup and named himself president of Cuba. The coup cost Castellanos the mayoralty of Havana. More importantly, it was the event that launched Castro on the road to the revolution that rules Cuba to this day.

On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro — precipitately, without preparation, and armed with a handful of loose cannons (literal and figurative) — attacked the Moncada Army Barracks in the province of Oriente. Some of his contingent even traveled to the event by public bus. They were quickly defeated and brutally rounded up. Most were shot on the spot. Castro escaped with his life because he had married into the family of one of Batista’s ministers. Imprisoned for life in the Carcel Modelo, he declared that “history” would “absolve” him.

When my father retired from AIG in 1955 because of failing health, he was 57 years old, but his dreams were still unfulfilled. He was a social democrat, one of those successful capitalists with a strong sense of noblesse oblige — he wanted to do good while doing well. So he introduced to Cuba the 1950s version of the Model T Ford: the Volkswagen. When the bug took root — and with the urgency of a man stalked by death — he then launched Cuba’s first big paper products factory, trying to give the de facto monopoly of Dixie’s or Lilly’s (I don’t remember which) a run for its money. Optimistic about Castro, he later contributed money and property to the revolution, both before and immediately after its victory, as many others did, including our next-door neighbor Castellanos.

Batista, to improve his poll ratings, decided to amnesty all political prisoners. On May 15, 1955, Castro was released. In June he flew to Mexico to lick his wounds, reorganize, and plan an invasion of Cuba. On Nov. 24, 1956, he sailed for Cuba with 82 men aboard the critically overloaded yacht Granma. A week later they landed on the southern coast of Cuba. Only a dozen survived or evaded capture. Those twelve men made their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains, regrouped, and rebuilt a force that became a thorn in the government’s side. The infection of that thorn slowly spread throughout the island. As Christmas 1958 approached, the rebels’ two-pronged advance out of the Sierras up the Carretera Central to Havana was succeeding beyond anyone’s imagination. Government troops were not only surrendering without a fight; they were switching sides. People of all sorts were welcoming the rebels with open arms. The steamroller was unstoppable.

When Batista fled the country on New Year’s Eve 1958, Havana erupted into an orgy of celebration. The metropolitan police, technically members of the old regime, kept a low profile. We children weren’t allowed to get near the windows, much less leave the house. My sister Nani remembers one passing car peppering our living room with bullets. My mother, ever cautious, concocted an arsenal of Molotov cocktails “just in case.” Days later, when Castro’s tanks rolled into the city, mobs lionized the long-haired, bearded rebels. Contingents of the olive-clad, Thompson submachine gun-wielding soldiers ringed all the embassies to prevent enemies of the people from escaping. With the Mexican ambassador’s residence only a block from our house, I couldn’t keep away. Armed with my pellet gun — for solidarity — I’d hang out for hours with the militiamen, target-shooting at birds and passing the time. For a 10-year old kid, it just didn’t get any better. As I’d later say when I learned English in Mississippi, “I was shitting in tall cotton.”

* * *

Ana María’s cousin and best friend, Tita, is still a contender for outliving Fidel. The two women shared the dream of witnessing Castro’s demise — a tiny but immensely satisfying symbolic victory over the 20th century’s deadliest ideology.

A flirtatious ball of energy, and a Bette Midler look-alike, Tita makes everyone her instant friend, and she can reduce you to stomach-cramping laughter within minutes of meeting you. Though she is three years older than Castro, she could still run circles around his hospital bed, with or without her cane. For her, outliving Castro is an intensely personal goal. She and her brother Bebo attended the University of Havana with Fidel in the late 1940s.

Bebo studied law with Fidel. Both remember him as a pistol-wielding political gangster type (a common phenomenon of the times), with an emphasis on action rather than ideology. What little there was of the latter came from José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish Falangism, with a dollop of Benito Mussolini thrown in for broader appeal. While Tita got her doctorate in Philosophy and Letters, Bebo and Castro became lawyers.

In Cuba everyone is connected by four degrees of separation, instead of the proverbial six. While at the university, Castro married into the Batista political family and into the George W. Bush administration, too. Mirta Díaz Balart, his first wife, was the daughter of Rafael Díaz Balart, a prominent Batista cabinet minister; and the sister of Rafael Díaz Balart (junior), another cabinet minister in the Batista administration. It was Castro’s in-laws who saved his butt after the abortive Moncada attack. The junior Rafael Díaz Balart was the father of Lincoln and Mario Díaz Balart, today Florida Republican Representatives for the 21st and 25th Congressional Districts respectively.

Tita’s uncle, Maríano Faget, also worked in the Batista administration. A law enforcement professional, he was in charge of the important-sounding Foreign Counter-Espionage Activities Department. Not that Cuba had any foreign enemies. Having been a loyal, albeit minor, member of the Allied contingent in World War II, Cuba became a dutiful cold warrior in the 1950s, refusing diplomatic relations with the USSR and establishing the Departamento de Actividades Enemigas to exercise solidarity with the rest of the free world. Maríano was a conscientious bureaucrat but, like the Maytag repairman, had little to do.

When Castro triumphed, Maríano, reading the handwriting on the wall, hitchhiked out of Cuba on the plane that flew Batista into exile. His secretary, a man by the name of Castaño and a strictly career civil servant, wasn’t so lucky. Castaño landed in La Cabaña, the jail adjacent to Morro Castle in Havana. Pulling every long-distance string available, Maríano got the U.S. ambassador to intervene. The ambassador extracted a promise from Ernesto “Che” Guevara to release the hapless secretary for immediate flight out of the country. The next morning, when the ambassador showed up to take charge of his charge, there was a scene straight out of Andy García’s “Lost City” (see Gary Jason’s review in Liberty, December 2006). Guevara declared that an enemy of the people had been liquidated. According to Tita, Guevara bragged that he himself had pulled the trigger.

Just before the Easter holidays of 1960, my father arrived at his paper factory to be welcomed by big red graffiti on the yellow walls urging “Miller al Paredón!” (to the firing squad wall). He knew it hadn’t been painted by his workers; he knew them all too well and shared trust and affection with them. It looked more like Fidel’s handwriting — a much more ominous interpretation. Two days later, under the guise of going on vacation, my father, my mother, and we three kids left for Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, each carrying one suitcase.

By December of that year most of my immediate family had fled. My grandmother Ana María stayed. She was too old and too Cuban to leave, and too parsimonious to abandon our grand mayoral residence to the clutches of Castro, as the new revolutionary laws required. In a vain attempt to salvage some of his business interests, my father flew back to Havana in the fall but didn’t even leave the airport. An associate who met him there warned him to depart immediately, as there was a warrant out for his arrest. Later, my father successfully lobbied the Kennedy administration to pass legislation to allow the deduction of Cuban property losses through the federal income tax.

Exile was a huge shock. Hot Mexican food, to a Cuban about as strange as eating turnips and mud, was the first tremor. Montezuma’s revenge laid me up for two weeks. Working our way up to the U.S., we settled temporarily in Louisiana, where we discovered peanut butter. Thinking it was a dairy product, we refused to try it. Assured that it wasn’t, we soon couldn’t get enough of it. Later, when hordes of Cuban refugees flooded Florida, peanut butter was one of the staples handed out as assistance to tide over refugee families in their transition. It was just as strange to them. My aunt Marta had shelves full of #10 cans (creamy style) hoarded in her garage. She scorned the stuff but knew it was valuable and refused to part with the cans.

The Deep South of the early ‘60s was in turmoil over civil rights. Perhaps it was the racial conflicts or the strange new foods or maybe the English-language school system, but I soon ballooned to morbid obesity. By the time I was 14, I weighed over 200 pounds. But the events in our life took a much more serious toll on my father. Already in bad health, he deteriorated rapidly and died in 1967.

Meanwhile, by the end of 1960 my extended family had gotten more caught up in events in Cuba. Cousin Eddy, an old-line commie, stayed. Tita shipped her 15-year old son, Armandito, off to the U.S., to save him from himself. A hot-headed, idealistic naif, Armandito dreamed of joining the counter-revolutionary movements already inchoate in the Escambray Mountains. Tita also stayed, to care for her mother, who was too sick to travel. So did her sister Cuca, whose husband still hoped that things might not turn out as badly as it seems they have.

Armandito was already deeper in the resistance than she realized. Counter-revolutionaries had been landing armaments on isolated beaches outside Havana, and he had been helping them. It had been up to him to locate the caches and transfer them to a secure location. He hadn’t wanted to leave Cuba. Once in Miami, he tried to join the resistance-in-exile but was rebuffed because of his age. So his family sent him to New York, as far from rebel activity as they could manage. There he worked odd jobs, acquired a Social Security number, and networked with whatever counter-revolutionaries he met.

Restless, he was soon back in Miami forging documents to get him into the MIRR (Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperación Revolucionaria), the main resistance group at the time. One month after turning 17, he shipped off to Guatemala for military training of Cuban exiles by U.S. military personnel on loan to the CIA for an invasion of Cuba’s soft underbelly, the Bay of Pigs. At first he was scared and lonely, but he soon found older classmates and acquaintances from Cuba who made the rigors of training more bearable. He was fortunate. After enduring nearly four months of hardships, he was better prepared than most volunteers for the upcoming operation, despite being the youngest among them.

In April 1961, Armandito landed at Playa Girón, one of approximately 1,300 men on two Cuban beaches. One hundred one of them died in the invasion. For many reasons, all too long and convoluted to review here, the enterprise was a complete disaster. The men fought until their ammunition gave out. Wandering aimlessly in the Cienega de Zapata brine marshes, Armandito and his comrades were soon out of food and water. Totally dehydrated, they resorted to drinking their own piss. Then they were captured.

They were lucky to be alive. Castro’s troops weren’t disposed to generosity in victory. Not all the captives survived the overcrowded and asphyxiating eight-hour ride to Havana’s Palace of Sports. Osmani Cienfuegos, the lieutenant in charge of the transportation, ordered a contingent of 149 men packed into one truck, then had it hermetically sealed. When someone warned him that people might die, Armandito heard him comment that then “there’d be fewer worms to deal with.” Nine of these “worms” perished. The lives of the remaining captives were probably saved when their usefulness as victory propaganda became apparent.

They were processed at the El Principe prison in central Havana. They were stripped naked and ordered to lie face down on the concrete while militiamen searched their clothes. Armandito carried three photographs and a letter, all of which were ripped up except for the photo of his girlfriend, which was dismissively tossed aside. When he reflexively reached for it, boots and fists landed on him. It was a lesson that would serve him well throughout his incarceration: morale was the most important survival tool; and morale didn’t come from things like photographs; it came from within.

Armandito, being the youngest, adapted well to captivity. The vat of cornmeal mush that was their main nourishment usually included a Cracker Jack-type surprise, usually some live cockroaches or scorpions, or even a rat. To the older men, this was an almost unbearable indignity; to Armandito, it was a celebration of fresh protein. Armandito’s upbeat attitude didn’t go over well with the militiamen. He was rewarded with a spell in solitary confinement. In Cuba, penal authorities had taken a truly novel and creative approach to the concept, vividly depicted in the movie “Before Night Falls.” The isolation cells were tiny concrete holes below the general concrete floor, roofed by storm drains through which all sorts of indignities could be poured. The cells weren’t large enough for a person to stretch out in. Hinged bars provided ingress and egress. Still, the air, light, and general prison hubbub — right above your head — made the experience more bearable. To Armandito, his week-and-a-half stint was no big deal, but his voice breaks when he relates how some men spent three months curled up in the holes.

Tita, still in Havana, had no idea that her son was in El Principe, much less that he’d been involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion. She found out when the roster of captives’ names came out in the newspaper. At the prison, the tail (in Spanish, a line is quite descriptively called a tail) of women lining up in desperation encircled the building. It would be a month before a wife, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother or a sister was allowed to visit.

All visitors were strip-searched. Militiawomen seemed titillated at making old women with radical mastectomies remove their bras, and would comment crassly to one and all. Tita had the routine so well choreographed that shame had no time to affect her. All manner of food, clothing, and other presents were welcome, but little got to the prisoners. Tita would stop at one of the city’s ubiquitous pushcart sandwich vendors and buy Armandito a medianoche, known in English as a Cuban sandwich: a piece of French bread with roasted pork, ham, and Swiss cheese topped with anything else that strikes your fancy. Armandito would cut it into bite-sized bits and share it with his comrades.

At the time, it wasn’t healthy to be related to a Bay of Pigs prisoner. So Cuca, Tita’s sister, left Cuba in August 1961. Cuca’s husband Pillo was due to leave in November but had to delay his departure when the health of his elderly parents took a turn for the worse. Pillo was arrested in February 1962. No reason was given either to him, Tita, or Cuca, who was now in the U.S. He remained imprisoned for eight months, then he was suddenly released, again without any evident reason, days before the Cuban Missile Crisis. He made it to the U.S. just before all commercial flights were grounded in anticipation of war.

When Armandito was transferred to Carcel Modelo on the Isle of Pines, visitation became almost impossible. Lucky for him, Castro was trying to ransom off the 1,180 captives of the Bay of Pigs. By December 1962, he and Kennedy had settled on a price of $60 million worth of food, medicine, and machinery. Armandito soon found himself in Miami.

But Tita stayed. She stayed to care for her parents, Pillo’s parents, my grandmother, and countless other poor or elderly relatives, shirt-tail relatives, ex-employees, and friends. She stayed until 1965, when she finally came to the U.S., settled in Puerto Rico, and took charge of the Peace Corps’ Spanish language immersion program.

Today, she and Cuca live in Little Havana, Miami, close to their large extended family. Armandito owns and runs “El Viejo Malecón” café in San Juan, Puerto Rico. If you’re ever there, stop by, say hi, and eat some great Cuban-Puerto Rican food — without a rat anywhere around.

* * *

Two years ago, a cigar aficionado friend of the family, we’ll call him John, traveled illegally to Cuba via Cancún, Mexico. We asked him, among other things, to drop by our old home and take some pictures. He did. The house, looking quite a bit smaller — as adult realities always look compared to childhood memories — was noticeably run down and was ringed by a concrete block wall that inelegantly severed the arching driveway in front. Being a pushy, libertarian sort of guy, he walked up to the front door.

We’d heard through the grapevine that, for a while, the building had been used to house visiting East Bloc dignitaries. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Special Economic Period in Cuba, the old residence of Havana’s ex-mayor had been turned into a paladar, or legal, private B&B. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the manager had been withholding taxes from the government — sometimes levied at over 100% of gross receipts. So the residence had been converted into a technical school guarded by a Kalashnikov-wielding militiaman.

John engaged him and requested entry. The militiaman said that the house was now the property of the people, and John wasn’t welcome. John declared that he was “a people” and therefore could enter. The militiaman was taken aback by such logic but, still refusing him actual entry, allowed him to walk around the place and take photographs of both the outside and the inside (through the windows).

If, in the future, confiscated property claims are ever entertained by a more liberal regime, my family will be there. Not because we need the money, but because it’s the right thing to do.

* * *

My mother, Ana María, had two brothers slightly older than herself. One of them, Robert (after whom I’m named), emigrated from Cuba in the 1940s and settled in Caracas, Venezuela, where he married Lya, a venezolana. They had many children, who in turn, also had many children. They have all prospered. Robert sent his youngest daughter, Marta, to the U.S. for her high school years, so she could learn English. She lived with my immediate family in Arizona while attending a Catholic girls’ school run by nuns. Lya Rita, Robert’s oldest daughter, became a lawyer and rose to become the first woman cabinet member in the administration of President Carlos Andrés Perez.

Venezuela’s much touted social contract had begun showing signs of stress. Perez, elected to ameliorate a widening divide between the rich and the poor, using neoliberal economic policies, ended up, in the short term, exacerbating the problem. In 1992 Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez led a coup against the Perez administration. The coup failed and Chávez was imprisoned, but Perez ended up being driven from office. Two years later Chávez was pardoned. In 1998 he ran for president and won. By the end of his first year in office, he’d overhauled the constitution and launched his Bolivarian Revolution.

Several months ago, my sister Nani, in Phoenix, got a call from my cousin Marta, in Caracas. After catching up on family gossip, Marta opened a new chapter in the family’s chronicle. She requested that we hire a U.S. immigration lawyer to begin the long, costly, and convoluted process of gathering the lives of the people in her household and delivering them from Hugo Chávez’s 21st-century socialism.

We hope to see them soon.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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