Audition (58 page)

“As I remember, this is the first time,” he replies through his interpreter.

“How do you feel when you come to the Bay of Pigs?” I ask him.

“Before the invasion I usually came here to fish and to rest,” he tells me. “After the invasion, I continued to come here, many times. I like this place. It is quiet, and there are good places for underwater fishing.”

And so began my extraordinary interview with the Cuban leader whose forces had decimated the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961, right here in the Bay of Pigs. Now his recollections are not of the U.S.-led attempt to overthrow him but of the good spot for spear-fishing.

Just how my camera crew and I ended up in this boat with Fidel Castro bears telling. It had been two years since I’d met him in Cuba, two years of trying to pin down the exclusive interview he’d promised me. I had written him countless letters through the Cuban Mission at the UN and through the Cuban delegation within the Czech Embassy in Washington. (The United States did not and does not have diplomatic relations with Cuba.) I never received a response—until May 1977.

I was ecstatic when Castro suddenly agreed to the interview. So were ABC and Roone Arledge. The mysterious Cuban leader hadn’t given a television interview in sixteen years, except for little blips about some sports event. We knew it probably wouldn’t draw huge ratings. Castro was no movie star. But an interview with him was considered so newsworthy that Roone decided in advance to run pieces of it on the evening news as well as schedule a half hour prime-time news
Special.

When I arrived in Havana I met with Castro in his office. He was all smiles. “Where would you like to go?” he asked through Juanita, the same lovely interpreter we had met before. “What would you like to see?”

I thought fast. “The Bay of Pigs, Mr. President.”

“Yes, we can do that,” he agreed.

“And, and I’d also like to go through the Sierra Maestra mountains to see where you started your revolutionary campaign.”

“We’ll do both,” he said. “I’ll arrange it.”

That is how we came to be on the Cuban patrol boat the next day, skimming across the Bay of Pigs. We stopped at a little island for a picnic lunch of grilled fish and pineapple, during which Castro swapped fish stories with the ABC crew. It was there that we taped our first brief but candid interview with him. In it he expressed his admiration for John F. Kennedy, the American president who had ordered the invasion of Cuba, and his disdain for Richard Nixon, who hadn’t. “I never liked Richard Nixon,” Castro said. “From the very first moment I could see he was a false man, and, politically speaking, he was foolish.”

To say that we were thrilled with the way things were going is an understatement. Our producers, Dick Richter and Tom Capra, had encountered unimaginable hurdles from the moment we’d landed. First they’d been informed that NABET, the same union that had crippled NBC during my contract negotiations, had gone out on strike against ABC. Our union crew had to drop everything and fly home while we had to wait for a freelance crew to arrive. In the interim we had to rent equipment from the Cuban National Broadcast Center, which tried to take us to the cleaners. When Castro learned of this he himself intervened and negotiated a very fair price. After all, who was going to argue with Castro? But another crisis quickly arose.

I had a live interview scheduled for the evening news with Alicia Alonso, Cuba’s prima ballerina—except we couldn’t get it to New York. There was no direct satellite hookup between Miami and Havana, so the interview had to be fed—can you believe it?—to Czechoslovakia and from there back to New York. The audio hookup, on the other hand, came through Miami, and turned out to be almost impossible to coordinate with the visuals.

The Bay of Pigs was a pick-me-up for everyone, and we celebrated back at the Hotel Riviera. Like the Hotel Nacional where we’d stayed two years before, the Riviera, in the past also one of Havana’s great hotels, was in sad shape. Again, there were no toilet seats. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls, the beautiful furniture was chipped, and the upholstery was torn. There were no soft drinks, either. Only rum. Without the Coke.

But who cared? We knew we were on our way to a great story. Unexpectedly, I was also on my way to a new friendship. After we returned from the Bay of Pigs, Castro invited us to join him at a baseball game, and the ABC crew was soon buzzing about a group of American men they recognized at the game—George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, retired Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford, and several Yankee coaches.

I had never heard of George Steinbrenner—he’d owned the Yankees only for a few years—but I was curious about what he was doing in Cuba. He, on the other hand, was not in the least curious about me. He took one look at me approaching him with a camera crew, spun on his heel, and strode away. It turned out that he and his coaches had been secretly invited by Castro to Cuba to give major-league pointers to the Cuban baseball players. Suddenly there was ABC News in his face. We had evidently outed him, and he was enraged. The word got around that Steinbrenner and his entourage were packing up to leave in the morning because of us, which made me feel very guilty.

I saw him sitting at the bar when we got back to the hotel and, with some apprehension, I sat down next to him. I told him we hadn’t shot any footage of him and weren’t going to. “I’m not here because of you,” I explained. “And I’m not going to make a big deal out of the fact that I saw you here.” He seemed surprised and was so relieved that he canceled his plans to leave. We began to talk, and thirty years later, we’re still friends. Nothing has pleased me more than to have sat in his box at Yankee Stadium and cheered on the home team, remembering that it all went back to that ball game in Cuba.

Back to Fidel. I have a note in Spanish framed on a wall in my apartment. The translation reads: “For Barbara as a remembrance of the most difficult interview that I have had in all the days of my life.” It is signed “Fidel Castro, May 20, 1977. 1:29 am.” It is the time that is relevant. That’s how long our interview ran the following night in his office. Five hours. Nonstop. During which he smoked long Cuban
Cohiba
cigars, enveloping me in the smoke. It’s a wonder I didn’t get instant bronchitis.

It would have been worth it, though, for in this lengthy television interview Castro laid out his major concerns and fears. First of all he made it very clear that he was a Communist. Although he came from an affluent family, he had been a Communist from his young years. Nothing was going to change him, which is why, he claimed, the CIA had made more than twenty attempts on his life, a claim partially validated by the recent release of declassified CIA documents.

Castro was also candid about the number of political prisoners in Cuba’s prisons—between two and three thousand—and in his response to my charge that the state controlled the media. “You allow no dissent,” I said to him. “Your newspapers, radio, television, motion pictures are under state control. People can dissent in their meetings, in their congresses, but no dissent or opposition is allowed in the public media.”

“Barbara, our concept of freedom of the press is not yours,” he replied. “If you asked us if a newspaper could appear here against socialism, I can say honestly no, it cannot appear. It would not be allowed by the party, the government, or the people. In that sense we do not have the freedom of the press that you possess in the U.S. And we are very satisfied about that.”

He was not as candid when I asked him the personal questions no one had asked him before. He clearly did not want to disclose whether he was married. “What is the importance of my being married or not?” he said. I told him it wasn’t, but wondered why “such a simple question like ‘Are you married?,’ not very complicated, raises such an uproar.”

He paused, then said firmly: “Formalmente, no.” [Formally, no.] That’s all.

I was dead tired when our five-hour marathon finally ended, but Castro was just warming up. “Barbara, are you hungry?” he said, and suddenly the whole crew and I were in his kitchen, where he made us delicious melted cheese sandwiches. I’ve had many gourmet experiences in my life, but having Fidel Castro cook for me at 2:00 a.m. certainly stands out. And we weren’t done yet. “What do you want to have for dinner tomorrow night when we’re in Sierra Maestra?” Castro asked. “Is roast pork and yuca okay?” I was struck dumb by the thought of another marathon with Castro until Dick Richter poked me in the ribs and I managed to say yes.

It was 3:00 a.m. when we got back to the hotel. Dick called Roone, begged for more airtime, and got it. By the time I collapsed into bed the half-hour
Special
had turned into an hour. At 9:00 the next morning, my phone rang. El Comandante would be sending a car for me in half an hour. To my astonishment, and the wide-eyed amazement of the few tourists in front of the hotel, the car turned out to be a jeep and the driver was Castro himself. This was not to be an ordinary journey. Off we went to board Castro’s presidential plane and fly to Santiago de Cuba, the second-largest city in the country, where Castro and his band of insurgents had launched the revolution in 1953 to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. It took them six years to succeed. Twenty-four years later their guerrilla campaign formed one of the most memorable days of my professional life.

“Come, Barbara. Sit next to me,” Castro said at the airport as we got into the second jeep of the day. With Castro again at the wheel, we climbed into the Sierra Maestra, where his revolutionaries had been secretly based. He drove with one hand, waving his cigar in the other. Crammed into the backseat were his translator, Juanita, and two of Castro’s former comrades from their revolutionary days. For six hours we drove up and down mountain roads while Castro pointed out the sites of battles and ambushes and guerrilla encampments to me and the camera crew following in other jeeps.

As we splashed through rain-swollen streams, Castro handed me the tin of hard candies he kept on the dashboard to give to the children who swarmed around him at every stop. He also handed me his revolver. My job was to hold the candy and the gun over my head to keep them dry. And to learn the verses of “Cielito Lindo,” which he sang loudly and off-key in Spanish. I look back on that trip as the most amazing car ride I have ever had.

At nightfall we reached his mountain retreat, a large complex of cabins, where each of us had our own room, fresh towels, hot water—and a toilet with a toilet seat. We drank much too much Algerian wine over dinner, dined on roast suckling pig with the head still attached, and then, amidst much laughter and goodwill, bartered with Castro, who joked that he wanted payment for the services he’d provided us.

This may be one of those stories where you have to have been there, but it was hilarious. Tom Capra told him we couldn’t pay him as an actor because he was a lousy actor. He stopped in the middle of scenes to talk to children. Castro then suggested being paid as a director or a producer, to which I responded that he was lousy at both. “You took us through swamps. If that’s your idea of directing, it’s not very good. And don’t think you’re a producer, because we wasted hours and hours seeing absolutely nothing.”

We settled on paying him as a driver and offered him five dollars, which he accepted. Tom then wrote out a receipt for his ABC expense account—“Payment to one driver, Fidel Castro. $5”—and Castro signed it with a flourish. I’m sure Tom still has that slip of paper.

As I look back on that visit to Fidel Castro’s personal hideaway, I know that it is the kind of experience I will never have again. Few world leaders ever give up this much time or become so open with journalists. Our timing was right. Castro wanted to explain himself. Also, he liked our crew. He appreciated their efficiency and good humor and, I think, the fact that they weren’t striking. People in Cuba don’t go on strike. I guess he liked me, too. Not that he ever became personal in word or deed, but the mountain trip was not exactly what he treated every journalist to. By the way, Castro knew very little English. Everything he said was translated by Juanita, who never left his side.

We left Havana the following day and I stopped in Florida to see my mother and sister as well as my father. I think it is a shock for any child to see a parent in a nursing home. My father had always been a smallish, slight man, but wiry and strong. Now he seemed shrunken and fragile. I took him outside in his wheelchair and we held hands for a while and tried to talk, but he had almost no energy. I told him I loved him and he told me he loved me, and I left. Somehow I knew it was the last time I would see him, and I couldn’t hold back my tears.

Back in New York, Dick Richter, Tom Capra, and I edited the footage of Castro. It was not easy. As much as we wanted to show how charming he could be, we also needed to make clear that he was the absolute dictator of a Communist country, a man who allowed no dissent, a man who imprisoned his enemies and was a staunch opponent of our democratic system. I ended the piece by saying: “What we disagreed on most profoundly is the meaning of freedom—and that is what truly separates us.”

Fidel Castro Speaks
aired on June 9, 1977, and got high ratings as far as news specials go, but didn’t come close to
Barnaby Jones
, a long-standing detective series on CBS, and a movie shown on NBC. I didn’t see it because I was in England covering Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. But the Castro
Special
marked a turning point in my career.

Roone acted on his statement to the
New York Times
that I was being “mishandled” behind the anchor desk and officially made me a roving anchor for ABC News. He realized that I would be far more valuable to the network as a reporter, free to travel anywhere in the world at any time rather than sitting behind a desk. I still coanchored the news, but Roone’s solution to the bad chemistry between Harry and me was to keep us separated as much as possible. I was the sole anchor if Harry was away on assignment, and vice versa, but more and more I was the one on the road. That is why I said Roone was my savior.