Authors: Lawrence Block
There were ridges of rock on either side of the road. The road had been cut through and the rock remained around it. Shrubs grew from cracks between boulders to provide additional cover. When the time came, the rebels would station themselves, half on either side of the road. There were ten of them now—Manuel, Maria, Garth, Fenton, Taco Sardo, Francisco Seis and four new recruits whose names Fenton did not know yet. They would wait for the motor convoy with Castro at its head. Then, as a triumphant Castro sped to Santiago, they would open fire and kill him.
“We may have much luck,” Manuel said. “Fidel’s brother, Raul, he may be with him. In the car. We may get both birds. Is that how it is said?”
“You mean two birds with one stone.”
“That is what I mean. It would be good, killing them both. It would be very good.”
Fenton said nothing. He was geared for killing, geared and primed to kill Fidel Castro. It did not occur to him that it would be good or bad to add Fidel’s brother to the list of casualties. That did not seem to enter into it.
“Fidel and Raul,” Manuel was saying. “I will have much name,
amigo
. I will be the man who executed both the Castros. That will put me very high in the eyes of the people. Is it not so?”
“Of course,” Fenton said.
“And I shall have followers. My name will be a unifying force, a force tying Cubans together to rally against the Castro butchers. They may shout my name,
amigo
.”
Fenton nodded uncertainly.
“When Castro is dead,” Manuel began. “What will you do then?”
“I don’t know,” Fenton said honestly. Somehow, he had not given the question any thought. His whole being was geared now to one thing only, the destruction of Castro. What happened after that did not matter. After Castro was dead, Fenton would wait for cancer to kill him. It hardly seemed to matter where he waited, or what he did while he waited. He would be waiting for death.
“You could stay in Cuba.”
“Why?”
“With us,” Manuel said. “There will be much fighting, of course. A revolution, a full revolution. You have fought with me already, and you could continue to fight with me.”
“With you?”
“Of course,” Manuel said. He took a knife from his jacket pocket, opened the blade, idly sliced a slender branch from a tree. He began trimming the twigs from the branch.
“I used to make fishing poles in this manner,” Manuel said. “When I was a boy.”
Fenton kept his mouth shut.
“Here in Cuba,” Manuel went on, “there would be a place for you. A better place than in the United States.”
“What sort of place?”
Manuel shrugged. Now he was using the knife to peel bark from the branch. He was very deft with the knife. He removed the bark to expose the clean, white wood beneath.
“The other day,” Manuel began, “Maria told me what took place.”
“You mean with Garth?”
Manuel nodded.
“He knocked me out. I was lucky to come to in time to be much good.”
“You were very good,” Manuel said. “When I first met you, I thought you were less of a man than you are. I mean that I did not know you would be good at the fighting. I thought you were a quiet man, you know?”
“I am a quiet man.”
“You have much heart. I did not know that then. I know it now. Because of what happened with Maria, because of the fighting we have been in together. You have much heart,
amigo
.”
Fenton did not know what to say. He was pleased. He felt … alive, useful. He was very pleased.
“Later,” Manuel went on. “You will stay with us, yes?”
“If you want me to stay.” Why not, he thought. There was no place to go, nothing to do but wait for death. He might as well wait in Cuba. He could die fighting, could die at Manuel’s side. Manuel was his friend, his comrade in arms. Better to die at his side than in the teller’s cage at the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook.
“I want you to stay.”
“Then I will stay, Manuel.”
Now Manuel was cutting the branch into small sections, then idly tossing the sections into the brush. “There will be good things for you,” he went on, his voice quiet but intense. “When Castro dies, the revolution will begin. And the revolution will take little time. The Castristas will flee the island just as the Batistianos fled before them. And then,
amigo
, Cuba will be ours.”
Fenton said nothing. Something was bothering him, gnawing at him. He was unsure what it was.
“Someone will have to lead the nation,” Manuel went on. “Someone will have to be the strong man, the ruler.”
“Who do you mean?”
Manuel did not answer directly. “A man with reputation,” he said easily. “A man the people know. A man, for example, with the scalps of Fidel and Raul at his belt.”
“You mean yourself?”
Manuel shrugged. “Someone must take the job. And it would be good to have a man as an assistant. An American, so that the United States will know that Cuba is with the Americans and not the Communists. A man like yourself, for example.”
They left it there. But later Fenton thought of the conversation and something like sickness spread through his body. This was the revolution, this was the rising of the people—with Manuel already hungry for power, long before Castro was dead. This was the revolution.
Well, to hell with it. He had his job to do and that was all that concerned him. Castro was a dictator and he would die. The revolution would go on and he, Fenton, would join it.
In time, Manuel, or someone like him, would be the dictator—probably as despotic a one as Castro, perhaps worse. But that was no concern of Fenton’s.
He would be dead before it happened.
It was a short while past midnight on the first of January, 1959. Fulgencio Batista loaded a limousine with his luggage. His second wife and three of his children were with him, ready to leave the presidential estate at Kuquine. Batista said farewell to his servants, told them that the family was off on a brief trip. Then, with his limousine flanked by secret service cars carrying troops with submachine guns, the dictator headed for Camp Columbia.
Within two hours, Batista’s plane was in the air, headed for sanctuary in the Dominican Republic. Like a thief in the night, the strong man of Cuba had stolen out of his own country. His time for power was over and he could now do nothing more than save his own life.
The revolution was an unqualified success. The following day Castro and his bearded followers rode in triumph through the streets of every principal city of the islands. Crowds thronged after them, screaming Castro’s name at the tops of their lungs. The Twenty-sixth of July Movement, a movement pledged to the hilt to freedom and liberty, had triumphed.
The victory of Castro was the defeat of Castro. The shouts of acclaim for the revolution were that revolution’s death-knell. Because men who win wars are poor at making peace, and men who win fame as rebels are all too often unequal to the task of governing the land they have liberated. The switch from traitor to hero is too sudden, the new role too difficult to play properly.
There have been exceptions—George Washington in America, for one. But the exceptions are few and far between. It is all too simple for the men who overthrow dictators to step nimbly into the dictator’s shoes, all too easy for the liberator to place his own chains upon his nation.
In December of 1958 Fidel Castro was an outlaw, had been an outlaw for five and one-half years. In January of 1959 he was a national hero, an acknowledged leader. A greater man might have shaved his rebel beard, might have stepped down from the pedestal on which his country had placed him, might have denounced the Communists in his mushrooming band —as he had once accepted help from the Communists at the university and then turned against them—and then called at once for honest elections and for an end to terror. But most men would have done exactly what Fidel Castro did. Power was waiting, and he accepted it.
He was a hero now, known the world over. American magazines placed his picture on their covers. Cubans cheered his every word. Khrushchev fed his ego. The South American countries feared him. The United States, unfortunately, handled him with kid gloves, immobilized by concern over world opinion.
But Fidel charged forward, sure he was invincible, the man of the hour. Sure he had made promises, promises which seemed simple enough when he was a brigand in the hills of Oriente, broadcasting words of hope over the rebel station to hopeful listeners everywhere. But now that Batista was out and Castro was in, those same promises were much harder to keep than they had been to make.
In May of 1958 he had told Cuba: “Personally, I do not aspire to any post and I consider that there is sufficient proof that I fight for the good of my people, without any personal or egotistic ambition soiling my conduct. After the revolution we will convert the movement into a political party and we will fight with the arms of the constitution and the law. Not even then will I aspire to the presidency because I am only thirty-one years old.”
Had he meant that, or was it his way of blinding Cubans to his real purpose? At first, his words seemed genuine, for he appointed Manuel Urrutia as provisional president of Cuba, with general elections planned within the year. Then he deposed Urrutia and postponed those elections indefinitely. They were never held.
It seemed simpler to take the quick way, the easy way. He had the power and the nation was willing to follow wherever he led. Why bother with elections? Why wait for laws? He excused himself, saying that he would have to retain power until the revolution was a reality and until all reforms had been achieved. He kept his beard and went on wearing the uniform of a guerrilla fighter. Liberty and freedom could wait—or be shunted aside forever.
This was the first step, the suspension of the machinery of democracy. Next came the elimination of judicial processes. The country overflowed with former associates and lieutenants of Batista. Fidel had a simple answer. He put them before the firing squads. It was, once again, revolutionary justice. The term called into being with executions in the hills was revived now. Trials were dispensed with, the excuse being that they took time. Men were arrested quickly and systematically. They were brought before a revolutionary tribunal which pronounced them guilty. Then they were taken to the courtyard where the firing squad waited.
There were precedents, of course. The Committee of Public Safety, with its reign of terror that sent thousands to the guillotine in eighteenth-century France. The Russian Revolution, with mass executions of czarist officers. Castro called the process revolutionary justice, but it turned out to be another name for terror. He was no better than the man he had deposed—Batista.
The executions drew protest and alienated supporters, particularly in the United States. Fidel Castro could not understand the criticism. “Batista never gave anyone a trial,” he said. “He just had them killed, and there were no protests or criticisms then. These men are murderers, assassins. We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers and they deserve to be shot.”
Perhaps they did, but Batista executed for the same reason—to kill opposition. And methods which are legitimate for a guerilla band are not legitimate for a government.
Just as Castro’s domestic policies gave democracy a back seat, so did his foreign policy draw him further and further from the United States. He had stated frequently that he would confiscate no foreign property, that he was not a Communist, that the United States was no enemy of his. But his position began to change. American business interests kept leveling a charge of Communism at Castro. The American press echoed this charge. Castro denied vehemently these accusations.
But he seized oil refineries and took over land owned by Americans. He accused the United States of crime after crime, using America as a convenient scapegoat to justify every extreme measure of his own. Every day saw him drawing further from the West and moving closer and closer to the Communist bloc. He saw an enemy in everyone who disagreed with him, a potential danger in every casual opponent.
He had thrown out a dictator. Now he had become a dictator himself. The Cuban people still backed him, still worshipped him. But the seeds of discontent had been sown.
Señora Luchar was talking. They were in the living room, she and Turner and Hines, and they were drinking the inevitable demitasse cups of strong black coffee. Hines couldn’t stand the coffee, or Señora Luchar, or Turner, or anyone else in the world, himself least of all. His fingers gripped the small white cup so tightly he was afraid it would break in his hand. He wished he was a smoker; a cigarette would be good right now, but it seemed a silly time to start.
“Today is the twentieth of July,” Señora Luchar was saying. “Tomorrow Castro makes his trip across the island. Thursday he speaks in Santiago, a speech to workers and peasants. Then he returns here, to Havana, in time for his speech commemorating the anniversary of the Twenty-sixth of July Movement. He’ll be speaking Sunday, in the main square. That’s not far from here. You know where it is?”
Hines nodded.
“So that’s the time,” the Luchar woman said. “There will be a huge crowd, too huge for the police to do much good. You’re using bombs, right? Bombs that you throw?”
“That’s right,” Hines told her.
“So you mingle with the crowd and throw the bombs. Then you get away and return here. We’ll get you back to the mainland.”
“It sounds shaky,” Turner broke in.
“Mr. Turner?”
“Yeah,” Turner went on. “Yeah, it sounds shaky. We’re right in the middle of it. It’s not tough tossing the bombs. It’s tough getting away.”
The woman looked at him.
“We’re taking a chance,” Turner said.
“Of course. And you are being paid how much to take this chance? Twenty thousand dollars? You would not be paid so much if there were no chance, Mr. Turner.”