Authors: Lawrence Block
“The underground,” he told Hines. “They don’t kid around here. The underground lives under the ground.”
They were out of the caves finally and Turner took his first look at Cuba by daylight. The sun was bright, the sky empty of clouds. The air, while warmish, was clear and fresh, especially after the stale air of the caverns. He filled his lungs with it, killed his cigarette. Moreno had a car parked nearby and Turner and Hines got into the back seat. In Spanish Moreno said that he was going to drive them into Havana.
“Just like that?”
Moreno said it was simple, that no one would stop the car. He was taking them to the home of some members of the underground, he explained. These members were not known to the police. There was a room in the basement, a safe room, and Turner and Hines would live there. They would be fed, they would have beds to sleep in. And from there they could murder the Communist bastard Castro, the betrayer of revolutions, the murderer of women and children, the pig, the
ladron
, the
hijo de la gran puta
, the
maricon
, the
hombre sin cojones
—
All of this came in a steady stream that sounded as though it had been memorized from a prepared speech. Turner didn’t bother listening to the end of it. It was more fun looking out the window.
The highway between Matanzas and Havana had been built within the past several years and looked it. It was wide and traffic moved at a steady pace. The cars, Turner noticed, were mostly old ones. Almost all were American models, with an occasional Volkswagen and Renault tossed in. The newest one Turner spotted was a Fifty-eight Buick. The road ran parallel to the shore but a good distance away from it. There were cane fields on both sides, fields broken by an occasional gas station or roadside restaurant.
Turner glanced at Hines. The kid was looking out the window, too. “It’s pretty,” he said.
“You sound surprised.”
“It’s not what I expected.”
“What did you have in mind? Guns and barbed wire?”
“Something like that.”
Turner shrugged. “I don’t know politics,” he said. “They don’t interest me. But I’ve been a few places, done a few things. I used to ship out, short term cargo stuff, up and down the coast and around the gulf.”
“I know.”
“You meet people, sailors. That’s where I picked up Spanish. I’ve shipped with Cubans. It’s not that bad down here, Jim.”
“You think Castro’s a bargain?”
“I think he’s a bastard and a son-of-a-bitch. He found a little power and it went to his head. This happens. But Batista was just as big a bastard. The average Joe didn’t eat steak and still doesn’t. A few years ago he had to be satisfied with beans and rice and was happy to get that. One revolution later and he’s still eating the same crap. They’ve got wholesale executions and no democracy and it’s easy to find a lot of reasons to put Castro down. But you get back to the average Joe and he doesn’t care about these reasons. He’s more interested in eating better and being pushed around less. And all the things he finds wrong he can sit back and blame the Yankees for them, because that’s what Loudmouth Castro tells him, over and over again,
ad nauseam
. He figures Castro and the people around him are Communists but he also figures he’s got nothing to lose. So don’t look around for barbed wire. They don’t need it yet. The average Joe is still on Castro’s side or, at least, not definitely against him.”
“How about the underground? Aren’t they average Joes, Turner?”
“No. Maybe they’re rebels, sharp guys with a yen for more and better. Maybe they want power on their own. Hell, maybe they’re crooks or nuts or cranks or rapists or—”
Hines pointed to the driver.
“Forget him. He doesn’t understand English. None of the gang at the cave understood English.”
“How do you know?”
“I tested them last night. I told them all to go home and drop dead. They didn’t even frown. We’ll be getting into Havana pretty soon. What do you think of the setup?”
“It sounds okay.”
“Yeah? Maybe it does, I don’t know. The way it looks from here, we got quite a little game to play. Our boy’ll be guarded six ways and backwards. I don’t know about you, but I want to get out of this alive. I’m in it for the dough.”
“I’m in it for revenge.” said Hines. “But it’s not revenge if you get yourself killed in the bargain. Ever read
The Cask of Amontillado
by Poe?”
“No.”
“Oh,” Hines said. “It’s a short story. About revenge. One guy seals another guy in a wall in a wine cellar, just seals him in alive and leaves him there. Anyway, one of the lines says that in order to make revenge come off you have to get away with it.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Turner said. “But I don’t think we can seal our boy in a wine cellar. How are you with a gun?”
“I don’t know. I never used one.”
“Not even in ROTC?”
Hines colored. “I managed to cop out of that. I brought a note from my doctor telling them I was a bed-wetter. I’m not, really, I just—”
Turner laughed out loud. “Oh, to hell with it,” he said. “I used to be fair with a rifle but it’s been a long time. And you have to be lucky. There’ll be a crowd around and taking a pot shot at Castro would be like buying a lottery ticket. That much chance of it working. I was thinking about a bomb.”
“A bomb?”
“The homemade kind, the kind you throw. We’ll blow him to hell and then figure out a way to get home. How does it sound?”
“It sounds fine,” Hines said. “I guess.”
Turner rolled down the window next to him and flipped out his cigarette. Hines said something, some conversational feeler, but he didn’t bother listening or answering. He didn’t feel like talking any more. They were hitting the outskirts of Havana now, passing through middle-class suburbs. Turner saw Morro Castle on the right, La Cubana fortress on the left. Then there was the bridge, a wide modern span across the strait separating Havana Bay from the ocean.
And they were in the city.
It was a city, he thought. It could have been part of New York or Philly or Charleston or San Diego. It didn’t feel foreign. The people in the streets were Cuban and the signs were in Spanish, but there were neighborhoods like that all over the States—Spic Harlem in New York, Ybor City in Tampa, Mex Town in San Diego. Hell, the neighborhood here was a little poorer, the people were more down at the heels. But Spanish Harlem and Ybor City weren’t exactly the Ritz. He noticed a prostitute soliciting, a cop ignoring her.
“I heard Castro closed the whorehouses,” he said to Moreno in Spanish. “Made hustling against the law.”
“There are still prostitutes,” Moreno said.
“I figured there were. She didn’t look like a nun.”
Moreno managed a shrug, an expressive one. “There will always be
putas
,” he said.
“Yeah. Well, thank God for that.”
“You wish to meet a girl?”
He laughed. “No,” he said. “I’m just a sightseer. This place of yours much farther?”
It wasn’t. Moreno turned a corner into La Avenida de Sangre and pulled up at the curb.
The Avenue of Blood,
Turner thought.
And Matanzas meant slaughter. Christ on wheels.
The house Moreno led them to was a two-story frame dwelling. It needed paint. There was a front porch, and an old man rocked on it in silence, a thin black cigar in his mouth. His eyes looked up sleepily, then looked away.
“He is old and quiet,” Moreno said. “
El Viejo
, the old one. Toothless and harmless, no? You may see that his hand is inside the jacket of his suit. There is a gun in his hand. He knows me. Otherwise you would have been shot before you entered this house.”
“I’m impressed,” Turner said.
The door opened. A woman, stout and matronly, smiled benignly at them. She stepped inside, murmured something polite and let them pass. She had hair the color of a gray flannel suit. A thin scar ran from the corner of her mouth halfway to her eye. It looked to Turner as though it had been made by a knife. Moreno introduced her as Señora Luchar. She mumbled something pleasant again and went off to find coffee. She brought a tray of demitasse cups that were small without being dainty. The coffee was very thick, very hot, very black. Turner liked it.
Moreno finished his coffee and left. He took a long time to finish the coffee and a longer time to leave. He kept speaking in Spanish to the woman, telling her how important the task of the two Americans was, telling her to render them all possible assistance. The woman—Señora Luchar—listened to all of this with no expression. Finally Moreno was gone. Señora Luchar followed him to the door, bolted it, watched the man drive away.
“Un momento, Señora—”
She turned to Turner. “Let’s speak English,” she said briskly. “Your accent is impossible. What’s on your mind?”
“Uh—”
“Moreno’s a fool,” she said. “A useful fool, but still a fool. You didn’t know I spoke English? I lived in Miami, for five years. Political exile. My family didn’t get along with Batista. His men pulled out my old man’s fingernails. They cut off his testicles, gouged out his eyes, raped my mother and slit her throat. They raped me, too, but they let me go.”
“And now you want to kill Castro?”
“I don’t like dictators. Fascist or Marxist, I don’t like dictators. You two sleep in the cellar. Want to see your room? Follow me.”
They followed her.
July 26, 1953.
With his briefs ignored by Batista’s courts, with freedom of speech and freedom of the press forcibly suppressed throughout Cuba, Fidel Castro decided that only revolution would settle the issues at stake—the issues of freedom and liberty. He began meeting with friends in an apartment house in the Vedado district of Havana, planning a military operation which would excite the common people of Cuba and spark a revolt to send Fulgencio Batista running from the island.
The revolutionaries were a small group, a tiny band of idealists and heroes, and, some say, Communists. Ambassador William Pauley has stated on the Jack Paar Show that he heard Castro, very early in his career, proclaim that when it came it would be a Communist revolution. The capital at their disposal was minimal. The men themselves mortgaged their homes, sold their furniture, pawned their watches and their wives’ jewelry, gave up whatever they had in order to place as much money as possible at Castro’s disposal. They armed themselves with pistols and knives; some carried rifles and shotguns. They had no grenades, no explosives. They were, in all, a total force of one hundred seventy men. Their objective, initially, was the fortress at Moncada at Santiago, a fortress quartering somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred armed troops.
Castro set out for Santiago by automobile and stayed at a friend’s house in the center of the city. On July 25th, more of the revolutionaries began drifting east, converging on the city. Fidel met with them at ten that night, coordinating the attack, synchronizing plans.
The attack commenced the next morning. The revolutionaries moved through Santiago in groups. One task force was dispatched to capture the radio station, preparing to call upon the people of Santiago to join in the revolt and take arms against the government. Another group moved to occupy the Santiago hospital, to hold it in preparation for the care of wounded on both sides. The major group launched an onslaught against the Moncada Fortress.
But the uprising, nobly conceived and fearlessly put into execution, was smashed almost at once. Castro’s little band was undermanned and under-equipped. The radio station was not taken, and the bulk of the citizens of the town were not aware that a rebellion was in progress until it had already been put down.
At Moncada, Castro’s followers fought staunchly in the face of impossible odds, but they were too thoroughly outnumbered to have much effect. Batista’s army retained control, and the rebels scattered for their lives.
Many were killed in the fighting. Others, captured, never reached prison; they were killed on the spot by Batista’s troops. Fidel himself, and his younger brother Raul as well, narrowly missed execution in this manner. Only because the army officer who captured him had been a classmate of his at Havana was he delivered to the civilian authorities instead of being put to death at once.
Castro acted as his own attorney in the trial held that September. He told the court that an attorney appointed by the Havana Bar Association had not been permitted to see him while he was in jail, that he himself had been denied access to documents important to his defense. Nevertheless he made an impassioned and eloquent plea to the court, lashing out against the excesses of the Batista regime, presenting his projected reforms, criticizing the inequality and oppression which he saw around him throughout Cuba. His defense, doomed from the start, since the courts were in Batista’s hands, was not successful. It had no chance.
But his speech was successful. People listened to the tall young man with the firm voice. People who had never known Castro existed began to take him into their hearts as a leader. The trial, designed by Batista to squelch the resistance forever, had an opposite effect. It increased Castro’s following. And Fidel himself saw with greater confidence something he had already learned at the University of Havana: when he spoke, Cubans listened.
“I end my defense,” he told the court, “but I shall not do it as lawyers always do, asking for the defendant’s liberty. I cannot ask for this when my companions are already suffering imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. Send me to join them and to share their fate. It is inconceivable that honest men are dead or jailed in a republic unless the President is a criminal or thief.
“As for me, I know that jail will be hard as it has never been for anyone else, pregnant with threats and with cowardly ferociousness. But I do not fear it as I do not fear the fury of the wretched tyrant who has already torn away the life of seventy brothers.
“Condemn me! It does not matter! History will absolve me!”
The judges may or may not have been impressed; there is no way to tell. But, whether or not history would absolve Fidel Castro, they had no intention of so doing. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the Isle of Pines.