The Longest Romance (12 page)

Cuban exiles were also getting on both Matthews's and Kennedy's nerves at around this time. They were sending hate-mail to
The New York Times
and “sensationalist rumors” about Russian missiles to the White House. For weeks dozens of young
Cuban exiles had been infiltrating Cuba and bringing out eyewitness reports of Soviet missiles. In the process, dozens were also dying by firing squad and torture at the hands of Castro and Che Guevara's KGB-tutored secret police.

Matthews's insight into Cuban matters in October 1962 would have probably been welcomed among “the best and the brightest.” Chances are his insights would match and confirm their own. To wit:

“There is no evidence of any organized combat force in Cuba from any Soviet-bloc country,” stressed a public statement from President Kennedy in September 1962, “or of military bases provided to Russia or of the presence of offensive ground-to-ground missiles.”
⁷

“Our intelligence on this is very good and very hard,” stressed Undersecretary of State George Ball to a Congressional committee.
⁸

“Nothing but refugee rumors,” sneered JFK's national security advisor McGeorge Bundy on ABC's “Issues and Answers” on October 14, 1962. “Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States,” continued the Ivy League luminary, barely masking his scorn for the hot-headed and deceitful Cuban exiles and their sensational reports of missiles. “There's no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability in Cuba,” he scoffed.

“There's fifty-odd-thousand Cuban refugees in this country,” sneered President Kennedy himself, “all living for the day when we go to war with Cuba. They're the ones putting out this kind of stuff.”
⁹
Exactly 48 hours later U-2 photos on the President's desk revealed those refugee rumors, complete with nuclear warheads, and pointed directly at Bundy, JFK and their entire staff of sagacious Ivy League wizards—to say nothing of Herbert Matthews.

Much of that very good and very hard intelligence had been vouchsafed to Robert Kennedy by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The setting was one of those (hush-hush, wink-wink) “back-channel” meetings for which the Soviet ambassador and the U.S. attorney general were to become famous. The irresponsible
rumor-mongering from Republican Senators Keating and Goldwater about Russian missiles in Cuba had obviously reached Premier Khrushchev's attention, explained Dobrynin.

But he fully realized (wink-wink) that mid-term elections loomed in the U.S. So he fully expected those rascally Republicans (wink-wink), in light of their poor prospects and eager to affect a reversal, to engage in politics at their sleaziest. Hence their crackpot claims of Soviet missiles in Cuba, accompanied by tens of thousands of fully-armed Soviet troops.

Robert Kennedy assured Dobrynin that the president (wink-wink) was an old hand at this type of thing. He knew full well what the Republicans were up to and saw right through their scam. Soviet Premier Khrushchev need not worry. In the November elections the rascally Republican scare-mongers (wink-wink) would get their comeuppance, and all would return to normal.

In sum: eyewitness reports regarding Soviet missiles from men dodging Soviet patrols and risking death from Soviet-armed firing squads were poo-poohed as unreliably biased. Instead the president of the U.S.—to confirm his “back-channel” scoop from a Soviet ambassador originally appointed by Stalin—sought out a presumably unbiased report regarding Soviet intentions. For this he chose a man whom a Soviet satrap had personally decorated with a medal inscribed, “To Our American Friend Herbert Matthews with Gratitude. Fidel Castro.” In addition, the FBI had been monitoring this (presumably unbiased) man for three years. “One can't get much closer to communism without becoming one,” J. Edgar Hoover had written Vice President Nixon about Herbert Matthews in July of 1959.
¹⁰

After Carlos Bringuier and his in-laws had secured Eusebio Mujal's exit-visa from Argentina, the labor leader asked that Bringuier discreetly drive him to the airport—and in disguise. “If I
take a taxi, Castro's hit-team will get me before I reach the airport,” Mujal explained.

“Again I thought Mujal was exaggerating,” recalls Bringuier. “‘Drama queen' wasn't a term used in those days, but that's pretty much what I thought at the time. Regardless, we followed all his instructions and got him safely to his flight to Miami.

“Well, a week later I get a call from Lara, the Cuban consul in Argentina,” said Bringuier. “‘Where's Eusebio Mujal?' asks Lara. ‘Have you seen him? Tell him to be careful. Two men from Uruguay were here yesterday looking for him. I overheard their conversation.... I know this sounds crazy, but I'm pretty sure I overheard them sounding like they were out to kill him.'”

Cuban consul Lara, let's keep in mind, was in a weird spot at the time. He was a career Cuban foreign-service official. He'd been ambassador to Argentina under the Batista government, so he was still on the job in early 1959. The Comintern's hit-men had apparently been tipped off to Mujal's whereabouts by Castro. And assuming that the Cuban consul in Argentina must be a Castro-regime apparatchik, the hit-men were not as discreet as normal in their conversations.

“Where is Eusebio Mujal?” Fidel Castro shrieked during a speech in Santa Clara, Cuba that very week, almost as if to confirm Mujal's fears. “All I can say is that those who have not yet fallen will soon face the firing squad!”

“¿Donde Esta Mujal?”
(Where is Mujal?) asked Cuba's Castroite paper of the time,
Prensa Libre,
in a headline some weeks later. “I was back in Cuba by then,” recalls Carlos Bringuier. “But I sure wasn't telling.”

Successful hit-men also found a warm welcome in Castro's Cuba. In 1961, promptly upon completing his prison sentence in Mexico, Trotsky's ax-murderer Ramon Mercader found his way to Cuba, where he became a bosom-buddy of his longtime fan Che Guevara, then serving as Cuba's minister of industries. In that capacity Che anointed Ramon Mercader as Cuba's inspector
of prisons. Quite fittingly, in 1961, Castro's prisons held about the same number of political prisoners per capita as Mercader's boss (and Che's idol) Stalin's had held in 1936. But “Cuba is now a happy island,” assured
The New York Times'
Herbert Matthews.

Granted, in this age of “Occupy” movements where union officials march behind Communist Party placards and shoulder to shoulder with their card-carrying bearers, the notion of labor leaders on a Communist Party hit-list sounds odd. But three or four decades ago this was common practice, as Eusebio Mujal's American friend and associate George Meany would have willingly and gruffly explained.

CHAPTER 8

H
erbert Matthews was “the only person absolutely qualified to write about Cuba,” according to his friend and frequent host in Cuba, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway.
¹

As for the famous novelist—according to KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev, “the 42-year-old Hemingway was recruited by the KGB under the cover name Argo' in 1941, and cooperated with Soviet agents whom he met in Havana and London.” This comes from a book published in 2009 by Yale University Press (not exactly a branch of the John Birch Society).

“Castro's revolution,” Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is very pure and beautiful. I'm encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time.” Papa's sometime friend John Dos Passos said Hemingway “had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I've ever run into.”
²

“Cuban mothers, let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba's problems without spilling a drop of blood.” Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones upon entering Havana on January 8, 1959. As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued: “Cuban mothers, let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry.”

Indeed, Hemingway saw behind these pretensions of love, charity and humanism—quite literally.

Some background: as commander of Havana's La Cabana prison and execution yard in the early months of the revolution, Che Guevara often coached his firing squads in person, then rushed up to shatter the skull of the convulsed man (or boy) by firing the
coup de grace
himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution-yard, Che consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. His second-story office in La Cabana had a section of wall torn out to better view his darling firing squads at work, often in the company of distinguished friends. Havana resident Ernest Hemingway was one of these.

Accounts of “Papa” Hemingway's presence at these massacres comes courtesy of Hemingway's own friend, the late George Plimpton (not exactly a right-wing Cuban exile) who worked as editor of
The Paris Review
(not exactly a McCarthyite scandal-sheet).

In 1958 George Plimpton interviewed Hemingway in Cuba for one of
The Paris Review's
most famous pieces. They became friends, and the following year Hemingway again invited Plimpton down to his Finca Vigia just outside Havana. During the 1990's, an editor at
The Paris Review
related how this highbrow publication passed on an option to serialize the manuscript that became Che Guevara's
Motorcycle Diaries—
and revealed “Papa's” unwitting role in the rejection.

“I took the paper-clipped excerpt upstairs to the Boss [Plimpton],” writes James Scott Linville, “flopped down in the chair to the side of his desk ... and said I had something strange and good. As I started to tell him about it, his smile faded. I stopped my pitch and said, ‘Boss, what's the matter?'”

“James, I'm sorry,” Linville recalls Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him and he said, “Years ago, after we'd done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution. ‘There's something you should see,'” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.

Linville carried on, paraphrasing Plimpton's account. “They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town.
They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they'd been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew, the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners.

“The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.

“I said to George something to the effect of, ‘Oh, my God.'

“Then I said, ‘I don't believe you.' I'm not sure why I didn't.

“‘Did you ever write about this?'” Linville asked his boss Plimpton.

“‘No.'

“‘Why not?'

“‘He looked uncomfortable and shrugged.

“‘In the 20 years I knew George, it was the only time he refused to look at a piece of writing,” continues Linville. “It was unusual for George to talk about politics.... But still I didn't quite believe him. Quite simply, I'd never heard a word about such executions,” concludes Linville.
³

And there's the money quote.

Over the years
The Paris Review
has featured the works of literary luminaries William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, V. S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth, among many others. In the words of one critic, the magazine is “one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.” So up until the mid-1990's the ultra-educated editor of a magazine catering to the ultra-educated had no idea that Castro's regime had executed people. And he learned about a few of those executions only by a fluke.

“A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels,” said Hemingway in that very
Paris Review
interview with George Plimpton. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.”

So was Hemingway duped by Castroism? Did his shit-detector malfunction? Or was it on high alert? Few people, after all, had such access to Castroism's crime scenes. And the KGB, while certainly appreciating the work of dupes and useful idiots, was not known to sign them on (openly).

The Cuba Archive estimates that by the end of that year 2,000 Cubans had been murdered in the manner Ernest Hemingway loved to watch from his picnic chair while sipping mojitos. Significantly, both Hemingway and Plimpton passed on writing about any of those deaths in the afternoon—and morning and midnight. Augusto Pinochet's regime, needless to add, would never have gotten off so easily.