Buying the Night Flight Read online

  A week and a half before, I had finished the Dominican elections of April 1966 and felt I needed to "get away" for a few days (if a foreign correspondent can properly use that expression). So I went over to San Juan for the weekend. Al Burt, then of The Miami Herald, and I had breakfast and he told me jovially, "I suppose you know that José Llanusa is here with the Cuban contingent for the Caribbean games." Llanusa, then the Cuban minister of education, was very close to Castro and, Burt pointed out, was offering certain journalists a rare chance to get into Cuba at a rare moment.

  My weekend of peace and my dreams of beaches dissolved. No correspondents had been allowed in for more than a year and Fidel himself had not been seen for upward of four or five months. The rumors were gaining in crescendo like a crowd forming around a sudden accident. "Fidel is dead" ... "Fidel has been replaced" ... "Fidel is in prison" ... "Fidel is out" ...

  I took a cab out to the Olympic Village. My best estimate was that my chances were no more than one in one hundred, but I couldn't not take the chance. At the gate the engaging little Puerto Rican told me that Llanusa was out. I waited. I waited and waited. In fact I waited all day. I had lunch with the Puerto Rican guards and was just beginning to get tired of it all, wondering why I hadn't stayed on the beach, when Llanusa returned.

  A rangy, dark-haired man who looked as though he belonged in Montana rather than in Cuba, Llanusa stood, his hands on his hips and his sport shirt casually open halfway down his chest, facing me on the little patio of his "Olympic" villa.

  "You want to go to Cuba?" he asked. I nodded firmly. "All right, come back with us on the boat." It was all accomplished in less than five minutes. Again, "hanging around" had paid rich dividends.

  But the Cubans were not returning for at least ten days -- the duration of the games. I became impatient. Since I had not been home for a long time and since my father had been very ill, I decided to use this time to return to Chicago for a week. They promised, the Cubans did, that they would not leave under any circumstances before the end of the games. Besides, I had a Puerto

  Rican friend in the Olympic Village administration, and we arranged for me to call him every night to be sure that there was no mix-up. I left for Chicago.

  Everything went fine for six nights. Then, on a Friday night, I was at a party at our editor's, Roy Fisher's, and I put through my usual call. There were still four full days left until the scheduled departure.

  "Something changed," my Puerto Rican friend now told me worriedly. "The Cubans got very angry at the games rules today and they're pulling out tomorrow." Tomorrow!

  I boarded the first flight to San Juan on Saturday. It was three hours late. Every minute that passed was a deadly reminder to me of my mistake in not staying in San Juan. When we finally arrived at 6:00 p.m. instead of 3:00 p.m. I raced to the dock. I could still see the ship on the horizon. Going to Cuba. Going to Cuba without me.

  "They waited about forty minutes for you," the dockmaster told me matter-of-factly, as though I had missed an Amtrak to Philadelphia. "Then I guess they had to go." I said I guessed they did. I went down to the hotel, contemplated suicide, and instead went to the bar.

  The next few days were filled with a particular brand of torture. Every day I had to read about the ship. About how Fidel had taken the unprecedented action of meeting it there and riding with the athletes back to Havana on the train. I pictured myself ... arriving in Cuba ... sitting with Fidel on the train as he talked with the athletes .... My mind and conscience were equally unforgiving.

  But if making mistakes is part of the game, so is recouping. I tried to pull myself together and decide what to do next. Talking with the office, I decided it was worth it to make another last-ditch, desperate try. So I flew to Mexico City through Miami and prepared for a long siege of trying to telephone Llanusa in Havana and see if he would give me a visa to come through Mexico, where there was an embassy. I now expected the odds to be about a thousand to one.

  The first morning I put through a call. To my astonishment it went through right away and I also got Llanusa on the phone right away. "Of course," he said, to my astonishment. "If you go right away to the embassy, perhaps you can get the one p.m. plane." I was on the 1:00 p.m. plane; I had dinner with Llanusa that night in Havana.

  The next night Llanusa's wife leaned across the table at the Tropicana. "We have to go," she said suddenly. "Bueno, muy bien, " I said agreeably. "No, you don't understand," she went on, "you're going to see Fidel."

  Our car sped back to the Havana Libre, the former Hilton, and there, in front of the hotel, was Fidel Castro, leader of the revolution, hero to young revolutionaries throughout the world, premier of Marxist Cuba, pacing back and forth. Two jeeploads of men, their machine guns poking out like sticks out of a green garden, waited by the curbside.

  My first impression of Fidel Castro remains with me. And still, frankly, bewilders me. There before me was what everyone sees from the pictures--the big barrel-chested man with the neat khaki uniform, the heavy overhanging forehead, the little and tight eyes, the strange irregular jaw. But what surprised me then, and all the times I saw him, was the strange mixture of almost abnormal sweetness, like a favorite uncle's overly affectionate attitude toward his young kin, and a piercing and quite frightening coldness and ruthlessness -- bordering on a total lack of feeling for others -- behind the eyes.

  It was also strange to me that I felt virtually no normal sexual attraction for him at all. I say this with hesitation, because it is so easily misunderstood. I never looked at leaders or anybody else I interviewed as sexual quarry, and never ever confused professional and personal relationships. (Men are equal -- they shouldn't be sex objects, either.) Yet usually there was some very normal degree of sexual interest.

  Castro, who was after all a big, earthy man, left me with no feeling at all. I even felt a certain effeminacy in him, something I would not have trusted had not other women who met him backed up this view. I am not in the slightest suggesting homosexuality. Castro had had lots of women. Rather I think I was seeing for the first time a man for whom women and sex were simply instrumental and unimportant, for whom power -- in the name of "the revolution," with which he totally equated himself -- was everything.

  The rest of his entourage immediately fell asleep. I found myself, thirty-one years old with two years of experience in Latin America, face to face with one of the most charismatic and sought-after leaders in the world. My notebooks were in the hotel, but I could take no chance on losing this apparition. So I began to work out a certain method I later perfected. I learned to focus -- virtually to set my mind on -- certain important phrases as he uttered them. I had the conscious feeling of a hand coming out of my mind and grasping them and freezing them for a moment. I found that with this method I could keep quotes perfectly for at least three days.

  And Castro was indeed a marvelous interview. You never had to ask him a question -- he began, and seven hours later, or eight, he stopped.

  But there was one curious pause. At 1:30 a.m. Fidel paused for breath. He looked at Llanusa, who was asleep. "José ..." He jostled him to awaken him. "Let's get some ice cream."

  Llanusa looked groggily at his watch. "It's too late," he said.

  Right across the street from the hotel there was an enormous, super-modern ice cream parlor. Since it took in a full city block, was the only modern building about, and was tied to the earth by none other than flying buttresses, I sensed it represented more than a taste for ice cream.

  Fidel looked at me and said with deadly seriousness, "We now have twenty-eight flavors."

  I was astonished, confused. What was I supposed to say -- "Do you have chocolate ripple?"

  Then he said, again with total seriousness, "That's more than Howard Johnson's has."

  Now I was absolutely nonplussed. Howard Johnson's? Was I in Communist Cuba or was I Alice in Wonderland?

  Then he answered the riddle -- and gave me some good insight into the Fidelian mind. "Before the revolution
," he said, now with just a touch of humor in his eyes, "the Cuban people loved Howard Johnson's ice cream. This is our way of showing we can do everything better than the Americans."

  But the little charade didn't even end there. I described the little incident for a light touch in my first interview with Fidel. The paper called Howard Johnson's in Chicago and they replied, "Sorry, Fidel, but now we have thirty-two." When I told Castro this, the next time I saw him in the mountains, he laughed heartily and said, "That just shows we have to work harder."

  The stories I filed to Chicago, by wire then, went from there all over the world: " Castro IS ALIVE ," the banner headlines read. The Cuban exiles attacked me for saying that Castro took two showers a day. The pro-Castro people attacked me because I didn't eulogize him enough. That's the way it goes.

  Despite all this, Cuba in so many ways turned out to be a peculiar kind of torment. It was my first serious bout with the total ideological personality. In Cuba, for the first time, I was troubled by the kinds of conflicts that were to become the leitmotiv of my generation of journalists. My conscience tormented me with the challenge of portraying things truthfully and correctly, many of them things I could in no conceivable way really and wholly know. I was always on the outside touching parts and portions. This was my first confrontation with Marxist communism and its absolute demands for suzerainty over not only one's body but one's soul. A year later I would go to Russia -- and in subsequent years to many other Marxist lands, but this was my first and most painful confrontation.

  I have to admit, even now, that at first I was attracted by the clear absoluteness of it, and I resented and rebelled against and hated myself for this attraction. The entire philosophy seemed so simple, so whole, so cogent. One truth, one revolution, one way for man. As a lone American on that island for two months the bombardment of ideology staggered me, crept every moment into my consciousness.

  How, I kept asking myself, had this whole Western, Christian people -- this whole nation -- suddenly switched, like a light going off, to communism? How had such a rapid political and mental transformation been made? As in Santo Domingo, the very tropicality of the place was a dissembling factor; tropicales are not supposed to turn out to be impassioned ideologues. It was as if something darkly magical had taken place. Everywhere I went, I asked, "How did you come to communism?" And almost always the answer was, interestingly, the same.

  At Veradero Beach, Alfredo González, the bartender at the restaurant that had been the old Irénée Du Pont mansion (family pictures were still displayed on the end tables) told me when I asked him how he had become a Communist, "After the revolution, they kept making these laws, and they were good for the people, and then one day they said they were Communist."

  In the Third World countries that had gone to communism in the postcolonial period this change was never out of choice. It was because the people were following an all-powerful leader who had already been won to Marxism, which offered him eternal dictatorship. They were following the all-knowing traditional Latin American macho líder máximo.

  Then there was the continuous game of watching Fidel, trying to understand this prototype of the man who becomes "one" with the people: the leader, the caudillo, and, ultimately, the dictator. Dr. Claudio Palacios Mesa, a Cuban psychiatrist, described the relation ship between Fidel and the people in "la Plaza" in these words: "It was a kind of dialogue between him and the people. Oh, the people didn't speak, but from time to time they would applaud. They would find he was saying exactly the things they were feeling."

  I watched Fidel's New Class firsthand. I stayed at the Communist Party guesthouses (all very cute and swish) all over the island. I dined with Fidel at his beach house with Llanusa, and he talked endlessly about the types of yogurt he was producing. I stood for hours with him on the beach while he talked to the crowds that gathered-- often speaking elliptically about sharks, which I knew of course represented the U.S. I watched him take little scraps of paper from people's hands with their requests written on them. This practice had begun centuries before in Spain when people brought notes to the bishops. It was, even now, continued with the dictators all through Central America. I went to the old racetrack and watched the gaunt, jaded faces of the "Old Cuba" watching the horses.

  ***

  One day we all went down to a collective farm at Banao, where I observed how Fidel worked. Everybody was "waiting for Fidel"; this was why the country was working so poorly and why the Russians stepped in 1970 with their intergovernmental economic commission, which meant in effect that the Soviets took over the total planning of Che's destroyed ideological economy.

  The peasants, even officials, stood in a line until Fidel came. He emerged from his jeep, embraced many of them, then spent several hours walking up and down each line of beans, strawberries, corn. He would stand there, that special look of studied, theatrical puzzlement on his face -- a look I got to know well.

  "Why not move that over two inches?" he would say, speaking of an errant line of beans. "Sí, Fidel," they murmured, as in chorus. "Brillante, " another would whisper. It didn't take a degree in economics to see what was plaguing the Cuban economy; it was the old Caudilloismo and the dependency of the people.

  Everywhere I saw a blend of the old, traditional Latin characteristics and the modern, universal ones. At the beach one day, for instance, we stood for four hours while Fidel spoke to a group of Cubans, who stared at him as transfixed as their mothers would have stared at the Virgin Mary. They began to offer him their problems. Each problem -- a roof fallen down because of the rains, an overcharge of rent, a child not cared for correctly in a hospital, was written down on a scrap of paper by Fidel and placed in his upper right-hand pocket. He then took these back and gave them to his lover and assistant, Celia Sanchez, who personally took care of them.

  Then we had the lunch in Banao. To my surprise Fidel very deliberately sat me down directly across from him at a long table. Approximately thirty of his inner circle were with us. It soon became clear that I was being used -- as a foil.

  "Now, you are a decent person," Fidel would say, and I would wonder what was coming next. "Every decent person has to support the revolution."

  "Not journalists," I said. "Even if we personally support much of it, we have to keep a distance. Nothing is so perfect or so pure in the world that it does not need outer criticism, that it does not require some people who stand apart ... and outside."

  He focused on me in a strange manner. "Nobody can stand apart," he cried. And he began the ideological lecture, using me as a foil. "Everybody must take part. You cannot serve the imperialists if you are a decent person, you cannot...."

  I could see this was going to go on for hours. And though my Spanish was good, I was certainly at a disadvantage. So, in the heat, and exhausted after several hours, I unconsciously hit upon a successful stratagem. One of Castro's own speaking tactics, when he was addressing the crowds in the Plaza de la Revolución, was to say, "and what do the Yanqui imperialists say now? They say Cuba is going to fall into the sea. And what do I say, I say 'Mentira, mentira.'" [You lie.]

  And so, subconsciously, I found myself mimicking Fidel. When he said something particularly outrageous, I found myself shaking my right arm in the air -- at him -- and yelling, "Mentira, mentira. "

  To my relief and amazement it completely broke the tension. His aides roared with laughter, and even he laughed. The spell was broken and the pressure was off me.

  But when I got to my hotel room that night, I realized what a toll something like this takes. Never in my life had I ever been left so deeply, totally, emotionally exhausted and drained. I quite literally staggered into my room. I didn't even go down for dinner. Arguing with the Fidel Castros of the world is not invigorating.

  But I did not think I had lost.

  ***

  There was always the nagging question of "truth" -- the basic question, of course. Do you "truthfully" report a society like Cuba's by reporting what they tell you,
when you know they are lying? Do you report what you suspect? What dissidents tell you? In this, my initial experience, all I could try to do was to put together my observations and insights and judgments from all sources and try to arrive at a relative truth that would please no one. It didn't matter; journalists (as most people have already guessed) were not put in the world to please other people.

  I did work out ways of doing things. I could, for instance, work on two levels: the stated and the effective. Even if I disagreed fervently with someone, say a dictator of some sort, if he were indeed doing a lot of good for his people, I could judge and say that with utter dispassion and fairness. Equally, as much as I loved my own country, I could always judge where it was being just and effective in its policies and where it was not. This, it seems to me, is as close as one can get to a mini-philosophy of journalistic fairness.

  What was infinitely more complex was how to report this new ideological mind. How do we report mind control? Coercion, physi cal or psychological? The manipulators of souls? These were the new questions for the new era into which I just happened to be born, and they were utterly bedeviling. In 1966 Jonestown and Cambodia and Iran were still to come -- but I glimpsed their beginnings that hot, long, troubling summer.

  In 1966 Fidel Castro had only barely revealed himself. He was considered the revolutionary hero of his time, particularly in Latin America but also among many quarters in the States. I felt nervously uncomfortable with this definition of Fidel, even more so after I was in Cuba. When one looked into his psyche, there were certain things that stood out: