Buying the Night Flight (15 page)

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:

His rough and gross father, a Gallegan from Spain, sired Fidel and other siblings by his servant, a woman whom he married only after their birth. Fidel always hated him. Castro was typical of the charismatic personality described by writer Gene Vier: "No single person represented an absolute value. They were always seeking the universal, which implied a detachment from the particular, a detachment that pervades Castro's friendships -- no particular person has an absolute value for him." We know now that he always hated -- abhorred -- the U.S. and set himself up as a Communist in order to fight it. We know now that from his earliest days in the mountains fighting Batista, he planned to make the U.S. his enemy and foil, just as he tried to make me, on an infinitesimal level, his foil that day in Banao. In my heart I knew after that summer that Castro would never have made peace with the United States, no matter what we did -- he needed us, psychologically, and he needed us as the enemy against which all of his energies could rage, and thus become real.

But I learned more that summer than just how to peer into Fidel Castro's psyche.

The third day I was in Havana I had run into Chile's Salvador Allende in the lobby of the Havana Libre. I blinked. There was Senator Allende, not then the martyred first elected Marxist president in the world and certainly not anything near the martyr he was to become to so many people. He was still a charming, dapper, egocentric bourgeois. I had known him when he ran for the Chilean presidency in 1964. Only now he had been totally forgotten, by Chile it seemed, by the world, and certainly by his old "friend" Fidel Castro. Indeed, he was, in Fidel's eyes, disgraced. He had not only lost (Fidel never considered him a real revolutionary until much, much later, if then) but he had lost to Fidel's archenemy, the ethereal Eduardo Frei, and to Christian Democracy, which Fidel quite rightly considered his rival in revolution in the world.

So it was that he spent most of his time sitting in the hotel lobby, forgotten and forsaken. I immediately went up to him. "Senator Allende, do you remember me?" I asked.

It seemed he did remember me, perhaps because I seemed to be about the only person in Havana who wanted to talk to him. My guides looked at him sidewise with barely disguised looks of disgust. "He is always hanging around, waiting for Fidel to come and see him," one high party member told me, "and Fidel can't stand him." It all became rather pathetic, and I somehow felt sorry for the fallen Marxist, in his funny little hats. Every time I saw him, he would say something like, "I am sure Fidel will come for me today, I am sure of it."