Havana Harvest (7 page)

His guest took a gulp. “If nobody, not our government and not the
yanquis,
can prove that Raul knew about the drugs, we're halfway home. All we have to establish is that
I
didn't know about it either, but that's going to be a bitch. Too many people know that I know. They've gotten relevant orders from me directly.”

“In writing?”

“Don't be silly. But there's more than one of them and they'll corroborate each other's stories.” De la Fuente wiped his face and hands with a dishcloth he had picked off the oven door handle. “No, Patricio, there is only one way to save the Revolution, and that's through having us tried in public if necessary. And there's only one way we can save our own skins.”

“How?” Casas's question was a whisper.

“We need to have proof that either Fidel or Raul or my father-in-law or all three of them have been in this from the beginning! I know they have and you know they have, but do we have proof? Do we have irrefutable proof?”

The question troubled Casas. “We have proof that the government has known about Department Z from the word go. It's in the secret minutes, in writing, and everybody signed it. As for the drugs, I never saw anything in writing.” The meaning of what he had just said jolted Casas. “Jesus, Oscar,” he whispered, his eyes wide. “You've compartmentalized this thing so well that even I don't have direct proof of the drug thing being an offcially authorized operation.” He gave his guest a hard, no-nonsense look. “Tell me, Oscar,” his voice had a steely edge. “Tell me truthfully since you're the one who recruited me. Are you on the level, or have you been fucking with us all this time?”

“What if I have?”

Casas, beside himself with rage, yanked De la Fuente out of his chair with a swift, merciless movement, tearing the man's shirt in the process. De la Fuente stood his ground silently, until Casas released him.

“You ought to watch that temper of yours, Patricio,” he finally managed to croak, massaging his throat. “It no longer matters whether the operation is legit. What matters is believable deniability.” He turned on his heels and headed for the door.

“Oscar!” The word cracked like a pistol shot and made De la Fuente whip around to face his host. “You leave this house now and you're a dead man.”

The Minister smiled deprecatingly. “Don't be a prick, Patricio. You want me alive, not dead. To keep up the appearances of business as usual, come to the office Tuesday morning as planned, and we'll talk some more. By then I'm sure you will have calmed down.” De la Fuente left before Casas could think of a suitable reply.

Casas tidied the kitchen and then headed for his favorite spot in the garden, under the mango tree. He needed to think. It concerned him that De la Fuente had not answered the key question of whether the government really knew about the drug operation.

It was vital that the government know. Believable deniability was of no use to Casas. On the contrary, he wanted the world to see to what depths the revolutionaries had sunk. He wanted it known that they were drug dealers, merchants of death, the allies of pimps and whores. And for this, he needed Fernandez's testimony.

Casas's disillusionment with the regime had been slow to mature. He had heard the gossip about Che Guevara's excesses as commander of Morro Castle prison, where the Argentine had, supposedly, presided over the execution of a large number of alleged counter-revolutionaries. This had troubled Casas, but he had dismissed the matter because the Bay of Pigs happened and it had been necessary to protect the gains of the Revolution.

He heard the complaints when he returned from Russia: excessive bureaucratic meddling, the venality of the CDR presidents, cronyism in high places, the rise of a new elite (members of the Cuban Communist Party), inefficient production planning by the state. The list went on and on.

Give it time,
he had told himself,
it takes patience to build a new society.
But then the suicides began. Close to a dozen of his erstwhile comrades, all idealistic populists, killed themselves, one after the other. In the end, the drug thing had been the proverbial last straw that had broken the camel's back.

Oscar was unfortunately right for all the wrong reasons. To succeed in what he was planning, Casas had no alternative but to help De la Fuente to obtain proof that Fidel and Raul and the whole damn lot of them, were up to their necks in drugs and guilty as hell.

Whether Casas liked it or not, he and De la Fuente were allies in this. Though motivated by different reasons, they wanted to achieve the same end result. Why then did the deputy minister want Fernandez dead? It just did not make sense.

De la Fuente got into his Toyota and forced himself to sit still for an entire minute. He knew he was a bad driver under normal conditions, and anger seemed to affect his eye-hand coordination, which made him even more of a menace on the road.

“Two-and-a-half years' work down the drain,” he seethed. “I'm so near to success that I can smell it.” He desperately needed concrete evidence linking Castro to the drug operation, even if he had to manufacture it. Fernandez's testimony alone would never be enough.

But allowing Fernandez to remain alive would jeopardize the big picture. It would blow Operation Adios. He had no choice: to allay Casas's suspicions he had to insist that Fernandez be eliminated.

Like most of Fidel's early supporters, De la Fuente had been a student on July 26, 1953, the day Castro and his comrades had attacked the Moncada barracks. De la Fuente had been well aware of Batista's corruptness, his henchmen's cruelty, his cronies' indifference to the suffering of ordinary Cubans in a land where the rich had all the privileges and the poor were exploited without mercy. His relief was sincere when he heard that Fidel had been sent to prison for what he had done rather than condemned to die.

Castro and his fellow freedom fighters were released after serving two of their ten-year prison sentences and left for Mexico soon thereafter to organize the Cuban revolutionary movement from abroad.

De la Fuente suspected that several of his fellow students at the University of Santiago belonged to the clandestine 26th of July Movement, as Fidel's revolutionary group became known, but his discreet inquiries seemed to fall on deaf ears, and for good reason. De la Fuente's father, a magistrate, was known to be a strong Batista supporter.

Three years after the Moncada incident De la Fuente was taking math tutorials at El Preparatorio Flores in Santiago de Cuba when, one evening, he ran into Roberto Cisneiros, a classmate, who was dating Professor Flores's daughter. They got into an animated discussion, and De la Fuente was invited for dinner at the teacher's house. Thereafter, Cisneiros and De la Fuente met frequently for drinks and coffee. At these meetings Oscar made it clear that his sympathies lay with the rebels and not with his father's cronies. Then, one day, Cisneiros disappeared. His girlfriend told De la Fuente that he had gone underground to help prepare the way for Fidel's return.

De la Fuente was mortified. How could his friend have left him behind? Why was the opportunity to help rid his country of the tyrant Batista being denied to him?

A few days later De la Fuente was abducted by two men, blindfolded, and driven into the countryside to a
fidelista
safe house. There he was trained in clandestine work: operating shortwave wireless equipment, mastering methods of encoding, and assembling mines and other explosive devices. At the end of his course he was given the addresses of a number of safe houses located in the principal cities of the country, and then driven in the dead of night to Holguien, a town in southeastern Cuba, to start working for Fidel's underground.

Under Cisneiros's direction, De la Fuente carried out his duties with dedication, verve, and great effectiveness.

When Fidel decided to return to Cuba in the
Granma,
a rundown luxury yacht the revolutionaries had purchased in Mexico, he sent word that he needed a guide familiar with the targeted landing beach near Niguero in Oriente Province. Cisneiros, who knew the area, volunteered to meet Castro and to guide him and his companions into the nearby Sierra Maestra mountain range.

The
Granma
landed in the wrong place, and its occupants were ambushed by Batista's forces. Of the eighty-two revolutionaries on board, only thirty—including the two Castro brothers and the wounded Che Guevara—made it to the relative safety of the mountains with the help of Cisneiros and his adjutant, De la Fuente.

By the time the rebels triumphed in January 1959, De la Fuente had become one of Castro's trusted collaborators and was rewarded for his loyalty and hard work by el Lider Maximo with a post in the Ministry of the Interior.

But within five years De la Fuente was asking himself serious questions about the direction in which Fidel was taking the revolutionary movement. He understood that to make an omelet one had to break some eggs, but he thought there were altogether too many eggs being broken, some without reason.

On the seventeenth anniversary of the Triumph of the Revolution, a public holiday, De la Fuente got to his office early. He needed to attend to urgent business before joining hundreds of thousands of his compatriots on the Plaza de la Revolucion to hear Fidel speak.

He was hurrying through the composition of his second memo when the phone rang. “Oscar,” said a familiar voice he could not immediately identify. “It's me, Roberto.”

Who the hell is Roberto?
De la Fuente asked himself,
and how does he have this number?

“Roberto?”

“Coño, pero que te pasa?”
The voice insisted. “Don't you recognize my voice? It's me, Roberto Cisneiros.” His former comrade in arms sounded awful.

“I did, I did. It's just that I wanted to be sure. Security, you know,” he added lamely.

“I need to talk to you.”

“All of a sudden, after a couple of years? What's up?”

“I've been sick, Oscar, but you know that. I'm better now, and I need some advice.”

He is looking for a job
thought De la Fuente. Cisneiros had been captured and brutally tortured by Batista's secret police a week before the rebels' coming to power. As a result, he had required intermittent psychiatric care during the past decade and was unable to cope with the demands of a steady job. De la Fuente had heard through the grapevine that Cisneiros's wife had divorced him because he was beating her, and that she had taken their two small kids, whom he adored, with her when she moved out.

“When do you want to get together?” De la Fuente felt strong loyalty toward Cisneiros, who had saved his life on more than one occasion.

“How about meeting at the Copelia at eleven? It won't take long, not more than half an hour.”

De la Fuente consulted his watch then looked at the stack of papers in his In basket. “OK, let's do it, but be there at eleven sharp.” The arrangement left him ninety minutes of working time, certainly not enough to finish what he had hoped to accomplish during the day. But a friend was in need of help so he had to reorganize. He figured he'd spend half an hour with his erstwhile comrade and get home by noon for lunch with his wife and kids. Then he'd go back to the office and do some more work, hopefully finishing most, if not all, that was left to do in time to hear Fidel speak.

The Copelia Ice Cream Palace, on the corner of Calle 23 and N, opposite the Havana Libre Hotel, formerly a Hilton, was within two blocs of the Ministry of the Interior. Cisneiros was waiting for him at the entrance.

They lined up to make their choice from the thirty-odd varieties of ice cream the Copelia offered, and then took a table in the section reserved for the
nomenklatura,
important officials of the government.

Cisneiros looked awful. Dressed in a worn, long-sleeved plaid shirt and faded slacks, his face unshaven, his complexion sallow, his lusterless eyes ringed by dark shadows, he gave the impression of a tortured man down on his luck who had gone without sleep for days.

De la Fuente was so concerned that he could not help blurting out: “Roberto, you look terrible. Are you ill?”

Cisneros grabbed his arm. “It was all for nothing, Oscar, all for nothing,” he whispered.

He spent the next half hour telling De la Fuente about how the Revolution had failed the people, how corruption was rampant, how the populace was suffering as a result of Fidel allying himself with the socialist camp, how there was no hope for a better future for the children of Cuba.