Index to a Revolution

 

 

Prelude - Dateline, Oct. 1957 

Chapter 1 - The Banana Republics

Chapter 2 - Latina Heat

Chapter 3- The Grey Lady

Chapter 4 - Wiseguys & Revolution

Chapter 5 - The Man in the Shadows

Chapter 6 - First Base Box Seats

Chapter 7 - Latin Heat & Cuban Wet Dreams

Chapter 8 - Mobsters and Showgirls

Chapter 9 - The Legacy of Lucky Luciano

Chapter 10 - The Princess Princess Hooker

Chapter 11 - Pilar Ybanez & the School of Rebellion

Chapter 12- The Riots Begin

Chapter 13 - CiA and Blood on the Campus

Chapter 14 - Telephone of the Immaculate Conception

Chapter 15 - The Old Man and the Sea

Chapter 16 - Sloppy Joes & the CIA Funhouse of Booze

Chapter 17 - Storm Clouds Over Havana

Chapter 18 - Hemingway's Boat & A Bottle of Rum

Chapter 19 - Salty Dogs of the Caribbean

Chapter 20 - A Mariin Named Brando 

Chapter 21 - The Sierrra Maestra

Chapter 22 - The Double Cross

Chapter 23 - Fight to Win, Fight to Die

Chapter 24 - Battle of La Plata

Chapter 25 - Strange Bedfellows

Chapter 26 - Cross Hairs of the Kill Zone

Chapter 27 - Bullets for Breakfast

Chapter 28 - Dirty Laundry

Chapter 29 - The Aftermath

Chapter 30 - Last Man Standing 

The Prelude: Dateline: October 1957

 

 

Dateline Havana: Oct. 9, 1957

Cuban government sources say Havana’s “People’s Record Bulletin” news editor, Francisco Santiago was shot by unidentified gunmen on motorcycles as he drove to work in the city suburbs.
He died from head wounds after nearly three hours of surgery, doctors say.
News reports in the past  say Senor Santiago had numerous run-ins with the government. Other journalists in Cuba  have also suffered a string of recent attacks and left wing and right wing  freedom groups agree on one thing.. intimidation and violence make it one of the most difficult countries in the world in which to report the truth.

 

Television pictures of Santiago’s car showed blood-stained seats and bullet holes in the windshield.
"We tried our best to revive him but we couldn't," hospital director Antonio Garcia  told the MMN news agency. Police spokesmen are investigating the attack and  said gunmen on two motorcycles had escaped after carrying out the attack. No arrests have been made.

Mr. Santiago always tried to be objective in his criticism of the Fulgencio Batista regime by collecting and verifying  the facts, which was why so many politicians feared him. Senor Santiago, although sympathetic to the leftist rebel cause would also point out in editorials injustices perpetrated by the revolutionaries. In a recent interview with a Miami radio station he said, “There must be balance in reporting. I want both sides to know I will report and print the facts of injustice inflicted by either side.”

 

A spokesman for the President Batista released a statement saying “Francisco and I didn’t always see eye to eye, but he was a fair man in every respect. We are living in an era of revolution and political upheaval in our nation. We always could talk and discuss our differences of opinion and the points we shared in common. He will be sorely missed and we will do all we can, to make every effort to bring the assassins, no matter who they are, to be punished for this crime.  I have my suspicions of who is responsible, but will observe silence for now on the issue out of respect for my dear friend, Francisco Santiago. He will be missed by all of us.”

End Transmission.

Chapter One: The Banana Republics

  

 

The breaking  story of Francisco Santiago’s assassination came across the teletype machine in it’s usual cacophony of clatter chatter filling the air of our newsroom in New York  with the droning mantra of chunka-chunka noise as it spat out each sentence with the force of a Gatling gun from our Miami newswire service affiliate. Although it was describing that day’s horrific events in Havana, we as seasoned newsmen and women were  almost  immune to the urgency generated by the teletype noise over the years. They only time we put or coffee down in a hurry was when the alarm bell rang declaring URGENT! URGENT!

 

 

Then hungover or not  we would dash to the machine like lemmings for a quick read of the copy to see what was breaking news in the world around us.

 

The mind raced in anticipation. Had the world ended? Did Moscow launch nukes at us? Was the President killed in a plane crash? Important questions? Yes, if humanity was on the brink of imminent destruction, every news agency wanted to scoop the competing newsrooms that we fought with on a daily basis.  We all wanted to be first even if it was the last blast of a nuclear attack.

 

This was October 1957. There were more important things on our minds this warm  fall evening than planetary destruction  This is New York after all. We are the world! The Center of the Universe! The Big Apple! We only wanted to know one thing. Would the Yankees win the ‘57 series over Milwaukee? Hell we had Mickey Mantle, Old Number 7 and the Braves were drunks, and worse, they had Irish roots as the Boston Braves.  Time would tell. Hell, this was New York and the office pool was Yankee Town USA. If the Soviets were gonna nuke us….fine...just wait until the series if over.

 

The night  the Santiago murder broke over the wire service, I was acting night editor that evening. Once a week one of the reporters would rotate in that position so Lew Abrams could have a night off after pulling six 12 hour shifts in a row. Could be worse. I could be the night editor. He had been doing it since 1946 after his years as a roving correspondent on the front lines in the Pacific. He was on Iejima, a small island northwest of Okinawa interviewing troops for Stars and Stripes, the same day and island where his good friend and fellow correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by enemy machine gun fire.

 

I was no Ernie Pyle. Hell, I wasn’t even Lew Abrams. Instead I was happy being me. Mickey Russo, loose cannon reporter of NYC sports initially (boxing and baseball),  then graduated and was now covering the local crime beat. Good training and material for “that great American novel”  I wanted to write someday. Getting down and dirty in the grit and grime of New York’s underworld gutter of organized crime, gamblers, junkies and hookers.  I laid off the bookmakers. I am a degenerate gambler and needed them to place bets and hope I will at least break even.

 

I was working for a small sports newspaper, The Sports Gazette in 1947 when my series of articles ran about Jackie Robinson as the first African American in major league baseball. He was signed by my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers and in the process broke through the color barrier in his first game against, those Beantown drunks, the Boston Braves at Ebbets Field.

My series did not go unnoticed.  I was  hired by the Record Bulletin newspaper and news service as a sports writer at first until placed on the crime beat, my second passion, by its fearless leader and editor, Hymie Bachman, the take no prisoners Jewish journalist with an eye for news as keen as a grifter who can spot a mark at ten paces. In another life he  could have been an exemplary stogie smoking hotel detective at the Waldorf catching jewel thieves and unmasking sexual peccadillos of cheating spouses sweating up the sheets and stealing towels.

 

Tonight was no different than any of the other night shifts I had filled in for Lew. I ripped the wire copy from the machine after a quick cursory glance. Oh hell. Another killing in a banana republic. The have political assassinations and coups on a regular basis. Just this year in Columbia, General Rojas was overthrown by his own military with the backing of all political parties. It was fair payback as  he had overthrown the former Gomez administration in 1953 with the same military. Everybody wants be king at one point in their lives. In South America, anyone with enough guns can.

 

Haiti was now being run and ruined by the Duvalier regime which would make it one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere with a legacy of political murder, executions and a shutdown of a free press and free expression while, Cuba was merely another Caribbean paper hat kingdom run by the thug Batista with the help and influence of the US Mafia spearheaded by Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky.  The Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford of Team Mafia, New York

 

While the Mob ruled the nightclubs and gambling and prostitution rackets, Batista turned a blind eye and enjoyed the kickbacks and wealth pouring into his private banks accounts. The Cuban people were poor and frustrated. There had been a small revolutionary movement underway but had made little progress since it’s inception in 1953 when a small band of rebels attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The leader of the revolt,  a young Cuban, Fidel Castro and some of his cadre were  arrested and imprisoned. He and others were eventually released in 1955 when Fidel and his brother Raul went to Mexico City to meet  man with a plan. An Argentine firebrand named Ernesto Che Guevara.

 

They formulated a plan to foment a successful revolt and set sail on the Good Ship Lollipop Revolution from Mexico sailing back to Cuba in covert secrecy in 1956.  Now it’s 1957 and  it’s anybody’s ball game, or revolution.  The Braves or the Yankees? Batista or the Rebels?

 

I didn’t usually keep up on Banana Republic coups, revolts, or civil wars. My beat was the New York streets….until tonight. By mid-morning next I would be packing my bags and heading into the Cuban maelstrom on assignment from my editor, Hymie Bachman after a meeting with him behind closed doors and a mysterious man with shiny shoes and  I could guess had a large bag of dirty trick government secrets locked in a vault at Area 51 where deadly force is encouraged.

 

Within the next 24 hours I would begin  a two year journey in a tropical paradise as a foreign correspondent investigating the Francisco Santiago murder. I would also find myself in the throes of  love with a female revolutionary packing a Russian machine gun. That was the good side. The bad side? By 1958 I would end up on a death squad hit list by the Batista regime, with the added attraction of having a contract put out on me by the US mob and brought under close scrutiny  by those  humorless fellows at the CIA.  

 

That was stressful enough. Right now I had a real problem facing me. Would the Yankees lose to the Braves?  If so I’d be out $200!

CHAPTER TWO - Latina Heat

 

 

 

Sienna Santiago was a brilliant 19 year old Filipina Cuban mixed knock ‘em on their ass beauty and art student in Mexico City when the news of her father’s  murder in Havana hit the headlines the  day after it happened. She was as close to her father as a daughter could get. Her parents met each other when both were journalism students at the university in Mexico City in 1933. He from Cuba, she from the Phillipines. Both shared a passion for the truth….the underlying story...the yin and the yang of an issue. In effect, they wanted to change the world for the better. Champions of the oppressed. Defenders of the Fifth Estate.

 

Through marching in protest rallies and art galleries it was in the cards, fate being in charge of chance, that they would meet two individuals whose impact on them was meteoric. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the point in the art-political universe where art and activism met in a head-on collision. They became close friends and shared similar political views, love for art, and a dedication to educate the masses and stir up revolt. That relationship didn’t last long. There was a crack in the friendship foundation that occurred that would never heal.

 

As 1937 emerged from the womb of time there were changes in the air as Frida and Diego were leaning further out on the leftist limb...socialism soon was replaced and embraced by them of Marxist communism.  Santiago and his wife Cierra, both  ardent leftists, were not ready to embrace the police state tactics of Stalinism that they had been reading about.

 

Prior to the friendship splitting the emotional atom, Frida and Cierra were very close. So close in fact they had an affair with each other in 1934 that lasted almost two years. Both Diego and Santiago, aware of the heat the two girls generated in each other, sat back, gave them plenty of romping room and   looked the other way. Tolerance was a virtue both men shared along with their wives hunger for each other. As 1937 progressed, more than politics were driving the couples apart from each other. Cierra was now pregnant by Santiago. When not in bed with Frida she performed marvelously hot blooded for her husband.

Another change in their lives was waiting in the employment wings. Santiago was offered his first job and hired as a journalist for a small Cuban newspaper where he would work and perfect his his craft for next 10 years covering the politics of the Batista regime. He was also writing articles showcasing the young rebel movement that was growing from the seeds of rampant poverty and discontent among the Cuban people.

 

The presumed happiest day of his life  arrived in  1938 when his baby daughter, Sienna Santiago made her appearance in the world in the placenta soaked wake of her birth which was complicated. So complicated that her mother died giving life to her daughter….her “angel” she referred to her yet unborn baby for nine months. Santiago was now  a grieving widower and a single parent. The happiest day of his life, was now also the saddest day of his life….but...life goes on...as it must.

 

Santiago was fortunate as he  had many siblings in Cuba and thankfully his unmarried sister Isadora took over the duties of raising  young Sienna and providing housekeeping duties in her brother’s home. He never married again and now devoted his life to his growing activism as well as to his daughter’s education and well being.

 

Fate was about to come knocking on Santiago’s door one more time.  In the spring of 1939 Ernest Hemingway came to Cuba in his boat sailing from Florida. He eventually rented a 15 acre property a mere 15 miles from Havana and remained in Cuba for most of the war years. While in Cuba he wrote most of his best known  novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” which was published in 1940.

 

Santiago was eager to meet this “God of Words” as he jokingly called him in private of course. Getting up his courage, (a shot or two of run helps) he contacted Hemingway for an interview for the small newspaper. As it turns out Mr. Hemingway read the small paper regularly and was a fan of Santiago’s no nonsense journalistic approach. They met, they talked, they became friends for life….until Santiago was murdered in 1957. Hemingway departed by eating a shotgun for breakfast in 1961.

Sienna growing  up in a home enriched by literature (she referred to Hemingway as Uncle Ernesto who treated her like a princess when she was growing up) and arts (she had heard much of her parents and their adventures with Frida and Diego) that it was inevitable  that a love of art would prompt her to attend university in Mexico City to study the works of the great Mexican painters, including and especially the works of Santiago’s former comrades Diego and Frida. She never knew or could imagine...that the woman she admired as an artist was also an ardent lover of her mother. Some things a father never tells a daughter about.

 

In 1948 the publisher of the newspaper Santiago was working for was closed down by the regime for being “too honest” in its criticism of the Batista regime. Santiago now out of a job did what any unemployed person would do. With an old printing press he would  start his own newspaper. This time he would bide his time. He had learned a valuable lesson. Don’t go up against a stronger foe until you are strong enough yourself to do battle. That meant balancing the facts and setting a middle course at first then when you had full wind in your sails let her loose.

With little money in the bank, Santiago approached his  friend “Ernesto” Hemingway who already had heard about the newspaper being closed down, so without any encouragement needed, he financed the new operation and even wrote some pieces for it to gain readers quickly and to generate an image transcending Cuba and bringing it notice on the US mainland as well. By 1950, the paper was off and running with editorials and coverage making  Santiago a rising star among the proletariat and the literati of political journalism

By 1953 his newspaper had grown, subscribers were devouring it and the Batista regime was content with allowing minor criticism of their system to show a facade of “freedom of the press” as long as it didn’t go too far, and delighted the left was also not without journalistic scars wielded by Santiago’s virtuous and balanced sword. That sword unfortunately had a double edge to it. Left and Right would come under journalistic attack when each crossed the line and human rights were goose stepped on. Santiago gained many friends on both sides who applauded him, but he also made as many enemies. The fuse  was lit...and only a matter of time before it exploded and ended Santiago’s life.

Chapter Three - The Fifth Estate and the Grey Lady

 

 

Dawn was beginning to fill the canyons of New York with enough light to drive the winos and junkies underground as the three piece suits began their early morning trek to small cubicles on Madison Ave. while construction workers with collars of blue and  black lunch boxes filled with slabs of salami and great chunks of cheese head to various building sites on a sacred urban mission to enclose and  envelope the city in concrete, looking in disdain at the  Broadway denizens who are just now leaving the all night automats and diners to call it a day until Broadway would light up again after dark and the curtain rises once again on “West Side Story”.

 

The huge Heidelberg presses were ready to roll out the morning news, “all the news that’s fit to print” or so said the logo on the New York Times or the Gray Lady as she was affectionately known.   I had already fleshed out the final copy from Miami wire bulletin on the Santiago murder. Small piece, filler taking up no more than 4 column  inches on page five. I left the original copy on Blake’s desk. He wanted to know every piece of news coming in.

 

I was sure the Santiago story was minor. Hell we had a New York mayor to elect in November. Bob Wagner, our incumbent had the full Tammany Hall machine to back him up for his second term “coronation”. He was an avid sports fan and after he would win the election in  the fall  he appointed a commission to determine whether New York City could host another National League baseball team, eventually leading to the Mets franchise being awarded to New York after the Dodgers and Giants left New York City. Play ball Mr. Mayor.

I was heading back to my desk when more news was from Havana was inching it’s way in the teletype. A quick rip and read and I was satisfied this would be the end or the beginning of the story,

 

Dateline Oct. 9, 1957 6:10 AM

Early indications from police investigations have convinced officials that leftist guerrillas are responsible for the attack and murder of publisher Francisco Santiago. Grenade fragments found were of the type used by the Soviet military and bullet casings found at the scene were determined to have been fired at close range from a vz.52 semi automatic manufactured in Czechoslovakia.

 

The Presidential Palace issued a statement today declaring Oct 12 as a National Day of Mourning. Senor Santiago will be given full honors.

 

President Batista has pledged the entire force of the government to track down and punish the rebels responsible for the death of this great journalist who only wanted to speak the truth and was killed because of his conviction and determination to present honest reportage to the people of Cuba.

 

-- End Transmission ---

 

That was the end of the transmission...but only the beginning of my story. This page five filler would within a little more than a year lead to banner headlines around the world. My story began when Blake O’Hara, my editor walked in the office door that morning and summoned me to his office in his usual no nonsense gruff manner. “Russo! Get in here!”

Chapter Four - Wiseguys & Revolution

 

 

October 10, 1957 7:14 A.M. (Seven hours from game seven of the World Series)

Walking into Blake O’Hara’s office was an experience similar to entering an H.G. Wells  time machine. The decor was classic stark 1930’s Steelcase office furniture from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Slate grey desks as large as an aircraft carrier, in fact we all referred to it as the USS Guadalcanal.

 

 

The overstuffed chair that acted as his editorial throne was a throwback or tribute, never sure which, to the film “Citizen Kane” while the rest of the spacious rooms furniture and decor gave the impression you were about to rub elbows with a group of Irish Republican Army gunmen in Bugsy Malone’s Saloon in Boston drinking mug after mug of what made Milwaukee famous.

 

The same goddamned Milwaukee the Yankees would be facing  on the field this afternoon in mortal pennant race combat. I was set and ready for the game...not only was Mickey Mantle in the game, I also had two first base box seats for myself and Penny Fitzsimmons, our office bookkeeper and my date. A Mick and a Dago on a ballgame date. We all called her Penny Arcade in private as she was like a pinball machine. Great levers and she loved to ball! By the way, in the end, all said and done...the Braves kicked our asses...there’s always next year….

 

“Shut the door Russo,” he gruffly mumbled with a voice that had been aged by Cuban cigars and Irish whiskey for, well, let’s say since he was one week old. He never breast fed, of that I was sure,  he probably used a shot glass for the hootch he kept stashed in his crib.

 

“Sit down, I have something to talk over with you. An opportunity, one you’ve been waiting for” he explained in a tone he felt I’m sure was as patrician as a Byzantine emperor, yet, came spilling out as raspy as a pug boxer who’d taken too many right hooks to the head and now viewed simple math equations as quantum physics. I knew better….Blake O’Hara was no rum dummy. He was as crafty as they come, which is why I buckled my emotional seatbelt. It was as the lady said, “going to be a bumpy night”.

 

I was anxious to get my days stories done in time for deadline for the  paper and was in a hurry. I didn’t want to miss the game. Besides having box seats and a healthy bet going in the office pool, I also had my bookie betting off the books for me. Goddamn Frank Costello...had to get himself shot on orders from that Mafioso prick Vito Genovese in May. He retired from the rackets now and I had deal with Vito’s bookies instead of Franks. My grandfather who raised me as a kid (my pop was whacked by some loan sharks whose installment plan included daily interest rates higher than the Empire State Building)  hated “those goddamned greaseball dagos” ...the gangster ones as he called them, but, Bommarito the butcher, down the street from us could slice prosciutto so thin with the precision of a fencing champion.  To gramps, Bommarito was to meats and cheese as  Josephine Baker was to causing erections in European cabarets two decades earlier. Gramps did see her do the famous “banana dance” and never forgot! Probably still had the same hard-on he did then, but grandma never complained. Perhaps the residual effect was worth the trip to Paris and Rome they saved up for years ago.

 

“I’ll stand  if you don’t mind, Chief. Got a lot to do, got tickets you know...the Mick will slam it out of the ballpark and I intend on being there to see it happen!” Blake shook his head barely concealing a smile that erupted on his face. “I know Russo. You also intend to score a homerun with Miss Fitzsimmons after warming up her bench. I know you Wops...you’re all sex fiends, ha, God love ya” He did have a point, but I managed to counterpoint with my own salvo. “Yeah, and all you micks are sorry drunks singing “Danny Boy” with tears streaming down your ruddy bloody faces.”

 

Pleasantries now exchanged we go got down to business. I’m sending you to Cuba. Havana to be exact. Christ, where else is there to go in Cuba. Dancing, music, women, and a lot of your underworld buddies are already there running the casinos and whorehouses. Meyer  Lansky will give you carte blanche I’m sure and comp you a room. He always liked you. His Hotel Nacional has excellent room service I hear. Long legged Cuban fillies with a bedside manner guaranteed to launch you into space to take your place as the first man on the moon after you land in her crater!”

 

 

“Jesus Christ, Blake...Cuba? Why? Take conga lessons so I can teach everyone at the Christmas party this year provided you won’t cheap out on us again this year with gift certificates to Macy’s for twenty bucks. Goddamn it, that was a cheap way out!”

 

Blake started to burst at the seams laughing as I was raging. “OK, OK, calm down. I feel your ready to move up to Foreign Correspondent, and want you in Cuba. Mainly to dig around and do that investigative shit you do so well here, but there...I want you to look into the Santiago murder. There’s got to be more too it than what the reports are saying. Francisco was a friend of mine so I have an interest in it. You’d be helping me out while at the same time take some vacation time in a paradise of debauchery and yes, pal around with the greaseballs.”

 

Before I could say another word. A man sitting in the darkened corner of Blake’s office, who I hadn’t noticed before stood up and walked over to me. “..and you would be doing your government a great service as well.”

 

 

“Blake...what’s going on here, who’s this?” Blake lit another cigar. “I told you to sit down Russo, now maybe you will. Sit..please..sit. This is Sean Donovan, CIA. No relation to Wild Bill Donovan, although we both worked with him as OSS agents during the war.”

 

Donovan interjected in a hand off from Blake as smooth as a play by the Harlem Globetrotters. “ It seems we have a small problem in Cuba that we don’t want to see grow larger. We need someone on the ground to gather information for us and the Batista regime. A journalist is the perfect cover, plus you’ll probably unearth the facts behind Santiago’s murder. A win win as I see it.”

 

I thought a moment and yes, I do want to be a roving journalist, and Cuba? Sex and booze? Yes, only one problem I could see. “Look guys, if you think I’m gonna expose Lansky and the mob down there, you’re both crazy. They’d have me whacked and dumped in a swamp. Even if I made it back here alive  I’d never be able to work for a paper again. They’d find me for sure. I’d be finished either way!”

 

Sean looked at Blake and both laughed. “Look,” said Sean, “I don’t give a shit about those guineas, besides, that’s Hoover’s problem. We’re interested in a young Cuban lawyer who’s stirring the shit pot. His names Castro, Fidel Castro. He’s a minor leftist player but is a pain in Batista’s fat ass. We also know Francisco Santiago was killed on his orders. We have a plan.”

 

 

I was beginning to warm up to the idea. As long as it didn’t involve Lansky and the mob. “OK, gentlemen. I’m in ...what’s the plan?” I couldn’t wait to hear the plan and make my own plans for nights of rum and rumba. Sean was delighted and relieved. “Good, this Castro thing is small, but we want to keep it that way. Besides six months from now, no one will even remember his name.”

Chapter Five - Man in the Shadows

 

I shot a defensive warning salvo of a look to the redoubtable lump of a government agent who was as overtly covert as they come. Impeccably dressed in an understated Brooks Brothers suit with all the banality I associated with staid office accountants and funeral directors. If he were to commit a murder in broad daylight with hundreds of witnesses to his nefarious act, no one could accurately describe him in any detail. These guys blended into the world around them, and their very strength lay in the fact that they are odorless, colorless and tasteless...not to mention highly dangerous.
“Excuse me….who the hell are you again?”

He slowly rose from the chair in the corner as though he were a stop action Harryhausen dinosaur in one of those sci fi drive-in movies so popular with the delinquent crowd and their souped up coupes. “I’m Sean Donovan, CIA.”

“I know that,” I said hoping the irritation was showing in my demeanor and evident in my voice. “What does my going to Havana have to do with you. I didn’t even vote for Ike.”
“Ah, Stevenson man I see. Look within the Agency we have no political agenda. We’re merely watchdogs at liberty’s door making sure the bad guys don’t get into the living room. Look, Russia squashed the student revolt in Hungary last year. So much for the proletarian Utopia. Budapest is still recovering. A few days ago the goddamned Reds got Sputnik up and running in orbit and beat our ass to space with what could be one ugly weapon prototype. North Vietnam beat the shit out of France three years ago and we’re well let’s say keeping our ears to the ground over there. Saigon recently attacked from the north this week. It’s a Red roller coaster ride that is fucking up Europe and now Asia. We want to make sure the Red’s don’t influence things in this hemisphere. We have a problem in Cuba, however, named Castro. If he gets Soviet support the tide will change...90 miles offshore of America.”

I was not unaware of the Reader’s Digest history lesson, but was still in the dark as to what I felt I was being rushed, pushed, forced into. Christ...Havana and sunshine, are one thing not to mention great rum, cigars and some fine Afro-Cuban pussy, but I felt Blake was holding back and letting Mr. Secret Agent do his dirty work.
“Blake, what the fuck is going on here?”

Thankfully, Blake took over. “Russo, during the war, not Korea, the other one, the big one, Sean and I were members of the OSS, or today’s CIA. Our mission was to sniff out attempts in Mexico and Cuba of any overtures the Nazi’s might attempt to gain a foothold at democracy’s gate. Sean was stationed in Mexico, I was resident agent in Cuba. Some Mexicans didn’t trust the US and wanted to back Germany. They were still pissed about Texas for Christsakes, so Sean and others did damage to Nazi feelers and eventually Mexico joined the Allied cause and booted the Nazi’s out. Same crap in Cuba. Except Cuba, Batista that is, kicked the bastards out in ‘41 and fought them with their navy and kicked U-Boat ass in the Caribbean. Now we’re afraid of Soviet intervention in Latin America.”
“And my job is to watch for any Red’s under Cuban beds, yes?”

Sean served the next volley. “Not exactly we have agents on the ground in Havana,” at which point he looked at Blake with the deer in the headlights look waiting for the final blast to come ripping from the barrel, drawing blood. “Not exactly, no. We need a man, a journalist to infiltrate Castro’s rebel army and report on it. Strengths, weaknesses, movements, numbers, weapons…”

I cut him off at this point. “Whoa, wait up cowboy. Infiltrate Castro’s rebels? Who the fuck do you think I am...Claude Rains? I am not the Invisible Man. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Cuban. I’m not CIA with decoder rings or whatever you guys use. I have a typewriter and no gun.”

Blake blasted both barrels. “Look Russo. You are going to Cuba to investigate Santiago’s killing, I know you want that along with the fancy title of Foreign Correspondent tag lining your reports. Santiago was more than a fellow journalist. He was my friend. Very close friend. Reports say the Rebels are responsible for his death. I want those bastards brought down. Fuck Ike and fuck the agency..do this for me and for a free press everywhere. Sean called me early this morning about recent developments and we came up with a plan that will make us all happy, and yes, even Ike.”

Sean took the ball from there as I was taking the bait. “You are a journalist so we’re halfway to the goal line. (I always hated football analogies in conversation) You will be looking for Castro to tag along with and tell his side of the story. Like that reporter who hung out with Lawrence of Arabia during WWI. T.E. Lawrence and Castro have one thing in common. Monster egos that need feeding. We have a contact in Havana who will arrange for you to get to the rebels through a third party. A party you will approve of. A female with guts and balls and looks damn good in khakis. Nice ass and smarter than all of us in this room. Oh you’ll have plenty of time to jerk off with your wop mob buddies too and drown in a sea of poontang and booze. So, I will ask nicely, are you in or out? I need your answer now, please. You’re the perfect one to pull this off. Yes? No?”

I thought it over at a hundred miles an hour in 60 seconds. “What the hell...life’s a bitch anyway. May as well get her in the sack for a romp under the covert covers. Yes, OK, I’ll do it, but Blake you better have that byline in bright neon!”

Sean set the timeline. “You’re playing ball with us so we’ll pitch an underhand softball your way. You can go to your game tonight, fuck the teen queen of the prom and stay hungover for a week if you like. You won’t have to leave until Saturday. We’ll have all the necessary papers ready and alert our contact in Havana. You’ll also be given instructions on how to code your reports to us without Castro knowing it. As for your initial contact, he’s a bit of a slimeball, but when you play in the sewers, slimeballs know the best routes to take.”

“Ok Gentlemen,” I said. “I’m taking the rest of the day off and so is Penny. We may do some warming up ourselves before we foreplay ball with each other.” Blake on cue pulled a bottle of his best Mick whiskey from his drawer and three shot glasses. “A toast ...to Cuba!” Blake bellowed. “To America,” cried Sean. “To Mickey Mantle!” I had a series game to root for. Cuba was Saturday. The Yankees were tonight!

Chapter Six -First Base Box Seats

 

My head was still in a Westinghouse spin cycle when I left Blake’s office. This newsroom has been home to me for years, my journalistic port in the storm. It’s as comfortable as a worn pair of Spanish American war boots trudging through mosquito infested swamps. Next week I’d be leaving it all behind in the journalistic rearview mirror as I would begin to burrow underground undercover caught up in the intrigue and politics of a political hurricane in the storm clouds of revolution now forming over Havana. I always wanted to be a foreign correspondent, but, you know the old adage...Be careful what you wish for.

Later…. Right now I had $200 bucks riding on the series outcome tonight and had plans afterwards to, as they say, fuck the prom queen under the bleachers. Penny was that prom queen and Mickey Mantle would unlock her sexual door with a win tonight! Maybe we’d both score, eh, Mick?

“Penny, you ready? Blake said for us to take off and enjoy the game. He must feel guilty about something. Oh, and he also said to take fifty bucks out of petty cash for expenses, you know, beer, dogs, gas and dinner after we win the pennant. I’ll write something about the game so it’s legit.” The voice of Zeus bellowed from Blake’s office. “I heard that Wop! You damn well better write up something or that fucking fifty is coming out of your paycheck or your ass!”

“Yas Bossman. Yas Suh. I unnerstands Massa Blake. Yas Suh!”
Penny smiled, grabbing fifty from the filebox she kept locked in her desk. “Got it,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The day was crisp and baseball was in the air, a high fly day! Let Castro eat shit and drink mud. I’m grabbing a few ballpark bottles of Baltimore’s Natty Boh’s and if lucky, some Nathan’s redhots if I can. If I’m really lucky, Penny Arcade will let me win the Kewpie Doll prize after snatching the toy from the ball diamond between her legs. Christ, a Mickey Mantle series win and a promiscuous passion prize all in one day. That should get my mojo working to make my howlin’ wolf smokestack lightnin’ to mellow down easy.

Baseball is not just MY passion. Penny is such an avid fan of the stick and ball competition she gets all sexed up and ready to romp every time the Yanks win a game. I know this from experience. However, if they lost she swore like a sailor for hours, get piss drunk and somehow the moment would lose its magic. I know this too from experience. It’s bad when your hard-on swings and misses. “Yerrrr Out!”

Both of us were in high spirits. A win was in the air. Overall, it was a bad year for New York baseball. It was announced that the Giants, the elder team statesmen of the tribe would be heading west to take up residence in San Francisco, probably at the Sam Spade Stadium. The goddamned Dodgers were also getting out of Dodge and would seek stadium shelter in Los Angeles at Micky Mouse Stadium. As for Ebbets Field? There goes the neighborhood. The Yanks and Dodgers met on the dirt diamond just last year in a “subway series” and the Yanks kicked their Brooklyn asses four to one in a series. No wonder they left town with their tail between their jockstraps.

Penny and I were high and hopped up on hope like a couple of street junkies that day. We arrived at the stadium a half hour before the first pitch...secured our highly prized first base box seats and got ready for Mantle Mania to send Milwaukee packing back to the Great Lakes. Hell, Warren Spahn was out of the game as he came down with the flu! Milwaukee didn’t stand a chance now! We Yank fans could smell blood and taste victory.
That wasn’t how it turned out. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that. Our best chance came in the sixth inning, we had had runners on first and second with two outs after a Mickey Mantle single and an error by Mathews at third. Gil McDougald then grounded out forcing Mantle at third to end the inning and the threat!

It didn’t get any better. You know the outcome. You read my columns. We lost to those Great Lakes drunks! We were limited to seven hits and one walk. Lew Burdette who flew high in Spahn’s place was eventually named the Series MVP after pitching three complete games and two shutouts. He was the first pitcher since Christy Mathewson to pitch two shutouts in a World Series.

Neither of us were feeling sexy after that Waterloo. We left with the crowd, broken in spirit. We needed a drink so we headed for Toots Shor’s bar on West 51st Street. I drank here often when I was working the sports desk, and still do as it is also where my bookie gets rich off of my misery on a semi-regular basis. Penny and I needed to surround ourselves with the faces of friendly drunken journalists, and who knows, maybe Sinatra or DiMaggio would show up and grace us with a dose of celebrity glamour.

My old friend and fellow crumb bum, as Toot’s referred to us openly, Studs Terkel was there. He was a writer and radio personality in Chicago who pulled no punches. We had met in Shorr’s one night a few years ago when he flew in from Chicago. He was back in town to see the game. A New Yorker by birth and heritage, his Dr. Jeykll soul had been taken over by the Midwest and his Mr. Hyde side had him rooting for Milwaukee now. Sitting next to him was our mutual friend, writer, pugilist lefty Norman Mailer who had recently founded the left leaning Village Voice and in his book shocked the Upper West Siders by his use of a Mailer made up word “fug” as in “fug it” “fug you” “fugging” He has brass balls and a right hook that will knock you cold out.

I was writing as a contributing columnist for the “Voice” under an assumed name, Arthur Burns. Didn’t want to burn my “objective and balanced” journalism bridge or lose my paycheck just yet. I haven’t written “the great novel” yet to sustain my lifestyle. Norm has, and he lets you know it! Blake I think knew I wrote for them, but turned the other cheek for my clandestine “eye for an eye” Village Voice” style. His hatred for Mailer had no bounds. The bone of contention Blake had with Norm is for what Norm introduced as the “new journalism.” Later, Blake would also despise a young protege of mine years later. A young sports writer named Hunter Thompson who worked freelance for us. He was working as a sports reporter at various newspapers in Puerto Rico and South America and filling filler pieces to us for syndication to get his feet wet in the ocean of journalism. I enjoyed his style of reportage. We hired him to cover Caribbean sports, including Cuba, as a freelancer for feature articles on the game. He eventually left the nest and our employ, going solo and opened the door to the Ninth Gate of the Hells Angels, and thus the new era of what is known as “gonzo journalism” where the journalist is part of the story, part and parcel. (Truth be told? Steinbeck and Hemingway had already blazed that trail in literature!)

As we made our way to Terkel’s table Norm jumped and threw a fake jabs at me. “Well, well, if it isn’t our newest foreign correspondent. We bow to you sir,” he said as he bent in half in a bow with the flourish of Liberace high on one too many sequins.
“Norm, you old punch drunk hack. How the hell are you?” as I raised my hand in greeting to Studs.

“The young lady can stay, you get the hell out of her,” Studs cajoled has he broke into laughter. “Sit. Sit. Tell us all about the world of the foreign correspondent.”
We sat. I was puzzled. As we had lost the game, Penny was thirsty and ready to get as drunk as a pirate’s wench in Tortuga.

“Penny this unfortunately is Studs and that sorry excuse for a writer is Norman. Both assholes. Loveable assholes but assholes nonetheless. How the hell did you guys hear about my assignment?” I queried with mind racing. How much did they know? This was supposed to be top secret. Off the books. You don’t exist stuff.

“It’s all over the street,” Studs chimed louder than the church bells at St. Patricks on Christmas. “You my young friend are heading up the Features and Sports Desk in Latin America for the chain. Great opportunity. Hell, you get an office in Havana and take in floor shows and interview visiting celebs. What a life! You made it amigo. Warm weather, no snow and lots of showgirls.”

Norm put his arm around my shoulders. “Look when you get down there, look up Hemingway. I already telexed him you’d be down there and to get you drunk and laid on your first night. Also there’s a kid down there, well in Puerto Rico. Young fellow named Thompson. Henry, Harry, Hunter. Something like that. Writes sports down there. Bowling, baseball, anything he can get his hands on. Ha, wants to be a writer. Good luck I told him. Anyway, kid’s good, needs polish and could be valuable to you as a write arm. He can cover some sports, you can get laid while he’s sitting it out in the bleachers. Here’s his number. I told him you’d call.”

The drinks came, glasses clinked, toasts roared off the assembly line as more of my contemporaries came by to congrats me. It was a great night. Penny was impressed. So impressed, she forgot, or didn’t care that the Yanks lost...I was on a roll tonight, feeling high on a cloud of visions of future fame on my horizon and scoring with Penny afterall. Mickey Mantle may not have had a good day on the diamond, but I would be MVP in Penny’s bed tonight!

My mind was on overdrive. I couldn’t tell these guys or Penny what I was really going there for as Blake and Sean must have leaked the diversion story on the street to cover me. Politics, especially Cuban politics makes for strange bedfellows. Tonight in bed with Penny, however, I wouldn’t be a stranger in a strange land. I was all too familiar with her sexual turf, and I was anxious to hit a high fly ball out of her park!

Chapter Seven - Latin Heat and Cuban Wet Dreams

 

Havana Harbor came into full panoramic view as I looked out of the small window of the commuter plane I hopped aboard in Miami after my connecting flight from La Guardia hours earlier. The port was looking for all the world as a frenetic bas relief Italianate sculpture similar to a Picasso version of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise”.

 

Below were waters of tranquil turquoise and of the deepest blue I had ever encountered. The harbor at this red-eye hour of the morning dawn was beginning to extricate itself, (as was I) from sleep as it began to come alive with moored yachts bobbing gently in the small waves alongside massive cruise ships and a flotilla of Meyer Lansky’s floating casinos where modern day pirates took you to the cleaners at the roulette and gaming tables.

 

Add to this a proletarian parade of local patched up fishing boats of every stripe, shape and size from stem to stern as the daily ritual of hoisting anchor got underway to begin the search for the day’s catch and the meager income derived from it to afford any repairs to the hull should it hit a shoal in low water. One has to earn enough to keep the boat afloat as well as a growing family in food. All that was missing was the Battleship Maine to make the portrait a visual historic diorama on a cheap postcard.

 

The taxi ride from the airport to my newly rented apartment (paid for by the accountants at the CIA) at Calle San Lazaro was a mixture of proud “this is my country” cabbie chatter, stifling tropical humidity, far worse than anything a New York August could hammer you with, and of course the obligatory boom cha cha boom Xavier Cugat music blasting from the scratchy AM radio of the 10 year old Chevy cab with worn springs and the confines of the cab thick with clouds of finely rolled Monte Cristo cigars.

 

I had ample time to look over the packet of information Sean had left with Blake to give to me when I left La Guardia. Photos and dossiers on Castro and his brother Raul, and a flamboyant character later destined for T-shirt fame, Che Guevara. To this old school Eye-talian Catholic I named the three of them The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit of the rebellion.

 

As the tattered excuse for a cab wound through streets clogged with Chevy’s, people on bicycles, kids begging for American dollars, and pushcarts pushed by tired old men weary and wearing skin the texture of leather footballs due to the fact they spent their lives in the sun, day in day out tallying me bananas or rolling tight cigars with only a corrugated steel shed to shield them from the heat. The neighborhoods were a Picasso painting of laundry hanging on ropes to dry from small cramped apartments. Gauguin had pleasant Polynesia to paint...this was Boticelli’s “Chart of Hell” by comparison.

My new apartment in Havana would prove to be modest, but by comparison to what the cab waded through from the airport it was the Ilamur Kasri palace built by the Sultan Abdulmecit of old Moslem Istanbul.

 

I was on easy street. Paradise, cream assignment with a touch of danger. Not bad for a 35 year old hack newspaper writer. My new place was being paid for by our own red, white and blue government out of some off the books budget. It was a 10 story apartment complex that was owned secretly by the CIA to be used as a safe house for agents from different bureaus coming and going from Prague or West Berlin and other invisible compass Cold War points around the globe while plotting assassinations or whatever they do for fun.

 

I had read three of Ian Fleming’s spy novels and was a huge fan of his writing style and the character James Bond in “Casino Royale” and his latest release early this year “From Russia With Love” Ian also had a vacation house in Jamaica. I felt with this proximity I would have a chance to meet him, I’d arrange that through Blake to pave the 007 road.

I have to admit...I was looking forward to rubbing shoulders with double agents, triple agents and maybe a defecting KGB agent looking for the American Dream. I was was imagining myself in a dapper tuxedo ordering a martini in the Nacional, shaken, not stirred while I offered a Turkish cigarette to a femme fatale from Finland.

 

My modest digs back in New York were also being paid for by “The Company” as they like to be called, with monthly checks mailed by Penny back at the office. Officially the landlord and my co-workers and the word spread on the street among my fellow Fifth Estate contemporaries is that I was setting up a Latin Bureau for news feeds from the region for the paper and our news syndicate to enable us to accommodate the needs of a growing Latin population and to increase our profits. We aren’t philanthropists...we’re Capitalists.

 

My salary had tripled on this assignment with additional monies from CIA funds funneled into my account. Free rent in Havana, free rent on my apartment in New York, increase in salary and the promise of a $10,000 bonus when the mission was completed. It was also arranged that I would maintain an “office” (a desk in a corner really) at Santiago’s People’s Record-Bulletin newspaper now being run by his former editor, now publisher emeritus, Jorge Gallegos who knew better than to cross the Batista line in the sand. Moderation was the word now at the paper. I knew I too would have to be careful when filing my “stories”. We would be watched carefully by Batista’s secret police and the incognito Castro spies who were everywhere.

 

The delicious frosting on the Cuban cake was the fact that my apartment was 2 blocks away from many of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky’s hotel casino operations. All work and no play makes a spy horny. Even a junior spy without a plastic decoder ring from a box of Cracker Jacks. I was already salivating and contemplating the comped perks I knew Meyer would toss my way. Two days ago, we talked briefly long distance and he assured me I’d love the sports action and the nightlife. I was now a peaceful smiling Buddha ready to recite obscene haiku’s aloud while engaging in the Cuban version of the Kama Sutra.

 

The mob ran the brothels and they were the Disneylands of sex, where you can get a double scoop of the girls who came in delicious edible varieties of mixed racial flavors that are sure to make your "banana split" Light Chocolate? Dark Chocolate? Almond Joy? You can choose from a wide array of undulating Ebony bodies with enough hydraulics in their well formed rear ends and enough magic in their wonder thighs to pull your own personal rabbit from her wet, moist pubic hat.

 

All you have to is follow Lansky’s Brothel Brick Road and you'll be waving your own magic wand in the Wizards Wonderland of Sex where you can mount the "Dorothy" of your choice and soon you too will be saying..."There's no place like her vagina..there's no place like her vagina... as you play with her "ruby red" between your fingers. So don't be a cowardly lion...firm up the straw filled sex drive and turn it into a hard as nails fully erect Tin Man hard on and go to town. Just don’t tell Auntie Em...she might be working there too!

 

Brothels and booze were on hold for the time being. I arrived at the apartments and grabbed my bags, paid the cabbie, tipped the cabbie, thanked the cabbie, who then gave me a soiled business card for future reference. He, Rojas, would end up as my unofficial chauffeur for the next year, as well as my best friend and valuable partner in crime in this hotbed of politics and poverty and injustice.

 

Right now I wanted a shower, a go at Lansky’s gaming tables and early to bed with a bottle of rum and a long legged Cuban hooker under the sheets until the dawn’s early light. Tonight I wanted sex and feel the rockets red glare fueled by Latin heat.

Chapter Eight - Mobsters & Showgirls

 

 

I was hoping to set up shop at the ornate Nacional Hotel gracing the promontory on the Loma de Taganana formerly  a Spanish fortification that occupied the site during the golden age of pirates, privateers and British war ships   hellbent on conquest for God and Empire over their Spanish adversary.

Now the British, along with Americans and others from around the world came to bombard the idyllic island once again.  This time they came as tourists hungry for hot salsa nights and sun filled days armed with money, various degrees of gambling addiction and a sex drive on overdrive.
The  pirates had changed as well. Cuban politicians and secret police dominated a Batista dictatorship rife with corruption while achieving monetary orgasm in bed with the American Mafia while the everyday Cuban was hanging on by an economic thread dangling precariously over a societal cesspool of poverty.

Proximity closer to the nightlife and the gaming action was a personal addiction of my own that was initially obscuring my vision of the  purpose of this foray that could turn into folly at the drop of a sombrero, but the US government was not a finger popping hipster when it came down to that sort of thing.

My cover had to be completely undercover, so by staying at the CIA owned and operated apartment safe-house complex I would be shielded  from the  prying eyes that were everywhere in Havana in those days. Alert, hungry  eyes that would sell you out for a greedy non-political handful of American greenbacks to the nearest KGB dime a dance interrogation room along with a one-way one shot one kill bullet to the base of the skull  once you’ve spilled your guts.

Staying in a safe house building  made sense as it made it more convenient to pass the intelligence information suppository  along securely and safely up Washington’s ass through the resident Company agent in Havana, while at the same time   not leaving a tell tale  incriminating Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail leading to me or my covert  comrades and any innocent contacts who may, in the course of “business” become guilty by association as well as expendable should the mission hit the fan.  

I was stuffing the dossier material back in the packet when Rojas stopped his cab outside the Americana Apartments.  I was resigned to take up residence here ready or not, here I come. Grabbing my bags from the backseat filled with notebooks and a few changes of clothing I stepped through the Looking Glass to begin my spiraling journey down the rabbit hole of revolution, Latin sex and politics.

Once inside I made my way to the landlord sitting behind a desk in a nondescript office. I started to introduce myself but, not surprisingly, he knew exactly who I was. Those CIA boys and girls don’t miss a trick.

“Welcome, Senor Russo. I trust you had a most pleasant flight over and that you enjoyed the brief tour from the airport through our beautiful city. We are very proud of our city and happy you will be staying here at the Americana. My name is Franco Reyes and anything you want, anything, all you have to do is ask.”

I knew the name immediately from the dossier packet the CIA had furnished me. Franco was the Cuban contact who would start the ball rolling to get me into Castro’s inner circle. I knew also that he was a slippery character. One of those Peter Lorre “Maltese Falcon” types who would sell you out for a few bucks. I also was aware that as a CIA stooge he was watched very carefully by the Company’s resident Havana agent to make sure he wasn’t double dipping in the espionage pool. He was paid well as an informant and should he get out of line he knew he would disappear deep into the military prison bowels of Guantanamo.  I learned later that he  was at times fed false intel information to test his loyalty. If the Russians were in his corner...we’d soon know about it.

In addition to CIA Company agents coming in and out of Cuba, the Americana was also a rogues gallery of agents from Britain’s Mi-5 as well as  the French intelligence agency. My mission was all laid out in plain English. To maintain my cover, I would file my  news copy from Havana’s Record-Bulletin Newspaper office via courier from the field, or mountain, or jungle, or wherever I might me tramping along with this new Lawrence of Arabia with a beard and cigar continually clenched in his teeth.

All intel gathered on Castro would be coded  in the field and  handed off to my “rebel” contact who I had not yet met, to be given to our CIA “handler” at the Americana, who would then spirit it  to the US Embassy for transmission to Langley. Cut and dry, clean and smooth, leaving me and my rebel contact without, hopefully, a target pinned to our backs.


The “landlord” had the room CIA ready for me. Completely furnished in a “motel chic” motif. A refrigerator full of ice cold beer was begging me to liberate them one by one,but more surprising was the inclusion of a Wollensak reel to reel tape recorded as big as a ‘57 Buick and a brand new Royal typewriter to bang out my articles  for syndication through our New York office. Monday I would check into  the newspaper office to establish my cover story as a visiting journalist.  The employees there were unaware of the real purpose of my mission or so I hoped. Curiosity could get this hep cat killed. First, a hot shower, a cold beer and a few hours sack time were on my agenda. Once refreshed I’d take in a floor show at Lansky’s Tropicana Club.

I awoke refreshed five hours later looking for all the world as a red eye Lazarus ready to mambo into the dawn. After another quick shower and shave I got  dressed in my casual white cotton pants and a Cuban guayabera shirt I had purchased in Miami on my layover between flights. It was 8 PM and I knew the action was non-stop at Lansky’s Tropicana Casino. My pump was primed and  I was ready to ride the bucking bronco of Havana nightlife... torrid, tempestuous and tantalizing.  


Lansky, Luciano,  and the mob, along with local kingpin Indalecio Pertierra had created a glamorous neon and glitter Garden of Hedon that included race tracks, casinos, hotels, bordellos and some of the most fabulous floor shows north of Rio. Batista and his cronies were paid handsomely for their “partnership” and got rich off the mobs establishment. Without the government’s blessing the mob couldn’t operate. Without the mobs greasing his sweaty palms, Batista would be just another ten cent bully in a palm tree palace. It was a marriage made in heaven or hell. Depending on your outlook.

The foundation for this empire and its attraction  to mostly American tourists was sex. Fantastically beautiful Cuban women with voluptuous amounts of  flesh where patrons could get up close and personal to the scantily clad dancers who were usually available. Then of course there were backstreet sex clubs run by locals with blessing of the mob and Batista as long as they got their share of the profits. Some of these backstreet clubs offered a variety of entertainment from lesbians on stage to bizarre acts involving animals. This was not Sesame Street.

The streets in the nightclub district were awash not only in brilliant neon but also in Latin music including the ever popular sultry sexy mambo designed for mutual seduction of the couple  created by Damaso Perez Prado and his band a decade earlier.

Locking my apartment door, I headed out for the three block trek  to the Tropicana Casino. I had to laugh. I had locked my apartment door! For what? It was all CIA furnished equipment...my money was on me. Locking the door seemed superfluous. As if that would do any good anyway in a building populated by CIA spooks who could kill you with a simple pencil. Certainly they could force a lock open faster than Willie Sutton could break out of his prison cell.

Smiling, I quickened my pace as I couldn’t wait to meet up with my old pal Lansky. He was expecting me so I knew the night ahead would be one of nostalgia while I filled him in on the latest New York street rumors and gossip. In exchange I’d get ripped on booze, probably lose a few hundred at roulette betting on blacks while reds ruled. The Tropicana also had the best looking showgirls on the island, so if I was really lucky I would be wrapped in thunderous Cuban thighs until the dawn yawned to begin another day. Right now...the night was just beginning….

Chapter Nine - The Legacy of Lucky Luciano

 

Charlie “Lucky” Luciano, at one time the Boss of Bosses of the American Cosa Nostra, set up a sportsmen’s playground of gambling and prostitution in Havana after his deportation from the USA to Italy in 1946. He traveled secretly to Havana to meet with Meyer Lansky, Santos Trafficante, and other top greaseball mafioso godfathers  to set the wheels in motion by greasing the sweaty palms of Cuba’s double dealing dictator, Fulgencio Batista who opened the floodgates of mob controlled casino’s that filled the coffers of El Presidente with delicious American greenback kickbacks.

Cuba was becoming converted to the new religion of sex, gambling and graft. The three basic economic food groups of a tin horn banana republic in the 1950’s. These casinos and hotels were not the early sleazy carpet joints you saw erupting  in Vegas in the mid to late ‘40’s. These were architectural monuments in pastel. The Pyramids of Giza are formidable imposing structures as is the Taj Mahal. St. Peter’s Basilica in the heart of Rome also very imperial looking and is the Vatican’s answer to Hitler’s Berchtesgaden. That was Rome and when in Rome...you know the saying. This however was not Rome. It was Havana and there was a new pope in town. Lucky Luciano the First and upon that rock he built not his church, but the new Sodom and Gomorrah. He said, “Let there light!” and the island  was at once  bathed in electric neon with an angelic spotlight highlighting a line of long legged mechanical chorus girls singing backup  for the slot machines and roulette tables.

I was walking slowly along the street to soak up as much of this dictatorial paradise living on the sharp edge of rebellion. The island was dangerous and beautiful, just as the islands women were  intoxicating to a degree that would melt lead.

As I approached the entrance I could hear the latin rhythms of Beny More coming from down the street fornicating with the conga music blasting from inside  the Tropicana. I opened the door and the cacophony of delightful decadence hit me all at once. Music, gambling tables, dancing, and one hell of a floor show. Fishnets and feathers fanning my libido .  Gyroscopic Afro-Cuban hips in motion  burning rubber on a sexual fuel injected dragstrip ready to take you across the finish line of the your own quarter mile in under ten seconds.

I spotted Lansky by the poker tables, watching over the green gold. He was the undisputed prophet of profits. Not one nickel would escape his careful, calculating eye. “Mickey! Over here. Please. Anything you want my friend,” he yelled as I jostled  carefully through the crowds of rich Americans, Canadians and Cubans hoping against hope to break the banks balls at some point.

“Meyer, so good to see you, and yes, whiskey neat.” He motioned to one of the roaming waitresses signaling two drinks. “I hear you came down to investigate Senor Santiago’s unfortunate departure. Now tell me the truth. That is the rumour that was passed along to me from Frank Costello in New York.  I hope this is true and that damned Irish prick boss of yours didn’t send you here to look into our business down here for one of his investigative show pieces. That would be bad for business and certain government officials here would react accordingly and I would have no control over that.”

“Look Meyer, it’s revenge for Santiago’s murder. They were very close. We know the rebels had something to do with it so, if I can get hard evidence Castro and his people were behind it, then we can help put a journalistic nail in his political coffin. That alone should put a smile on the faces in those “certain government officials” as well as your people.

Our drinks arrived and I was parched and ready to drown in whiskey all night long. Meyer handed me my drink and put his arm around my shoulder. “Good. This is good. I know you wouldn’t lie to me. We’ve been friends too long for that. Now come I’ll give you the grand tour and if there is anything you want, just ask. Anything, understand.”

“Meyer, I’m being upfront with you. Now, off the record, how the hell did you get such a sweet deal down here. It’s almost a fairy tale.” Meyer laughed his all knowing laughing Buddha laugh. “Grease the wheels my young friend. It’s not a big secret down here that corruption and greed together comprise the two party system of Cuba. In exchange for the rights to build and run our operations, hotels, clubs and casinos, He gets anywhere from 10 to 30% of the profits depending on the gross a property takes in. He get 30% from Georgie Rafts Capri Hotel Casino. I pay a high percentage but is nothing compared to what we gross and skim.”

“So he’s extorting bribes disguised as license fees?” Meyer shook his head smiling that cagey smile that masks the murderous killer he is. “Down here, it’s simply called ...business. This year alone Batista stands to make one million US dollars from the slots alone! He gets paid much more than the General in the White House because he understands business as do we. It’s a perfect setup. Legal and sanctioned by the government. Here we are breaking no laws. In fact….we are above the law!”

Chapter Ten - The Princess Hooker

 

The desk clerk came jackhammer  pounding on my door at sunrise. My head was ready to detonate from too much casino booze and all night wise guy comradery at Lansky’s  Tropicana. I had left a wake up call for 6 a.m. which in the aftermath of an all night drinking binge is like shooting yourself in the head. Jesus don’t bless suicide sinners, and the dawning day won’t buy your excuse that the dog ate your alarm clock.

“OK, OK. I’m awake. Gracias,” I managed to yell-grumble in a voice raspy with hungover rum gravel from a drunken rock quarry. I heard the footsteps recede down the hallway, The clerk did his job, the rest was up to me. I had to check in at the newspaper to get my covert cover story in place. They were told I was here as a guest correspondent to cover Cuban  culture and politics, as well as a banging out a few pieces on island baseball for the New York sports fans. Hopefully they would buy the package and not know I was wearing  a different hat trying to pin the tail of blame on Castro’s donkey to get justice for Santiago’s murder for Blake and and to get the CIA monkey off my back. I knew full well, as did they, if I didn’t play ball with them there was a little matter of income tax evasion I was sure they were aware of. The had me by the baseballs!

As I sat up in bed to rise and shine I felt a warmth against my leg I hadn’t noticed until now. I  found  a long warm body lying next to me that had a faint aroma of recent sex. Tossing the covers off the bed I was startled to find a full figured female form laying on her back with dark supple Cuban breasts at full mast in the dawn’s early light. Below her equatorial region there was a thick black jungle that marked the entrance to Amazonia guarded by two delicious coffee colored thighs spread apart awaiting the Trojan Horse to gain entry into her kingdom.

I nudged her gently. Her massive brown eyes opened slowly and a faint all knowing smile emerged as she reached over and pulled me on top of her. “Lansky, I suppose,” I said quietly so as not ruin the moment. She smiled broadly this time with full wet lips. “Yes, Mr. Mickey. I am a gift and you chose me yourself.” I smiled this time. “I can see why I chose you, but please, just call me Mickey. No ‘Mister’, No ‘Senor’. Just Mickey.”

She was a genuine Cuban angel who now pulled me inside of her. I guess I was at full mast already and Old Glory was ready to concede to her vaginal victory.

When we finished we jumped into the shower together lathering each other up and laughing our fool heads off. I found out her name was Hermosa, which means “beautiful woman” and she was just that and more. She was also a head taller than me which didn’t bother either of us. Once rinsed and dried we dressed and headed out the door to the street below. I for my first day of James Bonding, she  to the club to grace the bed of some other fortunate sinner .


“Can I see you tonight,” I asked in a voice a school boy would have when asking the prom queen out on a date in his father’s car. She smiled and kissed me and promised that if she didn’t have any other customers booked that she had to entertain then I could. “I’ll pay,” I said. She held a finger to my lips to silence me. “No, you not pay. We will have date.  Not business.”  I always was a sucker for a hooker. We parted company and I was on my way to ignite the CIA fuse to discredit Castro and the rebels, and in the process get justice for Santiago’s untimely death especially peace of mind and heart for his daughter Sienna.

I walked the few blocks to the Record Bulletin offices. As I walked up to the door I couldn’t help but notice a few bullet holes in the wall that tore out chunks of concrete making the buildings facade resemble the pock marked face of Peter Copy, a kid I went to P.S. 53 and sat across from in elementary school. I always thought his head was a map of the moon, craters and all.

Canvas satchel in hand I entered the Cuban world of the Fifth Estate. There to greet me was Jorge Gallegos, the paper’s new editor and publisher, and as I would find out later, Santiago’s right hand man at the paper for years.

"Ah señor Russo! Bienvenido. Todo el mundo, señor Russo está aquí. Soy Jorge Gallegos, director del periódico. Te voy a presentar a todo el mundo. Pero, en primer lugar, aquí es su escritorio y le dará un poco de café."

Jorge was the perfect host showing me my desk and ordering my first cup of coffee of the day and introducing me to the staff. He had a  broad sincere smile and  a tired, weary face from the pressure of running a newspaper trying to balance “the government and the rebel side of things.” in this hurricane of a political climate.

After all, it is the very same balancing act that got Santiago killed. I wondered if Jorge had the fear now that perhaps journalism in Cuba given the violent nature of the two factions at odds with each other would bring about his own demise. There is a saying, “You can’t please all of the people all of the time.” This is true, yes, but you only have to piss off one with a grudge and a gun and it’s lights out amigo!

Chapter 11 - Pilar Escobar Yvbanez & the School of Rebellion

 

As I was arranging my desk without the homicidal frenzied flair of a  interior decorator, a very pretty young girl, 18 or 19 or 20 I suppose, came running into the building with an arm full of what appeared to be textbooks, which soon took flight from her arms as she tripped on a strip of torn, worn carpeting. The books flew in different directions like  a flock of spastic parrots cascading near my desk. On the floor scattered, they were a colorful puzzle of political science, art history, and mathematics from what I could tell.

 

I bent over  to help retrieve the artifacts of academia just in time to hear a full metal jacket of profanity which was interesting and humorous in that I recognized the four letter words in English, but could only guess at the 12 letter Spanish invectives flowing from her mouth at 90 miles an hour.  These were not quaint Japanese 15 syllable  haikus or Robert Burns poetry about roses and haggis. It was Desi Arnaz on amphetamines with excoriating expletives combined with  streetwise wise cracking Ann Sheridan from the film, “Angels With Dirty Faces.”

 

She bent down at the same time head-on crashing into me sending us both sprawling on the floor like human pick-up sticks  from a child’s toy game from which I would sport a black eye for a week.

 

“El señor lo siento mucho! Por favor, perdóname, voy a buscar el resto, se sienta Pease!” I rubbed my head as Jorge intervened and interpreted, thankfully. “She is very sorry Senor Russo and begs forgiveness.”

 

“Oh hell, Jorge, it’s no big deal...tell her it’s OK, please.” Suddenly English gushed from her as oil from a Texas wildcat well. “I thank you Senor. I was in such a hurry, I should have been more careful.” Her voice was deep and raspy, OK, sexy and warm. Now that I could get a good look at her I could see she was one of the most beautiful young woman I had ever crashed into!

 

“Please, call me Mickey. You too Jorge. This senor thing makes me feel like I need a suit and tie or toreodor outfit. Hello. Let’s start all over. I’m Mickey and am pleased to meet you even if it was a head-on crash.” A shy smile formed on her face as  I helped her up to her feet, “My name is Pilar. Pilar Escobar Ybanez. I work here part time and go to university as well.”

 

“I’m Mickey Russo and am here as a correspondent from a newspaper syndicate in NYC. My publisher was a very close friend of Francisco Santiago so I will be here for a little while getting the flavor of the island and taking in a ballgame or two. I love baseball. So what are you doing for dinner?” I chanced the question. She could think I was too brash and forward, but somehow doubted that after I heard her say “Fuck” in English and at least three Spanish dialects except Castillian.

 

Her smile brightened the entire room. “OK, Mickey. Mickey. I like that very much, and yes, I would be honored to go to dinner with you and I will take you to see some baseball at El Gran Estadio de la Habana on the weekend. My treat.” Ah, my kind of woman!

 

She gathered then hurried to a back room with an old Gestetner machine. One of those old machines with the addicting smell of ink and solvent. No match for the scent of her hair and perfume she was bathed in. Tonight,  I’lltake her to the Nacional for dinner then to the Tropicana for drinks and a floor show. If she is 18 or 19 I better see if that’s legal age down here. I know in the Southern states they can marry and knock up  a 13 year old as Jerry Lee Lewis would show within a year.

 

“What’s her story Jorge?” His countenance assumed a somber somewhat serious facade. “Sit down, Senor. Excuse me, Mickey. She is a student at the university. She studies political science and I am sorry to say involved with a left wing student group based on the 26th of July Movement. Castro’s movement. She helps out here where she can, writes a small column and in exchange I let her use the Gestetner to print out leaflets for the students to pass out. Announcing meetings of the group to gain more members, news of Castro, that sort of thing. They are in real danger for their activities from the police if they go too far, but they are young and of course want change so feel a sense of how you say, immortality.”

 

The picture was coming into sharp focus. “In other words, she could get hurt, yes?” I asked in an agitated voice with a dash of fear. It was all too real. I was used to New York, hell, the USA. You could voice an opinion that lodged somewhere from outside the confines and strictures of the societal status quo. Here, Pilar and the other students can face a firing squad after days of sadistic torture. These kids may not be immortal, but they sure had balls, beliefs and determination.

 

“Yes she could get hurt, very badly Mickey,” Jorge answered with a paternal love in his voice for her. I was beginning to feel very protective of her as well, even though she could head butt me and leave me with a swollen eye.

 

At that moment, Pilar rushed from the backroom and as she flashed through the length of the office she yelled out, “Thank you Senor Gallegos, and Mickey. I will meet you here at 6:00 for dinner if that is OK. I have class most of the day and a student meeting this afternoon. Is OK?” I smiled and waved and with a warm feeling for this not so innocent innocent I yelled back, “Si Senora.” I felt I owed her to speak as much in her language as she spoke in mine. One problem. My Spanish was near zero. Her English was as abundant as junkies, male hustlers and  prostitutes  in and around Times Square back in New York.

 

I could feel pain in my eye now. Gawd I hate delayed reaction pain. “Jorge, got any ice here I can pack on this thing?” He laughed and nodded in the affirmative and over to the antiquated Admiral refrigerator and fashioned an ice pack to relieve some of the swelling. I looked like one half of a racoon.

 

“Gracias, Jorge. Now, what about this Castro. Does he have a snow balls chance in hell of upsetting the political apple cart and beating the army and police, or is it all a pipedream of his? You know, Don Quixote tilting at Latin windmills.”

 

“I can assure you that it is no pipe dream of his. He’s serious, very serious and my fear is for the young students that may get stuck in the crossfire if he is not successful. Including Pilar!”

 

Stony silence followed. Castro had the only journalist assassinated that had the brass balls to support him as much as the paper could. Why this fascination then with him? Was he a good guy or merely a tin soldier trying to call a bluff? I’d find out soon enough in the weeks to come when Pilar, our rebel contact in Havana and myself would join him in the Sierra Maestra. My job now became more complicated. I needed the information on his movements, as I also wanted to find out why he had Santiago killed. Now, more importantly, I wanted to make sure no harm came to Pilar or myself. This part of the equation was a new element. It could get complicated. It could get one or both of us killed...at least it was multiple choice...we could screw up and be macheted in the jungle by the rebels...or face a firing squad as guests of El Presidente Batista. Somehow I had to involve Lansky and his boys. They knew how the ballgame was played down here and to a large degree, wrote the playbook!

Chapter 12 - The Riots Begin

 

Dateline Havana October 17, 1957 6:00 P.M. by Mickey Russo, Special Correspondent

Rioting broke out today on the campus of the University of Havana when leftist student leaders staged a peaceful protest for freedom of political speech and were attacked by Havana Police.  In the confusion that followed, shots were fired and two students were wounded.

 

According to a police official, the student’s tossed a Molotov cocktail at police, thereby igniting the melee that followed. Student accounts differ from the official government reports.

 

When interviewed at police headquarters where she was being held, student activist, Pilar Escobar Ybanez of the student group,  Red October (named to celebrate the 2nd Russian Revolution of 1917 that put the Bolsheviks in power) they were refused permission to march on campus, but felt they had to have a voice in the decision recently handed down by university officials to ban all political clubs, publications and other activities determined to be a threat to the current Batista regime.

 

…...End Transmission…….

 

The day erupted with volcanic  interruptions that prompted my first byline from Cuba to the home office in New York for distribution throughout the newspaper syndicate. It wasn’t Pulitzer material by any stretch of a mental patient’s imagination, nor that of a hack journalist, but it opened my eyes to the dangers these students were confronted with for a simple act of peaceful protest.

 

Just two years ago in 1955, anti-black violence escalated in the South including the kidnapping and brutal murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till, that spawned widespread aggressive protests from Negro  and white Americans. Also that same year,  in Montgomery, Alabama, there was a bus boycott led by a young Negro minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., practicing a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to protest segregation that attracted national and international attention and of course the backlash violence that came with the territory.

 

Now the everyday Cuban  was on the same threshold of potential violence as the Batista regime was putting its police in a confrontational stand against the population with guns and bullets, while it’s military forces were off in the mountains and jungles in the south of the island trying to stem the mounting victories of Castro and his rebels, not only in pitched guerrilla warfare against the regime,  but in the winning of the hearts and minds of the peasants. His forces were growing larger in numbers, while  in Havana, discord among the poor and the students was becoming a force to be dealt with. The Batista regime was under attack on all fronts, yet he was confident in that he may lose a battle or two, but in the end would win the war.

 

I had spent the day in the office with Jorge, getting educated on the political landscape of the island with a lunch break and a few tequila’s at Sloppy Joe’s (I’d finally meet Hemingway here as it was his favorite bar. I’d also hired the young sports journalist, Hunter Thompson while he and I got smashed at Joe’s after 5 hours of drinking after which we ended up with two prostitutes in a room at the Tropicana courtesy of Meyer Lansky)  

 

Jorge filled me in on Castro and have to admit, found him to be a fascinating character. The best description I could muster was a Errol Flynn swashbuckler leading a band of jovial pirates on a plunder and pillage mission. I hadn’t met him yet, and when I did I found him to be cold and calculating. Not a Hollywood stereotype at all.

 

When we got word of the campus riots we made tracks for the campus as fast as we could, with our photographer, Enrique in tow. Pilar’s meeting turned out to be a march instead, a fact she neglected to tell Jorge or myself. The whole event was over in 20 minutes, two wounded, (both would die later from their wounds) and 53 arrested including Pilar. There goes dinner!

 

The CIA,  ever vigilant knew about Pilar and the fact that she held the key to getting me to Castro. As Jorge and I went to police headquarters (with a substantial bribe in pocket) a CIA man fronting as a US Embassy official was already there and secured her release on the grounds that she was a journalist who was writing for an American newspaper. I found out later that the company had already arranged her release through Batista himself, as he was aware of her mission to get me to Castro, a mission that would only benefit Batista and his band of merry men. The fix was in. If Batista was keeping a watchful eye on Pilar, then I knew those same eyes would be locked on me as well. I was now in the spotlight, or was it the crosshairs? In Havana these days you can never be sure.

 

Pilar was released at 6:27 P.M. into our custody swearing like a Portuguese sailor and yelling at every policeman in the building. I could see the angry fire of revolution in her eyes. She was a fortress of energy and determination. When we got back outside and onto the street, Jorge bid us good evening. I looked at Pilar and my heart was pounding fast...she was absolutely beautiful and fiery. A real Cuban mixture that spells sex appeal. My eyes were forced open today, wide. Politics in Cuba were a volcano ready to erupt and consume the entire island in revolution. Pilar was already consuming me, but, before every revolution...dinner as planned. It was still early and Sloppy Joe’s was nearby.

 

 

Food and drink would fortify us.  Cuba was ready to erupt at any moment.  I ended up following her into that volcano and it was the best thing I ever did.

Chapter 13 - CIA & Blood on the Campus

 

A month had passed since the campus riot erupted. The student protest had effectively receded from the  forefront of the proletarian mind, much as the semi-diurnal low tides cleanse the beach of it’s seaweed, shells, empty beer bottles refuse from the “family of man”   along with the  discarded debris from passing freighters from the Black Sea leaving in it’s  frothy wake  mollusks and sea sponges exposed.  

 

The remainder of 1957 was spent creating an illusive front  that would gain  us entry into Castro’s camp without suspicion. Once there I felt I could get someone, in a loose drunken moment at least  to admit to the groups culpability in the assassination of Francisco Santiago. What good it would do was negligible, but would give closure to Blake as well as  to Santiago’s daughter, Sienna, wherever she was. Mexico, Florida, New York. It was anyone’s guess. This whole spy business was a crapshoot at best, best not played by amateurs such as myself. I felt I was being squeezed like an orange in a juicer and all that would be left is the pulp.

 

The students political clubs were shut down. No more distribution of “questionable” pamphlets on the campus were allowed. Under these circumstances snitches abound hoping to curry favor and cash rewards by turning in anyone who smelled in the least leftist.  Indeed they  were as plentiful as maggots on a dead carcass of a water buffalo in a rice paddy in Indo-China.

 

Havana was a tinderbox ready to go off when Pilar and the students initiated their small peaceful march.  As a direct result of the severity of the reactive brutality the police displayed that day had a collateral effect. More  rural people, farmers and peasants were now joining Fidel Castro's army in the mountains and at one point a collective of  college students, intellectuals and workers  stormed the presidential palace. It was a violent day as protesters were killed or wounded in the streets. It was heating up and getting bloodier by the day,

 

The lefty students on campus were devouring the words of  Karl Marx. The Ides of Marx I suppose. I noticed too they were emulating the jaunty Greenwich Village black beret look of the charismatic Che Guevara, already becoming a mythological icon. To me these students  looked like leftover beatniks after a poetry reading and a bongo concert pissing  cheap wine by the gallon. (As for Che, decades later his face would be on t-shirts in every head shop in America. By 1967 he’d be a dead Argentinian in Bolivia)

 

Exactly one week after  Pilar’s march and arrest, I was finally approached at my apartment by my CIA handler in Havana, Jack “Buster” Scalisi who was the overseer of all clandestine CIA activities on the island.  I never trusted, nor will I ever trust, a grown man who goes by the name of Buster or Junior just as I avoid women named Muffy and three legged dogs named Tripod.

 

“This is a perfect cover, Mickey, me boy,” he said over a  bottle of Puerto Rican rum he offered by way of  an introduction. He must have known of my proclivity for  drink. They probably had a thick file on me under “Debauched Drunks” in a cabinet deep in the basement bowels at Langley.

 

“Pilar was busted and the newspapers all over the island have featured the protest and her arrest,” he laughed as he expounded. “That along with your stories favorable to Castro breaking in  New York and the rest of the national news syndicate are the perfect marriage!”

 

“Why is this perfect?” I queried.  “We could get killed. Do I need a machete for protection or can I count on you guys to throw me to the lions yourself?”

 

“No, you don’t understand. Castro’s spies in the cities here will make sure the news gets to him. In fact it already has. She is a hero and becoming  a Pilar pillar of the leftist youth movement!” The ecstatic smile on his face was as brilliant as Times Square on New Year’s Eve>

“Your stories in New York are being sent here by Sean and Blake. You’re getting featured Section A, and I’ll make sure they are seen by the right people, well, they are the wrong people on the wrong side of the fence, but you see, you’ll come off as a Castro friendly as well...paving the way for you to get close to him for your “profile and biographical features” to get his side of the story to an international audience. This is too good. We couldn’t have planned this better!”

 

I wanted to bring his exuberance level down to a reasonable earthbound level. “Students died that day, Buster. Others were beaten bloody. Some arrested and  held for God knows what type of interrogation. Pilar was released only because the CIA, excuse me, the State Department and Embassy, excuse me again, YOU interceded on her behalf with the blessing of your buddy Batista.”

 

“He’s not my buddy. Let me get that straight. He’s a pawn on a large chess board, we call the shots down here. As for the camps incident, well, hat’s all behind us. It’s working out beautifully. Now what we want, no, what we need you to do, is to talk Jorge into letting the students of Pilar’s group meet in the basement of the Record Bulletin under the guise as a group of journalism students studying your craft. The perfect ruse.”

 

“With Batista’s blessing no doubt,” I added. There was a pause, not quite pregnant, whatever a pregnant pause is, after which he said in a tone to serious for my comfort zone. “Yes, he will look in the opposite direction this time. He wants Castro squashed, erased, eliminated and by getting into bed with him you and Pilar can put the final nail in his political coffin. Of course eventually we will have to bust the meetings up in due time and arrest both you and Pilar to reinforce both of your positions and to eliminate any qualms Castro may have. We need complete believability in this.”

 

I had to admit, it was coming together. We had talked out the details and finished the bottle. Buster left and as soon as he did I called Pilar to tell her to meet me at the Record-Bulletin office early the next day to fill her in on the plan. She agreed and explained to her group how it would work. I was beginning to feel guilt overwhelming me. She had no idea she was a pawn in the dirty game of international politics and I was dragging her into it. I had to admit to myself.  I felt protective of her...but another emotion kept tugging at me...I was also falling in love with this firebrand of a woman. Latin Heat was melting my heart, but I had a job to do. Maybe when it was all over she would forgive me or damn me to the eternal fires in hell. We’re both Catholics so Hell has been force fed to us since our first Communions.  

 

We still needed to make this charade known to Castro, and this was the easy part. The apartment manager, Franco Reyes was a sleazeball, just as Sean described him to me back in October. I was told to leave copies of the New York papers with my articles in the open knowing he would snoop around anyway and sell information to the other side. As Buster said, “He’s the perfect conduit to feed misinformation to the right people on the wrong side.” He was right.

 

It was almost Christmas now, and our target was to be in the rebel camp by March. Hurricane season would be well behind us and the dry season would be underway...good weather conditions if you are battling military forces or just going to the beach for sun and surf. There would be no beach parties next year. 1958 would be crucial. It would also be deadly for Pilar and me when we get the greenlight to meet up with rebels.

 

We’d have to get to the south portion of the island. Traveling by land was too dangerous. In addition to the Cuban military, there were also armed bandits who would slice your throat for your gold watch. Somewhere beyond those two factions in the Sierra Maestra  were the rebels. We’d have to go by boat either to Pico Turquino or Santiago De Cuba. Then with the rebels by pre-arrangement guide us to camp where Pilar and I would be at the mercy of the fates.

 

We also had yet to make contact with our “mysterious” rebel contact, known only as “Victoria” who blended into the urban and political landscape of Havana and who would lead us Castros camp. Buster as always had a plan, CIA smartass that he was.

 

The main problem would be getting a boat and a captain we could trust. One slipup on my part and we’d both be dead. For now, it was almost Christmas, Pilar had moved into my apartment in mid-November and we were ready to face the battles ahead, and consequences no matter what they may be. We still wanted to know how we were to sail our way south to the Sierra Maestra without being caught in a trap, when the phone rang in the apartment.

The problem was solved. It would be a Feliz Navidad afterall!

Chapter 14 - Telephone of the Immaculate Conception

 

The phone rang loud and rude, awakening  me with a jolt.  I was in middle of a soft cloud of a dream of tropical breezes and firm bronze breasts. Not sure who they  belonged to, but they felt warm to the touch. The phone was nothing more than an armed intruder, breaking and entering into  my dream state. I had every right to defend myself and bring it down with one well aimed, well placed bloodletting bullet to the chest from my .45  Presented to me and given by Buster Scalisi as a Christmas gift, compliments of Langley. “You may find this could come in handy. May as well have an equalizer.”

 

The startling ringing  of the phone  seemed louder  than the church bells of  La Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepcion Inmaculada de La Habana in Cathedral Square in Old Havana. Why the hell do the Spanish need 13 words to say something that in English consumes only six words? I may be a Catholic, but never did believe in immaculate conceptions. It takes two to tango and tangle. “Did you have sex with that woman?” “No sir, it was an immaculate conception. Damn pervert with a beard broke in and raped her before my very eyes, then disappeared in a puff of smoke and mirrors Officer.”

 

The ringing was relentless,  slicing  through the early day after Christmas morning stillness and dragged me kicking and screaming into the humidity of the dawn that was tempered by a gentle windward refreshing caress of a breeze.  Pilar, in the flesh, was here safe in my arms in bed, so I knew the call wasn’t a get your ass in gear and bring bribes to the police station kind of call. Thankfully she wasn’t sitting in some cavern like basement cell at the invite of Santa Policia. In Havana in those days there was no Santa Claus.

 

“Hello,” I managed to drag from the gutter of a raspy throat.

 

“Grand good morning, Mickey. I hope I didn’t wake you, but I can hear from your tone, I did. Are you conscious?” Damn it, Buster again.  The guy could ruin his own wet dream.

 

“Yes, I’m here, I’m awake, and this better be good.”

 

“Good? Muy Bueno Amigo! I have a captain and a boat for you. Guaranteed risk free.”

 

I was now cutting through the fog of my own harbor. “Is he trustworthy, or is he another greaseball like Franco who would sell us out for a bucket of warm beer?”

 

“Aha, amigo. Completely 24 karat safe. Fort Knox safe. The only problem is you have to sail in January. We’ll keep on top of the weather conditions so if any tropical storms threaten we can postpone. Well, reschedule. I want you to meet him tonight, bring Pilar with you of course, you two are joined at the groin anyway and she is the pivot of this whole thing. I’ll start working Victoria into the picture. Without her, no Castro, OK?”

 

What the hell could I say, “Si….oh hell, Yes, a big English YES! Where and when do me meet this Captain Bligh?”

 

“Tonight at 8 at Sloppy Joes. I was thinking one of Lansky’s joints but too risky. Loose lips sink ships!”

I hated hackneyed WWII slogans, especially when they dealt with ships sinking! “We’ll be there,” I managed to grumble.  Still plenty of day left before the night would bring us in contact with some Cuban Horatio Hornblower who would be responsible for getting us to Santiago de Cuba to insert us into the very center of the revolutions combat vagina. The more I thought of it, it would be a covert CIA immaculate conception, but Castro was no Mary, and the CIA was not clean by any definition. If things went wrong, Pilar and I would be fucked with a not so immaculate reception in front of a rebel firing squad.

Chapter 15 - The Old Man & The Sea

 

Dateline: Havana Dec. 26, 1957 6:30 P.M. Filed by Special Correspondent Mickey Russo

 

The Christmas season  passed with only one minor political incident to mar an otherwise peaceful week. Today campus students of Havana University’s  banned leftist organization, Red October began marching in a unified, peaceful and orderly protest at the Presidential Palace. President Batista was out of town with his family at his villa in Matanzas during today’s demonstration.

 

Police however, were present, allowing the students to march until one young man sporting a beard, the new look of the new Cuban left to honor rebellion leader Fidel Castro began to lead the group in a loud chant in remembrance  of Frank Pais, the Cuban Revolutionary who was shot down in the streets of Santiago de Cuba on July 30 last summer while campaigning for the overthrow of the Batista regime. The students worked up in a mantra frenzy then began shouting  demands that Batista step down as president.  

 

It was at this point the police began to move in a line towards the students to disperse the crowd when a rock was thrown from the protesters side of the line in the sand hitting one of the officers on the side of his head. The young crowd acting on impulse began picking up  any foreign object they could use as a projectile. At that point with fixed bayonets the police charged the crowd  resulting in the injury of 12 students who were all beaten and then arrested.

 

Police officials when queried refused to answer this reporter’s questions regarding the student’s conditions, injuries or where they are being held. This will not be end of the violence. In fact, I fear it is only the beginning.

…...End Transmission…..

 

Memo: Date Dec. 26, 1957 6:58 P.M.

To: Blake O’Hara

From: Mickey Russo

Confidential

Tonight, will meet with Buster Scalisi, our guide here on the island. He has secured a boat and captain that will take me out on a fishing expedition to the south of the island. I hear the marlin are massive and if successful will have one mounted for your office. Wish me luck!

….End Transmission….

 

Coded lingo was becoming a second language for me these days. The marlin in this case being Castro. Should the messages get intercepted in this hot bed of backstabbing politics it would appear harmless enough. Many Americans come here, not only for a chance at the brass ring at the mobs gaming tables or an evening of some of the most exotic sex on the planet, but also for the sportfishing. World class trophies lurk in these pristine waters. Many adorn wood paneled hunter green ame rooms in San Francisco and high rise glass and steel monolithic offices in clouds high above the grand canyons of New York.

 

I filed my story after Pilar and I witnessed the march. She knew it was going to happen, and why shouldn’t she. It was arranged by her a month ago. This time she wisely chose not to be on the front lines. I don’t need her behind bars. I need her in bed, in my arms, in my life. Besides, tonight we’d begin the next phase of our Castro mission. A crucial phase...getting  off the bench to hit one out of the park and run the bases to home plate!

 

My newswire copy was filed and my memo to Blake (and as a result to Sean and the rest of CIA chorus line) was winging it’s way home to New York via the massive United Press teletype machine in the Havana newspaper office.

 

Pilar and I were  ready to leave the Record-Bulletin Office, so I turned off the lights in the back room we had assigned for ourselves to engage in any undercover work so we’d be unnoticed by anyone passing by outside and to keep our work from prying eyes in the office. Even Jorge wasn’t in the inner circle of this caper. I trusted him but Buster felt this was the wiser way to handle it. He was naturally paranoid as you would expect a CIA company man to be. It goes with the territory.

 

All Pilar knew was that Buster Scalisi was an American ex-pat who knew people, and in Havana knowing people is the name of the game. If she knew he was CIA and the real mission was to spy on Castro and to get evidence he had Santiago whacked, who knows what she might do. If we got that evidence of assassination of a very well respected and beloved editor, public opinion would turn on Castro, hopefully eroding  his Robin Hood image and in the process undermine the foundation of his rebellion.

 

As far as I was aware that she was aware is that Buster had found a boat to get us to Castro so I could do a bio piece on him to get his message out on the world stage. She in the bargain would get to meet her idol, do her part for the revolution and be part of Cuban, and yes, world history. First we had to get word to Castro. If you think CIA guys are paranoid, walk a mile in a revolutionary’s combat boots. I didn’t feel all that patriotic that I wanted to eat a bullet for breakfast tied to a palmetto tree trunk with bullets from a M1 Garand rifle turning me and Pilar into Swiss cheese.

 

The night air was cool and refreshing as we walked the short distance  to Sloppy Joes, fast becoming a favorite saloon of mine, in addition to Lansky’s Tropicana. I spent less time at Lansky’s.  Who needed a hooker on a hot afternoon after shelling out a few US dollars. I had Pilar, the most intelligent, daring, beautiful girl I had ever known, and more importantly...I had love. Who in their right mind needs more? I didn’t. I had a great job, a beautiful woman in a tropical paradise and enough excitement facing me head-on to last me three lifetimes.

 

We entered Joe’s and after our eyes adjusted to the dim lighting I looked around and found Buster and another figure off at table at the end of the 59 foot bar. He waved us over and as we blazed a trail through  a forest of boisterous drinkers I stopped a waitress and ordered two rum and cokes for myself and Pilar to be brought over.

“Mickey, Pilar you’re early, but then so are we,” he laughed that “I’ve had a few drinks already” laugh. His guest whose back was to us, turned and with a pleasant smile grinning ear to ear he held out his hand. As I took it, my eyes got as big as the coconuts from the palm trees that line the Via Bianca. Buster laughed again. “Mickey, Pilar, meet your captain, meet Ernest Hemingway.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is the man who outfitted his boat with weapons and went hunting German U-Boats in the Caribbean during the war. I had to face reality. We’re going to storm Castro’s hideaway with the Old Man and The Sea!

Chapter 16 - Sloppy Joe's & the CIA Funhouse

 

I had neglected contacting Hemingway  when I arrived in Havana. I felt guilty that Mailer had gone to bat on my behalf arranging a meet and greet, but everything was so overwhelming upon arrival.  Riots, arrests, establishing my cover had taken priority...and then, a big then….meeting Pilar. Proletarian passion under the palm fronds in paradise. Heaven’s name was Havana.

“Mr. Hemingway, a pleasure, I assure you!” I effused as I shook his hand perhaps a bit too vigorously. “Easy lad, I’m not a water pump in need of priming,”  he shot back with a wink and a broad smile. “Please sit. I’ve been admiring your work for the papers back in New York, and the work you’re doing here for Jorge. I have the New York papers sent to me here weekly. I like to keep up on events back there, you know, the Broadway scene and book reviews, that sort of thing, but honestly I don’t care to be anywhere except here in Cuba to live, fish and write. As for you Pilar, so very good to see you again, here sit next to me. Been quite awhile my dear.”

Pilar knew Hemingway and never once mentioned it to me! What was I, chopped liver?
To a molehill of a writer as I am in awe of a wordsmith mountain of a giant as Hemingway is and   to not tell me you know him was a mortal sin in my Sunday bible! Go, repent and sin no more!

“I’ve known Pilar since she was a rowdy little tomboy tyke. Her dad and I go way back,” he said by way of explanation as the puzzled deer in the headlight look on my face must have given me away faster than a Catholic door prize at the Knights of Columbus bingo night.

I was relieved  when our drinks finally arrived at our table to grease the wheels of conversation  for the  obligatory “get to know you” 20 minutes  of dragged out long drawn superficial pleasantries before we got down and dirty in the CIA mud pit. Buster fired off the first serious round. “Here’s the deal. Hem here has a boat, don’t panic when I tell you it is also named the “Pilar” which it is.” More revelations from on high!  “He will get you to Santiago de Cuba on the ruse you are fishing for marlin. In addition to drinking, Hem loves to deep sea fish, and let’s face it. This is a fishing expedition of sorts.”

“Once there you will be met by Victoria, our rebel contact who will lead you through the mountains to Castro’s camp,” he continued. “She’s already gotten word to Castro of your desire to get his message out to the world, and as expected, his ego is larger than Lawrence of Arabia’s and he was stroked efficiently enough to set his lefty tinder ablaze.”

I could see  the plan coming into focus. Shit with Hem at the helm we might even get a flashback taste of the Spanish Civil War back when Hem was tolling the bell for thee.

I noticed out of the corner my eye, Hem and Pilar already deep into conversations of an obvious nostalgic nature were completely oblivious to the Buster and I, the peasants, and deep in a conversation of old times.  I was still confused. She knew him and never said a word! I was distracted, but got back on track. Business before confusion. I had not just a few questions poking around inside my cranial cavity rolling around as loose as  ball bearings in a mess kit cup.

“How do I get my news copy sent from there to New York.?” I asked Buster sarcastically. “Seems a little remote. Perhaps a sea going donkey will ride the currents into New York Harbor and waltz in on all four hooves into Blake’s office, you know sort of a CIA programmed to speak in code Francis the Talking Mule.

Buster leaned in close and lowered his voice letting the cacophony of the crowd, the low murmur constant sound that a hot rod idling in neutral would make.  Sloppy Joe’s is famous good times, laughter, and the attendant mask of noise just enough to hide those secrets uttered by international spies and philandering husbands and their married mistresses. Believe me at Joe’s there plenty of both lurking in the dark recesses of the bar hiding secret plans of assassinations as well as sexual assignations. Either way, someone was going to get fucked. Figuratively and literally.

My imagination shifted into first gear. In the corner, over there, the blonde Master Race looking fellow with lipstick lightly applied. He’s gotta be a bi-sexual East German agent and former trapeze artist. That woman with the large Ann Sheridan 1940’s Hollywood Hedda Hopper hat standing seductively against the by the wall near the men’s room, I can tell she is from Tel Aviv. An Israeli Mossad femme fatale with a grease gun looking for Martin Bormann hiding out as a bartender in this very bar! I see MI-5 is here too. Fucking Ian Fleming’s James Bond clones licensed to kill and make love to international beauties in skimpy underwear. Damn, even the French SDECA are on hand trying to unmask the perpetrators who switched their croissants with American doughnuts when they weren’t looking.

By the time my mind was about to shift to second gear, Buster answered my query “Not to worry Mickey. We have  a CIA safe house already set up in Santiago de Cuba. It’s outfitted with a teletype machine, two in fact, just in case one goes down we have a backup. You’ll give your feature pieces to Victoria who is in addition to being his chief snoop here in the capital, but is also Castro’s runner. He trusts her implicitly. She’ll bring your news copy for the newspapers to me. I’m also going to supervise this operation myself including coding the pieces at the end with Castro’s movements and plans. These will be sent as duplicates to Havana for Batista’s people to set up counter actions and attacks on the rebel forces. None of this 20/20 hindsight bullshit.  We’ll also have an offshore radio ship fully equipped to backup all information to Miami for distribution to Langley. You just supply us the copy and we’ll code it for the field agents and  Batista.”

It appeared to be a lock and load, but,  guilt  lingered over me about keeping Pilar in the dark about the true nature of the mission. I felt I was betraying her and  was gnawing at me worse than a wharf rat in a Battery Park dumpster. Not only was I deceiving Pilar  I was now pulling a subterfuge mask over Hemingway. The man of the people. The man who saw action against Franco in Spain. The woman I love and the man I admire, and here I was hiding the truth  from  both.

Buster could tell by my face of the turmoil I was feeling. “Ah, Hemingway. I see. Look, Hem may have his heart and soul with the people, but Francisco Santiago was one of his closest friends. As far as he knows you are merely trying to get the facts on Santiago’s killing. He puts politics aside when it comes to friendship. He doesn’t know the CIA reason you are going, and better left that way. Do some fishing on the way down, drink some beer and make love to Pilar under a full moon on a gentle sea.”

I had nowhere to turn at this point. As long as Hem got something out of this, all is well. Justice for him, Sienna and Blake. “OK,” I said, “I won’t sweat it. Look a teletype machine and a radio ship. Man that’s gotta run a few accountants crazy in Treasury.”

Buster had an answer for that too. “It’s not coming out of Uncle Sam’s worn pockets. Your buddy Lansky is footing the bill!” Lansky! I couldn’t believe it. “Why would Lansky even consider that,” I practically yelled. Buster sat back in his chair and  threw back a shot glass of whiskey. “Lansky and Trafficante and the rest of those wise guys have it made now with Batista. Remember, Lansky is a capitalist, not a communist. He’s riding a gravy train now. Almost has his own country here under his control. Castro could put an end to that. He wanted you to go in and kill him, get rid of him. Very similar to what Bugsy Siegel told that Italian count during the war. He offered to go to Berlin and do a hit on Hitler. Lot of balls on that boy. No brains, but balls as big as Texas. Lansky is in … it’s a done deal...our way!”

I was impressed. This supposedly covert mission, known until now to only a handful of FYI people,  now involved a rebel turncoat, the American Mafia and a writer who could whip literature's ass in one round of boxing, except for maybe Norman Mailer.

“I guess it’s under control. When do I meet this phantom rebel queen Victoria or is she being manufactured in Detroit as we speak. Next year’s spy model with power steering?”

Buster pointed to a female form walking towards us from the bar. She had raven black long hair and a determined walk. Strut actually. Her stride was confident. “Here she is now. Meet Victoria.”

At that point, my mouth dropped. Pilar and Victoria hugged each other in a fashion reserved for old sorority sisters sis boom bah. Apparently they l knew each other too. So much for deception on my part. I felt I was the odd man out. How the hell did this happen….and right under my nose. I looked up at the ornate ceiling fully expecting Lansky to descend from on high with a host of mob angels with dirty faces. Hell, this is Cuba, 1957. Anything  is possible. Even betrayal and death. Let’s face it...you only live once anyway… may as well go out with a bang!

Chapter 17 - Storm Clouds Over Havana

 

Storm Clouds Over Havana Dateline: Havana April 11,  1958 By Mickey Russo Special Correspondent 8:54 A.M

Strikes organized by the 26th of July Movement did not have the momentum Fidel Castro had hoped for.   A general strike was attempted  two days ago, but did not receive nation-wide popular support and the fire of revolt was quickly extinguished by strong government counter actions by the police and military. Following the aborted strike attempt, the rebels appear to be losing  strength and prestige, while a number of government sources report schisms within the movement.

 

Other sources from the rebel camps report that at the present time the 26th of July Movement is stronger than it has ever been, and its chances for success in overthrowing the Batista regime have increased.

 

The Castroites appear to have  taken a more anti-American Yankee Go Home line based on  charges that the United States is supplying the Batista forces with arms and other war materiel to combat the insurgency. (As of March 13, we  obtained verification from Washington D.C. from a source in the Department of Defense that arms were being supplied to the Batista regime for a time, but as of this date, all shipments have been suspended.)

 

The Cuban Government has consistently charged that 26th of July Movement is penetrated and influenced by communism, however have offered little in the way of evidence  to prove these allegations, although there are continuing reports that some communists have entered the lower ranks of the rebel forces, again, according to government sources without supporting evidence.

The Batista government continues to hold all the cards at this point to abort the revolution’s success based on the government's ability to maintain the support of the armed forces and organized labor. The majority of the Cuban citizenry when interviewed by this reporter, do oppose  Batista in principle, but out of fear of reprisal are not willing to take up arms against him and merely desire a return to stable political conditions.

….End Transmission …….

Memo To: Blake O’Hara April 11, 1958 9:43 A.M. (Please encode for transmission)

Final preparations to leave for Santiago de Cuba are being made. We have been hampered by weather since January but it appears we’ll be ready to depart Havana at the dawn’s early light, without  the rocket’s red glare aimed at sinking our trusty fishing boat!

 

Have had great times getting to know Ernest H. A real man’s man and apparently a ladies man as well as he has proven  at Lansky’s clubs where I’ve spent many hours with him.

 

Proof that a man of letters is truly a man of action with booze and women. He must have one hell of a large Pulitzer! Our rebel contact, Victoria will meet us in Santiago de Cuba to take Pilar, Hem and me to Castro’s camp in the mountains where I’ll begin the series of interviews and dig around to find out more on Francisco’s killers. Hopefully I  won’t blow it and meet the same fate!

….End Transmission …

 

Pilar fell asleep exhausted that night cradled in my arms, while I just lay there staring at the ceiling. Thinking, over thinking. Planning, over planning. Revolution. It happens in the best of families, but do they all work as the warranty suggests, or is the reality that they are a worse curse than what they've replaced?
As a political and social scientist.  So I didn’t anticipate any epiphanies or revelations regarding the revolutionary orbit in  rebellious solar systems of social issues and rights of the people. Besides, writers words aren't gospel, although some writers will claim they are the second coming of Jesus H. (Hemingway) Christ, truth is...forget the words, and realize it is between the lines, between the sweaty sheets of literature, that you'll find the message, as well as the white space between the words...or what a writer doesn’t write but actually omits, that tells the story and pieces the puzzle together. The old one hand clapping Zen hipster zinger.

 

Revolution is an internal family affair...like incest its best kept hidden away in the closet of the trailer. It's a social fabric that has torn, and in time inbred, ready to come apart at the familial seams it seems. It's a case of weird Uncle Hector fucking his 13 year old first cousin dressed in a sheer see-through frock behind the barn, why? Because he can, and the resultant child is a mutant, born with three heads similar to a freak farm animal on display at some roadside rattlesnake farm in the Southwest.

Revolution takes a number, and gets in line. In the Russian Revolution I picture a peasant woman with a babushkag, you know, a rag scarf over her head, she has bad teeth and she needs a shave let alone a bikini wax, as she stands stoically in a Ukrainian bakery on a Saturday morning in random order of rebellion.The Russian Revolution is regarded as the undisputed World Series of revolutionary events

 

Cuba! Now this different. This one is the sexy tits and ass floor show of revolutions. There is no business like revolution business...Cuba...a most sexy and sensuous paradise of rife and strife. A Caribbean island paradise of carnal pleasures, where pussy and politics go hand in hand along with the rum soaked bacchanals. She is an outlandishly flamboyant island nation of sexy, curvaceous and long legged females, dressed as plumed dancers on brightly lit casino stages, in decadent old Havana with a stable full of sex floor shows involving everything imaginable and unimaginable back in Podunk, USA.

 

This is the  private American play land of brothels, good times, and bad gangsters, like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and Third World American hand picked hand puppet leaders, like Juan Bautista, The mob made Cuba an offer it couldn't refuse. The rich got richer, and the poor once again, got poorer. The country was as ripe as a field of sugar cane for revolution, when cabana's would give way to Castroites,  and beach bums would make way for beach bombs.

Well,  enough overthinking. I had a busy day ahead. We all did. So now I had to sleep. Rejuvenate. Energize. Besides as the lady said “Tomorrow is another day!” I agree, it is another day, and to be honest quite frankly I don’t give a damn.

Chapter 18 -Hemingway's Boat & A Bottle of Run

 

 

Early dawn yawned over the smooth waters of Cojimar Bay just east on the compass from Havana. In its awakening spotlight bath of golden rays It gave life and dimension to our trusty sea worthy transportation. Hemingway’s boat, “The Pilar.” She was a beauty.

 

A jewel in the rough, Hem’s boat was the greatest source of his pride. Even more so than his Pulitzer I believe. The “Pilar”  was a sleek sexy svelt 38 foot customized outfitted   version of the Wheeler Shipyard’s hand-crafted Playmate series of wooden boats produced, or rather given birth lovingly at their shipyard at Coney Island in New York City. The “Pilar” was the Lauren Bacall of the sport fishing world, and Hem fussed over her as if he were Bogart himself. Actually two of his guests on two of his rum and fish run voyages were Bogart and Bacall!

 

We began loading the supplies we would need once we arrived at X Marks the spot in Santiago de Cuba. Oh hell, we were going to meet Castro so I guess it would be more appropriate to say X Marx the spot as we prepared to heave ho  making the sea going journey south  for our clandestine rendezvous with the rebellion.

 

A few changes of clothes along with the tools of the journalist’s trade. Notebooks and pens. Buster Scalisi was on hand doing his last minute cheerleader chants and helping load the more technical items aboard such as my prized field ready portable Smith Corona Skywriter I’ve had for years. The same one I banged out the Jackie Robinson series of stories on that helped launch my career into the teeming jungle of newspaper reporting. (Buster would drive ahead to our mission point along with an electronics expert from Langley to outfit the apartment/office we’d be using. He was also on hand to set up the pirate radio station on the Lansky freighter to get the coded messages to Miami and then to Langley at CIA Headquarters for analysis before forwarding to Batista.) Tricky business this spy business.

 

Once our gear was stowed away below, Hem stood proudly on deck beaming like a cat who had just eaten the proverbial canary. “Well, Mickey. How’s she looking?” I hadn’t had the opportunity to view this wonder of the Hemingway world before. “She’s a beaut Hem!” I admitted honestly. “A damned fine looking craft.”

 

He beamed with so much pride and excitement I felt this boat could give him a faster and more gratifying blow job than Mama Do-Right the fellatio queen of Havana could and did to many a serviceman on leave who wandered into her back alley off of the Prada in the Barrio Colon.

 

“We’ll get some marlin fishing in on the way down, to make it look good and legitimate,” he explained, speaking more as a junkie explaining how he only needs one more fix then will quit.  “Got a customized live fish well for the trophies.” I nodded to Pilar and she was game for fishing. Hell, she was always ready for anything. Live life to maximum speed was the motto that explained her uncanny amount of  drive and energy to experience life.

 

“Will we have to refuel along the way or can we make it non-stop. I mean not stopping for fuel at some fishing village that still thinks it’s 1898?” I guess the sarcasm was as blunt as a brick used to smash the skull of a high roller with pockets bulging with cash on a dark street in Manila.  

Pilar shot a look at me from her double barreled shotgun of big brown eyes. I took the hint and held my tongue when Buster filled in the blanks. “You are aboard the fastest boat around, my doubting friend. She’s got extra large fuel tanks making landfall frequency miniscule for this trip, and you have two motors. One a 40 HP for leisurely trolling for Brando the Marlin, and a hefty 75 HP job to get you to your destination in little time. Remember though, there are Castro’s spies along the coast as well ever vigilant, ever watching so we have to make this look real. Fishing along the way to interview Castro would only appear natural, leisurely, as they are already watching us.”

 

“Watching us? Now?” Pilar motioned to me to NOT look around and not to speak loudly. “Over on the beach, two people, an old man and old woman sitting. They’ve been watching us with binoculars since we got here. I was told by Victoria that they would be there and others will be watching us along the way. Castro is a very careful man, Mickey. That’s why we will be victorious in our battle to free the Cuban people!”

 

At that point Hem did a magic trick by pulling a “rabbit”  from his canvas bag….”Aha, to celebrate, I’ve brought along some of the finest sea-going rum in the hemisphere and a few of the finest cigars Cuba has to offer to launch the journey.” He pulled a couple of “ladies” as he called them and passed them out, ladies first to Pilar,  (yes she was a cigar afficianado as our apartment would attest to) and one to me and one to Buster saving the Queen Isabella for himself. The rum was busted open, formality was tossed aside to four winds as we began taking turns swigging the nectar of the Havana Club Rum letting it glide smoothly down our throats as the sun rose smoothly above the horizon.

 

It was time for Buster to leave us, as he bid us “Godspeed” and left. Hem dashed up to the flying bridge to crank up the engine, cigar firmly fixed clenched in his teeth. Pilar and I went forward to the bow to enjoy the emerging sun and the sea spray on our faces. We had our rum soaked breakfast with a side order of cigar. We headed out to the open sea and I the salt air, gasoline and oil smells couldn’t destroy the erotic aromas of Pilars bath salts, shampoo,  and the natural scents given off by her body. I was of course in love with her, and  now aboard the boat with the romance only  the sea can generate in a person I felt I was the luckiest man on earth. I was in love with two Pilars…Pilar the woman and Pilar, Hemingway’s boat. It may be the sun and sea affecting me….or perhaps….the rum!

Chapter 19 - Salty Dogs of the Caribbean

Setting sail into the Straits of Florida we began tracking a westerly course. Pirate waters at one time that were  alive with mythological mermaids singing songs of enticement to excite men devastated by scurvy and drink, as the ships danced on the waves while overhead they were witness to  lofty high flying, nose diving pelicans and perhaps the Ancient Mariners cursed albatross brought down with a crossbow of fiction and rhyme.

 

The “Pilar” left in it’s wake, land and safe haven as it’s bow plowed a path through turquoise waters and golden sun. At night, small patches of plankton would glow with a bio-luminescence creating a finger painting by the tiny liquid hands of an invisible concubine of King Neptune.

 

We dropped anchor the first night inside the harbor of La Fa. It had been a long first day. We were fueled by adrenalin, salt air and a few choppy waves, bow breakers as Hem called them, as we ventured further into the rich waters of the Caribbean. After a few hours, the waters decided to give way to a smoother cruise as we became flanked by Atlantic flying fish. The Royal Air Force of the Neptunian Kingdom accompanying us while entertaining us as the “Pilar’s” 75 HP motor raced in the middle of them. Churning up a white foam that left a temporary path off our stern, while her bow sliced through the waters as skillfully as a surgeon’s knife in the hands of Jack the Ripper on the prowl in London’s White Chapel district.

 

“Well, mates. How was your first day?” our Captain queried. Pilar had ridden with Hem before as I found out. Old friend of the family and all. As for me, “Hem, this is fantastic. I feel at home, content, relaxed out here. The fresh air and salt spray from the ocean. Builds up quite an appetite. A shame we can’t just keep going to the other end  of the earth.  Fall off even, I don’t care,” I said exuberantly. I even managed to do a little two step jig as though I was possessed by the spirit of a  midshipman on one of Her Majesty’s 1700’s Royal Navy sailing vessels searching for a port in old China to trade for opium.

 

We opened a few beers, light cigars and all sat back on deck chairs, Pilar and I with our feet on the sterns brass rail enjoying the gentle rocking motion of the boat as small sunset waves caressed her hull.  Hem had a beer and then went below to the galley. “Steaks, me hearties,” be bellowed from below. “Rare all around. Only way to enjoy them, spiced and red with blood. I’ve also got some plantain I’ll fry up to go with it. Mickey, grab one of those bottles of red wine from the cooler. Glasses are down here, I’ll bring them up.”

 

Pilar jumped up. “I’ll get the glasses and plates. Where do you want to eat, up here on down there.” Hem laughed a huge “HA” and made a proclamation, “We eat on deck ye pirates wench, on deck surrounded by sharks who can smell the blood of the steaks and will bump the boat to add some dangerous spice to the meal.”

 

Gawd, I swear this was the best meal I have ever eaten or will ever eat. Cooked to perfection, atmosphere convivial and romantic at the same time, and I never saw Pilar so beautiful. The gold and red of the setting sun played off her hair and gave her skin an extra layer of brown sensuality.

 

After a few more hours, the wine had completely overtaken me. It was now 10 o’clock and Pilar who had long since sat on the floor of the deck near my feet had fallen asleep, her head resting on my knee and I realized I had been stroking her soft hair for an hour. I could feel her upper torso against my calf, breathing in and out, peaceful, content. “Hem,” I said softly, I’m going to put her to bed and join her.”

 

“I’ll just finish another beer and call it a night too. Good day today Mickey, I must say, and please, you take care of that  little girl. She’s very special to me.” I was told never argue with a man who owns shotguns. In this case it didn’t matter. Pilar was half of who I am, was and ever will be. Without her, I’d never be whole.

 

“You don’t have to worry. She’s special to me as well. She is a treasure, and if we come out of this alive, I’m gonna marry her. Not letting this one get away.”

 

Hem smiled broadly. “Ah, for whom the church bell tolls….it tolls for thee Amigo!”

Chapter 20 - Latin Latitude Love & A Marlin Named Brando

Billfishing is the sea hunt for the Maltese Falcon of the sportfishing world in both Hemingway’s half of the hemisphere in the Caribbean Ocean and  the placid Pacific where Zane Grey pursued his quarry from the wild west depths of Davy Jones’ Locker. The turquoise waters of the Latin latitudes and longitudes of Cuba were teeming that April with “blues” and “whites” that gave a 50 pound test line a devastating Joe Louis workout.

 

We had one more day before we made landfall at Santiago de Cuba, and this was the day anointed by Pope Ernest as St. Marlon Brando the Blue Marlin Day where he felt his timbers shiver and he would call upon St. Andrew the patron saint of fishermen. As we took our positions in the “fighting chairs” poles baited with artificial lures he handed a half full bottle of rum the Pilar to “baptize” the moment. “You know, Jesus Christ himself never caught one of these monsters. If he did, he might have stayed around a bit longer, and turned the water into rum. Now, there’s a man’s drink, and these are a man’s fish!”

 

I wasn’t about to argue with a Pope. If he was the Pope, then this pope boat was a seagoing Vatican and the marlin were sinners who spend  time  preserved forever in a den on a  paneled wall above a pool table, after fighting like the devil in mortal combat with it’s human contender.

 

As Hem wrote in Old Man and Sea published in 1952, “The marlin wakes Santiago by jerking the line. The fish jumps out of the water again and again, and Santiago is thrown into the bow of the skiff, facedown in his dolphin meat. The line feeds out fast, and the old man brakes against it with his back and hands. His left hand, especially, is badly cut. Santiago wishes that the boy were with him to wet the coils of the line, which would lessen the friction.

The old man wipes the crushed dolphin meat off his face, fearing that it will make him nauseated and he will lose his strength. Looking at his damaged hand, he reflects that “pain does not matter to a man.”

 

As the sun rises, the marlin begins to circle. For hours the old man fights the circling fish for every inch of line, slowly pulling it in. He feels faint and dizzy and sees black spots before his eyes. The fish riots against the line, battering the boat.  When it passes under the boat, Santiago cannot believe its size. As the marlin continues to circle, Santiago adds enough pressure to the line to bring the fish closer and closer to the skiff. The old man thinks that the fish is killing him, and admires him for it, saying, “I do not care who kills who.” Eventually, he pulls the fish onto its side by the boat and plunges his harpoon into it. The fish lurches out of the water, brilliantly and beautifully alive as it dies. When it falls back into the water, it’s blood stains the waves.”

 

Pilar was not about to pit wits against a fish who did her no harm. I could see the pain in her eyes and told Hem, “Look, she’s a little sensitive about it so I’ll go sit this one out with her as well. Besides, I don’t think I’m a match for a 1,000 pound behemoth. Now, meet me in Northern Michigan where you used to hunt and fish and I’ll go one on one with large mouth bass.”

 

Hem laughed that outdoorsman laugh that came from deep within his being. “I’ll do that and the one who can’t catch his limit for the live well, buys the beer at the Keyhole Bar in Macinac.” Having been born and raised in Michigan I was all too familiar with the haunts of Hemingway. You couldn’t take a step without standing where he stood pole or shotgun in hand.

 

The day proved, much to Pilar’s delight fishless. Only because Hem decided he would put pole aside and instead went fishing for words from his typewriter. Most of his greatest works were behind him in the dust of the past but, he was mid-stream on his memoir “A Moveable Feast” and worked on it that afternoon at sea as we had one day to go before we would end our fantastic voyage with this man for all seasons.

 

Later when I began writing novels I knew a writer needed sanctuary for thought  I remember what he wrote about the art of wordsmithing. “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.  Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

 

Pilar and I spread out a blanket on the deck and fell asleep to the rocking quiet motion of the boat and the caress of the setting sun. Soon it would be time for the dinner bell to ring and we’d all come alive again for a few hours until too much drink would gently cloud or cleanse our minds, never sure which.

 

Soon Pilar and I would be on our way into the heart of the revolution in the Sierra Maestra. Before that happened however, I had another thought and shared it with Pilar. “I always heard a captain at sea can perform a marriage ceremony. Well, Hem is the captain of this ship wasn’t he? He himself thinks at times he is God Almighty!”

 

Pilar smiled sweetly. “Are you proposing to me Senor Mickey, yes?”

 

“Yes, I guess I am. I love you Pilar!” Rum and sun were not to be blame this time. It was heart and soul!

 

At that moment Hem came from below deck where he had been writing, emerging with a bottle of wine. “No need for glasses this time,” he said. “I couldn’t help but overhear you. Well, no I was listening and moved closer to hear better. Fact is, a captain really has no such power in the eyes of law or God. Both manufactured to mankind’s specifications. That being said, I will be honored to perform a symbolic ceremony. It won’t count of course, but you can always get the real McCoy later by some padre for a few pesos in some  church on the island. As Pilar is like a daughter to me…..I am happy she has such a fine protector and a writer who is not afraid of life. You both have my blessing. Now, drink!!!! Dinner will be a feast to celebrate your lives as one! I’ll perform the ceremony tonight under the stars!”

 

This would not be the last time we would see Ernest, but I didn’t know that at the time. As he went below deck to get dinner started I held Pilar and kissed her. “You know, I’m really gonna miss that old man and his sea.”

Chapter 21 - The Sierra Maestra

Personal Journal Entry: May 2, 1958

Glad to report we  are finally on the road (dirt cow path) to the rebel encampment high in the Sierra Maestra. When  we  landed in Santiago de Cuba we were taken to the CIA spook house already outfitted with all the electronic gear and transmission gadgetry that Dick Tracy would be proud of if he weren’t a comic strip character. Buster Scalisi, who should be a comic book character told us all was ready for the mission. All he was missing was a rumpled trench coat and a Lone Ranger decoder ring

 

Hemingway  left immediately for Havana after dropping us off and not to mention having a few snorts of rum. Who needs a bottle of rum when you have Ava Gardner waiting in your house! He got a message from Buster that  she had arrived the day before from Spain and made a stop over. She’s been having  a fling thing with him as well as a few bullfighters along the way from what I read in Variety magazine. Ava Gardner! Hell, what red blooded Americano or hot blooded Latin bullfighter wouldn’t want to put on a pair of tight fitting bulge enhancing matador pants just to get into hers?

 

After he left with appropriate bon voyage bon mots our delayed  wait began. It was  two weeks and a few days before Victoria arrived, so I spent my time mainly getting some advance copy out to New York and progress reports to Blake at the paper, and Sean Donovan at the CIA secret bat cave at Langley. At night...Pilar and I took in what nightlife was available to us before disappearing under the sheets after walking in the moonlight barefoot on the beach. Oh hell, you can have Ava Gardner...I’ve got Pilar!

 

Victoria was running messages for Castro during the wait,  but  the main delay was that  it took him two weeks for him to give the final thumbs up  for us to follow the Socialist Brick Road into the Sierra Maestra. It’s now day two of our journey and  we are now off to see the Wizard of Oz.

 

Pilar is excited. To her, this is the second coming of Jesus  Christ. I guess he had a beard too and was a revolutionary. Castro has the dragon Batista to slay, while JC had his own cross to bear so the speak.

 

While in town we outfitted ourselves for the trek with new boots and I even bought a pair of great white hunter pants and matching tan shirt, you know the kind worn by any well bred revolutionary involved in overthrowing a small island nation or a gas station attendant in at a Phillips 66 station near Barstow, California. “Can I check the oil? Fill ‘er up? Got a revolution?”

 

I had enough pockets on both pants and shirt  that would give an Aussie kangaroo  a massive marsupial hard-on. Thankfully, there were no horny ‘roo’s in Cuba that wanted to do the marenga in a smokey cantina.

I filled the pockets with small notebooks, pens, pencils, compass, waterproof matches, and my trusty Swiss Army Knife. The kind with a corkscrew just in case we ran into a wine cellar hidden in the lush jungle. I also brought along my canvas backpack with my pride a joy… my  camera, a unique German Leica rangefinder strangely with interchangeable Nikkor lenses, plenty of black and white film and  changes of clothes and toiletries for myself and Pilar. I also thought to bring a box of Cuban cigars and two bottles of tequila by way of introduction. Pilar carried those in her pack along with certain ladies items necessary for that special female time of the month.

 

Pilar had similar attire and damn if she wasn’t tempestuously torrid in equatorial khaki. She was as brilliant as Venus in the sky at 4:30 AM on a frosty January morning. She was a planet and I was merely a moon in her orbit, held in place by her gravitational pull. With her shirt opened at the top, two buttons released from its puritanical  bondage and duty of propriety, she exposed  tiny drops of sweat that blazed a trail through her cleavage that I wanted to follow all the way along its flow that would eventually lead me into the  pubic delta of her Amazon Forest.  Dr. Livingstone I presume?

 

Victoria could have been an iconic centerfold for an L.L. Bean Revolutionary Catalog complete with a fashionable stylish Eastern Bloc machine gun. The machete hanging from her army surplus web belt was the perfect accessory to compliment the Gerber commando assault knife she sported attached to what in civilization would be a Saks Fifth Avenue bandolero of ammunition sparkling  in sun as blinding as a diamond from Tiffany’s.

 

Our group was augmented by three of Castro’s crack commando’s who would run interference for us if we ran into government troops on our way to the Emerald City to have the bearded wizard grant us our wishes. I knew too well that Castro was not the Wizard of Oz, that my friends is a horse of a different color.  

 

After a three day trek following a path constructed by the Spanish in the seventeenth century, known as the ‘Camino Real,’ through jungle, pine forest, scrub and some strange lizards and snakes, we reached the crest of a small mountain commanding a view in all directions should an attack be attempted by enemy forces. Castro’s camp at last. Our mission was now in overdrive.

 

We walked through the small camp consisting of small wood planked buildings. A hut covered in palm fronds was the guard post.  Another interesting structure with an antennae reaching for the sky was the clandestine rebel radio station, The station was set up earlier this year  by Che Guevara designed to broadcast the aims and latest news of the 26th of July Movement. Transmitting on short-wave, Radio Rebelde also broadcasts the latest combat news, music and speeches to the people of Cuba to counter the government propaganda efforts as well at planted lies by the American CIA.   I wondered if they played Elvis?  

Just past the radio station, perched near the edge of a ravine was the lair of Zeus...Castro’s abode and headquarters.

 

The local farmers and peasants are the guardians of the rebel encampment. Protecting it’s location  and as they were doing  today, bringing in supplies of food, coffee, medicine and cigars. Can’t run a Latin revolt without cigars,  rum and guns! The  guns and ammo  were obtained from the cities and rural area’s loyal to the rebel cause. (Many were shipped through well off rebel loyalists living in Tampa, Florida through sources in the US and Europe that found  their way to the Castro pipeline.)

 

The Batista regime keeps the populous in poverty with cruel methods including torture and death if they voice any opposition to the dictatorship. The regime is a disease. The rebels are viewed as the magic bullet.

 

We were shown to our various quarters that I can best describe as purely existential, Pilar and I were given the “honeymoon hut” that meant mosquito netting, a soft bed on the ground with clean sheets  and a bottle of wine. Castro thought, and rightly so it would make a good first impression. One thing about Latins. They know romance and passion.

We will freshen up first skinning dipping in the small stream out back and after a few hours of getting acclimated will dine with our host and his staff. I couldn’t wait to be thrilled by the Che Guevara Dancers! We were now playing Broadway, center stage in the revolution, standing room only. I told Pilar….”It’s showtime!!!”

Chapter 22 - The Double Cross

 

 

Personal Journal Entry May 3, 1958

While we were getting our revolutionary compass bearings in the Sierra Maestra rebel compound, I began my series of interviews with the highly enigmatic Castro. Fortunately I had plenty of notebooks to record my notes as he could talk for verbose filled hours, and often did. His philosophies  were those of modified Karl Marx politics punctuated with baseball terminology...hitting Havana is hitting a home run...and all dramatically explained with a Mickey Mantle at bat flourish to emphasis this point and that detail.

 

I was transported mentally into  a Hollywood Errol Flynn film.   “Pancho Villa meets Groucho Marx” directed by John Huston.   Castro’s rapid fire delivery and flowing cascade of words regarding his revolution was pure fast paced Bogart banter straight out of “The Maltese Falcon” bam bam bam bam... He was excited to tell the story he wanted to reach the outside world, and we would get the message across, complete with black and white photos I am taking that may or not make Life Magazine. By gaining his trust I felt I could get to the truth of Santiago’s death, my real task. The revolution could wait...I wanted justice...truth...was this man a man of the people as he claims or merely a cold blooded killer of a journalist who fought for truth and justice with words?

I must admit, Castro and Che, who we also met are fascinating. Pilar is mesmerized by Castro’s philosophy as well as the military strategy being developed by one of his top aides, Che Guevara. An interesting sort, not a Cuban and by no means a peasant. I like him, but as Pilar said earlier today after meeting him last night, “He needs a bath!”

 

 

• End of Entry -

 

 

Excerpt from the 1975 autobiography of Sean Donovan  CIA - Retired

Unknown to Mickey, “Victoria” and “Pilar”   is that we were secretly recording conversations at the Tropicana through wire recording technology. One night we almost got what could best be described as an admission of what we already knew, but couldn’t prove …. until that night.

 

Buster Scalisi, our main agent in Havana, went rogue at some point and had been working secretly, without our knowledge,  as an independent agent for the Cuban government on Batista’s payroll. In addition he was also collecting income from the Mafia, coordinating mob influence on the political affairs  of Cuba aimed at castrating Castro’s revolt.   Batista and Meyer Lansky, were a marriage made in espionage hell. Buster also knew first hand the secrets of our CIA involvement in the country and could forward any negative information to Batista that may affect US involvement, and more important, any shift in US state department policy that might hold back the CIA efforts to help him maintain his control on Cuba.

In one of the recorded conversations, Lansky inquired about a gun shipment. To which Buster replied “They arrived quietly, Batista doesn’t have a clue about them or our involvement. Why the hell would you even send weapons to Castro? I don’t get that at all? Seems like risky business that could get us all killed!”

 

Lansky, ever the businessman who knew how to turn a peso into dollars had an answer for everything. He never acted without looking at every angle of a venture that meant money. “The weapons we are supplying the rebels with are not the latest and greatest. Batista gets the good stuff, Castro gets the crap. A carbine is no match for artillery or machine guns. Besides Castro is also getting weapons from other sources in Tampa so it evens out. Batista gets the US made weapons, Castro gets Eastern Bloc and Chinese. In other words, Batista gets the Burgundy wine, Castro gets the Mogen David.  The main point is this. The rebels have 300 maybe 500 fighters...Batista has 10,000 American trained troops and police.  In the end the rebels will be eliminated easily, but in the meantime, why not make a profit..it’s business, plain and simple. Soon this will be over and we can go about our business...and you’re making money too...more than the CIA pays you. We pay better anyway. You made the right choice.”

 

Buster had reservations and by voicing them gave us insight to the more sinister aspects of the events they were coordinating. “What if Russo digs deep and finds out about our plan to kill Castro?”

 

Lansky had an answer for that too. “I like Mickey, always have but, business first and this is the perfect set-up...we kill Castro with a pistol, same model you gave to Russo.  We already have a man in the camp ready to act. Same pistol model too.  When the time comes, he goes in and takes him out and like magic disappears into the jungle, while Russo takes the fall. All you have to do is get him off the island from Santiago de Cuba to that radio ship of yours and get him back to Tampa. We have a small fishing boat ready to handle that leg of his journey. The CIA is clean, we’re clean and Castro’s out of the picture. It looks like revenge for the Santiago killing, pure and simple, and is how it will be portrayed by the Batista government. Mickey unfortunately is a victim of the times. Remember I gave the go ahead to have Bugsy Segal my oldest dearest friend killed for fucking up that Vegas project. Remember,  It’s BUSINESS..Nothing more nothing less!”

 

“What about the girl, that Pilar woman?” Buster asked. Lansky paused, then with a coldness in his tone declared, “She goes too. She’s a young  journalist, passionate one at that,  and if she learns anything from Mickey, it’s how to root out a story. We don’t need any of this mess to come back to haunt us. Then life can go on as it has, you can pretend you’re CIA again and will have made money and will continue to be paid by Batista and us for any information you have on the CIA and or FBI operations targeting our casino and prostitution operations or the regime.”

 

“And the rebel girl, Victoria?” Lansky laughed. “She’s nobody. Knows nothing. A peasant. Besides after this over she can work as a dancer in my clubs and you can rent her for the night...Viva La Revolucion!”  

Chapter 23 - Fight to Win, Fight to Die

It's now early July and we are on the move with Castro’s army. His brother Raul had opened a new front on the coast in May to meet an advance force sent by Fulgencio Batista to soften up the rebels, to tenderize them, to borrow a Good Housekeeping phrase, for the big push designed to weaken and eliminate the revolt once and for all. We had gone along to observe the fighting first hand, my first battle, so my “war” cherry was popped and I was no longer an innocent, nor unbiased observer, nor could I ever qualify as queen of the prom.

 

I have watched in growing amazement, and glowing admiration over the past few months as Pilar trained daily in weapons handling, hand to hand combat, and how to walk “invisibly” along the trails undetected. She has become quite the warrior princess and I now wonder who will actually be wearing the pants in our family should we emerge from this cauldron unscathed. If she comes to bed wearing a belt of bullets with camo panties and a bullet proof bra while brandishing a hand grenade I’ll have my answer.
I have filed three in a series of Castro profiles and interviews and so far have found nothing in way of proof he had Santiago killed in cold blood. If he did give the order no one was giving up that information.

The fact of the matter is when his rebel forces captured any of Batista’s army, they were taken to Santiago de Cuba and released to representatives of the Red Cross. If this was a man who didn’t kill an enemy that just hours before were hurling bullets in his direction, I couldn’t fathom how he could have ordered the death of a man for firing words at him as projectiles from a printing press. He did confiscate their weapons and ammo which in the Sierra Maestra is worth more than gold in them thar hills!

 

I also held back certain information regarding the rebels supply lines for two reasons. One, purely mercenary is that it will available in the book I fully intend to write about these day with my one foot in the fires of hell...but primarily I held back on it to protect the lives of the native Taino people, the Caribbean Indians who lived in villages throughout Cuba and other islands in this magnificent tropical garden patch of the world much as they had 500 years prior warding off the first invasion of Spanish seekers of gold and newly converted Catholic slaves for God and King.

They know these mountains as well as a New York cabbie knows the best route from anywhere in the burroughs to the Garden for the Friday night fights with time to spare. Cabbie wars are all verbal and he who can out race the contender using his own personal sacred asphalt and concrete route is declared the champion!

The Taino know the mountain trails and are excellent scouts and observers watching for any out of place movements in their domain, such as a Cuban Army column advancing towards the rebel camps. They had been persecuted by the government economically and shared a kinship with the island peasantry and Castro’s camp. They cared not for wealth, nor politics, nor technological progress, but mainly, they care not for El Presidente. This is the bond that make them the unsung heroes in this unfolding military melodrama that is changing with a fury on a daily basis. I am a betting man, but I bet even Studs Terkel wouldn’t know who to put his money on in this contested contest.

Pilar noticed the change in me first. I was taking sides. My objectivity had been compromised because I was too close to the nucleus of Castro. Something, Sean Donovan and the other CIA brainiacs hadn’t forseen either. I was not a cold, hard as steel trained 007 agent ready to kill on command as my training would have taught me. I was a writer, out for a story, an assignment for a newspaper syndicate that was seeing both sides and to me one side had a shine to it, a humanity to it, oh hell, call it what you will … “a cause” while the other side lacked humanity and oppressed the people for the profiteering of the government fat cats with the rich support of the American Mafia and the intelligence apparatus of the CIA. A triumvirate of fear, intimidation, and arrests that created the present pressure cooker of revolution that only had two options …. That was to fight and win...or fight and die...for the sake of my beautiful Pilar and myself, I placed my money on the roulette wheel’s red squares to fight and win….I wanted to grow old with her in Cuba. I know what Hemingway felt now. Cuba was in my blood....Pilar filled my heart....

Chapter 24 - Battle of La Plata

 

Dateline: Cuba July 11, 1958 6:34 PM Filed by Mickey Russo, Special Correspondent

The rebel held area  of the Sierra Maestra region came under attack early this morning as the Batista government’s summer offensive “Operation  Verano” was launched by the nation’s military forces under the command of General Cantillo, a former college classmate of Rebel leader Fidel Castro

 

Gen. Cantillo’s main battalion led an amphibious assault at the tiny village of La Plata near the river of the same name on the Oriente coast, while a simultaneous attack from 300  land based troops was launched from a region north of the rebel camp in the mountains in an effort to cut any escape route for the rebel  forces.

 

The amphibious forces landed without incident and proceeded  inland to meet the advancing troops  from the north to capture the vastly outnumbered rebel fighters.

Information regarding the surprise assault was obtained a week ago by informants in Havana who passed the information along to one of Castro’s intelligence agents, known only as “Victoria”.

 

As the Cuban army began the advance into the mountains, rebel forces under the command of Castro and one of his generals, a Che Guevara managed to delay the advance through a series of areas filled with landmines that took a heavy toll on government troops.

 

Once clear of the minefields, rebel forces including the newly trained Female Battalion ambushed the surprised Cuban soldiers who began a fast retreat back through the minefields  under a rain of constant deadly machine gun fire, grenade attacks and small arms fire. Added to deadly mixture, the retreating Cuban army  was under the rifle sights of  rebel snipers attacking them along the way with pinpoint accuracy.

 

The soldiers who were able to run the gauntlet found that they were now in the false calm of the eye of hurricane of combat, and as a result  are now surrounded. In a desperate attempt for survival they are digging trenches awaiting  help  from reinforcements as their supply of ammunition must be almost depleted.  

….End of Transmission …

 

Memo To: Sean Donovan, CIA, Langley; Buster Scalisa, CIA, Havana; Blake O’Hara, NYC

During the evening of July 9, there was an assassination attempt on the life of General Castro. The plot was uncovered by “Victoria”, the same fighter who also gathered the intel on the Batista summer offensive attack that has suffered a disastrous setback on day one from an inferior number of rebel troops. Inferior in number only, but superior in tactics and marksmanship.

 

The assassination attempt was unsuccessfully attempted by  a young Cuban from Havana, a former waiter working for Meyer Lansky who had joined the rebel camp two weeks ago. As he was attempting to get close to Castro’s hut to carry out his mission, Victoria and Pilar were waiting in the dark to catch him in the act. At one point he pulled out his pistol and was mere feet from Castro’s hut when Victoria yelled out to him. He was startled and as he turned to face her, gun in hand, she did what I would have done...she shot him.

Castro, Che, Raul and others ran outside of their tents to find him lying bleeding on the ground. Victoria can’t spell “wound” very well, but as a marksman what can you expect.

Castro called for medical help as he wanted to question the young man as to who sent him, but on the way to the medical tent he passed out and passed away, but not before his dying breath expelled the name “Lansky”

 

Find out if you can what Lansky has do with this. I can’t believe he would get involved on this level.   As you can see...things are heating up in the old camp. Assassination attempt, now we’re under attack by government troops. Blake you owe me big time if I ever get back to New York.

 

PS: Do me a favor. Get money from the bottom of Sean’s Cracker Jack CIA Box and pay off my tab at Toots Shorr’s and buy a round for the boys on me...and tell Mailer….now I know what ‘fug’ means and I didn’t get it from his book, and my book will have more ‘fugs’ than his, or at least if I survive this assignment….my fug is bigger than his fug!

 

Personal Diary Entry July, 12, 1958 Early Morning Sunrise in the Camp.

It’s been quite a few days. I need a cold beer badly. Beer is OK here, but no refrigeration so room temperature, which here means a beer with a head and a heat index reading is the best we can do. I never saw a man shot and killed before. Pretty incredible, but after a day of combat carnage yesterday death takes on a mystique all its own.  A certain unreality. I feel numb to it..as if it is happening in a dream, my dream and I observe and don’t view with anymore qualms than I do when attending the fights at Madison Square Gardens, except, when you’re down for the count in a revolution, you’re down for the count...forever. That is the reality of my unreality.

 

Pilar is on overdrive. Helping to derail an assassination attempt is heady business for a young college girl who has traded in her pen and hand calculator for a semi automatic rifle and can lob a grenade with such accurately she could be a Karl Marxman Valedictorian at the University of Dissent during this season of discontent.

 

She and Victoria are closer now than they ever were in college as students, but am worried now. Pilar’s politics now involve bullets and guns, whereas before it was pamphlets and protest. I’m afraid Victoria has convinced her that dying for a cause makes you a martyr. I’m in love with her and want her to be the mother of our children, not the martyr of a cause.    

 

The one good thing that is coming from the past two days is that she has primed her sexual pump on all this combat action. Her vagina seems to respond to victory in a big way. In bed last night I was with a Cuban panther, dark, sleek, and sexy. She was no longer a wild eyed college idealist….Pilar was now exerting  the  power in bed. Determined, demanding, focused, sweaty and sexual.  She was the revolution...I was the conquered. To the victor go the spoils….she was the victor...I was happy to be the spoils. I told her, “Revolution seems to suit you, yes?” She smiled while sitting astride me as I lay prone, happy, “Fuck you Mickey. Surrender, now!” and laughed. I had to laugh too.  “I’m yours, take me to your leader!” I cried. She looked at me slyly put her fingers to my lips leaning over and said in that raspy voice of hers that drives me wild…”I am the leader!”

Chapter 25 - Strange Bedfellows

 

Dateline: July 22, 2958 Sierra Maestra, Cuba 10:30 AM by Special Correspondent Mickey Russo

Cuban military forces sent to La Plata to quell the insurrection of the rebels led by Fidel Castro surrendered unconditionally yesterday afternoon. Major Jose Fernando Quevedo, commander of Battalion 18 that led the amphibious attack against Castro’s army 11 days ago from the beachhead at La Plata, a small fishing village on the coast, was subject to days of shelling and small arms and rifle fire when the battalion became completely surrounded and trapped by rebel forces.

 

Che Guevara, one of the rebel commanders used loudspeakers to urge the major to surrender. The major finally agreed after receiving a personal letter from Fidel Castro that his men would not be harmed in anyway and would be turned over to Red Cross representatives in Santiago de Cuba. The major then agreed and surrendered himself and his troops quietly yesterday afternoon.

 

In the final tally, Battalion 18 lost 71 men dead and  wounded, while 400 surrendered to the rebels along a cache of weapons and ammunition. While many of the Cubans were released to Red Cross officials, others, including Major Quevedo switched sides and  joined forces with the rebel army to help bring down the Batista regime. This could be the turning point as rebel victories are mounting and government forces are losing on many battlefronts not to mention in prestige in the international press.

 

Revolution does make for strange bedfellows.

 

There is still the matter of Battalion 17 who attacked from the north while the amphibious assault was underway. They have been halted just south of the Las Mercedes lake and are still dug in fighting rebel troops led by Raul Castro.

……..End Transmission……

 

Tonite as we were all sitting down, Pilar at my side, enjoying a cigar and beer (my kind of woman) along  with the newest cadre to join Castro’s growing army, Che Guevara walked over to me, standing and toasting. Saluds were everywhere this evening.  I was still feeling the adrenaline rush of bullets and bombs, history in the making and I was a part of it. How could I ever go back to covering the mundane world of muggings, murder and mob bookies on trial in New York.

 

My mental foraging was interrupted by Guevara. “Senor Russo...Mickey. Our friend. You have helped get our message out on the world stage..with honesty and truthfulness of fact and with a passion I never realized a journalist had. A toast to you...and to your lovely Pilar, may you both be happy and bear many revolutionaries!” My thank you’s were drowned out by a cacophony of laughter.

 

“Quiet, please,” Che chided. “We now have a special request of you and I feel you can do this. We trust you and have faith in you.” I couldn’t wait to hear this. Maybe it was to make a small speech. I can do that I thought.

 

“We need you to arrange a meeting in Washington with your President Eisenhower or with a representative of his to meet in Havana to discuss relations with the new Cuba once we take control. We seek recognition from your government as well as economic aid to put the country back in the hands of the people.”

“Uh...hold on Che. I’m  a minor player in this. I didn’t even vote for the man, and can barely spell his name. I don’t see how I can be of any help. I mean I have some contacts and will try, but don’t count on anything coming of it.”

 

Pilar gave me a small kiss, “You can do it Mickey. You have nine lives, like a cat. El Gato!” to which everyone laughed. “Ok, Ok, I’ll try. I need to get a message to a friend at the US Embassy in Havana, Buster Scalisi.”  I didn’t dare tell them he was CIA or I would have watched all my so called nine lives disappear in front of a firing squad where I would be the guest of honor.

 

“I also need to meet in Havana with an American businessman, Meyer Lansky. He has influence of a different sort.” Che interrupted, “You mean Meyer Lansky the criminal. American criminals come here all the time, someday maybe we can return the favor and unlock our prisons and send our criminals to Miami. We know who he is. What else do you need from us?

 

“I need messages to go out to request meetings, and I am pretty sure they will be approved so will a boat to get me to Havana. Me and Pilar, she comes with me.”

 

Fidel said, “Si, Si, amor!” and then interpreted by Che. “He said Yes, and the girl too. Love is in your heart so you must either have Cuban in you, or have been in a Cuban!” OK, I had to laugh along with the rest of them including Pilar.

 

“We will arrange for a boat from the village owned by a fisherman and friend of ours to get you to Havana. You will also take Victoria along for safety, yes?”

 

“I wouldn’t feel safe without her. Yes, by all means.”

 

“I will get your messages out to Havana tomorrow by one of our couriers, and arrange for your transportation as well. SALUD!”

 

I was now acting intermediary between a faction of revolutionaries and the Oval Office. I’ve come a long way from the Bronx covering mob murders in courtrooms. I was in the middle of a war and setting up a meeting between a banana republic  rebel leader in khaki with the hero of the Normandy Landing in France. Life will never be the same again..It was getting late so I whispered in Pilar’s ear. “Are you ready to practice producing some little revolutionaries tonight?”

 

She paused and exhaled a giant cloud of cigar smoke “Practice makes perfect!”

Chapter 26 - Cross Hairs of the Kill Zone

 

July 27, 1958 11:15 AM

“Jesus Christ Scalisi. What the hell took you so long?” I fumed through the phone. “This war could be over and both of us retired living in Miami with alligators, wheelchairs and a pension!” We had been waiting for almost a week to set the meet with Scalisi and Lansksy to bend Eisenhower’s ear with a deluge of facts of why he should smoke the diplomatic peace pipe with Castro and the rebels.

 

Buster Scalisi, as evasive as ever was on the phone with me from Havana iceberg lettuce cool and as calm as a mental patient enjoying a meal of tranquilizers at Thanksgiving. “I know, I apologize. Something came up and I had to deal with it.  Are you any closer to solving Santiago’s murder?”

 

“One thing is for certain. Castro didn’t do it. No proof, just gut feeling.  Call it reporter’s instinct. A lot like a woman’s instinct without the Tampon.  I think the whole thing was a frame up to discredit the rebels, to undermine and castrate the Castro mystique. It probably was on orders from Batista himself.”

 

Buster used his best practiced psychology major voice of reason...the kind you would employ talking to a madman holding hostages in a bank. “No, if it came from Batista, I would know about it. It was probably some disgruntled peasant thinking it was a sacrificial lamb to lay at the foot of the altar of Castro. What does Pilar think, she’s a journalist and I’m sure she follows in your paranoid footsteps.”

 

“She agrees. Something not kosher about it. What about Ike? Can you arrange for a meet in Washington or here. It’s important. The way things are going Castro may have to be figured into the equation for the future of our relations here. Business and politics. Gotta keep the Reds out of bed you know. Kruschev may be one ugly son of a bitch,  but if he gets his fat foot in the door in Cuba you’ll see May Day celebrations 90 miles off shore with battalions of commie ballet dancing Bolsheviks and their Bolshoi bullshit hitting OUR fan!”

Buster was as smooth as a can of WD-40. “Well when you get here we’ll examine every facet. One thing at a time. I’ve already sent a letter outlining all this to the State Department. They seem interested so I should have an indication by the time you get here.  Look, I arranged for a small plane to pick you and Pilar up in Santiago de Cuba. It’ll land at a small airfield the CIA has outside of Havana. Looks like no more than a cow pasture landing strip for crop dusters. No one pays it any attention. I’ve arranged with Lansky to have some of his men pick you up there and take you to a house on the coast in Matanzas Too many eyes and ears here. Lansky’s men will run any interference if there’s a problem on this end. Enjoy the ride and if Batista had a hand in the killing, I’ll take care of it through proper channels and protocols. So relax...see you tonight Russo.”

 

I hung up the phone and told Pilar and Victoria the plan. As far as they knew Buster was working for the New York News Syndicate as my contact in Cuba. Simple, cut, and dried. Pilar was nervous about flying, but Victoria was ecstatic.  “Good, a plane will save me time too. I’ll join up with with some of our friends in the movement after we land. I have business to take care of in Havana before our Fall Offensive if you don’t mind me riding along I’ll make those arrangements now.”

 

“No, no. Don’t mind at all. We can kill two birds with one stone,” I said as philosophically as a first year Psyche Major trying to impress a bartender. “Bad choice of words,” Victoria mused. I’ll inform Che of the plans. You two better get packed and don’t forget to take all the information you have on the Santiago killing. Get Castro off the hook. The last thing he would do is to kill a press ally.”

 

The wheels were set in motion. If  Eisenhower would open any door of dialogue it will be a step in the right direction utilizing the compass of diplomacy. I only hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his golf game. If he shot over par because of this, I’d be shot at dawn at Camp David.

 

6:50 PM

The flight was bumpy. Small planes always made me entreat some unknown entity for salvation whenever I was aboard one. You know, there are no atheists in foxholes, that sort of feeling. I was relaxing now as Havana came into view below. A jewel in the necklace of the Caribbean. THE crown jewel in fact.

As we closed in on the harbor town of Matanzas we began a jerky descent to what Buster described as a cow pasture for crop dusters. He gave it too much credit. It was a cow pie strewn field of manure and hard scrabble. If the pilot could land here he could land on the barren surface of the moon.

 

We skidded to a stop and gathered our belongings, clothing for a few days, my ever present notebooks and pens, camera and film. Pilar kept the Santiago murder documents in her backpack. Victoria, traveling light as usual with small daypack and pistol in her shoulder holster. No bra, no underwear (one of her quirks) just a Ruger and a full clip.  I swear at that time of the month she probably inserts  an artillery shell or stick of dynamite. She is tough!

 

We wished each other safe journey and would all meet back in the Sierra Maestra. Members of the underground 26 July movement were there to pick her up in a rusted Jeep that must have seen action at Pork Chop Hill in Korea. Our ride was a black sedan driven by one of Lansky’s gorilla’s along with two others with machine guns.

 

“Mr. Russo, Meyer’s waiting for you. Get in.” I held the door for Pilar, gent that I am even in a revolution. Chivalry is a virtue for the virtuous. Not that I am, but Pilar is. We drove for 15 minutes in silence. Mafia goombah’s are not much on conversation after all unless they’re ordering pizza or a hit to have someone whacked.

 

Matanzas is beautiful and the drive through town was enchanting. I could hear strolling street musicians plying their trade for the supper crowd. The beach area was not far and the CIA safe house was minutes away in a secluded area garrisoned with a few Lansky sentinels standing guard.

 

We grabbed our bags after we pulled up and went inside. Pleasant enough, stark decor designed by a failed decorating student but a great view of Hemingway’s beloved sea.

Inside to greet us were Lansky and Buster.

 

Lansky, ever the slippery diplomat greeted us with a smile masking something I already didn’t like. Buster stood up and along with one of Lansky’s men took our backpacks and frisked us. “Sorry about this Mickey, just routine. Do you have the Santiago documents?”

 

“Yeah,  sure in Pilar’s pack. What’s the rush?”

 

“Sit down and let’s have a drink first,” he said with an edge to his voice as sharp as a farmers machete. “We have a problem, we need to resolve.”

 

Pilar looked at me with the fire of fear in her eyes. I have to admit, I wasn’t feeling like Superman myself. “What kind of problem, Scalisi?”

 

Lansky spelled it out simply…”You and Pilar are the problem. We need to get this straightened out. You’re getting too close to the truth.”

 

“Truth? About what?” I blurted out with anger fueling my words.

 

“The Santiago murder. We didn’t think you would be so efficient in digging into it. Now, OUR problem. What do we do with you? Remember, it’s only business.”

Business to Lansky and to the CIA could mean only one thing. We were now in the crosshairs of a kill zone…...

Chapter 27 - Bullets for Breakfast

 

I was up against the proverbial wall without a thought in hell of how I was going to breach the barrier. “You haven’t really contacted the State Department about this, or anyone for that matter, did you Scalisi. Why’d you lie about this? What’s the big deal anyway? What the hell is going on?” I demanded with as much gusto as a condemned man does when he asks for a last meal of steak and potatoes, a final bungle in the jungle conjugal visit with the warden’s daughter and a Turkish cigarette.

 

Lansky, the Merlin of Murder  started to put the pieces of the puzzle together for us in plain Brooklyn English. “You see Mickey, we have a good thing going here, and we like it just the way it is. We practically have our country, we OWN Cuba!  Americans own most the manufacturing plants, supermarkets, and all of the tourist facilities. Casinos, hotels, bars, and of course the bordello’s”

 

“Whore houses you mean.”

 

“I dislike that term, but yes, we control the prostitution and gambling and hotel action. It’s better and bigger than Vegas. American banks also hold 25% of all bank deposits in Cuba not to mention American interests own 50% of the public railway system, the telephone and power companies. We have a friend in Batista. If he goes…..we go...and that’s not good business.”

 

I had also heard the mafia had their hooks in a Massachusetts senator, and son of the bootlegger Joe Kennedy. If he ran for president as they expect him too, and he wins….they would then own the White House! Chances were slim...he’s a Catholic, and no Catholic has a chance at the Beltway Brass Ring. Like Castro, perhaps no one will remember  him either. They’ll both be just two forgotten footnotes in a dusty encyclopedia.

 

Scalisi,  now that his tongue was limbered up with the help of  few drinks gave us the geo-political slant on affairs. “If Ike gives Castro the time of day...it’s telling the world we recognize his revolt as legitimate and we’re turning our backs on Batista. Castro would then have more validity...prestige…. and this may even push the remaining population on the island over to his side...that would be a wake up call to the masses to overthrow the current regime. Ike a leftist? How would that look to our allies around the world?”

 

I could see I was going up against a formidable double team of politics and greed. “What were Pilar and I  doing that was going to upset your pineapple cart, and goddamn it,  why are we your guests or should I say prisoner...or don’t you like that term either. Meyer, we’ve been friends for a long time, now our relationship is coming apart like a cheap suit at Sears.”

 

Lansky of course had an answer for everything, including why Pilar/Sienna and I were expendable now. “You were getting nowhere in fixing the blame on Castro for the death of the beloved Santiago. A saint in the publishing world. Soon you would aim your sights on Batista, who is guilty of many things, but I can assure you, not Santiago’s demise.”

 

“I smell Langley in this, Meyer. Buster,  the CIA pulled this off? I can’t believe it, why?”

 

Buster explained, “No, it was not CIA, it was me, well and Meyer.  We  engineered it with to look like Castro did it. The CIA had no involvement and in fact has no clue... nor does Batista know that we did it. To them, cut and dry, it was Castro. We wanted to undermine his influence, but unfortunately it failed. He’s still...uh, viable. So now we have another plan and unfortunately, you are in the middle of it. ”

 

I can’t wait to hear this,” I said visibly shaken.

 

“In this Act or our staged production  Castro will be accused of killing a US citizen, a journalist in fact, which will cause a reaction from the White House and the American public. Respected journalist, Mickey Russo, killed by a firing squad as a spy posing as a journalist. Remember, you were recruited by Sean Donovan in New York so it will be a case of mistaken identity, or will it? You could be CIA, no one will confirm or deny, but either way, you are an American. Red, white and blue and all that jazz. Ike will come unglued and Castro will never get his backing or recognition,” Buster explained with self inflated pride at his Master Plan.

 

Lansky added a footnote...a big footnote.  “Not only that, but the island residents will be up in arms calling for his head on a platter when they find out he also ordered the execution of Sienna Santiago, his daughter.”

 

I had to laugh. “Killing me won’t get the reaction you think it will, the boys back at the bar in New York will simply drink themselves into oblivion toasting my ghost. As for his daughter you have to find her first! That will throw a monkey wrench into the gears.”

 

There was a pregnant pause, (I hate pauses that get knocked up)“We have found her Mickey, in fact she was never lost to be found,” Lansky pompously stated. “You really don’t know what’s going on here, do you?”  

 

“I guess not, what are you talking about?”

 

Buster got up walked over to Pilar and put his .45 against her head. “Let me spell it out, sort of the ABC’s of this little drama.” I felt the floor falling beneath my feet, no net to break my fall.  My whole world was falling apart at the seams.

 

“You see Mr. Russo, Sienna Santiago was sent to Mexico City to live with an aunt when she was younger when things were heating up here. We gave her a new identity, Pilar, for her own safety Santiago was getting death threats constantly from both sides. Many of those we created ourselves. We eventually, the CIA, actually Sean Donovan in New York had her brought  back to Cuba at  her request as Pilar to be with her father.  We forged documents showing she was indeed Pilar, a journalism student from Mexico City now enrolled at the university in Havana. Perfect cover. She wanted to be with her father so we arranged the charade but wanted to protect her identity so she wouldn’t be used as leverage in a tug of propaganda war. However, I arranged for her father’s assassination….”

 

At this point Pilar, Sienna, whoever she was now broke down in tears. She had no idea until now that her father was killed by Buster Scalisi and Meyer Lansky’s hired thugs. All along she thought, as did many, that Castro was indeed the architect of the murder.

 

Pilar was now in tears. “I had to keep this a secret from you so you wouldn’ be in any danger, I thought Castro did have him killed so I assumed the role  as a Castro activist on campus to get close to his student contact and runner Victoria so I’d have access to Castro. I wanted to kill him myself. Then you came along and I wanted you with your expertise to help me prove Castro was guilty. I wanted justice at all costs, and you were the key. I didn’t count on falling in love with you. Everything changed and after all the facts, I no longer believed he had anything to do with it...Mickey, please forgive me. I had no idea it would end up like this.”

 

Buster then put the frosting on the cake. “Remember the recent assassination attempt on Castro in the camp?  We were going to fix the blame on you and you would have been killed by the rebels which was our original plan to have a US citizen killed, have you killed, a such a shitfaced wake back in New York it would have been too. Well, It backfired, when this Victoria, the vigilant vigilante shot and killed our man,  but now we have you and Sienna to take the fall. We kill you and quietly dump your bodies in the Sierra Maestra where they will be found and life will go on as it has. Except you two won’t be around. Castro’s balls will be in Batista’s hands so to speak.”

 

“Mickey,” Lansky said almost paternally, “It’s just business. We have a good thing here and your two lives won’t matter.” I held Sienna close in my arms for what could be our last night on Earth. The revolution would go on without us….in fact as Meyer said, life will go on without us. At least Sienna and I would die in each other’s arms.

 

Soon it would be dawn….and then...bullets for breakfast!

Chapter 28 - Dirty Laundry

 

It was all coming together now. Even Hemingway was privy to a portion of the puzzle. He’s good I have to admit. He never let on to me that Pilar was Sienna, the young girl who used to call him “grandpa Ernesto”.  Everyone involved knew something, but very few knew of us everything. It was as though each of us had one syllable of a zen haiku which is meaningless alone until the words were strung together in a necklace of the great No-Thing.

 

I was still holding a trembling Sienna. These were emotional aftershocks taking their toll on her and me as well. Suddenly one of Lansky’s gunmen standing guard outside burst through the door, as agitated as a junkie in Tompkins Park who missed making his connection.

 

“Meyer, we got movement out here! On the beach heading here, five maybe six men.”

 

“Are they armed?” Buster busted in.

 

“Yeah, I think so. I can see rifles and they are in a hurry.”

 

All I could envision now was Murder, Inc. meets the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with Sienna and I as the guests of dishonor. I was beginning to feel like Frank Costello when they tried to whack him in New York and he only suffered a head wound, but it was enough to make him “retire” from the mob. I had no plan, no gun, and looked like no future at this point.

 

Buster moved quickly. “Get these two into the car. We’ll get them down there tonight and do what we have to do. Besides, Castro is battling the Army again so their death will fit into our plans nicely now. Move!!”

 

As Sienna and I were rushed to the door a barrage of gunfire sprayed the building turning the veranda into Swiss cheese . Lanksy’s men and Buster returned fire to the phantoms in the dark advancing slowly but deliberately when we heard a car start up out back. It was then I noticed...Lansky had flown the coop and was heading out for the safety of mob controlled Havana. He later stated in an interview in Israel that he went for reinforcements but his tires were shot out and he had to hide in the dunes.

 

Buster was hit in the shoulder, I took a bullet in the arm and the large  Philco shortwave radio that dominated the corner of the room was DOA after machine gun fire inflicted serious injury to every GE tube inside.

 

The gunmen were now on the porch, the other Lanksy men ran out the back, while Buster and I lay wounded, not seriously, but enough so we’d have to be replaced on the pitcher’s mound. The door crashed open and the figures were shadows in the doorframe until they stepped inside into the light. “Mickey, are you alright? Pilar?” My gawd it was the second coming of St. Victoria. She had led the assault. “You are an angel from hell’s heaven,” I laughed nervously. “Man, are we glad to see you! Pilar is fine too. That was a close one!”

 

At that moment, stepping to the head of the assault team was a familiar New York face, Sean Donovan! Either Sean joined Castro’s rebels or Victoria was plea bargaining.

 

“Relax Russo. I created Pilar and Victoria knows she is Santiago’s daughter. By the way Blake says ‘good job’ Sienna got up and ran to Victoria for one of those girl crush hug moments. “Let’s get those wounds treated. Scalisi, don’t even think of moving or talking. Just shut up, for your own good.”

 

Victoria and Sienna worked on dressing my wound, a pass through so there wouldn’t be any bullet extraction or excavation of flesh to endure. Two of the men in the assault team took care of Busters leg wound...that did require removing a bullet and without the benefit of an anesthesia or shot of whiskey.

“I’m actually glad to see you Sean, but why are you here with the rebels. Did Castro overthrow Eisenhower?” I quipped weakly. Sean assumed an Uncle Remus stance and told us the story of the CIA briarpatch. “Buster Scalisi here went rogue sometime ago, we all know that. We also know he engineered Santiago’s murder through Batista and Lansky, but we had to prove it, and you did that for us with help from Victoria here. By the way,  Mickey, Sienna, meet Agent Peggy Anazi from our Miami Bureau.”

 

Surprised? I was Lincoln sitting in a box seat in the balcony watching ‘Our American Cousin’

“Anazi is Cuban American, came to the US as a child with her parents. When she expressed an interest in law enforcement as a career, we moved in and recruited her for the agency. Her mission was to make friends with and protect Sienna posing as a college student at the same university when suddenly, Santiago was killed. The ballgame was now going into extra innings. We knew it wasn’t one of our missions, as any US involvement could lead to an embarrassment of monumental proportions. We also knew Castro was friends with Santiago, as an associate, a fair associate who printed only the truth. Castro is a realist...Batista is a prick. So Victoria, as you know her was to unmask Buster who was not until this moment aware she was agency.”

 

Busters moans of pain verified this point. “Oh, and yes, Blake knew what the mission was all about too. Remember, he is former agency as well.”

 

“So, I was a fucking pawn in this along with Sienna, yes?”

 

“Yes, regrettably, but it was the only way to get the mission accomplished effectively. Anyway, mission accomplished and we’re pulling you three out now. New York, steaks, and the gang at Toot’s Shorr’s are ready to celebrate your sainthood. Batista is on the way out, his crimes have become known worldwide and he’s asked for asylum in America. That would look bad for us so it was denied, but we are working with a third party to get him out of Cuba. The least we can do for the asshole. Castro is scoring victory after victory so it’s inevitable ...Castro is in and we just have to deal with the winner.”

 

Sienna spoke next, “What about the Communists? How will your government deal with that?” Damn good question and of course Sean had a damned good answer.

 

“The Soviets wouldn’t dare set up shop 90 miles from US soil. It’s unthinkable. They have enough problems in Europe especially with the Czechs and Hungarians. Here it’s a nation of Desi Arnaz babaloo bongos and black magic voodoo mambo, not borscht and babushkas. The Nazi’s tried it in the war and it didn’t work. The Reds will be lucky if they let Kruschev into Disneyland!”

 

He had a point. Castro would come to us first. We’d turned him down now but once he’s in the driver’s seat of the ‘57 Chevy we call Cuba we’d want him to be aligned with us. Besides, the Soviets have Siberia...we have baseball and Castro loves nine innings of horsehide action….better yet...we have the Yankees!

 

“So are you ready to go home, you know Yanqui Go Home now?” Sean was no Lenny Bruce but he meant well.

 

I looked at Sienna and her eyes spoke to me. “No, we want to see this through, We’ve come this far and would hate to miss the last round of the revolt. We’d like to stay and file updates and see this thing through if you don’t mind.”

 

“Blake and I already figured on that. We already have stories written at Langley in your style and with your byline explaining the Batista connection with an independent businessman who planned Santiago’s killing. No US involvement,  no CIA. Castro will be cleared and you and ‘Pilar’ will be his new hero’s. Victoria has expressed the desire to remain so when the revolt is over we’ll have the official CIA birds eye view of events. Besides, she can’t just disappear or vanish. That would blow the cover story.”

 

“Good enough, but what about Buster here?”

 

“At Langley we take care of our own dirty laundry.  Let’s just leave it at that. No trial, no appeal. Houdini would be proud. Scalisi is no longer a spook...he’s a ghost!”

 

“Lansky?”

 

“Oh he was already in our hand when he got back to Havana. Omerta is their code. If he says one word about his or Buster’s involvement he knows we’ll close him down and kick him out of the country, then the FBI field agents will have a field day with him.”

 

“When can we leave for Santiago de Cuba.?” I inquired.

 

“Right now. We have a boat docked at the harbor to take you there.”

 

We followed the group to the docks and there it was. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was Hemingway and his boat, The Pilar! “You crazy son of a bitch!” I yelled at him as we moved double time down the dock. “I’m ready for you three. Got beer and steaks!” he yelled back in that jovial way of his.

 

“You crazy old man. What gives?”

 

“Well let’s just say I miss the old days in Spain. Hell, Cuba is the next best thing!!!”

 

We waved off and headed out to sea once again. Sienna and I were exhausted and fell asleep in each other’s arms on the open deck laying on potato sacks. “Good night Sienna. I love you.” I could feel her breathing gently, her warm breath caressing my face in the moonlight. “Sienna disappeared a long time ago. I am your Pilar, forever.”

 

I never felt so at peace as did that night. A crazy writer as a skipper heading us back into a war zone, a bullet wound that still ached, and escaping from sudden death with an assault team fighting it’s own CIA operative and the US Mafia.

 

Ah, Life is good….living is better!

Chapter 29 - The Aftermath

 

Personal Journal Entry - Oct. 16, 1962 - Havana, Cuba

It’s been four years since Castro and the rebels entered Havana having overthrown the Batista regime. Pilar (as she prefers to be called even now) and I had remained on the island to follow the new regimes  progress and promises of reforms. Blake gave the go ahead and we kept filing news stories to  New York as follow up on the new regimes progress and promises of reforms. In effect Pilar and I were the Caribbean Desk covering the rest of the island nations in the region as well as  Central America.

 

When it comes to government overthrows Cuba was the sexy tits and ass floor show of revolutions proving  in on a third world island nation, when it comes to revolution...there is no business like show business. Cuba today is a most sexy and sensuous Soviet satellite. A Caribbean island paradise of carnal pleasures, where pussy and politics still go hand in hand along with the rum soaked bacchanals. It’s an outlandishly flamboyant island nation of sexy, curvaceous and long leggedy Afro-Cuban  females like my Pilar.  It was the up until four years ago a  private American play land of brothels, good times, and bad gangsters, like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and Third World American hand picked hand puppet leaders, like Fulgencio Batista , who was America's Howdy Doody on a string.

Lansky and the mob made Cuba an offer it couldn't refuse in the 1950's. The rich got richer, and the poor once again, got poorer. The country was as ripe as a field of sugar cane for revolution, when cabana's would give way to Companero's and beach bums would make way for beach bombs.  With Castro it was time for the Mafioso to move over  and make room for the Marxists and Lansky to surrender to Lenin. It had been a long struggle, but on New Years Eve, 1959.....the island nation of Cuba began it's long trek on the Kremlin Red  Brick Road to take it's place 90 miles off shore to become the Soviet suppository poised to ram up the ideological ass of the USA.

 

The political and military fabric of the Batista regime began to unravel like a cheap suit off the rack at Montgomery Wards in 1958. Along with the loss of popular support and massive desertions in the military, Batista's government collapsed like a cancerous lung due to Castro's efforts.

 

On the early morning of January 1, 1959, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, (what the hell..it was good enough for Trujillo!) , He boarded a plane at Camp Columbia taking  along with him a personal fortune of more than $300 million that he had amassed through graft and payoffs.

 

In April of 1959, Castro hopped a plane to the United States (later, planes were usually high-jacked to Cuba!) as guests of the National Press Club. President Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of Normandy, avid golfer and downhome yokel refused to meet with him which is typical of American conduct when her nose is out of joint and it's ass isn't kissed properly. So what's a feller to do? Screw You, Uncle Sam, and he began to establish relations with the Soviet Union and asked the Commie Princess if she'd go to the prom with him..she said "Si!"

 

The USSR sent more than 100 Spanish-speaking advisers to help organize Cuba's defense committee. In February 1960, Cuba signed a trade agreement to buy oil from the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations. U.S.-owned refineries in Cuba refused to process the oil, so Castro expropriated the refineries. The United States retaliated by cutting Cuba's import quota on sugar. This began a decades-long contentious relationship between the two countries.


Then there was that Bay of Pigs fiasco where 1,400 US backed, badly trained and inept Cuban exiles invaded Cuba in an attempt to overthrow the Castro regime. The incursion ended in disaster with hundreds of the insurgents killed and nearly 1,000 captured. Though the United States denied any involvement, it was revealed that the Cuban exiles were trained by the Central Intelligence (Intelligence is a misnomer) Agency and armed with U.S. weapons. (but no air support! At this point Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and on February 7, 1962, the United States imposed a full economic embargo on Cuba. .

On March 17  President Dwight Eisenhower approves an anti-Castro plan. The U.S. will place embargoes on sugar, oil and guns, and issue propaganda. In addition, the plan calls for Cuban exiles to attack Cuba and attempt to overthrow Castro. Then 7 days after May Day in Red Square,  Cuba and the Soviet Union establish formal diplomatic relations.

End of entry --------

 

Sienna and I were getting ready to take a flight that night to New York to meet the gang for a night out on the town damn the torpedoes full speed ahead evening with old friends. As we were taking an afternoon walk along the harbor we noticed three large Russian freighters being unloaded by Russian seamen and soldiers. They were using cranes to unload large cylindrical tubes that looked at first like huge grain silos but when I saw them on large tractors ready to be taken away I realized they were the missiles with nuclear warheads and a Red Star on them you generally see rolling through Red Square in the Kremlin during May Day Parades.

 

The area, including us were briskly and roughly cleared when they saw us walking. The Russian language lacks the panache and flair of Spanish so I guess it was a big Cossack nyet we stumbled onto. We hurried off and headed to Sloppy Joes.

 

“Sienna, this doesn’t look good. Maybe we should cancel New York. I have a gut feeling the Cold War is about to heat up!”

 

Sienna asked the inevitable. “Do you think this will be a big story?”

 

“Well, Castro, the Russians and an anti-Castro Kennedy in office. Yeah, could be a very big story...or the end of the world!”

Chapter 30 - Last Man Standing

 

We were packed and Sienna and I were ready to go the New York, this time aboard our own boat we kept docked at Havana Harbor. My book on the revolution sold pretty well, thanks to Norman Mailer’s agent who took me on as a client.  Good old Norman. Can always count on him.

 

Sienna and I had decided to start our own news agency, geared to items and features of interest from the Caribbean and Central America  to feed the news needs of the growing Latin population of the United States. We had set up a network of young budding bilingual journalists from the island nations, the countries of Central America and Mexico. We hoped that someday we would see as the next cadre of Kronkites and Murrows.

 

We did all this with Blake’s blessings. We could shop it around the States to any newspaper, magazine and even radio features I would produce from our studio in Santiago de Cuba, a holdover from the Buster Scalisi days...recording equipment, phones, and reel to reel tapes galore. Blake on the other hand was free to use whatever material for free he felt was valid for New York City with Puerto Rico being the “rich port” of information for the city’s PR population that was growing at a rapid pace. It was Westside Story in the flesh.

 

With my book royalties we were able to buy a boat from the same manufacturer who designed Hemingway’s ‘Pilar’ except I named ours ‘Sienna’ the woman, now my wife who changed my life.  

 

Che would eventually  die in Bolivia in 1967 by the Bolivian military after he was captured trying to overthrow the government there. There is information available that Nazi Klaus Barbie had aided the CIA and Bolivian government in locating his base camp where he was captured. CIA documents are still sealed. He is now a popular T-Shirt.

 

Meyer Lansky would die in Miami of lung cancer at the age of 80 never spending a day in prison.

 

Fulgencio Batista would die in 1973 in Spain of a heart attack two days after a hit squad of assassins sent some say from Castro’s Cuba to assassinate him.  Mother Nature and heart disease did the job instead.

 

Sean Donovan retired from the CIA in 1985 and died in his own bed in his sleep, no doubt dreaming of ending the Cold War all by himself.

 

“Victoria” retired from the CIA and is a grandmother to 6 grandchildren. They visit often at her small ranch in Central Wyoming riding horses and asking her if she ever did anything interesting. She always tells them her life was boring and never did anything to take chances. Once a CIA agent...always a CIA agent. Very hush hush.

 

Hemingway? He ate his shotgun for breakfast in Idaho in 1961. He had been under investigation by the FBI during his last years. We had seen him the year before in Cuba during the marlin fishing tournament named in his honor that he started. Sienna and I were on the Pilar with him and Castro that day smoking cigars and drinking beer and toasting the revolution. He’s probably a ghost now chasing Nazi U-Boats or bullfighting in Heaven or Hell. With writers you never know.

 

As for Buster Scalisi? No one knows whatever happened to him. He disappeared and was not heard from again. Perhaps he is working as a short order cook in Leavenworth or Sean has his body preserved in Area 51...we’ll never know for sure as everyone knows...there is nothing at Area 51 except space alien bodies and perhaps Citizen Kane’s snowglobe, Rosebud.

 

As for Sienna Santiago, she is Sienna Russo now. Our two children are fully grown,  one boy, one girl. Our daughter, who we named Pilar is a freelance journalist covering civil wars and revolts wherever they flare up as a freelance journalist for cable news networks.  She’s also a leftist and activist.

 

Like Mother...Like Daughter. God help us all!

 

As for Fidel Castro…….Kennedy is gone, shot in Dallas. Bobby Kennedy is gone, shot in Los Angeles. Eisenhower is gone and buried in Kansas. Khrushchev died of a heart attack in a hospital near his home in Moscow in 1971, he never made it to Disneyland. Pravda ran a one-sentence announcement of the former premier's death.

 

As for Fidel Castro….he is the last man standing!

Impressum

Texte: Mike Marino
Bildmaterialien: Mike Marino
Lektorat: Mike Marino
Übersetzung: Mike Marino
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 27.06.2016

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