Mongoose, R.I.P. Page 3

  “Good evening, Doctor,” Rolando replied, trying to suppress his surprise on learning that his famous teacher-scientist was a fellow revolutionary.

  “You are to refer to me, when not in the hospital, only as ‘Varo.’”

  “Yes, Doctor. Yes—Varo.” The doctor signaled to Rolando to follow him. They climbed one flight of stairs and, without knocking, Varo opened the rear door into a warmly lit room, comfortably large, the walls lined with books, window shades tightly drawn, an upright piano in one corner, a desk opposite, and, in the center, four upholstered chairs, two of them facing the other two, a knee-high table in between. Fidel Castro sat on the mammoth chair on the right, smoking a cigar.

  Castro rose and Alvaro Nueces performed the introductions. The other two men in the room, one of them young and fair and wearing a sports shirt and slacks, the second middle-aged, dressed as a businessman might dress going out to dinner, were introduced simply as “Luís” and “Paco.” Rolando had not got used to the brevity of revolutionary nomenclature and found it difficult to say “Buenas noches, Paco” to a man twice his age, and so said, with a little bow of his head, only “Buenas noches.”

  Castro asked his young guest if he would like a drink, and Rolando stammered out “Coca-Cola” before recognizing his error. He was wordlessly brought an Orange Crush, a sparkling orangeade bottled in Havana and paying no royalties to U.S. capitalists.

  Castro motioned him down onto the vacant chair—Paco, after shaking hands and informally saluting Castro, had walked out of the room, leaving the young man and Alvaro Nueces. Castro began to talk, and soon Rolando felt the hypnotic rush. As a medical student he had written a paper about that famous sensation for his anesthesia class. This must be like what the drug-taker feels, he thought: what I feel now, in the company of this giant, who will surely have a historic future.

  Castro spoke at great length and with much passion about the need to liberate Cuba. A full hour went by before he shifted into the interrogatory mode: Was Rolando familiar with weapons? Oh yes, said Rolando eagerly. His father was—had been—a bullfighter, and as a young boy he had been trained to use all the weapons of the bullfighter. He even knew how to sharpen steel, had known how to do so before seeing his first scalpel; Rolando felt an impulse to boast about something to help accord in some way, in any way, for the distinction he was being paid.

  Castro said he was not talking about “cutlery,” but about firearms. Rolando said that he had been brought up in Placetas in Las Villas, in the open country his father farmed when not at the ring in Mexico. He had used his father’s rifle from the age of twelve and had become an expert marksman, shooting rabbits regularly and even—Rolando became a little expressive—“a young deer, on one trek into Camagüey and also a wild pig—two pigs,” he said self-effacingly. Though, he thought it fair to add, “I haven’t used the rifle since I was fifteen.” He added, lest he give the wrong impression, “Too busy becoming a doctor.”

  “Have you ever used a pistol?”

  Yes, his father had a collection of which he was very proud, three pistols, one of them dating back to the Spanish-American War. “The imperialist war,” he explained.

  Castro came to the point. Varo—he motioned toward the senior doctor—had told him that Rolando had singular qualifications, and that he was eager to participate in the great struggle that lay ahead against the tyrant. Castro had in mind for Rolando a position of some responsibility. But he would need to be tested first.

  Rolando nodded his head obsequiously. “Anything you direct me to do, señor.”

  “You are to carry out the orders of my revolutionary council. An execution.”

  Rolando could not entirely control his breathing. He could only think to ask, “Who, señor?”

  Castro laughed. He laughed uproariously. Such a laugh as demands of subordinates sycophantic acquiescence. Luís joined in the laughter. Dr. Nueces joined in the laughter. Eventually Rolando found himself laughing. He reasoned quickly that he had asked a naïve question.

  Suddenly Castro was silent. He rose. Luís and Alvaro instantly rose also, and Rolando.

  “You will be told who at the proper time.”

  Castro extended his hand. To Alvaro, “Take our young friend to the door.” And, to Rolando, “You will receive your instructions.” There was no laughter left over; no levity in the room.

  There would be—Rolando was given to reconstructing the events of that first night—the difficulty of coping with his roommate’s fascinated questions (Ernesto had never met Castro). Walking as in a dream past Calle O, 198, up Avenida Infanta, and through the Eloy Alfaro park, back to his quarters, he prepared his answers. He concocted a story: Castro had recruited Rolando’s cousin “at Oriente”—the far eastern end of Cuba he knew Ernesto had never visited and probably never would. That cousin had become close to Castro and had requested that, when back in Havana, Castro meet with Rolando Cubela, who had starred in his graduating class at medical school and whose sympathies were known to be revolutionary. Rolando (he would tell Ernesto) had spent an hour with the great man and was deeply impressed by his desire to liberate Cuba from the domestic tyrant and from foreign imperialism. Castro clearly had a towering perspective of what Cuba needed and, besides, was wonderfully informed on all matters—he had spoken “intimately” of the principal figures in Batista’s entourage, his so-called Cabinet, and the fake assembly that Batista affected to consult about public policy. That, Rolando thought, ought to do it. He would improvise on details. Ernesto would ask whether Castro had made any mention of any further meetings, or of enrolling Rolando in any particular organization. Rolando would need to be vague.

  It went plausibly, and the two young doctors had been up most of the night, talking animatedly of Castro and the future of Cuba.

  Two days later, in the mailbox where Rolando generally found nothing more than his weekly paycheck, the schedule for the following week’s activities at the hospital, and—occasionally—a brief note from his mother, he received the promised contact. A letter.

  The following Saturday, at noon—the interns had off every other Saturday afternoon and Sunday; Rolando would need to arrange a substitute because, on the specified Saturday, he was on duty—he was to be at the Parque de la Fraternidad in Calle Prado, seated on a bench on the west side, reading a copy of Hoy, at 12:45. The letter was signed simply, Luís.

  What followed that meeting, Rolando Cubela in later years had difficulty recalling in specific detail. Luís met him in the park and drove him to a remote farmhouse where a young couple took him in hand, Héctor and Amanda. He spent much of the afternoon in target practice with a 9-millimeter Luger. Ten years of inactivity with guns were quickly made up, given Rolando’s training as a boy and his natural aptitude as a marksman. Within an hour he was hitting the bull’s-eye at ten meters. “You will be much closer than ten meters to your target.” Héctor smiled. “We hope.”

  The evening, he remembered through the mists that, so soon and for so long, descended on those surrealistic hours, had been greatly convivial. Neither Héctor nor Amanda, who tended their farm informally (that much was obvious to Rolando), knew very much about farming, but he was careful not to ask what it was that they otherwise did. Manifestly, they were college graduates, conversant with literature, philosophy, and, above all, politics. He was careful not even to ask when the—incident—would take place.

  The next day, he remembered when taxing himself, as on occasion he did, to re-create the weekend, Amanda went into the city, and at that point Héctor, in the didactic manner of the schoolteacher, paced up and down the room, addressing Rolando but speaking as though a soliloquy.

  Rolando’s “target” always—“almost always—if he isn’t there that particular day, why, we just postpone the operation”—attended the eight o’clock Mass at La Catedral de La Habana in La Habana Vieja. Most often he was alone—his wife and three older children regularly went to Mass at eleven.

  Héctor pulled open a drawer and took f
rom it four photographs, the first showing the entrance to the church, the second a picture of the building opposite, and pictures taken of the area from one side of the church, and from the other. Rolando was to sit in the front seat of a car with Héctor. They would park opposite the church, arriving at 8:35—“Mass usually ends between eight-forty and eight-fifty.” Sometimes there were two or three cars parked opposite, cars belonging to “rich capitalists,” but it would be easy to adjust to the situation. “Our car will be parked so that we can make a fast getaway.”

  The execution was to take place the following Sunday unless Luís got word to Rolando before then that for whatever reason the operation was postponed. When the congregation began to come out from the church, Héctor would point to the target. Rolando, wearing a ranchero’s broad-brimmed hat and dark glasses, would wait until Héctor identified the target. He would then step out of the car, approach the target, fire the pistol at his face—“shoot three times at least, we do not want a wounded target”—return to the car—“don’t run, there will be no need, and remember that the man who is calm, even if he is the assassin, is the man in psychological control of the crowd”—open the door, and Héctor would drive him away.

  The following week, Rolando remembered, always in that haze, had been odd, both endless and stampede-speed fast. It required intense effort to concentrate on the work at hand, much of it delicate as he himself began to engage in the surgery for which he was being trained; but then, suddenly, he would find himself performing feats of extraordinary intricacy with the fluency of a Paganini going through a concerto, never mind that he had never practiced it. It was especially hard in the evening, when he had to chatter with Ernesto as though unpreoccupied. When, in their tiny little quarters—one room, two beds, two desks, a single window, a washbasin, the wheezy secondhand refrigerator his mother had given him as a graduation present stocked now with fruit and soft drinks and beer and bread and cheese—the overhead light was turned off, by common agreement at midnight, conversation would cease. Rolando lay fitfully on his bed, breathing the hot summer air. He thought of his Hippocratic oath, now not a child’s affectation but a formal vow. He agonized, yet he did not waver in his determination to do what he had told Fidel he would do: Anything you direct me to do, señor.

  It went flawlessly. They were strategically parked at 8:35 when, a minute later, a car drove up and parked in front of them, close enough to make a forward departure impossible without first having to maneuver. Héctor had reacted quickly, backed up his car, edged it out of the space he had occupied, and slowly reversed, double-parking alongside the car behind. “Nobody will complain,” he whispered. “Sunday. We are obviously waiting to drive somebody home from church.”

  It was at that moment that, for the first time, Héctor showed him a picture of his target. He took it from a shirt pocket. A 3 x 5 photograph of a man in a colonel’s uniform, glass in hand, trees in the background. A man in his late thirties, perhaps early forties; relaxed, smiling. Smiling warmly. A candid shot, taken presumably at a social function. He wore a trim mustache and had a full head of hair. Rolando discerned a small cross just below the neck, visible because the shirt was open, in the style of the Cuban military on all but the most official occasions.

  Just before 8:45—Rolando had looked down at his watch, his heart pounding—the doors to the church opened and the worshipers began to file out. Héctor had trained a small set of binoculars on the entrance. A minute later he whispered hoarsely, “There! There he is! Quick! Quick!” His mouth dry, Rolando opened the door, his hand gripping the pistol in his pocket. Rolando walked a few paces in broad sunlight toward the chatting parishioners. He spotted the colonel without difficulty. He came out of the church his right hand holding his wife’s, his left on the shoulder of a boy in his early teens; his family had accompanied him after all, Rolando thought in the blur. Rolando approached the colonel with a slight feint, turning him slightly to one side, as though he were bent on entering the emptying church. Ten paces away he stopped, pulled out the pistol, took aim, and fired three times.

  He thought he heard the wail of a chorus of wailers—it sounded, in his memory, as if they had been trained to wail—and then the screams. Then he was back by the car. He opened the door, and Héctor sped off.

  Clearly Héctor had rehearsed the escape route. They drove at an unprovocative speed, turning every few blocks in this direction and that. The license plate in the rear of the car had been smudged with mud. No one would be able to say more than that it was a Ford sedan; and yes, they might correctly guess that it was a 1953 model car; and yes, they would know it was dark blue, though no one would readily guess that the blue had been applied that morning from a bucket filled with watercolor. In an hour, back at the farm, the Ford’s original old metallic gray would be easily restored.

  Back at the farm. What had happened? Rolando could not remember, beyond the laundering of the car. He remembered only that at some point, later in the day, Luís had come by and driven Rolando off to within walking distance of his quarters, dropping him on Calle San Lázaro, near the hospital. He did not remember getting out of the car, did not remember where he went, remembered only returning to his room well after nightfall to find Ernesto jabbering. Jabbering about the assassination that morning of Colonel Blanco Rico.

  On hearing that name Rolando asked Ernesto to repeat it. Then he lurched toward the washstand and vomited.

  Blanco Rico! Blanco Rico! he repeated to himself.

  Ernesto laughed, and asked whether Rolando had been out drinking. “It’s not like you to throw up.”

  Then Ernesto had decided to be solicitous, asking Rolando whether he wished a thermometer. “Maybe you ate something. Where were you tonight?”

  Rolando washed his face, and said he must indeed have eaten something.

  He longed for privacy, and the thought crossed his mind to go out and spend the night at a hotel. But he had only a few pesos. And then he thought of his medical kit. He walked over to the corner and opened it.

  “What are you taking?” Ernesto asked, inquisitive.

  “Fifteen milligrams of Compazine.” His back was turned to Ernesto when Rolando discreetly opened the little red bottle and took out two Seconals, which he threw into his mouth, running the washbasin faucet, cupping his hands, and swallowing a handful of water. Without taking off his clothes, he went to his cot.

  He dimly remembered in the course of the night Ernesto massaging his chest with Vicks, and that he had forced on him a sweater and socks.

  “You are having one hell of a chill, Rolandito. If you’re not better tomorrow, you’ll be a patient at the hospital, not an intern.”

  The next day, during surgery, Dr. Nueces came by, doing his rounds. Rolando looked up from the open abdomen with the inflamed appendix. “I need to speak with you, Doctor,” he said, in a voice as controlled as he could manage.

  “Come to my office after the operation.”

  An hour later, the office door shut behind him, Rolando stood in front of the doctor who was leaning back at his desk, tense but prepared.

  Rolando spit it out. “Blanco Rico! Are you—are we—all mad? Blanco Rico, the one true, humane, patriotic gentleman in Batista’s entourage! He has performed more generously as head of military intelligence than anyone in memory! He is personally responsible for releasing over a hundred political prisoners. He is beloved even by people who hate Batista!”

  “Yes,” Dr. Nueces had said. “Yes. You are quite right about Colonel Blanco Rico.”

  “Then …?”

  “That is the point. Fidel doesn’t want anyone around Batista whom the public admires. It’s that simple. And Fidel is not our leader for nothing.”

  Rolando Cubela stared at the famous doctor, his teacher. He attempted to speak, but his mouth could not open, and three times he gagged. He turned, opened the door, arrested himself in the act of slamming it shut, closed it quietly, and walked down the hospital corridor, down the steps, the three blocks to his r
oom. Ernesto would not return until well after dinnertime, and it was not yet noon. He lay on his bed, and wept.

  4

  Blackford took a taxi to the Fontainebleau Hotel where he would stay in the suite reserved year-round for the “XPando Corporation.” It occurred to him as, driving down the through-way from the airport in mid-January, he looked about, eyeing a limited view of the ocean on his right, that for all that he had got about during the past twenty years, he had been only once before in Miami. That was in 1961, en route to Nicaragua, in the service of the Bay of Pigs operation. He knew intimately the streets of Havana. He had spent most of the preceding year there, on a personal mission for President Kennedy. He could get around in Berlin as readily as in Scarsdale, New York, where he had attended public school; and, for that matter, he could draw serviceable maps of Paris and London. He smiled grimly: he knew every corner of one cell in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.

  And now he must get to know Miami. Miami, the center of anti-Castro activity. Miami, to which an estimated 200,000 Cubans had come since New Year’s Day of 1959, when Castro liberated the Cuban people. Oh, if only Velasco were here with him! For that matter, if only Velasco were—well, alive … anywhere. Blackford thought wistfully about the little chain-smoking Spaniard who had shared his adventure in Havana, dying there. For this mission a replacement had been assigned to help him, one Pano Iglesias—Salvador was his name at the baptismal font, Blackford had been briefed, but the man was known as Pano, even back when he served as a captain in Castro’s Frank País Brigade. According to the dossier, a resourceful young man with an intimate knowledge of Castro’s entourage and doings, and perhaps the only tie to the most important figure in Operation Mongoose. Moreover, Pano having defected two years earlier—shortly after the Bay of Pigs—he knew intimately not only the political scene in Havana but, by now, the whole scene here in Miami.