Buying the Night Flight (16 page)

Later, after Allende was elected the first Marxist president of Chile, it was all quite another thing. Then Castro would fawn on him. Then Allende couldn't get rid of him. Castro imposed upon long, thin, cultured Chile an incredible nonstop thirty-day tour which left the cultured, non-
tropicale
Chileans gasping. But that was later. History, like love, cannot be predicted. It cannot be rushed --and it certainly cannot always be trusted.

Soon Allende was calling me in the afternoon to go swimming in the pool. He would bring me books of Chilean poetry, which I gladly read. He was a good companion, proper with me and somewhat subdued. He certainly wasn't lonely. What the Cubans
had
supplied him with was a gorgeous girl with dark, languid eyes who seemed to be with him everywhere. Later, when I interviewed him in his stylish townhouse in Santiago three months before he became president, I saw placed prominently among the pictures on his fireplace one of him with his arm around Senorita Dark Eyes. The real Mrs. Allende didn't mind, despite her worldwide mourning after his death. They hadn't lived together for years.

The one thing that always stood out about Allende was his incorrigibly gossipy nature. He was always cornering me somewhere and saying of someone or other, "Is he sleeping with her?" Or, "But I see them together all the time, don't you think ... ?" Then he came to ask of me, with a playful smile, "Is
he
the one in your life?" If I were with Mario, a Mexican editor whom I found out later to be on Fidel's intelligence payroll, it was, "It must be he." I'd shake my head. He was much like a meddlesome old lady. One day later in the summer he was out at Veradero Beach having lunch with his dark-eyed beauty and I was having lunch with a handsome young Cuban foreign officer nicknamed Paco. This time Allende's eyes met mine at a special time across the restaurant--serious, not jocular. He said nothing. The next day he said with an unusual solemness, "Now I know."

This time I turned my eyes away and did not answer.

Allende had invited me to go with him to the Twenty-sixth of July celebration, the anniversary of Fidel's attack on the Moncada bar racks. It was a big, fancy reception in the palace, and I was delighted to go. We were chatting with Mario when an impressive-looking, square-shouldered man in his late thirties joined us and was introduced as Manolo Piñero. It should have meant something to me, but in fact it did not. He had a very, very solid gray suit on, which contracted memorably with a most astonishing head of red hair and a great, bushy red beard. I soon forgot him. After all, I had Allende and Fidel to talk to, but I did remember much later that his very green eyes had fastened upon me with an odd intensity.

I forgot him only until 2:00 a.m. that morning, when the phone in my hotel room rang. "This is Manolo Piñero," the voice said. "I'm coming up to have a drink with you."

"You are not coming anywhere," I said with angry firmness. "I'll call the police." This turned out, in the light of things, to be rather funny.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I thought you might remember me. I met you at the palace with Salvador. I just got off work and I wanted to see you again."

The green eyes clicked into place. "I'll come downstairs," I said. When I saw Piñero in his real self -- when I saw him in his khaki military uniform -- everything fell into place. We sat all night in the stillness and the emptiness of the Havana Libre lobby and talked. Talked about his years teaching literature in New York at Columbia, of his marrying an American girl who was a ballerina, of the years in the mountains with Fidel. Manolo Piñero, I now remembered, was the head of intelligence in Marxist Cuba -- and the third most powerful man in the regime. It was Piñero who directed all the Cuban training of guerrilla movements in Latin America, who influenced the American New Left of the sixties, and who later godfathered the entire Cuban adventure in Africa and in Central America.

We sat up until breakfast in their dull coffee-less cafeteria and about 10:00 a.m. I went up and went back to sleep. My first thought was that Piñero's interest in me was political, but what political advantage could he possibly be seeking in a young journalist with no powerful connections? No, in the weeks that followed, it became all too clear that it was a personal "thing," made up most probably of extreme macho power play, but quite real and unquestionably intense.

To be perfectly frank about it, I found Piñero, or "Barba Roja" (Red Beard) as he was widely called, attractive. Those strange green eyes stared out like inviting lights in the midst of all that ominous red hair. He had a razor-sharp mind and a nice wit. But he was the
head of intelligence for Cuba
. There was no way in the world that I was going to enter into any kind of a close friendship and certainly not an affair with the head of intelligence of Cuba! Besides, if I am to be honest about it, I knew it would bring me only a lot of trouble -- and no information.

So it was that I politely "declined" any further involvement with Piñero, although I told him I was happy to have him as a "friend." How naive -- in retrospect. I even outlined the rules to him (I was being "fair"). We could have lunch or go swimming in the afternoon but no more 2:00 a.m. meetings. He looked at me quizzically -- I'm sure he thought me quite mad. But we never went swimming ... and he never, never gave up. And I was already caught in one of those classical conundrums that women of my interim generation were constantly faced with and that would eventually poison all my Cuban relationships.

The day after our innocent 2:00 a.m. tryst in the lobby, the plot continued. This was the day Fidel spoke in the Plaza de la Revolución. For hours, and hours, and hours. People walked in and out in the celebrity stands where I sat and stood. They drank beer and talked among themselves while Fidel went on and on and on. I spoke for a while with Vito, a delightful CBS cameraman who was the only other American journalist around, and with him was the Cuban named Paco. Paco, who headed the press section at the Foreign Ministry, was six feet two, with curly brown hair, an ethereally beautiful smile, and stunning blue eyes. He kept staring at me, and I admit to flirting a bit, caught up as I was in the carnival spirit of the day.

That same night about ten o'clock I was back in my room writing my article when Vito phoned to invite me for a drink. To my surprise, when I knocked on his door, Paco opened it. While Vito kept a diplomatically low profile, Paco and I made an acquaintance quickly.

In spite of my caution, during the remaining five weeks I was there, Pinero managed to call me at two or three every morning, gradually building up in me a crescendoing fear.

With Paco the situation was different. I was keeping that in hand until one day, while we were walking down the street by the Associated Press office, he told me, "I've changed your assignment officer." I stared at him. "I've changed him to me."

I looked down and away. I knew it was wrong, and I also knew it was inevitable. "It's not a good idea, Paco," I said. "I don't think we should do it." What it meant was that he, and not the puritanical Communist guide I had had on my travels around the island, would travel with me. Alone. "No," I said finally, "no."

"It's done," he said, shrugging and pulling rank. "There's nothing more to do."

I stopped right there in the street and lectured him. I was absurdly like that in
those days. "I suppose there's nothing I can do about it," I finally agreed. "But there is not going to be anything between us. Nothing. And if you try to make something between us ... "

My upbringing regarding sex and sensuality had been very strict, and I moved through this very sophisticated world, at least in those early years, being extremely careful of involvements. I am sure that most of the men thought me quite crazy -- I do, today, myself. Yet, at the same time, since I am a very passionate woman in personal feelings as well as political feelings, I think it protected me.

Eventually, however, my 1940s Midwestern inhibitions gave way. We were both single, we were in love, we were harming no one. I had been honest with Pinero, and certainly nobody had told me that being in
love was either mandated by or forbidden by the Cuban revolution.

Then one day I walked into my hotel room, having just arrived back from Veradero Beach and Paco, and the phone rang. It was Pinero's deep voice saying, "I understand you are going to marry a Cuban." My stomach tightened until I could barely breathe. Why was I so afraid? What was I doing wrong?

"Why don't you take me to lunch?" I suggested, for that was, among my "rules," allowed. He did -- to a gorgeous restaurant on the sea, one of those reserved only for that "New Class" of Marxist Cubans of which Pinero was a charter member. The restaurant was nearly empty those days, for we arrived in the wake of the purge of the party's high livers. Pinero's green eyes fixed impassively on me. I was trying to find out how much he knew, but it was fruitless with someone like him.

"We had a talk about you," he said at once.

I looked quizzically at him. "Who?"

"Everybody said you were just like all the rest of the Yanqui imperialists -- except two of us."

"Two?"

"Yes." His eyes narrowed. "Fidel and I."

In all of this, in spite of being a now-experienced journalist, I was still naiveté incarnate, still the girl next door from the South Side of Chicago. I was convinced Pinero did not know of my romance with Paco -- in fact, I thought no one knew -- whereas, in truth, everybody did.

Even here I held to my own ethical-moral female standard, always so much more complex than those of men. I suspected -- strongly -- that Paco was a thoroughly lukewarm Marxist, if one at all. But I never -- never -- asked him anything personal about communism. I didn't think it fair and I didn't want to know anything that could compromise him.

The night before I left, however, as we sat in one of the "New Class" bars, Paco for the first time poured out his heart to me. "I can't bear this anymore," he said, saying much too much. "I don't belong in this, I don't believe in it. And I love you and I can't get out and I'll never be able to leave." For the first time I learned that he had indeed been working
under
Pinero, although he was ostensibly in the Foreign Ministry. This didn't worry me in terms of intelligence, but it certainly worried me in terms of personal relation ships because, it also turned out, he and Pinero were old enemies. All of Pinero's strange glances at me, growing more and more intense over the weeks, suddenly began to make more sense -- to take on a dangerous new life of their own in which I was only the instrument for vengeance.

I left the next day, with the haunting image of Paco leaning against the airport building, his eyes seeming to stare inside himself. Allende, our paths again strangely linked, was sitting in the seat ahead of me on the plane. Then, ten minutes out of the airport, I was staring at the wing when before my eyes, one of the engines went out. At that exact moment the plane swerved totally and we made it back to Havana.

I immediately called Paco, who rushed back to the airport. By that time I was sitting with Allende and two others, having lunch. Paco came to the table, his face flushed, and said he would wait for me in the bar. And then Allende -- a little man with a little man's envies --revealed so much. As Paco walked away, Allende muttered to me in Spanish,
"Ningun hombre merece tener hombros como estos.
-- No man deserves to have shoulders like that."

Four days and another plane failure later, I finally did get out of Cuba, sitting all the way to Mexico city talking to Josephine Baker, who had her wonderful pack of mixed-race children with her. I did not know then that I would be forever banned from Cuba, irrespective of the fairness or unfairness of my stories.

***

The next morning after getting out of Cuba, I received word from Chicago: my father had died, suddenly and quickly, of a heart attack at our summer home in Wisconsin. It seemed that the world could not collapse enough around me. So he was gone. How does one go on living? It was desolation itself. In 1979, when my mother, who had been the true rock in my life -- the point of strength from which I was able to go out to revolve around the earth -- when she died I truly thought the world was ending. It became clear to me then how she had made everything possible, had given me the strength and the confidence to face down the world. For the first couple of years I came very close to falling apart. Then I began to rebuild the structures of support and sympathy; but life was never again the same.

The next year I applied for a Cuban visa again. No answer. My phone calls were not answered. I begged people for explanations. There were no complaints about my work -- and no explanations. I foolishly kept assuring myself, as women do in these situations, that I had done everything honestly and straightly. I had--that didn't really have anything to do with it.

Finally, through a friend, I took out one of the top men in the Cuban mission in New York for lunch. I plied the chap with wine, but despite this all my pleas for answers were sidetracked. Finally at 5:00 p.m. after three bottles of wine between us, I was just about to give up, if only to go to sleep, when he narrowed his slightly blood shot eyes at me and said, "You want to know why you can't go back to Cuba?" I nodded. "Did you ever offend Comandante Pinero?" he asked pointedly.

I had -- and I never went back. Thirteen years later they still refused my visa requests. Manolo was still chief of intelligence, directing the thousands of Cuban troops in Africa and, by the eighties, Central America.