So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (33 page)
Read So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life Online
Authors: Frank Mankiewicz,Joel L. Swerdlow
Different, of course, doesn’t automatically mean worse. When New York City had so many daily newspapers, plenty of people reading those newspapers were still narrow-minded and ill-informed; plenty of stupid things happened with strong public support. They were often ill-informed, but at least people knew what they were ill-informed about. They knew what subjects their countrymen were discussing. Now the news will come on a screen, perhaps the size of a wristwatch. A “real” newspaper is news on paper, hence “news-paper,” just as it’s been for hundreds of years—since before the emergence of modern democracy.
This may be unlike me, because I usually welcome new things and am no automatic friend of the status quo. If I sound a bit like a grumpy old man, there’s a lot to be grumpy about.
* * *
In 1977, when
The Washington Post
invited me to write a column of reminiscences and observations, the editors approved my title, “Waiting for Rain,” taken from (I assumed the
Post
caught the connection) T. S. Eliot’s
Gerontion:
“Here I am, an old man in a dry month,/Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.”
When I chose that title for my column, I was in my early fifties—still quite young by today’s standard.
Fidel Castro had appeared several times in my work, most notably in 1965, when I told LBJ that contrary to what top U.S. government officials were saying, the reformers in Latin America were
not
under the influence of “Castro-style revolutionaries.” For obvious reasons, I didn’t go so far as to share my personal opinions with LBJ: I rather liked “Castro-style revolutionaries.”
Historians tell us that the United States seized Cuba from Spain in 1898 during the Spanish-American War and occupied it, sometimes with troops, sometimes by controlling its economy and government, until Castro took over on January 1, 1959. I think that pretty much summarizes the situation. I remember the massive extreme poverty and repressive elites in Peru I saw, and Cuba under Castro has been, in many ways, the only Latin American country to escape that. I know my view of Castro is not popular in the United States; perhaps I’m as much “anti” organized crime and “anti” corporate abuse and greed as I am “pro” Castro.
Did Robert Kennedy as U.S. attorney general try to get Castro killed? I know that many American scholars—many from the so-called Left—think this is true. But more than once, in private and in public, I heard RFK say, “Kill Castro? I did just the opposite. I saved his life.” Bob once told me of the Cuban missile crisis, “You have no idea how close we came to war,” but never said anything critical of Castro.
But a widespread belief, often supported by former U.S. government officials (usually alumni of the CIA), is that as attorney general and a top adviser to JFK, Robert Kennedy participated in decisions to have Castro killed. Most often, this assertion has been written by journalists and researchers who have a strong anti-Kennedy bias. This has always seemed particularly strange because high on the list of the “what would have happened if RFK had lived” literature is evidence that he was working toward normalization of relations with Cuba.
The extent of poverty and degradation in Cuba at the time Castro took over—Americans, with some exceptions, such as former Peace Corps volunteers in Latin America, just do not comprehend it. Most Cubans had houses with dirt floors and could virtually be sold whenever the land they worked was sold. Life in Cuba under Castro, pervasive as poverty has been—and often is still—is a vast improvement for almost all Cubans: free schools, free medical care—good, first-rate medical care—toll-free public transportation, houses without dirt floors. Those who prospered when Americans ran the place—mostly the Mafia and some big corporations—have left the country. People who want freedom as we define it here in the United States, or at least think we define it, are in jail in Cuba? Nonsense. Castro was smart enough to encourage dissidents to go to the United States. The poets are in jail? That’s also a myth. True, for several years in the 1960s the Cuban government went after homosexuality, and true, there are a few political prisoners, but very few.
In 1953, during his criminal trial after the failure of his first attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, Castro famously told the court, “History will absolve me.” How will history judge Castro? It depends on what comes after him. If relationships are normalized and American corporations move back to power, and Havana quickly becomes a glittering center of consumerism, if materialism and with it crime sweep over the island, then history, at least American history, will be very kind and ignore him, in much the same way the English ignore Cromwell.
In the mid-1970s, when the Cuba-U.S. relationship looked as though it might be moving toward normalization, I spent several weeks in Cuba with Kirby Jones, as journalists, during which we conducted extensive interviews with Castro. Once, he said, “Let’s go for a ride tomorrow,” so we hopped into an open jeep the next morning and drove around, with Fidel driving and showing us the sights of Havana. As we stopped at some red lights, people would wave and shout, “Olé, Fidel!” The Cuban people are charming. They love America and Americans more than any Latin American people I’ve seen.
Don’t forget their national game is baseball. On an early escorted visit to Cuba, I was in the midst of a really dreary explanation of agricultural planning by a deputy minister, when one of the members of our party took ill, and the others left the room briefly, leaving me alone with the minister and his deputy. Looking serious, the minister said, “Can I ask you a question about the U.S.?” Expecting a question about our government’s attempts to assassinate Castro or about the economic embargo, I said, “Yes, of course.” Then the man said, “Are you interested in baseball?”
When I told him I was a dedicated fan, he told me that in his youth he had played for the Detroit Tigers, “just in their farm system; I only spent one week in the majors,” he said. “Now, of course, we have amateur baseball at the championship level just as in the States,” he continued, “and we no longer have any interest in the so-called professional players and what you call the ‘big leagues.’” He had apparently memorized every American sports bribing incident in the past several years and recounted each of them in full detail, apparently to buttress his arguments that our professional sports were hopelessly tainted by money and American capitalism, whereas Cuban sports were all amateur and therefore on a higher plane.
Out of politeness, I did not correct him by pointing out that virtually all sports bribery in the United States comes at the hands of organized crime or of overly enthusiastic alumni trying to influence their school’s “amateur” football or basketball teams. And I nodded politely when he kept insisting that the only sports the Cuban people cared about were amateur.
Then his deputy joined the conversation and asked me, intently, “Qué significa ‘DH’?” I explained this was new to Major League Baseball that year and stood for “designated hitter,” a position previously unknown. It described, I said, a new position, a player who would bat with the team, in the place of the pitcher, but would not play in the field. They both expressed surprise at this new rule, and the minister, who had previously announced his complete disinterest in American professional games, pointed out the rule seemed to apply only to the “American League, not the National League.” I told him he was correct, and so he questioned me more closely, “You mean there are players on a team who need only bat and not also play in the field?” When I told him that was precisely the new rule for the
bateador designado,
he turned triumphantly to his colleague and proclaimed, “I could have stayed another five years!” Then, when the deputy asked if it was true that Lou Brock had stolen 118 bases the previous season and I assured him he was right, the minister, presumably for my education, added that this broke Maury Wills’s record of 110. It turned out that these guys followed the teams as closely as I, mostly from the box scores in the
Miami Herald
.
* * *
On another trip to Cuba, I served as a companion and informal interpreter and guide for the legendary baseball owner Bill Veeck, who wanted to explore a relationship with Cuba and baseball he had been working on for some time. Castro had forbidden any commerce between its ballplayers—all designated amateurs—and the American major leagues, presumably because it carried more than a whiff of capitalism.
Veeck’s idea was to sign the players on whom he had an eye—the stars—to
provisional
contracts, allowing them to remain in Cuba to play in the amateur leagues—unpaid, of course—until relations with the United States would permit commerce to revive, at which time the players would become the property of his Cleveland Indians or, later, his Chicago White Sox and begin to draw the salaries to which they had agreed. It was a promising notion, but Fidel Castro, once a ballplayer so talented, it was said, he was under contract to the New York Yankees, was having none of it. He smelled capitalism.
Still, Veeck persisted. In between meals, consisting mostly of the only Spanish word he knew—
cerveza
, beer—he promoted his idea, to journalists, government officials, waiters, bartenders, and even, on one memorable occasion, to the Cuban commissioner of baseball, a former pitcher for the Washington Senators. The commissioner had invited Veeck (and me) to a game in the Cuban equivalent of the World Series, between the Agricultores and the Carpinteros (Cuban leagues were organized by occupation, rather than geographic location). The game was being played at the National Stadium, a ballpark built pretty much to major-league standards, circa 1940, with wide slanting concrete aisles through the grandstands to the field. The commissioner listened politely to Veeck’s idea and then asked him to explain the new balk rule the “big leagues” had just adopted. Veeck, who had a wooden leg, stood in an aisle, as the game proceeded, and demonstrated the exact windup, pause, and release times now permitted, with the Cuban commissioner of baseball next to him, attempting, with two good legs, to mimic him.
Indeed, the most memorable thing I found about Veeck, a chronic cigarette smoker, was his habit, throughout the day, of using a small hole in his wooden leg, which was hollow, as an ashtray for ashes and used cigarettes. I was his roommate during our stay at the Hotel Riviera (built by the gangster Meyer Lansky), and I could observe Veeck at the end of the day getting ready for bed by, literally, unscrewing his leg and shaking out ashes and cigarette butts.
* * *
Castro and I often talked of serious matters. I reminded him that personal liberties such as freedom of the press were a matter of concern and asked what the words “personal freedom” meant to him. His answer showed both an unwillingness to admit any shortcomings in Cuba under his rule and a sophisticated feel for problems the United States faced:
I don’t think that we could summarize it here in just a few words. I could ask you, “What does individual freedom mean to an American?” I could ask you what individual freedom means to a man who is discriminated against in the United States? For a Chicano, Puerto Rican, to what is individual freedom reduced then? Freedom to vote, say, every four years for the two candidates chosen by the two major parties. The freedom to write. You write. I don’t deny that there are groups of people in the United States who write freely, but in the end freedom of expression is that of the owners of the major newspapers who delineate the policies of the newspapers. In general, really I am not going to deny that there exists in the United States a fairly free press. But I don’t see the freedom that the humble man of the United States has to change the system.
In summary, I believe there are two different conceptions of freedom. You believe that freedom can exist within a class system, and we believe in a system where everyone is equal, where there are no superpowers because there is no pyramid, no millionaires, no multimillionaires, where some don’t even have a job. I wonder if you can compare the freedom of the millionaire with that of the beggar or of the unemployed. However, you believe this is freedom. We believe that is all false, and we believe that without equality there is no freedom because you do have to speak about the freedom of the beggar, the prostitute, the exploited, the discriminated, the illiterate. Freedom to write and speak for a man who cannot write, who cannot read? We believe man can be free only if he is equal.
“Is there,” I asked Castro, “freedom to be a millionaire here in Cuba?” Here, too, his answer was revealing. “I believe the freedom to be a millionaire is very bad because in the United States many are millionaires because they inherited their money,” Castro said, continuing, “We do not agree with that sort of freedom. It is the freedom to pile up money and exploit others. This is why it is so difficult to answer your question, because we take off from two different points of view and we don’t believe freedom can exist in a society with exploited and exploiters.” Castro went on to insist Cuba has “no unemployment problems and we anticipate none because it is a basic duty of the state to find employment for its population.”
His views on John F. Kennedy were nuanced:
Kennedy was a bold man, a man with initiative, a man with imagination. And he was a man of courage; this is the evaluation that I have. Not because he was our friend, because we were the targets of his aggression. After all, he gave the order to go on with the expedition, he intensified the blockade of Cuba, he supported CIA activities against Cuba, the pirate attacks, the organizing of mercenary bands, he made the blockade tougher, he took many measures against us. But I speak to you in all sincerity and try to give you the opinion that I have of Kennedy. I say that truly he was one of the few men who had enough courage to question a policy and to change it. And he demonstrated this in his term as president. Moreover, the Kennedy elected president and the Kennedy of pre-presidency times was a much more conservative Kennedy. As he advanced and gained wider knowledge of the realities of the world, he went on to change his policy and his political criteria. I would say that this is a man whose political mind evolved, changing gradually and undoubtedly.