The Longest Romance (11 page)

Came April 9 and—much to Matthews's grief—Cuba's workers
again
blew a loud and collective raspberry at Fidel Castro, reporting to work en masse. “Cuba's laborer's always maintained a
stony indifference to Fidel Castro's movement,” admitted Cuba's richest man and (duped) Fidel Castro bankroller Julio Lobo, who knew because he employed thousands of them.
⁸
Lobo himself scooted out of Cuba barely ahead of a firing squad in 1960.

With his call for a general strike, Fidel Castro was again trying to derail the forthcoming elections. The rationale for these personal calls by Herbert Matthews in March 1958 is not hard to plumb. Here was the man most likely to win a free and fair presidential election (Marquez-Sterling) and here was the head of Cuba's largest and most powerful labor organization (Mujal). At that time, by the way, according to the International labor Organization, Cuban workers per capita were more unionized than U.S. workers. Both of these men must be coopted or neutralized, as Fidel Castro well knew.

So Castro called his faithful retriever from
The New York Times.
“Heel, boy! Heel!” Then he pointed him in their direction and said, “Fetch, boy! Fetch!” All under the guise of interviews for the famous
New York Times.

That some Hispanic politicians in some banana republic not only rebuffed his entreaties but booted him from their domiciles must have shaken the worldly, tweedy, pipe-smoking Herbert Matthews, reporter for the world's most prestigious newspaper, Polk Award Winner and friend to Ernest Hemingway. But so it came to pass.

“He really looked shocked when my dad kicked his ass out of our house!” recalls Carlos's son Manuel Marquez Sterling.

About the election itself, the story is short and not-so-sweet. General elections were held on November 1, 1958. As Castro had threatened to jail and execute any candidate who took part, the only person willing to stand for the office was a Batista partisan, Andres Rivero Aguero. Batista's flight and Castro's coup prevented him from taking office.

The very week Fidel and Che Guevara entered Havana, Carlos Marquez-Sterling received another visit from their men.
But the ones who came this time were bearded and heavily armed. Marquez-Sterling was arrested and bundled to La Cabana prison, already filled to suffocation. This was Che Guevara's command post and Havana's firing-squad central. Soon it would be known as Cuba's Lubyanka.

Shortly Che himself—sneering as usual, reeking horribly as usual—walked into Marquez-Sterling's cell and asked if he'd been the Cuban ambassador to his native Argentina in the 30's and 40's.

No, that ambassador had been his father, Carlos explained. “I'm not exactly sure of what the charges are against you yet,” said Che. “Then Che was alerted that he had some phone calls back in his office and he walked out,” recounts Carlos's son Manuel. “After taking these he walked back in and sneered at my father: to think that you and your politicking, you and your elections, almost derailed our revolution!”

So here was proof—and from a pretty primary source—of Castro's fears, and the motive for Matthews's visits. “Though we always suspected the rationale,” says Manuel, it “was now confirmed. He was using the good and prestigious offices of a
New York Times
reporter to try and derail my father's own attempted derailment of the Castro brothers' and Che Guevara's plans to Stalinize Cuba. To the end of his life my father considered Che's remark one of the biggest compliments he'd ever received.”

Further confirmation came to Argentina's ambassador, Julio Amoedo, a few weeks later. “Marquez-Sterling was the one we feared most,” Castro confided to him. “Had he won the elections, I would not be here today.”

So (unwittingly) from Che Guevara, Carlos Marquez-Sterling had learned of the Castroite charges against him. At a time when every media outlet and personality from
The New York Times
to Ed Sullivan was hailing the glories of the newly-democratic Cuba, a man was jailed for having taken part in a Cuban democratic process.

“In fact my father was released a few days later,” says Manuel. “Che must have taken a call from someone quite high when he
walked out of the cell. Remember, at the time Guevara certainly didn't take orders from too many people in Cuba. We think the call was from Fidel himself, telling him that the immediate danger from such as Marquez-Sterling was over. So he was released and put under house arrest. A few weeks later he and my mother escaped Cuba, intent on alerting the world to what was going on behind all those media headlines and to organize a resistance in exile to what he already foresaw as the Stalinization of Cuba.”

So despite what Matthews and all the rest were broadcasting to the world, here was early proof that Castro had no intention of allowing any elections in his new fiefdom. The immediate danger to his rule came—as it did to Stalin's plans for Poland—from the military. “Carlos Marquez-Sterling's turn would certainly come, but for now let's get cracking against Cuba's military, the outfit with guns—especially the few who showed mettle when fighting us in the hills,” Castro must have reasoned.

So Cuba's version of the Katyn massacre ensued. Within a few months, the bulk of the Cuban military officer-corps had been murdered by firing squad or imprisoned. Research by Armando Lago of the Cuba Archive project documented 1,168 firing-squad executions by the end of that first year of revolution, with another 5,000 Cubans (mostly professional military men) jailed for political crimes. With a few exceptions the international media echoed the Castroite line, rationalizing this reign of terror as “Nuremberg-type justice for Cuban war criminals.”

Among the exceptions was Havana correspondent for London's
Daily Telegraph,
Edwin Tetlow, who reported on a mass “trial” orchestrated by Che Guevara in February 1959, where the reporter noticed the death-sentences posted on a board before the trial had started.

The January 1959 issue of Cuba's
Bohemia
magazine listed a total of 898 Cubans killed on all sides of the anti-Batista violence starting in 1952. How a civil war with such casualties on both sides could produce so many war criminals on one side few reporters
cared to question. Their crusading journalistic zeal of a year before, with Cuba under Batista, vanished in a poof with Cuba under Castro.

Yet gripping human-interest stories were all around them. “I'm sworn not to violate my holy duties of confession,” sobbed a Cuban priest named Berba Beche to Gerardo Abascal in Santiago, Cuba during the early days of the revolution. Raul Castro was machine-gunning dozens of supposed war criminals into mass graves at the time but had graciously permitted Father Beche to hear the confessions from the condemned. “Who would lie upon his last confession?” asked the shaken priest to his friend Gerardo Abascal. “Why would these men lie to me? ... I can assure you that the Castroites are executing mostly innocent men.”
⁹

CHAPTER 7

T
he very week Castro took power—with everyone from Herbert Matthews to Ed Murrow and Ed Sullivan singing his praises as a “Christian humanist”—Castro's hit-teams went after Marquez-Sterling's partner in drafting Cuba's social-democratic 1940 constitution. The labor leader Mujal ducked into the Argentinian embassy just in time to escape a bullet in the neck, Lubyanka and Katyn-style. Somebody with Mujal's background, contacts and smarts might quickly let the Castroite communist cat out of the “democratic” and “humanist” bag that had been carefully sewn shut by so many in the media, starting with Herbert Matthews.

Mujal escaped to Argentina a few days later, only to meet up with fellow Cuban Carlos Bringuier, who happened to be visiting his Argentinean in-laws at the time. Finding a countryman in a foreign port always breeds quick rapport and, though they'd never met, Bringuier and Mujal had many common acquaintances back home. “The communists have taken over in Cuba and they're trying to murder me.” Mujal finally told Bringuier, who was then a 25-year-old lawyer.

“At first I figured Mujal was a bit crazy,” recalls Bringuier, “psychotically paranoid for sure.” But twelve years earlier, University of Havana student Fidel Castro had murdered Bringuier's cousin
Manolo Castro—no relation, but a rival to him as a student leader. So Bringuier was eager to hear out the older and wiser man.
¹

“I know most of the people really in power behind Castro's façade of a democratic government.” Mujal told him. “They're hard-core Stalinists I knew in the 30's. I know full well they'll now try to kill me. I've got to get to the U.S. where I'll be safer. I've already got a U.S. visa. Can you and your in-laws help me get an exit visa from Argentina?”

The more Bringuier spoke with Mujal the more he became convinced of everything he said—media and intelligence “experts” be damned. And here's what the “experts” were claiming about Castro at the time:

“We've infiltrated Castro's guerrilla group in the Sierra mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara have no affiliations with any communists whatsoever.” (Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel, November 1958)
²

“Fidel Castro is not only
not
a communist—he's a strong
anti
communist fighter! He's ready to help us in the hemisphere's anti-communist fight and we should share our intelligence with him!” (Gerry Droller, the CIA's expert on Latin American communism, April 1959)
³

“Fidel Castro is a good young man trying to do what's best for Cuba. We should extend him a hand.” (former President Harry Truman, July 1959)
⁴

“Now these things [i.e., Castro is a Communist] are charged. But they are not easy to prove. The U.S. Government has made no such charges.” (U.S. President Eisenhower, July 1959)
⁵

More than a year and a half later, in June 1960—as Cuba crawled with Soviet agents, with Raul Castro in Moscow arranging for the delivery Soviet missiles, with Castro a mere month away from stealing more than 1,600 U.S.-owned businesses at Soviet gunpoint—a situation report by the CIA and the State Department concluded: “We are unable to answer the simplified question, Is Castro himself a Communist?”
⁶

Eusebio Mujal had much to teach U.S. intelligence in early 1959—if only he'd been allowed entry to the U.S. Instead, promptly upon his arrival at Miami International Airport from Argentina, Mujal's U.S. visa was cancelled on orders of the U.S. State Department. Mujal then flew to Spain where he found asylum.

The State Department officials in charge of Cuban matters at the time were Roy Rubottom and William Wieland. According to sworn testimony by U.S. ambassadors Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith, both of those officials worked hand in glove with
The New York
Times's Herbert Matthews, who bore a grudge against Mujal. To return to the ambassadors' testimony:

Senator Dodd: “While you were the ambassador to Cuba, Mr. Rubottom was the assistant secretary for Latin American affairs, was he not?”

Mr. Gardner: “Yes.”

Mr. Smith: “I believe there was a close connection... between the Latin American desk and Herbert Matthews.”

Mr. Sourwine: “And by the Latin American desk, whom do you mean?”

Mr. Smith: “I would say the Latin American desk would go from the assistant secretary for Latin American affairs [Rubottom] right down to the man who presides over the Cuban [Wieland].”

Mr Smith: “I would say that
Mr. Wieland and all those who had anything to do with Cuba had a close connection with Herbert Matthews.
I will go further than that. I will say that when I was ambassador, I was thoroughly aware of this, and sometimes made the remark in my own embassy that Mr. Matthews was more familiar with the State Department thinking regarding Cuba than I was.” (my emphasis)

Senator Dodd: “You have been quoted, Mr. Gardner, as referring to ‘Castro worship' in the State Department in 1957. You are quoted as saying you fought all the time with the State Department over whether Castro merited the support or friendship of the United States. Would you explain?

Mr. Gardner: “I feel it very strongly, that the State Department was influenced, first, by those stories by Herbert Matthews, and soon [support for Castro] became kind of a fetish with them.”

Senator Dodd: “Your successor as ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith was actually [sent by the State Department] to be briefed by
The New York Times'
Herbert Matthews?”

Mr. Gardner: “Yes, that is right.”

Two years ago Obama's communications director Anita Dunn denounced a dangerous political-media axis consisting of conservative Republicans and Fox News, the second of which served as “either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” No proof was provided by Anita Dunn.

On the other hand, we have sworn Congressional testimony by Republican ambassadors Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith of intimate collusion by liberal State Department officials with a liberal
New York Times
reporter (Herbert Matthews). Partly owing to this collusion, the U.S.—in the Missile Crisis—would soon face its biggest external threat since the War of 1812. This State Department-
New York Times
cronyism had completely upended the traditional process. In 1957 U. S. government officials posted to Cuba got briefings and orientation from a
New York Times
reporter. It used to work the other way: reporters got briefings from diplomats.

Not to be outdone, during a chat with Matthews in the fall of 1962 President Kennedy learned that the reporter was again heading to Cuba. So the president asked if Matthews would be so kind as to stop by afterwards to brief him. A week later the Missile Crisis put the kibosh to Matthews Cuba trip. But the point is that Matthews's clairvoyance on Cuban matters (in which he now had more than five years' experience) impressed the U.S. president.