Flight from a Firing Wall Read online

  That top-secret Cuban refugee arriving on the Kerritack was something I had to see. His build-up was better fitted to a fugitive from a chain gang who was recovering from a mild case of leprosy.

  2

  In contrast to the sun outside, the ground floor where we waited for the elevator was dark and cool. The elevator stopped at the lobby floor, one flight up, to let on four earnest young businessmen acceptably clothed in dark-blue suits, white shirts and dark ties. Miami or Havana, you can’t make a success in the commercial world if you are comfortable and cool.

  I thought of my father, Roberto Carrillo, in his advertising agency, Hatuey S.A., near the American Club on Paseo del Prado. Before the days of air conditioning the office could hit a 100°, yet the height of discourtesy was to receive a client in your shirtsleeves. I could never remember him without a jacket on.

  The elevator stopped at four to admit an elderly couple of the Social Security Set. He was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt that was a mixture of a Hawaiian sunset and dawn after a bad night on the town. His hair was as white as spray in a storm, but sparks came into his pale blue eyes at the sight of Liliana’s stretchers. Under the pink fluorescent elevator lights, one quick glance might have given the illusion that she was clad in a bikini. His buxom Señora was taking no chances. She turned him around to face the door and moved her ample bulk in the way. With our morals saved, we soared on up to the seventeenth floor.

  The dining room was fairly crowded, with several parties waiting. Liliana took over. She turned loose a burst of charm on the hostess, who either knew her better than I did or wanted to tuck those legs away. Or maybe her ship-to-shore sister had already reserved a table. Who was I to say?

  Whatever the magic password, while others were still standing we found ourselves sitting face to face in a green leather booth with a picture window beside us overlooking Biscayne Bay.

  I ordered daiquiris (which are properly Bacardis—before the name became corrupted along with so many other things in life).

  Liliana said, “I’m tired of Miami. Tired of changes.” She pointed out the window to where a brand new island of fresh white sand was being filled in just south of the MacArthur Causeway. “Miami hates anything natural, particularly if it’s water. Soon there will be just solid land between here and the beach and no trace left of Biscayne Bay.”

  She took off the dark concealing glasses. At sight of the long-lashed luminous eyes, as black as her hair, I recognized her instantly. I had heard her sing at one of the better Cuban restaurants transplanted from Havana, and at one of the newest posh hotels across the bay.

  “There are no pep pills for nostalgia,” I told her. “That, not tiredness, is the syndrome of refugees, like you and me.”

  It was only a half-truth, for I was tired myself. Tired of living with shadows of the past and puling poetry when needed sleep was far away “… the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!” I was tired of punk politicos all over the world, who were happily playing Ping-Pong with peoples’ lives to line their own pockets. Dead-dog-tired of a resentment, thicker than tear gas, that rolled around me strangling me more thoroughly every day—a resentment that I knew was a child of my own unhappiness and which I still couldn’t entirely ignore. For the moment it threatened to choke me into sullen silence. I sat there with nothing to say.

  The waitress came. We ordered lunch and another round of cocktails. Out on the bay, a sports fisherman creamed by Burlingame Island doing twenty knots in a five-knot zone. A police launch shot out from some hideaway back of Brickell Point and took off after him like a whippet. The skipper must have swallowed his plates at the stop he made off of Bay Front Park when the water cops gave him the horn. This evidence of American law in action gave me a chance to become philosophical and indulge in a bit of corn.

  I said, “I wonder if anything on earth really changes except people? Old towns vanish and new ones are built, highways take the place of mud trails, land appears where water was before, but Florida is still Florida. Islands are dredged up from the bottom, but the bay is still Biscayne. Take this rum.” I held up my glass. “It used to be made in Cuba, but now it’s Mex, shipped in kegs to the Bahamas, and then from there to be bottled in the United States, but the cocktails are still daiquiris, and the rum is still Bacardi.”

  “I don’t exactly get your meaning.” She studied me with a tiny frown.

  “Cuba’s still there. Just ninety miles south of Key West across the Straits of Florida—all forty-four thousand square miles of it, still there. Only the people have changed, and then only in their thinking, the ones who are still there, and the ones who have left as we did.”

  Our second cocktail came. Liliana toyed with her glass, and decided to give me the language test. She broke into a rapid flow of Spanish.

  “Are you really a Cuban, Dr. Carrillo? You have me puzzled. You look more like an American with those brown eyes and that brown hair, and you certainly talk like one—your slang and no accent at all. Then, when you start soliloquizing … Well, it’s odd. I get the feeling that you’re thinking in Spanish, like a Cuban, even though you are speaking English.”

  I sipped my drink and gave her a taste of the old Carrillo Castilian pounded in me since birth by the best advertising man Havana ever knew. “I’m a half-breed, chica. I was born in Havana, and my father, Roberto, owned the advertising agency, Hatuey S.A. He came from a long generation of Cubans, but my mother was an American, a Connecticut Yankee, Margaret Adams. She was a well-known singer and musical comedy star, like you, only slightly before your time.”

  She smiled. “I am complimented that you know me, but I can scarcely be called a star.”

  “Nevertheless, many do! Although I graduated in medicine from the University of Havana in 1959, I spent most of my early years with my grandparents in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from prep school at Avon Old Farms, not far from that city. I guess I’m what they call completely bilingual. That goes for you, too.”

  I broke off abruptly. The local disc jockey who was feeding records to the piped-in music had decided the customers were screaming for that recording of María la O. Or had he? Could be I was getting touchy, but it was the same record that had hooked me in a few hours before and I didn’t like the coincidence—if it was one.

  Liliana was quick on the uptake. She said, “They’re playing that record for me. It has nothing to do with you.” She had switched back to English. “I have made it sort of a theme song and it has gotten connected with me. They happen to know me here, and at a lot of other places in Miami and at the Beach too.”

  “How did it get connected with me?” I wanted to know.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, honestly.” She shook loose a cigarette and I gave her a light. “As I told you, my sister said to play you the last few lines when she called from the yacht on the ship-to-shore phone. I’m curious, naturally. I hoped you might care to explain it to me.”

  I explained it in a watered down version which I felt was sufficient to take care of her curiosity. She sat and smoked thoughtfully.

  “We were the lucky ones, I guess,” she said when I had finished. “The Medinas, my father and mother, my sister, Soledad, and I. We were wealthy enough to make it worthwhile for Fidel to strip us and let us out legally on one of the last commercial planes. My father left a lot of fine tobacco land behind, but we didn’t have to make it in a small boat like you and with bullets in us. But as you say we still have scars.”

  “Is your family in Miami, too?”

  “Just me. My mother and father are in Puerto Rico. Soledad married Orville Harrington, a tremendously wealthy Bahamian. Or maybe he’s an American. I don’t really know. They’ve been married four years now. We don’t get along too well, so I don’t much care what he is so long as he keeps being generous and sends my parents enough to live on. I’m lucky that I have some sort of a voice, and some sort of looks that help me to make a good living. Are your mother and father still livi
ng in Havana?” There was a slight edge to her question.

  “Dead in Havana. Both. My father died in the Calixto García Hospital at the University, just before I left. Broken heart, or broken pride, call it what you will.”

  “On account of Fidel?”

  “On account of Fidel’s betrayal. My father was a proud man, a patriot, and a businessman. He hated el mulato Batista as he called him, with his spies and terrorizing soldiers everywhere. Yet if you wanted to keep your mouth shut and play it safe, nobody bothered you. Still, my father hated injustice more than anything. When it came to a showdown between Fulgencio and Fidel, he was quick to sympathize with Castro …

  “Yes. I was young, but weren’t we all? I remember his promises of end to dictatorship, and end to poverty, and free national elections. I can remember, too, how suddenly I was seized with terror when because my father had spoken out at a close friend’s house criticizing some of Fidel’s actions, he was asked to leave and called a counterrevolutionary, a gusano,a worm.”

  “And now the term applies to us all,” I said. “We wear it with pride like a badge of courage, flaunting it in their bearded faces—the Cubans who believe in freedom—¡gusanos!—¡gusanos!—all!”

  The waitress brought lunch. Before starting on the salad she had ordered, Liliana reached across the table and gently touched the back of my hand with the tip of her finger. “And your mother, Tony?”

  “She thought she could stay. She just couldn’t believe that things could be as bad as they really were. She wanted to save our house at L and Eleventh Streets, near the Calle Linea. Sentimental possessions. The place where I was born. Then I watched her dying in front of my eyes when the heat was turned on.

  “Slogans, slogans everywhere. Posters in the streets. The television. The radio. Everywhere you looked. Everything you turned on. ¡Patria o Muerte!—Fatherland or death! ¡Venceremos!—We shall win! ¡Paredón! ¡Paredón!—To the wall! To the execution wall! Recorded slogans between every ring when you dialed the phone: ¡Patria o Muerte!—and endless doses of ‘Death to the worms, the ¡gusanos!’”

  “¡Dios!” she exclaimed under her breath, like a prayer. “How horrible to watch one’s mother and one’s country dying together! It seems more than one could bear.”

  “Perhaps it was more than I could bear. My mother was an artist with a gentle soul, and all Fidel’s slogans were full of combat and hate, even the ones that as an American she wanted to believe in. War against hunger! Death to illiteracy! It has come too close, chica, to being death to us all. One day her heart just quietly stopped.”

  “Too much bitterness can bring death too, Tony.”

  “And what is too much?” I asked her. “You are having lunch with a monster, Liliana, a man full of hate. I have dedicated my own life to seeing the day that Fidel Castro and all of his ilk who have raped our country will stand all together in one long line up against his own firing wall.”

  3

  Liliana had a rehearsal to make. She thanked me for the lunch, for coming, for trusting her, and for everything. I told her she was welcome, and meant it. She wrapped herself up in her goggles again, and took off for the elevators leaving a trail of interrupted conversations in her wake. She left me with her telephone number, an address in North Miami Beach written on a paper napkin full of bum jokes—“A goblet is a small sailor.” A rosy glow that started down in my toes somewhere and worked up until it made my unusually level head sway.

  I tucked the paper napkin in my side coat pocket for future reference, ordered myself a double brandy, and turned my attention to a cruise ship nosing in through the Government Cut across the bay. There was a time when they used to run to Havana on the P. & O. Line, but now they have to make do with such peaceful places as Bermuda or Nassau. The big white ship measured a bit outsize to be the Kerritack, which I was waiting for, and anyhow Liliana had told me it would be coming in up the Intracoastal Waterway.

  With half of the double Martels refueling me, that rosy glow instead of subsiding started giving me the tingles. Unlike the shingles, the tingles are pleasant if you can just relax and enjoy them, but right now the symptoms worried me. Experience had taught me that when my bullet holes began to ache the prognosis was never favorable, and they were sending me a message in code to “Watch your step, Tony, old boy!” I was able to read them five by five even when I didn’t want to.

  Liliana had a lot of attributes that I could go for in a big way. I stuck a mental jeweler’s lens in my heated brain and started examining that rosy glow with all the cold enthusiasm of a pawnbroker casing a phony diamond on a rainy day. The more I turned the proposition over, the more I reached the conclusion that, while my judgment might be warped by loneliness, Liliana simply wasn’t the type who would qualify for a Playboy Bunny just anxious to play.

  I left Part 2 of my brandy on the table for a marker and searched out a telephone booth near the elevators clutching a ready dime. It bought me a couple of those well-known beeps for busy. I retrieved my pretty money and waited.

  Had anyone ever been crazy enough to list the number I had dialed in the Miami Telephone Directory, it would have belonged to the All Florida Aircraft Organization. This added up to the simple initials AFAO. Translated first into Spanish and then into English, it really stood for the Anti-Communist Freedom and Armed Forces Organization, a brain child of Dr. Luis Martínez.

  The first target of the Communist assault on Cuban education, begun early in 1959, had been the two-hundred-year-old University of Havana, the Alma Mater of Fidel Castro and Luis Martínez, in addition to granting an M.D. to me. Freedom from state interference, and the complete self-government of the University by the deans of the thirteen faculties, and the federation of the 22,000 students was a tradition and a political power that even Batista’s terroristic police had carefully shied away from.

  Yet Fidel, and Raúl, his brother, using the same techniques which they had applied to taking over the labor unions and everything else—contrived elections, a purge of students and faculty members, and the teaching of Marxism-Leninism by every faculty—had taken over the University completely by the spring of 1960.

  On July sixteenth the University Council was abolished and replaced by a “Superior Governing Board” and all non-Communist professors were fired. Fifty-five ousted from the Faculty of Medicine immediately became active in anti-Castro underground organizations, which had their headquarters in the Escambray Mountains, north of Trinidad, about a hundred and fifty miles across the country from Havana.

  Among the fifty-five was old Dr. Jorge Villaverde, now five years later in his seventies and still in Cuba, a festering thorn in Castro’s side, fierce as a hawk and as elusive as a bumblebee. His counterpart in Miami, although some years younger, was Dr. Luis Martínez, General Coordinator of the AFAO, who was fast making a Hatchet Man out of me.

  It has been said that whenever two Cubans get together you have a General and a Colonel, and Luis Martínez liked to add that when five Cubans got together you had forty different political organizations, all pulling against each other to achieve the same goal.

  The Bay of Pigs invasion, probably the most daringly conceived and boldly led bundle of blunders since the trumpeters blew the death charge for the Light Brigade at Balaklava was now four years gone. President Kennedy, who had spoken of the “sober and useful lessons” of the failure, had been assassinated by a self-confessed Fidelista more than a year and a half before.

  Miserably watching the bickering, the fights for personal power and profit, and even in some cases the open dishonesty and corruption which was all too rife in the exile political structure in Miami, Luis Martínez had found himself plagued by a single terrible question: “Could Cuba have survived political disaster, even if the invaders at the Bay of Pigs had won?”

  Evidently I had wasted enough time in futile unpleasant thoughts for the second dialing got me a ring.

  “All Florida Aircraft Organization. Good afternoon! May I help you?” the girl I called
Miss Minute Maid from her orange-juice voice inquired. She and the AFAO offices were among a couple of the sights in Miami I had never seen. I often wondered if anyone had.

  It was easier to contact Admiral Raborn, head of CIA, than Dr. Luis Martínez, a great student of the late Ian Fleming’s agent 007 James Bond. Instead of telling his invisible secretary that I wanted to hire fifty jet bombers for a small mission in Cuba, as I had so often wanted to do, I asked for myself. That was merely step one of the usual AFAO routine.

  “I would like to speak to Dr. Antonio Carrillo, please.”

  The natural comeback was to ask who was calling, but Luis trained his zombies well in the unnatural, including me.

  The voice said, “Just a moment, please, and I will see if he is in.”

  I could have saved her the trouble since I was staring at his reflection in the glass of the phone-booth door, and wondering just how crazy one could get trying to fight a private cold war in the city of Miami on a blistering July afternoon. Then, one quick thought of the Bay of Pigs, and the estimates that many hundreds of men, women and children had been mowed down by machine guns in Castro’s patrol belt since 1961, and the silliness vanished. I was ready to carry on.

  She waited just long enough to push a couple of buttons, or juggle some plugs, or perform whatever hocus-pocus Luis had trained her to do. “I’m sorry, Dr. Carrillo isn’t here just now, but he’s expected later. May I have him call you when he comes in?”

  This ushered in Formula #2. “Please do.” I gave her the number off the pay phone. That meant I had to hold down the booth for at least two minutes more before I got a ring back. I lit a cigarette and threw up a smoke screen.

  Two minutes isn’t a long time unless you have to wait them. I tried to crack my knuckles, but they had never cracked in my lifetime and wouldn’t now. I thought of Luis Martínez. He looked about as much of a conspirator type as Milton Berle. Like the well-known Enrique (Harry) Ruiz-Williams, who had acted as spokesman for the sixty most seriously wounded prisoners, released by Fidel from the Principe Castle a year to the day after the start of the Bay of Pigs invasion, all trace of intrigue in Luis’ intelligent oval face vanished under his disarming smile. Also like Harry Williams, Luis Martínez had never been a military man, a Batistiano, or a Fidelista, and possessed the same unbounded optimism and courage which made both men cling to the belief that all the Cubans in exile could be welded together into an effective machine in time. Luis’ English was fluent, although not quite so idiomatic, colloquial, and accent-free as mine, molded by an American mother and grandparents, and years in a Connecticut prep school. Luis needed all his assets and more if he hoped to unite forty divergent political splinters into a single functioning entity in the AFAO. That he had managed to win the friendship and approval of the Miami authorities, Washington, Immigration, Customs, the Coast Guard, the CIA and the FBI was nothing short of genius. Maybe his cautious James Bond cover wasn’t so kookie after all.