Hostage in Havana - Noel Hynd

“As the war continued in 1958,” Paul continued, “Guevara led his divisions west for the push into Havana. They traveled by foot for seven weeks, entirely at night to avoid ambush. Sometimes they didn’t eat for several days. In the final days of 1958, my uncle was promoted again to take the place of revolutionary officers who had fallen. He became part of the high command with Guevara. The rebels cut the island in half with an attack on Santa Clara, the capital of the La Villas province. Santa Clara was the final military victory of the revolution. Johnny was wounded there. Fractured kneecap. But he stayed with his men. A few weeks later, he rolled into Havana on a captured government tank. Guevara’s regiment came into the capital six days before Castro’s and two days after Batista had fled to the Dominican Republic.”

And there, on the walls, the way some men post diplomas or family pictures, were half a dozen photographs of Havana in January of 1959. In each, Johnny Guarneri was somewhere present: assembled with army riflemen, crouching along the Plaza Vieja with comrades, smashing slot machines that had been ripped out of the Tropicana and hauled out into the street, and in the living room of Batista’s former mansion, feet up on the sofa.

Alex and Paul heard footsteps and turned away from the pictures. Johnny entered, glanced at them, and grinned. “Half a century ago,” he said, following their thoughts. “Sometimes you look back and you think, ‘How did I get from there to here?’” He laughed. The old warrior exuded a strange charm.

Paul crossed the room and offered an arm to his uncle and guided him to the sofa. Johnny seemed older than his years by a decade. He had a lined face, a battered body, and knobby hands.

“The things you do when you’re young,” Johnny said. “God help us. No do-overs, though. You get one chance, one go ‘round.” He glanced at the wall. “Castro, Batista. Meyer Lansky, Che Guevara.

What you don’t know when you’re a young man,” he said, “is that they’re all corrupt, every one of them. And if they aren’t before they get power, they are after they’ve tasted it.”

He paused again. Thea arrived and gave Johnny a glass of water, with ice in it. The ice cubes clicked against each other. With the hand that held the glass, Johnny pointed to the photographs. “Interesting, aren’t they?” he asked.

“Very,” she said.

“I showed your husband night before last. He had never seen them.”

“So I’m told,” Alex said.

“Well, I saw it all close up,” Johnny said, recalling. “I remember New Year’s Eve when the government fell. The evening started out calm, a little tense maybe because everyone knew the rebels were close to the city. But no one expected Batista to use the cover of the midnight party to catch a plane to Miami. I was still with Guevara’s army, and we were about five miles southwest of Havana. But once the word got out that Batista was gone, people started to come out of their homes to celebrate. The local militias that were stationed in the working neighborhoods came out and stormed the casinos and the police station. Guevara woke us up and told us it was time to move into Havana. It was 4:00 a.m. We started to move to the capital. We didn’t get there till daybreak, and by then there was chaos. Happy chaos. Our army of happy campensinos overran the casino lobbies. If doors were locked, we broke them down. If they weren’t locked, our people surged in. After six years of fighting, the end was swift and efficient.” Johnny laughed. “One group of farmer soldiers drove a truck full of pigs into Havana and set them loose in the lobby of the Riviera. They defecated and urinated all over everything. They destroyed the place as much as the rebel soldiers smashing the roulette wheels.”

“The Riviera was Meyer Lansky’s pride,” Paul said, explaining the significance. “It was a special insult and years in the making. The gangsters had been a huge part of the Batista regime, and they’d kept the regime in power. So the casinos were targets.”

“So were the homes of the gangsters,” Johnny continued. “In the streets, there were fires blazing. All the mobster’s possessions – curtains and furniture – were pulled out of the casinos, soaked with kerosene, and ignited. Parts of the interiors of the casinos were torched too, as they deserved to be. Then when the sun rose on January second, mobs stormed out to Miramar where most of the gangsters had mansions. They overran the mansions and looted the place. All the mafia guys were gone though. They knew what was coming. They’d filled suitcases with money and took off for Miami in private planes and boats while Castro’s army moved toward the city. It was terrifying but it was beautiful,” the old man remembered. “Like a hurricane hitting the island. Valiente. Audaz. Podoroso. The criminals were swept away by revolutionaries in green khaki who motored through the streets with automatic weapons, waving the black and red flag of the Twenty-sixth of July Movement. One night the casinos are filled with mobsters and their whores in suits, diamonds, and furs – and the next night illiterate warriors from the provinces, bearded and with bare feet, are destroying everything linked to Batista.”

Johnny reached for his water and took a long sip. Alex and Paul remained quiet.

“Within another day or two, the airport was shut down. Castro went to the army bases and the soldiers flipped their loyalties on the spot. The navy had already flipped sides, and it became harder to escape the island. Revolutionary bands started arresting anyone who’d been associated with Batista or the gangsters. People went into hiding. There were great amounts of cash flying around. Meyer Lansky finally left with several million dollars in a suitcase. Batista had left with so much that he had abandoned three million in cash in his home and probably never missed it. Then El Commandante, Fidel Castro, came into Havana on January 6 after a victory march from Las Villas. Already there were scores of gangsters in the custody of the fuerzas revolucionarias. They wanted to be deported to America, but Castro was having none of it. He made the pronouncement. ‘We are not disposed to deport gangsters,’ he announced. ‘We are inclined to shoot them.’ “

Not for the first time this evening, Alex thought back to Sam Deal’s spiel in New York on the subject of Guevara. Guevara was Castro’s chief executioner. Under Che, Havana’s La Cabana fortress was converted into Cuba’s Lubianka.

“Summary executions began immediately,” Johnny continued. “No trials. Batista’s death squads and the yanqui gangsters were put up against walls at La Cabana fortress and finished by firing squads. That was justice! Someone asked about whether the U.S. would intervene, and Fidel made his famous remark, ‘If America intervenes,’ he said, ‘there will be two hundred thousand dead gringos in the streets of Havana.’”

“That remark didn’t go over well in the American press,” Paul put in. “Fidel later saw fit to retract it and apologize.” His eyes shifted and sharpened.

“This is where the story catches up to Paul’s other uncle and his father,” Johnny said. His gaze found Alex, eye to eye. “Paul’s father, Joseph, he was one of the lucky ones. He had a suitcase full of money. Maybe, what, half a million dollars in cash, was it?” “That’s what my father always said,” Paul answered. “Salvatore, my other brother, who worked at the casinos and racetracks for Lansky, had a higher profile. The rebels came after him and arrested him. Took him to the prison fortress. He was held for fifteen days; then Guevara passed sentence and signed the execution papers. But he had a suitcase of money too. It was known that he was my brother. I was allowed to go to his home and get a few things for him and to clean out his belongings. That’s when I found that he had a hidden supply of money too. The day of the execution came quickly. I did not witness it; I did not care to. At fortress La Cabana, they executed their prisoners, then sent the bodies to the undertaker, who was very busy in those days. I was allowed in the prison when the execution took place. I had the rank of a lieutenant colonel in the revolutionary army. So I was also allowed to accompany his body to the mortuary. I took my brother’s suitcase and removed all the money. It didn’t belong to him, but it didn’t belong to the rebels either. I was thinking only, where can I put it so that no one will find it? How can I hide it from everyone? I could think of only one thing to do. I sealed the money tightly in a canvas bag. It was all stacked together and tightly tied, so it handled easily. I knew people would be looking for it, but no one would be looking for it at the mortuary. When my brother was placed in his coffin, I took the bag and reshaped it. It was the size and shape of a pillow. Family was allowed to witness the closing of the casket. So while I said a private good-bye, I removed the pillow that my slain brother’s head was on and exchanged it for the parcel of money. I put two pillow cases from the undertaker’s supplies, which were right in that room, and I placed the new pillow under his head. Then I called the mortician. Before my eyes, as I stepped back, the casket was closed and locked. The burial was the next day.” “In Havana?” Alex asked.

“In the big cemetery,” Johnny said. “El Cemeterio de Cristobal Colon.”

Alex reacted in shock. “The money’s been sitting in a grave for half a century? Your brother’s grave? “

Paul’s uncle nodded. “Until now,” he said. “Or more accurately – “

“ – until tomorrow night,” Paul finished the sentence. Old Johnny grinned like a gargoyle. Alex took the smile to mean that some of the money was going to be coming his way. Then he rose with surprising agility and looked at his watch.

“The undertaker was further bribed,” Johnny said. “We felt that if my brother was buried under his own name, the revolutionaries would come and desecrate the grave. So he had this favorite ball player of the era named Chico Fernandez. Cuban. Used to come here with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the spring. So we changed the name on the death certificate and sent the body to a different mortician. It’s under the name C. Fernandez. That’s what I didn’t tell your husband till yesterday.” His eyes searched them back and forth. “C. Fernandez. Plot 234, Section SW4. Life is strange. So is death.” He eased back, as if a burden had been lifted. “Come along. It’s late,” he said. “You should go to the bedroom you will share tonight. Have you made love yet in Cuba?”

“No,” Alex said after a moment of mild astonishment at the old man’s candor. To her side, she could almost feel Paul suppressing a smirk.

“The moon will be upon your window, and the ocean will be in your ears and your soul,” the old fellow said. “You will have a wonderful night. If you make a baby, you must give the child a Cuban name.”

FIFTY-FOUR

In the late evening the old man woke up in the back of the cafe and ambled into Habana Vieja, the old section of Havana, for a final look. Live music was everywhere for the touristas, and hundreds of Habaneros were performing in bands, in shows, and at the restaurants in order to earn their daily convertible pesos, so that they could buy what they needed at the dollar stores. An armada of foreigners swept through the streets. He strolled quietly, keeping to himself and watching with amusement as the tourists were hustled by jineteras, the friendly, charming scam artists who specialized in swindling tourists.

Sometimes it was hard to love this country and its isolation. On occasion, back in the 1990s, the old man, significantly younger then, used to go out to the Jose Marti International airport on Sundays. It was moving to see the hundreds of people standing there in the morning waiting for their visiting families arriving from the U.S. Even though the man and his wife at the time were never expecting family to come, it was still emotional.

But he knew friends who had family.

They would all talk about the feeling they had when the plane was descending toward Cuba. The visitors could see the mountains and the rolling hills and everywhere the royal palm trees. They couldn’t believe how pretty the land was from the air, how fresh and unpolluted it seemed. It was a different world from the Cuban part of Miami that they were so used to, even though a less-glamorous reality waited on the ground.

Eventually, the old man found a table in another cafe. It was night now. He savored the smell of Cuban tobacco, which remained different from all other tobaccos in the world, and to his tastes finer. He bought a Bolivar cigar and began to smoke.

He ordered dinner. To him, it was still so wonderful how well a good cigar went with a Cuban evening, much like the Cuban coffee went with the local milk.

He looked around the square. The most amazing thing remained how old and untouched many of the modern things were. The cars. The colonial architecture, much of it crumbling, much of it still magnificent, even in ruin. He would have liked to have written a Valentine or a love poem to his adopted city. He had an idea where he might start such a letter.

Havana he might have described as an old diva who’d been forgotten by all her suitors but was still trying to look her best. Havana was frequently compared to her sister city, San Juan, Puerto Rico, which was modern, prosperous, and flourishing. Havana had been allowed to fall and deteriorate – physically but not spiritually.

The old man stayed in the cafe on the square till the music faded well after 11:00 p.m. He looked at his watch. He glanced down the block where his old acquaintance, Jean Antoine, the Frenchman, had his restaurant. He knew the Frenchman’s schedule, having observed it for years. The Frenchman would be in the back of his place, cleaning, setting up for the next day, and counting his receipts.

The old man stood. He took a stroll. He cut through a side street and an alley and came to the back door of Jean Antoine’s place. Sure enough, the place was closed and the staff had gone home. But there at a table, counting his money and credit card slips, was the Frenchman. The door was basically an iron grate.

“Perfecto,” muttered the old man. “Perfecto, perfecto, perfecto.”

The old man knocked. The sound startled Jean Antoine, who reached for a pistol, then stopped when he recognized the visitor.

They spoke Spanish. “Oh,” the Frenchman said. “It’s you.”

“Me,” said the old man. “Me, me, me.”

“What do you want?”

“Some company.”

“I’m busy.”

“I’m hungry.”

“You’re a pest.”

Jean Antoine finished with his cash and stashed it all in a strong box.

“I’m hungry,” the old man said again.

“You know how the lock works,” said the Frenchman.

“Ah. Yes. I do.”