Hostage in Havana - Noel Hynd

The hand at her mouth pulled away. “What are you doing?

Who are you?” she demanded in Spanish of her captors. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m a citizen of Mexico.”

But they weren’t listening. The insults came back.

“?Puta!” Whore. Crook. Criminal.

“Fight like a little pig, do you?” taunted one of the men. “Little pigs get stuck and grilled in Cuba.”

To take the fight out of her, someone kicked her in the ribs. She saw the kick coming and blocked it with a wrenched arm. She cursed long and hard again. Then someone, it might even have been one of the women, grabbed her by the hair, jerked back her head, and then drove her skull forward into the street. This time she was glad for the garbage since a soaking discarded bag lessened the impact.

Still, the blow stunned her. It took the rest of the fight out of her. The police pulled her to her feet. She felt wobbly and dazed, as if her feet didn’t work. More hands were all over her, frisking her, feeling her, taking whatever she had in her pockets, including money. Something was in her left eye, and she realized that her forehead must have been gashed because blood was running into her eye. It continued to flow and dripped onto her blouse. At the same time, one of the uniformed men was going through her bag. He pulled out her gun, made a fuss over it, and showed it to the others.

She wiped her forehead on her shoulder as best she could. She raised her eyes to the window again. Guarneri had vanished. Or maybe she had seen the wrong window. The police forced her into the back of an unmarked car. It was obviously state security of some sort because the interior was fitted as a police cruiser might be, complete with a divider between the front seat and the back.

From the window, she noticed two vans and more people pouring into the building. Then lights flashed on the dashboard. It started to move, but there was no siren.

The car pulled quickly away from the curb, and she was on a fast bumpy ride through the backstreets of Havana and then on some major ones. Alex was terrified. She tried to memorize the route, but the effort was useless and ended in confusion. There was no point of reference, just unfamiliar streets at dawn in a hostile city.

She trembled. She muttered a prayer aloud. Her body began to ache where she had received hits: forehead, ribs, and arms. Her left breast felt bruised as if she had been punched or groped. The blood continued to trickle steadily into her eye, and she kept wiping it away with her shoulder as best she could.

After a wild ride of several minutes, the police van pulled up in front of a gate. A pair of police guards manually raised a barrier and signaled the car through. The car followed a driveway that led to a garage. Then they were within a police installation.

The driver and his assistant opened the rear door and roughly pulled her out. They marched her into the station. A female guard fell into step beside the officers. They stopped at a booking station. The police undid the handcuffs and gave her a small towel to hold to her forehead as the cut was still trickling blood.

“I’m a Mexican citizen,” she said to anyone who would listen. “I want to see a lawyer. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

No one paid her any attention, as if they all knew exactly who she was. Meanwhile, some mumbling was exchanged between one of her captors and a superior. Alex took this occasion to protest again, claiming she was a citizen of Mexico and demanding to know why she had been abducted.

One of the arresting officers came back, looked her in the eye with doleful brown eyes, then cracked her across the face with his open palm. She staggered back, and someone else blocked her fall. She thought it was one of the female officers.

“Enemy of the Revolution,” he said. “That’s who you are!”

He made a gesture with his arms that suggested holding a rifle. “?Peloton de fusilamiento para ti!” he said. Firing squad for you. Then he laughed.

They sat her down and questioned her. They wanted to know who she was and when she had come into the country. She stuck with her Mexican identity and claimed she had arrived by air from Mexico City and that she had had a fight with her husband and he had dumped her.

She knew that if they checked her story about her arrival she was sunk. She prayed that they kept bad records. Then they stood her in front of a camera and took her picture. She was too dazed to resist. When the picture taking ended, another female guard took her arm and shoved her along a hallway to a cell. An iron door with bars swung open. They pushed Alex in among several other female prisoners, all of them much darker skinned than she was. There were no bunks, just fetid mattresses on the floor, a dirty cracked sink, and a single metal toilet. Everyone looked as if they’d been there for days.

She huddled in a corner on the floor, wondering why anyone with two millions dollars in the bank would accept a job that brought her to a place like this.

How could she have been so crazy? This, she decided, was insane! It went without saying that the operation with Violette had probably crashed now. Or had Violette been a setup to create an incident, to lure an American spy into Cuba?

If she ever got out of here, she told herself, she would live differently. Tears weren’t far away, but she was afraid to show them. She wondered what had happened to Paul – had he escaped or been killed? Then she wondered how anyone would ever find her here.

She trembled not knowing the answer to that question. She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. Nor had she ever felt so alone.

On the south shore of Cuba, less than a hundred yards from a small inlet twenty miles southeast of Cienfuegos, Manuel Perez was back in his element. His new employers had set him up in a cheerful little sniper’s nest that overlooked the tiny isolated beach. In less than forty-eight hours, his target would appear.

He nursed his provisions and spent many hours examining the new rifle that they had provided for him at Guantanamo. One good shot, one direct hit, was all that stood between him and liberty, as well as freedom for his family, who were still being held by those CIA thugs.

Perez had missed his mark in New York. But he now came to see that as a once-in-a-lifetime event. This time when his target emerged, the range would be shorter, and thanks to the sand on the beach, his target would be moving more slowly.

This one was a setup. As easy as walking into a restaurant and shooting a man in the face. Can’t miss and can’t lose, as long as one gets out of the area fast enough.

That had been his mistake in New York.

He had hung around too long.

It was like missing a shot: learn by the mistake and don’t do it again.

FIFTY-NINE

In jail, Alex lost track of time. Hours passed, hours on end. No one had a watch. The other prisoners mostly stared at her. The cell was obscenely hot, humid, and sticky – and infested with roaches. It smelled of urine, sweat, and disinfectant. A film of white powder covered almost everything, dust from the disintegrating paint and plaster on the walls.

She offered no conversation to any of the other women. Then night came. She barely slept. Breakfast was served: hard bread, a banana, and water. Then, in what must have been midmorning, a male guard arrived, called her name, and grabbed her. The guard pulled her out of the cell and ordered her to walk.

Alex was led to another area, deeper within the prison where the heat was even more relentless. The guard pushed her along when she didn’t walk fast enough. She tried to engage the guard in conversation, to find out if she could get a lawyer or a public defender, but she was told to keep quiet, otherwise she would be sent to solitary.

“Solitary sometimes lasts for months,” the guard said. “So shut your mouth, cabrona!”

Alex’s mind was already doing somersaults, but she knew she needed to get a message back to Washington or New York, to tell them where she was, at least to the extent that she knew, and what had happened. She realized, however, that she was unlikely ever to be free again if her captors found out she was American. Her only hope would be a neutral third-party nation.

But she knew that Paul Guarneri was part of this picture as well.

Why had he come to Cuba? What was the real reason? The money? And more importantly, had he been arrested as well? She wasn’t sure.

And then there was the CIA – wouldn’t they simply find it easier to ditch her?

“Follow,” the guard said. With trepidation, Alex obeyed.

They went into a small room, where a medical technician waited with a female nurse. A doctor walked in. He was middleaged, with a big belly and bad breath. He told Alex to undress. She resisted at first by standing perfectly still. Then he shouted the order at her. She undressed down to her undergarments and stopped. This seemed to satisfy him. He told her to sit on an examination table and she did. The nurse stood nearby and observed.

The doctor made a visual inspection. He had Alex open her mouth; then he checked her ears and eyes. His attention settled upon her shoulder and the wound marks left by bullets. “What happened here?” he asked in Spanish.

“I hurt myself,” she said.

“How?”

“Playing sports. Archery. An arrow ricocheted,” she said.

“Looks like a bullet wound,” he said.

“It was an arrow,” Alex insisted.

The doctor laughed. “Undress completely,” the man insisted.

Having no choice, she did. He then examined her gently but thoroughly. Alex had the impression that he was looking for microchips. He found none. Silently, she prayed an old prayer she had known from childhood, just to take her mind off the indignity of the present.

Meanwhile, the female guard took her clothes out of the room and returned with a tunic and three fresh pairs of underwear. The doctor had finished, a lousy physical exam and a thorough humiliation at the same time. He told her she could get dressed. Alex did, quickly, as the female guard watched. Then the female guard took her to yet another cell, this one having a more permanent feel to it. There were eight bunks in it and seven other women who stared at her when she entered. A single open toilet stood against one wall. Six of the women were dark skinned, one was mocha skinned. Alex stood out like a nightlight. The other women had removed their tunics because the heat was so intense, sleeping only in their undergarments, if that. Alex kept her tunic on because the mosquitoes were worse than the temperature.

One more night passed completely. She had been a prisoner for two full days. She knew she had missed the rendezvous with Violette and the mission now bordered on catastrophe. Her spirits were in freefall. She spent a good deal of time praying quietly to herself, praying as she never prayed before. She assumed the airplane had left that morning without her, and the thought tortured her.

In the middle of the third day, in what Alex thought was the afternoon, almost all of which she spent sitting on her bunk, the mocha-skinned woman came over to her. She started a small halting conversation in Spanish.

The woman was Creole, it turned out. Alex switched to French. The woman said she had come to Cuba with a male friend, and he had abandoned her. The woman’s name was Margritte, and she had been arrested a month earlier for stealing food from a market. She had stolen the food, she said, because she was starving. She was hoping to be deported to Barbados, since she had family there, and then she could work her way to her home village in the mountains.

The woman also had a small wooden cross around her neck. For some reason, the guards had not taken it.

“How long do you think they’ll hold you here?” Alex asked.

The woman shrugged. “Many years,” she said, as if she didn’t have anywhere better to go. Then she began to touch Alex with some longing and affection. Alex pulled away.

On the evening of the same day, dispirited and tired, two male guards roused Alex again. They led her down another yellowing corridor and into an office. They shoved her into a chair in front of a man who wore the insignia of the Havana police.

He sat behind a desk with a Cuban flag to his right. In the center of the wall behind him was a picture of three heroes of the revolution: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Frank Pais, an early rebel leader who’d died in an assault on one of Batista’s army barracks in 1957. The poses were neo-Stalinist heroic, three handsome, macho young men in jungle fatigues, outlined against sky and mountains, presumably in the Sierra Maestra.

The officer gave her a moment to settle in. She looked at him and recognized him. He waited until the two guards had departed and closed the door.

“Hello,” he said in extremely good English. “Welcome to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Cuba. What a pleasure. We meet for the third and final time. I am Major Ivar Mejias of the Cuban National Militia.”

She processed his name and face immediately. He was the commander who had headed the reception committee on the beach and the officer who had examined her passport in the lobby of the Ambos Mundos.

She tried Spanish. “Mi llama Anna Marie Tavares y soy ciudana mexicana,” she said. She then took it a step further and requested a lawyer.

With no smile whatsoever, he shook his head.

“No, no,” he said, remaining in English. “No lawyers. Not necessary. A trial is not even necessary. You’re an American criminal and counterrevolutionary,” he said. “And you’ve had the misfortune to be captured. Ten years in prison? Twenty?” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to be you. Your luck has run out. Unless you cooperate with us, your freedom is gone forever.”

SIXTY

Alex was sweating profusely. The white dust from the prison had formed in patches on her skin. It itched and was beginning to cause a rash. Now her heart was jumping too. She knew the man in front of her not only had been on her trail since the moment she arrived, but he was a professional interrogator.

Several seconds passed. They looked eye to eye. Nothing from Alex.

“I have a theory,” Major Mejias continued in Spanish. “It’s my own theory but I’m proud of it. It goes this way: each one of us has only a certain limited amount of deception in us. We can waste it incrementally on the small things, or we can blow the whole bundle on one big life-size lie. Either way, it runs out eventually, our supply, and what we’re left with then is the truth.” He paused. “What do you think?”

She blinked, stared at him, and said nothing.

“All right. Let me put another question to you,” he said. “You would seem to be an educated woman. Cultured. Not what we normally process here. Are you familiar with a film director named Luis Bunuel? He was a Mexican citizen, though born in Spain. Went to university with Dali and Lorca, the painter and the poet. It was said they were all Communists together in the 1930s.” He lapsed into Spanish. “Bunuel. The director. You know of him?”