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Why Fidel threw me out
of Havana
Garry Barker. The
Age, Australia, August 5, 2006.
MY LASTING memory of Fidel Castro is set
in a Havana television studio on July 9,
1960, 18 months after he and his guerillas
had ousted Cuban dictator General Fulgencio
Batista.
He is giving a press conference in a studio
packed beyond endurance with 200 young and
adoring Cubans who cheer their hero's tirades
against Batista, the United Fruit Company
and the US corporations that supported the
dictator.
Castro stands before the cameras, head
thrown back, bearded chin thrust forward,
his hair awry, his fists hammering the lectern
as he repeats his accusations of corporate
America, sets out his plans for reform,
exhorts all Cubans to work for the revolution
and tells his supporters how he was snubbed
in Washington by then president Dwight Eisenhower.
It is desperately hot under the blistering
klieg lights and the sweat stands out on
Castro's high forehead and stains his jungle
green fatigues. He looks driven, exhausted,
but he talks for more than three hours,
interrupted by only five short, prearranged
questions from the three local journalists.
He has just issued orders that nationalise
$US850 million worth of US property in Cuba
and he is seen as a threat to the status
quo and US interests in all Central America.
The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion devised
at CIA headquarters at Langley, near Ashburn,
Virginia, where I often stayed during my
time in the US, has yet to come, but the
portents of US reaction are there and the
Soviet missile crisis is looming.
We are sitting on the floor, shoulder to
shoulder. As a foreigner, I am not allowed
to ask questions on air and I sit beside
William Morgan, a gunrunner who fought with
Castro's guerillas. He tells me he runs
a frog farm in the hills behind Havana and
refuses to talk about the fighting against
Batista. He watches Castro solemnly and
says little. A few months later he is dead,
executed by Castro because he objected to
involvement with the Soviet Union and was
accused of informing to the CIA.
Fidel's brother Raul, who runs the secret
police, stands near the door, but leaves
after half an hour. The CIA thinks Raul,
and Che Guevara, Fidel's closest lieutenants,
are communists and control the charismatic
Castro. Castro's speech is interminable.
It isn't so much a speech as a harangue
which, though milder than some earlier similar
efforts, still intoxicates the cheering
crowd with its rhetoric.
Eventually it ends and I can ask Castro
if Cuba can maintain itself without US economic
support. "Yes," he says. "We
have the support of all Latin America -
look at Mexico. We will trade wherever we
can find markets."
Is he now aligned with the Soviet Union,
I ask. "I am sick of answering that
one," he replies. "I am not communist
and my ministers are not. But what is communism?
"The Russian revolution is 40 years
old and they are still working for it. Our
revolution is only two years old. We are
going through a social revolution. See the
changes in Cuba and what we are doing."
The interview comes to an abrupt end when
I ask if he will give bases to the Soviets.
We are speaking surrounded by a crush of
loyal Fidelistas and an English-speaking
bystander attacks me for the question. Castro's
guards close around him and lead him away.
My attacker reminds me that Castro has just
said that he intends to mobilise all Cubans
and I should be careful.
"Cubans, have courage," Castro
had said during his speech. "You carry
old guns but soon every Cuban will have
a new automatic rifle." His words were
drowned by several minutes of clapping,
stamping of feet and shouts of "Cuba
si, Yanqui no".
It is 11pm when I escape the crush and
head for the Floridita bar and a cooling
frozen daiquiri. Ernest Hemingway is there,
surrounded by admirers, but is soon whisked
away by his wife, who regards us all with
distaste; she blames us for his alcoholism.
The next night I am picked up and taken
to the Banco Nacional and shown into the
office of the bank president where, behind
a huge mahogany desk, sits Che Guevara.
Guevara is wearing his signature beret
and green fatigues. Throughout the interview,
which is largely about economic and social
reform, he drinks mate, an Argentinian herbal
drink thought to stimulate the mind. He
also plays with a massive pistol, the only
item on the desk. Guevara spins it on the
desk as he talks and when it comes to rest
pointing at me, he smiles.
Guevara insisted that despite the importance
of Soviet support, Cuba would resist Soviet
"colonisation" as vigorously as
it had thrown out US "economic colonists".
A couple of days earlier I had met a Russian
in the bar of the Hotel Nacional where I
was staying. He was friendly and liked a
drink and after a couple of daiquiris began
telling me how important Cuba was to long-range
Soviet plans. He was an engineer and probably
there to study the ground for the missile
sites the Soviets later began building in
Cuba. I wrote the story about the Soviet
adding that mainland Chinese delegations
were also there, looking for trade and influence.
I filed it at the Cuban cable office and
went to have coffee in an open-air bodega
with a British diplomat. The political police
arrived, I was detained, escorted to the
airport and told not to come back.
Garry Barker was in the
North American bureau of the Melbourne Herald
at the time and was sent to Cuba to cover
the rising political crisis with the US
over Castro's alliance with the Soviet Union
and mainland China.
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