26

Sept. 29, 1960

Dear Dad:

It appears that I do enjoy writing to you, since here is another letter on top of yesterday’s, and I am keeping my lady friend—about whom I will tell you one of these days—waiting. She is not a lady to cool her heels.

I want, however, to say more about my meeting with Fuertes. I need your reaction to his trustworthiness.

First, a word about Chevi’s appearance. When recruited three years ago in Montevideo he was an exceptionally handsome fellow, slim, rather muscular, and a knockout with the ladies. Becoming an agent altered him drastically. He ballooned in weight, grew an extra-long, down-raked handlebar mustache (semicomic), and was otherwise a slob.

Here in Miami, he is still much overweight but has become a dude. Wears tropical three-piece suits in off-pastels. Panama hats. He smokes Havanas with Habanero aplomb, and looks more Cuban than the Cubans.

While I will make no claims to Bob Maheu’s powers of recall, I believe that what I will offer you here is substantively accurate (90 percent). I did take notes as Fuertes spoke.

I must say that it is disconcerting how much he knows about us and what we’re up to. He is a born coffeehouse type and frequents all the Cuban restaurants, from Versalles on down to the lowest hangouts on Calle Ocho. He not only sweeps in gossip, but, a born intelligence man, evaluates it. On the day I invited him over to a safe house, he knew, for example, that September 19 was the date we set for completion of the Guatemala training camp, and the site is called TRAX and will train an exile brigade of 400 men.

With no difficulty, he lays out the sociological components of TRAX. Ninety percent of Brigade trainees, he tells me, are students and professionals of middle-class background. Ten percent are workers, peasants, and fishermen. (That is certainly correct—I’ve been at the recruiting stations.) He can even specify trainee garb and weapons, to wit, combat fatigues with black baseball caps, and grease guns. All correct, Chevi. Where do you get it? But we know. To Cubans, revolution is a family matter, and everyone talks to everyone in the family.

Chevi did surprise me with his next statement. “I calculate,” he told me, “that on the day of the invasion there will be no more than 1,500 men.”

I smiled back at him. I didn’t have a clue myself. I decided, however, to play devil’s advocate, and said, “It’s impossible. That number of men could not take Cuba.”

“They could,” Fuertes told me, “if Castro is truly detested by the masses. After all, Batista was hated, and Castro required less than a thousand barbudos. Of course, now the realities are different.”

He proceeded to give me a lecture. When Castro was still in the hills, there was but one doctor for every two thousand people. “There’s an old Cuban saying,” he informed me: “Only the cattle are vaccinated.” Then came a somewhat leftist presentation. (I believe his statistics, but distrust something in the liturgical aspect. Still, his figures did startle me.) Under Batista, 4 percent of the Cuban peasantry ate meat regularly; 2 percent ate eggs; 3 percent, bread; 11 percent, milk. No green vegetables. Rice and beans everywhere. Half of the homes on the island were without toilets of any kind. Yet, in Havana, there were traffic jams and TV sets. To be a Habanero was to believe that Cuba was an advanced Latin American country. Havana, not Cuba,” he remarked, “is the spiritual center of your exiles. They are all middle class.”

“You sound like a man who is for Castro,” I said to him.

“No,” said Fuertes, “as always, my heart is divided.” I must warn you that he is not without a Latin penchant for metaphysical bluster. “The man who spends his life engaged in a contest between his right hand and his left hand is always choking within,” he said solemnly.

“Why are you not for Castro?” I asked.

“Because he destroyed the liberties. A man like me, placed in Havana, would be dead or in the underground.”

“Then, why are you not against him?”

Right here he began an interesting, if long-winded, disquisition on the nature of revolution and capitalism which is guaranteed to irritate the hell out of you.

Capitalism, says Fuertes, is essentially psychopathic. It lives for the moment. It can plan far ahead only at the expense of its own vitality, and all larger questions of morality are delegated to patriotism, religion, or psychoanalysis. “That is why I am a capitalist,” he says. “Because I am a psychopath. Because I am greedy. Because I want instant consumer satisfaction. If I have spiritual problems, I either go to my priest and obtain absolution, or I pay an analyst to convince me over the years that my greed is my identity and I have rejoined the human race. I may feel bad about my selfishness, but I will get over it. Capitalism is a profound solution to the problem of how to maintain a developed society. It recognizes the will-to-power in all of us.”

As you must have gathered by now, he is in a state of beatitude when he can sit in a chair, drink an añejo, and pontificate. So he posed a dichotomy I had never thought about before—the fell difference between the dumb and the stupid. “It is a profound difference,” he said. “The dumb are weak mentally, and that is sad, but final. The stupid, however, have made a decision to be stupid. They exercise a willful negative intelligence. Their need-to-power is gratified most easily by obstructing the desires of others. Under Communism, where the present is presumably sacrificed for the future, the stupid stop up all the industrial pores. Slovenliness and inefficiency are their secret pleasures. Under capitalism, however, a greedy but stupid man is faced with a painful choice. So long as he remains stupid, he cannot satisfy his greed. Often, therefore, he is obliged to open his mind to be large enough to find some way to thrive. So, men who would be obstructive under Communism become instead, under capitalism, successful pricks and rich shits.”

Not resting for a moment there, Fuertes next said, “On the other hand, the Communist cadres are indispensable to Castro. Without them, his revolution would be wholly disorganized. With them, he has a bureaucracy capable to some degree of running the country.”

“Then you are not saying that Communism is bad for Cuba?”

How hard it is to bring him to focus. “No,” he says, “I am not certain. I paid a visit six months ago. The women impressed me. You should see how they look in their red blouses and black skirts when they march and sing in unison. Communism is solidarity for them.”

I must say that I was thinking at this moment of Howard’s description of the same ladies. If I recollect, Howard called them “as cacophonous as a tribe of she-goats.”

“Indeed,” said Chevi, “these women are profoundly moving to me. They have a sense of their own existence that they never had before. Castro has a visceral sense of how to provide theater for the masses, magnificent, grandiose, political theater. Why, when Batista fled Cuba at the end of 1958, Castro did not rush to Havana. He started from the Sierra Maestra, and stopped in each major city on the route to make a four-hour speech. Overhead would be a large black helicopter. It was a sensational choice. The angel of death above, and equal to the liberation. Death was a fundamental part of his revolution. Of course, the women understood. The Spanish mentality perceives us as here on earth to bleed and to die—that is the given. If there happen to be more doctors, more education, more decency in the economic details, well, what a trinity—blood, death, and progress—a revolutionary program for Latins.”

“Why,” I ask him, “isn’t that equally obtainable with the exiles? They are far to the left of Batista, but they are also for freedom as well.” (I must say—having been around the Frente—that I sounded a little undercooked to myself.)

“Yes,” said Fuertes, “but can any radical improvement be accomplished in a poor nation’s economy without a reign of terror? Castro answers in the negative. The only human motive more powerful than greed, he suggests, is terror. If the exiles take back Cuba, the corrupt who are among them—most numerous, I promise you—will form a network of greed. They will triumph over the idealists.”

“So you are back with Castro?”

“I am with neither, I am with both. I am for myself.”

We discussed pay. He wants a great deal, $300 a week. Plus bonuses. I believe he is worth it. Fuertes obviously likes to inhabit two worlds at once, but I think I can manage him if he is inclined to work a double game.

Please advise.

Harry

My father’s answer came the next day. The envelope read: EYES ONLY ROBERT CHARLES.

Communication of Sept. 29 received:

Your Uruguayan sounds like a sophisticated Communist to me, and a complete double-dealer. He is so corrupt, however, that the money may keep him in line. I will approve if you obey certain basic procedures:

1) No more political discussions with him. He could be probing your attitudes and passing them on.

2) Keep to limited objectives always. I will send you specific assignments. Do not stray. He will give you the kitchen sink when all you want is one washer. Get him down to the washer. I will, of course, test his take by whatever corroborative opportunities are available to me.

3) Never get to like the guy too much. I don’t care if you did save his life.

4) Absolute case-officer protocol. Never connect him to anyone in Zenith or Quarters Eye without advising me in advance.

5) The first objective to use him on is the fat Cuban you took to dinner. Call the fat Cuban RETREAD.

6) Let’s choose BONANZA as the saddlebag for your windbag friend.

HALIFAX