Manicaragua, Cuba
1958
I was about seven years old when I experienced my first firefight.
It started like any average weekend evening in our little Cuban mountainside town. My parents had dressed to go out to the nearby city of Santa Clara, leaving me in the care of Crucita, my sixteen-year-old nanny. My mom hugged me, then my dad ushered her into our family’s pride and joy, a factory-fresh 1957 Pontiac two-door hardtop. The year before, my dad paid $2,500 to bring it home. Kenya ivory with a beautiful two-tone interior, it was a symbol of our rising station in Manicaragua.
My dad loved cars almost as much as he loved horses, and he never missed an opportunity to take us someplace in our new ride. I’d climb up on the package tray under the rear window and stare at the passing trees whose branches formed a tangled green arch over the main road in our province as my father told stories from his rough-and-tumble youth.
I watched its taillights disappear into the night as they drove away, wishing I could go with them.
It was a warm weekend evening. A fan pushed air around in our living room while Crucita and I sat watching television on our thirteen-inch, black-and-white screen. Our semi-paved street was quiet and filled with family, a small enclave of the extended Prado clan and our businesses.
Our little green-and-blue brick house was actually a duplex. My dad’s sister lived next door. Across the street stood my paternal grandfather’s gas station and garage with his cigar-rolling business in an outbuilding. My dad’s coffee company was located next door to us. Each morning, my parents would jump next door and open for business. Dad ran the enterprise, while my mom served as the bookkeeper and head of sales.
We were a tight-knit family in a community of tight-knit families. Nestled in this middle-class capitalist home that my mother so lovingly decorated, I always felt a sense of peace and security.
To be honest, this often wore on me. My dad had been a wild one in his youth, and I shared his DNA. My mother tried to temper that streak with rules and order, structure and polish. I was her only child, delivered after a difficult birth that ensured she could have no more babies after me. This made her overprotective at times, something my dad saw and balanced out with man-to-man talks and trips into the local Escambray Mountains to visit coffee plantations in his business’s World War II–surplus U.S. Army jeep.
Being seven, I had no idea that Cuba was in the throes of a revolution. Sure, we’d heard stories of occasional raids outside of town, and the mountains were supposedly rife with guerillas living in the jungle. Here in Manicaragua, such things seemed remote—the stuff of schoolyard legends that filled us with excitement.
As Crucita and I watched the evening television shows, a sudden commotion broke out in our street. I craned my neck to look out our front windows. I saw the three-foot-high brick wall that abutted our front porch, but nothing else in the darkness beyond.
Suddenly, gunshots echoed through the neighborhood. A few stray ones at first, then a swelling rash as automatic weapons joined the fight. We sat, rooted in place by our TV, listening to the cacophony as muzzle flashes strobed in the street beyond and cast crazy shadows through the living room.
I jumped up, eager to see what was going on, oblivious to the danger, and rushed to the front windows. They moved with the use of a hand crank. I grabbed the handle and started spinning it in circles. Window open, I peered out into the night.
Right below my nose, a guerrilla, dressed in ragged green camo, lay prone on our porch. Just as I noticed him, he rose to a knee and triggered a full burst from his assault rifle at a nearby bar frequented by police and soldiers. The din was deafening, terrifying. Enthralling. I was engulfed by the moment, staring raptly at the fighter below me. His weapon to his shoulder, he pulled the trigger and sent another stream of automatic weapons fire downrange. Spent shell casings flew from his receiver to ricochet off our front windows with a sharp tink-tink-tink—a sound that is tattooed in the back of my brain even today some sixty years later.
I probably would have just remained transfixed in the window frame, but my panic-stricken nanny suddenly grabbed me from behind and yanked me away to the back of the living room.
Tink-tink-tink. More shells hit the glass as the revolutionary drained his magazine.
We listened, huddled together in nervous excitement as the bullets flew. Then, like an ebb tide, the sounds of battle grew distant until a few last angry shots echoed through the neighborhood. As quickly as it started, it was over. Silence filled the night.
Like wraiths, the guerrillas melted back into the countryside and escaped to their jungle refuge in the Escambray Mountains. For all the excitement and shooting, nobody was hurt. I was too young to know the difference between an assault and a hit-and-run raid, but this was certainly the latter.
I would learn what a full assault looked like later.
This may have been my first firefight, but I’d been around guns most of my young life. My dad, being a successful small businessman, often received threats. At the behest of his Masonic lodge brothers, he purchased a World War II–era German Luger pistol. To introduce me to firearms, he purchased a Daisy BB rifle and taught me how to shoot with it. He would sometimes practice with the BB gun by setting up a sawhorse behind the house, laying Coke bottles on their sides, then shooting right through their mouths to blow out their bottoms. It was a feat of marksmanship I could never match, but that was my dad. He was our protector.
Resourceful, rugged, and highly intelligent, his many wild barroom brawls in his youth before he met my mom transformed him into a man who was calm and fearless in a fight. After he fell in love, he channeled that energy into building a life for his family. He was a great businessman, an artisan who could work equally well with his hands, and even in middle age, standing all of five foot six, he was hard as oak. I wanted to be just like him.
When my parents came home that night of the firefight, I’d sworn to Crucita that I would say nothing of what had happened. She feared losing her job for letting me go to the window, though my folks would never have fired her for that. They knew I was always drawn to adventure. But a promise was a promise, and I didn’t mention the firefight until a half century later. By then, I’d been in so many tighter spots that this one only stood out for being the first.
That night represented a turning point for us average Cubans. It was the moment that things began to change for us. An ideological war raged, pitting Castro’s Marxist revolutionaries against Batista’s government forces. Castro’s men now gained the upper hand as the Batista regime began to collapse under the weight of its own corruption.
Our quiet days of horseback riding, church on Sundays, and school during the week look idyllic in retrospect, and the photos I have from that time show a happy, middle-class Cuban family built around the love my parents shared. We didn’t realize that these were the last days of a dying era. Those determined guerrillas loyal to Castro would soon usher in a new one at bayonet point.
It was in this turbulent time that I learned my first lesson in counterintelligence tradecraft, though at the time I had no idea what it was called.
One night a few months after that first firefight, a cousin of my father’s slipped into town unnoticed. Manuel was one of Castro’s fighters, but he was also loyal to his family and knew my dad was apolitical. Sometime after midnight, Manuel’s knock at our door roused the entire family. We let him in, and we gathered around our table to hear what he had to say. I sat next to him. Suddenly, he unslung his Thompson submachine gun and lowered it onto my lap. It was heavy—ten pounds—with a wood stock and a U.S.-military issue magazine. As he spoke, I clutched the weapon with both hands, feeling its weight, intuiting its power. It sent a surge of excitement through me like an electrical current. That moment, I knew that whatever my path would be, weapons like this one would be part of it.
As I stared at the tommy gun in my lap, I heard Manuel’s warning to my parents. He revealed that Castro’s revolutionaries planned to assault and capture our town in the next few days.
The adults debated what to do. My dad was well known in town. The police and soldiers were everywhere. If he fled the area with his whole family, the authorities would take notice and there probably would be retaliation. Worse, the revolutionaries knew their family connection. If my parents fled, he would be suspected of tipping them off, and everyone would get hurt.
“At least get your son out,” Manuel said.
My parents discussed this. I’d been going to school about thirty kilometers away in Santa Clara, staying with my godmother during the weeks, coming home on the weekends. My departure would arouse no suspicions, and I would be safe.
It was decided I would leave immediately with Abuelo Emilin, my grandfather. Manuel retrieved his Thompson and disappeared into the darkness to return to his camp. At first light, my parents called a cab. The driver arrived, and my grandfather and I climbed in back wondering if we would ever see my parents again. A quick goodbye, and the cabbie whisked us away, across a bridge over a deep ravine with a rock-chocked river snaking through it. A moment later, we were in the countryside, bound for the illusion of safety in Santa Clara.
Manuel’s intel tip served my family well. In my absence, my father prepared the house for war. He lugged sacks of coffee from his company and used them like sandbags to transform our bathroom into a bomb shelter. All the while, he had to pretend he did not know our town’s impending fate.
The revolutionaries attacked soon after, sweeping through Manicaragua and driving the government forces back in disarray. They fled across the bridge over the ravine to reassemble outside of town and prepare a counterattack.
My family emerged unscathed from that short, sharp fight, but soon the uprising threatened to engulf Santa Clara as well. My father called my grandfather and told him to come home as soon as possible.
Once again, we tried to escape the war. We drove back toward Manicaragua until our cab reached the bridge over the ravine, where we discovered the guerrillas had pulled up its planks as a defense against the coming government offensive.
The cabbie told us to get out. We dismounted and watched him head back down the road for Santa Clara. That day, there seemed to be no safe places.
Except with my grandfather. Born in 1900, he was a baby at the start of the Cuban rebellion against Spain. One night, rebels broke into his family’s home and stole a mattress—with him still swaddled in it. Fortunately, the rebels returned him to his parents unharmed. He grew up hard and proud. Like my dad, he was stoic, unflappable, and wise.
He looked down at me with lapis-colored eyes that seemed almost fluorescent and asked me, man to man, “We will have to cross the bridge. You afraid?”
I looked down the steep ravine, saw the water swirling through rocky rapids. A fall from the bridge would surely be fatal.
“No, Abuelo.”
“Good. Come, then.”
He grabbed my right wrist and held it firmly as we eased out onto the skeletonized bridge. We inched along a narrow beam; I had a death grip on the railing with my free hand looking down at the jagged rocks and foaming current. We made it across, and instead of fear, I felt a sense of exultation. For as dangerous as this situation was for us both, it was the type of adventure I craved despite my mother’s best efforts to temper that impulse.
We walked home to find rebels sitting on our front porch wall, drinking coffee our young maid was serving them. They were a motley bunch with sweat-stained shirts, red bandannas, and shaggy beards. They smoked home-rolled cigars. A few of these Marxists toyed with rosary beads. So holy.
We had not been home long when the army’s counterattack began with several air strikes. My dad hustled all of us into our makeshift coffee bag shelter in the bathroom, where we listened to the buzzing planes passing by overhead. Distant thumps and machine-gun fire punctuated the moment. We clutched each other and prayed for better days.
The army’s counterattack failed. Castro’s ragtag force held the government soldiers at bay, then continued their own advance. In a swift, sharp fight, they captured Santa Clara. The tide was turning against Batista.
My parents and grandfather agonized over what to do to keep us safe. I remember lying on my parents’ bed, staring at a painting of Jesus on their wall as I listened to them puzzle through this impossible situation.
“That man, Castro. He will be the ruin of our country!” my grandfather said.
“Aw, Dad, how can you say that?” my mom asked. We had family who supported Castro, fought with him. My godmother’s husband was a committed Marxist. Castro was supposed to be our nation’s salvation from the corruption of the Batista regime. We were all in for a terrible surprise.
My grandfather was right. Instead of our salvation, Castro was our destruction.
Within days, the purges began. Anyone associated with the Batista regime was persecuted, jailed, and some even hanged from nearby trees.