“YOU HAVEN’T LIVED until you’ve danced on a rooftop in Havana at 2 a.m., and not so sure how you got there or why you’re there, but you’re feeling fully alive!”
So said my friend, Harry Belafonte, as we prepared to travel to Cuba together in the early nineties—my first time and on a special State Department permit, as there was a travel ban in place. This had never stopped Harry, a frequent visitor in those days.
Driving into the city from the small airport, I was struck by how familiar Havana seemed, like looking at a faded postcard of a place visited long ago. With the fifties cars (including the highly dented and bright red Chevy Impala we were being driven in) to the old buildings in need of a fresh coat of paint and repairs, everything I was seeing felt familiar but from another time and place.
As we pulled up in front of the historic Hotel Nacional, I felt so strongly that I had been here before. “You have been,” Harry reminded me, “in the movies!” The Nacional, built as a luxury hotel in 1930, was an imposing mash-up of Art Deco, Greco-Roman, and other styles. In the heyday before Castro’s revolution, it had been the place for movie stars from Marlene Dietrich and Errol Flynn to Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando. Mafia kingpins had brought high-stakes gamblers there. Titans of industry strolled the elegant halls. Then Castro had commandeered it to serve as headquarters for his revolution. It wasn’t until the seventies that the hotel began to recapture its earlier glory.
As soon as Harry stepped across the portal, a Hollywood-type scene unfolded: lots of familiar hugs and air kisses with what I assumed were staff and friends, all gathered to greet him and his wife at that time, Julie. Within minutes, we were holding freshly made mojitos. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow this conversation, but I felt included and welcome.
I was introduced as a filmmaker who’d be showing the Women in War documentary at the Havana Film Festival. It’s a big deal to get invited to show your film at this international film festival, run at that time by the charismatic Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who appeared as if on cue with his black leather jacket topping well-cut jeans and t-shirt. He and Harry seemed to be easy friends.
I added to Harry’s generous introduction that I would also be visiting the Cuban Film Institute in Santiago to observe a Sundance lab program. The institute had been founded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and was a real magnet for film students from all over the world—except, of course, the United States. Despite the strictly enforced embargo between the United States and Cuba, exceptions had always been made for artists, provided you were willing to jump through some diplomatic hoops.
I got two sets of kisses from Tomás, apparently in recognition of my knowing two men he greatly admired, Redford and Belafonte. It was still unclear how official or unofficial the visit was, even then, because we’d been instructed not to get our passports stamped so there would be no evidence of a visit to a country where the United States had no diplomatic ties. We wouldn’t be able to use American money or even make a phone call. Cuba might be only ninety miles away, but it was a world apart in every way at this time.
And I was loving it.
After another mojito, I was shown to my room. As we passed through the lobby and down the dimly lit hallways, the lack of funds to keep up appearances following the withdrawal of Russian support was evident. The cushions on couches were a bit frayed; the white linens on tabletops in the dining room yellowed at the corners. With encouragement from others, I peeked beneath the buffet tables to discover a second set of tables used by gamblers for blackjack and roulette during Cuba’s more celebrated past. These tables, I was assured, were ready to be flipped over with the return of diplomatic relations.
Harry, Julie, and I met for a walk through Havana. Walking through the streets full of potholes and broken pavement, we saw the crowds of young people gathering in front of the small theatre marquees and ticket sellers pushing tickets to the film-festival screenings.
I watched my documentary that evening with a mostly Cuban audience who didn’t need the subtitles to understand that the leaders of the FMLN were fighting for the same principles that Fidel and his band of revolutionaries had fought for years before and that had fueled the Sandinistas’ struggle in Nicaragua, too. They wanted what all free people want: greater economic opportunity and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Sadly, these values were not sustained in the policies that followed these revolutions.
The Cuban audience cheered at the conclusion of the film, which ended with Sting’s song, “They Dance Alone,” playing over the final credits. Sting had written it to honor the thousands of women in Chile and so many other countries, including El Salvador and Nicaragua, who had lost their husbands, sons, and daughters in violent conflict.
No one referenced Cuba’s revolution in the Q&A following, and I was happy not to have too many questions. I was too tired and emotionally spent when I returned to the Hotel Nacional to notice that the bed, like Cuba, had seen better days.
HARRY, JULIE, AND I joined the Sundance group the next day to travel to the film school, where Harry hinted that there might be a special surprise after lunch. Would el comandante himself be paying a visit?
Harry talked about Castro’s love of music and poetry, his family life with his wife and daughter, and his nocturnal habits; it wasn’t unusual for him to hold meetings at midnight and continue well into the night. Clearly, they had spent a lot of time with him, although they neither denied nor downplayed the reported human-rights abuses during his long period of leadership. They both seemed to believe in some of the principles of Castro’s revolution, particularly the equality of education and health care. To some extent, they also defended his choice of an alliance with Russia to sustain his idealistic revolution. They were confident he would come to visit us, but finally, at almost midnight, I was falling asleep sitting up.
I dragged myself back to the Nacional, only to be dragooned by a group of film-festival celebrants back into Havana for a night of dancing. Somehow I found myself inside a rickety elevator in an abandoned building. When it shuddered to a halt, the door opened and I found a crowd already dancing to a local band. Within minutes, my exhaustion forgotten, I’d kicked off my shoes, my hands wrapped around yet another mojito, and was doing the salsa and merengue. Here I was at 2 a.m. dancing on a rooftop in Cuba, feeling fully alive just as Harry had predicted. I was feeling something else, too.
I feel there is purpose every time that music and dancing bring me together with people I may not know or ever see again but with whom I feel a heightened sense of shared humanity. Music and movement diminish the boundaries, differences, and inhibitions that separate and divide. It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I love to dance, so little wonder I could be persuaded to join the dancing that night on a rooftop.
Later I would learn that at that same moment, Castro was indeed visiting Harry and Julie. This ever-curious, “get the story” journalist regretted missing the chance to meet el comandante, but somehow I knew even then that this would not be my last opportunity.
MY NEXT VISIT to Cuba actually started early one morning when Ted Turner slammed his cup of coffee on the table in the hotel cafeteria and asked, “Pat, what about the Cold War?”
Given that it was 1994, we were in St. Petersburg, Russia, and I was incredibly jet-lagged from an overnight flight from Atlanta, I answered with my own question: “It is over, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s over,” Ted boomed, in a voice loud enough to be heard across the vast cafeteria where a large crowd of athletes, officials, and international visitors were having breakfast and preparing for the opening day of the Goodwill Games, an international athletic competition Ted had created as a response to the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. “That’s why we’ve got to tell the story!” he said. “Pretty soon, everyone will have forgotten why there was an East and a West and why for forty years, we got up every day worried about which country would hit the red button and set off a nuclear war. How many know even now that millions died to keep the Cold War from becoming a hot one? I want to make a documentary about this… now!”
“Sure,” I said, without a clue what I was agreeing to, “but Ted, isn’t that why we’re here for the Goodwill Games—to show that the post–Cold War world can be a more peaceful one?”
Ted had almost singlehandedly initiated the Goodwill Games with Russia (then the Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union) as his partner, first in Moscow in 1986, then Seattle in 1990, and now in St. Petersburg in 1994. The Goodwill Games were global athletic competitions with all the pomp and circumstance of the Olympics but none of the politics.
At the start of these third games, we might once again be in “enemy” territory, if leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had not entered into a competition for power that led to the assertion of sovereignty by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the USSR. The man who would open the games with Ted by his side was the mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin.
Ted gave me that wide grin that usually came right before he said something unexpected or outrageous, often both. “All the leaders could be dead soon, too, and the whole thing will be a paragraph in our grandchildren’s history books.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Ted. What did you have in mind?”
“Forty hours! One hour of documentary for every year of the Cold War.”
I nearly choked on my coffee, but tried to keep my voice level. “Forty hours? Well, that could take some time to produce… and would be pretty costly, too.”
Ted wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed. “Money isn’t the issue; time is, and we have to get started right away. That’s why I wanted to talk about it this morning. You’re here in Russia. Get started on the research.” With that, he took a final gulp of his coffee and got up from the table. “Oh, and I already decided who should help you produce this series… Jeremy Irons. Give him a call and offer him the job of executive producer.”
I assumed he didn’t mean Jeremy Irons, the actor, but I didn’t have a clue who he did mean.
Back in my room, I called Vivian Schiller and recounted the conversation. She laughed. “I’m pretty sure Ted meant Jeremy Isaacs,” she told me. “He produced the longest documentary series ever, The World at War. It was twenty-two hours for the BBC.”
After two failed attempts to convince Sir Jeremy to leave his lofty position at Covent Garden and produce a television documentary series for an American cable network, I did persuade him to come to Atlanta to hear about the project directly from the visionary media executive himself. We finally connected at Ted’s private hangar in Atlanta, where Ted was flying in from his son Rhett’s wedding ceremony in South Carolina.
For the first few minutes, Sir Jeremy looked like a man caught in a wind tunnel as Ted talked nonstop, loudly and passionately, about his big idea. Jane and I were mostly silent, taking in this historic exchange or, to be more accurate, monologue, as Jeremy never finished a sentence or question. But he understood what Ted wanted—the most comprehensive documentation of this forty years of global history ever produced. Within a half hour, the two titans shook hands, and with that “I win” grin, Ted and Jane headed back to the waiting Gulfstream.
As I drove him back for his return flight to London, Sir Jeremy was already musing about which historians should be brought on board. “But we have to talk Ted out of that forty hours bit,” he told me. “I won’t live long enough to produce them.”
With Sir Jeremy’s leadership, we assembled a group of historians—Americans, Brits, Germans, and Russians—to fulfill Ted’s mantra: “This is the global story of the Cold War; not the US version or the Russian version, but the whole story.”
On the Good Friday before Easter in 1995, I delivered Ted the book, which laid out, hour by hour, the way we would tell the global story, proposing a twenty-hour series.
My phone rang on Easter Sunday morning at 8 a.m. “This is great stuff,” Ted boomed. “But you and the team didn’t include enough on spies, China, Cuba, Africa. So it can’t be twenty hours; it’s got to be at least twenty-four hours.”
Before I could respond, he hung up. When I gave the Ted report to the team, the historians were silent for a few minutes, considering this quick assessment of eighteen months of research and writing, but soon all agreed that Ted was, once again, right.
THREE YEARS LATER, we had interviewed nearly all of the leading players in the Cold War—Helmut Schmidt, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, plus five hundred others. These interviews, over 1,000 hours, are an invaluable source of history and lessons in leadership, but sadly, this content has not been optimized for its value as history or education. After Turner Broadcasting was sold, first to Time Warner, now AT&T, no one even seems to know where this valuable archive is and CNN has not programmed it again since the premiere. Four years of work, history documented by the leaders who lived it and the people who survived it. History too important not to be remembered… so as not to be repeated.
Two of the Cold War interviews led to personal stories too good not to share with you: Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Cuba was a satellite country for Russia’s communist expansion, and the placement of Soviet missiles there, within easy range of US territory, brought the three countries to the threshold of war during the period known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Were those missiles in Cuba armed with nuclear warheads—and would Fidel Castro have fired them at us? In three trips to Cuba, Martin Smith, the series producer, had not succeeded in getting an interview with Castro. The deadline for completing the documentary was bearing down on us.
“You go to Havana, Pat,” Ted told me. “Fidel will talk to you. He knows me and he’s happy about CNN setting up a bureau there. I’ll call him myself and tell him this is the last time; if he doesn’t do this interview, he’ll be left out of the Cold War story.”
I went and waited for an entire week, mostly hanging out at the Nacional and seeing friends I’d met on the previous visit, but never venturing far from the phone, which didn’t ring until our last night in Havana. My crew and I had gone for a great dinner at one of our favorite paladores, the restaurants that many Cubans were opening surreptitiously in their homes and on their rooftops. And yes, there was dancing, too. I was packing up back at the hotel when Castro’s chief of staff called. “El presidente will see you now.”
“Now” was around 2 a.m. by the time we got to the palace, went through the intensive searches, and set up our cameras. I reviewed the twelve questions we knew we needed answers to with Castro’s longtime translator, a friendly woman named Eleanor. She would translate my English into Spanish for him, which was not really necessary because Castro spoke and understood English, though he spoke publicly only in Spanish. I would have his answers simultaneously translated into my earpiece. We were ready to go when he walked in without any fanfare and strode toward me, hand extended.
He was tall. Unlike many movie stars and bigger-than-life personalities, Castro was taller, not shorter, than you expect. He was wearing the familiar green military fatigues, popularized in all the photographs of the revolution and in most of his public appearances since, but his uniform was starched. He looked fresh and alert despite the late hour.
“You look like my friend Jane Fonda,” he said to me in Spanish. The translation flowed into my earpiece.
“Thank you,” I replied, then hesitated, realizing I hadn’t asked what to call him—so I mumbled, “el presidente. Thank you for agreeing to this interview, which we feel is very important for the documentary series we are producing for CNN on the Cold War.”
Castro sat down, took the small clip-on microphone from the audio technician, clipped it on like a professional journalist, and gave me that look that said, “Okay, I’m here. Let’s get started.”
I asked my first questions about the original values of the revolution, and how the leader of that revolution evaluated the status of their accomplishments so far. Castro’s answers were well framed, even erudite sounding as he quoted interspersed passages from Plato and Aristotle, and even quoted a poem from memory… and every answer included a lengthy lecture on democracy. Ten to fifteen minutes later (the average time of his answers), I managed to squeeze in another question, and so it went for the next three hours. I had asked twelve questions but not yet the most critical one, to set the record straight, hopefully, on what actually happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As soon as I spoke those words, Castro got more animated and more agitated. At one point, he began to describe a telex exchange he had had with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader at that time, and suddenly he jumped up, nearly pulling the audio deck with him, and disappeared. Was the interview over? “No, no,” his translator assured me, “he’s just gone to his office to retrieve something.”
Castro returned with the actual telex he’d written to Khrushchev on the night of the deadline that the United States had imposed to release the ship Cuba had seized in the waters off their coast. The standoff that resulted when the Soviet Union threatened to launch missiles from Cuba in retaliation for any aggressive move from the United States had put all three countries—the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union—on high alert for potential nuclear conflict.
In his message to the Soviet leader, Castro pointed out, translating the Spanish into English by himself (which reminded us that he spoke and understood English quite well in spite of insisting on a translator for the interview), that he had asked Khrushchev for permission to launch the missiles, saying that Cuba would take the consequences if there was a counterattack.
I knew I was looking at one of the most important documents of the Cold War, a document that made it quite clear that Castro himself was prepared to take the action that would have created mutually assured destruction—MAD—as strategists often referred to such crises during the Cold War. And most agreed that the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the times when we were closest to MAD. I had a flashback to the absolute fear I felt as a college freshman, sure that the world would be ending just as my new life was getting started.
Castro pointed, with some pride, to Cuba’s willingness—or at least Cuba’s leader’s willingness—to launch the missiles aimed at the United Sates, and most assuredly launch another world war. Then he revealed Khrushchev’s response, which was essentially to stand down—to not use the missiles. That response, according to Castro’s account now, reached him only twenty minutes before the deadline.
“Were the missiles armed and ready to go within that twenty minutes had the instructions been to fire them?” I asked. This had always been the central point on which Cold War historians differed, as did the intelligence reports. I held my breath for his response.
“Yes,” Castro answered. “Armed and ready to go.”
Had he ever admitted that before? I glanced over at my producer, whose look communicated what I was realizing: we had a big story! Before I could ask anything else, Castro stood up again and announced, “Excuse me, but I have to go.”
I quickly stood to thank him, knowing we had the answer for which we’d come to Cuba.
“I’m only going to the men’s room,” he told me with a big laugh. “I’ll return in ten minutes. Do you have to go, too?” he asked with a wink.
I didn’t dare move out of that room. The crew, who had been documenting this story for three years, had asked about the Cuban Missile Crisis in every interview from Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, to press secretary Pierre Salinger, to the Soviet Union’s current leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his minister of defense Andrei Gromyko. No one had admitted that those missiles were armed and could have been fired and hit their target within the half hour or so between that telex and the deadline!
I knew we had to push for more on this, and I did when Castro returned. We went over every detail of the telexes between him and Khrushchev. Had he been aware that if he had fired those missiles, the United States stood ready to retaliate in kind? “Yes, absolutely,” he said. “I was prepared to accept the consequences.” He never backed down from this position or his opinion that it would have been a necessary sacrifice for the ideals of the communist revolution he had led and that at the time was still being supported, financially and with other resources, by the Soviet Union.
When he stood the next time, he announced it was time for dinner, even though the sun was rising. We went to a small adjoining dining room, and for the next couple of hours, Castro entertained us with songs and stories of the revolution. The crew and I were still trying to make sense of what we had heard from Castro and had observed in the country that he ruled with absolute power for more than fifty years. “I’ve outlived more than ten American presidents,” he boasted as we said our good-byes and headed directly to the airport.
I WANTED TO return to the United States quickly before anyone changed their mind about letting us leave with this momentous, five-hour interview. Back on home soil, Jeremy and the experienced team, headed up by Martin Smith and Taylor Downing, with whom Jeremy was writing a companion book, Cold War (published in 1998 and released in 2008 in paperback), included some of the best archivists and researchers working anywhere in television. They rushed to translate and integrate the interview into our Cold War documentary series in time for the CNN broadcast. In the middle of editing, we got a call from the National Security Archive advisor who had been working with us on validating archives, photographs, and interviews. Since some of what Castro had said in the interview contradicted some official interviews in the National Security Archive, a closer review was called for to ensure that the evidence from our interview and the telex met CNN’s standards for accuracy.
Our translation team rushed to get the transcript done. “I’m going to put some of Castro’s use of the familiar Spanish back into the more expected and respectful formal Spanish,” one of the translators told me. “He is far too familiar in his language. People may think you know him or something.”
I wondered whether the translator would have made that comment if Castro had used the familiar form of you with a male reporter, but even so, I didn’t like the implication that being a woman reporter had elicited the familiar tone or the newsworthy confession from a dictator who was rumored to have had many affairs during his long tenure at the top. Ted dismissed my concerns: “If feeling more comfortable with a female reporter got him to tell the truth about the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he said, “then so be it. We have a war to document.”
In the fall of 1998, CNN released a special called “Castro in His Own Words,” which covered this revelation and included more of my interview than could be used in the twenty-four-hour documentary series that was broadcast on CNN in the fall of 1998—to great acclaim and some controversy.
Some conservative critics accused the series of being biased toward Russia by not giving Ronald Reagan enough credit for ending the global East-West standoff, while others questioned the choice of historians; but even the critics acknowledged that this series, the longest television documentary series to be broadcast up to that point, was a monumental achievement, one that only a visionary leader like Ted would have seen the need for and would have supported doing the right way.
He had instructed us to tell the whole story—not the US story or the Soviet story but how this war impacted lives on every continent, how it was the ninth deadliest war in history, one in which 10 to 25 million people died in related civil wars, interventions, and genocides, which were the so-called surrogate wars for the superpowers that drew the lines, built the walls, and diverted resources to create the weapons that could, then and now, create mutually assured destruction. MAD, indeed.
For all of us, the presence of nuclear weapons in the world is a primal concern. Recent estimates are that the United States will spend nearly $500 billion on modernizing and building nuclear weapons, and in the budget passed in 2018, Congress boosted the annual commitment for weapons activities within the nuclear sector to $11.1 billion. MAD, mutually assured destruction, as a foreign policy strategy, still exists, not only here but in many other countries now boasting nuclear weapons capabilities.
Imagine what we could do if we redeployed those billions into education, or to fund the sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, or to ensure access to affordable health care for all! We need some dangerous women to raise their voices of concern and activate their networks of support to demand the end of nuclear weapons and of MAD once and for all.
TWO MONTHS AFTER the series aired, I was back in Cuba. This time, I was traveling with my boyfriend (now husband) Scott Seydel. We were taking a short trip to meet with the new CNN bureau chief there, and to show the Cuban Missile Crisis segment of the Cold War documentary at the Havana Film Festival.
Since I had no reason to request another audience with el presidente, I hadn’t informed Castro’s office that I would be in the country. Nevertheless, the moment we arrived at Havana Airport, my mobile phone rang, a new phenomenon in Cuba. Mobile technologies had connected the two countries in ways politics and diplomacy had failed; American dollars had radically changed the economy top to bottom. The call was from a man in Castro’s inner circle.
“Welcome back to Cuba,” he told me jovially. “What are your plans?”
“Oh, it’s mostly personal,” I told him. “I’m going to visit the beaches and hotels and meet some artists.”
“You’re staying at the Nacional?” he asked. “Wonderful. I’ll be in touch later.”
Patty Villa, our CNN bureau chief who had met us at the airport, looked at me. “You know what this means, Pat, right? We’re going to be followed for sure, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Castro springs a meeting on us.”
We struck up a conversation with the driver taking us from the airport to our hotel. A former physician, he’d quit his practice to become a driver because he got paid in American dollars. The same professional exit into service jobs was evident with the waiters, private restaurateurs, tour guides, and interpreters we met. The educated class in Cuba was moving down the economic scale in order to move up in American cash.
Felipe’s call came, two days later, just as Patty, Scott, and I emerged from the beautiful waters of Varadaro Beach. “El presidente will see you now.”
My voice went up an octave. “Felipe, that is not possible. We’re in Varadaro and just came from a swim. We’re wet and have no clothes with us!”
Felipe was firm. “Patricia, you are expected. Begin the drive back and we will send an escort.” He hung up.
We climbed in the car, Patty got behind the wheel of the CNN Jeep, and she started to drive—fast.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We can’t go to the palace like this! We have to go to the hotel and change!”
An official government Range Rover flashed its lights and pulled onto the road in front of us: our escort back to Havana. Suddenly, we were flying down the road as Patty tried to keep up, veering to avoid hitting chickens and children along the winding, bumpy road.
“Stop, Patty!” I begged. “We have to go to the hotel first!” I had no intention of seeing Castro with wet, drippy hair, no makeup, and only a dirty serape covering my soaking bathing suit!
Patty wholeheartedly agreed. “Look at me! I’m in nothing but a bikini with cutoff shorts. I’m CNN in Havana and I can’t meet Castro looking like this!”
Scott, in wet trunks and a dirty t-shirt, eyed our presidential escort up ahead and laughed. “Sorry, ladies. It looks like we’re going straight to the palace. You can forget changing clothes.”
He was right. Less than an hour later, we were pulling up at the guard gate. Two gun-toting guards waved us through.
Once inside, the guards tried not to laugh as they searched our sparsely clothed bodies. Barefoot, wet, and bedraggled, I considered making a run for it, but the armed guards surrounding us reminded me that we were more like prisoners than guests.
After a few minutes of standing—we didn’t dare sit down on the chairs for fear of leaving big wet spots—el presidente appeared, in the same green fatigues. Without a smile, Castro walked directly over to Scott, extended his hand, and said in perfect English, “Welcome to Cuba. I heard you were here.”
Then he looked at me, again without a smile, and said, “Welcome back, Patricia. I didn’t expect you to return so soon after our conversation. Did you have any more questions?”
Before I could answer, he stepped back to give us another once-over. His gaze lingered on Patty. How could he not have noticed this beautiful young woman in that tiny bikini top and cutoffs? To her he said, “I am sorry we have not welcomed you to the palace before, Señorita Villa. Can I offer you some tea?”
With that, he summoned the official photographer and translator and never spoke to us in English again. We posed for a number of photographs, only one of which was sent to us, a degraded digital image showing the three of us at our most bedraggled. Who knows what happened to the rest?
We were escorted to Castro’s office and told to sit down on the brown leather sofa. We did so, wet butts or no wet butts. For the next half hour or so, Castro entertained us with stories about the pope’s recent visit, holding court with his three visitors who looked more like beach bums than the CNN bureau chief, president of CNN Productions, and her new boyfriend.
He finally bid us adios with one last good laugh and we were hastily hustled out a secret exit. The passageway was surreal: a large, dark tunnel with soldiers hefting machine guns as they sat in makeshift nests. I assumed this would be Castro’s escape route in the event of a palace coup. It was one of the most unsettling walks I’ve ever made. I didn’t really breathe easily until we were out of the gates of the palace and on our way back to the hotel.
During another, later visit to the Havana Film Festival, I was allowed to screen the hour of the Cold War documentary series that included this interview with Castro and the revelation about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because of the news blackout, most of the Cuban people were unaware that nuclear missiles on their soil had been aimed at America and that the United States stood poised to annihilate them should nuclear war break out.
The documentary was showing them their own history—including possibly the most alarming moment for them since the revolution—for the very first time. US secretary of defense Robert McNamara was up on the screen saying, “I never expected to live another Saturday night.” The people in the theatre were seeing evidence that their own leader was willing to make that their reality, too, by launching the armed missiles at the United States. I expected a spirited Q/A session at the end, but instead, there was silence. “Remember,” the festival director whispered to me, “we are living in a dictatorship and you don’t ask too many questions.”
To a much lesser extent, I had also learned not to ask too many questions when Ted Turner gave me an assignment. So when he said, “Fly to Moscow and find out what Gorbachev is planning to do now that he’s dissolved the Soviet Union,” off to Moscow I went, with Diane Meyer Simon, philanthropist and environmental leader, who had more information about Gorbachev’s plans and had agreed to support them. Together, in Moscow for the first time, we found our way, with much difficulty as no one wanted to share information about Gorbachev, to a tiny, well-hidden office in the Kremlin where he had been exiled without his papers or any staff other than his faithful and ever-present translator, Pavel. As we waited outside, devouring the muffins we had picked up after our four-hour interrogation at the airport about our “intentions” in Russia, Gorbachev appeared, laughing at our muffin-filled mouths as he extended his hand, saying “bon appetite!” We began to talk rapidly to cover our embarrassment only to discover that those words, plus a few he knew from Frank Sinatra songs, were all the English he spoke.
Describing his plans for a new global environmental movement he called Green Cross International to restore the natural resource depletion and devastation from the Cold War, he asked Diane and through me, Ted, to fund the movement in the United States.
I became the first chair of Global Green USA, and—along with my soon-to-be husband, who would follow me as the board chair—formed a strong personal bond with Gorbachev, traveling the world with him to convene forums on the environmental threats that remain his focus. At eighty-eight, he is less active, but in my opinion, never acknowledged for his important environmental leadership and his role in ending the Cold War.
I also became close to his wife, Raisa—a truly dangerous woman who spoke her mind, no matter whom she alienated—and when she died in 1999, Gorbachev asked me to speak at her funeral, alongside world leaders and ambassadors.
All of this happened, and more than I have space to share, in my seven years of working with Ted Turner—he made media history, and what I learned about leadership and power would shape, in large measure, my forward journey.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Zoya
Zoya—not her real name, as printing that would put her in danger—is a member of RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, an underground organization dedicated to helping Afghan women fight for social justice and human rights. When the mujahideen killed her parents, a teenage Zoya and her grandmother fled to neighboring Pakistan, but Zoya made the decision to forsake personal safety and return to her home country to document the full story of how women are suffering under the harsh Taliban regime and tribal factionalism as well as the fallout from the presence of US and NATO troops.
Despite the fact that she’s witnessed such horrors as amputations and public executions, she remains hopeful about the courageous women dedicated to education and to improving their lives. Her life and work have been profiled in Zoya’s Story: An Afghan Woman’s Struggle for Freedom. I have known her for nearly two decades as one of the activists supported by V-Day. She is one of the most quietly courageous and committed women I have ever met.
How do you begin to become a dangerous woman when you live with such grave dangers every day?
Zoya: Breaking the chains of patriarchy, religious restrictions, traditions, customs, and social norms can make any woman a dangerous woman. A woman who swims against the tide that oppresses, deprives, tortures, takes their lives, and brings about extraordinary inequality is a dangerous woman. She is dangerous because she challenges the status quo and wants to be part of the equation for any social and political change and reshuffling.
This woman can be anyone. A woman who, despite her family’s objections, makes endless excuses at home to secretly go to the nearest place that offers to teach her something; a woman who wakes up in the morning with a battered body and bruised face after being hit by her husband the previous night, but still looks at herself in the mirror with the hope that things will change and she will get her freedom; a woman who will jump off her balcony so she can escape being gang-raped by a group of jihadi fundamentalist brutes; a woman who risks being stoned to death by the Taliban, and runs away with the love of her life instead of marrying an old man who has paid her father a big sum of money in exchange for her; a woman who refuses to be silenced by the threats of fundamentalist criminals and their foreign master, and ends up paying for this resilience with her life.
These women fight to unwrap the grip of the bloodied talons of the cruel society and its merciless rulers to change their lives for the better, and the lives of others. These are the dangerous women of Afghanistan.
At what point did you feel you had to become dangerous to survive?
Zoya: I didn’t choose to become a dangerous woman. I was born into a dangerous country, at a time when the Soviets had invaded my country. My mother remained in Afghanistan to fight against the invaders and the dangerous internal enemies. She sacrificed her life, her family, and her children to struggle for her people’s rights and freedom. After her death, I could have fled to the United States or Europe to lead a normal life. Instead, I’ve tried to make a difference the way my mother did. Change is a long and difficult road, and needs generations of struggle and sacrifice.
Who influenced or inspired you or gave you the strength and courage to continue your work?
Zoya: My grandmother taught me to follow my heart in everything that I did in life. She told me that I should not chain myself to my father, brother, or husband, and follow their orders; that I should not bow down to the oppressive customs, traditions, and practices of the Afghan society; and that I should not stop moving forward in life simply because I have to step out of the line that the society has drawn for me. But if someday I meet a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an engineer, a journalist, a political or social activist, an artist, or a writer that I have somehow helped in achieving their dreams, it will be my biggest reward.
What advice do you give other women about how to survive dangerous times?
Zoya: Women should not be afraid to raise their voice, even if they have to pay a high price for it, because they should know that their actions and sacrifices, from the smallest act of defiance to the biggest social or political activities, contribute to the struggle of women everywhere. Challenging the norms and the status quo makes them, more than anything else, dangerous.