One night just before he was arrested, Lee was shaving in the bathroom. June asked him for a piece of soap from the cabinet, and he absentmindedly gave her Marina’s makeup mirror instead. She banged it on the toilet seat, and the mirror slid out of its frame and shattered against the toilet pipes. Marina cried. To her superstitious mind the shattered mirror meant bad luck. She was afraid that something was going to happen to her or the baby she was expecting in October.
President and Mrs. Kennedy were expecting their child just a few weeks before that. The Oswalds had been discussing Mrs. Kennedy’s pregnancy ever since it had been announced. Lee hoped it would be a girl; Marina wanted them to have a boy. She expected a son and wanted Jackie to have the same. One day in August—the 7th—Lee came home looking cheerful.
“Guess what, Mama? Jackie’s had her baby, and it’s a boy.”
He asked Marina, not for the first time, what sex their child would be, and again she predicted a son. “I can believe you this time,” he said, “especially since you were right about theirs.”
Gently, because he knew Marina was worried about their own baby, he went on to break the news that all was not well with the Kennedys’. The doctors were afraid for his life and had rushed him to a special hospital. The doctors, Lee added, would be the best, and the baby would probably survive.
The next day Lee listened to bulletins on the radio about the baby. Each time she heard the name “Kennedy,” Marina asked the news. “Still the same,” he would say, but Marina noticed that he was anxious and more and more reluctant to tell her anything. As evening came on, he admitted that Patrick Kennedy was very sick and the doctors did not have much hope.
Coming on top of the broken mirror, the news signified to Marina that things would go badly for their baby, too. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to Lee, “if it’s a choice between me and the baby, keep the baby.”
“Other babies we can have,” he said. “Junie has to have a mother.”
Marina had not yet even seen a doctor, and she thinks that both she and Lee were anxious about the same thing: if the president’s baby could not be saved—the president, for whom everything could be done—then what about their baby?
“If anything happened to our baby, who would care?” Marina asked.
“No, no, you’re not to worry,” Lee tried to reassure her. “You’ll be taken care of. Once you’re in the hospital, the doctors don’t care whose baby it is. They do the same for everyone. I’ll borrow money. I promise you, you’ll never be thrown out of the hospital.”
When the news came over the radio early on August 9 that Patrick Kennedy had died during the night, Marina wept. Lee tried to comfort her. Maybe it was better for the baby to die rather than be sick all its life.
Jackie was frail, he said. She had lost other babies. He thought he had even read somewhere that she got sick on planes.
“We’ll have an easier time,” he said. “We haven’t any money, and maybe we can’t get good doctors. But you’re strong. We’ve got a baby already. Ours will be healthy. Everything will be all right.”
Friday, August 9, the day Patrick Kennedy died, was the same day Lee was arrested. And as soon as he was released, he started stamping leaflets again. He and Marina sat many nights after that, she sewing and he pausing now and then to listen as she tried to talk him out of it. Sometimes he stole the leaflets from the closet when she was not looking and tried to stamp them on the sly. She told him to do it openly. “Up to your old games again, are you, big boy?” she said.
“For God’s sake shut up,” he said. “Why did God send me a wife with such a long tongue? I’ve been a good boy all day. Why can’t you leave me be at night?”
Marina was trying to drag him back to reality and make him see himself as others saw him. She told him he was no genius, “not like a tall pine tree on a flat plain,” towering above everybody else. Even if he were clever and everyone else stupid, he still had to understand how others looked on things before he could win them over. How could you convince anyone, living in the clouds and taking into account nobody’s views but your own?
“Be content to be an ordinary mortal, as you are,” Marina said. “You’re nobody special. Cuba has lived without you, and it can continue to get along without you now. One Lee Oswald can’t do anything. Do you think you’re such a great man that you’re the only one who can help?”
Cuba was “a tiny country surrounded by enemies,” Lee explained. “If only everyone would do a little, the way I do, then we could help Uncle Fidel. With these leaflets I can wake up the American people.”
Marina said sarcastically that she had never seen leaflets passed out except in old movies of the Russian Revolution. It surely would be fascinating to see it happen in real life. “Look at our neighbors,” she said, “the people living all around us. They don’t care about leaflets. They are peace-loving people, busy with their families. They don’t want a revolution. No one does, here. If it’s a revolution you’re waiting for, I tell you, this country isn’t ready for it yet.”
“You’re right,” Lee sighed. “I ought to have been born in some other era, much sooner or much later than I was.” “I know, but you were born now,” Marina said. “Better forget the whole thing.” Lee added that he had no desire to be like their neighbors. “They’re petty bourgeois. I’m not interested in the stupid things they care about.”
Marina did not mention the obvious—that he ought to be out looking for work rather than spending the little money they had on guns and leaflets and fines. But she did say, “Poor great man sits here all by himself. He’s part of a great cause, and yet he has nothing to eat. Nobody sees that he’s a genius.”
“You laugh now,” Lee said to her. “But in twenty years, when I’m prime minister, we’ll see how you laugh then.”
Their conversations went on like this for weeks, and it seemed there was nothing Marina could say to convince her husband that he was only an ordinary person. Her efforts were further subverted by the letter Lee received in early August from Arnold Johnson of the Information and Lecture Bureau of the Communist Party. Perfunctory as it was, this letter, together with Vincent Lee’s letter of May 29, contributed, Marina thinks, to Lee’s feeling that he was a great man—a man of loftier concerns than the common herd.
“Okay,” she said to him, as he was stamping leaflets one night. “So you take two hundred of these things. You go out on the street and give them to people. They toss them away. Has one person come to you as a result of them? People don’t care about that here.”
Lee’s eyes filled with tears. He threw down his leaflets and read Johnson’s letter aloud. “See this?” he said, waving it in front of her. “There are people who understand me and think I’m doing useful work. If he respects what I’m doing, then it’s important. He’s the Lenin of our country.”
Lee had already told Marina that American Communists were not like Russian ones.1 The Communists in Russia are careerists, he said. They join for a job or an apartment. Here it’s like Russia in the old days. The members are people of principle. They work underground, in conditions of persecution. Knowing Lee’s respect for the American Communists, Marina was routed. “Okay,” she said. “Go ahead and stamp your papers if it makes you happy.”
On Friday, August 16, wholly unchastened by his arrest just a week before, Lee waited with unaccustomed patience for Marina to iron his favorite shirt. He had already called the local TV stations to tell them that there would be a Fair Play for Cuba demonstration that day in front of the Trade Mart building in downtown New Orleans.2
Lee hired two recruits, a nineteen-year-old boy named Charles Hall Steele Jr. and another young man who has never been identified, to help him hand out his leaflets. The fifteen- or twenty-minute demonstration went off without trouble, and pictures of Lee were shown on the television news that night.
Marina refused to go to the Murrets’ to watch the broadcast. “I see you every day at home in all forms. I don’t want to see you on TV. Besides, how come you’re not ashamed to telephone the stations yourself?” Marina was appalled that her husband had sought publicity. To her it was very poor form. But it was just what Lee wanted, and there was more to come.
At 8:00 A.M. the next day, Saturday, August 17, William K. Stuckey, a young reporter with a weekly radio show on station WDSU, drove up to the Oswalds’ in search of Lee, whose name and address he had obtained from Carlos Bringuier. New Orleans was a hotbed of right-wing political activity, and now that a bona fide left-wing organization had appeared, Stuckey wanted to cover it on his program, “Latin Listening Post.” He expected to find a “folk-singer type,” a fellow in sandals and beard, and was startled when a clean-cut young man appeared, clad only in Marine Corps fatigues—no shirt—and invited him onto the porch. He would like to ask Stuckey in for coffee, Lee said, but his wife and child were still asleep.
Stuckey explained who he was and invited Lee to record a five-minute interview for his show that night. If Lee would come to the station about 5:00 P.M., well before the 7:30 broadcast, they could have a long interview and Stuckey could cut it to the required few minutes. Lee accepted.
He showed up punctually and recorded an interview of nearly forty minutes. Then, in Lee’s presence, Stuckey cut the tape to four and a half minutes. Lee was pleased as he heard the tape being played back.3 He felt he had “scored a coup.” He had not allowed himself to be lured out of his depth or led into talking about subjects he did not wish to pursue. Nor was anything said about his years in Russia, since Stuckey knew nothing about them.
Stuckey, too, was pleased, and he used the edited tape on his program that evening. He found Oswald highly “articulate,” a man who seemed “deliberate” about every word he spoke and every gesture he made, the sort who would inspire confidence because of his self-control.4 He was more than a little amused that such a man should have materialized as a pro-Castro organizer in kooky, anti-Communist New Orleans. Hoping to persuade the news director of his station to let him run the entire thirty-seven-minute tape, he asked Lee to call him on Monday.
The news director would have none of it. Indeed, he said, there had been an angry public reaction already. Rather than run the uncut tape, he urged Stuckey to schedule a radio debate with some local anti-Communists to refute Oswald.5
With his usual imperturbable punctuality, Lee telephoned Stuckey on Monday and was asked to take part in a debate on Wednesday, August 21. The other participants were to be Carlos Bringuier—“to add a Cuban flavor,” Stuckey said—and Edward Scannell Butler, director of the Information Council of the Americas, a propaganda organization that taped interviews with Cuban refugees and refugees from Iron Curtain countries and distributed them to radio stations south of the border. Lee agreed to the debate.
Meanwhile, Stuckey had decided to do some checking on Oswald. That same Monday he made the entire thirty-seven-minute tape available to the local FBI office, where the stenographer pool made a transcript, then returned the tape to Stuckey along with a copy of the transcript.6 While he was talking to an FBI source over the telephone that day, Stuckey, as he remembers it, was put through to the chief or deputy chief of the New Orleans bureau, and this man read aloud to him over the phone portions of Oswald’s FBI file, including the facts that he had been to Russia, tried to renounce his US citizenship, stayed there nearly three years, and married a Russian woman. Stuckey went to the FBI office and was permitted to examine the file, as well as newspaper clippings from Moscow at the time of Oswald’s defection.7
While Stuckey was at the FBI office, Edward Butler received a visit from Carlos Bringuier and a fellow Cuban exile, Carlos Quiroga, who had done some investigating of their own. On the evening of the demonstration in front of the Trade Mart, Quiroga, posing as a Castro sympathizer, had paid Oswald a call to see what he could find out. Oswald, who suspected that Quiroga was an agent either from Bringuier or from the FBI, told him nothing. But while the two men were talking on the porch, June came running out and spoke to her father in Russian. Bringuier and Quiroga reported the incident to Butler and told him they had information that Oswald had been to Russia and had a Russian wife. Butler tried to reach someone in Washington by telephone.8 Later in the day he informed Stuckey that he, too, had learned of Oswald’s Russian background—from someone at the “House Un-American Activities Committee.”9
Stuckey and Butler agreed over the telephone that they would bring Oswald’s Russian past to light on the program, expose him as a Communist sympathizer, and destroy his organization.
On Wednesday Lee arrived at the station first, wearing a heavy flannel suit that was totally wrong for the New Orleans heat, and looking nervous because he knew that this time he faced opposition. He had been practicing at home all day. He wrote down what he wanted to say on scraps of paper, then he strode around the living room delivering his remarks with what he thought were appropriate gestures.
When Stuckey arrived, Lee joshed him a bit about inviting people “to gang up on me.” Bringuier was the next to appear; Lee went up to shake hands, and Bringuier remarked humorously that if ever Lee wanted to join his side, the anti-Castro side, he would have nothing against him personally. Lee answered good-naturedly that he believed he was right and was doing his best.
The debate was taped for broadcast that evening, and it was a disaster for Lee. Stuckey started off by announcing that Oswald had a Russian past, had tried to renounce his US citizenship, and had concealed it on their interview only a few days before. The rest of the “debate” amounted to a verbal pummeling: did not Oswald’s self-proclaimed Marxist faith and his residence in the USSR signify that the FPCC “chapter” of which he was “secretary” had to be Communist? Lee had been sandbagged, and there was little he could do but keep his temper, which he did.
Afterward he looked “dejected,” and Stuckey invited him to have a drink. They went to Comeaux’s, a bar down the street from the station, where Lee slowly nursed a beer. When Stuckey pointed out that he was not doing well with his beer, Lee answered that actually he was accustomed to vodka—his father-in-law, a colonel in the Red Army, had taught him to drink it straight.10
Lee told other lies, as well as one or two truths, to impress Stuckey. And in general Stuckey was impressed. He thought Lee was open, friendly, relaxed, and perhaps even relieved that his Russian past at last was out in the open. But Stuckey also got the impression that Lee, without being arrogant exactly, felt he was living in a world of clods, of men and women who were his intellectual inferiors.11
In fact, Lee was far from relieved. “Damn it,” he said to Marina when he returned home, “I didn’t realize they knew I’d been to Russia. You ought to have heard what they asked me! I wasn’t prepared, and I didn’t know what to say.”
Still, he was anxious to hear what he had said. He called the Murrets to let them know about the program. They were not amused. An irate Dutz said later that they had not heard the whole of the program, “but enough.”12
Long before the program was to go on the air, Lee switched on the radio and sat in the kitchen waiting. “Come quickly,” he called out to Marina. “I’m about to speak now.”
Marina did not understand who was saying what, but she could tell who was on what side and that Lee was claiming to be secretary of an organization. She also could tell from his voice when he was lying.
Afterward she asked, “Are they such fools there at the station that they actually believe you have an organization? One man is chairman, secretary, and sole member!”
“Maybe the debate will help, and others will join,” Lee said.
“I doubt it,” Marina replied. Her reaction was not one of pride at hearing her husband speak, but of amusement at the way he sat, “proud as a rooster,” listening to his own voice.
“Twenty minutes!” he said, when the program was over. “And I spoke longer than any of them. Every minute costs a lot on radio. And I talked by far the most.”
Whatever euphoria he may have felt at the moment, after thinking it over, Lee seems to have realized that his position as a political organizer in New Orleans had been drastically changed as a result of his exposure as an ex-defector. All through August he had continued to write Vincent Lee of the FPCC and Arnold Johnson of the Communist Party. He had sent both a small clipping from the New Orleans Times-Picayune of August 13 about his arraignment for “disturbing the peace” and had also written Vincent Lee about the August 16 demonstration and his original appearance on Stuckey’s program. But he had had no response.
Now he was baffled. Having been exposed as Marxist and possibly pro-Soviet, was it any use to go on trying to organize an FPCC chapter, or had he been totally discredited? He made a strange decision. He would seek advice, but instead of appealing to the FPCC, the organization that he feared he had compromised, he would write to the Communist Party. Since he was going to write the party, it would have been logical to write Arnold Johnson. Instead he decided, typically, that he would go straight to the top, to the Central Committee—the party’s highest governing body. It was a breach of protocol, for he was not a party member. But it shows how seriously he took himself and his dilemma. It also reveals that, as usual, he felt entitled to special consideration, even when he might have done wrong.
The letter itself was presumptuous. It opens with the greeting, “Comrades,” and closes: “With Freternel [sic] Greeting,” both party salutations that Lee was not entitled to use since he was not a member. The letter is likewise remarkable for its execrable spelling, a sign that Lee was upset, and for its totally uncharacteristic tone of humility. Lee wrote that he had lived in the Soviet Union and, on his return, had organized a branch of the FPCC in New Orleans, “a position which, frankly, I have used to foster communist ideals.” But now that his previous history had been made public in a radio program, he wondered whether he could continue to wage the struggle against “anti-progressive forces above ground,” or whether he would have to go underground. The letter closes: “I feel I may have compromised the F.P.C.C., so you see that I need the advice of trusted, long-time fighters for progress. Please advise.”13
As so often happened with Lee, his letter did go to the top. It reached Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, secretary of the Communist Party, and she asked Arnold Johnson to reply. Lee received an answer three weeks later. It was soothing in tone, suggested that the FPCC was broad enough in character so that Oswald might be able to work in the “background” without going “underground” and added, in response to still another letter that had been received from him, that the Communist Party might find a way to get in touch with him later.14
Throughout August Lee must have been considering his next move. And after the radio debate of August 21, he was ready to face the situation. He had passed out nearly a thousand handbills and membership applications, had engaged in public demonstrations, and had spoken twice over the radio. And he had not yet attracted a single follower. Nor had he had a single word of encouragement from the FPCC. He had to face the fact that for him, in New Orleans, the FPCC was a lost cause. So once again he fell back on an old plan that had been at the back of his mind for years. He would go to Cuba to fight for Castro.
The obstacles were formidable. Lee had saved a little money, but possibly not enough to get to Cuba. Moreover, the State Department had banned travel to Cuba by American citizens, and all that summer the Militant had been filled with stories about Americans who faced imprisonment and fines on their return. That was only a minor deterrent, however, for Lee did not intend to return. He hoped to stay in Cuba. Or if he did not like it there, he would go to China, or else seek readmission to Russia, where he would rejoin Marina. But the problem was how to get to Cuba in the first place.
Finally, Lee came up with a solution. About the third week in August, possibly just after his exposure in the radio debate, he announced to Marina that he had decided to go to Cuba. Since there was no legal way to get there, he was going to hijack an airplane.
“I’ll be needing your help,” he added.
“Of course I won’t help,” came the wifely response.
Lee immediately started exercising to strengthen his muscles—deep knee bends and arm exercises. Each evening he tore through the apartment in his undershorts for half an hour, making practice leaps as he went. June, who thought he was getting ready to play with her, jumped up in bed, followed him everywhere with her eyes, and burst out laughing.
Marina could not help laughing, too. “Junie,” she said, “our papa is out of his mind.”
Lee pretended not to hear.
“With shoulders like yours, exercises couldn’t hurt,” Marina commented helpfully.
Lee came up to her and flexed his muscles. “You think I’m not strong? Just feel those arms. You think I’m weak and not a man?”
“Of course. You’re just a foolish boy.”
“And whose is that?” he asked, pointing to June. “I made her.”
“That didn’t take much time,” Marina answered tartly. “I spent nine months of my time and health on her. I made her.”
Lee kept up his exercises for a couple of weeks, causing much merriment in the household. Afterward he rubbed himself all over with strong-smelling liniment, took a cold shower, and came out of the bathroom as red as a lobster.
Meanwhile, he had brought home airline schedules and a large map of the world, which he tacked up inside the porch. He started measuring distances on the map of the world which he tacked up inside the porch. He started measuring distances on the map with a ruler, and Marina heard him mention “Key West.”15 Next, he told her that the problem was to find a plane with fuel enough to fly as far as Cuba. A Miami-bound flight would not do; they would have to find something bigger, a plane headed for Philadelphia or New York that had plenty of fuel.
Marina listened with disbelief as Lee explained how he planned to hijack the plane. He would be sitting in the front row, he said. No one would notice when he got up and quietly moved into the pilot’s cabin. There he would pull his pistol and force the pilot to turn around.
“And how about the passengers?” Marina asked.
“I have strong muscles now. I’ll deal with them.”
His eyes shining, he told Marina what she would have to do. First, they would buy tickets under different names so no one would know they were man and wife. She was to sit in the rear of the plane. Once Lee had subdued the pilot, she was to rise, holding June by the hand, and speak to the passengers, urging them to be calm.
Marina reminded him that she did not speak English.
“Right,” Lee said. “That script won’t do. I’ll have to think up something new.” He sat her down on the bed, went out of the room, then burst through the bedroom door pointing his pistol straight at her: “Hands up, and don’t make any noise!”
Shaking all over with laughter, Marina reminded him that she could not speak those words either. But Lee refused to give up. If only she would play her part, he promised to buy her a small, woman-sized gun. He said he had been shopping for one already.
Marina could restrain herself no longer. “Do you really think anybody will be fooled?” she said. “A pregnant woman, her stomach sticking way out, a tiny girl in one hand and a pistol in the other? I’ve never held a pistol in my life, much less shot anyone.”
“I’ll show you how.”
“No thanks. I can’t stand shooting. I’d go out of my mind.”
He implored her just to hold the pistol even if she did not mean to use it.
“No,” she answered again. “If you want to break your neck, do it alone.”
He ran through the script again. “I’ll be up in the front row. No one will think twice when I go into the cabin. I’ll whip out my gun and order the pilot to turn around. Then I’ll open the door and stand where both the pilot and the passengers can see me.”
“And you don’t think the passengers would try to rescue him?” Marina asked.
“Ugh, they’re cowardly Americans,” Lee said. “They won’t even dare to move. They’ll just sit there like cows.”
“Do what you like,” Marina said. “But don’t count on me. It’s not my nature to go around killing people, and I don’t advise you to do it, either. The whole thing is so funny, it even makes the baby laugh.”
Lee assured her he had thought of everything. Nothing could go wrong. Marina told him lots of things could go wrong; there was plenty he hadn’t thought of. It wouldn’t turn out the way he thought.
Lee went to the airport and obtained more schedules, this time of flights not from New Orleans but from a smaller city nearby so he would have fewer passengers to subdue. For two days he was carried away by that. After he had tried about four times to talk Marina into joining him in his scheme, and had failed, he told her he had been looking for someone who would help him, someone who might want to go to Cuba. But he had given up. The reason he gave could not have been more significant: “Your accomplice is your enemy for life”—meaning that an accomplice can be a witness against you as long as you live.
At this stage of their marriage, Lee was confiding in Marina, making her his touchstone, his lightning rod to reality. And Marina understood what he was asking of her. Even though she wondered, as he unfolded his hijacking scheme, whether or not he was crazy, she drew funny word pictures for him to show how his plan looked in the clear light of day. Ever since the night, at the end of June, when he had broken down and cried in the kitchen, she perceived that Lee needed her. With what appears to be an inborn sympathy for anyone who is lost or in trouble, or on the outs with the world, she reached out and responded to his need. “Do you know why I loved Lee?” she once said. “I loved him because I felt he was in search of himself. I was in search of myself, too. I couldn’t show him the way, but I wanted to help him and give him support while he was searching.”
Indeed, by August of 1963 their relationship had become an extraordinary feat of empathy on Marina’s part, one that few people could have achieved, much less a girl of twenty-two. No doubt it was this quality that had enabled her to get through to Lee and win from him such trust as he was capable of giving. Yet his “trust” was a crushing burden for her, too.
As the one person whom Lee trusted, and feeling responsible for his actions as she did, Marina was painfully at odds with herself and her surroundings. She, too, had been a rebel. In part, it was this that had drawn her to Lee, and this that still helped her to understand him. But now she was about to be the mother of a second child, and carrying the full weight of the family, she badly needed an anchor. Everything in her strained toward staying in one place, settling in America, building a nest. Lee’s responsibilities had changed, but he had not. He was still a rebel, and he kept repeating the same actions again and again. He yanked Marina away from the stability she coveted, placed her squarely outside American life, and prevented her from building her nest.
Even that was not the worst—for husband and wife were also at odds over right and wrong. Marina tried, not always successfully, to resist complicity in Lee’s deceptions. She refused to approve such of his schemes as she knew about. But she now insists that he had a stronger character than she, “because he brought me low and made me cover up his ‘black deeds,’ when it was against my morality to do so. I felt too much pity for him. If only I had been a stronger person, maybe it would have helped.”
Marina’s words are an apology for her failure to make a different man of Lee and alter the outcome of his life. They are an admission of the guilt she felt for the way that their life together worked out. But the truth is that there is no such thing as being married to a man like Lee Oswald and not becoming his emotional accomplice.
Meanwhile, she went on trying to help Lee find his way without letting him get dangerously off course. “Look,” she said to him about the hijacking scheme, “it’s not a good omen that the mirror broke. It means you’ve got to be careful. Go to Cuba if you must. But try to find a legal way. Don’t do anything dangerous when you get there. And don’t do anything illegal. If it doesn’t go right, come back home right away.”
She reminded him that they had one child and would soon have another. “If you want my support, I’ll give it to you. I’ll save money and do what I can for you here. Of course,” she added, lowering her voice, “it would be better to save for the new baby. But I’ll sacrifice and try to save on that if it will help you to do what you want.”
Her words found their mark. A day or two later, Lee burst into the apartment. “Guess what, Mama? I’ve found a legal way. There’s a Cuban embassy in Mexico. I’ll go there. I’ll show them my clippings, show them how much I’ve done for Cuba, and explain how hard it is to help in America. And how above all I want to help Cuba. Will you come to me if I send for you there?”
“Hmm,” Marina said, “we’ll see.” She accepted his going to Cuba, so long as he did it in a legal way, for she knew that he would have to see the country with his own eyes before he could give up his dream. But she was skeptical. It was her guess that no country would satisfy him and that he would be home in three months to a year. And she could not resist teasing him. “If you do go,” she said, “for heaven’s sake take some American soap. It will be dirty there.”
“Okay,” he replied. “You can send me packages if you’re still here.” Then he begged her again to come with him.
“Not to Cuba,” she said, “but Havana—a lovely city.”
Lee promised that she could study free of charge and get a job. Since he was American and the Cubans would be flattered to have an American defector, they would give him privileges—a job and a nice little house.
Marina hated that about her own country: Russians felt that foreigners were somehow better than they were and gave them every privilege. She could not believe the same might be true of Castro, of whom she had heard nothing but good.
“No, no,” she said. “They have real Communism there. You earn according to your work. You’ll have to work for ten years before they’ll give you any privileges. The place is full of poor people already. Besides,” she added, dropping her voice again in mild reproof, “it’s not who you are but what you are that will make all the difference to them.”
Marina had no thought of joining Lee in Cuba. Cuba, China, there was no telling where he might want to go next. Of course she would have to join him if she had no way of living in America. But the wisest course was to wait and see. It was her hope that he would become disillusioned in Cuba as he had in Russia, and that this time he might learn something from it. He would come home, settle down, and live a normal life with his family.
That was her dream. His was that she would join him wherever he pleased—“I go to China, you’ll go to China.” Or more ominous and more likely—“I’ll send you back to Russia. And if I don’t like Cuba, I will join you over there.” He added that while he was in Mexico City, he would go to the Soviet embassy and try to speed up her visa.
Marina did not realize that Lee could not go to Cuba and simply come home when he had had enough. Instead, this time he would face a real danger of imprisonment. Nor was it easy for an American to gain admission to Cuba, even from Mexico City. He would first have to go to the Soviet embassy and apply for a visa for Russia. Then he could go to the Cuban embassy with his Russian visa and apply for a visa to visit Cuba “in transit” to Russia. That was where Marina came in. She was his pretext and his fallback plan. He was going to Russia to join his wife and children. Lee had not changed at all. Russia was still a place of refuge in his mind, the place he would go if he got in trouble or if he ran out of choices elsewhere. Even though he had now experienced life in the Soviet Union for himself, Russia continued to hold the same place in his thoughts that it had five years earlier, during his talks with his Marine Corps comrades.
Once he was in Cuba, of course, Lee counted on the old magic to work. He would do in Havana exactly what he had done in Moscow in 1959: persuade the Cubans to let him stay. He would show them his clippings, his FPCC leaflets, his correspondence with the FPCC and the Communist Party, and all his bona fides as a Castro enthusiast and convince them that he was a believer and not a spy. Maybe they would allow him to join the army and train recruits in guerrilla warfare. Maybe Castro would send him out to help liberate neighboring islands. Or maybe he would stand by to help if there was an invasion from the United States. All he asked was to be allowed to fight for Castro.
Later, if he got tired of Cuba, he might go to China or take his American passport and visit various countries in Western Europe at a leisurely pace on his way to join Marina in Russia. Money, of course, was a problem, but maybe he would have earned some as a mercenary or as a Castro volunteer. Maybe he counted on Cuba to give him a subsidy as Russia had. Or maybe he did not think about money at all.
Lee’s plan bore a haunting similarity to his defection from America to Russia only four years before. Once again he would forsake his homeland and count on a foreign government to take care of him. The plan made no sense, of course. Even if Marina was permitted to return to Russia, it was extremely unlikely that he would be readmitted. There were no guarantees that he would be allowed to visit Cuba in transit, much less to remain there. And if he did succeed in visiting Cuba and was then denied readmission to Russia, he would face prosecution and imprisonment if he tried to return to America.
Real or unreal as the plan might be, Lee before the end of August was studying Spanish again, as he had done in 1958. At the close of each lesson, he asked Marina to give him a little test, especially a pronunciation test, since he had trouble with the Spanish “r.”
Lee appreciated Marina’s acquiescence, or her awareness, anyhow, that it was no use telling him what to do, and that the only way for him to learn whether he liked Cuba was to go there and experience it for himself. After she had given him her consent to go peacefully, via Mexico, he gave her his highest accolade—“You understand me.”
Despite the harmony that presently prevailed between them, there was an occasional sign that it was not a case of two minds with but a single thought. They had always agreed that their next child, a boy, was to be named “David Lee.” But for some time Lee had been turning another name over in his mind, and he cautiously broached it to Marina. He told her, stealing up a little on the subject, that he thought it might be a nice touch to call their new baby “Fidel.”
Marina had been trying to give in, trying to understand and accept Lee, and do nothing to jangle his nerves. But this was too much. Was she, or was she not, about to be the mother of this child? To think that politics, the cause of all her woes and the thing she hated most in life, was to be insinuated into her family, into her very belly, was more than Marina could abide.
She reasserted herself in all her old magnificent asperity. “There is no Fidel and there will be no Fidel in our family.”