It would still take some time, but the clues uncovered by the Cuban agents would eventually lead to a young Central American who lived 2,000 kilometers from Miami, knew almost nothing about Cuba and never even imagined that the second man in the revolutionary hierarchy, Raúl Castro, had the same first name as he did. What the twenty-six-year-old Salvadoran Raúl Ernesto Cruz León really liked was rock n’ roll, sports and target practice at private shooting ranges in El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. With no interest in politics, his idol was the hulk Sylvester Stallone: he’d seen all his movies, some of them several times. In 1995 he was working as a bodyguard at Two Shows, a company that offered personal security to foreign personalities and artistes visiting El Salvador. Cruz León had always liked guns, and his familiarity with them stemmed partly from his father’s activities as an army soldier, and also from the fact that throughout most of his youth, El Salvador had been immersed in a brutal civil war. During that period it was as easy to buy a machine gun as a pair of shoes. When Cruz León was fifteen, he and his mother, brother and two sisters were shattered by the news that their father, stationed at the Sensuntepeque barracks, a hundred kilometers from San Salvador, had killed himself with a single shot to the head. Since a group of guerrillas had occupied the road that linked the capital to the barracks, the Cruz Leóns had to wait several days before collecting the corpse from the local morgue and burying it in San Salvador.
Thanks to his mother’s unsparing efforts, the boy managed to reach ninth grade at the Colegio Salesiano, which he left as a fluent English-speaker. At seventeen, his favorite toys were a Russian Makarov pistol, an Italian nine-millimeter Beretta and a Smith & Wesson with a laser sight. His passion for firearms would lead him to take the Army cadet course, but despite twice coming second at its shooting championships, he didn’t adapt to the rigid discipline of the barracks and lasted only a year at the military academy. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink and had never tried drugs—not even marijuana, which was usually consumed openly by his showbiz clients. His only addictions were guns and extreme sports, like climbing, rafting and surfing. He was not much given to reading and could remember only two books that had made an impression on him: The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, and Manual of the Warrior of the Light, by the Brazilian Paulo Coelho.
The young Salvadoran’s heroes were not, in fact, Stallone’s recurrent characters John Rambo and Rocky Balboa. His ideal of bravery and courage was embodied by Ray Quick, the pitiless bomb and explosives expert portrayed by Stallone in what Cruz León considered a cinema classic, The Specialist. And Cruz León often compared himself to Ray, as he felt they shared many characteristics. However, one difference between them was paranoia. Ray was unshakable when facing danger and displayed an enviable coldness. Cruz León was not easily frightened, but he distrusted his own shadow. Yet in Cruz León’s eyes both men had good souls. Ray had shown this several times, as in the scene where, alone and unarmed, he beat up four Hispanics who were threatening a young girl on a bus in Miami. And there were other similarities. They both detested blood: Ray never used knives and cringed at the sight of a sharpened blade; Cruz León turned pale when he had to have a blood test. They both liked cats: Ray had a furry Angora that had followed him silently one night for several blocks in Miami Beach until being adopted, with the name of Timer—an instrument they both used in their jobs; Cruz León kept a scruffy cat called Hija (daughter), who got on well with his canary. The two men were the same height, about five foot seven, and although at fifty-one Ray was almost double Cruz León’s age, he was a mass of muscle and a disciplined weightlifter. Like Stallone, Cruz León didn’t have the perfect Hollywood face: a typical Central American mestizo, he also sported a big chin, an effect of the prognathism that had resisted years of orthodontic braces.
But Ray Quick’s unique status also lay in his enviable relationship with the gorgeous May Munro (played by Sharon Stone), who contracts Quick to liquidate the leaders of a Miami mafia gang. Among them are the men who killed her parents, a crime she witnessed when she was ten years old. Convinced that a hired hitman will not be reliable (“Bullets can always go astray,” she says), Munro decides to hire an explosives expert. Not just someone who can blow up walls, but someone who can guarantee absolute precision—a specialist. That’s Ray Quick. A retired CIA agent living in Miami, Quick provides services to both government and private citizens—so long as they respect his code of ethics: he will perform no act that might involve the risk of death to innocent people or children. By the time the last man in his contract with May Munro has dropped dead, the two protagonists are living under the same roof. Cruz León thought the prize was deserved: after all, Ray wasn’t just a specialist, but a victorious hero. The Salvadoran was still a beginner, but he felt the day would come when he too would complete a contract and take a May Munro to bed.
Cruz León was awakened from his daydream by the turbulence experienced on the Taca Airlines Boeing 737, which had taken off from El Salvador on the morning of July 9, 1997. He would still have to face a stopover of at least three hours in San Juan, Costa Rica, where he would then embark on the final leg of his journey: a flight to Havana, Cuba. What was a two-hour direct flight could often take up to eight hours, such was the length of time lost in stopovers and connections. How had a person like him learnt so much about Ray Quick? The encyclopedic knowledge was due to the fact that he had watched The Specialist dozens of times. It didn’t matter that Ray and May were characters invented by a Hollywood scriptwriter, they were nevertheless the model couple for Cruz León. The Salvadoran knew he had a long way to go to reach the level of a Ray Quick, but he was taking his first steps in his career as a specialist: after all, here he was on his first mission, armed to the teeth. Or, to be more precise, to the feet.
Although he wore size nine shoes, on that day Cruz León wore a pair of Timberland boots that were size twelve and a half. The empty space between the tip of each boot and his toes was filled with 250 grams of C-4, the preferred explosive of terrorists and action film heroes alike. With a detonation velocity of nine kilometers per second, more than 30,000 kilometers an hour, a handful of C-4, the size of a tennis ball, is sufficient to knock down concrete walls and steel girders. What gave Cruz León a feeling of safety, despite the lethal material at his feet, was knowing that without the aid of a detonator, that gunk was as lethal as plasticine. His detonators, wires and timers were sensibly stored away in the blue nylon Tommy Hilfiger backpack that he’d placed in the overhead baggage compartment. Except for an unforeseen delay of several hours, the stopover in Costa Rica went by without incident and it was already night when the passengers were called to board the plane that would take them to Cuba.
In reality, Cruz León’s stressful adventure had begun a month before. His recruitment by Francisco Chávez Abarca happened at the end of May, six weeks before that trip. In fact the initiative had been his. Cruz León wanted to sell his sister’s van and someone recommended he look up Abarca, the owner of a used car lot and a small rental firm called Geo Rent-a-Car, both installed in a garage in San Salvador. A lot of people said that both the store and the rental firm were a front used by Central American carjacking gangs, but since he wanted to sell and not buy, Cruz León had nothing to fear. He had already heard about Abarca, who was young like him, gruff, suspicious, reserved and the owner of a belly of monumental proportions—whence his nickname Panzón (“Big Paunch”). During the negotiation for the van they discovered their common taste for guns and arranged to meet one day at the Xangai shooting range, near the capital. The deal was finally closed—in cash, because the enigmatic Abarca never used checks or credit cards. A few days later he showed up one late afternoon at Two Shows for a coffee, and as he was leaving beckoned Cruz León to his car, a shining white Nissan Pathfinder. From the glove compartment he took out a misshapen ball that looked like pizza dough, and asked, kneading it with his fingers:
“Do you know what this is?”
“I’ve seen it in movies. It’s C-4, isn’t it?”
Keeping up an air of mystery, Abarca was throwing the ball from hand to hand:
“Yes, there’s no better explosive than this. You can whack this ball with a hammer or play baseball with it and nothing happens. You can put it in an oven at temperatures as high as 300 degrees centigrade and it doesn’t explode. But all it takes is a nine-volt electric pulse, the energy from an ordinary battery, like the ones in children’s toys, for this little ball to sink a ship or blow a thirty-ton tank off the ground.”
He started the car and invited Cruz León to a demonstration:
“Come on, I’ll show you how this shit works.”
He sped through the streets of San Salvador towards the coast. On the way he extolled the virtues of C-4. Apart from its superior explosive capacity when compared to military dynamite, it had a unique characteristic: its plasticity. “With C-4 you can rip the cover off the glove compartment of this car without scratching the dashboard or hurting anyone,” he explained as they left local traffic behind, “but it can also produce an expansion wave enough to turn a ten-story building into a mountain of rubble.” Cruz León knew what Abarca was talking about: making explosions with surgical precision was exactly what made Ray Quick a specialist. Minutes later the car pulled up on the sands of La Perla, a rocky outcrop rarely visited by seaside tourists. Abarca took some objects out of a bag and got out of the car. Walking between the rocks, he was followed closely by Cruz León. He chose a rock, crouched down on the ground and laid out what he had been carrying: a miniature screwdriver, a portable calculator-alarm clock, a detonator—a metal cylinder similar to a big nail with no head—and two pieces of wire in different colors. With the screwdriver he opened up the calculator and took out the bell, the size of a coin, then attached the loose wires to one end of the detonator. The other end of it was inserted into a little ball of C-4 the size of a chewed-up piece of gum. He set the clock to go off in five minutes, tied it all up with a piece of insulation tape and stuck the package behind a rock the size of a car. Cruz León hurried to take shelter behind another pile of rocks, but Abarca calmed him down. “Don’t worry, it’s only going to explode in five minutes,” he explained as he walked along the sand. “And even if we were there, we’d be safe because I placed the explosive so as to make the rock explode on the opposite side to where we were.” Just in case, Cruz León preferred to wait behind the trunk of a palm tree, but the confident Abarca stayed on the beach, without protection. Five minutes later a loud thud blew half the rock into the air—exactly on the side chosen by Big Paunch.
Weeks later, Abarca reappeared at Two Shows and took Cruz León out to a half-empty Italian restaurant. Speaking even more quietly than usual, he went straight to the point, without mincing his words:
“Want to place two bombs for me? You saw how easy it is to set one up.”
On hearing that, Cruz León’s jaw dropped even further:
“Bombs? Where? For you?”
“It’s not for me, it’s for some friends in Miami.”
Ray Quick’s humanitarian spirit seemed to take him over:
“Place bombs to kill people? Count me out.”
“No, it’s not to kill anyone; it’s just to scare them. We only want to make bulla, a lot of noise.”
“Here in El Salvador?”
“No. It’s in another country.”
“Which country?”
“I can’t tell you. If you accept, I’ll say where it is. I pay 15,000 colones per bomb, plus travel expenses, accommodation and food.”
The “friends in Miami,” as would become clear later, were Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo Sampol and Pedro Ramón Crispín—the trio that would be arrested and pardoned in Panama years later—as well as Arnaldo Monzón Placencia and Francisco “Pepe” Hernández, director of the Cuban American National Foundation. The meetings between Big Paunch and the group normally took place at the Mister Don snack bar, in the Salvadoran capital, or in a suite at the Radisson Hotel in Guatemala City. Fifteen thousand colones was not exactly a fortune, but it was enough to buy $1,500 on the black market. As there were two bombs, that meant 30,000 colones, or $3,000. Or three months’ salary at Two Shows. Cruz León wanted to know how many days the job would require—“You know that I have a boss and a schedule to keep to,” he said—and was reassured. Between leaving El Salvador and returning, the mission would take a week at most. Cruz León had a day to decide. As if he were doing the most natural thing in the world, Chávez Abarca devoured a bowl of spaghetti and another of meatballs and drank a bottle of wine, while his dining companion was almost too excited to touch a bite. Years later Cruz León would remember the ecstasy that had seized him that night:
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but right there I imagined I was Ray Quick. What I felt at that moment was this: I was Ray Quick. I was Sylvester Stallone. I was going to put bombs in some unnamed country. I’d come home and go to bed with Sharon Stone. I felt like a spy, I felt I was the greatest.”
The fascination gave way to paranoia when the next day Chávez Abarca revealed the name of the country where the two bombs would be placed:
“Cuba? Have you gone nuts? They say Cuba’s the most militarized country, the most policed in the world. I heard there’s even a wall in Havana, like the one in Berlin. There must be cops, cameras and mikes everywhere, even under the hotel beds!”
Once again Big Belly calmed him down, saying that all this famous surveillance was just communist talk:
“I was in Havana less than a month ago. I put two bombs in a hotel and walked out of there without being bothered by anyone. And if you ever did get caught, which is completely unlikely, we would hire a good lawyer and in a few hours you’d be here again. As you can see, I went over, placed some bombs and here I am, all in one piece.”
It wasn’t bravado. Abarca had in fact been in Cuba and on the night of April 12 had activated a charge of C-4 explosive in the restroom of Aché, a disco on the ground floor of the Meliá Cohiba, the country’s most luxurious hotel, where he was staying. By a miracle the bathrooms were empty at the time of the explosions and there were no casualties. Two weeks later when he was getting ready to check out, he stuck another package with 400 grams of explosive into a flower vase in the corridor of the fifteenth floor of the same hotel, but this time the security services deactivated the bomb before it went off. What Big Belly did not tell him was the difficulty in getting paid. Since the bomb on the fifteenth floor hadn’t exploded and the blast at the Aché had occurred in the middle of the night, with the dance floor and the lobby already deserted, the Cuban government had managed to suppress news of the two attacks for weeks. For several days, no information about these explosions was leaked to the international press.
Abarca persisted over the phone with the “friends in Miami,” demanding what he was owed, until he got this answer by fax at his car business:
As I already explained to you, if there is no publicity the work is useless. The American newspapers publish nothing that has not been confirmed. I need all the details about the discotheque to be able to check them. If there is no publicity, there is no payment. I’m expecting the news today, I’m leaving tomorrow and will be gone for two days.
Accept the respects of
Solo [an alias of Posada Carriles]
Cruz León took heart and accepted the job. He was then coordinating the security for a rock band that was playing in El Salvador, and it wasn’t hard to arrange a week’s vacation. Abarca asked for his passport—Cruz León had already made short tourist trips to Mexico and Central America—and on the night of Tuesday, July 8, the eve of Cruz León’s departure, Abarca appeared at the modest apartment Cruz León shared with his mother and brothers downtown, in the Cuscatlán neighborhood. Abarca was carrying a suitcase with the boots, a ball of the explosive wrapped in aluminum foil and the rest of the paraphernalia needed to carry out the attacks. He laid out on the dining table the calculators, pieces of wire, detonators, batteries and a voltmeter, a plastic gadget little bigger than a cigarette pack, with a small display and two mini-clips to test whether batteries are producing the voltage necessary for detonation. This time he slowly went through the operation he’d done on the deserted beach, explaining the details step by step. As he couldn’t afford another fiasco—for whatever reason, the bomb on the fifteenth floor of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel in Havana didn’t explode—he made a rough diagram in Cruz León’s diary showing where and how to attach each wire and how the detonator should be adjusted. The batteries and wires would travel hidden inside a General Electric radio-alarm clock, the size of a book, and the voltmeter and a small roll of insulation tape would be packed at the bottom of his toilet bag together with his toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor and a bottle of eau de cologne. The detonators would be carried in the core of two felt-tip markers. Before saying goodbye, Abarca repeated the objective of the explosions:
“The people in Miami don’t want to kill anybody, just to show foreigners that going to Cuba as a tourist can mean mortal danger. Here are some of their suggested targets, for you to choose the two where you’ll place the bombs.”
As Abarca dictated, Cruz León wrote down the names of the hotels in his pocket diary—the Meliá Cohiba, Nacional, Capri, Comodoro, Santa Isabel and Tritón (which he mistakenly noted as “Plutón”). Apart from these, the “pals in Miami” had included the two most visited tourist spots in the Cuban capital: the bar and restaurant La Bodeguita del Medio, Ernest Hemingway’s favorite venue for his infamous drinking sessions, and the Tropicana, the country’s most traditional cabaret and nightclub. On leaving, Abarca gave Cruz León $500 in cash and a plastic briefcase from the Joanessa travel agency where his package tour had been acquired, containing the air tickets and two vouchers, one for the airport transfer and the other to cover his daily expenses at the Ambos Mundos hotel, with full board included. The choice of the hotel was Cruz León’s only request to Abarca. He could have chosen a luxury place like the Nacional or the Cohiba, both located in Vedado, the chic part of Havana, but Cruz León preferred the romantic three-star hotel in Old Havana for a special reason, as he would reveal years later:
“I’d read in a tourist brochure that it was at the Ambos Mundos that Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. By coincidence, they reserved a room for me on the fifth floor, next door to the room where the writer lived, which had been transformed into a museum.”
On the morning of July 9, in the taxi that would take him to the San Salvador airport, Cruz León felt paranoia set in again. No matter how convincing Abarca’s reassurances that there was no risk whatsoever in carrying the explosive inside the boots, his feet were sweating profusely. He stopped at a drugstore, bought a small tin of antiseptic talcum powder and poured half the contents inside each boot. There were no unforeseen events on leaving the country. Used to welcoming and seeing off personalities for Two Shows, Cruz León knew everybody at the airport and was ushered through without a hitch.
It was already past eleven at night when the flight attendant announced that the plane was about to land at José Martí Airport in Havana. Abarca had chosen him a flight that would arrive late in Cuba, because he believed that at the end of the night, the police and immigration agents are usually tired and security checks are laxer. He was wrong. The passengers had already shown their passports at the entrance gates when two young men in uniform approached Cruz León, scowling, and ordered:
“Empty the backpack on the counter and open the case.”
He thought he was going to have a heart attack, but the officials seemed more interested in locating some smuggled article. They ran their fingers between the clothes, looking for some hidden object, but they were doing it slowly, as if they wanted to delay him on purpose. They fumbled around, rummaged here and there, looked at the passport and the vouchers without finding anything suspicious. Feeling certain that he was in the clear, Cruz León decided to play the tough guy. He turned to one of the officials and asked the fatal question:
“Don’t you want to see if you can find some contraband hidden between my teeth?”
The answer was immediate:
“Put your things back in the backpack, close the case and come with us.”
At the end of a corridor the three of them went into a small room, where the door was then locked. One of the policemen rapped:
“Take off your cap and your shirt and pull down your pants and underpants.”
Bare-chested and without his cap, Cruz León lowered his head to unbuckle his belt and loosen his pants, when he noticed that some of the talc he’d used to powder his feet had come out between his laces, with a dusting of white all over the tips of his boots. “At that moment, I felt that because of my cowardice, my stupid nerves, I had just signed my own death sentence,” he would remember afterwards. “Even a child would have suspected that I was carrying cocaine in my boots. I was totally fucked.” By luck, however, when he undid his belt, the pants and underwear fell on top of his boots, preventing the policemen from seeing the white powder. They made him lift up his testicles and separate his buttocks with his hands, leaving him semi-nude for some more minutes while they flicked through his passport and the rest of his paperwork again, and only then did they give the final order:
“Get dressed. You’re free to go.”
In the van that took him to the hotel, surrounded by noisy tourists, he felt born again, like Lazarus. And he repeated to himself in silence:
“I’m Ray Quick. I’m Ray Quick. I’m Ray Quick.”
Half an hour after the scare, Cruz León walked into the pink, five-story Ambos Mundos Hotel on the corner of Obispo and Mercaderes, halfway between the Plaza de Armas and the Bodeguita del Medio. Once installed in room 521, two doors away from 511, Hemingway’s museum-bedroom, Cruz León had doubts about the security of the digital safe screwed to the inside of his wardrobe. He chose to hide his electronic gadgetry in nooks and crannies in the furniture, like the empty space behind the drawers of the two nightstands and the pulley casing of the wooden blinds—always being careful to keep the detonators and the batteries separate from the C-4 paste which he had cautiously removed from his boots. He took a shower, fell into bed and sank into a deep sleep.
He woke up next morning and went down to the self-service cafeteria on the ground floor of the hotel wearing shorts, T-shirt and sandals. Perhaps because it was very early, there were no other guests there. He filled his plate with omelet and rounds of sausage, took a piece of toast, butter, a cup of coffee, and chose a table at random. As he began to eat, he saw a young couple come out of the elevator and serve themselves at the buffet. To his surprise, although all the other tables were empty, the pair crossed the room and went up to him. It was the young guy who asked him politely, again setting off his paranoia:
“Mind if we join you?”
With his heart pounding at record-breaking speed, he feigned spontaneity and answered, smiling:
“Yes, of course, with pleasure.”
The girl wanted to know where he was from and he thought it best to lie:
“I’m from Honduras. How about you?”
Cruz León didn’t like the answer:
“We’re from right here. We’re Cubans.”
He had heard that it was common for Cuban couples to spend their wedding night in tourist hotels, and added:
“Are you on honeymoon?”
The man replied, smiling, between spoonfuls of yogurt:
“No, we’re not even married. We’re from the police.”
Cruz León felt the omelet turn over in his stomach, his hands and feet began to sweat, but he kept his cool and joked:
“So that means I’m a suspect?”
The Cuban gave a laugh:
“No, of course not! As we’re responsible for internal security here at the hotel, we have our meals here. When we saw you eating alone, we decided to keep you company.”
Hunger gave way to fear and Cruz León thought it best to get out of there as quickly as possible. But go where? He thought about going out onto the street, but feared the exits might already be guarded by other cops. He made an excuse, got up and walked towards the elevators, looking out of the corner of his eye to see if the couple were following him, but they stayed at their table, eating breakfast. He went up to his room with shaking hands and sat on the edge of the bed, deciding what to do. He was sure he’d been rumbled, those policemen must just be waiting for the right moment to arrest him. After thinking for a few minutes, unable to calm down, he picked up his backpack, put on his cap and decided to go out. It would be no surprise if he were to open the door and run into this couple waiting for him, guns in hand, but the corridor was just as empty as before. When the elevator got to the first floor, he noticed that the couple was no longer in the cafeteria. The street was already busy with people—tourists, taxi drivers and street vendors offering souvenirs and loose cigars—and he used the opportunity to mix in with the bystanders, always squinting his eyes to see if anyone was following him. He saw a bici-taxi going by—a sort of Cuban rickshaw—and flagged it. He asked the rider to take him to the Vedado neighborhood, four kilometers away. The driver suggested they go via the Malecón, the seaside boulevard, but he preferred to go through the narrow streets of Old Havana, a longer route and not as nice but it would allow him to check with more certainty if he were being followed. Forty minutes later he got off near the Hotel Nacional, convinced that his jitters had been nothing more than just another paranoia attack.
During the next two days Cruz León explored the Cuban capital by taxi, on foot and by bici-taxi. He visited the eight targets suggested by Abarca, some of them more than once, until deciding on the Capri and the Nacional. A hundred meters apart, both of these hotels were part of Cuban history. Opened in 1955, two years after Batista’s Hotel Law gave tax breaks to large hotels and casinos, the modernist, twenty-five-story Capri was owned before the Revolution by a trio of Americans famous in the crime world: the actor George Raft and the gangsters Santo Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, the latter immortalized by Lee Strasberg in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II. Built in Spanish Neoclassical style and set in enormous gardens, the seven-story Hotel Nacional dates from 1930. Considered for decades the most luxurious hotel in the Caribbean, it was the favorite of celebrities like Winston Churchill and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as well as Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando and Orson Welles. In 1951 its presidential suite was covered in flowers to welcome the newlyweds Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.
Cruz León had picked the night of Friday, July 11, to prepare the bombs. He had dinner early, went up to his room at the Ambos Mundos, closed the window that looked onto a small interior garden, pulled the drapes, and spread his material over the bed. Squatting on the floor, he opened the diary to the page where Chávez Abarca had drawn the diagram and unscrewed the covers of the two calculators. He attached one end of the wires to the bell and the detonator pin, and the other end to the two battery terminals, not without first checking with the help of the voltmeter that the power generated was nine volts. He closed both mechanisms with a piece of insulation tape and divided the C-4 paste into two equal balls, putting them inside an opaque plastic bag. He put everything in the backpack, taking care to keep the calculators, batteries and detonators in one compartment and the explosive in another. He gathered up the pieces of wire that had fallen on the bedspread, flushed them down the toilet and went to sleep.
Cruz León woke up next day at nine o’clock, took a shower, put on his tourist gear—shorts, T-shirt, sandals, cap and sunglasses—donned the backpack and went down for breakfast, asking God to make sure he would not cross paths with the couple from hotel security. He had a small plate of fruit salad and a yogurt, and went out to look for a taxi. Fifteen minutes later he was sitting in an armchair in the lobby of the Capri Hotel. Apart from the employees at the reception desk, there was only a woman standing behind a table spread with tourism brochures. He was about to go to the first-floor bathroom to stick the detonator into the ball of explosive and activate the timer, when he was approached by a young, slim black man, wearing a white toque and apron:
“Are you a guest of the hotel?”
This was all he needed. Another Cuban chatting him up.
“No, I’m not. I’m waiting for a friend.”
“Here’s the thing: I’m the hotel cook, and I need to borrow five dollars to buy a bus ticket to visit a sick relative out in the country …
Cruz León didn’t even let him finish. He stuck his hand in his pocket, took out a ten-dollar bill and gave it to the Cuban, who was effusively grateful:
“Thank you so much. Come to the restaurant on Monday and I’ll make a special dish for you.”
The Salvadoran waved him off irritably:
“That’s OK, that’s OK, now excuse me, I’m waiting for someone.”
He locked himself in one of the restrooms of the reception area, opened his backpack, sank half of the detonator into the ball of C-4, set the clock to go off in ten minutes and went back to the lobby carrying the plastic bag with the bomb inside. He lodged it behind the armchair where he’d been sitting and marched swiftly out to the street. Just as he had already timed it, he took one and a half minutes to cover the distance of one block to the Nacional. In the hotel restroom he fixed the second bomb to go off in seven minutes, put everything into another little plastic bag and went back to reception. He was about to slip the package behind a flower vase, when a smiling young girl in a miniskirt appeared in front of him. He soon realized she was a jinetera, a call girl, looking for clients. Before she could open her mouth, he cut her off with a threat:
“I’m not interested in sex. If you don’t get out of here right now, I’m calling the police.”
The girl turned around, scared, and walked away. Cruz León was able to make his way to the vase at the end of the tiled lobby and discreetly hide the little bag among the foliage before going out onto the street. As he was descending the steps leading to the front gardens, the bomb went off, turning the hotel’s enormous front door into thousands of shards of broken glass. A group of European tourists who were getting off a bus stampeded wildly through the trees, and Cruz León took the opportunity to mix with them. In the midst of general panic and confusion, he walked on for a few minutes; when he got to the Malecón, he heard the second bomb explode at the Capri. He wandered for half an hour, took a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Plaza de Armas. He was perspiring so much that he changed his green shirt for the white spare he was carrying in his backpack. He spent the day cruising around aimlessly among the tourists who filled Old Havana and only at dusk, after making sure there were no police waiting for him, did he return to the Ambos Mundos. On Sunday morning he went to a newsstand and bought copies of Granma and Juventud Rebelde, the two main newspapers in Cuba, and was surprised to see that not a single word had come out about the two explosions. No photos, no news, nothing, absolutely nothing. On Monday, July 14, when his package tour was over, the van from the agency picked him up at the appointed time and took him to the airport. The departure went off smoothly, and at midday the Taca plane was heading for Costa Rica. The mission had been accomplished.
Thirteen years later, in April 2010, sitting in a prison cell at Villa Marista in Havana, waiting to be led before the firing squad, Cruz León, now fifteen kilos heavier, would remember that far-off sunny Monday morning:
“When the plane flew over Havana, I was thinking of only one thing: I really was Ray Quick. I was a specialist. I deserved to take Sharon Stone to bed.”