Sunday mornings in Miami are usually calm and peaceful. In general people like to get up late and go for brunch around midday, not at home, but in restaurants and hotels. In the quietness of dawn, the only noise heard by the few residents jogging in the city’s wooded streets and avenues comes from the air conditioners turned on in almost every house. That is, when the long-awaited, well-deserved weekend rest is not interrupted by the loud arrival of El Jefe, “The Chief,” at the wheel of his big white SUV. The Chief is what the Cuban exile Rodolfo Frómeta calls himself. At five-foot-two, the sixty-year-old Frómeta sports hairy eyebrows, a thick black beard and a flat nose. Confident in the constitutional precept whereby the law of silence is overridden by the freedom of expression, every Sunday at crack of dawn he covers his head with a black beret, takes his Ford Bronco out of the garage, turns on the speakers on the jeep’s hood and starts off slowly on his round of anti-Castroist preaching, which always begins with the same battle cry:
“Wake up, fellow countrymen!”
Indifferent to the protests, often couched in bad language, emanating from people’s windows, he winds leisurely through the streets that cross the deserted Le Jeune Avenue, one of the city’s main thoroughfares.
“Wake up, Cubans! Wake up, for our homeland is in danger!”
Named on one of the index cards in the register of “individuals linked to terrorism” given by Cuba to the FBI, Rodolfo Frómeta is perhaps the character who best represents the stereotype of the exiled Cuban that led the lawyers of the five detained men to request the transfer of the trial from Miami to another city in Florida. The little man dressed in camouflage who introduces himself as “the hero of a thousand battles” is the leader of the F4 Commandos, an anti-Castroist organization installed in a modest room in Little Havana and registered at City Hall under the pompous name of Comandos F4 Partido Uno Inc. In the cafés of Miami’s Cuban neighborhood, some people sneer that every battle commanded by El Jefe was waged in total safety in the humid swamps of the Everglades. That’s where he and his few followers stage combats that almost invariably end with the arrest and summary judgement of “Fidel Castro,” impersonated by one of the group members. Over the years, the journalists attending his press conferences have grown ever fewer. In the tiny, stuffy room on West Flagler Street, Frómeta welcomes the press surrounded by a “general staff” made up of his wife, one of her sons, his brother-in-law and a childhood friend, all in camouflage gear. On such occasions he trumpets “the last attack by the organization against the tyrant Castro” or against “the repression services of the dictatorship.” If some inexperienced reporter asks to see evidence of the prospective actions, his retort is that “a patriot needs to give explanations to no one.”
His comedic features do not mean, however, that the strutting Frómeta is a harmless opponent of the Cuban Revolution. In 1968 he fled the Island by jumping over the wire fence protecting the Guantánamo naval base—the same one José Basulto had bypassed a couple of years previously. He stayed for just one day at the military base before being moved to the United States on a US Air Force plane. He set up residence in New York, where he was recruited by the terrorist group Alpha 66. In October 1981, when he attempted to pull off his first and only clandestine incursion into Cuba, he was arrested and convicted by the local authorities; released nine years later, he went back to the United States, this time to settle in Miami. In 1994, the Chief was arrested by American police while planning to take a shipment of weapons into Cuba. When he was released that same year, he split from Alpha 66, claiming that its main leader, Andrés Nazario Sargén, was “all talk and no action,” and created his own organization, the F4 Commandos. Intending to put his organization on the map with a spectacular operation, he ordered four Stinger 92 portable rocket launchers from a Florida arms dealer, costing $150,000. According to the manufacturer, Raytheon Systems, at least 270 airplanes had been shot down to date, in various parts of the world, through the use of this weapon. On the day set for him to deliver the cash and receive the merchandise, Frómeta was arrested by the seller himself, in reality an FBI agent disguised as a trafficker. Tried and convicted, the Cuban spent three and a half years in prison and was then released on probation, going straight back to his armed activities against Cuba and his Sunday preaching.
Just a few blocks away and a few minutes on foot from the F4 Commandos headquarters, stands living proof that the ludicrous Rodolfo Frómeta does not personify the sentiments of the entire exiled Cuban community. Located on the west side of Little Havana, the Alianza Martiana (named after José Martí, the apostle of Cuban independence) occupies premises as modest as those of the organization run by the Chief. The Alianza Martiana functions as an umbrella organization for four groups in favor of dialogue with the Cuban government—the José Martí Association, the Alliance of Workers in the Cuban Community, the Association of Christian Women in Defense of the Family and the Antonio Maceo Brigade—as well as a group called the Bolivarian Circle of Miami, made up of Venezuelan immigrants favorable to President Hugo Chávez.
The Alianza Martiana owes its public visibility to its chairman, Max Lesnik, a man who is even smaller than Frómeta and yet at over eighty years of age displays all the forcefulness and agility of a young man. The Hispanic community in Florida, especially the Cubans, were used to hearing his strong, hoarse voice on “Radio Miami.” Despite the name, always followed by the slogan “An Open Forum at the Service of Truth,” this “radio” is, in fact, a one-hour daily slot rented by Lesnik on a local radio station. Between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, from Monday through Friday, he directs and presents what he calls “a radiophonic magazine.” Physically this radio program is squeezed into a four-meter-square studio, set up at the back of Alianza’s space. Lesnik sits down there every day at the same time, adjusts the earphones on his head where a few scarce auburn-dyed hairs survive, and monopolizes the microphones for the final twenty minutes of the broadcast. The unequivocally pro-Cuban Revolution “Radio Miami” presents itself as an alternative to southern Florida’s media “that do not provide truthful, objective information on what is going on in America, in Cuba, and in the world,” and usually refers to the anti-Castroist organizations as “the irascible ultrarightists from the ghetto.” Three other exiled Cubans assist Lesnik: the sixty-something Lorenzo Gonzalo and Ramón Coll, the latter brought to the United States in the wake of Operation Peter Pan, and the young Sergio Montané, son of Jesús Montané, one of the expeditionary members on the yacht Granma along with Fidel and Che Guevara, and also a member of the Cuban Communist Party directorate until his death in 1999. Gonzalo split with the Revolution soon after backing it, was accused of terrorism and sentenced to a thirty-year prison term, at the end of which he moved to Miami.
Four years younger than the Cuban leader, Max Lesnik got to know Fidel Castro in the late 1940s, when they were both studying law at Havana University. Back then, the future president was clean-shaven and always wore a jacket and tie. The fact that they belonged to different wings of the Orthodox Party—Lesnik had never been a communist, and Fidel was already getting close to the Marxists in the student movement—did not stop them from becoming friends. The son of a Polish businessman who had immigrated to Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lesnik was the only one of their group who had a car, a navy blue Pontiac, a fact that made him the driver of his friend, who had not yet become a communist. And it was in the Lesnik family’s apartment, in front of the old presidential palace in the center of Old Havana, that Fidel hid for two weeks from the dictator Fulgencio Batista’s police when they were first on his tail.
When the two men finished university, they each went their own way. In 1953, while Fidel was leading the frustrated attempt to take the Moncada Barracks, a show of daring that would cost him two years in prison, Lesnik was taking his first steps in journalism, which would come to be his lifelong occupation. They would not meet again until December 1955, when Lesnik, just married to Miriam, took advantage of his honeymoon in Mexico to visit his friend. Fidel, his brother Raúl, Che Guevara, Jesús Montané and some others were learning the rudiments of guerrilla warfare on the outskirts of Mexico City with the retired Cuban general Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. Excited by the group’s determination to overthrow Batista’s dictatorship by force, Lesnik returned to his country and joined the urban cells of the 26th of July Movement that brought together different guerrilla factions.
With the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, Lesnik fully endorsed the new regime, but turned down invitations to participate in government, prefering to remain “safely in journalism.” The political and personal bonds between the two old friends would be tested for the first time a few months after the bearded men took office. The creation of revolutionary courts and the execution by firing squad of allies of the old regime, accused of murder and torture, shocked the young journalist. “The shootings left a bitter taste,” he would remember half a century later, in his comfortable house in Coral Gables. “It was not just a matter of humanity; I thought the paredón [the execution wall] would tarnish the Revolution’s image, which in fact it did.” The last straw, causing a definitive break with Fidel, was Cuba’s increasing closeness to the Soviet Union. Lesnik knew, of course, that the increasingly radical Revolution did not tolerate dissent, not even from someone like himself, a friend of almost all the top members of the government and an active militant in the fight against Batista. In December 1960 he decided to leave the country. He sent Miriam and their two daughters to Miriam’s parents’ house, and in January 1961 took refuge in the residence of the Brazilian ambassador, Vasco Leitão da Cunha. Shortly after, he secretly boarded a small motorboat and made the dangerous nineteen-hour trip to the United States. His fellow escapees were Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and Andrés Nazario Sargén, who two years later would become the main leaders of the Alpha 66 group. After two months, Miriam and the two girls landed safely in Miami.
Even far away from his homeland and from the friends he had helped to power, Lesnik still felt himself to be one of them. “I never ceased being a revolutionary,” he would repeat to whoever was listening, “but as I’m a revolutionary who worships intelligence, I can’t be a communist.” Despite its declared anti-communism, that statement was enough for him to be branded a “traitor to the homeland” and “a spy at Fidel Castro’s service” by some sectors in the already numerous Cuban community in Florida. Indifferent to what they thought of him, he plunged headlong into journalism where he felt like a fish in water. His new start in the United States was low-key. As he would do again some years later with “Radio Miami,” he rented space at a local station where he broadcast a daily program in Spanish. In the mid-1960s, Lesnik decided to launch the tabloid Réplica, intended to rival the weekly newspaper Patria, a clearly anti-Castroist newspaper funded by the overthrown Fulgencio Batista, who was enjoying a sweet exile on the island of Madeira under the protection of the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Unlike the dogmatic Patria, whose texts read like anticommunist rants, Réplica championed pluralism, publishing opinions from both sides of the Florida Straits. Compared with its slick rival, Lesnik’s Réplica had a poor graphic appearance, but it was handed out for free, often by Lesnik himself, in the cafés and Cuban meeting places of Little Havana.
The formula worked. Launched with only eight pages, a few months later Réplica was circulating with two forty-page sections, half of which were taken up with advertising. A year after the launch, the success inspired Lesnik to issue a second publication with the same name but in magazine format, and with a color cover. The tabloid continued to circulate on Tuesdays, while the magazine arrived at the kiosks on Thursdays. The magazine proved even more popular than the original newspaper. By the time Réplica was two years old, in the middle of 1968, Max Lesnik had four publications on his hands: besides the tabloid and the magazine, he had launched a tourist guide, distributed free of charge in hotels and airports. However, the greatest success, both with the public and financially, would come from a little magazine called Guía de TV; it was a Spanish copy of the ubiquitous American TV Guide, the weekly listings magazine which also gave the inside gossip on the stars.
When Lesnik was owner of just the Réplica newspaper, he didn’t seem to bother the more radical sectors of the exiled Cuban community. But the rapid evolution from an almost handmade publication to a small media empire turned on a red warning light for the verticales, the “upright” anti-Castroists. In response to the first death threats, made in anonymous phone calls, Lesnik discreetly began carrying a Colt .38 revolver on his belt. A few weeks later, a bomb destroyed the front of the building where his publishing company operated. When he went to the police to file a complaint, he heard a chilling warning from the chief officer on duty:
“We will investigate the attack, Mr. Lesnik, but if you intend to keep up your present editorial line, then you’re a dead man.”
Over the following months, eleven bombs exploded at his publishing house, Réplica Editorial, but since the headstrong Cuban would not give in, the extreme right-wing groups then began attacking his supporters. They targeted the newspaper stands and kiosks that sold or distributed Lesnik’s publications, then the advertisers. One of these was the cigar manufacturer Padrón Cigars, owned by the exiled Cuban millionaire José Orlando Padrón, an advocate of maintaining a dialogue with Havana’s communist government. As well as advertising regularly in all of Lesnik’s publications, Padrón offered the two versions of Réplica, the tourist guide and the TV magazine for sale in his tobacco stores—a degree of solidarity punished by four bomb attacks. The terrorist campaign would eventually yield results. Max Lesnik ran out of advertisers and distributors, and eighteen months after the first threatening phone call, he closed the doors of his publishing house. Consistently committed to détente between Cuba and the US, Lesnik went back to Cuba for the first time in the mid-1970s. When he was received for an audience at the Palace of the Revolution, Lesnik joked with the friend he had hidden in his house twenty years before:
“How should I address you: as Commander, President or Prime Minister?”
The Cuban leader answered with a smile:
“For you, I will always be Fidel.”
From then on Lesnik started to pay regular visits to Cuba, where he was invariably received by Castro. Through another exiled believer in renewing the dialogue between Cuba and the US, the Cuban multimillionaire Charles Dascal, owner of the Continental Bank of Miami, Lesnik got close to the former American president, Jimmy Carter. For a long time the journalist acted as a go-between between the Cuban leader and Carter, who would become an active advocate of the normalization of relations between the two countries. This process culminated in a visit to Cuba by Carter in May 2002, the first by a former president of the United States since 1959; it required special authorization from President George W. Bush. The visit would end with a scene that would have been unthinkable at the height of the Cold War: before a crowd of 50,000 people in Havana’s Latin American Stadium, Carter threw the first pitch with Fidel Castro as batter in an unprecedented baseball game between a Cuban and an American team.
However, the diametrically opposed profiles of Lesnik and Rodolfo Frómeta are insufficient to convey an even slightly reliable picture of Cuban Miami. A third point is needed to complete the triangle with “Radio Miami” and the F4 Commandos, and this can be found in the sixty-eight-year-old writer Norberto Fuentes, who lives in a penthouse apartment on Boulevard Ponce de León. The grandfather of five children and the father of four daughters from four different marriages, Fuentes didn’t hide his irritation upon discovering that he would be sharing this chapter with Lesnik and Frómeta. “Please, put me in some other company,” he protested. “Frómeta’s a ridiculous character and Lesnik’s an opportunist.” His opinions about the Cuban exiled community as a whole are equally caustic. “Cuban immigration turned Miami into an independent republic, a typical banana republic,” he scoffs, with a laugh that dispels any suspicions of resentment. “This place is shit.” Asked why he elected to live among compatriots whom he seems to despise so much, he answers that he doesn’t live in Miami, “but in the United States.” As a matter of fact, no one has ever seen the writer at any functions organized by the Alianza Martiana and much less in the company of anti-Castroist verticales, whom he doesn’t even want to hear about:
“I was, and still am, a revolutionary. I’m a Marxist, I didn’t come to the States to take part in a counterrevolution. I came here in search of the rebelliousness and iconoclastic spirit of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Wayne in Rio Bravo.”
Considered even by his enemies on the Island as one of the greatest Cuban writers alive, Fuentes was only fifteen when Fidel Castro came to power. If fate walked in a straight line, the natural thing would have been for him to leave the country in the first migration waves to the United States. His father, the advertising executive and lawyer Norberto Fuentes, represented the interests of none other than Santo Trafficante in Cuba, one of the most famous American gangsters of the 1950s. According to documents disclosed by the CIA in 2007, Trafficante, who owned two casinos, one nightclub and four hotels in Havana, among them the Capri, delivered 10 percent of his establishments’ takings every night to one of Fulgencio Batista’s messengers. Once the dictator was overthrown, Trafficante was arrested and deported to the United States as an “undesirable alien.” Fuentes Sr. chose to stay on in Cuba, “doing the business he could and the business he couldn’t,” according to his son, until his death in 1978.
Educated at Candler College, a traditional American Methodist school established in Cuba, the writer-to-be grew up listening to Elvis Presley and Cole Porter. Joining the Revolution at the precocious age of seventeen, he started to work for a magazine published by the Communist Youth, a job that allowed him to travel all over the country writing articles on the radical changes implemented by the new regime. Fuentes made his debut as an author in 1968, at the age of twenty-three, with Condenados de Condado (The Condemned of Condado), a collection of short stories inspired by his coverage of the repression of a hotspot of armed resistance to the Revolution in the Escambray Mountains. Although the book had been awarded a prize by the Casa de las Américas, the most traditional cultural institution in post-Batista Cuba, and had become a national bestseller, Condenados was considered a “dissident work” by the government and as such caused what the writer called “my first collision with the Revolution.” Leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces had been stung by what the author called “my irrepressible, unalterable lack of respect.” According to Fuentes, when Fidel Castro finished the book he threw it so hard against the wall that “its puny one hundred and fifty pages” were scattered all over the floor.
In 1971, well after the unruly Fuentes and the Revolution had “forgiven each other” for the incident, they clashed again, more noisily. The writer Heberto Padilla had been arrested on vague charges of subversion following the publication of his prizewinning book of poems Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game). There was an international outcry and a strongly worded petition from sixty-two intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Mario Vargas Llosa, Susan Sontag and Carlos Fuentes, after Padilla was forced to perform a humiliating act of public self-criticism before the Writers’ Union. He included in his mea culpa his wife and other colleagues who were present. When Norberto Fuentes heard his name, he jumped up and protested:
“Just a moment, Heberto! Take my name off that list! Besides repudiating self-criticism, I can’t regret any counterrevolutionary activities which I never engaged in!”
Such insolence proved costly. Although no explicit punishment was meted out, Fuentes endured some years of ostracism, during which he devoted himself to his next book, Hemingway in Cuba. With a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, the work was published simultaneously in Cuba and the United States in 1984, and its success was instrumental in reconciling the author with the Cuban Revolution and its leadership, whose favorite writer he became. Fuentes experienced the Angolan Civil War as both journalist and combatant, and was part of the Cuban delegation to Cairo that negotiated the peace treaties in 1988 with representatives of Angola, South Africa, the United States and the Soviet Union. As well as being awarded the Internationalist Combatant Medal, First Class, Norberto Fuentes had built a solid friendship in Angola with Antonio “Tony” de la Guardia, a colonel in the Ministry of the Interior with a long record of services rendered to the Revolution, not only in Africa, but also in the war that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua.
On the morning of June 14, 1989, the people of Cuba awakened to an unbelievable piece of news on the front page of Granma: the day before, General Arnaldo Ochoa, who had led the hundreds of thousands of Cubans in the Angolan and the Ethiopian campaigns, Colonel Tony de la Guardia, his twin brother of the same rank, Patricio de la Guardia, and another dozen officials had been arrested. The accusation against them could not be more serious: between 1987 and 1989 the group had supposedly used Cuban airplanes, boats and military facilities to smuggle six tons of cocaine, in an operation that had brought in over $3 million in commission. The drug was acquired from the Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, carried to Varadero beach in Cuban airplanes and loaded onto speedboats heading towards the islets at the extreme southern tip of Florida. When he read of the arrests, Norberto called one of his powerful friends, Carlos Aldana of the Ideology Secretariat, with a staggering revelation: three months before, Tony de la Guardia had asked him to stash some bags full of dollars, and the money was still hidden in his house. At dawn on June 16, a group of officers of the Ministry of the Interior showed up at Fuentes’s apartment, in the Vedado district of Havana, and seized half a million dollars hidden under his bed. According to the police report drafted on the spot and signed by the writer, there were “564,000 dollars, separated into wads of different denominations, stored in black nylon Samsonite bags.”
When de la Guardia asked him to conceal such a sum in his house, Fuentes suspected that it might be “plata mal habida” (ill-gotten gains), but he never dreamed that his friend could be involved in corruption, let alone drug trafficking. After all, this was a respected war veteran who since 1982 had been occupying a post of vital importance at the Ministry of the Interior—the department in charge of all the dollar transactions for setting up joint ventures with foreign companies and circumventing the US economic embargo. Although the authorities accepted the writer’s innocence when he insisted that he was unaware of the provenance of the money, his honeymoon with the top echelons of the Cuban political hierarchy was over. Tried by a military court including forty-five generals, brigadier generals and admirals, the fourteen defendants were stripped of their ranks, medals and decorations, among them that of “Hero of the Republic of Cuba” bestowed on General Arnaldo Ochoa. Fuentes’s name did not arise during the trial. According to the verdict, published on July 10, ten of the defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten to thirty years. Ochoa, Tony de la Guardia, Major Amado Padrón and Captain Jorge Martínez were sentenced to death and executed at dawn on July 13, 1989.
Interrogated several times at Villa Marista over the weeks following the “Ochoa case,” Norberto Fuentes would spend four years in political and professional limbo. He remained free but would never again be “the columnist of the Revolution,” as he was called by the Cuban press. He spent his time working on a new version of his bestseller Hemingway in Cuba, wrote a book on the Angolan war and compiled a selection of his best articles—but no Cuban publisher was interested. He received invitations to give speeches and seminars abroad but couldn’t get the necessary exit visas. In the second half of 1993 Fuentes decided to escape from Cuba via the only means available to someone in his circumstances: by sea.
Perhaps because it had been conceived by a writer, the escape plan seemed like the screenplay for a Hollywood thriller. With the help of some friends in the United States, Fuentes pitched a story to the conservative daily the Washington Times that so far only had a title—“The Rafter”—and which would describe the getaway to Miami that he intended to carry out. In order to complete the project, however, he would need $10,000 in advance to cover travel expenses. The newspaper, owned by the South Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon, jumped on the offer, and days later the requested amount reached him in Havana. Fuentes next hired the services of Boomerang, the nickname of a sailor who had ferried many exiles across the Florida Straits and done several stints in prison for it. Via the bolsa negra, as the black market is known in Cuba, the writer used Reverend Moon’s money to buy an old Soviet inflatable launch, big enough for twelve people, with a 135 hp Yamaha engine. To document the adventure he invited the Italian photographer Luca Marinelli, a frequent visitor to the Island. Young, bohemian and adventurous, Marinelli had become a celebrity photojournalist the year before, when he captured the dramatic execution of an Italian soldier by a rebel in Somalia.
The first setback was when Boomerang decreed the inclusion of six more passengers on the crossing, making it even more lucrative for the sailor. Although Fuentes disliked the idea of being part of a group escape, with people he’d never seen before, he had no alternative. Before departure, however, he spent a few weeks recording memories and information onto diskettes that would be invaluable if he decided to write about his troubled story one day. By the end there were fourteen megabytes of notes on ten disks, the equivalent of 2,000 pages of a book. He stored the disks in a plastic bag weighted down with a little lead bar he used as a paperweight. If the worst came to the worst and they were caught by the police, the first thing he would do would be to throw the bag with his precious memories into the sea.
On the evening of Sunday, October 10, 1993, Fuentes and his wife Niurka de la Torre, a doctor three decades younger to whom he had been married for some years, met up with Marinelli and together they walked for an hour until they reached the small, stony Jaimanitas beach, located a few blocks beyond the twin hotels Tritón and Neptuno, in Miramar. Around ten, Boomerang showed up in the dark, steering the boat that already had his quota of six passengers on board. Although the dangerous trip in such a rickety vessel could take well over twenty-four hours, the trio’s only supplies were a few packs of cookies kept in a backpack along with the disks. Marinelli, who seemed to have drunk too much rum, was carrying nothing but two Nikon cameras around his neck plus his Italian passport and an air ticket for Miami-Cancún-Havana in the back pocket of his jeans. When the adventure was over, he intended to resume his vacation in Cuba.
Everything went wrong. At one o’clock in the morning, when the lights of Havana were still visible from out at sea, the boat slowed down and began to go round in circles. The vibration had caused a piece of wood from the stern to come loose, making the engine sag down into the water and minutes later stop working. The skipper and his passengers remained adrift for forty long, hushed minutes, until the boat was swept by a beam of light coming from an approaching vessel. When Boomerang saw it was the Cuban Coast Guard patrol, he put his hands on his head. “Assholes!” he muttered. “Another New Year’s Eve in the cooler!” Fuentes reached surreptitiously into his backpack, grabbed the bag with the disks and threw it into the sea, blithely copied by the photographer who didn’t hesitate to throw overboard two cameras that were certainly worth as much as the writer had paid for the boat and the engine that had left them in the lurch. Dawn had not even broken yet when they found themselves locked away inside the cells at Villa Marista.
In less than a week, Boomerang’s six customers were freed and the photographer had been packed back to Italy on the first available flight. One month later, Fuentes and Niurka were released and the seaman, just as he had foreseen, started off 1994 in jail. In the writer’s opinion, his release was due to the Cuban government’s fear they might be “creating a new Solzhenitsyn in the Caribbean”—a reference to the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a sworn enemy of the Soviet Union (in 1970, after spending years in Soviet prisons, the author of The Gulag Archipelago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature). Fuentes spent the following ten months at large. He didn’t know, however, that an operation was underway in the United States to get him out of the country.
After some informal discussions, though it is not certain on whose initiative, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez and presidents Clinton and Salinas de Gortari of Mexico decided to act to get Fuentes out of Cuba as soon as possible. Besides the three of them and the writer Carlos Fuentes, only two others were aware of the plan: Felipe González, the president of Spain, and the American writer William Kennedy, who was then on the board of trustees of PEN International. Under absolute secrecy, over the following weeks Gabo traveled three times to Cuba and Fidel got at least four phone calls from Salinas de Gortari, who always stressed that he was talking entirely for himself, not on behalf of Bill Clinton. With such powerful sponsors, results were not long in coming. On the morning of August 24, 1994, a jet with the Mexican president’s insignia painted on its fuselage landed at Havana Airport carrying only two passengers: García Márquez and an official from President Salinas de Gortari’s Cabinet. A passport was hurriedly issued to Norberto Fuentes and on August 25 he boarded the plane to Mexico, where he stayed for ten days and then left for Miami, where he would settle.
And it was as a lonely, silent observer that Fuentes read the news of the Cuban intelligence agents’ arrest in Miami—unlike Max Lesnik and Rodolfo Frómeta, who led noisy pressure groups lobbying at the courthouse door, respectively in favor of the Cuban prisoners and against them. The thirty years of his tumultuous relationship with Castroism had left deep wounds—“the Cuban Revolution was very, I mean very ungrateful to me,” Fuentes never tired of repeating—but these wounds had not turned him into a typical miami cubano. On the contrary, as became apparent a few days after he arrived in Florida. Invited to speak before the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, he disappointed the audience, who expected to hear him vituperate against Fidel Castro. “Those people were hoping that I would do there what I had refused to do in the Padilla case: self-criticism,” remembers Fuentes, with roars of laughter. “They wanted me to write an exile version of Condenados de Condado.” The Cuban agents’ trial would again pit him against the mainstream of the Cuban community in Florida. “For the first time, this society poisoned by defeat had the chance to strike a blow against the Cuban Revolution and against Fidel,” maintained the writer. “From the first day, the trial was pressurized by public opinion and by the media toward a single result: conviction.” Nor does Fuentes believe this was an isolated opinion:
“It was clear that if the trial were held in Miami they would be convicted. I knew that, the five prisoners knew that, and Fidel knew it too.”