Gabriel García Márquez happened to be in Havana when Graham arrived. The two writers were now old friends, and it was Gabo who helped break the ice when Fidel Castro dropped in to visit Graham Greene.
García Márquez’s original report of the meeting was reprinted in the Cuban newspaper Granma on 14 April 1991 after Graham’s death.
Graham Greene stopped over in Havana for 20 hours, and the local correspondents of the foreign press read all kinds of things into it. Naturally. He arrived on an executive plane belonging to the government of Nicaragua and was accompanied by José de Jesús Martínez [Chuchu], a Panamanian poet and professor of mathematics who was one of the men closest to General Omar Torrijos. Moreover, they were met at the airport by protocol officials, and the meeting was wrapped in so much discretion that no journalist found out about the visit until it was over. They were taken to a house for visiting dignitaries that is usually reserved for heads of state of friendly countries, a black Mercedes Benz was placed at their disposal — the kind that was used only during the 6th Summit Meeting of Non-Aligned Countries, nine years ago. Actually, they didn’t need it, because they didn’t leave the house. Old Cuban friends of theirs came to see them — friends who knew they were there because the writer himself told them. Painter René Portocarrero who became Greene’s friend when the writer came to Havana to study the setting for Our Man in Havana, got the message too late, and, when he got there, the writer had already gone back. Greene ate only once during the 20 hours, nibbling at a lot of things like a wet bird, but he had a bottle of good Spanish red wine, and the two of them and their guests polished off six bottles of whisky.
When Greene departed, he left the impression that not even he knew why he had come — a thing that could happen only to one of his characters in his novels, fomented by doubts about God.
I went to his house two hours after he arrived because he phoned as soon as he heard I was in the city. This made me very happy, not only because I’ve admired him for a long time as a writer and as a human being but also because many years had gone by since we’d seen each other last.
After so many years, I found a rejuvenated Graham Greene whose clear thinking continues to be his most surprising and unalterable virtue. As always, we talked about everything under the sun. What most caught my attention was the sense of humor with which he referred to the four trials in which he had to appear in various French courts, as a result of the accusatory pamphlet he published against the Mafia in Nice. For many familiar with the Côte d’Azur’s underworld, Greene’s revelations were nothing new. But we, his friends, feared for his life. He held to his course, however, and went ahead with his denunciation. ‘I’d rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate,’ he said. And I said then — I don’t remember where — that Graham Greene was playing literary Russian roulette, as he had done in his youth with a .32 Smith and Wesson, as reported in his memoirs. He remembered my statement during the visit and took it as a starting point for telling us the details of his four trials.
At around 1.00 a.m. Fidel Castro dropped by to visit. He and Greene had first met shortly after the triumph of the Revolution, when Greene attended the filming of Our Man in Havana. They saw each other several times since then, during Greene’s periodic visits, but it seemed that they hadn’t gotten together the last two times, because, when they shook hands, Graham Greene, said, ‘We haven’t seen each other for 16 years.’ It seemed to me that they were both a little daunted, and it wasn’t easy for them to start talking. Therefore I asked Graham Greene how much truth there was in the episode of Russian roulette that he’d told about in his memoirs. His blue eyes, the clearest I’ve ever seen, lit up with the memory. ‘That was when I was 19,’ he said, ‘when I fell in love with my sister’s teacher.’ He said that, in fact, he had played a solitary game of Russian roulette with an old revolver belonging to an older brother and that he’d done so on four different occasions.
‘There was a week between the first and the second time, but the last two were just a few minutes apart.’ Fidel Castro, who couldn’t let a fact such as that go by without exploring it in depth, asked him how many bullets could fit in the cylinder of the revolver. ‘Six,’ Graham Greene replied. Then Fidel Castro closed his eyes and began to murmur multiplication figures. Finally, he looked at the writer in astonishment and said, ‘According to the calculation of probabilities, you should be dead.’ Graham Greene smiled with the serenity of all writers when they feel they are living an episode from one of their own books and said, ‘It’s a good thing I was always terrible at maths.’ Perhaps because they had been speaking about death, Fidel Castro quickly noted the writer’s youthful appearance and good health and asked him what exercises he did. It was a question that was bound to come up, because Fidel Castro considers physical culture to be one of the keys of life. He does several hours of exercise every day, in the same enormous proportions in which he does everything, and he urges his friends to do the same. His physical condition is exceptional for a man of his age, and he attributes his good mental health to this. Therefore he was taken back when Graham Greene replied that he’d never done any exercises at all, yet he felt very alert and had no health problems at 79. Moreover, he said that he didn’t have any special diet. That he slept between seven and eight hours a night — which was also surprising in an old man with sedentary habits — and that, at times, he drank up to a bottle of whisky a day and a liter of wine with each meal, yet he’d never become a slave to alcohol.
For a moment, Fidel Castro seemed to doubt the efficacy of his regimen of health, but he quickly realized that Graham Greene was an admirable exception —admirable, but an exception. By the time we said goodbye, I was sure that, sooner or later, that meeting would be described in a book of memoirs by one of the three of us — or perhaps by all.
When Graham returned to Antibes he wrote in a letter to me dated 2 February 1983, ‘It was an amusing meeting with Fidel in my twenty-four hours in Cuba. He looked to me much younger than he had done in 1966 and much more relaxed.’ An article reported by a colleague of mine had appeared in Time that had enraged Graham. He was so upset by this article and the treatment of the Sandinistas that he went on French television to excoriate it. He said he had promised to send a copy to Chuchu.
In a letter two weeks later he said:
I wrote to you after I returned but I was very tired and I don’t know what I told you! Did I tell you that we had had a visit from Marcial who was very friendly? I was very shocked by that piece in Time magazine so that I broke all my resolutions and went on television on the Third Regional to contradict the story of which I said I did not believe a word as I had spoken to many priests and American nuns in Nicaragua who would certainly have had some knowledge of such things going on. [The Time story, ‘A Defector’s Firsthand Account of Massacres and Torture’, was full of allegations which the Sandinistas denied.] I have also written a long letter to The Tablet [the British edition of the Catholic newspaper] on the unreliability of Archbishop Obando y Bravo. I will send you a cutting when it appears. A crazy young documentary Australian film director Bradbury has sent me a student’s ticket to Managua and back because he wants me to help him in a film he is doing with Bianca Jagger. He is a good documentary man and on the right side and I expect he will be trying to look you up. Did I tell you that Fidel prophesied a guerrilla victory in San Salvador in a year’s time?
Pope John Paul II descended on Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua less than two months after Graham departed. The Pope’s visit began with his humiliating Father Ernesto Cardenal, the Minister of Culture. As Father Cardenal knelt to kiss his papal ring the Pope withdrew his hand and wagged his papal finger in the priest’s face. The Pope was admonishing him and other Catholic clerics for taking an active role in the revolutionary government. Then the papal Mass turned into a free-for-all. Youthful Sandinistas in the huge throng baited nuns sitting before them in the stands who were trying to keep the youths quiet. Badgered by hecklers in the crowd, the Pope grew impatient and asked them to be silent. The agitators loved it. The Pope had suddenly lost his infallibility and descended to their level.
John Paul II had angered many Sandinistas not only by his public scolding of Father Cardenal but by reaffirming his support for Nicaraguan Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, a harsh critic of the Sandinistas. The comandantes sat through the Mass, making no effort to intervene to restore order.
Following the Pope from Nicaragua to Port-au-Prince on his tour, I found it interesting that he faced a different kind of political drama in Haiti. Led by Bishop Willy Romulus of Jeremie, the liberal wing of the Haitian Catholic Church took heart when the Pope declared, ‘Things must change here.’ This papal declaration was pounced on by young oppositionists who used it as their battle cry against the Duvalier regime. The ensuing popular uprising succeeded, and Jean-Claude Duvalier ceased to be President-for-Life on the morning of 7 February 1986.
Graham, who was already deeply concerned by the Polish Pope’s actions, wrote in a letter to me on 28 March 1983, ‘I haven’t a very high opinion of [Daniel] Ortega and I thought he behaved rather stupidly — but then so did the Pope. I am glad the rum punches are still good at the Oloffson. I have no summer plans for the time being, but I’ll let you know if I travel west.’
In Nicaragua, three months after Salvadorean guerrilla leader Marcial had visited Graham in Managua, the commander of the strongest arm of the Salvadorean guerrilla force was dead. His end came days after his second-in-command, Mélida Anaya Montes, known by her nom de guerre Ana María, was brutally murdered in a safe house in a prestigious suburb of Managua. Her throat was slashed, and according to the Nicaraguan Interior Ministry her body revealed eighty stab wounds. Marcial was in Libya at the time and returned to Managua for the funeral. Reporters who saw him described Marcial as looking much older than his sixty-four years and wearing a sweater under a coat despite the intense summer heat. Six days later, on 12 April, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, ‘Marcial’, was found dead, reportedly by his own hand, of a bullet in the heart. His role in the killing of Anaya Montes had been established. In a letter dated 22 May Graham wrote:
I haven’t yet any settled plans for the summer except that I hope to find time to get on a bit with the book I am writing about Omar. I was shocked by Marcial’s death. When I saw him in Nicaragua he was full of optimism for the future. The death of his woman deputy seems to have been a peculiarly brutal one. I am glad the men responsible have been arrested. Chuchu keeps on ringing up and the story of Cayetano’s death becomes more and more mysterious. Now they are blaming the murder of this woman on him.