'Comandante' Fidel bows out

My first days in Cuba in the late Sixties were taken up with racing to the airport as yet another hijacked American plane landed, and dealing with neighbours anxious for me to supply them with coffee, to which they had little access.

Having just finished a first assignment covering the Vietnam War, I became the correspondent for Reuters to Havana in 1968-69. I spoke Spanish thanks to a year I spent hitch-hiking through Mexico and the Central American republics in the steps of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, staying as an English tutor for a rich family in Puebla, Mexico, for several months.

1969 was named “the year of the Heroic Guerrilla”, in tribute to the late Che Guevara, who was seen as close to Comandante Fidel Castro, but not completely in accord, maybe even far from it.

It was the Argentinian Guevara who was responsible for much of the firing squad killings that occurred when Castro took control of Havana on his victory. The walls had their bullet holes that, I think, are there yet.

The next year was dedicated to a huge sugar production record, which actually was not achieved, a blow to Castro which was a telling one.

I followed a busy Reuters journalist, Michael Arkus, who had achieved a fine scoop by interviewing Castro while swimming in the warm waters at one of the resorts just outside Havana.

A hard one to beat! My first weeks were taken up with the continued entry into Cuba of men, many coloured, who had seized aircraft to be flown to Cuba from the US. Some hijackers seemed legitimate men under threat, but most were criminals.

I used to race with my friend, the AP correspondent, to beat him to the airport to see the hijacked planes coming in with their trembling passengers. We usually tied, and shared what we knew.

The Cuban authorities, wisely, kept the curtains of a room ajar at the airport so that we could see what was happening in the first interview with the hijackers. Often the gun had been thrown down in a chair next to the window so we could look at it. But we knew the authorities did not find all the weapons and that became a source of worry later.

Hijacking in the end became a bore for the foreign press. It was, after a while, a normal event of the time.

One had to be concerned about incidents closer to home. I lived on the top floor of an 11-storey building occupied otherwise by ordinary citizens.

When I first went to my allotted apartment looking down on the venerable Hotel Nacional, once frequented by Winston Churchill and Nat King Cole, I was surprised when a pretty black woman came in and quickly shed her clothes down to a swimsuit. What was that all about, I wondered. A plant? I never found out.

I also had a comely neighbour who came and asked for coffee, obtained from the foreigners’ only special supermarket. She would throw off her clothes to my consternation as she clutched the coffee I had donated, for her mother, she said. Fortunately, on that day, another hijacked plane came in and I was able to make an exit. Not all connections, however, ended chastely.

At a diplomatic reception, soon after I got to Havana, I met Castro for the first time. I was introduced as being a Reuters correspondent who had been covering the ongoing war in Vietnam, including the offensive around Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration.

It was, in truth, a little difficult to approach the Comandante, as he was always known, as he was usually surrounded by little female students from North Vietnam and South Vietnam who were studying in Cuba, their own country being ripped apart by American bombs.

Each girl had a grip of one of Castro’s fingers, leaving him rather immobile. A good time to put a couple of questions to him.

Vietnam and Cuba became the best of friends, as they indeed still are. Neither were really 100 per cent Marxist, but rather Nationalist, to the frustration of the US and Europe. Cuba was not just a one party state, it was a one person state - Fidel Castro.

The two countries were fighting for their freedom, the North from the French, the South from the Americans. And they both achieved it though the costs were tremendous in people treasure.

After Cuba, I met Castro in other places on his highly-secured tours where you never knew where he was going next in case of assassination - American assassination; after all, the Americans had tried to put explosives in his cigars, so the story went.

In, 2001, when he was giving a lecture in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, there was a full house, but knowing Castro’s loquaciousness, I knew that in the half hour of question time there would be enough for only one question.

I put up my arm in the way one wants to be recognised, and my question took all the time to answer - though I can’t recall that seemingly brilliant query.

When I talked to Castro afterwards, he told me conversationally he had stopped smoking cigars. Intrigued, I tried to ask if he believed there was a health problem. But small, lively Malay girl journalists elbowed me aside - it was their country after all - and I could not get the whole question in.

In other respects, Cuba was similar to other Iron Curtain countries then. There was a certain sense of being watched, but unlike the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe officials seemed delighted when they saw me with a Cuban person of the other sex. There was no barrier to contact.

Cuba was a more natural country than countries of the erstwhile communist bloc. At the same time, Cuba had a definite communist side.

Then I discovered that the Black Panthers under their then leader Eldridge Cleaver had sought shelter in Havana. On my way to Cuba I had seen Wanted posters in the US describing Cleaver as being “armed and extremely dangerous”, and he had $50,000 on his head.

But I managed to track him down by knocking on doors in an area of Havana where he had been seen, a method also used in Glasgow where I was working as a reporter before I joined Reuters.

At last a black man with frizzy hair opened a door and when I asked for Cleaver he invited me in.

I saw Cleaver; author of Soul on Ice, sitting at a desk, and he told me his was writing a new book, but he was not able to give me an interview just then. Later, I ended up in that book.

I knew I had to file the story of Cleaver’s presence in Cuba no matter what. The Cubans did not try to stop my story getting out, as they could have done, and next morning it was all over the front pages of the American press.

That was when I began receiving threats from hijackers, though not from Cleaver’s party. The thuggish variety. “I know you are CIA,” said one. “You’ll be hearing from us.”

I would not have taken the $50,000 for anything; it was a sure way to a quick death. In the event, I spent a night in the British Consul’s residence, God bless him.

I didn’t know where to turn, but suddenly I was picked up by the head of the Cuban Information Department and a beautiful blonde girl I knew in the same department. They couldn’t have been nicer.

They stayed guard for my protection for that night, and next day in a remote home for privileged Cubans.

They were not angry with my scoop in finding Cleaver; in fact, they were happy about it, no doubt because they wanted Cleaver and his men (and women) out. All the dubious foreigners were soon shipped out to Algeria, an ally - but poor Algeria!

Cuba was definitely different from other communist states, and it wasn’t just the rum and the Moquitos they produced. ‘’Come and see the changes yourself,” Castro told me in Kuala Lumpur, but when I got there I found that he had just jailed over 70 people on human rights charges and the atmosphere was fraught.

Castro was a more open, personable man, different from leaders of other Iron Curtain countries. He was more human and natural. But enemies sometimes disappeared - for good! It was no treasure trove of human rights.

Now a new wave has started in that part of the world. A shift towards the right, headed by Trump! ■