Part 5: Kennedy/Castro
dcharles
Banned
"Of course, we had slavery in Cuba as well. It was abolished about twenty years after slavery was abolished in the US...What many Americans don't realize is that the most violent, the most extreme members of the so-called Exile community in the United States, the community from which so much of the violence, the terrorism, the assassination attempts--which are inflicted upon the Cuban people and the lawful government of Cuba--much of this so-called community is made up of the descendants of the enslavers, the exploiters, the kidnappers, the violators. For many years, you had a similar problem in the United States, with groups such as your Ku Klux Klan... So no, the opinions of this reactionary core--the descendants of the exploiters and the enslavers--are not of the least importance to me, or of the least importance of the people of Cuba. To many of them, I say 'good riddance.'"
----- Fidel Castro, quoted in George; March 2000 issue.
"What happened to John-John? We've always known that the liberal elites didn't share our values, but of course we thought he was different. He is no different. Castro is a tyrant and a thug. This is the height of irresponsibility and recklessness for him to use his magazine to give a platform to this murderer, this dictator, especially at such a delicate time, when the fate of a young boy hangs in the balance."
----- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, February 4th, 2000.
"This interview almost didn’t happen.
The team at George and I started negotiating with President Castro for an interview all the way back in the first half of 1999, and the terms were finalized in mid July. Not even a week later, my plane went down en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I lost my wife and two dear friends to the Atlantic, as all of you reading this surely know by now.
Although the crash itself did not jeopardize the interview, it changed the interviewer a great deal. I likely will not know for many years all the ways that terrible event has changed me, but I am different. The man who writes this today is a more confrontational man than the one who set out to attend my cousin’s wedding on that island in Vineyard Sound. Though it is even harder to write than it is to admit, I am more bitter now than I was then. I am angrier.
One day I may come to regret this self-assurance, but I do not feel it is bitterness alone that has changed me, though I am sure it has done its part. Entwined with the bitterness of loss is the simple fact that I came very close to death this past summer. As anyone who has been there can tell you, a scrape like the one I saw this summer forever changes your appetite for risk.
I don’t mean to give the wrong impression. In my own case, it isn’t that I’ve decided to eliminate all risks in my life. But today, I have an appreciation for consequence that I simply did not have eight or nine months ago. I doubt that I was even capable of it.
I almost lost everything, period.
I did lose almost everything.
Trust me when I say that the end can truly come from out of nowhere. That’s taught me two important lessons:
One, don’t take an unnecessary risk just to cut a corner. It might just turn out not to be worth it.
Two, don’t hesitate to take the right risk. You might never get another chance to.
Some of you are probably wondering what all this has to do with Fidel Castro. It’s a fair question. As recently as November, it had nothing to do with Fidel Castro. But on Thanksgiving Day, a five year old boy named Elián González was found floating in the Atlantic, clinging onto an innertube for dear life. Elián and two others were the only survivors of a group of fourteen brave but desperate souls who tried to cross the Florida Straits in an old aluminum fishing boat. As we’ve come to learn, the boat’s engine died somewhere along the way, and when a storm crossed their path, the group’s quixotic dash for a better life ended in tragedy. Among the eleven dead were Elián’s mother, Elizabeth, and the man who would have presumably become his stepfather, Lazaro Munero.
Like a lot of you, I didn’t find out about Elián until the day after Thanksgiving. But the story immediately moved and captivated me. After all, Elián and I had been through similar experiences. Like me, Elián had come close to losing everything. Like me, he did lose almost everything. And of course, Elián lost all he had lost in the rough, indifferent waters of the Atlantic, just as I had.
If I was fascinated by our similarities, I was equally transfixed by our differences. To say that we were born in different worlds would almost qualify as understatement. I won’t waste your time or mine on euphemisms. I was born into a family with wealth, power, and access.
Elián wasn’t.
After all, Elián’s mother was so strapped for money that an old shallow water fishing boat with a suspect engine was the best means of escape she could afford. She felt so powerless that the prospect of being a refugee in a strange land was an improvement. And she was so lacking in access that the dangerous path she chose for herself and her family seemed like the best option she had.
Ironically, it was our respective positions, perched as we are on opposite ends of the spectrum of privilege, that led us both to nearly being lost at sea. I have no illusions. If I had not been rich enough to afford a plane; if my family had not been rich enough to have a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, I wouldn’t have even been in the air that night. If Elián hadn’t been poor, he wouldn’t have been in that boat.
Still, my fascination with the case of Elián had no bearing on my upcoming interview with Castro until Friday, December 10th. That was the same day that the Florida Gonzálezes filed for political asylum on Elián’s behalf. As I was about to leave the office and head home, I got a message from Castro’s people that threw everything into jeopardy. President Castro wanted me to know that he had no intention of deviating from our original outline for the interview, which meant that he would not be “discussing the case of Elián González Brotons at this time.” As a display of my good faith, he “requested” that I didn’t contact any of the Florida Gonzálezes.
Our original outline for the interview was simple but broad. We wanted to have a conversation about the past and future of the US and Cuba. Why was it that ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when so much had changed, that US-Cuban relations hadn’t? Obviously, the case of Elián doesn’t directly answer that question. But just as obviously, Elián’s situation is emblematic of just how bad relations between our two countries are. And in case no one has noticed, Elián González is the #1 Cuba-related news item these days. So while it was theoretically possible to avoid the subject of Elián, it was practically impossible.
Castro’s second request was equally impossible. Although I had no intention of contacting the Florida Gonzálezes in connection to my interview with President Castro, I had in fact already been in contact with them eleven days before, for reasons unrelated to Castro. After the State Department announced that it was “recusing” itself from the issue earlier in the day, I realized that Elián was likely to be in the United States for longer than a week or two. So I reached out to Lazaro González, Elián’s great uncle and ersatz guardian, to talk with him about the importance of therapy for Elián; how important it’s been for me. I told him that if he found a therapist that he liked but money was an issue, he could send me the bill. We didn’t talk about embargoes or policies, or politics of any kind. It was a strictly personal call.
I don’t know how I would have responded to Castro’s requests eight or nine months ago. I suspect I would have tried to assuage his concerns. But Castro’s people weren’t talking to the version of me from eight or nine months ago. They were talking to me at the end of the day on a Friday in December, on a day that I needed to get home and take a prescription I had forgotten to take that morning. So I sent a short response back. The answer was no, I told them. They couldn’t expect me to interview Fidel Castro and not reference the biggest story in US-Cuba relations in years. And under no circumstances would I allow the Cuban government to dictate who I could and couldn’t use as a source, in this story or any other. There was some back and forth, but within an hour of the original message, the Cubans had cancelled the interview.
I was furious, of course, but there was little I could do. The situation remained the same through the weekend, until I got a call on Sunday evening. It was my office. A staff writer who had come in to work some extra hours on a piece told me that someone from the Cuban government was calling the office, insisting that the writer who took the call get in touch with me. I gave them my private number and told them to give me a call.
I expected to hear from Juan, the press commissar I’d been dealing with for the past few months. For several hours, I waited with increasing impatience for a phone call that did not come. I cancelled my dinner plans and ordered in. I waited some more. Still nothing. Finally, fuming at the thought of a wasted evening, I gave up. I decided to take a shower and call it a day.
A few minutes under the warm water and I began to relax.
Naturally, that was when the phone rang. I hesitated for a moment, deciding whether to get out of the shower and answer it, which only made it worse when I realized that I absolutely had to. In the end, the interview was going to mean a whole lot more to me than it would Castro. I had to sell a magazine, after all. Castro had no problems getting people to listen to him talk. If it wasn’t going to be me, it was going to be someone. I had to come to some kind of agreement with Juan about how we could do the interview without compromising my journalistic ethics. So in the name of journalistic ethics, I awkwardly slipped my way across the bathroom tiles to grab the phone in the next room.
I answered the phone.
“This is John?” went the voice from the other line. The voice was thickly accented and husky. The voice of an older man. Definitely not Juan’s.
I said that it was John.
“This is Fidel,” came the response.
So there I was, dripping water on my bedroom floor, talking to Fidel Castro. Despite what some people on talk radio may tell you, this is an unusual event, even for me.
He asked me if I knew what time it was.
There was a clock on my bedside table. “It’s 10:10.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And do you know what else is ten-ten?”
“I bet you’re going to tell me,” I said.
“Is Cuban Independence Day, of course.”
“Message received,” I laughed. The man does know how to make a statement. And really, what else do you do except laugh, when you’re standing in a puddle of shower water and the Maximum Leader is quizzing you on Cuban trivia?
The leader of Cuba is a famously talkative man, and that night was no exception. We talked for nearly three hours with numerous digressions, but the conversation began and ended with discussions about our scheduled interview. Castro first proposed that we scrap our extended interview altogether, and that I instead do an extended piece on Elián, Juan-Miguel, and the rest of the Cuban Gonzálezes. He told me that Lazaro Munero, the boyfriend of Elián’s mother, had already made the trip to Miami and back once before, and had an extensive criminal record. He said that Munero might have even been involved in drug running.
Castro offered to let me interview Munero’s associates, too.
Since I had no interest in letting George become an English-language version of Granma, much less doing a longform piece on the saga of Elián, this was a nonstarter, and I told him so. Fidel Castro gives the impression of a man who does not often hear the word “no,” so it probably comes as no surprise that I had to restate my refusal in several different ways, at several points throughout the conversation. But it wasn’t our major sticking point. Our major sticking point was my refusal to agree to being noncommunicative with the Florida Gonzálezes.
To the extent that I’m willing to get into the details of a background conversation that spanned three hours, Castro’s concerns boiled down to this:
He considered the Florida Gonzálezes to be deeply enmeshed in the extremist exile community in Miami. Castro thought that he had been burned by the American media before, and he was concerned that if the Florida Gonzálezes were involved in the story, he was going to get burned again. The interview might be in Fidel’s words, but they would be framed and pruned by extremist exiles. I sympathized with his position, but I dug my heels in. The fact was, I wasn’t going to let Castro dictate who I was and wasn’t going to talk to. It was out of the question, and the fact of his insistence only made me want to talk with them more, not less. Did he have something to hide? Did they have some special knowledge of Castro that I wasn’t aware of?
And while it was true that I wasn’t going to let Castro dictate my sources, I didn’t tell him that I’d already been in contact with Lazaro González. How could I? If he was already suspicious of the mere idea of me talking to them, I doubted that I would be able to reassure him if he found out I already had.
So we were at an impasse.
It was Castro who broke it, albeit unintentionally. He had launched into a digression about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how nothing in US-Cuban relations had been the same since. I asked him why.
“Because Khrushchev tried to sneak the missiles,” he said. “And I tell him not to. Why? The US have missiles in Turkey. They did not sneak them in. Why must we sneak and hide, like we are criminals? But Khrushchev tried to hide them. Then, he is discovered. Then your father trust us no more. Then your father died. His opinions become the opinions of the country.”
It seemed to me that my present impasse with Castro also stemmed from mistrust. He didn’t trust me to write a fair story, and I didn’t trust him not to react unfairly if he knew I had already been in contact with the Gonzálezes. And that was the crux of it. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, but I didn’t think he would see it that way. Getting the interview was so important to me that honesty seemed like a risk I couldn’t take. So I fell back on abstractions, like my right to choose my own sources for a story. But it was getting me nowhere. The more I stood on principle, the more he mistrusted me. The more he pushed, the more I mistrusted him.
So I came clean. It was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking. Did it work out? Since you’re reading this, you know I got my interview. But the payoff wasn’t immediate. I told him about my contacts with the González family about an hour into our conversation. We talked for two more hours, and for a portion of the remaining conversation, Castro was angry. He felt he’d been deceived, and it was hard to blame him, because I’d been hiding something from him. But eventually, he came around. The modicum of trust we’d established between the two of us allowed us to have the interview we had, which is an interview that I don’t mind telling you that I’m proud of.
At six hours held over three days, it’s the longest interview I’ve ever done by a large margin. The subject is one of the 20th century’s most charismatic, controversial, and contradictory personalities, loved and hated by millions alike. And it’s an opportunity that I wouldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t taken a risk on trust.
It turned out to be the right risk.
I think there’s a lesson in there for us all.
Sincerely,
John Kennedy"
-----George, March 2000 issue.
OOC: Since I didn't want to do a giant, 10,000 word interview of just Kennedy and Castro, I thought I would give the intro here, and then sprinkle the excerpts in throughout the next three or four updates. The interview is going to be one of those things that has small but important ripples for a good portion of the story.
BTW, I hope the first-person excerpt from Kennedy works. I thought it would take too long to describe and dramatize all of that info in 3rd person, so 1st person it was. However, Kennedy's writing style, syntactically, is very different from mine. I love punctuation--italics, dashes, parentheses, semi-colons, etc--but he didn't use much of that at all. So it took a little bit of getting used to. Hope I hit my stride with it.
