Buying the Night Flight (14 page)

Years passed. The next time I saw Juan Bosch was in 1970, when I returned for the next elections. Part of what I wrote then captures, I think, the mood then of this kind of man scorned:

The bitterness and trouble etched in the craggy face of Juan Bosch are like canyons in an ancient wilderness. If he were not so much a man, he would be the essence of the woman scorned.

He is back in his native land after three weary years in exile, so angry at the United States that he seems all by himself to be a chorus of Greek furies.

He lives in his sister's home near the blue sea that edges this tropical city, and he seldom goes out.

Each day, this troubled-looking man with the clipped haircut cries out to his countrymen. His early afternoon radio broadcasts, with their homey parables about Dominicans, love, politics, and life, reach into every corner of this convulsive green island, enlivening a torpid existence with questions that only God could answer.

Yes, Bosch -- the mystical, temperamental, tough core of so much of the torment of this island, is a different man today than he was five years ago. Though he is only 61 and looking fit and splendid, he is painfully aware of his age. ... He is the democrat betrayed, so betrayed he now has turned his Cartesian mind to the delineation of a "solution" for his country that he obscurely calls "dictatorship with popular support."

Much of the fascination with Bosch is that he is a man who weaves perfectly constructed, slim and shiny theories about his Dominican country (a most random and undisciplined world) with the natural, even thoughtless, avidity with which a worm spins silk.

So it was no surprise to me, having known him for six years, to find that the furies within him had erected another perfect construction to explain his disillusionment with the United States and with democracy, both of which he had perhaps loved too much.

"Every day here people have less and less interest in representative democracy," he began. I thought back to the time when he was Mr. Democracy in the Caribbean. "Even in the United States it doesn't work. Luckily, the American intervention opened the eyes of our people," he went on, rocking gently in a rocker on the open porch of the attractive modern house. "If not, we might have gone years without realizing that representative democracy would never work for us."

I was only being facetious when I asked, "Dr. Bosch, are you suggesting we did you a favor?"

"Yes," he answered, "this is the way history works."

But that, still, was not the final denouement, not the final scene. That, for me, occurred in 1976, when I again found myself in the Dominican Republic, drawn as by some strange magnet to this mulatto kingdom of suffering.

I finally found Dr. Bosch in a nice but simple apartment up from the sea. He was totally out of politics, and he had drawn about him, like a protective cloak, an ingrown far-leftist group. He had his own ideological salon. As soon as I saw him--as soon as he welcomed me in his usual gallant way -- I could see the change in the man. Before, his face had always seemed on the brink of suffering. He always looked as though about to break. Now he looked comfortable and happy, but most of all at peace. We chatted for a few minutes, while he rocked back and forth in his rocker, and finally I said, "Dr. Bosch, I have never seen you looking so good."

He responded eagerly. "It is true, Georgie Anne, it is true. I have never been so happy." He then went on, with a gentle enthusiasm I had never witnessed before in him, and talked about his "group," which I knew gathered at his feet with the spirit of the young Greeks around Socrates. He loved the exchange, and the teaching, he loved the living and working only with ideas.

When I left, I felt a certain peace too, for I always liked the man. Perhaps this was always the place for a Juan Bosch; he was meant to be a professor, a thinker; being a leader had often, I know, driven him to the edge of madness. He had finally come home.

But that was not the end of Bosch; the end, for me, was sordid and tragic, considering what he had earlier represented as "Mr. Democracy in the Caribbean." Drawn ever back to this island where I had known so much happiness and so much sorrow, I returned in 1982 for the elections. Now Bosch was running as an all-out Marxist for the presidency. His young followers, wearing red berets and running in march time, were a new kind of social fascist. But Bosch, running on his bitterness against a country, which he now felt had never appreciated his genius and not on ideology, lost badly. Times had changed.

My close friends who had sculpted the revolution and the democracy and who time and time again came close to giving their lives to it and for it now were in power. Despite everything, they stubbornly remained total democrats. There was the great young black leader, Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, leader of the PRD party and now mayor of Santo Domingo, and Sacha Volman, the wonderfully crazy and dedicated and deeply democratic Rumanian. A legend in the Caribbean, Sacha had been behind or adviser to almost every democratic movement in the years he spent there. He was and is a political genius, not to speak of being the most delightful of companions. Sometimes, thank God, the good win.

For those of us in the press Santo Domingo was the harbinger of all that was to come. It was where we learned not to trust our government. It was where we learned firsthand the palpability of evil in banal people. It was where soldiers first told us, with common amazement, what they tell journalists in all wars: "What the hell are you doing here? You didn't have to be here." And it was, even more than Vietnam, for those of us who were there, the place where the press began the steady process of becoming not only the describers of events, but the interpreters and arbiters of "truth." Once it started there, this process was to appear everywhere, and it was my generation of journalists, which had the special curse or blessing of having to live through and work through this too.

New Cuba, Old Cuba

"You have all the advantages, being a woman."
--Practically every male correspondent I have ever known

I stood on the pier in Puerto Rico, watching the ship moving away in the night. The lights of the ship first skimmed the water like tiny stars; then they glimmered on the horizon; then they dimmed, and dimmed, and dimmed. And I stood there... and stood there ... and stood there, before I finally turned in despair. Suicide seemed not at all an unreasonable response.

A week and a half before, I had finished the Dominican elections of April 1966 and felt I needed to "get away" for a few days (if a foreign correspondent can properly use that expression). So I went over to San Juan for the weekend. Al Burt, then of
The Miami Herald,
and I had breakfast and he told me jovially, "I suppose you know that José Llanusa is here with the Cuban contingent for the Caribbean games." Llanusa, then the Cuban minister of education, was very close to Castro and, Burt pointed out, was offering certain journalists a rare chance to get into Cuba at a rare moment.

My weekend of peace and my dreams of beaches dissolved. No correspondents had been allowed in for more than a year and Fidel himself had not been seen for upward of four or five months. The rumors were gaining in crescendo like a crowd forming around a sudden accident. "Fidel is dead" ... "Fidel has been replaced" ... "Fidel is in prison" ... "Fidel is out" ...

I took a cab out to the Olympic Village. My best estimate was that my chances were no more than one in one hundred, but I couldn't
not
take the chance. At the gate the engaging little Puerto Rican told me that Llanusa was out. I waited. I waited and waited. In fact I waited all day. I had lunch with the Puerto Rican guards and was just beginning to get tired of it all, wondering why I hadn't stayed on the beach, when Llanusa returned.

A rangy, dark-haired man who looked as though he belonged in Montana rather than in Cuba, Llanusa stood, his hands on his hips and his sport shirt casually open halfway down his chest, facing me on the little patio of his "Olympic" villa.

"You want to go to Cuba?" he asked. I nodded firmly. "All right, come back with us on the boat." It was all accomplished in less than five minutes. Again, "hanging around" had paid rich dividends.

But the Cubans were not returning for at least ten days -- the duration of the games. I became impatient. Since I had not been home for a long time and since my father had been very ill, I decided to use this time to return to Chicago for a week. They
promised,
the Cubans did, that they would not leave under
any
circumstances before the end of the games. Besides, I had a Puerto

Rican friend in the Olympic Village administration, and we arranged for me to call him every night to be sure that there was no mix-up. I left for Chicago.

Everything went fine for six nights. Then, on a Friday night, I was at a party at our editor's, Roy Fisher's, and I put through my usual call. There were still four full days left until the scheduled departure.

"Something changed," my Puerto Rican friend now told me worriedly. "The Cubans got very angry at the games rules today and they're pulling out tomorrow." Tomorrow!

I boarded the first flight to San Juan on Saturday. It was three hours late. Every minute that passed was a deadly reminder to me of my mistake in not staying in San Juan. When we finally arrived at 6:00 p.m. instead of 3:00 p.m. I raced to the dock. I could still see the ship on the horizon. Going to Cuba. Going to Cuba without me.

"They waited about forty minutes for you," the dockmaster told me matter-of-factly, as though I had missed an Amtrak to Philadelphia. "Then I guess they had to go." I said I guessed they did. I went down to the hotel, contemplated suicide, and instead went to the bar.

The next few days were filled with a particular brand of torture. Every day I had to read about the ship. About how Fidel had taken the unprecedented action of meeting it there and riding with the athletes back to Havana on the train. I pictured myself ... arriving in Cuba ... sitting with Fidel on the train as he talked with the athletes .... My mind and conscience were equally unforgiving.

But if making mistakes is part of the game, so is recouping. I tried to pull myself together and decide what to do next. Talking with the office, I decided it was worth it to make another last-ditch, desperate try. So I flew to Mexico City through Miami and prepared for a long siege of trying to telephone Llanusa in Havana and see if he would give me a visa to come through Mexico, where there was an embassy. I now expected the odds to be about a thousand to one.

The first morning I put through a call. To my astonishment it went through right away and I also got Llanusa on the phone right away. "Of course," he said, to my astonishment. "If you go right away to the embassy, perhaps you can get the one p.m. plane." I was on the 1:00 p.m. plane; I had dinner with Llanusa that night in Havana.

The next night Llanusa's wife leaned across the table at the Tropicana. "We have to go," she said suddenly.
"Bueno, muy bien,
" I said agreeably. "No, you don't understand," she went on, "you're going to see Fidel."

Our car sped back to the Havana Libre, the former Hilton, and there, in front of the hotel, was Fidel Castro, leader of the revolution, hero to young revolutionaries throughout the world, premier of Marxist Cuba, pacing back and forth. Two jeeploads of men, their machine guns poking out like sticks out of a green garden, waited by the curbside.

My first impression of Fidel Castro remains with me. And still, frankly, bewilders me. There before me was what everyone sees from the pictures--the big barrel-chested man with the neat khaki uniform, the heavy overhanging forehead, the little and tight eyes, the strange irregular jaw. But what surprised me then, and all the times I saw him, was the strange mixture of almost abnormal sweetness, like a favorite uncle's overly affectionate attitude toward his young kin, and a piercing and quite frightening coldness and ruthlessness -- bordering on a total lack of feeling for others -- behind the eyes.

It was also strange to me that I felt virtually no normal sexual attraction for him at all. I say this with hesitation, because it is so easily misunderstood. I never looked at leaders or anybody else I interviewed as sexual quarry, and never ever confused professional and personal relationships. (Men are equal -- they shouldn't be sex objects, either.) Yet usually there was some very normal degree of sexual interest.

Castro, who was after all a big, earthy man, left me with no feeling at all. I even felt a certain effeminacy in him, something I would not have trusted had not other women who met him backed up this view. I am not in the slightest suggesting homosexuality. Castro had had lots of women. Rather I think I was seeing for the first time a man for whom women and sex were simply instrumental and unimportant, for whom power -- in the name of "the revolution," with which he totally equated himself -- was everything.

The rest of his entourage immediately fell asleep. I found myself, thirty-one years old with two years of experience in Latin America, face to face with one of the most charismatic and sought-after leaders in the world. My notebooks were in the hotel, but I could take no chance on losing this apparition. So I began to work out a certain method I later perfected. I learned to focus -- virtually to set my mind on -- certain important phrases as he uttered them. I had the conscious feeling of a hand coming out of my mind and grasping them and freezing them for a moment. I found that with this method I could keep quotes perfectly for at least three days.