Havana Harvest (5 page)

Though Lonsdale had pretended to Quesada that he could not speak Spanish, he was very much at ease in the language. Nonetheless, he conducted the interview with Fernandez in English.

“And you say you were afraid to return to your posting because there was too much money in the account? I don't find that credible.” He'd been baiting Fernandez for some time, but the Cuban would not be shaken.

“I told you already, and I will tell you again,” he said. The man had a deliberate way about him, and his speech reflected it. “I am exposed, I am unprotected. If General Casas wants to destroy me, he can. Nobody else can back up my story. If he says I am a liar, I am a liar, and I am dead.” His slightly accented English was just about flawless.

“But why would he want you dead?”

Fernandez shrugged. “I don't know. I have been trying to figure this out ever since I found the new account and all the money. Everything was going really well. There were no problems; the operations were being conducted with military precision—”

“They were military operations, remember?”

“Yes, and we were operating like clockwork. The money was good too.”

“Where did the money go after being transferred to Panama?”

“Nowhere. It stayed there in a special account, ready for use by Department Z.”

“Department Z?”

“Yes, the Ministry of the Interior set it up to circumvent the U.S. blockade.”

“How?”

“Originally certain officials in the Ministry of the Interior were given some dollars, which they were allowed to smuggle out to Panama. They used the money to buy medicine and essential spare parts that they smuggled back to Cuba. That's how it all started.”

“And then?”

“Then they ran out of money and someone, I think Comrade De la Fuente, suggested the drug idea to them.”

“Tell me again who Comrade De la Fuente is”

“Mr. Bob or whatever your name is,” Fernandez was getting exasperated. “I've already told you about him three times.”

Lonsdale gave the man a bleak smile. “Then tell me about him for the fourth time,” he said, his voice icy cold, “and leave out none of the details.”

Fernandez sighed and started again. “General Casas told me that the idea of Department Z was Fidel's. He put comrade De la Fuente in charge of creating it and he got General Casas to help.”

“Why?”

“Comrade De la Fuente is a deputy minister in the Ministry of the Interior. In this new situation he needed the cooperation of the armed forces. The Ministry has no authority over the army.”

“Go on.”

“General Casas also told me that De la Fuente then went to Raul, Fidel's brother, who is also our secretary of defense. Raul appointed General Casas to act as coordinator between the Ministry and the army to make Department Z work.” The Cuban took a sip from the glass of water on the table, and then continued. “We started to operate in the mid-eighties, buying sensitive materials wherever we could find them.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere, but especially in Canada, Holland, and Germany.” Fernandez stopped talking. He was an old hand at the interrogation game. By making Lonsdale prompt him he would tire Lonsdale and give himself a rest. But Lonsdale, recognizing a professional, would not play. He got up and left.

“Found out anything new?” Morton was anxious to hear.

“In a way, I guess I did, Jim. Fernandez confirmed what I was beginning to suspect: there can be only two explanations for Fernandez's behavior.”

“Namely?”

“General Casas is either a very decent human being, ashamed that Fidel Castro's morals have degenerated to the point where he is willing to deal in drugs, or Casas is a front for the Cuban security people in a sting against the CIA.”

“Explain.”

“Assume that Casas is straight. He wants to tell us about the drug thing, but he's closely watched. He can't order Fernandez to defect and come to us. Doing so would irrevocably damage Casas's position if things went wrong. So he scares Fernandez into doing so by compromising him through messing around with his bank account and practically ordering him to take the extra money and run.”

“Got it.”

“Now let's assume that Casas is not straight and that he is trying to sucker us into denouncing Fidel for being a drug dealer. He'd make Fernandez do the exact same thing as if he were an honest injun, except that, in such a scenario,
Fernandez would be in the know.”

Morton nodded. “I understand this too, but where would the sting part come in?”

“After our having denounced Fidel, the Cubans would provide irrefutable proof to a five-star international panel of neutral observers that they weren't in bed with the Medellin cartel and that what we took for being drug-transport ships were in reality vessels carrying some innocuous material such as medicine or foodstuffs.”

“And Uncle Sam would have egg all over his face.”

The long silence that followed was broken by Quesada. “What do we do with Fernandez now?”

Lonsdale bit into a stale ham sandwich and washed it down with tepid coffee. It was past one o'clock in the afternoon, and everybody was edgy. “Leave him alone in there for a while, but turn off the lights and the air conditioning. Let him stew.”

“What about his civil rights?” Quesada was concerned.

“He has no civil rights. He came in on a forged passport— remember?”

“He's a Cuban refugee. He's seeking political asylum. He's protected by special laws.” Quesada had been the one with whom Reyes Puma had negotiated Fernandez's surrender and it would be Quesada whom the lawyer would crucify if Fernandez were maltreated.

“So we had a power failure.” Lonsdale wanted Fernandez to sweat.

“Ease up fella.” Morton spoke quietly but with authority. “You know very well Quesada is for the high jump if Fernandez turns out to be valuable and word got out that we roughed him up. Besides, what else can he tell us just now anyway?”

Morton's logic was unassailable, but Lonsdale was not ready to give in. “I need a week to check on his story, and by then I'd like our boy to be really insecure. Babying him won't help me.”

“Let's leave that problem to our people downtown,” Morton said with finality.

Saturday
Havana, Cuba

The little garden was just as Patricio remembered it: cool, cozy, and suffused with the heavy scent of white lilies. The hard-bodied, graying, and distinguished-looking quartermaster general of the Cuban Army and commander of all Cuban forces in Africa, Patricio Casas Rojo, had been given the house and garden on Calle 28 in Vedado by a grateful Fidel Castro at whose side Casas had fought in the Sierra Maestra for three tough years.

Now well into middle age, Patricio could still vividly remember the day when, as a wiry boy of sixteen, he had first met his leader. “So you're the holy terror everyone's been talking about,” Fidel had said to him. “The fearless fghter, ambushing Batista's men left and right.”

He had stood his ground, waiting for Fidel to stop joshing, embarrassed and much too aware of the people around him in the sunlit clearing, laughing with him ... or was it at him? He hadn't been able to tell, but it hadn't mattered. In those days of trial by fire, his dedication to Fidel and to the Revolution had been absolute. And he did have a special kind of talent, an instinct that always told him where to position himself in battle for maximum effect, for the greatest firepower, for the most startling surprise. Within six months of having joined the Rebel Army he had been named platoon leader and allowed to initiate operations against the enemy without supervision from headquarters. He was a born soldier, and Fidel had been quick to recognize the youngster's special skills.

Casas had been nineteen the year Batista had fied Cuba, but there had remained much to be done and Casas had volunteered to stay on in the army for a while. Though Cuba was at peace, the ever-present threat of invasion by the United States required that her fighting forces have talented, competent, and devoted leaders. In the end, Casas, who qualified on all counts, was persuaded to make soldiering his career. He married a girl he had met in the Sierra, settled down in Havana, and became the father of two beautiful little girls.

A captain at the time of the Bay of Pigs, he had driven to the battle zone in a taxi, ahead of everybody, and had immediately taken charge of the eastern front. The nation and its leader had been grateful.

When he was sent to Russia for further training and to become a good Communist, his wife, who didn't like his being away so often, left him after a few years. She took the kids with her, but he'd kept the house and moved his widowed mother in to look after it.

His mother greeted him as he walked into the house: “Go wash your hands, Patricio.” She still treated him as if he were a child. “You want to set a good example for your daughters.” Casas laughed and hugged the gnarled old woman lovingly. His daughters were in their mid–teens and unlikely to be impressed by their father's clean hands.

He considered the multiple meanings of clean hands as he removed his watch and began to scrub in the downstairs bathroom, carefully avoiding the scar on his wrist. It was still tender, although the accident with the phosphorous grenade had happened more than a year before.

Clean hands indeed, the hands of a murderer, a drug dealer, a cheat.

The Revolution had been pure and noble—all for the people. Casas had seen that. The son of a foreman on a tobacco farm in Pinar del Rio, luck had been with him during Batista's reign. There had always been food on the table and a roof over their heads because his father had learned to read and write and do arithmetic.

Casas had started work at thirteen, backbreaking work in the tobacco fields and lofts. He had been a good-humored boy with a friendly, open smile, always ready to help. The smile and the good humor had stood him in good stead in the Sierra, and later on as well. Soldiers sought to serve under him because he was approachable, brave, and fair.

Batista had been a murdering liar and cheat and a corrupt puppet of the U.S. national crime syndicate run by Myer Lansky. In the forties and ffties there was misery in Cuba; prostitution and drug dealing were rampant, government officials were corrupt, and there was no medical help for the poor. Twenty-five percent of the population couldn't read or write since schooling was available only in the towns and cities;
los campesinos,
the farmers, in the villages and on the farms were condemned to live in ignorance, neglect, and abject poverty.

Along came Fidel Castro and the nation united behind him. He and his followers believed that it was not power that corrupted, but misery. Fidel had tremendous popular support, and in the end, the rule of the army and police thugs, the
gorillas,
came to an end.

Deeply insulted by the Eisenhower administration's dismissive attitude toward him, and egged on by Che Guevara, who was constantly haranguing him about the United States's intention to try to reimpose its will on the people of Cuba, Fidel turned to Russia for help. The Americans responded by blockading the island and the country's economic situation deteriorated because help from the Soviet Union was insufficient to counteract the effects of the blockade.

Casas shrugged as he wondered yet again why Fidel thought that, however brave, an Argentine doctor was qualified to take on the job of being president of the Cuban National Bank and then, having screwed up, become minister of industry.

“Che never really understood that our basic industries were agriculture and tourism. We're not, and never will be, an industrialized nation,” Casas had kept repeating to his colleagues at meetings of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.

Nor did they listen to him when he pleaded against state-directed economic planning, even after he had told them about what he had seen in the USSR while studying at the Staff College in Moscow: the quickest way to destroy individual initiative and wreck an economy was to give bureaucrats the power to make decisions that should be made by entrepreneurs.

Everyone, even his idol Fidel, had thought of him as just an ambitious, talented military commander, without ideas and opinions about anything other than matters military.

If they only knew how wrong they were.