“The people have no meat, but La Bodeguita del Medio can feed the turistas all the pork they want.” Soto puffed on his cigar and blew aromatic white fumes in my direction. “Do you care for lunch?”
I wasn’t feeling hungry just then.
We had walked several more blocks when Soto said, “It is a crime to return the art.”
Funny, I thought it was a crime to take it.
“Do you know what we could do with the proceeds from just a fraction of the paintings and gemstones?” Soto asked.
“You could give this city a coat of paint.”
“I could equip an army, or I could feed the island for a year. I could build factories and roads and hospitals. Or I could make a revolutionary statement the world would never forget.”
Now what did that mean?
The old dreamer. An errand boy, his daughter called him. Burned out, Foley said. But Soto wasn’t reminiscing about past glories. He was looking to the future, and again he was carrying a gun. When he closed his eyes, he must have seen sugar cane workers abandoning the fields and streaming into the mountains, lean men in fatigues cleaning their weapons in a tropical downpour. He heard rifle bolts clicking into place, smelled cordite and gun oil, felt the tingle of quickened heartbeats.
“Do you have a sense of irony?” Soto asked. He tossed his cigar into the street. “The art was the product of corruption. The Russian peasants starved so that the Romanovs could have diamond eggs. Is it not ironic that the handiwork of such evil could now be used for the benefit of the people?”
“But it won’t be used at all. It’s going back to the museums. No more art for wheat. No more sting operations. Socolow got the word, remember. The U.S. doesn’t want to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.”
Soto barked a humorless laugh. “ Si, just as your government didn’t want to interfere in Guatemala in ’54, but that didn’t stop the CIA from overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz. Just as you didn’t want to interfere in Panama in ’64, but U.S. troops still killed a score of protesters, to say nothing of the illegal invasion of that sovereign country in 1989 in order to kidnap General Noriega. How far does American respect for sovereignty extend? Not to Libya, Cuba, or Iraq. I am sure Sukarno of Indonesia and Nkrumah of Ghana would have been surprised to learn that the U.S. doesn’t interfere in their internal affairs. What would Allende say if he were alive to say it?”
Nobody ever called me a knee-jerk patriot, but all this America bashing was getting on my nerves. I was also beginning to wonder if coming back to Cuba had jarred a screw loose in the old man’s head. “I’m no expert on world affairs, but you’re leaving out a lot of the good. My government also gave you a job and a home and the freedom to say what you want. Frankly, I’m worried about your priorities down here.”
Soto looked away, pretending to admire an old church. “I have said too much. Do not fear. I am a good soldier.”
I knew that. I just didn’t know in whose army.
25
We were on Agramonte Street nearing the Maximo Gomez monument when the driver stopped and pointed to his left. Severo Soto nodded, rolled down his window, and spat in the direction of a baroque palace of arches and columns. “The antiguo palacio Presidencial, decorated by Tiffany, occupied by the pig Batista. How unfortunate he did not die there rather than in his bed in Spain. Now, it’s the Museo de la Revolucion.”
The driver headed out of Old Havana on the Malecon just as the sun was setting. Behind us, the city was bathed in a pink glow, softening the focus, concealing the decay. We were on Fifth Avenue, the broad tree-lined boulevard of foreign embassies, when Severo Soto spoke to the driver in Spanish, and we took a sharp left turn in front of the Presidente Hotel.
The setting sun was at our back. My sense of direction told me we were headed away from the ocean. “The marina is to the west,” I said, “and we’re headed east.”
“There is something I want to see before we do our business,” Soto replied.
I had left Foley sitting at his table at the Tropicana roughly twenty hours earlier. Soto spent the day at the U.S. Interests Section, fiddling with a satellite up-link telephone, speaking in coded English to his superiors at Langley. He conveyed my messages and gave me theirs as we worked on details of the agreement. I already had prepared the first draft of the paperwork. An assistant attorney general made some revisions, then I made some more. Soto sent and received the documents by fax. Later we would meet with Foley, review the papers, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Just another day of lawyering, but somehow it didn’t feel the same as settling a slip-and-fall at the Porky Pig market.
Had Foley really said ten million?
The taxi pulled into a large square dominated by a huge obelisk. “The Plaza de la Revolucion,” Soto told me. “Formerly, Plaza Ci’vica.”
“Folks do a lot of name changing around here,” I said. “Maybe after Castro’s gone, they’ll change it all back. Like Leningrad to St. Petersburg. How about a Parque Soto in Old Havana?”
“I never had such ambitions. It is enough for me to be a lieutenant in the eternal war for justice. “
He stared at the monument, and something nagged at the back of my mind. What was it?
Present tense.
It is enough for me…
Soto was still a soldier. “What war?” I asked.
“Do you know nothing of history, the struggle against neocolonialism, fascism, and racism?”
“That sounds like Castro’s rhetoric.”
“Rhetoric? Is that what you call it?”
“What now, are you going to defend the guy who put you in prison and threw away the key?”
“I don’t condone his Stalinist repression of dissent, but I have never disagreed with his philosophy or principles. Have you ever listened to even one of his speeches to the Movement of Nonaligned Nations?”
“No, I seldom have six hours to kill.”
“His are the words of a giant who has prevailed against the concerted efforts of eight American presidents to overthrow him. Fidel has been shaped by Cuba’s tragic past, four hundred years of domination by the Spanish, fifty years by the Yankees.”
“And now thirty years of glorious independence.”
He looked toward a statue of the Cuban poet Jose Marti at the base of the spire. “You are being sarcastic, are you not?”
“Yeah, in case you haven’t heard, Marxism is dead, but here you are, the number-one fan of the All-Pro commie dictator.”
“I told you I can see Fidel’s faults, but-”
“But he’s the lesser of two evils, right?”
“ Si, compared to the imperialists-both American and Russian-Fidel is a santo, a saint. He believes in Cuba for Cubans, an independent country free of control by outsiders.”
“I don’t believe this. All this time, I thought you wanted to overthrow Castro.”
“My philosophy has been consistent for thirty-five years. Am I not entitled to my beliefs, my freedom of expression you Yankees always speak about?”
But where does philosophy end and action begin, I wondered.
Soto motioned for the driver to get moving. “We were the children of the centenary, Fidel Castro Ruz and I. In 1953-the one hundredth birthday of Jose Marti-we attacked the Moncada fortress in Santiago de Cuba. You should have seen Fidel then. Rugged, clear-eyed, full of purpose. Did you know he was a lawyer?”
Just like Gorby and little old me. I wondered if the clear-eyed bearded one ever defended a condom-in-the- salad case.
“The attack failed,” Soto said, “and we were both arrested. At the trial, Fidel gave a brilliant speech. He told
