On and off the field, he takes care of himself. He never wastes a minute of his time, nor lets a penny fall from his pocket. Until recently he was shining shoes down at the docks. Pelé was born to rise; and he knows it.
(279)
1955: Stockholm
Garrincha
Garrincha plays havoc with the other teams, always threatening to break through. Half turn, full turn, he looks like he’s coming, but he’s going! He acts like he’s going, but he’s coming. Flabbergasted opponents fall on their asses as if Garrincha were scattering banana peels along the field. At the goal line, when he has eluded them all, including the goalie, he sits on the ball. Then he backs up and starts again. The fans are amused, but the managers go crazy. Garrincha, carefree bird with bandy legs, plays for laughs, not to win, and forgets the results. He still thinks soccer’s a party, not a job or a business. He likes to play for nothing, or a few beers, on beaches or ragged little fields.
He has many children, his own and other people’s. He drinks and eats as if for the last time. Openhanded, he gives everything away, loses the works. Garrincha was born to fall; and he doesn’t know it.
(22)
1958: Sierra Maestra
The Revolution Is an Unstoppable Centipede
As the war reaches its height, beneath the bullets Fidel introduces agrarian reform in the Sierra Maestra. Campesinos get their first land, not to speak of their first doctor, their first teacher, even their first judge—which is said to be a less dangerous way to settle a dispute than the machete.
Batista’s more than ten thousand soldiers can’t seem to do anything but lose. The rebel army is infinitely smaller and still poorly armed, but under it, above it, within it, ahead of and behind it, are the people.
The future is now. Fidel launches a final offensive: Cuba from end to end. In two columns, one under the command of Che Guevara, the other under Camilo Cienfuegos, a hundred and sixty guerrillas descend from the mountains to conquer the plain.
(98 and 209)
1958: Yaguajay
Camilo
Magically eluding bombardment and ambush, the invading columns strike for the island’s gut, slicing Cuba in two as Camilo Cienfuegos takes the Yaguajay barracks after eleven days of fighting and Che enters the city of Santa Clara. Suddenly, half of Batista’s island has disappeared.
Camilo Cienfuegos, brave and greedy, fights at such close quarters that, killing an enemy soldier, he catches his rifle in mid-air without its touching the ground. Several times the fatal bullet that should have been his just barely wasn’t, and once he nearly died from gobbling down a whole kid after two days of eating nothing at all.
Camilo has the beard and mane of a biblical prophet, but where a worry-creased face should be, there’s only an ear-to-ear grin. The feat he is most proud of is that time up in the mountains when he fooled a light military plane by painting himself red with iodine and lying still with his arms crossed.
(179 and 210)
1959: Havana
Cuba Wakes Up Without Batista
on the first day of the year. The dictator lands in Santo Domingo and seeks refuge with his colleague Trujillo; back in Havana, for the former hangmen, it’s sauve qui peut, a stampede.
U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith is appalled. The streets have been taken over by rabble and by a few dirty, hairy, barefoot guerrillas, just a Latin Dillinger gang who dance the guaguancó, marking time with rifle shots.
(98 and 431)
The Rumba
The guaguancó is a kind of rumba, and every self-respecting Cuban has the rumba under his belt, in peace, war, and anything between. Even when picking a fight, the Cuban rumbas, so now he joins the dance of the bullets without a second thought, and the crowds surge behind the drums that summon them.
“I’m enjoying it. And if they get me, too bad. At least I’m enjoying it.”
On any street or field the music lets loose. There’s no stopping it—that rumba rhythm on drums and crates, or, if there are no drums or crates, on bodies, or just in the air. Even ears dance.
(86, 198, and 324)
1959: Havana
Portrait of a Caribbean Casanova
Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican ambassador, looks with dread on this horrifying spectacle. He has nothing for breakfast but a cup of coffee. The news has taken away his appetite. While servants by the dozen nail down boxes and close trunks and suitcases, Rubirosa nervously lights a cigarette and puts his favorite song, “Taste of Me,” on the phonograph.
The sun, they say, never sets on his bed. Trujillo’s man in Cuba is a famous enchanter of princesses, heiresses, and movie stars. Rubirosa beguiles them with flattery and plays the ukulele to them before loving or beating them.
Some say his tremendous energy derives from the milk of his infancy, which came from sirens’ tits. Dominican patriots insist that his secret is a virility elixir Trujillo concocts from the pega-palo plant and exports to the United States.
Rubirosa’s career began when Trujillo made him his son-in-law; continued when, as Dominican ambassador to Paris, he sold visas to Jews persecuted by Hitler; and was perfected in his marriages to multi-millionairesses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton. It is the smell of money that excites the tropical Casanova, as the smell of blood excites sharks.
(100)
1959: Havana
“We have only won the right to begin,”
says Fidel, who rides into town on top of a tank, direct from the Sierra Maestra. To a surging crowd he explains that all this, while it might look like a conclusion, is no more than a beginning.
Half of Cuba’s land is uncultivated. According to the statistics, last year was the most prosperous in the island’s history; but the campesinos, who can’t read statistics or anything else, haven’t noticed. From now on, a different cock will crow, with agrarian reform and a literacy campaign, as in the sierra, the most urgent tasks. But before that, the dismantling of an army of butchers. The worst torturers go up against a wall. The aptly named “Bonebreaker” faints each time the firing squad takes aim. They have to bind him to a post.
(91)
1960: Brasília
A City, or Delirium in the Midst of Nothing
Brazil lifts the curtain on its new capital. Suddenly, Brasília is born at the center of a cross traced on the red dust of the desert, very far from the coast, very far from everything, out at the end of the world—or perhaps its beginning.
The city has been built at a dizzying speed. For three years this was an anthill where workers and technicians labored shoulder to shoulder, night and day, sharing jobs, food, and shelter. But when Brasilia is finished, the fleeting illusion of brotherhood is finished, too. Doors slam: This city is not for servants. Brasília locks out those who raised it with their own hands. Their place is piled together in shacks that blossom by God’s grace on the outskirts of town.
This is the government’s city, house of power. No people in its plazas, no paths to walk on. Brasília is on the moon: white, luminous, floating way up, high above Brazil, shielded from its dirt and its follies.
Oscar Niemeyer, architect of its palaces, did not dream of it that way. When the great inaugural fiesta occurs, Niemeyer does not appear on the podium.
(69 and 315)
1960: Rio de Janeiro
Niemeyer
He hates right angles and capitalism. Against capitalism there’s not much he can do; but against the right angle, that oppressor, constrictor of space, his architecture triumphs. It’s free and sensual and light as clouds.
Niemeyer imagines human habitations in the form of a woman’s body, a sinuous shoreline, or a tropical fruit. Also in the form of a mountain, if the mountain breaks up into beautiful curves against the sky, as do the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, designed by God on that day when God thought he was Niemeyer.
(315)
1960: Rio de Janeiro
Guimaraes Rosa
Daring and undulating, too, is the language of Guimaraes Rosa, who builds h
ouses with words.
Works warm with passion are created by this formal gentleman, metronomically punctual, incapable of crossing a street against the light. Tragedy blows ferociously through the stories and novels of the smiling career diplomat. When he writes he violates all literary rules, this bourgeois conservative who dreams of entering the Academy.
1960: Artemisa
Thousands and Thousands of Machetes
wave in the air, brushing, rubbing, colliding, clashing, providing a background of battle-music for Fidel’s speech—or, rather, for the song he is singing from the platform. Here, on the eastern end of the island, he explains to sugar workers why his government has expropriated Texaco Oil.
Cuba reacts to each successive blow with neither trepidation nor deference. The State Department refuses to accept the agrarian reform: Cuba divides the U.S.-owned estates among campesinos. Eisenhower sends planes to set fire to canefields and threatens not to buy Cuban sugar: Cuba breaks the commercial monopoly and exchanges sugar for oil with the Soviet Union. U.S. oil companies refuse to refine Soviet oil: Cuba nationalizes them.
Every discourse is a course. For hours and hours Fidel reasons and asks, teaches and learns, defends and accuses, while Cuba gropes forward, each step a search for the way.
(91)
1961: Santo Domingo
In the Year Thirty-One of the Trujillo Era
The paperweight on his desk, lying amid gilt cupids and dancing girls, is a porcelain baseball glove. Surrounded by busts of Trujillo and photos of Trujillo, Trujillo scans the latest lists of conspirators submitted by his spies. With a disdainful flick of the wrist he crosses out names, men and women who will not wake up tomorrow, while his torturers wrench new names from prisoners who scream in the Ozama fortress.
The lists give Trujillo cause for sad reflection. Leading the conspirators arrayed against him are the U.S. ambassador and the archbishop primate of the Indies, who only yesterday shared his government. Now Empire and Church are repudiating their faithful son, who has become unpresentable in the eyes of the world, and whose prodigal hand they now reject. Such ingratitude from the authors of capitalist development in the Dominican Republic hurts him deeply. Nevertheless, among all the decorations that hang from his breast, his belly, and the walls, Trujillo still loves best the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Gregory, which he received from the Vatican, and the little medal which, many years ago, recognized his services to the U.S. Marines.
Until death he will be the Sentinel of the West, despite all the grief, this man who has dubbed himself Benefactor of the Fatherland, Savior of the Fatherland, Father of the Fatherland, Restorer of Financial Independence, Champion of World Peace, Protector of Culture, First Anticommunist of the Americas, Outstanding and Most Illustrious Generalísimo.
(60, 63, and 101)
1961: Santo Domingo
The Defunctísimo
leaves as his bequest an entire country—in addition to nine thousand six hundred neckties, two thousand suits, three hundred and fifty uniforms, and six hundred pairs of shoes in his closets in Santo Domingo, and five hundred and thirty million dollars in his private Swiss bank accounts.
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo has fallen in an ambush, bullets tattooing his car. His son, Ramfis, flies in from Paris to take charge of the legacy, the burial, and vengeance.
Colleague and buddy of Porfirio Rubirosa, Ramfis Trujillo has acquired a certain notoriety since a recent cultural mission to Hollywood. There, he presented Mercedes Benzes and chinchilla coats to Kim Novak and Zsa Zsa Cabor in the name of the hungry but generous Dominican people.
(60, 63, and 101)
1961: Bay of Pigs
Against the Wind,
against death, moving ahead, never back, the Cuban revolution remains scandalously alive no more than eight minutes’ flying time from Miami.
To put an end to this effrontery, the CIA organizes an invasion to be launched from the United States, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Somoza II sees the expeditionary force off at the pier. In the Cuban Liberation Army, machine-tooled, oiled, and greased by the CIA, soldiers and policemen from the Batista dictatorship cohabit with displaced inheritors of sugar plantations, banks, newspapers, gambling casinos, brothels, and political parties.
“Bring me back some hairs from Castro’s beard!” Somoza instructs them.
U.S. planes, camouflaged and decorated with the star of the Cuban Air Force, enter Cuban skies. These planes, flying low, strafe the people who greet them, then bomb the cities. After this softening-up operation, the invaders land haplessly in the swamps of the Bay of Pigs.
Meanwhile, President Kennedy golfs in Virginia. He has issued the invasion order, but it was Eisenhower who had set the plan in motion, Eisenhower who gave it the green light at the same desk where he approved the invasion of Guatemala. Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, assured him it would be as simple to do away with Fidel as it was with Arbenz. A matter of a couple of weeks, give or take a day or two; even the same CIA team to take charge of it. Same men, same bases. The landing of the liberators would unleash popular insurrection on this island under the boot of red tyranny. U.S. intelligence operatives report exactly that. The people of Cuba, fed up with forming queues, await the signal to rise.
(415 and 469)
1961: Playa Girón
The Second U.S. Military Defeat in Latin America
It takes Cuba only three days to finish off the invaders. Among the dead are four U.S. pilots. The seven ships of the invasion fleet, escorted by the United States Navy, flee or sink in the Bay of Pigs.
President Kennedy assumes full responsibility for this CIA fiasco.
The Agency believed, as always, in the reports of its local spies, whom it paid to say what it was desperate to hear; and, as always, it confused geography with a military map unrelated to people or to history. The marshes the CIA chose for the landing had been the most miserable spot in all Cuba, a kingdom of crocodiles and mosquitos—that is, until the revolution. Then human enthusiasm had transformed these quagmires, peppering them with schools, hospitals, and roads.
The people here are the first to face the bullets of the invaders who have come to save them.
(88, 435, and 469)
1961: Havana
Portrait of the Past
The invaders—hangers-on and hangmen, young millionaires, veterans of a thousand crimes—answer the journalists’ questions. No one assumes responsibility for Playa Girón; no one assumes responsibility for anything. They were all cooks.
Ramón Calvino, famous torturer of the Batista regime, suffers total amnesia when confronted by the women he had beaten, kicked and raped, who identify and revile him. Father Ismael de Lugo, chaplain of the assault brigade, seeks shelter beneath the Virgin’s cloak. He had fought on Franco’s side in the Spanish war—on the Virgin’s advice, he says—and joined the invasion force to keep the Virgin from having to suffer any more the spectacle of communism. Father Lugo invokes the tycoon Virgin, owner of some bank or nationalized plantation, who thinks and feels like the other twelve hundred prisoners: that right is the right of property and inheritance; freedom, the freedom of enterprise; the model society, a business corporation; exemplary democracy, a shareholders’ meeting.
All the invaders have been educated in the ethics of impunity. None admit to having killed anybody; but then, like them, poverty doesn’t exactly sign its name to its crimes either. Some journalists question them about social injustice, but they wash their hands of it, the system washes its hands. After all, children in Cuba—in all of Latin America—who die soon after birth, die of gastroenteritis, not capitalism.
(397)
1961: Washington
Who Invaded Cuba? A Dialogue in the U.S. Senate
SENATOR CAPEHART: How many [planes] did we have?
ALLEN DULLES (director of the CIA): How many did the Cubans have?
SENATOR SPARKMAN: No, the Americans had how many?
DULLES: Well, these are Cubans.
SPARK
MAN: The rebels.
DULLES: We do not call them rebels.
CAPEHART: I mean, the revolutionary forces.
SPARKMAN: When he said how many did we have, that is what we are referring to, anti-Castro forces.
RICHARD M. BISSELL (deputy director of the CIA): We started out, sir, with sixteen B-26s …
(108)
1961: Havana
María de la Cruz
Soon after the invasion, a vast crowd assembles in the plaza to hear Fidel announce that the prisoners will be exchanged for children’s medicines. Then he gives out diplomas to forty thousand campesinos who have learned to read and write.
An old woman insists on mounting the platform, insists so energetically that finally they bring her up. She flaps vainly at the too-high microphone, until Fidel hands it down to her.
“I wanted to meet you, Fidel. I wanted to tell you …”
“Look, you’ll make me blush.”
But the old woman, all wrinkles and little bones, isn’t about to be put off. She says she’s finally learned to read and write at the age of a hundred and six. She introduces herself. Her Christian name is María de la Cruz, because she was born on the day that the Holy Cross was invented; her surname is Semanat, after the sugar plantation on which she was born a slave, the daughter of slaves, granddaughter of slaves. In those days the masters sent blacks who tried to get an education to the pillory, María de la Cruz explains, because blacks were supposed to be machines that went into action at the sound of a bell, to the rhythm of whips, and that was why she took so long to learn.