Vintage Didion

MIAMI TWO

Guillermo Novo was known to FBI agents and federal prosecutors and the various personnel who made up “terrorist task forces” on the eastern seaboard of the United States as one of the Novo brothers, Ignacio and Guillermo, two exiles who first came to national attention in 1964, when they fired a dud bazooka shell at the United Nations during a speech by Che Guevara. There were certain farcical elements here (the embattled brothers bobbing in a small boat, the shell plopping harmlessly into the East River), and, in a period when Hispanics were seen by many Americans as intrinsically funny, an accent joke, this incident was generally treated tolerantly, a comic footnote to the news. As time went by, however, the names of the Novo brothers began turning up in less comic footnotes, for example this one, on page 93 of volume X of the report made by the House Select Committee on Assassinations on its 1978 investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

(67) Immunized executive session testimony of Marita Lorenz, May 31, 1978. Hearings before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Lorenz, who had publicly claimed she was once Castro’s mistress (

Miami News

, June 15, 1976), told the committee she was present at a September 1963 meeting in Orlando Bosch’s Miami home during which Lee Harvey Oswald, Frank Sturgis, Pedro Diaz Lanz, and Bosch made plans to go to Dallas…. She further testified that around November 15, 1963, she, Jerry Patrick Hemming, the Novo brothers, Pedro Diaz Lanz, Sturgis, Bosch, and Oswald traveled in a two-car caravan to Dallas and stayed in a motel where they were contacted by Jack Ruby. There were several rifles and scopes in the motel room…. Lorenz said she returned to Miami around November 19 or 20…. The committee found no evidence to support Lorenz’s allegation.

Guillermo Novo himself was among those convicted, in a 1979 trial that rested on the demonstration of connections between the Cuban defendants and DINA, the Chilean secret police, of the assassination in Washington of the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and of the Institute for Policy Studies researcher who happened to be with him when his car blew up, Ronni Moffitt. This conviction was overturned on appeal (the appellate court ruled that the testimony of two jailhouse informants had been improperly admitted), and in a 1981 retrial, after the federal prosecutors turned down a deal in which the defense offered a plea of guilty on the lesser charge of conspiracy, plus what Guillermo Novo’s attorney called “a sweetener,” a “guarantee” by Guillermo Novo “to stop all violence by Cuban exiles in the United States,” Guillermo Novo was acquitted.

I happened to meet Guillermo Novo in 1985, one Monday morning when I was waiting for someone in the reception room at WRHC–Cadena Azul, Miami, a station the call letters of which stood for Radio Havana Cuba. There was about this meeting nothing of either moment or consequence. A man who introduced himself as “Bill Novo” just appeared beside me, and we exchanged minor biography for a few minutes. He said that he had noticed me reading a letter framed on the wall of the reception room. He said that he was the sales manager for WRHC, and had lived in Miami only three years. He said that he had, however, lived in the United States since 1954, mostly in New York and New Jersey. He was a small sharp-featured man in a white tropical suit, who in fact spoke English with an accent that suggested New Jersey, and he had a way of materializing and dematerializing sideways, of appearing from and then sidling back into an inner office, which was where he retreated after he gave me his business card, the exchange of cards remaining a more or less fixed ritual in Cuban Miami. GUILLERMO NOVO SAMPOL, the card read. Gerente de Ventas, WRHC–Cadena Azul.

That it was possible on a Monday morning in Miami to have so desultory an encounter with one of the Novo brothers seemed to me, perhaps because I was not yet accustomed to a rhythm in which dealings with DINA and unsupported allegations about Dallas motel rooms could be incorporated into the American business day, remarkable, and later that week I asked an exile acquaintance who was familiar with WRHC if the Guillermo Novo who was the sales manager there was in fact the Guillermo Novo who had been tried in the Letelier assassination. There had been, my acquaintance demurred, “a final acquittal on the Letelier count.” But it was, I persisted, the same man. My acquaintance had shrugged impatiently, not as if he thought it best not mentioned, but as if he did not quite see the interest. “Bill Novo has been a man of action,” he said. “Yes. Of course.”

To be a man of action in Miami was to receive encouragement from many quarters. On the wall of the reception room at WRHC–Cadena Azul, Miami, where the sales manager was Guillermo Novo and an occasional commentator was Fidel and Raúl Castro’s estranged sister Juanita and the host of the most popular talk show was Felipe Rivero, whose family had from 1832 until 1960 published the powerful Diario de la Marina in Havana and who would in 1986, after a controversy fueled by his insistence that the Holocaust had not occurred but had been fabricated “to defame and divide the German people,” move from WRHC to WOCN, there hung in 1985 a framed letter, the letter Guillermo Novo had mentioned when he first materialized that Monday morning. This letter, which was dated October 1983 and signed by the president of the United States, read:

I learned from Becky Dunlop [presumably Becky Norton Dunlop, a White House aide who later followed Edwin Meese to the Justice Department] about the outstanding work being done at WRHC. Many of your listeners have also been in touch, praising your news coverage and your editorials. Your talented staff deserves special commendation for keeping your listeners well-informed.

I’ve been particularly pleased, of course, that you have been translating and airing a Spanish version of my weekly talks. This is important because your signal reaches the people of Cuba, whose rigidly controlled government media suppress any news Castro and his communist henchmen do not want them to know. WRHC is performing a great service for all its listeners. Keep up the good work, and God bless you.

[signed] R

ONALD

R

EAGAN

At the time I first noticed it on the WRHC wall, and attracted Guillermo Novo’s attention by reading it, this letter interested me because I had the week before been looking back through the administration’s arguments for Radio Martí, none of which, built as they were on the figure of beaming light into utter darkness, had alluded to these weekly talks that the people of Cuba appeared to be getting on WRHC–Cadena Azul, Miami. Later the letter interested me because I had begun reading back through the weekly radio talks themselves, and had come across one from 1978 in which Ronald Reagan, not yet president, had expressed his doubt that either the Pinochet government or the indicted “Cuban anti-Castro exiles,” one of whom had been Guillermo Novo, had anything to do with the Letelier assassination.

Ronald Reagan had wondered instead (“I don’t know the answer, but it is a question worth asking….”) if Orlando Letelier’s “connections with Marxists and far-left causes” might not have set him up for assassination, caused him to be, as the script for this talk put it, “murdered by his own masters.” Here was the scenario: “Alive,” Ronald Reagan had reasoned in 1978, Orlando Letelier “could be compromised; dead he could become a martyr. And the left didn’t lose a minute in making him one.” Actually this version of the Letelier assassination had first been advanced by Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who had advised his colleagues on the Senate floor that it was not “plausible” to suspect the Pinochet government in the Letelier case, because terrorism was “most often an organized tool of the left,” but the Reagan reworking was interesting on its own, a way of speaking, later to become familiar, in which events could be revised as they happened into illustrations of ideology.

“There was no blacklist of Hollywood,” Ronald Reagan told Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times during the 1980 campaign. “The blacklist in Hollywood, if there was one, was provided by the communists.” “I’m going to voice a suspicion now that I’ve never said aloud before,” Ronald Reagan told thirty-six high-school students in Washington in 1983 about death squads in El Salvador. “I wonder if all of this is right wing, or if those guerrilla forces have not realized that by infiltrating into the city of San Salvador and places like that, they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring down the government, and the right wing will be blamed for it.” “New intelligence shows,” Ronald Reagan told his Saturday radio listeners in March of 1986, by way of explaining why he was asking Congress to provide “the Nicaraguan freedom fighters” with what he called “the means to fight back,” that “Tomás Borge, the communist interior minister, is engaging in a brutal campaign to bring the freedom fighters into discredit. You see, Borge’s communist operatives dress in freedom fighter uniforms, go into the countryside and murder and mutilate ordinary Nicaraguans.”

Such stories were what David Gergen, when he was the White House communications director, had once called “a folk art,” the President’s way of “trying to tell us how society works.” Other members of the White House staff had characterized these stories as the President’s “notions,” casting them in the genial framework of random avuncular musings, but they were something more than that. In the first place they were never random, but systematic and rather energetically so. The stories were told to a single point. The language in which the stories were told was not that of political argument but of advertising (“New intelligence shows…” and “Now it has been learned …” and, a construction that got my attention in a 1984 address to the National Religious Broadcasters, “Medical science doctors confirm …”), of the sales pitch.

This was not just a vulgarity of diction. When someone speaks of Orlando Letelier as “murdered by his own masters,” or of the WRHC signal reaching a people denied information by “Castro and his communist henchmen,” or of the “freedom fighter uniforms” in which the “communist operatives” of the “communist interior minister” disguise themselves, that person is not arguing a case, but counting instead on the willingness of the listener to enter what Hannah Arendt called, in a discussion of propaganda, “the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world.” On the morning I met Guillermo Novo in the reception room at WRHC–Cadena Azul I copied the framed commendation from the White House into my notebook, and later typed it out and pinned it to my own office wall, an aide-mémoire to the distance between what is said in the high ether of Washington, which is about the making of those gestures and the sending of those messages and the drafting of those positions that will serve to maintain that imaginary world, about two-track strategies and alternative avenues and Special Groups (Augmented), about “not breaking faith” and “making it clear,” and what is heard on the ground in Miami, which is about consequences.

In many ways Miami remains our most graphic lesson in consequences. “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana,” John F. Kennedy said to the surviving members of the 2506 Brigade at the Orange Bowl in 1962 (the “supposed promise,” the promise “not in the script,” the promise “made in the emotion of the day”), meaning it as an abstraction, the rhetorical expression of a collective wish; a kind of poetry, which of course makes nothing happen. “We will not permit the Soviets and their henchmen in Havana to deprive others of their freedom,” Ronald Reagan said at the Dade County Auditorium in 1983 (2,500 people inside, 60,000 outside, 12 standing ovations and a pollo asado lunch at La Esquina de Tejas with Jorge Mas Canosa and 203 other provisional loyalists), and then Ronald Reagan, the first American president since John F. Kennedy to visit Miami in search of Cuban support, added this: “Someday, Cuba itself will be free.”

This was of course just more poetry, another rhetorical expression of the same collective wish, but Ronald Reagan, like John F Kennedy before him, was speaking here to people whose historical experience has not been that poetry makes nothing happen. On one of the first evenings I spent in Miami I sat at midnight over came con papas in an art-filled condominium in one of the Arquitectonica buildings on Brickell Avenue and listened to several exiles talk about the relationship of what was said in Washington to what was done in Miami. These exiles were all well-educated. They were well-read, well-traveled, comfortable citizens of a larger world than that of either Miami or Washington, with well-cut blazers and French dresses and interests in New York and Madrid and Mexico. Yet what was said that evening in the expensive condominium overlooking Biscayne Bay proceeded from an almost primitive helplessness, a regressive fury at having been, as these exiles saw it, repeatedly used and repeatedly betrayed by the government of the United States. “Let me tell you something,” one of them said. “They talk about ‘Cuban terrorists.’ The guys they call ‘Cuban terrorists’ are the guys they trained.”

This was not, then, the general exile complaint about a government that might have taken up their struggle but had not. This was something more specific, a complaint that the government in question had in fact taken up la lucha, but for its own purposes, and, in what these exiles saw as a pattern of deceit stretching back through six administrations, to its own ends. The pattern, as they saw it, was one in which the government of the United States had repeatedly encouraged or supported exile action and then, when policy shifted and such action became an embarrassment, a discordant note in whatever message Washington was sending that month or that year, had discarded the exiles involved, had sometimes not only discarded them but, since the nature of la lucha was essentially illegal, turned them in, set them up for prosecution; positioned them, as it were, for the fall.

They mentioned, as many exiles did, the Omega 7 prosecutions. They mentioned, as many exiles did, the Cuban burglars at the Watergate, who were told, because so many exiles had come by that time to distrust the CIA, that the assignment at hand was not just CIA, but straight from the White House. They mentioned the case of Jose Elias de la Torriente, a respected exile leader who had been, in the late 1960s, recruited by the CIA to lend his name and his prestige to what was set forth as a new plan to overthrow Fidel Castro, the “Work Plan for Liberation,” or the Torriente Plan.

Money had once again been raised, and expectations. The entire attention of el exilio had for a time been focused on the Torriente Plan, a diversion of energy that, as years passed and nothing happened, suggested to many that what the plan may have been from its inception was just another ad hoc solution to the disposal problem, another mirror trick. Jose Elias de la Torriente had been called, by a frustrated community once again left with nowhere to go, a traitor. Jose Elias de la Torriente had been called a CIA stooge. Jose Elias de la Torriente had finally been, at age seventy, as he sat in his house in Coral Gables watching The Robe on television about nine o’clock on the evening of Good Friday, 1974, assassinated, shot through the Venetian blind on a window by someone, presumably an exile, who claimed the kill in the name “Zero.”

This had, in the telling at the dinner table, the sense of a situation played out to its Aristotelian end, of that inexorable Caribbean progress from cause to effect that I later came to see as central to the way Miami thought about itself. Miami stories tended to have endings. The cannon onstage tended to be fired. One of those who spoke most ardently that evening was a quite beautiful young woman in a white jersey dress, a lawyer, active in Democratic politics in Miami. This dinner in the condominium overlooking Biscayne Bay took place in March of 1985, and the woman in the white jersey dress was María Elena Prío Durán, the child who flew into exile in March of 1952 with her father’s foreign minister, her father’s minister of the interior, her father, her sister, and her mother, the equally beautiful woman in the hat with the fishnet veiling.

I recall watching María Elena Prío Durán that night as she pushed back her hair and reached across the table for a cigarette. This was a long time before the C-123K carrying Eugene Hasenfus fell from the sky inside Nicaragua. This was a long time before Eugene Hasenfus mentioned the names of the 2506 members already in place at Ilopango. NICARAGUA HOY, CUBA MAÑANA. Let me tell you about Cuban terrorists, another of the exiles at dinner that night, a prominent Miami architect named Raúl Rodríguez, was saying at the end of the table. Cuba never grew plastique. Cuba grew tobacco. Cuba grew sugarcane. Cuba never grew C-4. María Elena Prío Durán lit the cigarette and immediately crushed it out. C-4, Raúl Rodríguez said, and he slammed his palm down on the white tablecloth as he said it, grew here.

— 1987