Darkest Havana
Counter-Revolutionary Agent. By Hans Tanner. (Foulis, 22s. 6d.)
Wan fine originality Mr. Tanner calls his first chapter 'Our Man in Havana." Exactly whose man he was he never discloses, and the photo of him, with rifle, pistol, sheath knife, dark
• glasses, beard, side-burns and grimace as im- maculately tough as his sombrero is immacu- lately cocked, offers no clue. His publishers, stating that he is known and hunted by the Cuban secret police under the name of El Suizo, describe him as an international correspondent, but—in Mr. Tanner's own terse, international language—I wonder.
It seems credible, however, that he was a racing motorist on his way to a Grand Prix in New Zealand towards the end of 1960, that he stopped off in New York where he met an old Cuban friend in a bar, that he went down to Miami and got mixed up with one of the sixty different factions of anti-Castro Cuban exiles there, that he trained for guerrilla warfare with them somewhere in the backwoods of Florida and that early in 1961 he flew three times across to Havana, ostensibly on business trips con- nected with Maserati car spares, but in reality to organise an invasion of Cuba.
In Cuba he hired a taxi-driver called Jesus, rang up a girl called R, made an appointment with a man called Fernandez in the fifth row at a strip cabaret, learnt from a girl called Celia that Castro's navy was on the point of defection, went for a ride in a Chrysler with a man called `Errol Flynn' and drank a lot of daiquiris. Apart from getting a little muddled with all those Cuban names—an executioner called Herman mysteriously turns up later as Alfred, and 'a foreign minister called Raul, more understand- ably, becomes Paul—Mr. Tanner's skill in his profession was unquestionable. In Santiago a stranger in a rocking-chair advised him, between nonchalant puffs on a cigar, to go and look at the paintings in the cathedral, preferably around ten next morning. Mr. Tanner got the message.
At the time it may have all been very dan- gerous and heroic, but a year later, in Mr. Tanner's blunt prose, it sounds just very silly. The culmination of his operations was an ex- pedition from Miami in three motor-boats with the object of bringing down Castro's govern- ment; a few days later they limped home, having lost each other in the dark and been forced to throw most of their guns and equipment over- board. Unfortunately Mr. Tanner was still out of action in Miami at the time of the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the story of that sense- less, tragic, humiliating episode is still to be told; but to make up for the omission our inter- national correspondent offers a description of the assassination of General Trujillo of the Domini- can Republic, which he didn't witness either.
Through all the chaos of futility, inefficiency and jealousy, several big surprises emerge. First, Mr. Tanner and his friends really did seem to take themselves seriously. Second, the CIA did too. Third, nobody managed to form any effec- tive coalition among the myriad squabbling groups exiled in Miami. Fourth, the exiles, as well as the CIA, were disastrously wrong about the probable reaction in Cuba to any attempt at a counter-revolution.
Of course, it was sad for Mr. Tanner; having missed the Grand Prix in New Zealand and then having failed to topple Cstro, he must have cut a sorry figure—Nobody's Man in Miami. But he will survive. International correspondents have friends in the most unlikely places. On a flying trip to the Bahamas to get an extension for his US visa he checked in at a hotel, and bless me! if the manager wasn't his old friend Freddy Pinto . . .
NICHOLAS WOLLASTON
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