7
Next day I started on the last stage of the programme which had been arranged for me. Humberto and Daniel Ortega had checked with Cuba and I was assured that my invitation was from Fidel Castro and not from the Casa de las Américas. The Nicaraguans provided a small jet plane, which I was told had formerly been the personal plane of Somoza, and when I chose my seat, the pilot was amused. ‘You have chosen Somoza’s,’ he said.
Chuchu and I now had a rather odd companion whom Chuchu had somehow picked up in Nicaragua. He had begged Chuchu to give him a lift to Panama. Apparently he was a Colombian guerrilla who after nineteen years in the jungle wanted to return home and take advantage of an amnesty offered by the new president, but as he had no papers he couldn’t travel on a commercial plane. Chuchu planned to lodge him in Panama with Rogelio and Lidia, as he had done with the dubious professor from Guatemala, until he could arrange for him to have a passport. (Chuchu was a man of infinite resource when it came to smuggling arms or men, but I felt sorry for poor Rogelio and Lidia.) The Colombian was a man who spoke very little. He wore a cap even at meals, and he trimmed his nails on to the cloth while he ate.
We were met at Havana by an old acquaintance of mine, Otero, who had travelled with me and the poet Pablo Fernandez around Cuba in 1966, and by the then head of security, Piñeiro, whom I had last seen the same year playing basketball with Raúl Castro and other ministers at two in the morning watched by their patient wives. His forbidding red beard had turned snow white, which gave him a patriarchal air. While driving to the house on the outskirts of Havana where we were to be lodged for the night, we talked of this and that and I was astonished to learn that the man who had been head of Cuban security for so long still imagined that MI5 and MI6 were rival branches of military intelligence. I thought it was unnecessary – and perhaps a little humiliating for him – to correct his error. We lunched together and then Piñeiro went off to arrange the meeting with Castro.
In the evening we went for our rendezvous to the house where my friend García Márquez was installed. Castro had been dining at the Spanish Embassy with Gabo. I had not seen Castro since we passed some hours of the night together in 1966, and he had given me a painting by my friend Porto Carrero. He seemed younger, thinner and more carefree. I produced a formula in greeting him which amused him, ‘I am not a messenger. I am the message.’ In other words, I had been flown to Nicaragua by the two colonels, Diaz and Noriega, and afterwards to Cuba by the Ortegas, as the known friend of Omar Torrijos, to indicate that in spite of General Paredes the ideas of Torrijos were still very much alive in Panama.
Castro remarked, ‘It would be a good thing if Paredes were elected President, for then he would have little power to harm. It would be unfortunate if the conservatives ran a candidate against him who won. Then there would be a conservative president and the danger of a conservative general.’
As for the war in El Salvador, Castro proved as optimistic as Cayetano. He believed that the guerrillas would reach power by the end of 1983. By this time we know that Colonel Diaz, who believed in a long and inconclusive struggle, came nearer the truth.
Castro had read – probably at Gabo’s insistence – about one third of my novel Monsignor Quixote and this led us to the subject of wine, in which he proved unexpectedly interested. He had read too about my difficulties with Nice justice.
Gabo then introduced the subject of Russian roulette, which I had played in my adolescence (as usual with Gabo he got the facts wrong, saying that I had played the game in Vietnam). Castro wanted to know exactly the circumstances, the number of times I had played and at what intervals. He told me, ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’
‘That is not true. Mathematically each time one plays the odds are the same – five to one against death. The odds are not affected by the number of times you play.’
‘No, no. You are wrong there. The odds are not the same.’ He began to make abstruse calculations which I couldn’t follow and concluded again, ‘You shouldn’t be alive.’
He then wanted to know what régime I followed.
‘No régime. I eat what I like and drink what I like.’
This obviously shocked him, for he followed a very strict régime himself, and he quickly changed the subject.
As in 1966 it was in the early hours of the morning that we said goodbye. At the door he said with a smile, ‘Tell them that I have received the message.’
That night in the bathroom I was very startled. I went to urinate and there was a piece of brown paper in the toilet. When my pee touched it the brown scrap leapt out of the bowl and landed on the wall above my head. It was a frog. Perhaps that will be the most enduring memory of my last visit to Communist Cuba. I never knew before that a frog could jump more than six feet in a vertical take-off.
8
A few hours later I was back in Panama, where I was not at all unhappy to find that I had lost my pretentious suite which had been allotted now to an important visitor, Mr Kissinger. I was less happy that I had lost also a gold coloured tie given to me by someone I loved – perhaps Mr Kissinger inherited that, too. My agreeable bodyguard was now protecting Mr Kissinger.
Colonel Diaz called on me and I reported on my trip. He insisted that my knowledge of Panama was incomplete without seeing something of the life of the upper bourgeoisie to whom Omar had been anathema. I must go that evening with him to a house-warming given by an acquaintance of his. ‘But please don’t tell anyone that you have been in Nicaragua and Cuba.’
The party was a nightmare, and I was without the support of Chuchu. One could hear the noise from two streets away. There was a buffet in the garden, but I was never able to reach it, for it was separated from me by hundreds of guests who were all shouting at the top of their voices in order to make themselves heard above the din of a band which was determined to dominate the guests. One guest bellowed into my ear, ‘Just over from England?’ And mischievously I ignored the warning of Colonel Diaz.
‘No, Cuba.’
‘Where?’ he asked with incredulity.
‘Cuba,’ I shouted back, ‘and Nicaragua.’
He thrust his way into the crowd to escape and I thrust my way out of it. Would these be the people who elected the next president?
9
So it was that I found myself with Omar’s daughter, tossed hither and thither in the helicopter. We were on the way back from visiting the village named in memory of the murdered Archbishop of San Salvador, the first archbishop to be murdered at the altar while celebrating Mass since St Thomas à Becket.
Ciudad Romero had been carved out of the jungle on some low ground beyond the mountain village of Coclesito, where Omar had built himself his modest house and where three years back I had visited the buffaloes. There were four hundred and twenty refugees from El Salvador in the village, and nearly half of them were young children – a few of these had been born in their new home. Their old homes had been destroyed by bombs from the air and then burnt by the military. They had fled to Honduras, where they had found their conditions almost as bad and as perilous as in El Salvador. I don’t know in what way Omar got to know of their plight, but he sent a plane to fetch them to Panama. After arrival they were left for a while at a military post at Cimarrón to recuperate and then the village headman was asked to choose a site to build his own village. He chose this site in the jungle because of the fertility of the soil, because of the inexhaustible supply of wood for the houses, and because it was on the banks of a navigable river, so that supplies which would otherwise have had to come by air could come by sea, for there were no roads through the jungle.
All the villagers had congregated in the schoolhouse to welcome us, to welcome in particular Omar’s daughter, for the memory of Omar was very dear to them. Whenever he went to his house in Coclesito he would take a helicopter to the village and his pockets were always full of sweets for the children. One of the villagers spoke of the poem he had written in honour of Omar and I asked to hear it. It had been s
et to music by another of the peasants and he sang his poem accompanied by a drum, a guitar and a violin.
The villagers must have heard the poet sing his poem many times, but they listened with grave intensity. They were hearing the story of their own lives. It was as though they felt it to have become part of literature. The poem was all in eight-syllabled lines and the sound of the half rhymes seemed to transform it into a rough poetry. (Chuchu has translated the words for me.)
Voy a contar una historia: I am going to tell a story
lo que mi Pueblo sufría About how my people suffered
por una Junta asesina On account of a murderous Junta
que compasión no tenía. That had no compassion.
Cuando un Primero de Mayo One first of May
dos aviones bombardearon Two airplanes bombed us
y los soldados quemaron And then the soldiers burned
las casitas que teníamos. The little houses we had.
De alli salimos a Honduras, We went then to Honduras
llegamos a Las Estancias. And arrived at Las Estancias
allí estuvimos seis meses Where they kept us for six months
bajo mucha vigilancia. Under very strict surveillance.
Venimos a Panamá, Then we came to Panama
nos fuimos pa’ Cimarrón And we went to Cimarrón
allí estuvimos un tiempo Where we stayed for some time
sólo en recuperación. To rest awhile.
El Gobierno panameño It was the Panamanian Government
fue el que asilo nos dió, And Señor Omar Torrijos,
y el señor Omar Torrijos, A General of Division,
General de División. That gave us asylum.
Hoy Panamáestá de luto, Today Panama is mourning
lo sentimos su dolor, And we also feel their pain,
porque ha perdido a un gran hombre, Because they have lost a great man,
hombre de mucho valor. A man of much courage.
El General fue un lider, The General was a leader,
lider de fama mundial, A leader of world fame,
y que luchó por los pobres, Who fought on behalf of the poor
sincero y muy popular, A man sincere and very loved.
Este Pueblo panameño I admire and love
y su Guardia Nacional, The Panamanian people
yo los admiro y los quiero, And their National Guard.
es un Pueblo fraternal. It is a very fraternal people.
Los Latinoamericanos We Latin Americans
decimos en voz popular: with one voice:
no lo olvidaremos jamás shall never forget
al querido General. Our dear General.
Ya con ésta se despiden With this we say farewell,
los humildes campesinos We, the humble peasants
que viven fuera ’e su Patria That live far away from
por un Gobierno asesino. their homeland
Because of a murderous government.
One girl among the villagers held my attention because of the melancholy beauty of her eyes. She looked about sixteen and I thought her to be the young mother of the child whom she held between her knees, but when she stood up to go when the song was over I realized that she was only a small child herself, no more than twelve – it was fire, bombs and death which had given her a too-early maturity.
The meeting in the school area over, there was something the peasants urgently wanted to show us. I heard the world ‘altar’, ‘altar’, often repeated as they led us to the outskirts of the village, and there sure enough was an altar which they had built and it bore the photograph of the murdered Archbishop in the centre and photographs of Omar at each side. I remembered the abandoned church I had seen in Coclesito with the hens pecking in the aisle and I remembered too what Omar had said about village cemeteries on the first day that we met nearly seven years before: ‘If the people don’t look after the dead they don’t look after the living.’ These people without a doubt were looking after their dead.
10
The time had come to say my goodbyes, but first there was an obligation I had to fulfil. General Paredes was certainly not one of those who had tried to keep alive the ideas and ideals of Torrijos, but I could hardly leave Panama without seeing him and thanking him for the plane to Managua and the helicopter to the village of Romero. He invited me to lunch at a new restaurant, named the Charlot in honour of Charlie Chaplin, and I accepted, but then a warning reached me from the owner of the restaurant. One of my fellow guests would be a Cuban refugee journalist who had come from Miami in Kissinger’s wake. No journalist in my experience is wholly trustworthy, but a Cuban refugee . . . what a story this man might invent of my visit to Fidel Castro. I sent a message back that I was sorry, but I wouldn’t be able to lunch if the journalist were there, and the General altered his guest list. To his credit he showed no resentment at my interference.
It was strange finding myself back for apéritifs in the house which Omar had shared with his friend Rory González and which was now occupied by General Paredes. There were not many obvious changes, but inevitably there was a great sense of emptiness, and I looked around in vain for Omar’s budgerigar. No Omar and no budgerigar. Colonel Diaz was there and Colonel Noriega, to whom I was able to pass on an invitation to Nicaragua from Lenin Cerna. To Paredes I gave Fidel Castro’s good wishes for the presidential election. Paredes seemed to take these wishes at their face value with a smile of gratification.
Had Castro’s good wishes even affected his ideology? I was surprised at lunch to hear him criticize Reagan’s policy in Central America and he even had some kind words for the Sandinistas. He seemed anxious to show me that he was following the Torrijos line and in the middle of lunch he presented me with an extravagantly expensive watch inscribed ‘To an English brother of General Omar Torrijos from General Paredes’. To refuse the present was impossible, but it was an embarrassing gift. I couldn’t help being aware of the cynical amusement of the other guests who knew what my mission had been.
General Paredes did not follow the Torrijos line for very long after the lunch. A few months later I read of how he had paid a visit to Costa Rica where he spoke against the policy of his own President and against the peace-making activities of the Contadora group, and later a certain mystery surrounded him, for a few months after retiring from the National Guard in order to begin his campaign for the presidency it was announced that he had retired from the conflict. Then weeks later the puzzle became more complex. It was reported that he was not standing in the election for the presidency because if he were defeated it would reflect on the National Guard. Had he realized what lay behind Castro’s good wishes, and was there now a danger of the result Castro feared? However, I was reassured by Chuchu on the telephone the other day – Paredes, he said, was kaput.
That night I gave a farewell dinner in the Peruvian restaurant to my friends, to Chuchu and Silvana, Rogelio and Lidia and, inevitably, the Colombian refugee who had not yet obtained the papers he needed and who still wore a hat and trimmed his nails at the table. Nineteen years of humid jungle life perhaps make the nails grow fast.
Next day, while I waited for my plane in the diplomatic lounge at the airport, Kissinger entered to a barrage of flashlights. I would have liked to ask him whether he had my gold tie, but I wanted to escape quickly, for the Cuban journalist was on the same plane to Miami and he had spotted me. My old bodyguard was drinking coffee by the door, so there was another goodbye to be said. I got the impression that he preferred the more convivial life he had led with me and Chuchu to life in the shadow of Kissinger.
It was a goodbye also to Panama, a little country for which after seven years I had formed a great affection. Five or six times since I began to write this last chapter the telephone has rung and brought me the voice of Chuchu urging me to return. ‘The Nicaraguans want you,’ he always adds as an inducement, which I take with a big grain of salt. But all the same I find myself unable to give him a firm ‘No, no, I can’t come again
.’ Although Panama belongs to the past, to a section of my life which is over, I hedge, I prevaricate. Perhaps in three months, I say . . . or four . . . perhaps next year it will be possible, for to pronounce a final ‘no’ to Chuchu would be to dose finally the pages of a book and relegate to a shelf all the memories which it contains of a dead man whom I loved, Omar Torrijos.
POSTSCRIPT
I have been perhaps unduly sceptical of any part played by the CIA in the death of Omar Torrijos. Since writing this book a document has reached me which is apparently a minority report dated 11 June 1980 addressed to the State Department in Washington.
The writer, or writers, speak of the vital importance of Panama for the United States in connection with El Salvador. ‘General Torrijos, who continues to exercise control over the armed forces and veto power over government policies, is described in our character profiles as “volatile, unpredictable . . . a populist demagogue with a visceral anti-American bias . . . and a penchant for the bottle”, hardly the description of a reliable ally. Our precarious situation in Panama was recently evidenced by President Royo’s public condemnation of our training programme for the Salvadoreans.
‘Consider the following additional bonds between Panama and El Salvador:
* Although initially supportive of the 10.15.79 coup, General Torrijos – and the Panamanian Government – have improved ties with the FDR/DRU moderates [on the left].
* Panama’s economic difficulties and its dependence on the US banking community make it potentially responsive to our pressure. However, the same factors, combined with our tendency to act heavy-handedly, may encourage a resurgence of “anti-Imperialist” sentiment.