Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,85

by that class, nor did he want to be. Like Emiliano, he had grown up as an outsider, and now both men wanted to obliterate those class distinctions once and for all. She wondered how poor Mirta was holding up under all of this.

“How long have you been married?” she asked Castro.

“Four years,” he said, taking a long pull on his cigar and blowing out a stream of smoke.

“And what a honeymoon they had,” Emiliano interjected, looking at Jackie and rolling his eyes. “Fidel’s father paid for them to stay at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for a couple of weeks and at a luxurious hotel in Miami where the shah of Iran stayed. Not only that—his father gave Fidel money to buy a Lincoln Continental so he could drive his bride from New York to Miami in style.”

Jackie did a quick computation in her head and figured that the cost of the honeymoon and the car had to come to about twenty thousand dollars. Not bad for a guajiro. “That was very generous of your father,” she said to Fidel. Thinking of herself, she added, “A life of privilege can be addictive. I admire you for being able give it all up and fight for what you believe in.”

Castro smiled. “Knowing my middle-class childhood, no one would have predicted that I would turn out to be a revolutionary. My circumstances as the son of a landowner and my education in religious schools attended by the sons of the rich would have made it logical for me to be indifferent to the hardships of others. Living in Cuba, where all films and publications were ‘made in the USA,’ was another reason that I should have been a reactionary.” He gave his pointed remark a chance to sink in like a well-aimed dart, and then smoothly continued, “But I defied all the odds when I entered the university. Out of the thousands of students, I became one of only thirty who were anti-imperialist. At age twenty, I joined the fight to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, which your government tacitly supported, and wound up swimming nine miles through shark-infested waters to get back to Cuba.”

Jackie ignored the anti-imperialist barbs and said, “That was very heroic.” She was reminded of the stories she’d heard about Jack Kennedy swimming off an island in the Pacific to get help after his PT boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer.

Now Castro seemed to have found his niche talking about his favorite subject—himself. “Seven months after that, I joined thousands of Latin American activists in Bogotá, Colombia, for a conference to come up with a unified statement against U.S. imperialism. That ended in an explosive three-day riot. When the police came after the students who were active in it, the Cuban embassy gave me refuge, and I was flown home to Havana aboard a Cuban aircraft with a shipment of bulls.”

Jackie laughed out loud as she remembered hitchhiking a ride with Emiliano in a truck full of goats, but she desperately wanted to change the subject to something other than American imperialism. Looking around the room for something else they could talk about until Castro was ready to tell them why he had summoned them, her eyes traveled back to his wedding photograph. Not far from it was another picture of Castro and his wife in street clothes, posing with a cute toddler in front of them.

“Is that your son?” she asked Fidel.

“Yes, that’s my little Fidelito,” he said, beaming. “He’s three years old now. He and my wife are at our apartment in Marianao.” He sounded almost apologetic. “My wife is very supportive of me and is separated from her family because she doesn’t think Batista should have come back. But Mirta doesn’t want to get involved in politics. She would rather devote herself to being a mother and homemaker and let me do what I was born to do.”

Jackie sensed a red flag in a marriage where a husband’s immersion in politics has separated his wife from her family and even from the husband himself, but she said nothing. When is he going to tell us why he brought us here?

But Castro seemed stuck in the past and eager for Jackie to understand what made him so passionate about political activism. “Even in my grade school years, I spent most of my time standing up to authority. Whenever I disagreed with something the teacher said to me, I would swear at