I Was Castro's Prisoner: An American Tells his Story

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I WAS CASTRO’S PRISONER

AN AMERICAN TELLS HIS STORY

BY

JOHN MARTINO

IN COLLABORATION WITH NATHANIEL WEYL

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 4

DEDICATION 5

1—Roulette Wheels and Firing Squads 6

Deaf Ears and Closed Minds 8

The Cult of Dirt 9

The Alan Courtney Show 10

The Death of José Castaño 12

2—Prisoner of Fidel Castro 14

Police Chief Efigenio Almeijeiras 16

Pilot of the Counterrevolution 18

Colonel Ventura Again 22

Almost Free 24

3—The American Embassy: Profile in Cowardice 26

Castillo de Atarés 28

The Perfidious Dr. Estévez 29

The Attaché and the Russian Radio 31

Shaving the Barbudos 34

More Protection from the Embassy 35

4—Sanctuary Found and Lost 38

The Indictment 41

Sanctuary at the Embassy 45

5—Sadists and Perverts of El Principe 49

The Homosexuals 51

Almeijeiras, Almeida, Raúl Castro 52

Homosexuality and Communism 54

The American Executioner 55

6—Trial by Judge Fury 57

The Darkening Clouds 58

A Switch of Lawyers 60

Rafael del Pino 62

Before the Military Tribunal 65

7—Problems of Survival 68

Freedom Slips Through My Fingers 70

Another Brush with the Embassy 72

8—Men Without Freedom 76

The Transistor Radio 77

Death and a Ruptured Appendix 80

We Move to La Cabaña 83

9—The Cocaine Revolution 85

La Cabaña Fortress 86

Men Waiting for Death 88

Narcotics Traffic 89

10—The American Prisoners 92

The Three Americans 94

The Death of Dr. Yebra 99

11—The Isle of Pines: A Cuban Inferno 102

The Prison on the Island 104

The Green Hell 105

The Women’s Prisons 109

The Prison System 110

12—The Death of William Morgan 111

Hunger Strike 113

Six Americans on a Pleasure Trip 115

Betrayal in the American Embassy 117

The Six of Us Were Born This Morning 119

The William Morgan Story 122

I Kneel for No Man 128

13—Backwash of Invasion 130

The Betrayed Beachhead 135

The Dragnet 138

14—Down Into the Abyss 141

Filth, Squalor, Thirst 143

Another Escape 145

Communist Methods of Torture 147

The Last Escape 150

15—Victims of the Betrayed Beachhead 152

Purchasing Agent for Castro 154

The Betrayed Underground 156

Showdown with Dr. Dubuté 160

16—The Communists Plan Rehabilitation 162

Jack Paar’s Folly 163

The Communist School 164

We Fight the Brainwashers 167

17—Revolt in the Village 171

Trouble in the Countryside 172

The Communist Viewpoint 175

18—Black Supremacy 177

The Rise of the Negro Communists 178

Negro Racism 179

Batista and the Military 180

Miscegenation and Venereal Disease 181

The Blacks and the Prisons 182

The Negroes and the Underground 183

The Negroes and Paredón 184

19—Ordeal of the Invaders 185

The Trial of the Invaders 185

In the Hands of the G-2 185

The Andres Vargas Gómez Case 185

20—An American Brainwasher in Cuba 185

A Typical Revolutionary Trial 185

Dialogue with a Communist 185

Castro’s Plans for Invasion 185

An American Brain Washer 185

21—I Find Freedom 185

The Road to the Sunlight 185

To the Land of the Free 185

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 185

DEDICATION

TO ALAN COURTNEY

WHOSE PROGRAM ON STATION

WQAM, MIAMI, HAS

FOR SO LONG UPHELD THE SPIRIT

OF AMERICAN FREEDOM.

1—Roulette Wheels and Firing Squads

WITH my wife, Florence, I made my first trip to Havana in July 1958 for the opening of the Deauville Hotel and Casino. The city was gay, bustling, bursting out horizontally and vertically with new hotels and apartment houses.

Cuba was under General Fulgencio Batista; the revolutionaries were out in the hills, but there was occasional terror in the streets of the city. Teenage followers of Castro’s 26th of July Movement would throw bombs in police stations or leave them inside buses carrying people to and from work. When the bombs exploded, they would scatter limbs, flesh and blood, the mangled debris of human beings. In retaliation, the police would sometimes kill suspected bomb throwers and leave their corpses in the streets as a warning to others. We saw very little of this, but we knew it was going on.

We spent about a week in Havana. I installed an electronic protective system for the Hotel Deauville casino. Most of the gambling spots lacked adequate protection and they came to me with the request that I install similar devices. They were quick to realize that this was vital to their business because, when a casino has a crooked croupier, it is for an practical purposes dead. What the Havana gambling places needed were electronic surveillance systems that would make it impossible for the croupiers to rob the gambling tables.

I agreed to make these installations and drew up a list of the equipment I would have to buy in the States. This was work I had been doing for the previous ten years. With my partner, I set up specialized electronic surveillance and protective systems and installed them, designing the installations and sometimes inventing new devices, which I have sold all over the world.

Once I had the equipment, I returned to Havana and proceeded to install it. At this point, I met two people who would play a fateful and malign role in my life, one of them purposefully, the other because of forces beyond his control.

The first of these men was Doctor Gustavo Estevez, the physician of the Hotel Deauville. My acquaintance with him was due to the fact that I had been suffering for fifteen years from chronic colic of the kidneys, a condition that can be extremely painful and that can be arrested, but cannot be cured.

The second was Captain José de Jesús Castaño y Quevedo. A powerfully built, intense and strikingly handsome man in his early forties, José Castaño was about six feet one and towered over most Cubans. He was Chief of Operations of Batista’s special political police organization, the BRAC, or Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities.

Castaño frequented the Deauville casino and we soon struck up an acquaintance. He impressed me as a dedicated professional soldier of the best type. As we got to know each other better, he told me something about his life. He had entered the Cuban Army as a private at the age of nineteen and risen step by step through hard study and superior marks on the competitive military examinations.

By 1940, Castaño was assigned to the Cuban Military Intelligence Service. His business was to ferret out anti-democratic activities. During World War II, this meant concentrating on catching Nazi agents. Thereafter, it was a matter of uncovering the secret organizations of Cuban Communism and of Soviet espionage in Cuba. A non-political man, Castaño did this work under three different Cuban Presidents, representing two different political parties: Batista, Grau San Martín and Prío Socorrás.

He received special training at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico. I was told in Cuba that Castaño was regarded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as one of the five men in Cuba who really knew the details of the Red network there. Castaño was an excellent linguist who had taught modern languages at the Military Academy, El Caribe. As the Communist threat to the Americas gained in importance, he set himself the task of learning first Russian and then Chinese in his spare time.

Deaf Ears and Closed Minds

At the time I met him, Captain Castaño was disturbed and unhappy about his work. The revolutionary movement of Fidel Castro was riding high, on U.S. State Department support and a mawkish American press that could see no evil in the bearded leader of the Sierra Maestra. Castaño told me on several occasions that he knew Fidel Castro was a Communist and that his movement was under Communist control. Castaño said he had tried to get this message to the American people, but the American correspondents in Cuba would neither listen nor examine the evidence. He said he felt like a man shouting from inside a corked glass bottle.

Castaño told me that in 1957 and 1958 he sent documents concerning the Communist nature of the Castro movement to the American Embassy in Havana. He did this twice, under the ambassadorships of both Arthur Gardner and Earl E. T. Smith. These reports dealt with the activities of Castro and his men in the Mexican training camps where they prepared their invasion of Cuba. They detailed the connections of the Castro leaders with Mexican and Iron Curtain Communists and contained actual photographs of Fidel Castro in the company of Russians in Mexico City. As far as Castaño knew, these reports made no impact on the Americans.

In this, Castaño was wrong. Thanks to the testimony of Ambassadors Gardner and Smith before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and to Smith’s book, The Fourth Floor, we now know that both Ambassadors did their utmost to warn the State Department that support of Fidel Castro might mean a Soviet base in the Caribbean. These warnings were ignored, according to Ambassador Smith, because of the activities of middle-echelon State Department bureaucrats who were committed to the Castro cause.

Later, when I was a prisoner of Fidel Castro, I learned more of Captain Castaño’s efforts to warn the American people. Julio García García, a former officer of the BRAC, became one of my cell mates. He told me that in June 1958 Castaño had called the American reporters in Havana to a press conference at BRAC headquarters.

Castaño showed the group documentary evidence that Fidel Castro and his leading henchmen were Communists. Jules Dubois, correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, who was at the time a defender of Castro and his movement, called the documents a "paquete" that is to say, a bundle of forgeries concocted by the Batista Government. He was joined in this attitude by Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times. Captain Castaño pleaded with these people, pointing out that the documents were authentic and that the material had been given to the American Ambassador.

However, Dubois and Matthews evidently considered that they knew better and not a single line of the evidence accumulated by the BRAC was published in any American newspaper. Castaño once asked me what was the use of a free press which gave a little clique of prejudiced reporters the power to slant and suppress the news in the interests of America’s enemies. I had no answer to that one.

The Cult of Dirt

While I was installing the protective systems, I would commute between Havana and Miami Beach, returning to Florida on weekends to be with my family. The casino job was running smoothly.

One day in November 1958, Dr. Estevez happened to notice my pocket radio receiver and asked me what it was for. I explained that it was part of a radio paging system that we had devised which made it possible for everyone in the system to receive individual calls from a central telephone answering service. I explained that in the United States many doctors, lawyers, salesmen and others used this sort of system to make it possible for their offices to get in touch with them when they were on the street or in their cars.

He suggested that this would be a wonderful idea for Cuba, where the telephone system was still comparatively young and where even physicians had trouble getting phones installed. At his suggestion, we discussed the matter with his father, who was also a doctor. I addressed a meeting of the College of Physicians in Havana, explaining how radio paging worked and arousing a great deal of interest. Accordingly, Dr. Estevez and I set up a company in Cuba for radio paging. We called it Radio Llamado de Cuba, S.A. Dr. Estevez was Secretary-Treasurer. Political chaos was growing in Cuba, and Dr. Estevez assured me that the Revolution was sure to win but that afterwards the country would settle down and there would be a favorable atmosphere for our business venture.

I returned to Miami Beach for Christmas, but was back in Havana on December 27.1 stayed over for the beginning of the new year and, therefore, was in the Cuban capital when Batista and his government fled. By January 2, all businesses were closed; the stores had their shutters over the show windows, and the city looked as if it were waiting for an air attack. At the request of the casino owners and of my business associates, I began moving the electronic equipment out. They had no optimistic illusions about the future and wanted to salvage whatever they could.

Soon the bearded veterans of the Sierra Maestra swaggered into Havana and received a wild, tumultuous welcome. There were already little signs of what was to come. When they saw Christmas trees in the windows of houses, the barbudos would sometimes pound on the doors and threaten the inmates with their automatic pistols. The most noticeable thing about them was that they were not only unkempt, but filthy. Their clothes were soiled; their faces and beards were dirty; their bodies stank. This was not simply the result of combat conditions, for the fighting had been over for a week now and all the barbudos had had opportunity to bathe, trim their beards and put on clean clothes.

It appeared that to be unwashed was the badge of the Revolution. Before the barbudos swarmed into Havana, very few beards had been seen in Cuba. For sanitary reasons, they were unsuitable in a tropical climate and even the old men seldom wore them. Cuban men had generally been fastidious to a fault about bodily cleanliness and neatness of dress.

The Alan Courtney Show

By January 17, most of the electronic equipment had been taken out and shipped home and I returned to the States. A day or so later, I phoned Alan Courtney who has a night radio program in Miami which reaches about a million listeners. As early as 1957 Alan Courtney was exposing the Red connections of the Castro movement. He was one of the first. His show has guests and the audience participates by phoning in questions and comments.

Naturally, Alan was interested in my impressions of Cuba.

The situation doesn’t look good, I told him. They are executing a lot of people. Signs are sprouting up like mushrooms, urging people to buy Cuban products and claiming that they are better than American products. I have the impression that this new crowd is cultivating hatred of the United States.

Alan said he was sure the Communists were behind the Castro Revolution. He asked me how I would like to go on his radio show as a guest and discuss it. I told him it would be impossible because I had business interests in Cuba and would have to go back there and try to get along with the people in power.

We compromised finally on his proposal that I telephone in and that he and I discuss the Cuban situation over the phone without his mentioning my name.

I went on the Alan Courtney Show last night. At that time, Fidel Castro was riding the crest of a wave of popularity in the United States and all Latin America. Despite the Roman circus trials and the firing squads, it was believed that he could do no wrong. The people had bought the propaganda picture of Castro foisted on them by press, radio and television. He was a tropical Robin Hood and a new Abraham Lincoln. Personally, I could not visualize Abraham Lincoln with a telescopic rifle in one hand and a brandy and benzedrine highball in the other, but then I was in the minority.

People began to call in and make adverse comments on my radio remarks. Some argued that I had never really been in Cuba at all. To others, I was an agent of the Batista dictatorship who was trying to tie the tin can of Communism on the tail of an honest Cuban patriot and agrarian reformer.

After a few weeks in Miami Beach, I phoned Alan to tell him I was going back to Cuba and would let him know my impressions of conditions there on my return.

Fine, he said. You do that, John.

As I was standing at the ticket counter at Miami International Airport, a United States Marshal asked me if I was going to Cuba. When I replied affirmatively, he said:

You know conditions are pretty hairy there. If you go to Cuba, you are going on your own.

I told him I knew that.

In Havana, the hotels, the casinos and the night spots had been taken over by the Rebels. In the Hotel Deauville, the fellow who used to clean the swimming pool had suddenly emerged as the business agent of the trade union. That meant that he dictated to all the workers of the hotel and, since the unions were riding high, it meant he also dictated to the management. When I asked what there was that was so special about this swimming pool cleaner, I was told that he was a member of the Communist Party.

In the Deauville and elsewhere, I was soon made aware of a strong feeling of resentment toward the United States. The Cuban air had become poisoned and I no longer enjoyed breathing it. I pulled out the last of my electronic equipment from the casinos and returned to the States.

Alan Courtney again asked me to go on his show and I did so anonymously the same way as before. In the course of the telephone interview, I said there must be something wrong in Cuba because a U.S. Marshal had warned me at the airport that, if I went there, I did so at my own risk.

This touched off a barrage of phone calls to the station to the effect that I was a liar and that the incident with the marshal was an invention. They said that I was the sort of person who brought up the red herring of Communism whenever a government was installed anywhere in the world that didn’t suit me.

The next morning, Alan called to say that he was sorry, but he ran a responsible radio program and, because of listener complaints, he would have to check my story about the U.S. Marshal at the airport.

I told him to go ahead. That afternoon, he phoned:

Johnny, I investigated at the airport and you were absolutely right. That is what they advise everybody going to Cuba.

During the next few months, Cuba was far from my thoughts. I was traveling to New York, Las Vegas and other places, setting up electronic equipment. Around the middle of March, Dr. Gustavo Estevez wrote to ask me what I intended doing about the company we had started in Cuba. I replied that my associates and I would prefer to wait until the dust settled. We felt that the new Castro Government was communistic, but we were prepared to wait and see what it did I added that I would be in touch with him.

The Death of José Castaño

Around this time, I learned that my good friend, Captain Castaño, had been convicted by a revolutionary tribunal and executed by a firing squad. This was bad and shocking news. It was also the sort of thing that could easily happen during a revolution. On the other hand, Castaño had been one of the bravest and most implacable enemies of Communism in Cuba. His execution fitted in with the general picture that was taking shape in my mind.

It was only much later that I learned what really happened to him.

José Castaño stayed on in Cuba because he was a professional soldier and thought it would be cowardly to run away. He had been named chief of the BRAC on January 1, 1959 by the entirely imaginary provisional government of General Eulogio Cantillo, which warmed the chairs of power immediately after the flight of Batista. Forty-eight hours later, Castaño was arrested at his post.

The Communists who headed the new Government in the first days of the Castro regime—Fidel and Raúl Castro, Ché Guevara, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Antonio Nuñez Jiménez and several others—had every reason to hate and fear Castaño. The details of their subversive pasts were in the BRAC archives, which they had seized as one of the first acts of the Revolution, and in Castaño’s prodigious memory. His continued existence jeopardized the success of the Communist plan to continue with the great deception and to make the world believe that Fidel Castro was the agrarian reformer and Lincoln of the Caribbean that Herbert L. Matthews claimed he was.

When Castaño was brought before one of the circus trials which satisfied the thirst for blood of the Havana rabble during the early months of the Revolution, the sentence was a foregone conclusion. He would be killed because he was a political enemy. But in addition, his reputation as a decent and honorable man had to be shattered so that he would have no followers after his death.

Among others who bore false witness in the trial was Alicia Agramonte y Marrero, an aging actress with a collapsed figure, who was a Communist. Alicia Agramonte accused Captain Castaño of having raped her. The most devastating refutation of this charge was her face and figure. Castaño was attractive to really beautiful women and it is inconceivable that Agramonte could have interested him sexually.

On the basis of this and other perjured testimony, the tribunal condemned Castaño to death by firing squad. At this point, the attorney for the defense, Dr. Aníbal Pacheco, contacted high dignitaries of the Catholic Church and foreign embassies, particularly the American Embassy. Pacheco was told by the authorities in La Cabaña Prison that, unless orders to the contrary were received before five in the morning, Castaño would meet death at the paredón.

The American Embassy pleaded to have the death sentence commuted. Attorney Pacheco saw Fidel Castro at two in the morning. Castro told him that he had ordered Comandante Humberto Sorí Marín to tell Ché Guevara to call off the execution.

Having little confidence in the integrity of any of these people, defense attorney Pacheco got in touch with Father Javier Arzuaga, who was the confessor for the hundreds of Cubans executed in La Cabaña. The priest told him that Captain Castaño had not confessed as he had been informed at three that morning that his life was to be spared. After receiving that news, Pacheco went to bed and slept soundly.

He awakened to learn that Castaño had been executed at four o’clock, the morning of March 7, 1959. What had happened was that Ché Guevara had assembled a squad of cutthroats, including the notorious American, Herman Marks, and had taken Captain Castaño right outside the gate of the prison. Ché Guevara had personally shot Castaño in the back. When he fell to the dirt, other members of the squad dispatched him. Captain Castaño’s widow was not allowed to have her husband’s body for fear that the Cuban people would learn he had been murdered, not executed.

I have been told that one of the reasons Ché Guevara was determined to have him killed was that Captain Castaño had managed to get a microfilm copy of the extensive BRAC files on Communism to the FBI in Washington. I do not know whether or not this is true.

2—Prisoner of Fidel Castro

IN THE summer of 1959, a group of Americans asked me to fly to Havana to bid on installing automatic totalizing machines for the Oriental Race Track and flood lighting for night racing. I agreed to go to Cuba and look into the situation.

On the afternoon of July 23, I called Rafael————, a Cuban friend who was connected with the track, gave him my flight number and asked him to meet me at Havana airport that night. As I was packing, I decided to ask my thirteen-year-old son, Edward, if he would like to come along.

That would be fine, Daddy. I have never been to Havana.

While Edward and I were at the Miami International Airport buying our tickets, Jorgé Hernández, a Cuban friend whom I hadn’t seen for several months, approached me.

I have been looking for someone who is going to Cuba, he said. Could you do me a favor?

What is it?

When you go to Havana, would you call Mrs. Sofia Cisneros—here is her phone number—and tell her that Mrs. Rodríguez has had her operation and is convalescing well.

I suppose I was preoccupied with the problem of the race track totalizers. At any rate, it didn’t occur to me that it was strange that Hernández should camp at the airport waiting