HIS STORY HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD. It starts in pre-1959 and ends with the 2000 Gore/Bush presidential election. A story T of intrigue carried out in and Washington, as well as in Panama, Nassau, Kingston, Cuernavaca, Mexico City, New York, and Atlanta, Secret Missions to is a powerful exposé of the intimidating influence that militant Cuban exiles have had, and its enormous consequences for . The key to exploring exile politics in is Bernardo Benes, a Cuban American lawyer who made dozens of trips to Cuba to meet with during the Carter and Reagan administrations. Benes’s first mission in 1978 led to the release of 3,600 political prisoners and enabled exiled to visit their relatives. He operated in an atmosphere of intimidation so strong that those not adhering to exile community pressures were branded Castro agents, or worse. The personal consequences for Benes were severe: He became—and remains to this day—an outcast in Miami’s Cuban community for having dealt personally with Castro. “As a reporter who covered Miami during the time these events took place, I wish I knew then what this book reveals now. Truth is truly stranger than fiction,” notes best-selling writer Edna Buchanan, who won the Pulitzer Prize for crime reporting while at the Miami Herald. In 2000, anti-Castro rancor in Miami fueled an intense dispute between Cuban Americans and their neighbors over Elián González. The anti- government backlash meant that even more Cuban Americans than usual voted for the Republican Party in the remarkably narrow presidential election. This groundbreaking book by Latin American specialist Robert M. Levine is about the shaping of American foreign policy, Cuban–American relations, and the United States’s hidden history with Cuba. For the first time ever, read the full story—and witness the tensions, volatility, and paradoxes inherent to Cuban Miami. Secret Missions to Cuba

Secret Missions to Cuba

Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

Robert M. Levine SECRET MISSIONS TO CUBA Copyright © Robert M. Levine, 2001. All rights reserved. No part of this 6RIWFRYHUUHSULQWRIWKHKDUGFRYHUVWHGLWLRQ book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published 2001 by PALGRAVE™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave is the new global publishing imprint of St Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 978-1-4039-6046-7 ISBN 978-1-137-04360-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-04360-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, Robert M. Secret missions to Cuba : Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami / by Robert M. Levine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

1. United States—Relations—Cuba. 2. Cuba—Relations—United States. 3. Benes, Bernardo. 4. Businessmen—Florida—Miami— Biography. 5. Cuban Americans—Florida—Miami—Biography. 6. Exiles—Florida—Miami—Political activity—Case studies. 7. Castro, Fidel, 1927 - 8. Espionage, American—Cuba. 9. Cuban Americans— Florida—Miami—Social conditions. 10. Miami (Fla.)—Social conditions—20th century. E183.8.C9 L46 2001 303.48’27307291—dc21 2001 021890

Design by Letra Libre, Inc.

First Edition: September 2001 10987654321 To the grandchildren of Ricky and Bernardo Benes: Allan, Eliana, Garrett, Seth, Brett, Stephen, Nataly and Cydney

Contents

List of Photographs ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix Statement on Corroboration xxi

Chapter One Beginnings 1 Chapter Two Cuban Miami 39 Chapter Three Mission to Havana: The Carter Years 85 Chapter Four The Reagan Years and Beyond 149 Chapter Five The Making of a Pariah 175 Chapter Six Only in Miami 217 Chapter Seven Elián Elects a President 249

Notes 287 Index 313

List of Photographs

PREFACE P.1 President Jimmy Carter thanking Benes at Miami International Airport. Miami News collection. xv

CHAPTER ONE 1.1 Panama City, 1969, Office of General Omar Torrijos, meeting on housing needs. Bernardo Benes collection. 2 1.2 Receipt from Panamar Restaurant. Bernardo Benes collection. 3 1.3 , ca. 1936. Birthday party. Bernardo Benes collection. 13 1.4 Benes receiving Bar Association Award from Fidel Castro, 1959. Bernardo Benes collection. 15

CHAPTER TWO 2.1 Broken-down housing for new arrivals, early 1960s. Robert M. Levine collection. 48 2.2 Alpha 66 truck in Miami anti-Castro demonstration, early 1960s. Robert M. Levine collection. 75 2.3 Rafters in the Florida Straits. Robert M. Levine collection 83

CHAPTER THREE 3.1 Notes taken by Benes at secret Mexico City meeting. Bernardo Benes collection. 94 x

3.2 Page of memorandum from Benes to Zbigniew Brzezinski, March 24, 1978. Bernardo Benes collection. 98 3.3 Press coverage of first prison visit, October 1978. Bernardo Benes collection. 117 3.4 Partial list of prisoners to be released, 1978. Bernardo Benes collection. 124 3.5 Wedding in Havana prison, 1978. Bernardo Benes collection. 134 3.6 Orange Bowl Tent City during Mariel, 1980. Bernardo Benes collection. 143 3.7 Page from Cuban computer printout listing claims to be paid after normalization. Bernardo Benes collection. 143

CHAPTER FIVE 5.1 Senator Edward M. Kennedy installing Benes as president of the American Health Planning Association in Washington, D.C., June 1977. 177 5.2 Postcard received by Benes, 1974. Bernardo Benes collection. 184 5.3 Bomb damage, Miami, 1979. Miami Herald. 189 5.4 Threats against dialoguers, 1978. Source: Benes FBI file. Photograph by Robert M. Levine. 194 5.5 Picketing Benes, Continental National Bank, , 1978. Robert M. Levine collection. 195 5.6 Fidel Castro with Bernardo Benes in Cuba, October, 1978. Miami News. 212 5.7 Benes and former political prisoner Juan Ferrer, Miami, 2000. Bernardo Benes collection. 212

CHAPTER SIX 6.1 George Sánchez’s Bay of Pigs Memorial. Robert M. Levine collection. 234 xi

6.2 Batista and Pérez Roura at Havana rally celebrating defeat of student-led attack on presidential palace, 1957. Bernardo Benes collection. 236 6.3 Armando Pérez Roura in Cuba, standing behind revolutionary Minister of Labor, during the confiscation of CMQ radio and television, Havana, May 13, 1960. Bernardo Benes collection 237

CHAPTER SEVEN 7.1 Elián González billboard, Miami, 2000. Photograph by Robert M. Levine 261 7.2 Bernardo Benes on his balcony, October 2000. Photograph by Robert M. Levine 276 7.3 Periodiquito rack, Versailles Restaurant, Little Havana. Photograph by Robert M. Levine. 279

Preface

ecret Missions to Cuba reveals for the first time the full details of a story sketchily known at best. Indeed, some of its events have never Sappeared in print. The research in this book generated tensions as it progressed. Participants differed pointedly one from another in recol- lections of activities in which they played key roles. Our story begins with Bernardo Benes. Benes arrived in Miami from Havana on Friday, November 11, 1960, as a young lawyer and accountant in the wave of arrivals after Castro’s victory on January 1, 1959. The man “with a flair for public relations, a cigar in his mouth, and an atrocious accent in English”1 demanded full participation by Cubans in the community. He not only lobbied for Cuban exile causes but, from the early 1960s to 1978, spent long hours trying to convince “Anglo” philanthropies, businesses, and other organizations to reach out into the Cuban exile community. First, he advised, they should form Hispanic (read: Cuban) divisions, and later bring local Cuban Americans into positions of leadership.2 Starting in 1977, Benes made at least seventy-five private trips to Ha- vana with the support of high officials of the Carter and Reagan adminis- trations. He spent approximately 150 hours with Fidel Castro, and thousands of hours with Cuban senior officials, mostly members of Cas- tro’s trusted Special Forces. The players in the secret negotiations had to take extraordinary steps to hide their activities from the Soviets. They ex- changed messages through the Cuban consul in Kingston, Jamaica, and used code names (“Benito” for Benes; “Gustavo” for his business partner, Carlos (Charles) Dascal; “Pedrito” for State Department official Peter Tarnoff). Benes’s descriptions about his encounters with Castro reveal new and sometimes startling insights into Castro’s personality and character. xiv S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA

Despite the election of Ronald Reagan, considerably more of a hardliner toward Cuba than Jimmy Carter, Benes and Dascal continued to act as emissaries between the State Department and Castro’s highest advisors, especially during and after the 1980 Mariel crisis. Later, in fact, Benes carried a message from the president to Castro, offering to open rela- tions and end the embargo in exchange for ending Cuba’s “Exporting the Revolution” policy. Had the Miami Cuban exile community learned of this gesture, a CIA-sponsored operation possibly linked to the ad- ministration’s negotiations with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, its members would have felt shocked and bitterly betrayed. Among Benes’s achievements, with the assistance of others, was Cas- tro’s agreement in 1978 to free 3,600 political prisoners; another was the Cuban regime’s agreement to permit exiles in the United States to visit their relatives and to allow Cubans to visit their relatives in the United States. Washington spent billions of dollars to deal with Cuba, but Cas- tro’s decision to free his political prisoners and to permit exiles to visit their relatives—done with little cost to Washington—proved the most meaningful act in forty-two years of United States relations with Fidel Castro. Cuba benefited from the remitted dollars, but Cuban exiles, torn emotionally between their dual loyalties and desperate to reunify their families even briefly, benefited the most. Benes and Dascal participated in the negotiations on their own since the United States had broken relations with Cuba. They remained in con- stant touch with top administration officials. Congressman Dante Fascell and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance acted as their main supporters. They worked closely with Peter Tarnoff, Vance’s executive secretariat, at the State Department. Benes’s missions to Cuba continued between 1977 and 1986. Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central In- telligence Agency also participated in this process. As a result of his dialogue with Castro, however, Benes, in his own words, became “a pariah” in South Florida. After having seen him as a respected community leader, Cuban Miami suddenly rejected him. More than twenty years of vituperation left him disoriented and briefly suicidal. In his angry and depressed state, he became querulous, hard to deal with. He was subject to experiences that seemed Kakfaesque. On October 25, 1978, the Secret Service contacted Benes to say that Pres- S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA xv ident Carter, who was campaigning for Florida Governor Bob Graham’s reelection, wanted to see him the next day. He was taken to the airport landing strip adjacent to Air Force One and asked to stand fifty feet be- hind a line of leaders of the Florida Democratic Party shaking hands with the president. When Carter reached the end of the line, he walked over to Benes. The president thanked him for his tireless efforts to help the cause of human rights. But as soon as Benes went to his car, he turned on the radio. At that moment, a Spanish-language radio station was reviling him as a commu- nist and traitor. He remained under FBI protection, surviving at least one and possibly two assassination attempts, and wearing a bulletproof vest during the first year. His bank was picketed and firebombed, and, for the second time in his life, he lost almost all of his assets. For years he could not even visit Little Havana without people refusing to shake his hand or look him in the eye. In recent years, he has gained grudging acceptance from some but

P.1 President Jimmy Carter thanking Benes at Miami International Airport. Miami News collection xvi S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA remains despised by many, and is virtually stranded on the periphery of the Cuban exile community. Consider, for instance, what occurred as re- cently as August 14, 2000: This is the day when Benes heard that Joe Lieberman had been chosen as Al Gore’s running mate. That morning, the news director of Radio Mambí, Armando Pérez-Roura, in urging the Miami Cuban community to not vote for Lieberman/Gore, stated that Cubans should not vote for Lieberman since “he is a Jew, just like Bernardo Benes, who seeks to dialogue with Castro.”3 Clearly, Pérez- Roura’s statement is disturbing in several ways. This book seeks to understand the nature of the Miami Cuban exile experience over four decades, using the trajectory of Benes’s experience as a case study in community dynamics. His story provides a sadly cau- tionary tale: people who take risks in a charged atmosphere run the risk of falling victim to the emotional climate, especially when that climate encompasses rage and hate. The following chapters unfold the history of the Miami Cuban com- munity in the context of the disquieting, poisonous relationship between the United States and Cuba since 1959. It examines the pressures exerted on Miami Cubans both by their self-appointed as well as their elected leaders to conform to the Cuban militant exile lobby’s line, even if it has at times included threats to the principle of free speech and accepted tac- tics of intimidation, bombings, and assassinations. Emotions run deep in Miami, fueled by the pain of having to adjust to a foreign culture and the sting of perceived betrayals. These went back as far as the near-constant practice of political corruption under the Cuban republic; when Batista overthrew its elected government in 1952; when President John F. Kennedy, earlier badly advised, withdrew promised support for the in 1961. They also included actions by community “dia- loguers” speaking personally with the hated Fidel Castro starting in 1978, and, having perhaps the greatest impact of all within Cuban Miami, At- torney General Janet Reno’s order to have six-year-old Elián González re- turned to his father and federal agents sent to seize him early in 2000. While most influential Miamians remained silent after Benes’s efforts at dialogue, some thanked Benes privately. “I just want you to know that great men must do what they believe in. You have done it. I will always respect you for it,” Robert A. Brandon of Coral Gables wrote to Benes.4 Wood S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA xvii

McCue, for eight years the director of the Comprehensive Health Planning Council for South Florida under whom Benes served as an unpaid board member and, later, president of the national parent agency, said in an e-mail note when asked for comments about Benes that “Bernardo is one of my fa- vorite persons and I consider him to be a brother.”5 Clerics—from Roman Catholic and Episcopal bishops to rabbis and evangelical Protestants—told him how much they appreciated his efforts to work on behalf of, in the words of Bishop James L. Duncan, “our Cuban brethren.”6 His family gave him continual support, even when things turned bleak.7 “Anglo” commu- nity activist and County Commissioner Ruth Shack praised him in personal letters. Some Miami Cubans—including Lourdes Alonso and lawyer Ri- cardo Martinez-Cid—did too, but there were not many others. Hundreds of families asked him to help intervene in behalf of a relative, imprisoned in Cuba or threatened with deportation from the United States. But only a tiny handful offered Benes support publicly. Among them included Ernest A. Iniguez, a Hialeah police officer who sent a mailgram to Myles Frechette at the State Department’s Cuban desk, stating:

Sir, a few individuals at present are enjoying an alarming degree of success in disrupting the community and putting innocent lives in danger.... Cer- tain small newspapers and loud radio stations are perpetrating a hoax on the community expanding on a demonical lie. In the Miami area there is not a communist behind every tree and one out of every five ex-political prisoners is not a spy. I feel that the FBI and the State Department should come forth and deny the scale of those accusations and allow innocent cit- izens to continue their lives.8

Some time later, former United States Interests Section head Wayne Smith spoke in Spanish on Miami’s radio station WQBA (“Cubanís- sima”), calling Benes a friend and in no manner a Cuban agent. “My per- sonal opinion, since we live in free country, I have the right to have my personal point of view, is that all of this is absurd.”9 But no one stepped forward where it really mattered. During the twenty-two years since he re- turned with the first planeload of prisoners, Benes remained unemployed for twelve of those years. Carrying out the research for this book produced moments of anguish. In November 2000, just when the manuscript neared completion, un- known robbers stole Benes’s car from a downtown Miami parking space. xviii S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA

In the trunk were not only copies of the manuscript but dozens of valu- able documents and notes from his files. Even more mysteriously, the car was found a week later—intact, without damage, and without anything missing. Could someone simply have photocopied the manuscript or the documents? Three weeks later the author’s briefcase, containing impor- tant documents related to the study, was stolen from the outer office of a University of Miami administrator during an appointment. Then some photographs disappeared for two days before turning up in an unlikely place. Perhaps we have seen too many James Bond movies—or perhaps the book’s contents made people worry. Working on Secret Missions to Cuba has been unlike any of my previous book projects. The tensions the study generated were consistently unset- tling, not to mention wholly unpredictable, and the fact that interviewees vociferously denied statements (which I had proof of) occasionally made me wonder if I’d landed squarely in the middle of an espionage/spy novel. Indeed, the process affected Benes as well. After re-reading a letter from an old friend and mentor who had been queried for information, Benes confessed that he began to cry because, in his words, “His letter made me aware of the extent of the injustice committed by Miami Cubans against me for being good. I am sixty-five, without income, and without real em- ployment. I have not made one single penny this year.”10 This book also seeks insight into the hearts and minds of more than 700,000 former Cubans and their children residing in Miami, assaulted in a way by headline-seeking media, by what sensitive Cuban Americans term “Cuban bashing” by holier-than-thou Anglos, and by Miami’s com- plex ethnic tensions. How may we understand the trauma of the exile from Cuba and the reasons why Miami Cubans permitted themselves to be intimidated to the point at which speaking out in favor of dialogue with Castro, or any other “dissident” opinion, could and did lead to death threats, some of which were carried out? Bernardo Benes was only one of many who suffered because of the acquiescence of politicians and com- munity leaders lacking the courage to speak out. Acknowledgments

any people provided assistance in researching this book. Among them: Tina María Abich; Dr. José Raúl Alfonso; Lic. M Moisés Asís; the late Jim Baker of Operation Pedro Pan; attor- neys Jo Anne and Michael Bander; historian Margalit Bejarano; “Skip” Brandon; journalist Edna Buchanan; former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; oral historian Elizabeth Campisi; Israel Castellanos; academician Max Castro; scientist Leon A. Cuervo; Tom Cunningham, former president of Britain’s Open University; diplomatic historian Justus Doenecke; Dr. José “Pepe” Edelstein; photographer and scholar Juan Car- los Espinosa; former president of Panama Ricardo de la Espriella and his wife Mercedes María; historian Luis Martínez Fernández; president of the University of Miami Edward T. Foote II; the Reverend Raúl Fernández- Calienes; Elena Freyre; Jossie García; Patricia García-Velez; Senator Jack Gordon; Jim Hampton of the Miami Herald; Harvard’s Luiz Sérgio Hernández Jr.; educator Ofélia Martín Hudson; economist Antonio Jorge; and Dr. Diane Just of the Center for Latin American Studies. Also, vet- eran Miami journalist Howard Kleinberg; Nita Rous Manitzas of the Cen- ter for International Policy; J. L. Medina; Ambassador Ambler H. Moss, Jr.; Silvia J. Muñoz of Miami’s Pedro Pan Association; Emílio Ochoa, one of the writers of Cuba’s 1940 constitution; attorney Karen J. Orlin; Enrique Ovares, former president of the Cuban Federation of University Students; former Carter administration Latin American specialist Robert A. Pastor; Luis Pozo, son of the former mayor of Havana; Emilio Rangel; Sergio Rodríguez of the University of Miami administration; Susan Sachs; “Luis Salas,” a Cuban American career military officer; Basílio V. Sifko; the former head of the United States Interests Section in Havana, Wayne S. Smith; librarian Sara Sánchez, Anita Stone, retired attorney Seth Stopek; psychologist José Szapocnik; former State Department official xx S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA

Peter Tarnoff; Angel Fernández Varela, former chief officer of Radio Swan; Fred Wahl; Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh; General Vernon A. Wal- ters; and several former employees of the FBI and CIA who wish not to be named. More than anyone else, Palgrave/St. Martin’s editor Gayatri Patnaik deserves credit for understanding from the first this book’s po- tential and for shepherding the manuscript through the editorial process. Along the way, she boosted my courage when it was needed, diplomati- cally handled undiplomatic moments, and never wavered in her convic- tion that such a potentially controversial book merited publication. I am also grateful to Sabahat Chaudhary for her end-of-the-line copyediting. Statement on Corroboration

bviously, a book of this kind, especially when it deals not only with the recent past but also the present, needs to provide as Omuch corroboration as possible. Some of Bernardo Benes’s per- sonal documents covering the years since 1960 were donated in 1992 to the Cuban Heritage Collection of the University of Miami Library, thereby making them available to scholars, and the remainder will be deposited after this book is published. They include hundreds of newspaper clippings, photographs, legal documents, lists of names and addresses, minutes of meetings, and long, detailed pages of notes taken with the permission of the Cuban officials with whom Benes was dealing, often with verbatim ci- tations. During the negotiation years during the Carter and Reagan ad- ministrations, Benes wrote on a yellow pad the details of every meeting or telephone conversation with the date, the people involved and the sub- jects discussed. He has kept all these documents in chronological se- quence. The Cubans gave Benes permission to take notes, and United States officials knew of his note-taking as well. They contain a wealth of information on the negotiations, including seventy-eight documents from the Carter years and twenty-nine during the Reagan administration. Benes possesses one of three original copies made by the Cuban gov- ernment listing thousands of claims for confiscated property and the amounts it was willing to pay provided the negotiations succeeded. Whenever the text quotes Benes without adding an endnote, I checked in every case the detailed notes taken by Benes either at the event de- scribed or immediately afterwards. Benes’s collection of evidence by itself falls short of providing sufficient proof. The 1977–78 mission under the Carter administration is easier to xxii S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA corroborate than the second mission during the Reagan years because the latter was entirely covert. Still, I have worked painstakingly to find cor- roboration and to spot untruths. Corroborative evidence backs Benes’s entire detailed story. Many have helped by providing feedback or by answering long lists of questions. President Carter’s ambassador to Panama at that time, Ambler H. Moss, Jr., has not only read the manuscript but added details, such as a description of Benes’s request to his office in the American Embassy in Panama to use a secure phone to speak with Peter Tarnoff at the State De- partment in Washington. Robert A. Pastor, President Carter’s Latin American advisor on the National Security Council, also read the manu- script and made helpful comments. I spoke with Peter Tarnoff, “Skip” Brandon, and Zbigniew Brzezinski by phone and corresponded with William Aramony, and several others. For the secret negotiations during the Reagan years, corroboration is even more difficult, because as a CIA operation, it was never revealed publicly. I have spoken, however, with a senior CIA official, now retired, who worked with Benes not only in Miami and Washington but also in Mexico, and with a senior FBI agent, also now retired, who worked on the negotiations. During a week at the United States Air Force Academy in which both I and General Vernon A. Walters, former deputy director of the CIA and ambassador-at-large, participated in a program related to Latin America, we had two talks about Latin America in general and about Cuba in particular. General Walters sent me a copy of his privately published and out-of-print memoirs after he returned from Colorado Springs; unfortunately, however, his book was published in the mid-1970s, so it does not contain information about Walters’s secret trip to meet with Castro as part of the negotiation process. Fortunately, we spoke about it at length over the telephone, and he gave me permission to quote him. I also contacted James Baker and George Shultz, both members of President Reagan’s cabinet when, under the prodding of the CIA, a meet- ing was held to discuss the implications of offering Castro normalized re- lations in all areas as long as he abandoned his efforts to export his revolution abroad. Both Baker and Shultz replied that they had “no rec- ollection” of the meeting, but one could argue that “no recollection” is not a hard-and-fast denial. S ECRET M ISSIONS TO C UBA xxiii

Former Florida State Senator Jack Gordon confirmed Benes’s story— told in chapter three—about the Johnson and Murphy boots he brought for Castro to replace his Florsheims. I have spoken with members of mil- itant organizations and with Cuban political prisoners who languished in jail for a decade and a half before Benes’s negotiations won their release in 1978. I have interviewed journalists who interviewed Benes immedi- ately after what he expected to be his triumphant return from Havana with the first planeload of released prisoners. In mid-2000, Benes wrote to one of the Cubans with whom he had ne- gotiated. He asked if government officials would clarify some points and permit me to interview them. The response was: “Fidel Castro prefers to dwell on the present and on the future, not the past.”11 Several persons central to this book’s themes have died since the events in which they played major roles. These include President John F. Kennedy; Senator Abraham Ribicoff; Representative Claude Pepper, Rep- resentative Dante Fascell, CIA Director William Casey, and Jorge Mas Canosa. President Ronald Reagan, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, un- fortunately cannot be asked about the clandestine attempts to strike a deal with Castro.