Tocayo: A Cuban Resistance Leader's True Story
Navarro, Antonio
TOCAYO A CUBAN RESISTANCE LEADER'S TRUE STORY Antonio Navarro / Sundown Books / $14.95 Roger Kaplan At first, Antonio Navarro believed in Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. He was not the only...
...For a while, Navarro cooperated with the fidelistas as they began to transform Cuba and wreck its economy...
...He was not the only one...
...One of his poems is called: "Boniato Jail: Account of a Massacre...
...They tore apart testicles: they did it to Roberto Martin Perez...
...the next day Navarro's family textile firm was seized), but The Trial by Franz Kafka...
...Navarro was willing to stomach the expropriations of property, though he knew there was no economic sense to them, but not the summary executions, which very soon began to affect not only the officials and military officers of the deposed regime but many of Castro's own comrades-inarms as well (Matos, arrested only months after the victory, could not be executed because of his strong following among the guerrillas...
...it is an extraordinarily candid and perceptive description of a young businessman witnessing, and to some degree aiding, the early, idealistic, and hopeful stages of a Communist revolution...
...The military leader of Rescate was Ernesto Perez Morales, known as Moreno, a Scarlet Pimpernel of fantastic gallantry...
...He joined Rescate (Revolutionary Democratic Rescue), which was headed by Manuel Antonio de Varona...
...This is a government that respects the right of the people...
...he got twenty years...
...Rescate's mission in those days was to lay the groundwork for the planned invasion and to smuggle oppositionists out of Cuba...
...or Center for Appeals for Freedom, 20 West 40th St., New York, NY 10018...
...It describes an atrocity that occurred on September 1, 1975...
...They represented hope in a society that was rotten politically, and carried it with them as they descended from the mountains toward the cities...
...It had a self-conscious and business-oriented middle class that had made the island better off than any other land in the Caribbean, perhaps all of Latin America...
...Even those like Navarro, who understood quickly enough that his economic plans would not be in their immediate interests, were attracted to him...
...Castro's early speeches were constructed around themes such as these: Above all, we are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to dictatorship . . . How did the Rebel Army win the war...
...the people won the war...
...The men of Rescate and the other underground groups were courageous, but even in those days when his police were not terribly efficient, Castro was able to repress them ruthlessly...
...When Textilera was nationalized by the new regime in 1960, Antonio Navarro's father-in-law did not have so much as a checking account outside of Cuba...
...Released (apparently on a plea from the Brazilian government), he knew he was a marked man...
...Antonio Navarro was a brave man and a lucky one, as he is the first to acknowledge...
...There is one marvellous scene from this early period, in which Navarro describes his meeting with Guevara...
...Cuba is now a vast prison camp...
...His regime left Cubans a large measure of freedom but limited room for political expression, and of course there was graft and the ugliness of a rule based on force...
...Perhaps...
...Indeed, a] number of Cuban industrialists, men of commerce, and even prudent U. S. firms such as the National City Bank, the Bank of Boston, International Harvester, United Fruit and many sugar mills spontaneously advancedtheir estimated 1959 income taxes to help get the new government back on its financial feet . . . There obviously must have been something about Castro that was compelling...
...Sadism...
...For, at a distance, Castro also captured the sympathy and the support of many people who by the time he came to power were without illusions about the Soviet Union and its model of revolution...
...By telling the truth to the people...
...Ernesto Perez Morales was ambushed by the Communists and later executed...
...The people...
...It was not that he was drawn to revolutionary visions-he comes across in this memoir as a man without profound political ideas but with an essential, unbreakable devotion to democratic norms-but rather that he was attracted to the generoug promises of the Revolution...
...Among those singled out for special attention is Armando Valladares...
...The invalids were pulled out of their wheel chairs and dragged by the legs their heads bloodied, banged against the steps: they did it to Liuva del Toro and to Pascasio...
...he is in a wheelchair...
...Guevara was no illiterate...
...and Castro told him to go talk to the Che about it, as he was in charge of confiscations...
...His father-in-law had built a firm, Textilera, and, though American, he plowed his profits back into the Cuban economy...
...Antonio Navarro went into opposition, adopting as his nom de guerre: Tocayo...
...Maybe he really believed that the nightmare described by Kafka is a phase the revolutions of our times must go through...
...NW, Washington, D.C...
...It reads in part: *Estimates of the number of political prisoners in Cuba vary, with the State Department counting twenty thousand and others as many as fifty thousand...
...There was, without doubt, broad support for the Fidel Castro who spoke in these terms, and who promised free elections "in eighteen months...
...It is only three months before the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba...
...His spirit is not broken...
...Revolutionists know how to tap these kinds of feelings, and Navarro's picture of how this worked in Cuba is particularly interesting...
...Navarro relates that he and Castro attended the same Jesuit school...
...He was arrested about the same time as Navarro, on December 17, 1960...
...For information contact Of Human Rights, Georgetown University, 1400 37th St...
...The first part of the book ends here...
...The judicial system was turned into a gruesome kangaroo court, with Castro himself often announcing the verdict and the sentence before the trial even took place...
...20057...
...Antonio Navarro was a young man of modest background who received a good education and went to work in the textile industry...
...He has managed to smuggle poems out of jail, and they have been collected in From My Wheelchair and The Heart With Which I Live...
...On New Year's Eve 1958, the advance guard led by Camillo Cienfuegos captured the Camp Columbia Barracks in Havana, the last stronghold of those still loyal to Batista (the dictator himself fled), and on January 8, 1959, Fidel Castro marched into the city...
...W]ho won the war...
...The second part, which reads like a thriller, describes the pre-Bay of Pigs anti-Communist movement in Cuba, when Antonio Navarro was known as Tocayo...
...he represented hope, he and men like Camillo Cienfuegos and Ernesto Guevara and Huber Matos, the austere schoolteacher who became the military commander of Camaguey province...
...The Boniato garrison greets this great occasion with red flags of tortured blood...
...It is the people, the little people who count...
...He had been assured by Fidel Castro himself that the family property would not be nationalized...
...There were some ill windsBy and large, however, everyone inside Cuba went along with Castro...
...The asthmatic terrorist, whose fierce, disheveled face became famous in the college dormitories of the late 1960s, kept weird hours, and it was at dawn that he finally granted Navarro an audience-to discuss, not confiscation of property (he said he agreed with Castro in this particular case...
...But he got thirty years and he is still Castro's prisoner...
...The treatment Armando Valladares has received has paralyzed his legs and damaged his heart...
...Cuba also had a dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who was corrupt and brutal...
...He too was, at first, with Fidel...
...Some of them went to work for Fidel Castro, the man of the 26th of July...
...Navarro and some of his friends were celebratingthe new year at a new resort hotel on the Island of Pines...
...The young men of Navarro's generation adopted an I'm-all-right sort of cynicism, or talked about the necessity of returning the country to democracy...
...He spoke, in those days, in the accents of an idealistic humanitarianism which have since been echoed by-among others-the liberation theologians who gave a gloss of ecumenism to the Sandinista enterprise in Nicaragua...
...Despite the claims made by the Fidelistas and faithfully reproduced by the New York Times''s Burchett-in-Havana, Herbert Math-ews (and many others), Cuba was not in the hands of rapacious Yanqui exploiters...
...After a final, hair-raising shootout he sought asylum in the Brazilian Embassy, from where he eventually made his way to the United States...
...Tocayo was caught in late 1960 with false police papers and put through three weeks of interrogation in which the mental torture made up for what he was spared in physical abuse...
...At any rate, Navarro got the message...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
