Fidel in Manhattan
Solomon, Barbara P.
Fidel Castro came to New York this past fall and had the wisdom to conclude his visit by popping into the offices of the New York Times. He boasted about how he had tricked the Times...
...You are not to be on the list...
...Castro, in freshly pressed army fatigues, was arriving under the white protective canopy...
...q 88 • DISSENT...
...After lots of back-and-forth telephone conversations I was told to come to IFCO on 145th Street at three o'clock Saturday to pickup my press accreditation...
...Would I squelch any negative feelings I had in what I wrote...
...I'd been in politically canned situations before...
...When the pope or a controversial world figure like YasirArafat comes to the United States the press generally does a pre-event news analysis...
...Gone are the heady days of the time of Fidel's first visit to New York, when the perception of Fidel Castro's revolution as dreamed by Paris intellectuals still seemed plausible...
...He knows that he can invent imaginary multitudes in Harlemthe same way he invented imaginary troops for Herbert Matthews...
...I orderedthe same troop of weary soldiers to parade past him again and again...
...The American press had a unique opportunity to ask Castro to respond to substantive issues...
...I saw a passing couple point to me, and I heard them say that I was "the security car...
...I had also given assurances that my editors wouldn't be able to change the politics of anything I wrote (also true...
...It felt murky...
...I showed up like a drowned rat at IFCO's Harlem office at three...
...Two days before Castro arrived in New York I finally contacted one of the American culture organizations that act as a go-between for Cuba, 86 • DISSENT Fidel In Manhattan the Cuba Mission, and the United States...
...The young volunteer I had spoken to over the telephone was sympathetic...
...Instead of news, we were given social notes from the Sierra Maestra...
...The list is closed...
...I was told to contact IFCO, the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organizations, which was in charge of invitations and press credentials...
...he urged me to write a personal letter to President Castro...
...I sat in it, taking notes and trying to puzzle things through...
...The older woman then said they had to speak about the matter alone, and they left the room...
...IFCO had been upfront with me about wanting only favorable press...
...I was back on the list...
...On Saturday the city was flooded by torrential rains...
...I kept protesting and addressing the young volunteer...
...She then played her trump card...
...He came and went from New York strictly on his own terms...
...I again insisted that I'd been told to pick up my credentials at IFCO...
...His big event at the Abbyssinan Baptist Church was perfectly choreographed to come after the Shaw interview (with just enough time to change from his suit and tie to his fatigues...
...But suppose I didn't like what I heard inside the church...
...No one seemed able to give a coherent account of their meetings with Castro...
...But I was told to come here at three...
...Castro, they said, would be speaking Sunday night in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem...
...I didn't understand her rhetoric, and again protested: "I haven't made any historic presentation of Cuba...
...One of the three women there was jubilant...
...We are favoring a press with a local history—grass-roots publications...
...The young woman I had spoken to on the phone looked unhappy...
...I never had directly written about Cuba, but I had signed human rights protest letters...
...Typically, an interview with Castro was dangled, but not promised...
...My own week with Castro, or, more accurately, not with Castro, played out in a strange way...
...My coverage was such a small piece of the whole—did it really matter...
...We discussed openly my close friendship with the Spanish and Latin American "Boom" writers who originally gave Castro his revolutionary lustre, then broke with him...
...Since this was not the Sierra Maestra days, why was the public being kept in the dark...
...they read my columns in El Pais...
...You mean no one has ever heard of them...
...An error was made...
...I went back out into the pouring rain, furious that I had let myself in for the now-you-seeit, now-you-don't tease...
...Castro, all sweetness and light as he jovially slapped Shaw on the knee, was making no bones about the fact that Shaw's boss, Ted Turner, was his best chum...
...I was told that I was on the list...
...That was a decade ago...
...What the public was handed were social notes—what mogul munched what hors d'oeuvre with Castro—not journalism...
...Harlem, other than the small group of pros and antis near the church, seemed oblivious to his presence...
...I doubted that an interview would be forthcoming, but I did write a formal request to interview him, and I said that I would bring up the human rights issue...
...You misheard," the grim woman said...
...President Clinton's and Mayor Guiliani's provincial bad manners in excluding Castro from the UN fiestas actually helped his press campaign—New Yorkers were embarrassed at the gaffe— but it does not account for the meek, muffled, and meager reports we got from the New York media moguls who had private meetings with him...
...One of the delegates insisted that Castro was "broadminded" about such associations...
...I was sent upstairs to another office...
...Castro totally dominated Sunday television...
...I was to present myself at the Abyssinian Baptist Church at three o'clock...
...Which gives the world the impression that Castro was greeted by the multitudes...
...I could picture the faithful, including the hand-picked press, yelling "Castro si, Cuba si...
...The next day Castro was reported to have said that when he rode through New York everyone uptown had thumbs pressed down, while in Harlem everyone had thumbs up for him...
...When the woman came back she said that press credentials had been given out "on the basis of historic presentation of Cuba...
...I noticed that several foreign journalists whom the Cuban Mission had sent over were being questioned in an adjoining room in the basement headquarters...
...Shaw mentioned the recent Americas Watch report on human rights in Cuba, then did no follow-up...
...It was the usual offer...
...Why...
...Our reasons for granting press credentials are based on historic presentation of Cuba...
...Bernard Shaw looked miserable...
...Somewhere in the chain of events and myriad phone calls and meetings I had said (which I truly felt) that I was against the blockade of Cuba...
...Instead, the press colluded with his fabrication of a secretive ersatz casual private event...
...Shaw was being publicly put in the ignominious position of acting as Turner's paid lackey...
...It was exactly like those canned demonstrations that Franco used to order up for himself...
...Castro is famous for his nonstop oratory, but his real talent is for masterful visual effects, from his pressed army fatigues to the live chickens in his rooms during the old days at the Hotel Theresa...
...I was not on the list...
...Castro arrived in New York on October 21, yet the Times's news analysis of our relationship to Cuba wasn't published until well after he left, on October 31...
...I am well known to them...
...Now Castro was arriving in New York, and being courted by David Rockefeller, Lee Iacocca, Mort Zuckerman, the Council on Foreign Relations, the luxury magazine Cigar Aficionado, businessmen hungry for a shot at the Cuban market, ecologists presenting Cuba with composite toilets to compensate for water scarcity, and an eager press...
...Not since de Gaulle has any visiting political figure received treatment like this: tremendous media coverage with not a single tough question asked...
...Just when the French nouveau roman was dying, the Latin American Boom writers—Sarduy, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Jose Donoso (Octavio Paz always remained to one side of the Boom)—were providing intellectuals in Paris new hope for the novel and an intellectual validation for a revolution with an anti-American spin...
...He boasted about how he had tricked the Times correspondent Herbert Matthews into believing that he, Castro, had commanded lots of troops in the Sierra Maestra in 1957...
...Castro is still a genius at managing the press...
...Was this a case of random inefficiency...
...By mid-afternoon the highly polished Harlem bourgeoisie who had attended Sunday services in the churches in the area were being replaced by television cameramen and the police...
...As the United States moves toward a gradualista policy toward Cuba, we will be dealing with two versions of Castro: the airbrushed version and the non-airbrushed version...
...Or was it that I had the wrong set of writer friends...
...I would be their guest...
...Sarduy's name jolted me: it was a ghostly reminder of Castro's vanished relationship to the writer-intellectual...
...I walked across 138th Street to the place I had parked my car...
...We were ordered to stand well back on the sidewalk...
...You were told if you came here at three that maybe you would be on the list...
...I sent my credentials over to the Cuba Mission to be put on the journalists' list for Castro's visit...
...Hey...
...No story in the press reported that the reverse was true: the business community gave Fidel a chic welcome...
...If you do that there is an excellent chance he will accord you an interview and then you will go to Cuba...
...Would the reader suffer...
...When he isn't sure of drawing crowds, such as in the Hispanic sections of the city, he does his impromptu jackinthe-box act...
...I waited alone...
...Also on the table was La Gaceta de Cuba, the literary magazine of the official union of Cuban WINTER • 1996 • 87 Fidel In Manhattan writers and artists...
...Once home I sent off an angry fax to the cultural organization that had originally cleared me with IFCO...
...The nice woman I had originally spoken to met me across the street from the church...
...As a working journalist what would I do...
...We went across the street into a temporary basement office, briefly discussed the matter again, and I was given the credentials...
...Castro has an acute awareness that our press has disintegrated into mere photo images, and he flirts with it like a nineteenth-century coquette...
...The next morning I was recontacted by IFCO...
...It occurred to me I might have conveyed the impression I would not act as a member of a hostile press...
...I racked my brain...
...They were furious with Turner: "CNN was in Havana inApril...
...I walked back across the street, past the bodega and the bakery, and past the small knot of anti- and pro-Cuban demonstrators, and TV cameras focused on them, to the church...
...My only dealing with the Mission was in the eighties, when two members of its delegation paid a visit to my apartment with an official offer to visit Cuba...
...I couldn't figure out whether the woman was having a bad day or whether her icy treatment of me was intentional...
...His midday UN speech was followed by short CNN blips announcing Bernard Shaw's hourlong prime-time interview with him...
...But the feel-good gossipy aspect of the Shaw interview was a landmark television disgrace...
...The New York Times kept mum as if his visit had to be shrouded in mystery...
...I never got a reply...
...We've got the drums...
...A small group of media journalists were watching the CNN group set up their cameras...
...Once I had the press pass I began to feel queasy...
...Though the European press carried many stories about his impending visit here, the American press behaved as though on a James Bond secret mission...
...The error had been re-corrected...
...On Malcolm X Boulevard, across the street from the police barricades, was a display table with pro-Cuban anti-imperialist publications...
...The issue featured an article by Severo Sarduy, the exiled Cuban poet who died of AIDS in Paris...
...Edward R. Murrow, where are you...
...We have CNN—we have plenty of coverage...
...But the older woman in charge, the one I now needed to talk to, looked grim...
...I chose at the last possible moment not to go in...
...Turner gives Castro what Castro needs, and Castro gives Turner what he needs...
...I went to the second floor of the small town house converted into a makeshift headquarters...
...El Pais is Spain's equivalent of theNew Yorklimes, and its international edition is read throughout the Latin American world...
...In the new stylish media morality, Turner and Castro's close palship, because it is overt, is not considered a conflict of interest...
...she yelled...
...There was no way for the working press to cover his speech at the church without becoming an inevitable actor in Castro's New York theater...
...The froth replaced what should have been straight coverage and interpretation of our relationship to Cuba, plus an update about conditions on the island...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
