Death by Fidel: A Family’s Story of Survival

 

There’s no question that life is filled with mystery.   From time to time, how things happen, or why, can be impossible to determine.  But when Mystery appears on your doorstep, demanding entry, only the foolish or insensitive would refuse to open that door.

Last Friday afternoon, Mystery came to call.  Many of you know that I varnish boats for a living.  I was down on the docks, working on a boat for a new customer and chatting with him as he went about his own projects.  One thing led to another, and I mentioned blogging.  Then, I mentioned my interest in the Cuban blogger, Yoani Sanchez, and the experience of finding the blog Babalu.  Glancing up, he said, “I know Babalu.”  I was startled, intrigued and curious.  As if to answer my unspoken question he added, “I was raised in Havana.”

Indeed he was.  Gary Anderson’s father, Howard Anderson, had moved his family to Cuba in the late 40s because, as Gary said, “Grandpa didn’t want to be alone”.  Together with his wife Dorothy and their children, Howard Anderson lived and worked in Cuba until 1960.  In the summer of that year, they moved their boat to Miami and rented a house.   Conditions in Cuba were simply bcoming too dangerous for a family.

After the New Year arrived, stories and rumors of expropriated business holdings were rampant.  Howard Anderson returned to Cuba to protect his assets, including a chain of filling stations and a Jeep dealership.  While he was not a CIA agent, he did carry messages for the Agency, as well as providing radios to the anti-Castro movement.  That was enough for him to be charged with conspiracy during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961, and sentenced to death April 18. 

Writing in the September 15, 2006 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Evan Perez recalls Mr. Anderson’s last letter to his wife from a jail cell in Cuba’s Pinar Del Rio province: “Mr. Anderson said his fate was sealed.  As his trial began, air-raid sirens could be heard outside the courtroom… ‘It is unfortunate that this invasion took place, as under normal circumstances I am sure that the tribunal would not have been ruled by passion but by their own revolutionary laws,’ Mr. Anderson wrote in neat, square letters. ‘I hope and pray that you and mother will forgive me for the troubles that I have caused, especially this present big one.’  He was executed four hours later.”

Gary Anderson’s sister, Bonnie, was five years old when her father was killed.  Today, she is an award-winning journalist with 27 years’ experience, including two decades with NBC News and CNN, and the author of NEWSFLASH, an exploration of the decline of independence and truth in media published in 2004.

She also is a daughter determined to preserve and honor her father’s memory and a Cuban-American who insists the world face the reality of Castro’s Cuba.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, not to your own facts”, and it is the facts which Bonnie Anderson has on her mind.  On December 3, 2006, her feature column in the Miami Herald detailed some of her family’s experience, and her frustration with the current state of affairs.  The full text is easily found online; these portions should provide a sense of her passion and thought:

My father, Howard F. Anderson, was only one of 20,000 people tortured and executed by Fidel Castro.  Before my Dad’s execution by firing squad, he had most of his blood drained from his body to be used for transfusions for the revolutionary troops.   (Note: Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Circuit Court, April 13, 2003). “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”)  Other political prisoners who watched the execution from their cells told me years later that my father refused a blindfold, and he whistled as the bullets tore into his body.  One of the few memories I have, since I was only five years old at that time, was that my Dad whistled when he was angry…”

“As a journalist, I refrain from generalities.  But I do believe there are few Cubans on the island and even fewer Cuban exiles who have not had a family member either executed or imprisoned by this megalomaniac.  What I fail to understand is why there seems to be so little national compassion for the pain that Cuban exiles have experienced.  Americans show compassion for cancer survivors, for DUI and rape victims, for people suffering from depression, physical and mental abuse.  We show compassion for famine victims in Africa…genocide in Ethiopia…  So why, I ask, are Cuban exiles not afforded the same support and compassion?”

Despite my Anglo name, I was born in Cuba.  My mother was born there.  Her parents are buried there.  My father was buried there until Castro was so ticked off by an article I wrote in 1978 as a Miami Herald reporter that he had my father’s remains dug up and thrown out.  I am most proud of being Cuban American, and I want the rest of the world to understand our pain.  It is part of our daily lives, no matter where we live.  It is the ache of losing a country, but it is more than that, too.  It is a loss we feel in our blood and in our bones…  Our pain is part of our spirit.  The most we can hope for is compassion…”

While Fidel is celebrating a birthday, my brothers, sister and I are mourning the death not only of our father but also of our mother, Dorothy Stauber Anderson McCarthy, who died less than two months ago.  She was 39 years old when Fidel made her a widow.  She struggled to raise us and give us a new life, and she was most successful.  But her greatest triumph was to instill a sense of right and honor in us, to teach us strength and morality.

A month after her death, a New York judge ruled that we should receive millions of dollars of the frozen Cuban assets held in this country because of Fidel Castro’s murder of my father.  It is a very welcome decision, but very bittersweet.  Fidel Castro is alive and he knows he has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to pay for his heinous act.  But the fact that my mother isn’t alive to see this final measure of justice is a soul-deep wound that I wll live with for the rest of my life.

I weep for her.  I weep for us, and I weep for all who have been the victims of Fidel Castro.”

The entire Anderson family – mother and children - testified during the trial.   In our conversation, Gary said, “It was just as traumatic as I thought it would be.”  I can only imagine. Bonnie herself testified that when she went to Cuba in 1978, on assignment from The Miami Herald, she met Castro during a press conference, and he “knew who I was.” 

An AP story printed in the March 13, 2003 South Florida Sun-Sentinal reported that “she was able to travel to western Cuba and found her father’s untended grave at the rear of a municipal cemetery.  Twenty years later Anderson, then on assignment for CNN, again traveled to the cemetery, where the same caretaker led her to the grave site.  But this time, a teary-eyed Anderson testified, “There was just a hole in the ground. The caretaker said that someone had ordered that the remains be dug up, and they were either burned and thrown out or just thrown out.”

 Today, May 21, is Cuba Solidarity Day.  When I first thought of posting an entry to mark the occasion, I imagined I would speak of Yoani Sanchez, or the history of Cuba, or the people of the island.  To the extent that I know anything at all of Cuba, that is what I have known.

Instead, I find myself thinking of Howard Anderson, who whistled in front of his firing squad because, as his daughter says, he “whistled when he was angry”.  I think of his wife Dorothy, who learned of his death not by a compassionate knock on the door, but by a radio broadcast out of Cuba.  I think of Gary, his brothers and sisters, who told a judge they wanted to testify at trial, in order to make clear the larger significance of what had happened to their father.  I think of Bonnie, using her skills as journalist and writer to send words around the world that continue to resonate today, strong and vibrant as the day they were published. And, on this Cuba Solidarity Day, I will go down once more to Cuban Gold:  to work, and ponder the mystery of how a boat purchased with funds taken from a murderous regime has fallen into my care. 

Call it romanticism, call it too much time in the hot sun, call it crazy if you will, but I like to talk to my boats.  I do it all the time.   The constancy of the wind and repetitive nature of the waves seems to affect them.   They’re a bit like children – they love to hear their stories, retold a thousand times.  They love hearing how they came to be, and the meaning of their names.  LIke any of us, they love to dream, wondering where the path will lead once they’ve been freed from moorings and slip.

And so today, as the heat and humidity rise, and the feel of tropical summer permeates the air, as the pelicans dive and the wind begins again to blow steady from the southeast, from the Island whose day it is, I’ll talk to Cuban Gold.  I’ll tell her the story of her naming.  I’ll tell her what I know of the beauty of the Island for which she is named, and the endurance of the people who live there.  I’ll tell her of other boats that have crossed the Straits and of that great river of flowing water called the Gulfstream.  I’ll imagine with her the satisfaction of one day riding a great wave of joy into Havana Harbor, mooring beside the wall and resting there to be admired by the walkers along El Malecon: beautiful, proud - and free at last.

 

 

 

© Text copyright Linda Leinen 2008

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