E-mail a friendAnn Louise Bardach
airdate April 17, 2006
Investigative journalist Ann Louise Bardach has covered Cuba for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Vanity Fair, where she was a contributing editor. An acclaimed author, her books include Cuba Confidential—named one of the 10 best nonfiction books of '02 by the Los Angeles Times—and her latest, Without Fidel. Bardach began writing after grad school at Hunter College. She's the winner of the prestigious PEN West Award for Journalism and teaches International Journalism at UC Santa Barbara.
Tavis: A look at the current state of Cuba now on the forty-fifth anniversary of America's failed invasion, with Ann Louise Bardach. She's an award-winning journalist who has spent much of her career writing about Cuba. Her most recent books on the subject are 'Cuba Confidential,' 'Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana,' and 'Cuba, A Traveler's Literary Companion." Ann Louise Bardach, nice to have you on the program.
Ann Louise Bardach: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Tavis: It's my delight to have you here. Let me start with, where do I wanna start? Your background. How did you get interested in writing about this place called Cuba?
Bardach: Well, I gotta tell you, in fact, it began with an assignment. I was a staffer for many years at "Vanity Fair,' and I had been interviewing several world leaders, and I don't know how it came up, but the editor of the magazine said to me one day, go down and interview Fidel Castro. (Laugh) Oh, I think I'd been working on a Miami exile piece with exiled militants in south Florida.
And so things were starting to move in that direction. Some of the former Watergate burglars, in fact, I was writing about. And I said, "He's not giving any interviews." Which he hadn't. In the early nineties, he was not giving any print interviews. And I went down, and you know how hard it is to land some time with the great man.
He's very much the movie star dictator. "I will let you know, (laugh) I will summon you to my mountain when I am ready to speak to you." And that was quite an ordeal. I figured out why Castro gets so much good press is that he wears out reporters who are waiting around hotels and told to wait here and he never shows.
By the time they see him, the reporters are completely exhausted. (Laugh) They don't have their wits about them to really ask serious questions. Any event, I think I did ask him some serious questions, and I kind of agitated him. In fact, a few times he actually started yelling. (Laugh) And we did around three hours. And then I saw him another time, and then I saw him a couple other times with larger groups.
Tavis: Well off air, we'll have to compare our Castro stories. 'Cause my call came at 1:00 in the morning. We're ready to talk now. And I stayed up all night talking to him. But it was a fascinating - what were your impressions when you first walked in the room with this guy?
Bardach: Well, I had been clocking him for a while. I'd been watching him at group events, etcetera. And I must tell you, one-on-one, I did not get the big charm factor.
Tavis: You did not get that?
Bardach: I did not get that. I had been already watching him in a few events. I did not get, "Oh my God, this is the most charismatic man I ever met." What I got was a very strategically brilliant guy, a person who is trying to stay one, two steps ahead of you. Very much a guy who's always playing chess. Making his moves ahead of time.
A guy who is almost ruthless and unforgiving, in an emotional sense. When I would talk to him about certain incidents, former comrades of his, who subsequently he sent to jail or who had been executed, the way he would shut off emotionally. And I also got that he was a man of ferocious curiosity and intellect.
And that was the most engaging part of him, is his curiosity about virtually everything. But in terms of him being a charmer, I didn't find him a charmer. In fact, he's uniquely un-Cuban in many ways. He's a man who doesn't dance. He doesn't sing. He's not really interested in music.
Tavis: He played baseball.
Bardach: He played baseball. Baseball and athleticism is the thing. But he is not your conventional Cuban guy. He doesn't make jokes.
Tavis: This is difficult to, in 10 minutes, (laugh) put in context here, and do justice to what you've written in an entire text here. But for those watching who now know that this is the forty-fifth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, I guess the obvious question is, how did this guy, how has this guy survived all these years?
Bardach: He is absolutely determined. He is, as I said, a formidable man of extraordinary intelligence. This is a complete single-minded focus of his to gain power and maintain power. We underestimated him from the gate, and we have paid the consequences. Take, for example, the forty-fifth anniversary we have today of Bay of Pigs. Well, it was completely hare-brained, and he knew about it. He was expecting it.
Tavis: Let me jump in right quick. For those who are not 45 years old, who weren't around when this happened, tell right quick the story. What the Bay of Pigs invasion was, the attempt at least.
Bardach: The Bay of Pigs invasion was an invasion force led and created by the CIA, but using 1,500 Cuban exiles, very angry at Castro, wanting to overthrow his revolution. And they landed in southern Cuba. No one could keep a secret. There were big problems. The plan was developed by Eisenhower. Kennedy inherited it. Kennedy had his questions and doubts about it. And in the middle, he refused to provide air cover, which completely doomed it.
Tavis: So these exiles were supposed to land with U.S. support, get the people in the streets riled up, march to the palace, and throw Castro out.
Bardach: Exactly. And people were supposed to be waiting in the streets, the way we were sort of told in similar, sort of in Iraq, that we would be greeted as liberators. Well, at that time in history, Castro really did have a lot of strong popular support. He still has some support, but at that time he had considerably more.
So you didn't have people rushing out in the streets. But more than that, we did not annihilate the Cuban air force, which is what we needed to do. In fact, Castro was so wise to the deal that he had put out these decoy papier-mâché airplanes that we were knocking down. So I mean, again, and this seems to be what's gone on 45 years here, is that we're playing checkers, and he's playing chess.
Tavis: For those who do not understand the Bay of Pigs 45 years ago, despite your brilliant explanation, they do understand Iraq. And the comparison you make between how we were told we were gonna be greeted in the streets of Baghdad and what, in fact, has and continues to happen.
So, how is it that we knocked over Iraq - we don't control it yet, one could argue, but we knocked Saddam out and knocked the place over. How did we do that thousands of miles away in Iraq, and 90 miles off of our shore, 45 years later, this guy's still thumbing his nose at us?
Bardach: Well, you can take over any country through sheer brute military force. We have vast military superiority, sand we could have done it in Cuba. John F. Kennedy, who was President at the time said, "I'm not comfortable with this." He told the CIA, I have limits on this. Previously under Eisenhower, we had done that in Guatemala.
It had immediately led to a civil war. It was in fact a civil war that went on for 40 years. Kennedy did not wanna go down that road. He wanted a different kind of politics. Not that he was pro-Castro. But he did not wanna go that way. And this is the problem. You are seen as invaders, you're seen as occupiers.
And unless you have completely and total support from people in the streets, it's not gonna happen. The political legacy of Bay of Pigs, which I think is important today, is that as a result of that failure, it really embittered Cuban exiles in Miami. And what happened, out of their outrage against Kennedy and his party, which was the Democratic party, they forged a pretty rock solid alliance with the Republican party, which has been very keenly important in elections ever since.
Tavis: Every time Castro sneezes, as you well know, everybody starts to look at him to see if the guy is about to keel over. He turns 80 later this year.
Bardach: August thirteenth.
Tavis: August thirteenth. So what's your sense, right quick, of what is going to happen whenever that inevitable does happen?
Bardach: Well, I've been asked to help work on obituaries of him by various media organizations. And I say to all of them okay, we'll do them. But as far as I'm concerned, as they say on the streets of Miami, he is immortal until proven otherwise. There are some rumors floating from the CIA that has Parkinson's.
But many people think the CIA are as off on that as they have been on others. Let's say something does happen and he does die and pass on. Cuba has created a kind of succession plan. He plans to install his brother, Raul Castro, who runs the army, who has a lot of advantages, because it is his army. And that, barring a U.S. intervention, would probably be what would happen if something happened to Fidel Castro.
Tavis: I got 20 seconds right quick. There are some who say the genie is already out of the bottle, and you can't put it back. Even if Castro dies, you got Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Chile has a new president, and maybe somebody in Mexico. Is the genie out of the bottle in Latin America?
Bardach: The genie is out of the bottle. We have, right now, under the Bush administration, enacted the most hard-line, restrictive restrictions on travel. We virtually have criminalized travel. And what has been the result? Fidel Castro, after 47 years, he's in his glory days. Hugo Chavez, who's the equivalent of Juan Perone with oil, and he has watched all of Latin America flip to the left.
Tavis: The new book, 'Cuba Confidential, Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana,' by Ann Louise Bardach. Nice to have you here.
Bardach: My pleasure.
Tavis: That's our show for tonight. Thanks for watching. Talk to you on the radio this weekend on PRI. Keep the faith.
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