The day that my father and uncle saved Castro's life
BY RAFAEL A. LIMA
Special To The Miami Herald
My father hands me an 8x10 photograph. Across a distance of more than
four decades, I look at a black-and-white image of my father and my
uncle Luis, his brother-in-law. They sit in the cockpit of a C-47, hands
casually resting on the controls with a familiarity that belies hundreds
of hours of flight time. They wear the uniforms of Cuba's army air
force. They both turn, smiling over their shoulders; an unseen
photographer clicks the shutter -- the moment turned to silver iodide
crystals and photographic paper.
''That was the day your uncle and I saved Fidel's life,'' my father says
casually.
''That was the day you did what?'' I ask incredulously.
My father explains that unseen in the back of that plane -- on the very
day that photo was taken -- was a 26-year-old prisoner named Fidel
Castro, sitting silently next to two armed soldiers.
It was 1953, the year that I was born, a warm autumn morning at Campo
Columbia military airfield near Havana. In the summer, Castro and a band
of young rebels had attacked a military barracks called Moncada, in
Oriente province. Castro, captured, was sentenced to 15 years at El
Presidio Modelo de Isla de Pinos -- literally, the model prison of the
Isle of Pines, modeled on the notorious prison in Joliet, Ill.
The two pilots who were personally ordered by Fulgencio Batista to fly
Castro there were my uncle, Maj. Luis Rojas and my father, Capt. Rafael
Lima Sr., who was the co-pilot that day. Both were in their early 30s.
''We overheard one of the guards talking about throwing Fidel out of the
plane over the ocean,'' my father says. ``We heard, `We just throw him
out like trash.'
''Your uncle Luis and I had been ordered by Batista to deliver Fidel
alive to the prison or we would pay with the lives of our own
families,'' he explains.
My father said that my uncle Luis overheard the two burly guards before
the flight and that he had stepped to the back of the plane to confront
them. Both pilots then ordered that the prisoner remain inside the
aircraft -- alive. And then the two began the flight that bore Castro to
prison, delivering him into history.
''So who knows, we may have saved his life,'' my father says. His face
reflects his acceptance and resignation about how things turned out.
• •
I rewind an imaginary timeline back past 10 American presidents, to the
dawn of the Cold War.
The young Castro in the cavernous hold of the noisy cargo plane that day
would survive the trip and the two guards' grim plans, and he'd only
spend 22 months in the Isle of Pines.
The young Castro would become the longest-running dictator in Western
history. Castro -- with the help of the Soviet Union -- would bring the
world to the brink of nuclear war. The dark-haired young prisoner in the
C-47 would fan the flames of global revolution.
And the two pilots' fates would be tethered to that of the prisoner with
the vacant stare. Six years later, after Castro's triumphant march into
Havana, my uncle and my father would become his prisoners. A
rubber-stamp court would condemn them to death by firing squad. Later,
those sentences would be commuted to 20- and 25-year prison terms.
But now, as I gaze at the photograph, questions loop in my head:
What if the guards had carried out their plan?
What if my father never overheard them?
What if the guards had tossed Castro out of that plane?
Holding that black-and-white picture, I imagine a parallel universe:
Castro is grabbed by the two guards and wrestled to the open door of the
plane. In one brutal move, the guards heave him into the air at 10,000
feet into the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Batabanó.
In this alternate reality, my two uncles have not spent 20-plus years in
Cuban prisons after they were charged with war crimes, as all Batista's
military were right after the fall of Havana. The Cuban Missile Crisis
has never happened. The Bay of Pigs invasion has never touched the
beaches of Girón. Many thousands of rafters have never ventured out to
sea on stolen scraps of plywood and perished in the Florida Straits.
Forty-plus years of family separation have never happened. Some might
even say JFK might never have been assassinated.
I want to ask my father what I know is impossible to answer:
I want to ask him if he could hear the rumble of the nuclear warheads
being dug into Cuban soil. Could you strain your ears forward in time to
hear the crack of that Mauser being fired from that Texas School Book
Depository? Did you know there would come a time that you had lived
longer in exile than you did in your beloved Cuba? I want to ask Luis if
he could foresee his 23 hellish years in prison.
I know, of course, that they could not.
• •
During the 50-minute flight as the engines droned, the uncommunicative
prisoner wearing a light short-sleeve shirt and dark pants didn't look
up. He seemed somber but not defeated or worried. His hands were folded
on his lap when he stepped into the plane, and he wasn't handcuffed or
tied up during the trip.
On the tarmac at the Isle of Pines, my father tells me, a Jeep pulled up
to the plane right away. A driver and an officer -- the prison commander
-- welcomed and shook hands with Castro, who climbed into the Jeep's
passenger seat. My father tells me he saw that, and then he glanced at
Luis and shrugged: ''Like old friends.'' Luis shook his head and left it
at that.
As the two men began their preflight checklist for the return to Havana,
the dark-haired prisoner in the jeep didn't glance back over his
shoulder at them. There would have been no reason to. Castro didn't know
that the pair, following orders, had safe-guarded his life. And Castro
couldn't know that the three would meet again six years, at La Cabaña
prison; this time, instead, the pilots would be his captives.
''Dad, did you know? I mean was there any sense that . . .'' My words
trail off.
``No, son, we had no idea what the future held. The whole flight back
was silent because in those days, the planes were noisy. We didn't have
intercoms, and we didn't yell. We flew in silence back to Havana.''
I imagine the roar of the twin Pratt & Whitney radial engines as the
universe aligned.
• •
Somewhere on a dusty shelf or in an archive in Havana is a logbook or
perhaps a fading notation written into the margin of some form that
might read: Isle of Pines Prison; pilots Capt. Rafael Lima Sr. and Maj.
Luis Rojas. Passenger: Fidel Castro. But the only people who knew what
happened that day would have been my father, my uncle and the guards.
Luis Rojas would go on to spend 23 years in political prisons -- he's
mentioned in Armando Valladares' book, Against All Hope: A Memoir of
Life in Castro's Gulag. But he seldom, in his later years in Miami,
talked about the dictator. It was as if he felt his time in prison had
been a bad dream and that when he awoke, he was a tottering old man. He
spent his final years quietly with his grandkids, who had fled the
island years before.
My father fared better because after spending only a few weeks in
prison, he escaped Cuba, with the help of a rebel soldier and the
Brazilian Embassy. But he never gave up his dream of trying to defeat
Castro, even as my mother urged him to resign himself to living in the
United States and raising his son here. He joined clandestine groups; he
flew a small Cessna over Havana in the 1960s, distributing leaflets.
After the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, the strain of his failed quest
helped his marriage to collapse.
Decades after the photograph was taken, I will ask my father if he and
my uncle regretted not allowing Castro to be killed.
''No,'' he said. ''I was an officer in the air force, and I was a man
with ethics. Murder was not what officers do. Officers follow orders and
the rest is'' -- he smiled, enjoying the play on words -- 'hisstory.' ''
He also tells me he hasn't told this story to anyone, until now.
• •
My elderly father leaves the room, refusing to watch the TV that's
broadcasting news footage from Cuba, refusing to cross paths again with
the source of his most painful memories. But now that I know this story,
I can't turn away.
I watch the video of another frail, aged man, this one stepping
unsteadily out of an elevator. He wears jogging clothes, and ''F.
Castro'' is embroidered on his chest.
The feeble figure in the video has survived exploding cigars, invasions
and assassination attempts over more than four decades -- and one
thwarted attempt on his life the history books have never recorded and
that even he may not know anything about.
Rafael Lima Jr. teaches writing
at the School of Communication,
University of Miami. He is also a captain in the Tamiami squadron
of the Civil Air Patrol. To post
a comment on this article, go
to MiamiHerald.com and click
on Today's Extras. Or e-mail
Issues&Ideas@MiamiHerald.com
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