Topaz - Leon Uris [36]
Héctor de Córdoba preferred the electricity of life in Havana and the international sparring grounds of diplomacy and the world’s sporting places to the bondage of the family holding near Santiago.
In the mold of a staunch independent thinker and somewhat of a black sheep, Héctor’s interest in family affairs remained nominal, Actually, he was in constant battle with his family, deploring the exploitation of the peasants and the other social injustices upon which the family had been able to build and hold an empire.
The pull and tug of Cuban politics had always been a deadly game. Héctor de Córdoba, a liberal in days of reaction, achieved a stature so great that he rose above that small army of bickerers and became one of Cuba’s foremost diplomats, mainly as a roving ambassador and negotiator. His value was great enough to pass him through seasons of disfavor with Batista, although, over a period, his relations with the dictator turned to ice.
He rejected a Batista attempt to bury him in a remote, obscure diplomatic post and chose to practice law and live in de facto political exile in Marianao, a suburb a few miles west of Havana in the hills overlooking the sea.
When Castro swept from the Sierra Maestra Mountains into Havana, it was Héctor de Córdoba who embraced him beneath the monument to Martí. It could now be known that Héctor had been one of Castro’s manipulators and backers in the capital who hastened the collapse of Batista.
A month after the liberation of Havana, Héctor de Córdoba was killed in a tragic airplane crash en route to his first diplomatic mission under Castro.
Raul and Fidel and Che Guevara and Rico Parra all wept openly as the Little Dove was handed the flag of Cuba that adorned her husband’s coffin. In shaken voice, Fidel Castro named Héctor de Córdoba a martyr of the Revolution.
Juanita then retreated with her two sons into mourning in the pink marble villa in Marianao.
In the days that followed Castro’s victory, great estates were broken up ruthlessly, with the former owners receiving a pittance of their true value.
Fidel Castro personally interceded in behalf of Juanita and arranged a large and admirable settlement on the de Córdoba holdings. The Little Dove of Cuba was that kind of aristocrat who could transfer from one regime to another and become an aristocrat of the Revolution.
When the time for weeping was done, Juanita emerged from her villa and continued the good works that had been part of her training and heritage from childhood. She walked among the impoverished and battled for the orphan.
She was swept into the swirl of state functions.
She was a woman who made a man feel good. To pour his liquor, to light his cigar. To dance with him till dawn.
She campaigned for greater sanitation in the villages.
The disenchantment with Fidel and his Revolution set in almost at once.
Lifelong friends were rounded up in a terror that soon filled the dungeons of Morro Castle and the moats of La Cabaña.
And many ended up in the Green House of G-2 on Avenida Quinta, to be doled the cruel mercy of Castro’s chief inquisitor, Muñoz.
Juanita de Córdoba’s reaction to the rape of Cuba and the murder of her friends filled her with unbounded hate of Castro. And she set out to do something about it.
Many years before his death, Héctor de Córdoba had attended a conference in Washington as an adviser on the sugar quota.
André Devereaux had also attended in behalf of France, both because he was knowledgeable in matters of the sugar quota, and because it was a good place to obtain intelligence information.
In the course of their daily contact, a friendship was struck up between Devereaux and Héctor de Córdoba, and also between their wives.
In his subsequent visits to Cuba, André continued his friendship with the de Córdobas and never failed to visit them at Marianao. Through his sources in Havana, André learned that Héctor was secretly working for the Castro band, which was then still in the Camaguey