Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (22 page)

It was
cold,
man . . . you know, like January. You remember that big snowstorm? When they pulled all the cars off the street? Yeah, well that was it. . . .
Cold.
And this friend of mine, Ramón, comes by. I know him ten, fifteen years, but you know, haven’t seen him for a while, so there’s a big bla-bla hello scene . . . and he was running from something, I mean that was pretty obvious, but he was always very high-strung, moving around a lot—Miami, L.A., Mexico—and right away he says, “Man, let’s go to
Miami,
where it’s
WARM.”
And he had this
car,
and well, I mean it wasn’t difficult him talking me into going, because of the weather and all. So that was the first thing—we went down to Miami.

Had he mentioned anything about Cuba before you left for Miami?

No, man, he didn’t say anything about
Cuba—
or maybe he
did
mention it, you know, fleetingly . . . like “bla-bla-bla the Cuban situation,” or some crap like that, but we were just going to
Miami.
I mean he probably
did
mention it, because he was
born
in Cuba, you dig, and speaks Spanish and so on—but Castro was all right with me . . . I mean he had that
beard,
you know, and he seemed pretty interesting. No, we didn’t talk about that, we get down to Miami, and we have three great days at the track, and then we have four terrible ones—we were reduced to moving in with Jimmy Drew, a guy I know there. And so Ramón’s taking me around—I mean, he knows Miami, see, and there’s a
liquor
store in the neighborhood and he introduces me to this guy owns the liquor store—nice guy to know, owns a liquor store, and we get very friendly, you know, and he’s giving us bottles of
rum.
Well, he’s
Cuban,
dig, and he and Ramón start yakking it up about
Cuba
and “bla-bla Castro” and so on, and now he’s talking about the
“invasion”
and how he’s going to get back what they
took
from him and all that jive. And naturally I’m
agreeing
with him—well I mean he keeps laying this
rum
on us, about three bottles a day . . . but he’s, well he was obviously full of crap, a kind of middle-aged hustler businessman . . . and all these cats hanging around the liquor store all looked like
hoods,
but sort of
failing,
you know? Anyway, we were meeting all these hood-faces hanging around this liquor store, mostly Cubans, or born in Cuba, and one of them took us to this . . . well, they had this recruiting station, you know, where they’re all signing up for the
invasion,
and Ramón, well he’s getting more and more excited about this—he’s a
salesman
actually, I mean that’s what he does, you know, in real life, sell things, and so he’s selling himself on this idea, invading Cuba . . . and of course he was selling me on it too.

Well, now this recruiting—this station—was this being done quite openly?

Openly? Well, man, it was open twenty-four hours a day. You know, like in the middle of town.

This was about the time Cuba raised this question in the V.N. and the U.S. delegation so emphatically denied it. If recruitment was being done as openly as you suggest, how could they deny it?

Well, use your bean, man—what are they supposed to do,
admit
it?

All right, now let me ask you this, what was Ramón’s idea exactly—I mean, if the invasion was successful, did he think he would get something out of it?

Well, Ramón’s what you might call an
essentialist—
and he just more or less figures that the man with the gun is, you know,
the man with the gun.

And how did you feel about it?

The money was the thing that interested me—I mean we’d had these four very bad days at the track, and I had no
money.
Well, they were offering two-fifty a month and, you know, room and board, and . . . let’s see, what else . . . yeah,
a trip to Guatemala.
But I guess the main thing was these cats at the recruiting station, giving this big spiel about “bla-bla-bla the American Government, the C.I.A., the U.S. Army,” and so on. I mean the picture
they
were painting had
battleships
in it, Dad—you know, rockets against pitchforks. Well man, I mean how could we lose? Cuba versus America—are you kidding?

So it was pretty obvious even then that it was an American project?

Well
of course,
man—that was the whole pitch. You don’t think they could have got these guys in there any other way, do you? I mean most of
these
guys were just sort of tired, middle-aged businessmen, or young hustlers . . .
they
weren’t going to do anything, anybody could see that. It was like they were recruiting for the
parade,
you know, to march through Havana—and these guys were joining up to be
in
the parade, that’s all. I mean there was a
slight
pretense at a front—the
Juan Paula Company,
that’s the way the checks were paid, from the
Juan Paula Company—
and then there were some of these C.I.A. faces running around, trying to make a cloak-and-dagger scene out of it, but that was just sort of a
game
with them. I mean everybody in Miami knew about the recruiting.

Did you meet other Americans who wanted to go?

Well, they didn’t want Americans, you see, they wanted
Cubans
—for the big parade, dig? So you had to be Cuban, or if you were American, like Ramón, you had to be born in Cuba. But yeah, there were some other Americans down there, trying to get in—guys from the South mostly, these real . . . you know, anything-is-better-than-home types. Most of them had been in the Army or something like that. But they didn’t want them—they wanted Cubans.

So how did you get in?

Well, man, I mean they didn’t make an
issue
of it or anything like that, not as far as
I
was concerned, because we had gotten sort of friendly with them, these C.I.A. cats . . . and they weren’t bad guys really—I mean they thought
they
were doing the right thing and they thought
we
were doing the right thing, so we had a pretty good relationship with them. They were nice guys actually—just sort of goofy.

Where did you see the first C.I.A. person? At the recruiting station?

That’s right, they would fool around this recruiting station . . . but they were sort of flunky types. The first, what you might call “higher-echelon” C.I.A. face, was this guy directing the loading, you know, when we left for the airport. Young, dapper, sort of prematurely gray, crew-cut, very square, would-be hip-looking cat. I guess he was a faggot actually.

How did you get to the airport?

Well, one night about a week after we signed up and had finished taking these physicals they said, “Okay, this is it”—you know, very dramatic—and they picked us up, there were about ninety of us altogether, in these trucks . . . sort of like moving vans, and, well, went to the airport.

Was this the Miami International Airport?

No man, it was some kind of abandoned
military
airport. Took us about an hour to get there—then we were inside this huge hangar, and that’s where they issued the uniforms. Khaki uniforms, shoes, and all that jazz. Then we get on the plane . . . C-47 . . . with the windows taped up, you know, no light, very cloak-and-dagger. And the trip . . . well, we took off that night and landed the next morning. Guatemala. And it was
hot,
man . . . wow, was it
hot,
Cats falling out all over the place—I mean,
these
guys were in no shape to start with, and then this
heat.
Well, there were these trucks there to pick us up—sort of red, commercial-type trucks, like farm trucks, you know, big open trucks. And they took us from the airstrip to the camp—that was outside Retalhuleu, the airstrip—and it takes about an hour and a half to get to Trax, the camp, the last half hour very
steep,
like straight up a mountain. First we pass a Guatemalan outpost, then a Cuban one. And it’s all
lava—
the campsite was all lava . . . cut right out of the side of this mountain about 8,000 feet up. It was laid out in three levels, you dig, like huge terraces. The first level had the firing range, parade ground, the second had the barracks, mess hall, and so on, and then at the top was where the C.I.A. lived—separate, with their own mess hall, movie, and all that. Anyway it’s all lava . . . like crushed coral, you know, crunch, crunch, crunch, everywhere you step. And it was supposed to be a secret camp, but of course everyone knew about it—I mean there were fifteen hundred guys up there eventually, blasting away all day—rifles, machine guns, mortars. And it was written up in all the newspapers and magazines—including
Bohemia Libre.
Know that one? It’s the big anti-Communist magazine there.

Was this formerly a Guatemalan army camp?

No, man, this was formerly
nothing.
They were still working on it when I got there—I mean the camp was built for this, you know, this particular project, and they were still working on it.

Well, had you gotten to know any of the other men yet? What were they like?

You mean the guys on the plane? Well, let’s see, there was this guy, Martinez . . . he was about fifty-two or -three, had been in the Batista army, a clerk—beautiful handwriting . . . well, you know the type, man, a
clerk.
And he was there because that was all he knew—the army and how to write. I mean that was the whole story with him. And then you get someone else, like this kid Raúl-young country boy, thinks his old man has been beat for a couple of
cows
or something. Very sincere cat. Well, you know, man, there were all kinds, like any army. Mostly pretty simple cats though—well, you know, like any army.

Can you describe the camp more fully?

It was the usual scene, man—a
camp.
A military
camp.
The barracks . . . well, a couple of them were quonset huts, but most of them were just ordinary wooden barracks—hold about seventy guys, something like that. Mess hall, orderly room, quartermaster, motor pool, and so on . . . like an ordinary American Army camp . . . a little shabbier maybe, you know, more makeshift.

How was the food?

Well, that was a pretty funny scene all right—that whole mess-hall scene. They had these three American cooks, you dig, and a lot of Guatemalans to do KP—with a couple of translators, you know, so the cooks could tell the Guatemalans what to do—and the food was okay, sort of typical American fare, but the Cubans didn’t particularly dig it. I mean they like different things, you know—black beans, rice, pork, they eat a lot of pork. Anyway, sometimes they wouldn’t eat in the mess hall—they would cop a
pig
somewhere, you know, off a farmer, somebody like that . . . trade him a gun for it, anything—I mean, there were, you know, quite a few little black-market operations going on. So they would have the pig . . . a live, squealing
pig,
man, and they’d butcher it right outside the barracks and build a big fire and cook it. They’d have a ball—a kind of little
fiesta,
you know, singing and dancing, lushing it up, cooking this pig. It was a crazy scene.

Did you start your training right away?

Yeah, you started off as a group. . . . They would keep all the guys who arrived together as a group, right through Basic Training—you know, marching, calisthenics, rifle range, and so on. And then they would train you for some specialty—like mortar, machine gun, or something. But we didn’t get started until the next day. I mean there was a little confusion when we arrived, because there had just been a take-over the night before—a Batista coup—and the San Román boys had taken over. These were two brothers, Pepe and Roberto San Román—they were very tight with the Americans. See, the Americans never knew what was happening—I mean, they lived apart, ate apart, none of them spoke Spanish, and they never had any idea what was going on in camp—so if some guy came to them and said “bla-bla-bla Communist plot” or some crap like that, why they had to
believe
him—they really had no choice, they always had to take the word of the guy who was telling them. So they’d say: “Okay,
you
take over—get those Commies outta there!”

Had there actually been a plot?

No, man, this was just
politicking.
There was a lot of maneuvering going on, you dig—I mean, these guys were sort of divvying up the spoils, you know, even before they got there. That’s how sure of themselves they were. And so the San Román brothers finally came out on top. Short-lived though it proved to be.

Anyway they had these three cats in the can—not the regular stockade, but a tin-roof shack built just to hold these guys. They were the ones who had taken all the weight in the coup—you know, supposed to be Communist spies. It was like that shack in
The Bridge on the River Kwai,
and those cats were in there for
three months,
man. Nobody was allowed near them except whoever was guarding the shack—and the guy who brought their chow . . . and, that’s right, there were a couple of G-2 faces would question them sometimes. But they never cracked—I saw them the day they came out—they were strong cats, man.

Do you suppose they were Communist spies?

Well, I think they were just strong, dangerous cats, man—who, you know, disagreed with the Batista clique. So when they pulled off this coup, these guys caught all the heat.

So the San Román brothers became
. . .
what, the commandants of the camp?