Cuba Read Online Free PDF

you
    with my life when I first approached you. Nothing has
    changed.”
    Sedano puffed on the cigar in silence,
    studying Garcia’s features. Born in America
    of Cuban parents, Garcia had been a priest.
    He couldn’t leave the women alone, however, and
    ultimately got mixed up with some topless dancers
    running an “escort”…service in East St.
    Louis. After a few months the feds busted him for
    violation of the Mann Act, moving women across state
    lines for immoral purposes, i.e.,
    prostitution. After the church canned him, he jumped
    bail and fled to Cuba. Garcia had been in Cuba
    several years when he was recruited by the CIA, which
    asked him to approach Sedano.
    Hector Sedano had no doubt that Garcia had the
    ear of the American governmentin the past four years
    he had supplied Sedano with almost a million
    dollars in cash and enough weapons to supply a small
    army. The money and weapons always arrived when and where
    Garcia said they would. Still, the question remained, who
    else did the man talk to?
    Who did his control talk to?
    Hector had stockpiled the weapons, hidden them
    praying they would never be needed. He used the money for
    travel expenses and bribes. Without money
    to bribe the little fish he would have landed in prison
    years ago.
    Hector Sedano shook his head to clear his thoughts.
    He was living on the naked edge, had been there for
    years. And life wasn’t getting any easier.
    “Castro is dyingea”…he said. “It is a matter of
    weeks, or so the doctors say.”
    Alfredo Garcia took a deep breath and exhaled
    audibly.
    “I tell you now man-to-man, Alfredo. The
    records of Alejo Vargas will soon be placed in
    my hands. If you have
    betrayed me or the people of Cuba, you had better find
    a way to get off this planet, because there is no
    place on it you can hide, hot from me, not from the
    CIA, not from the men and women you betrayed.”
    “I have betrayed no one,”.alfredo Garcia said.
    “God? Yes. But no rnan.”
    He went away then, leaving Sedano to smoke in
    solitude.
    Fidel Castro dying! Hector Sedano could hear
    his heart beat as he tried to comprehend the reality of
    that fact.
    Millions of people were waiting for his death, some
    patiently, most impatiently, many with a feeling of
    impending . doom. Castro had ruled Cuba as an
    absolute dictator since
    1959: the revolution that he led did nothing more than
    topple the old dictator and put a new one in his
    place. Castro jettisoned fledgling
    democracy, embraced communism and used raw
    demagoguery to consolidate his total, absolute
    power. He prosecuted and executed his enemies and
    confiscated the property of anyone who might be against
    him. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled, many
    to America.
    Castro’s embrace of communism and seizure of the
    assets of the foreign corporations that had invested in
    Cuba, assets worth several billions of
    dollars, were almost preordained, inevitable.
    Predictably, most of those corporations were
    American. Also predictably, the
    United.states government retaliated with a
    diplomatic and economic blockade that continued
    to this day.
    After seizing the assets of the American corporations
    who owned most of Cuba, Castro had little choice:
    he had to have the assistance of a major power, so he
    substituted the Soviet Union for the United
    States as Cuba’s patron. The only good thing
    about the substitution was that the Soviet Union was a
    lot farther away than Florida. Theirs was
    never a partnership of equals: the Soviets
    humiliated Fidel at almost every turn in the road.
    When communism collapsed in the Soviet Union
    in the early 1990’s, Cuba was cut adrift as
    an expensive luxury that the newly democratic
    STEPHEN COONTS
    Russia could ill afford. That twist of fate was a
    cruel blow to Cuba, which despite Castro’s best
    efforts still was a slave to sugarcane.
    Through it all, Castro survived. Never as popular
    as his supporters believed, he was never as
    unpopular as the exiles claimed.