Spying for the revolution

On March 12, 1998, sometime after midnight, a Russian-made Lada swerved out of control in the Miramar section of Havana, killing its driver. The driver and sole occupant of the vehicle, Manuel Pineiro Losada, better known as Barba Roja for his mangy carrot-red beard, had been Cuba’s legendary spymaster for more than 30 years. A Castro confidante going back to their days in the Sierra Maestra, Pineiro headed up the Ministry of Interior and later its Department of Americas, the branch of Cuban intelligence charged with exporting and fomenting revolution.

Cubans have several predilections, not the least of which is a passion for conspiracy. Hence, notwithstanding perfectly coherent explanations for the crash -- Pineiro was a heavy drinker, a diabetic, not to mention a lousy driver -- rumors instantly lit up the wires from Havana to Miami to Washington that Pineiro’s accident was, claro, no accident.

Taken to the grave with him, went the reasoning, were some 30 years of secrets, plots and intrigues. Or so it seemed. Now comes a memoir from Jorge Masetti, a former Barba Roja operative turned whistle-blower, engagingly titled “In the Pirate’s Den: My Life as a Secret Agent for Castro.” It is a slim memoir of precious little political analysis and psychological insight but one that offers tantalizing glimpses into the murky guerrilla demimonde of the 1970s and ‘80s, when revolutionary ideals not infrequently mingled with criminality.

Masetti comes with an unusual and dashing pedigree. His father was Jorge Ricardo Masetti, the Argentine journalist turned revolutionary who arrived in Cuba in 1958 to chronicle the barbudos in the Sierra. Later he established the news agency Prensa Latina before enlisting with Pineiro. Working under the supervision of his countryman Che Guevara, he was dispatched to the northern mountains of Argentina, where he was killed in 1964. For his namesake growing up in Havana, the cachet of being the “son of Masetti” included entree into los hijos de Papa: the Cuban Brat Pack.

In 1970, the family returned to Buenos Aires, where the teenage Masetti set about creating himself in his father’s image. First, he began apprenticing at a local newspaper and then enlisting in any anti-government group that would have him. Eventually, he fell in with the ERP or the People’s Revolutionary Army, an Argentine guerrilla group with close ties to Cuba, and began his career as a full-time revolutionary. By the mid-’70s, Masetti was back in Havana working under the tutelage of the wily Pineiro, who became his mentor and patron over the next decade.

Greeting Masetti at Jose Marti Airport was his father’s mistress, Conchita, who also worked for the Ministry of Interior. “It amused me that they had sent her to pick me up,” he writes, “when in fact we had never even met.” There were other surprises: a half sister who resembled him more than his full sister.

Masetti offers a vivid account of the Cuban-run training and indoctrination programs for wannabe guerrillas. Upon graduation, he globe-trotted through Angola, Lima, Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, the Congo, Colombia, Chile -- seeking to topple “imperialist regimes” and plant the seeds for socialist paradises. But the willful and restless Masetti was forever bristling at the Cuban bureaucrats and desk jockeys who called the shots.

Masetti quickly learned that the ERP didn’t hesitate to do whatever was needed to advance its cause -- be it kidnapping, counterfeiting, assassinations, bank robbery and even dabbling in ivory smuggling to generate funds for its operations and to support its agents. A natural misfit, Masetti was barely perturbed. “The kidnappings financed all this,” he writes. “I understood their necessity but I was glad when instead of being given a gun and a mask, I was ordered to return to Italy and ‘work with the masses’.... Whether or not we could make a revolution, we could certainly rob a bank.”

Along the way, Masetti -- who inherited his father’s movie-star looks -- casually fathered five children, all of whom were raised without him. One of the more disconcerting elements of Masetti and his book is his lack of consciousness or, for that matter, a conscience. There is an evasiveness and lack of detail in some sections -- perhaps seeking to protect former comrades or himself or relatives still in Cuba. But in at least two areas, “Pirate’s Den” helpfully fills out the historical record: the Sandinista overthrow of Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza and its chronicle of the De la Guardia-Arnaldo Ochoa scandal that rocked Havana in 1989. The former was the apex of Masetti’s career, the latter, his undoing.

“Pirate’s Den’s” most intriguing disclosure is Masetti’s version of the audacious assassination of Somoza in Paraguay in 1980. Somoza’s six gunmen were known to have been Argentine guerrillas allied with the Sandinistas. Masetti, however, claims that the decision to eliminate Somoza, who fled with much of the Nicaraguan treasury in tow, was actually made by the Cuban government: “Nicaraguan intelligence -- which is to say Cuban intelligence, which was clearly in control, had decided to follow the assassination of Comandante Bravo [the infamous chief of operations of Nicaragua’s National Guard] with an even grander target: Somoza himself.”

According to Masetti, feuding among his old ERP comrades led him to drop out of the group shortly before the Somoza hit. It was his former companero, Flaco Santiago, who fired the bazooka into Somoza’s oncoming bulletproof vehicle while kneeling in the middle of the road. “His shot hit the mark dead center, but the projectile was a dud,” Masetti writes. A second salvo hit a bull’s-eye, puncturing the vehicle’s armor and killing Somoza and two aides. The group escaped with the exception of Santiago, who was captured and killed.

While working in Managua, Masetti met the dashing Cuban intelligence chief, Col. Tony de la Guardia, who secured weapons for the Sandinistas and fought alongside them. Back in Havana, De la Guardia was charged with running the Ministry of Interior’s MC program (moneda convertible) to generate direly needed dollars. Within months of working for De la Guardia, Masetti fell in love with his stunning daughter, Ileana, and married her.

By the mid-1980s, Masetti found himself at loose ends. “Armed struggle was giving way to politics,” he admits. “But I had no access to this way of life. I was cut out only to be a henchman for someone like Pineiro: with no family, commitments, country, flag or religion.”

But full-blown disenchantment does not kick in until his father-in-law, De la Guardia; his brother Patricio, a distinguished general; and the revolutionary hero Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa were tossed in jail by Castro and charged with corruption and later drug smuggling. Few have been convinced that the men, if guilty at all, were rogue operators. Masetti argues that it was ideology, not drugs, that determined their grim destiny. “I remember that Ochoa spent a long time speaking about the need to discuss our problems openly, to be able to travel and talk freely. I remember that Patricio also mentioned perestroika with admiration ... [and was] reading Gorbachev’s book.” Convinced that they would survive their televised trial by cooperating with their accusers, the De la Guardias talked their family into not seeking outside attorneys or media to spotlight their plight. But to the everlasting shock of Cuban society, Tony de la Guardia, Ochoa and two others were executed by firing squad. “It was a revolutionary version of Alice in Wonderland,” Masetti notes acidly. “First the verdict, then the trial.”

The book’s translation generally flows smoothly but is marred in places by silly and unnecessary literalizations. Hence, the Argentine guerrilla, Flaco Santiago, is re-christened Skinny Santiago and so on. Published first in France almost 10 years ago, Masetti’s tale has made the journey from Spanish to French before arriving in its present English version. Particularly bizarre is the fact that no translators are noted for credit.

“In the Pirate’s Den” concludes with a grand, almost melodramatic, mea culpa: “[T]he fact is during those years of conflict, all we did was destroy,” he concludes. “We built nothing.” Reeling from the tragedy that befalls his in-laws, Masetti left Cuba with Ileana in 1990 and now lives in Paris. “We were young and irresponsible,” he explains insufficiently. “We were pirates.”