America's Yanqui Fidelistas

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

source - Paul Wolf <paulwolf@icdc.com>

Miami Herald - January 10, 1999

America's Yanqui Fidelistas 

by paul Brinkley-Rogers

No one honors them. 

Four decades ago, a handful of naive American boys ran off to Cuba in
search of adventure and an ideal worth dying for. They certainly
found adventure, and some believe they found an ideal. But what they
also acquired was a label, a brand, they wear now and for the rest of
their lives -- yanqui fidelistas.

There is no rum-and-rumba version of the American Legion, no Vietnam
memorial for these veterans of the Fidel Castro's revolution. Many of
them kept their exploits secret even from family members, or enlisted
in the U.S. military and never mentioned their rebel past to their
fellow GIs.

Even Cuba -- which in 1997 buried the newly recovered bones of
Argentine Che Guevara with full military honors -- officially ignores
them. Che was immortalized. These old gringos are another matter.

Don Soldini of Fort Lauderdale was a kid in search of a good cause
who is now a millionaire with a cream-colored Rolls-Royce. Two other
Florida men -- Mike Garvey and Chuck Ryan -- were teenagers when they
ran away from home at Guantanamo naval base to join Fidel at the
birth of the revolution. Neill Macaulay, a retired University of
Florida professor, became a rebel lieutenant and trained a firing
squad.

Nowadays, they are middle-aged grandfathers who mostly vote
Republican. But they still believe they did the right thing.

Who would call these aging yanqui fidelistas heroes, especially in
South Florida where this month's celebrations in Havana of the
triumph of Fidel's revolution are bitterly resented by most of the
Cuban exile community?

Read their stories, and decide for yourselves.

THE GITMO RUNAWAYS

The letter to the president of the United States signed by three
teenagers was from the heart, and it did not apologize for the fact
that they had run away to join a revolution.

"We respectfully let you know," the young Americans told Dwight D. 
Eisenhower, "that we have enrolled in the Cuban Liberation Army
which, in the mountains of Cuba, is fighting for the same ideals of
Liberty and Democracy that were taught to us in home and school."

For most men their age, driving their dad's Bel Air on a hot summer's
night might be the cherished memory of their youth. For this handful
of volunteers, however, the high point was that year when they puffed
an endless supply of Partagas cigars and carried guns in the name of
freedom.

The year was 1957. The place was Oriente province in east Cuba, where
the kids -- sons of Navy personnel -- were high school students at
sleepy Guantanamo naval base.

Mike Garvey, 15, had a great Jerry Lee Lewis pompadour. Vic Buehlman,
17, wore bow ties. Chuck Ryan, 19, was the opinionated son of a Navy
medic.

At the base, where the U.S. was transferring arms to dictator
Fulgencio Batista, rumor had it that the "Gitmo Boys," as their
classmates had dubbed them, had been smuggling guns bought at the PX
through the fence to Fidel Castro's rebels. The gossip was right.

Kids sought to be crusaders

The year Garvey and his friends ran away, not even leaving a note for
their parents, was a time when the souls of young Americans yearned
to soar.

The tragedy of the Russian crackdown in Hungary -- after Radio Free
Europe promised help -- disturbed many young people. The civil rights
movement was making its first inroads in the deep South, drawing
volunteers willing to put their lives on the line. It was the year
Jack Kerouac published On The Road, a time when kids like Garvey
itched to be rebels, or even better, crusaders.

Castro landed in Oriente province to start his revolution in December
1956. Most of his men were killed, and Batista claimed that Castro
was dead.

But at Guantanamo, on the south coast of Oriente, Cubans who worked
there told the teenagers he was alive. Garvey and the others saw with
their own eyes what Batista's brutal cops were doing to Cubans their
own age.

"I didn't like Batista's police standing on the street corners with
guns," Garvey remembers. "I didn't like what his cops did to young
people. People were disappearing.

"Me and Ryan would go to the whorehouses at Camanara (a GI hangout
near Guantanamo). We were there for fun. But they were all talking
politics.

"Batista said on the radio that Fidel was dead," Garvey remembers. 
"Then, Cubans started asking us, 'By the way. Can you get us any
guns?' They gave us the money. It didn't seem like Fidel was dead.

"At Windmill Beach the sailors had beer parties. We'd go out there
and get drunk. The sailors thought we had access to teenage girls,
and they'd say, 'She's a fox. Hey buddy, what's her name? Can we buy
you a six-pack?'

"We'd say sure. And guns too."

Made contact with movement

Those red-light-district polemics resulted in contact with Castro's
M-26 Movement underground. They learned that 55 young Cubans were
setting out from nearby Manzanillo to join Castro. Ryan told Garvey,
"Hey Mike. I'm going up into the mountains to fight for the Cuban
people. Do you want to go?"

"I said OK," Garvey remembers. "I sure didn't tell my parents. We
just went off base and we didn't come back. I didn't give a damn."

The trio posed for dramatic photos at a safe house, wearing
red-and-black M-26 armbands. Somebody in the rebel camp realized that
signing up the Gitmo Boys was a public relations coup.

Those photos, the letter the teens wrote to Eisenhower, and film
taken by a CBS crew which showed them with Castro and Che Guevara,
cleaning automatic weapons, helped put the revolution on the map both
in Cuba and in the U.S., scholars of the revolution have written.

"They should be proud of their sons," Ryan told the film crew,
addressing his remarks to his friends' parents. "I only hope that
they can try to realize what their boys are doing... Their boys are
fighting for an ideal... for their country and the world."

Soon, many young Americans -- including men like Soldini and Macaulay
-- were asking how they could get into the fight. Idealists from
Columbia and MIT vowed to spend spring break in Cuba hacking their
way through the jungle to help Fidel Castro, instead of partying in
Fort Lauderdale.

"When I met Fidel in the Sierra Maestra [in March 1957]," says
Garvey, "all he had were 17 guys. He was nobody, just a
revolutionary trying to overthrow an evil dictator. That's what it
was all about for me. Good versus bad.

"We got there, and I asked Fidel, 'Where's the army?'

"He said, 'This is it. We are all people dedicated to the principle
of liberty or death.' "

At least 25 young Americans, according to estimates in 1958, would
fight. In those days, cables from the U.S. Embassy in Havana made it
clear there was no evidence Castro was a communist. Garvey and the
others insist that was the case -- that Castro told them he did not
like communists.

Two sent home

Castro sent Garvey and Buehlman back to their parents after they
served four months, saying that if they were killed it might pop the
bubble of sympathy for his cause in the U.S. They had mostly stood
guard duty, but the teenagers helped capture a police agent who was
then executed.

Ryan, the eldest at 19, said he was mature enough to make his own
decisions and stayed to fight under Fidel's brother Raul at the
bloody battle of Uvevo -- the first major rebel victory. One man in
four among the 75 guerrilla raiders was killed or wounded. In October
1957, Castro sent Ryan to the U.S. to help raise funds for M-26, but
Ryan dropped out when rival Cuban groups began bickering.

The Cold War virtually erased interest in Cuba for the three. They
all served in the U.S. military but their very special expertise was
never called upon. Garvey, who had enlisted as an Army paratrooper,
found himself in 1962 wondering if his unit -- on alert because of
the Cuban missile crisis -- would be ordered to invade the island and
put him in the strange position of having to kill rebel buddies.

Trio reunited recently

The trio lost touch. They found each other again two years ago when
CBS reviewed old footage in connection with a project on Castro's
70th birthday. When the network mentioned the young gringos to Cuban
officials, Fidel quickly demanded -- as Garvey put it -- "Find them
for me!"

Castro invited all three to come to Havana as his personal guests. 
Buehlman, citing his unhappiness with the new Cuban state, declined. 
But Garvey and Ryan went, staying at Protocol 34, a guesthouse for
visiting dignitaries in Havana.

Castro's aides said he would stay 30 minutes. Instead, the Cuban
leader -- speaking English -- swapped stories with the two men for an
emotional five hours as he studied ancient black and white photos of
the trio in the mountains.

"Oh, he remembered us," said Garvey, of Castro.

"It was like he was a young man again, trying to overcome adversity. 
It took him back to old times when he was not carrying the weight of
running the country. He was more at peace with himself when he was
running a war."

The gravel-voiced Ryan, 60, citing unease over Cuban exile reaction,
was much more reticent. He lives near St. Augustine.

"I didn't go in there to choose Fidel Castro as leader," he
explained. "The Cuban people did. I only went in there to get rid of
a dictator.

"The Hungarian revolution really did it for me. The U.S. kept saying
to revolt and they did. And then the Hungarian students got shot down
and I knew I had to do something, so I did."

Buehlman, 58, a sales manager for an electrical equipment company who
lives in Knoxville, Tenn., says that over the years he has lost faith
with Fidel.

Young Castro no communist

The Fidel he remembers -- the 32-year-old Fidel he cherishes -- "was
no communist," this ex-Marine says, grinning as he remembers a
jocular Castro warning him to stay away from Che Guevara because he
was "Muy malo. Muy malo. Comunista!"

"I just felt he [Castro] did wrong," Buehlman says. His brief time
as a guerrilla probably ruined his Navy pilot father's career.

A few years ago when his mother asked him what she should do with his
letters from the Cuba days, Buehlman told her to destroy them. He
said he regrets that now. What he did was of value. "We never talked
about it at home after I came back (from the mountains). My dad had a
hard time with it."

But he had strong emotional ties to key figures in the revolution.
Shipped in disgrace back to the U.S. on the first plane out of
Guantanamo the week he and Garvey reemerged from the mountains,
Buehlman honored a pledge he had made to Camilo Cienfuegos, a hero of
the revolution honored for bravery. Cienfuegos, who had worked as a
waiter in California, had asked Buehlman to visit his wife in San
Francisco.

He saw her, he says, without telling his parents, and told her her
husband was well. Three years later, a light aircraft carrying
Cienfuegos -- by then chief of Cuba's army -- disappeared.

No money to party

Garvey was in school, trying to be a typical teenager at
Jacksonville's Lee High -- with his exploits kept secret from his
senior class -- as Castro celebrated victory. When TV showed
guerrilla faces, Garvey could not resist telephoning Havana. Somehow
he found a former comrade-in-arms, Camilo Cienfuegos, at the
presidential palace who told him to come on down for the party.

"I couldn't," he said. "I didn't have any money. I was just a
kid."

He was still at school when a man who claimed to represent the Mafia
"arrived at my house in a Caddy. He wanted me to go to Cuba and told
me he'd give me $50,000 if he could meet Fidel Castro." But this
emissary trying to keep Mafia-run casinos open disappeared when Fidel
pledged to shoot crime bosses.

Now 56, still retaining a paratrooper's buzz cut and big fists,
Garvey proclaims, "I would have died for Fidel Castro. I would still
die for Fidel. I would die for the Cuban people. I would die for the
[Cuban] dissidents, and the exiles in Miami. I would die for the
United States."

And then he shakes his head, realizing he can't have it all.

REBEL IN A ROLLS

Try to picture Don Soldini in what he had believed to be the final
moment of his life 40 years ago: A Cuban policeman is holding a gun
to his 19-year-old head. The cop barks, "Camine, puta!" (Walk,
bitch!) Another policeman strikes him in the face with a rifle butt.
Then, in the blazing headlights of a squad car, he is handed a shovel
and told to dig his own grave.

Picture Soldini today: garrulous millionaire developer who drives
around Fort Lauderdale in a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible.  The
journey from past to present was some trip.

Soldini was a Brooklyn street kid whose Italian dad was a Wobbly (a
member of the radical [Industrial] Workers of the World labor union)
and whose mom was an Irish nationalist, recovering at home after
being shot in the neck while fighting for Raul Castro's Second Front.

"In January 1957, I was a young kid looking for a cause," says
Soldini, who still talks with all the ardor of youth.

"If it had been 1938 I would have enlisted with the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade [against the fascists in Spain]. I had hitchhiked around the
U.S., hanging out with beatniks. And then I ran into a Sgt. Baldazano
recruiting for the U.S. Army. After listening to me, he said, "I'm
surprised you didn't sign up with the guy who invaded Cuba.'

"Cuba? Cuba? I checked and sure as hell there was a guy called Fidel
Castro."

But how to get to Cuba? Soldini got a job as a pipe fitter at
Bethlehem Steel and saved his money. He got to Santiago de Cuba and
began trying to make contact with M-26 in bars. "I told them I had
military experience, which was bullsh--."

And then Frank Pais, an M-26 leader still mourned by the Cuban state,
was killed by Batista's police. He went to the funeral where fire
hoses were being used to disperse the mourners. "I got through the
lines and ran up to [American Ambassador Earl] Smith and started
yelling at him about Batista. Next day the Army told me to get out."

Pamphlets for Castro

Back in New York City he endeared himself to M-26 by throwing
pro-Castro pamphlets at fans watching a 1957 World Series game at
Yankee Stadium. "Fidel was the guy with the white hat," Soldini
says.

Soon he was back in Cuba, this time with M-26 approval. He linked up
with Raul Castro in the Sierra Cristal and, armed with a lever-action
44-40 rifle left over from the Spanish-American War, went into
action.

He was in what he says was a "hard-line nationalist" outfit,
however. It delighted in executing informers when they were tied up. 
"I was very uncomfortable with this," he said. "That wasn't my
idea of fighting."

Soldini, lightly wounded, decided to leave. He cooked up an
arms-buying mission to New York City. He was standing on Third Avenue
with M-26 cash ready to take delivery of 3.5-inch bazookas when the
FBI moved in, forcing him to leap over cars to make his escape. "Oh
yeah," he says, grinning. "That little bit of trouble."

Digging own grave

In Cuba again he was grabbed by Batista's fearsome SIM (Military
Intelligence Service) police and hauled off to Havana. "They knocked
me on my ass, and proceeded to beat the sh-- out of me," Soldini
says, laughing. "They beat to death the guy in the cell next to me. 
Three times in a row they made me dig my own grave.

"I can still remember it," he says, his face turning red, his voice
explosive. "You take control of yourself. You rationalize they are
going to kill you. Then fear takes control -- a horrific feeling."

But Soldini talked his way out of it by claiming that Batista often
ate at his parents's non-existent restaurant in Washington. 
Recuperating in the U.S., M-26 asked him to review the hundreds of
letters the organization had received from Americans demanding to
take part in the revolution. Selecting 70 of these guys, he stashed
most of them in Miami and began planning how he could take this
gringo column to Cuba with himself as comandante.

But then Fidel entered Havana, and was hailed by the multitudes. 
Soldini took a room on the floor below the suite Castro occupied at
the Havana Hilton. He commandeered an office in the presidential
palace. He told Castro that he had decided to study economics and
Fidel, who liked the brash yanqui, told him he wanted him to go to a
Cuban university.

But Soldini was seized by a premonition.

"I knew I was going to leave Cuba," he said, even as he celebrated
victory. "I knew there was going to be bloodletting. I didn't want
to take a position."

"It was their country," he said. "A revolution is full of
idealism.  They thought they could change human nature. They wanted
to create the new man and do away with everything evil. The problem
was the only people who had those ideals were the communists and for
them the enemy was the USA, and I was an American."

Educated in Mexico

Soldini studied economics. But he got his degree in Mexico City, not
in Havana. His International Preferred Enterprises is active all over
the world building resorts. He travels to Havana to see friends, but
he will not do business there.

"I don't want to make money from Cuba," he says. "It was a
beautiful dream."

In January, Solidini plans to be in Havana as a member of the Center
for International Policy, a Washington D.C. group of political
moderates that includes Sen. Tom Harkin. The Center, which monitors
U.S. policy in Latin America, is opposed to the embargo.

Some of his old comrades -- now generals and high-ranking officials
-- will probably surface, he thinks.

"They owe me some medals," Soldini says, as he drives off in his
Rolls.

THE FIRING-SQUAD PROFESSOR

Neill Macaulay, a graduate of the Citadel military school, took an
imaginative combat resume along with him when he made his way to Cuba
in 1958 at age 23.

Now 63 and a retired professor of Latin American history at the
University of Florida, he is in Havana this month for his second
reunion in two years with members of his old unit, which battled
Batista troops and police in Pinar Del Rio province west of Havana.

This tall, scholarly man with a modern assault rifle mounted on the
wall of his study, got into the revolution after donating automatic
weapons to M-26 supporters in New York City.

Macaulay told them that as a freshly discharged first lieutenant who
served in Korea, he knew how to fight. But in truth, he'd gotten no
closer to the trenches than the PX he managed. And although he felt
he was joining a righteous cause, he also hoped for rewards of land
and a title after the revolution succeeded.

The rebel army took him at his word and sent him to a new guerrilla
squad where his rudimentary Spanish kept his rebel comrades in
hysterics. But his unit also fought well, ambushing police cars and
raiding small garrisons.

Training the killers

In late December 1958, when Castro's forces closed in on Havana,
Macaulay started training firing squads. He had been promoted to
lieutenant.

When Castro came out to Pinar del Rio to take a look, the province's
military chief, Comandante Dirmidio Escalona, introduced the South
Carolinian as "the American who is training the firing squad."
Fidel, Macaulay remembers, roared with laughter, and the two then
posed for a photo surrounded by adoring young women.

"I have no regrets," Macaulay, who sometimes delivered the coup de
grace, says of the executions. "I did what I had to do. Those guys
deserve everything they got. They hurt the people." The firing squad
targets, he says, included Batista henchmen notorious for their
crimes.

Macaulay, whose best-selling "Sandino Affair" (a study of Nicaraguan
resistance to U.S. occupation in the 1920-30s) was published in 1968,
is looking forward to meeting his friends -- though some of them
definitely aren't partying in Havana.

One member of Macaulay's unit, Rafael del Pino, became chief of
Cuba's air force, but later defected. Another former comrade, Vicente
Martinez, mounted a three-man geriatric invasion of Pinar del Rio
from Miami last year, was quickly arrested, and is being held in a
Cuban jail.

One day, Macaulay says, he hopes the Cubans give him his veteran's
papers, which would identify him as a revolutionary soldier and
entitle [him] to Cuban veterans' benefits. Although Cuba seldom mentions
Americans like him, Macaulay says, in 1996 he was featured in a
Pinar del Rio journal in which his fellow squad member, Rene (El
Rubio) Gonzales Navales, described him fondly as "a mix of Henry
Fonda and Robert Ryan."

After the revolution, Cuba gave Macaulay a tomato farm. Occasionally,
planes from the U.S. would fly over Pinar del Rio dropping small
incendiary bombs as part of Washington's effort to destabilize Cuba. 
"I'd go out and shoot at them," Macaulay says.

He shipped one crop to Pompano Beach and made a profit. But in 1961,
when Castro said the government intended to control exports, he left
for the U.S. He had to fight a legal battle to retain his U.S. 
citizenship.

Forgot about Cuba

For years, he said, he put Cuba out of his mind. But as he got older
he began wondering what happened to his old friends. His recent
contacts with his comrades, some of whom have become senior officers
in Cuba's armed forces, have been "very emotional," he says.

"Everyone has a great desire to normalize relations. They are
absolutely baffled at how we can be friends with Vietnam, but call
Cuba 'the enemy.'  Miami Cubans want Fidel and Raul shot by a
firing squad. But I think Fidel is going to win. The embargo is going
to be lifted."

 
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