Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero (46 page)

Clemente spent the day at the parking lot of Hiram Bithorn Stadium in the Hato Rey section of San Juan, across from the Plaza Las Americas shopping center. From eight o’clock that morning, the action seemed to orbit around him, all the incessant noise and bustle of people coming and going, dropping off food and cash. Every so often, Clemente grabbed the microphone and instructed people on how to make donations. “Don’t give money that you cannot afford,” he said. “If you can give money, so there is no problem, make your checks out to the Roberto Clemente Relief Committee for Nicaragua, not to Roberto Clemente. Thank you very much.” The mood was urgent, pulsing, always more to do, arrangements to be made for crates, boxes, trucks, medical supplies, and squads of fit young students who could unload here and load there. Enough had been collected already for more than one trip. The committee had reached an agreement with an air transport company based in Miami to lease a Lockheed Constellation known as the Super Snoopy for three round-trips between San Juan and Managua, each at a cost of $3,700.

At the end of the day, Clemente and Ruth Fernández drove to Channel
4 to promote the relief effort again, this time on Luis Vigoreaux’s 8
P.M.
television show. The program itself was a comic absurdity in contrast with the seriousness of events in Nicaragua. It was known as
Sube, Nene, Sube
—or
Up, Baby, Up.
Engaged couples would appear on the show, with the woman yelling words of encouragement—
Pa’arriba, Papi, Pa’arriba,
or Get There, Daddy, Get There—as her fiancé tried to climb a greased pole and retrieve a flag planted on the top. If he succeeded, they would win an all-expenses paid honeymoon. It was after that segment of the show that Vigoreaux turned his attention to the Managua earthquake. He explained the magnitude of the disaster and said that all Latins were coming together to help their brothers and sisters in Nicaragua. Fernández spoke next. “I want to say to the people of Puerto Rico, the best way to serve God is to serve the other people,” she said.

¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!
For all those years, that had been Bob Prince’s exuberant radio greeting whenever Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates rose from the on-deck circle and stepped toward the plate. Day after day, year after year for eighteen seasons, Clemente met the challenge.
¡Pa’arriba, Papi, Pa’arriba!
Fernández turned to Clemente to speak. He focused on what the disaster meant to young people and how they had responded. It was apparent that Roberto’s dream of a sports city for Puerto Rican kids remained at the front of his mind. “I want to take this opportunity to thank the people of Puerto Rico,” he said. “The teenagers have been very helpful in picking up the boxes and gathering everything for the planes. They are from twelve to sixteen years old and they have helped us a lot . . . The young people of Puerto Rico are the ones most worried about this.”

Howard Hughes, after refueling stops in Florida, Newfoundland, and Ireland, had arrived at Gatwick Airport on the southern rim of London by then. Authorities detained him inside his ten-seat Lockheed Jetstar for more than a half hour as they sought to determine his identity. His American passport had expired. Through the intervention of his local sponsors, N. M. Rothschild & Sons, the London bankers, his entry was finally approved, and he was chauffeured in a fleet of four Rolls-Royce sedans to the Inn at the Park, overlooking Hyde Park, where he was put up in a $2,500-a-night suite. His wing of the hotel
was sealed off, all the fire escapes in the hotel were blocked, and Rothschild security guards patrolled the sidewalks below with walkietalkies. A wealthy guest from Canada, quartered at the same nightly rate on the other side of Hughes’s floor, was vexed to discover that overzealous guards had seized a brace of pheasants he had bagged in a weekend hunt and had hung proudly on the hotel balcony. But if Hughes was looking for seclusion, it was not to be had. Fleet Street reporters and television crews huddled outside, recording any scrap of news about him. At one point, apparently without irony, an aide came out and told the assembled press corps that his boss was hoping to “live more of a life, if people will let him.”

The first step in living a more normal life, officials at the U.S. embassy suggested, might be for Hughes to fill out an application form and pay the $12 fee for arriving without a valid passport. In Managua, a reporter for the
New York Times
drove up to the Hotel InterContinental and thought about how the place had been abuzz ten months earlier when Hughes had arrived from the Bahamas, and now here it stood, overlooking the fallen city, “black and empty.”

Volunteers in San Juan worked overnight to load the Super Snoopy with supplies donated to the relief effort. There was an X-ray machine and other medical equipment for the hospital in Masaya. The plane would leave the next morning at dawn. Raul Pelligrina, a major in the Puerto Rico National Guard and close friend of Osvaldo Gil, had agreed to accompany the crew and shepherd the delivery to Managua, along with Ana Salaman, a registered nurse from Carolina. The Clementes came to the airport to see them off in the dark, misty chill. Vera remembered looking over at her husband as the plane rolled down the runway and wondering whether that was a tear she saw in his eye.

•   •   •

Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America, about the size of Iowa, but the least populated. In 1972 it had about 2 million citizens, a quarter of them in metropolitan Managua. The people were known for their beauty, the nation for its poverty. More than half the populace was illiterate. Like other Central American countries, Nicaragua had its own difficult and peculiar history with the United States. It was
long coveted by American interests as a pathway to the Pacific and the gold of California, and was the first proposed route of a canal that eventually was built in Panama. In 1855 an American freebooter from Tennessee, William Walker, invaded the country with the idea of transforming it into a slave-holding colony, and for a brief time, before he was driven out, he established English as the official language and called himself emperor. U.S. Marines arrived in Nicaragua in 1909 and were there much of the time until 1933. Three years after they left, the reign of the Somoza family began. Describing the singular hold the Somozas had over Nicaragua for nearly fifty years, University of Denver professor Tom J. Farer once wrote, “If El Salvador was the country of the fourteen families, Nicaragua was the country of only one.” The first Anastasio Somoza ruled for twenty years until he was assassinated in 1956, but power was passed along to his sons.

Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who would be the last in the Somoza line, took power in 1967. He spoke fluent English, went to prep school on Long Island and in Washington, D.C., and was a member of the U.S. Military Academy class of 1946. He graduated 752nd out of 875 cadets but excelled in marksmanship and military tactics. At home in Nicaragua, Somoza also came to excel at using power for financial gain. By 1972 it was estimated that he and his family controlled 25 percent of the gross national product. The Somozas controlled cattle ranches, coffee and sugar plantations, sugar mills, distilleries, auto dealerships, textiles, hotels, airlines, and a newspaper,
Novedades,
while also owning vast stretches of real estate on the outskirts of Managua. Looking back on the years of Somoza’s rule, a commission on Central America chaired by Henry A. Kissinger declared that the general’s “galloping greed discouraged foreign investment, distorted the economy and progressively concentrated in his hands capital assets and investment opportunities.” The Somoza family’s selfishness, the commission report stated, reached its fulfillment in the person of Anastasio, “whose achievements gave new meaning to the term kleptocracy, that is government as theft.”

By December 27, on the fifth day after the earthquake,
the greed of Somoza and his cronies was becoming apparent. Red Cross volunteers wondered where all the aid was going. Money seemed to disappear.
Raul Pelligrina returned to San Juan that night after a round-trip to Managua with the first delivery from Puerto Rico. He went directly from the airport to the relief committee headquarters outside Hiram Bithorn and could barely contain his disappointment. It was awful, he told Clemente. The moment they landed, Somoza’s soldiers surrounded the plane and tried to take everything. Nicaragua was in chaos. No one knew whether aid was getting to the right people. Pelligrina, calling the military’s bluff, said that if they didn’t let him through he would reload his aircraft and fly back to San Juan and tell the great Roberto Clemente what was happening. Finally, Somoza’s son Tachito came to see who was giving his soldiers trouble. Upon hearing the invocation of Clemente’s name, Tachito relented and let them go on to Masaya. But it was a hassle from beginning to end, and it seemed to Pelligrina that most supplies were being diverted. Osvaldo Gil stood nearby as Pelligrina told this story. Clemente was silent, but it was apparent how angry he was, Gil said. They could see it in his eyes. When Pelligrina finished, Clemente, his voice reaching a high pitch, said they had to do something to get the aid to the people who needed it. If he had to travel to Managua himself to make sure Somoza and his guards weren’t stealing it, he said, then that is what he would do.

Special missions had been reaching Managua every day during that week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. On the same day that the Super Snoopy flew in from Puerto Rico with the first shipment from Clemente’s relief committee, a small chartered plane arrived from Jamaica carrying Bianca Jagger, her husband, Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and some medical supplies.
Bianca, then only twenty-two, had grown up in Managua and was worried about her divorced parents, neither of whom she had been able to reach since the earthquake struck. Her mother, Doris Macias, ran a shop in the old section of Managua, where everything was rubble. Mother and daughter shared a love of politics and an intense dislike of Somoza; during a student protest when she was a teenager, Bianca had been tear-gassed by Somoza’s National Guard. What she saw as soon as they landed at the airport in the aftermath of the earthquake only intensified her feelings. Soldiers were everywhere, she recalled in an interview with journalist Kurt Jacobsen, but they were just seizing supplies and taking them to
government warehouses. Nearby, on the other side of the fences, hungry people were shouting for food and water, their pleas ignored. With the help of a British journalist, the Jaggers roamed the city in search of Bianca’s parents. As it turned out, her mother and father had made it out of Managua safely and were staying in Leon, where they were reunited two days later. But her experiences during those few days in her hometown affected Bianca Jagger so much that she persuaded her husband and the Rolling Stones to perform a benefit concert for the Nicaraguan people. She would never forget the arrogance of the Somoza regime, she said, nor the “stench of burned flesh” that overwhelmed her as they drove through the ruins.

From the North, arriving within hours of the Jaggers, came a thirty-three-member medical team organized by health officials in Rockland County, New York. At the end of a long flight, as the Pan Am jetliner was descending, Dr. Hart Achenbach noticed a jagged trench running parallel to the shores of Lake Managua that stretched for miles and was so deep he couldn’t see the bottom. He was stunned to realize that earthquakes really did open the ground and swallow people and buildings into the great maw.
Once the plane touched down, the doctors were met by one of Somoza’s sons, who asked them whether they brought any barbed wire so he and his troops could put it around the cargo. This was the same demand that had been made of Major Pelligrina when the Clemente aid came in from Puerto Rico. The Americans ignored young Somoza and loaded four hundred cartons of a mobile hospital into trucks that they had arranged to have waiting for them.

Once they set up their hospital tents on the edge of downtown, the doctors were overcome by the stench. “The smell was incredible. There were lots of dead, though we didn’t see them, we could smell them,” Achenbach recalled. “It was sickening. We would take handkerchiefs and wet them and put them over our faces.” His colleague, Dr. Frederick Zugibe, chief medical examiner for Rockland County, anticipated that the doctors and nurses would be overwhelmed with patients, but there were more dead than injured. They did treat 250 Managuans and deliver twenty-five babies, but what Zugibe remembered most was that some of his patients had been wounded by soldiers,
not injured from falling debris. “I had more individuals that I treated who were shot,” he recalled. “They were shot for looting. It was amazing. Young kids. I remember operating on young kids to remove bullets.”

At about the time that Dr. Zugibe was removing bullets from a young patient on the afternoon of December 28,
President Nixon placed a call to Maurice J. Williams at his holiday retreat in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Williams was the deputy administrator of the Agency for International Development, and the President had just picked him to be his representative at the earthquake scene. “I want you to go to Managua and take charge of the relief effort,” Nixon said. “I’m concerned that the Communists may take over the country. Somoza is a personal friend of mine; I will have a letter for you to carry to him.”

Williams caught a flight from Washington to Panama and then reached Managua by military helicopter. His first impressions were like all the others: desolation, smoldering rubble, ungodly stench. He visited the field hospitals and noticed that many casualties had resulted from gunshot wounds. Maybe, he thought, there had been an attempted revolt, as Nixon had feared. Then he went up the hill to visit Somoza, carrying with him the President’s letter. The first thing he noticed was a platoon of U.S. infantry soldiers armed and camped on the site—there, he assumed, by order of President Nixon. “Quite a character,” Williams said later of the Nicaraguan general. “Somoza impressed me as an entrepreneurial type. Certainly he had extensive business monopoly interests and apparently was milking the country economically.” Williams tried to set up rigid accounting practices for the U.S. aid. “However, I found that relief supplies from other countries and private agencies were being received by Somoza’s son, a young man in the uniform of an Army lieutenant, who stored them in a locked warehouse outside the city. One had a sense of inefficiency and corruption.”