Kingdom of Fear (29 page)

Morgan was his name, they said. He played late-night piano at the Red Crab, a Caribbean roadhouse set back in the palm trees not far from the Calabash Hotel. He showed up one night not long after the
invasion, and after he played a few tunes like “Fandago” and “Way Down upon the Swanee River” people liked him, and when the place was crowded, he would play for as long as they wanted, doing singalong gigs with the State Department people and the Military Police.

They would gather around his piano and raise their beer mugs and croak hoarsely at one another, like young lions. On some nights, Colonel Ridgeway, from the State Department, would come in with a carload of women and then go out back with the waiters and smoke huge spliffs on the ledge behind the garbage cans.

V. S. Naipaul was there, along with Hodding Carter and General Jack “Promotable” Farris and a girl who was posing for a centerfold spread for
Australian Playboy.
Farris wouldn’t come inside, for military image reasons; he would sit outside in his Jeep and watch the merriment from afar, feeling Joy in his heart and safe at last from all fears of botch and embarrassment. And never seeing his main man, Jim Ridgeway, back there on the ledge with the Rastas.

It was our kind of war. And when somebody finally asked Morgan where he came from and he said he’d spent the past year or so in the insane asylum up there on the hill near Fort Frederick, people laughed and called for another round. “Good old Morgan,” they said, “he’s crazy as a loon.”

Which was true, or at least certifiable. This is not one of those situations where you want to start delving into questions like who’s crazy and who’s not. Nobody needs that down here. This thing was weird from the start. People fought and died on this island, for reasons that were never explained—and probably never will be until Bernard Coard comes to trial.

That should happen sometime around the spring of 1988, when the press is busy elsewhere. His lawyer will be Ramsey Clark, former attorney general of the U.S.; the prosecution will represent the Queen of England, and among those subpoenaed will be Fidel Castro, the director of the CIA, the Russian ambassador in Grenada at the time, several members of the Vigoreese Family from Marseilles, and a whole raft of armed dingbats ranging from international Trotskyites to wild whores from Trinidad and Mini Moke salesmen from Paris and vicious thugs wearing uniforms and pearl-handled .45s.

The trial of Bernard Coard—the man who killed the revolution in order to save it—will not be ignored in some circles.

Bernard Coard faces the firing squad in Grenada, Winter 1984 (United Press)

There are no charges, as yet, but speculation ranges from murder and treason to unlawful conspiracy and crimes against the Crown. All we know for sure is that Bernard Coard—ex-deputy prime minister of Grenada in the last days of the Maurice Bishop regime—holds the key to the cruel mystery of whatever happened here in the autumn of’83.

It was a strange time, a profoundly weird chain of events. The U.S. Marines invaded; a gentle and widely popular sort of Caribbean Marxist revolution destroyed itself in a fit of insane violence; a place that could just as easily have been invaded and conquered by a gang of Hell’s Angels got jumped on by the Rangers and the U.S. Marines and the 82nd Airborne and the Military Police and the U.S. Navy and Blackhawk helicopters and Psy-Ops and Night Vision scopes and concertina wire and huge explosions at all hours of the day and night and naked women brandishing machine guns.

We conquered Grenada. Even Morgan understood that. He had been in a cell on Row B when the first bombs hit. He is a mulatto, who appears to be about 40 with long blondish hair and a red headband. There is a touch of Woodstock in his bearing. Morgan looks like he was born, once again, on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the summer of’67. He was sitting peacefully in his cell, listening to other inmates howling and jabbering frantically at the sound of low-flying jets overhead, when “suddenly the whole place exploded,” he said. And after that, he fled.

. . .

I wanted to stay in Grenada for the funeral of Maurice Bishop, which was scheduled for Saturday, but when they still hadn’t found the body by Wednesday, I changed my mind and decided to get out of town.

It was raining hard in the morning when we drove over the mountain to Pearls Airport on the other side of the island. There are no speed limit signs along the roads in Grenada. You can drive as fast as you want to, or as fast as your car can stand it. The potholes are square now, since the Army moved in, but some of them are still six feet deep and even the small ones are axle breakers.

There are three ways to drive on these roads, and the first two usually depend on whether you own the car or rent it. A new Mitsubishi will run about $22K in Grenada, and people who own them tend to spend a lot of time in second gear, creeping through the potholes like snails in a minefield.

The renters like to get into third gear, ignoring the damage, and bash ahead like dumb brutes, at least until the kidneys start bleeding—and when the car breaks in half, turn it in for another one. The roads are littered with wrecks, ranging from Datsun sedans to Soviet military trucks, all of them stripped to the skeleton. The radio goes first, then the jack and the wheels and all the engine parts, and finally the engine block itself, which makes a fine dead-head anchor for an offshore fishing boat. Rearview mirrors can be mounted on the bathroom wall for shaving purposes, and the seats from a new Toyota will make a stylish set of porch furniture for the whole family.

I recognize when power moves.

—Richard J. Daley, Mayor of Chicago, 1968

The invasion of Grenada was one of those stories with an essentially Midwestern heart. It was a fine mix of show business and leverage and big-time political treachery, and even Abe Lincoln would have admired the move for its swiftness, if nothing else. This is, after all, an election year, and the President is not the only one who is running for re-election. The whole Congress is up, along with a third of the Senate, and it is bad business in an election year to go back home to the district and question the wisdom of an incumbent President who has pulled off the first successful U.S. military invasion since the Inchon Landing in 1950.

On my last night in the St. George’s Hotel I took a long-distance call in the lobby from a man who works on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. “Don’t come back here with any of your liberal bullshit about oppressing the Third World,” he said. “You drunken bastards have had your way long enough. It’s about time you told the truth for a change.”

I have just received an invitation to visit Havana, from the head of the Cuban Film Commission, and my heart is full of fear. At first I was happy, but then I did some research and a feeling of queasiness came over me. I was more & more paralyzed by
Angst en Walging,
as the Dutch say. The more questions I asked, the more heinous became the
answers. What had once seemed like a token of idyllic good fortune suddenly transmogrified itself, right in front of my eyes, into a guaranteed horrible experience in the dark underbelly of life in the tropics. Everything I learned convinced me that I was about to be fleeced, busted, and put in prison for treason.

MEMO FROM THE CUBA DESK: HST / MARCH 30, 1999

Dear Jann:

Liftoff for Cuba is at 0930 & I am very excited. You will be happy to know that I am sparing no expense in moving The Desk to Cuba for the next two weeks. We are finely organized. The job is well in hand & all the key signs are perfect. The moon is in Venus & Mescalito is rising. The nights are becoming almost perfectly dark, for our purposes. No moon at all, only starlight, and no light at all when it rains.

(THIS IS AN URGENT REMINDER TO SEND A FEW SMALL LITHIUM BATTERY-POWERED
FLASHLIGHTS
IN THE
ROLLING STONE
PACKAGE TO ME AT THE NACIONAL. TELL MIKE GUY.)

The weather forecast for Cuba calls for bright mornings, rain showers in late afternoon, and extremely dark nights with strange winds. That is good news for those of us who see by starlight or have single-cell Lithium spot/floods that can illuminate a naked figure running on a beach 1,000 feet away. Not many people have those advantages, and those who do will prevail. . . .
Sic semper Tyrannus,
eh? You bet. That is the simple secret of the Winning Tradition we have established & maintained (with a few spectacular exceptions) for almost 30 years.

Wow! Who else in Journalism can make that claim? Think about it. We should establish an annual award, with lavish ceremony, for the National Affairs Desk selection for Finest Journalism of the Year, as chosen by a dazzling jury of experts like Tom & Halberstam & me & Ed Bradley—

OK. You get the idea. So let’s get back to Cuba. I am leaving in a few hours and I still have to pack my Portable Ozone equipment,
which is legal but very delicate. . . . That’s right. I forgot to tell you that I am getting into the Ozone Business, which is a sleeping giant in Cuba. Yes, and more on that later.

I have also learned that Hemingway was into voodoo & that Castro will live for another 50 years because of Ozone . . . Also enc. find my Journal notes, to date.

TO: BOB LOVE /
ROLLING STONE
JANUARY 29, 1999 FROM: HST

Bobby:

I have just been advised by recent travelers that having a
Journalist Visa
is, in fact, a very important & professionally desirable thing to have in Cuba. It confers a sort of VIP status & political access, as well as immunity to prosecution under the goddamn Helms-Burton Act.

The same immunity is provided, I’m told, to those who “bring medicine” into Cuba under the auspices of the U.S.—Latin American Medical Aid Foundation. (
members.aol.com.uslamaf
/)

A Journalist Visa also makes it “legal” (and thus easier) to conduct money transactions in Cuba. It also entitles you to drive a car with a Black license plate, which is important. Or maybe it’s Yellow plates that get you through roadblocks & cause thieves & pimps & traffic cops to give your car a wide berth.

In any case, I think I might need some help from You/RS in re: securing whatever documents, visas, letters of transit, etc., that are necessary or even helpful for me to do my job down there. As Michael says, people in Cuba are very wary of talking to people who might get them in trouble. . . . And that is why so many citizens turn strangers who don’t act right in to the police whenever they get pissed off.

Whoops. Never mind that. But all the same I trust you will investigate this matter and let me know ASAP. We are, after all, professionals.

Thanx, Hunter

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK///JANUARY 30, 1999
FROM HUNTER S. THOMPSON:
HOTEL NACIONAL #6: HAVANA, CUBA 60606
TO JANN/RS/NYC

Okay. I guess that will be my forwarding address for a while. Either that (above) or the Swiss Embassy, or maybe that horrible Isle of Pines Prison where Castro put those poor bastards from the Bay of Pigs. Who knows? We seem to be heading into a void of some kind, a political Time Warp full of whores & devils & cops, where, for all practical purposes, there is no Law at all & everything you do is half-illegal.

Sounds like Washington, eh? Yessir. Mr. Bill is very big in Cuba, these days. Many people are counting on him to deliver the bacon. He is Dollar Bill, Mr. Moneybags, and he is about to make a lot of people rich.

But we’ll get to that later. Right now I want to tell you a few little things about my assignment in Havana & the relentless high-risk weirdness I am being forced to deal with. (Whoops, strike that. It is dangerous to use words like “force” and “deal” in Cuba. Almost everybody will turn you in to the police if you talk like that.)

“Bomb” is another politically unacceptable word, like “whores” & “guns” & “dope.”

SUNDAY NIGHT / AFTER THE SUPER BOWL JANUARY 31, 1999 / OWL FARM

The Cuban situation is deteriorating faster than it is coming together. There is a constant sense of angst about it, a sense of being bushwacked. Some people would call it paranoid, but they would be the dumb ones, the
Incognocenti.
Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance. The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears.

But I am, after all, a suave gringo. I understand that many assignments are fraught with risk, personal danger & even treachery. Greed and human Weakness are ever present.

There is nothing funny, for instance, about having your passport & all your money stolen while traveling illegally in a foreign country.

Okay for that. The time has come to talk about Fun, about Victory and Victimization—about who has a sense of humor and who doesn’t.

TO: COL. DEPP / LONDON / FEBRUARY 2, 1999 FROM: DR. THOMPSON / WOODY CREEK SUBJECT: PUBLIC FLOGGINGS I HAVE KNOWN

Okay, Colonel—Good work on your brutal publicity. Kick the shit out of five or six more of those rotters & you’ll make the cover of
Time.

Or maybe you want to come to CUBA this weekend & help me write my new honky-tonk song: “Jesus Hated Bald Pussy.”