Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior

PREFACE

Until I began my own journey through the Agency, I had no idea what it took to protect the United States from dangerous forces and people bent on inflicting Americans harm. I was a street kid from Miami with a past, seeking adventure with a purpose and a way to strike back at the revolutionaries who stole my roots. I longed to wear the white hat!

My family had once lived in middle-class comfort in small-town Cuba. We owned a television and a beautiful 1957 Pontiac that was my father’s pride and joy. Then the Castro revolution dumped our world upside down. We lost everything and everyone we loved in a bid to escape and have a chance to live in freedom once again. In desperation, my father got me out first, and I spent my first eight months in the U.S. in a Catholic orphanage in Pueblo, Colorado. America offered that freedom, but those first years in Florida were hardscrabble ones indeed. My father worked two jobs and dragged me with him to work on Saturdays. My mother labored away in a sweatshop making shirts. We lived in tiny, run-down apartments and learned to get by on a fraction of what we once enjoyed in pre-Castro Cuba.

We fought our way back to prosperity, chasing our version of the American dream. The path was rocky, and more than once I strayed from it as a kid. I learned to fight, I learned to hustle. I also learned that loyalty is the greatest gift you can share or receive, while betrayal inflicts the brutal wounds to the heart.

The U.S. Air Force gave me purpose and discipline. I became a Pararescueman in 1972, just missing the tail end of the Vietnam War. My path to the Agency was as atypical as the rest of my life in America. Call it fate, call it God’s will, when you find your calling, the tumblers in your heart click into place and suddenly the future makes sense. For me, that moment came as I walked past the Memorial Wall at Langley and realized the depth of my love and appreciation for America. Where else could a Cuban-born, once-orphaned boy go from Miami’s back-alley brawls to the heart of the nation’s first line of defense?

Those fledgling days in the Agency opened the door to a world I did not know existed. Sure, I avidly read Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but 007’s spy universe bore no resemblance to the full-contact, dark world that became my life for the next few decades. Bond had his Goldfingers and Dr. Nos, but in the shadows we operated in, we faced no such cartoonish villains. Instead, we battled caudillos in communist guise, anarchist insurgencies, narco-terrorist groups, proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, traffickers of people, drugs, and illegal weapons.

I’d seen my family’s life in Cuba destroyed by such people. Now, the Central Intelligence Agency gave me a chance to strike back at them. I started that new life in the jungles of northern Nicaragua, working closely with the Nicaraguan Contras—men and women vilified by the American press, yet who I knew to be true patriots wanting to liberate their country from the depredations of a carbon copy of Castro’s regime. With them, I saw firsthand how the Sandinistas marauded through the Nicaraguan countryside, plundering from the already impoverished, inflicting starvation upon a long-suffering population. I saw how their vicious tactics drove desperate, traumatized people into the ranks of the Contras, where they were willing to live in the most primitive conditions imaginable, armed with ancient weapons cast off by the Israeli army. They faced every manner of jungle disease, privation, and sudden death. They did it with virtually no pay, armed only with the resolve that the Sandinista reign of terror had to be stopped if Nicaragua was to ever be free.

For three years, I helped fight the covert war against the communist Ortega regime. I emerged from the jungle, hardened to the realities of the dark world. I’d become a blunt instrument, at ease with a weapon in hand and a target to take out. That Cuban kid who lost his native country to revolutionaries now helped cut off some of the communist tentacles that threatened to engulf Latin America.

Ultimately, our Contra program was a definitively successful black op carried out solely by key personnel from the CIA.

But under legendary Bill Casey and Dewey Clarridge (the latter a beloved mentor of mine), this program grew a hundredfold, and our collective effort with the Contras resuscitated the post-Vietnam, decimated CIA back to relevance.

In 1984, the Agency ordered me from the Honduran jungles and sent me to the Farm to learn to be more than a paramilitary operator. I was trained on dead drops, running agents, conducting surveillance, and evading enemy tails. This was another new universe for me, one of finesse in the shadows of everyday life. It stood in stark contrast to the years I spent being at the pointy end of the spear. Yet it was a new way of standing on our nation’s ramparts that appealed to me. The men and women I met at the Farm were not the Jason Bournes and Ethan Hunts of the silver screen. They were men and women devoted to one cause: keeping our country and our people safe from those who intend to do us harm. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we failed, but that was always our mission, our calling. Our life’s purpose. The same courage, conviction, and guile that it took to operate in the jungles applied to how my colleagues and I operated in a much more complex and more traitorous jungle. A jungle of criminality, corruption, betrayals, and atrocious human rights abuses we were determined to help eradicate.

In the back alleys of the world, I saw how we fought back against these forces, and how sometimes our own sense of right and wrong undermined our ability to stop a foe that behaved with absolutely no scruples or humanity.

From the point of the spear to the velvet fist of the shadow world, my career took me through a full spectrum of how the Agency defends America. When the wall fell, I joined the counterterrorism fight. Like for most of us, 9/11 was a life-changing event for me. I owned the best job in the CIA at the time—Chief of Operations with the Counterterrorist Center. But the truth is, that role behind the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda wasn’t my course. Every time I’ve strayed from the path set forth for me, I’ve felt an unease that resonates through my spirit. In this dark hour of our nation’s history, I knew headquarters was not the place for me.

From Bill Casey’s man in the Contra camps, to plank owner of the Bin Laden task force, to SIS-2 as Chief of the Koreas in 1998, to Chief of Operations at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) on September 11, 2001, I found myself always in the right place at the right time. Always unplanned, always by fate. I followed where it took me and learned vital lessons on each point of this journey.

There is a war that goes on in broad daylight, in the everyday streets of cities around the world. It has its own rules, its own foot soldiers and leaders, and it is invisible to those simply wanting to live their lives in peace. Like a universal police officer walking a global beat of international crime and intrigue, you’ll never look at everyday American life the same. You’ll see that danger lurks from seemingly innocuous sources. You’ll find Hezbollah sleeper cells in your own town, North Korean agents sneaking across our borders. Terrorists lurking and lying in wait. It is a thankless, anonymous task stopping these forces, but my colleagues do so not for accolades and fame; they seek only to preserve the lives of strangers in the nation they love.

It is for them that I write this book. This is the story of the men and women I worked with who dared to go through a dark, ominous portal, to see the clandestine world others cannot. They are warriors whose courage and selfless devotion have been ignored or disparaged by our own media for decades. All too often, the Agency is painted as evil, rogue, filled with crazed drug-smuggling killers or enhanced super-killers like Jason Bourne. The reality could not be more different from these portrayals.

Imagine an American family sitting around a dinner table, and a young son or daughter announces they want to join the FBI when they grow up. What’s the immediate response? Pride, excitement? That child seeks purpose, wants to be a protector.

Now, what would be the typical first reaction if that kid said they want to join the CIA when they grow up? After all the decades of Hollywood portrayals, my guess is the average American parent would be appalled and might even drag their child to therapy to make sure they hadn’t raised a sociopath.

This book is my attempt to correct the misperceptions that make the Agency one of the least understood and most mistrusted institutions in America today. The reality we faced on the ground in places from Muslim Africa to East Asia, to our own streets here at home, is one of persistent threats that must be countered to keep our people safe. Those who shoulder this responsibility are rugged, intelligent, capable. They understand the stakes. They understand that if they miss one crucial piece of the intel puzzle, our folks at home in our cities and suburbs will experience tragedy.

To this day, I pinch myself as I review my life, amazed at how many wonderful people were placed in my path to help correct my weaknesses and nurture my strengths. My pops, a simple carpenter with the heart of a lion who risked all to ensure I would live in freedom. My first sensei, Jim Alfano, a tough Marine and Vietnam Vet who immersed me in the martial arts. Or Pararescue legend Chief Master Sergeant Wayne Fisk, who befriended me as a young and raw PJ student. CIA legend and mentor Dewey Clarridge, who introduced me to our greatest DCI, Bill Casey. Last, but not least, legendary Special Forces Sergeant Major Billy Waugh, who till this day is a role model. Few men can count on this kind of backup in life’s firefight.

The path set before me in the late 1970s opened the door to a world few see and even fewer know exists. It gave me a compass and course that tempered my vain adventurism into a life of dedicated service to a higher cause.

The words penned in the following pages are my way of passing the torch to our next generation, to show the mettle of the Agency and the quality people who are drawn to it. They are, as Paulo Coelho calls them, the Warriors of the Light. It is time America knows of these protectors. So come with me, the portal’s open. The shadow world awaits.

PART I

1

CUBAN SUNSET

Manicaragua, Cuba

1958

I was about seven years old when I experienced my first firefight.

It started like any average weekend evening in our little Cuban mountainside town. My parents had dressed to go out to the nearby city of Santa Clara, leaving me in the care of Crucita, my sixteen-year-old nanny. My mom hugged me, then my dad ushered her into our family’s pride and joy, a factory-fresh 1957 Pontiac two-door hardtop. The year before, my dad paid $2,500 to bring it home. Kenya ivory with a beautiful two-tone interior, it was a symbol of our rising station in Manicaragua.

My dad loved cars almost as much as he loved horses, and he never missed an opportunity to take us someplace in our new ride. I’d climb up on the package tray under the rear window and stare at the passing trees whose branches formed a tangled green arch over the main road in our province as my father told stories from his rough-and-tumble youth.

I watched its taillights disappear into the night as they drove away, wishing I could go with them.

It was a warm weekend evening. A fan pushed air around in our living room while Crucita and I sat watching television on our thirteen-inch, black-and-white screen. Our semi-paved street was quiet and filled with family, a small enclave of the extended Prado clan and our businesses.

Our little green-and-blue brick house was actually a duplex. My dad’s sister lived next door. Across the street stood my paternal grandfather’s gas station and garage with his cigar-rolling business in an outbuilding. My dad’s coffee company was located next door to us. Each morning, my parents would jump next door and open for business. Dad ran the enterprise, while my mom served as the bookkeeper and head of sales.

We were a tight-knit family in a community of tight-knit families. Nestled in this middle-class capitalist home that my mother so lovingly decorated, I always felt a sense of peace and security.

To be honest, this often wore on me. My dad had been a wild one in his youth, and I shared his DNA. My mother tried to temper that streak with rules and order, structure and polish. I was her only child, delivered after a difficult birth that ensured she could have no more babies after me. This made her overprotective at times, something my dad saw and balanced out with man-to-man talks and trips into the local Escambray Mountains to visit coffee plantations in his business’s World War II–surplus U.S. Army jeep.

Being seven, I had no idea that Cuba was in the throes of a revolution. Sure, we’d heard stories of occasional raids outside of town, and the mountains were supposedly rife with guerillas living in the jungle. Here in Manicaragua, such things seemed remote—the stuff of schoolyard legends that filled us with excitement.

As Crucita and I watched the evening television shows, a sudden commotion broke out in our street. I craned my neck to look out our front windows. I saw the three-foot-high brick wall that abutted our front porch, but nothing else in the darkness beyond.

Suddenly, gunshots echoed through the neighborhood. A few stray ones at first, then a swelling rash as automatic weapons joined the fight. We sat, rooted in place by our TV, listening to the cacophony as muzzle flashes strobed in the street beyond and cast crazy shadows through the living room.

I jumped up, eager to see what was going on, oblivious to the danger, and rushed to the front windows. They moved with the use of a hand crank. I grabbed the handle and started spinning it in circles. Window open, I peered out into the night.

Right below my nose, a guerrilla, dressed in ragged green camo, lay prone on our porch. Just as I noticed him, he rose to a knee and triggered a full burst from his assault rifle at a nearby bar frequented by police and soldiers. The din was deafening, terrifying. Enthralling. I was engulfed by the moment, staring raptly at the fighter below me. His weapon to his shoulder, he pulled the trigger and sent another stream of automatic weapons fire downrange. Spent shell casings flew from his receiver to ricochet off our front windows with a sharp tink-tink-tink—a sound that is tattooed in the back of my brain even today some sixty years later.

I probably would have just remained transfixed in the window frame, but my panic-stricken nanny suddenly grabbed me from behind and yanked me away to the back of the living room.

Tink-tink-tink. More shells hit the glass as the revolutionary drained his magazine.

We listened, huddled together in nervous excitement as the bullets flew. Then, like an ebb tide, the sounds of battle grew distant until a few last angry shots echoed through the neighborhood. As quickly as it started, it was over. Silence filled the night.

Like wraiths, the guerrillas melted back into the countryside and escaped to their jungle refuge in the Escambray Mountains. For all the excitement and shooting, nobody was hurt. I was too young to know the difference between an assault and a hit-and-run raid, but this was certainly the latter.

I would learn what a full assault looked like later.

This may have been my first firefight, but I’d been around guns most of my young life. My dad, being a successful small businessman, often received threats. At the behest of his Masonic lodge brothers, he purchased a World War II–era German Luger pistol. To introduce me to firearms, he purchased a Daisy BB rifle and taught me how to shoot with it. He would sometimes practice with the BB gun by setting up a sawhorse behind the house, laying Coke bottles on their sides, then shooting right through their mouths to blow out their bottoms. It was a feat of marksmanship I could never match, but that was my dad. He was our protector.

Resourceful, rugged, and highly intelligent, his many wild barroom brawls in his youth before he met my mom transformed him into a man who was calm and fearless in a fight. After he fell in love, he channeled that energy into building a life for his family. He was a great businessman, an artisan who could work equally well with his hands, and even in middle age, standing all of five foot six, he was hard as oak. I wanted to be just like him.

When my parents came home that night of the firefight, I’d sworn to Crucita that I would say nothing of what had happened. She feared losing her job for letting me go to the window, though my folks would never have fired her for that. They knew I was always drawn to adventure. But a promise was a promise, and I didn’t mention the firefight until a half century later. By then, I’d been in so many tighter spots that this one only stood out for being the first.

That night represented a turning point for us average Cubans. It was the moment that things began to change for us. An ideological war raged, pitting Castro’s Marxist revolutionaries against Batista’s government forces. Castro’s men now gained the upper hand as the Batista regime began to collapse under the weight of its own corruption.

Our quiet days of horseback riding, church on Sundays, and school during the week look idyllic in retrospect, and the photos I have from that time show a happy, middle-class Cuban family built around the love my parents shared. We didn’t realize that these were the last days of a dying era. Those determined guerrillas loyal to Castro would soon usher in a new one at bayonet point.

It was in this turbulent time that I learned my first lesson in counterintelligence tradecraft, though at the time I had no idea what it was called.

One night a few months after that first firefight, a cousin of my father’s slipped into town unnoticed. Manuel was one of Castro’s fighters, but he was also loyal to his family and knew my dad was apolitical. Sometime after midnight, Manuel’s knock at our door roused the entire family. We let him in, and we gathered around our table to hear what he had to say. I sat next to him. Suddenly, he unslung his Thompson submachine gun and lowered it onto my lap. It was heavy—ten pounds—with a wood stock and a U.S.-military issue magazine. As he spoke, I clutched the weapon with both hands, feeling its weight, intuiting its power. It sent a surge of excitement through me like an electrical current. That moment, I knew that whatever my path would be, weapons like this one would be part of it.

As I stared at the tommy gun in my lap, I heard Manuel’s warning to my parents. He revealed that Castro’s revolutionaries planned to assault and capture our town in the next few days.

The adults debated what to do. My dad was well known in town. The police and soldiers were everywhere. If he fled the area with his whole family, the authorities would take notice and there probably would be retaliation. Worse, the revolutionaries knew their family connection. If my parents fled, he would be suspected of tipping them off, and everyone would get hurt.

At least get your son out, Manuel said.

My parents discussed this. I’d been going to school about thirty kilometers away in Santa Clara, staying with my godmother during the weeks, coming home on the weekends. My departure would arouse no suspicions, and I would be safe.

It was decided I would leave immediately with Abuelo Emilin, my grandfather. Manuel retrieved his Thompson and disappeared into the darkness to return to his camp. At first light, my parents called a cab. The driver arrived, and my grandfather and I climbed in back wondering if we would ever see my parents again. A quick goodbye, and the cabbie whisked us away, across a bridge over a deep ravine with a rock-chocked river snaking through it. A moment later, we were in the countryside, bound for the illusion of safety in Santa Clara.

Manuel’s intel tip served my family well. In my absence, my father prepared the house for war. He lugged sacks of coffee from his company and used them like sandbags to transform our bathroom into a bomb shelter. All the while, he had to pretend he did not know our town’s impending fate.

The revolutionaries attacked soon after, sweeping through Manicaragua and driving the government forces back in disarray. They fled across the bridge over the ravine to reassemble outside of town and prepare a counterattack.

My family emerged unscathed from that short, sharp fight, but soon the uprising threatened to engulf Santa Clara as well. My father called my grandfather and told him to come home as soon as possible.

Once again, we tried to escape the war. We drove back toward Manicaragua until our cab reached the bridge over the ravine, where we discovered the guerrillas had pulled up its planks as a defense against the coming government offensive.

The cabbie told us to get out. We dismounted and watched him head back down the road for Santa Clara. That day, there seemed to be no safe places.

Except with my grandfather. Born in 1900, he was a baby at the start of the Cuban rebellion against Spain. One night, rebels broke into his family’s home and stole a mattress—with him still swaddled in it. Fortunately, the rebels returned him to his parents unharmed. He grew up hard and proud. Like my dad, he was stoic, unflappable, and wise.

He looked down at me with lapis-colored eyes that seemed almost fluorescent and asked me, man to man, We will have to cross the bridge. You afraid?

I looked down the steep ravine, saw the water swirling through rocky rapids. A fall from the bridge would surely be fatal.

No, Abuelo.

Good. Come, then.

He grabbed my right wrist and held it firmly as we eased out onto the skeletonized bridge. We inched along a narrow beam; I had a death grip on the railing with my free hand looking down at the jagged rocks and foaming current. We made it across, and instead of fear, I felt a sense of exultation. For as dangerous as this situation was for us both, it was the type of adventure I craved despite my mother’s best efforts to temper that impulse.

We walked home to find rebels sitting on our front porch wall, drinking coffee our young maid was serving them. They were a motley bunch with sweat-stained shirts, red bandannas, and shaggy beards. They smoked home-rolled cigars. A few of these Marxists toyed with rosary beads. So holy.

We had not been home long when the army’s counterattack began with several air strikes. My dad hustled all of us into our makeshift coffee bag shelter in the bathroom, where we listened to the buzzing planes passing by overhead. Distant thumps and machine-gun fire punctuated the moment. We clutched each other and prayed for better days.

The army’s counterattack failed. Castro’s ragtag force held the government soldiers at bay, then continued their own advance. In a swift, sharp fight, they captured Santa Clara. The tide was turning against Batista.

My parents and grandfather agonized over what to do to keep us safe. I remember lying on my parents’ bed, staring at a painting of Jesus on their wall as I listened to them puzzle through this impossible situation.

That man, Castro. He will be the ruin of our country! my grandfather said.

Aw, Dad, how can you say that? my mom asked. We had family who supported Castro, fought with him. My godmother’s husband was a committed Marxist. Castro was supposed to be our nation’s salvation from the corruption of the Batista regime. We were all in for a terrible surprise.

My grandfather was right. Instead of our salvation, Castro was our destruction.

Within days, the purges began. Anyone associated with the Batista regime was persecuted, jailed, and some even hanged from nearby trees.

2

THE SILVER SPURS

Cuba

1959–1962

A few days after I returned home, revolutionary forces led by Che Guevara launched a three-pronged assault on Santa Clara. The fighting engulfed my godmother’s city, and on New Year’s Eve 1958, Batista’s troops broke and ran. That was the final nail for the Batista regime, and the dictator fled the country for the Dominican Republic a few hours later on January 1, 1959.

The revolution, dubbed the 26th of July Movement, swept Castro into power, and overnight, life changed for my family. In Santa Clara, the effects of the recent battle were evident everywhere, including in my godmother’s small duplex. During the fighting, one of Batista’s World War II–era American-made M3 Stuart light tanks put a 37mm armor-piercing round right through their living room and demolished their couch.

Fortunately, nobody was hurt. I remember my cousin showing me the solid, unexploded round, which he’d found in the living room and kept as a souvenir. It was bigger than my hand.

If the aftermath of the revolution was evident in the streets, the new way of life for us kids began at school. We were ordered to join the Cuban Revolutionary Youth, dubbed the Castro Youth. It was loosely based on the organization of the Boy Scouts, but instead of learning to camp, the Castro Youth tried to mold us into compliant Marxist ideologues. We wore our uniforms every day—shorts and white shirts with a neckerchief whose color denoted what level you were in the organization. We were sent out into the countryside to be foot soldiers in Castro’s new literacy program. At age eight, I was expected to teach hardscrabble peasant farmers how to read. That was my first direct contact with the absurdity of the new Marxist regime.

In school, our teachers told us to watch each other and our families. If we heard anyone saying anything against Castro, we were to report it at once. The new regime weaponized us against our own families in perfect 1984-esque fashion. Around town, every block had a designated official who recorded his neighbors’ movements. Ears were always open, listening to the slightest critique of Castro, his revolution, or of Marxism in general. Once reported, those people vanished, taken in the night by the storm troopers of the 26th of July Movement.

As Marxist indoctrination soon dominated every aspect of our lives in school, life back home in Manicaragua became a growing nightmare for the middle class. A lot of people in town had always been jealous of my family’s success. We’d endured threats before, but this seemed different. Various revolutionary committees were formed, led by some of the true dregs in our city. Now that they had achieved a level of power they hadn’t had under a capitalist system, they took revenge on those more successful.

It didn’t take long for some of the local guerrillas who had fought loyally with Castro to see this would soon spin out of control. They broke with the revolution and headed back up into the Escambray Mountains to carry on a new struggle against their former leader. Castro’s loyalists showed no mercy to these traitors, who were hunted down and killed over the next four years.

While new skirmishes raged outside of town, my father found it increasingly difficult to run his business under the new regime. In June of 1959, one of the newly appointed committees showed up at our family’s business and declared it confiscated in the name of the people. My mother tried to go back in and get her sweater, which was draped over her office chair, but the committee stopped her, declaring that even the sweater was now property of the state.

Across the street, they came for my grandfather’s cigar-rolling business and his gas station. Overnight, we went from prosperous and hardworking to a family officially robbed by the new regime. The committee generously asked my father to manage the people’s coffee roasting concern, but he refused. Though he was apolitical and had never expressed his views on Castro, after his livelihood had been stolen, he was far too proud a man to run it for these thieves.

About the same time, my godmother’s husband sat my father down to give him a warning. Though he was a professor and lifelong Marxist himself, he could see the devastation the revolution was having on us and wanted to help. The news he conveyed was not good. My school in Santa Clara had been tasked with selecting several of its most promising students to be sent to the Soviet Union for further education. My name was on that list. This would not be optional; the government would simply put me on a plane to the Soviet Union, whether my parents agreed or not.

I was about to be torn from my parents to be brainwashed in a foreign land so I could someday become part of the revolutionary vanguard itself.

In the years since, I’ve often wondered what would have happened to me if we had not received that tip. Would I have ended up a Marxist, too? Would I have joined an intelligence service like Cuba’s version of the KGB, the 02? I’d like to think not, but the indoctrination those children were subjected to in the Soviet Union transformed most of them into apostles of the revolutionary Marxism who later held positions of importance in the regime.

Losing his business was bad enough. My father was not about to lose his only son to the state as well. He pulled me out of school at once and returned me home to Manicaragua, where the tension ran high. At night, my parents would whisper to each other, planning and working through what to do. Already, the coffee business was being run into the ground by the revolutionary committee. They asked my father to come back and manage it again. He refused. It went out of business not long after.

The family limped through the next year in our home, watching conditions deteriorate. In April 1961, CIA-backed counterrevolutionaries landed on the Bay of Pigs, adjacent to La Planchita, one of the beaches my family used to vacation at in better times. I remember it being a place of great memories for my family, where the seafloor was carpeted with blue crabs and my dad would take me shrimping. Now, as the anti-Castro forces landed and tried to push ashore, revolutionary troops throughout the island mobilized to fight them. The gringos are coming! were the words on everyone’s lips in those days.

The CIA-organized Bay of Pigs Invasion lasted three days and ended in a complete fiasco due to the betrayal and broken promises of the Kennedy administration. That costly failure both solidified Castro’s status as a national hero and humiliated the United States. There would be no breaking Castro’s stranglehold on power now.

My father and mother saw the writing on the wall. Our position had grown more acutely vulnerable every day and our family’s options grew limited. It was time to leave town and try to get out of Cuba.

The new regime did not ban emigration, but anyone wanting to leave Cuba was required to leave all their possessions and resources behind. In the days before we departed for Havana, the local committee reappeared at our house, inventorying every possession inside. In front of us, they argued over who would get what item. It was revolting—legalized theft.

We packed a few clothes and decamped to Havana’s Bristol Hotel, where we joined many families in similar straits. My father soon discovered that while it was possible to get out of Cuba, getting the exit permits needed to do so was an exceptionally difficult and corrupt process. He spent months cultivating contacts, trying to cut loose the necessary documentation. Meanwhile, we lived a life of waiting in the hotel.

It became clear we could not get the entire family out at once. My parents looked for options, growing ever-more concerned about the excesses of the Castro regime, fearing more violence and crackdowns aimed at people like us.

They had cause for such worry. When we first arrived in Havana, we turned onto one street to discover bodies hanging from the light poles. My mother gasped and screamed, Don’t look! as she twisted around and dived over the front seat to try to hide the scene from me. Too late, I saw it. Buffered by a child’s innocence, I was surprisingly not disgusted. It would be years before I understood that horror.

Those bodies hung there as reminders of what happened to enemies of the revolution. If we had not already started to hate Castro, this was the turning point for