‘My Dearest Fidel’: An ABC Journalist’s
Secret Liaison With Fidel Castro
The untold story of how
Lisa Howard’s intimate diplomacy with Cuba’s revolutionary leader changed the
course of the Cold War.
By PETER KORNBLUH
May/June 2018
Lisa Howard had been
waiting for more than two hours in a suite of the Hotel Riviera, enough time to
bathe, dress and apply makeup, then take it all off to get ready for bed when she
thought he wasn’t coming. But at 11:30 p.m. on that night in Havana—February 2,
1964—Howard, an American correspondent with ABC News, finally heard a knock at
the door. She opened it and saw the man she had been waiting for: Fidel Castro,
the 37-year-old leader of the Cuban revolution and one of America’s leading
Cold War antagonists.
“You may be the
prime minister, but I’m a very important journalist. How dare you keep me
waiting,” Howard declared with mock anger. She then invited Castro, accompanied
by his top aide, René Vallejo, into her room.
Over the next few
hours, they talked about everything from Marxist theory to the treatment of
Cuba’s political prisoners. They reminisced about President John F. Kennedy,
who had been assassinated just a few months earlier. Castro told Howard about
his trip to Russia the previous spring, and the “personal attention” he had
received from the “brilliant” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Howard
admonished Castro for the repressive regime he was creating in Cuba. “To make
an honorable revolution … you must give up the notion of wanting to be prime
minister for as long as you live.” “Lisa,” Castro asked, “you really think I
run a police state?” “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”
In the early
morning hours, Howard asked Vallejo to leave. Finally alone with her, Castro
slipped his arms around the American journalist, and the two lay on the bed,
where, as Howard recalled in her diary, Castro “kissed and caressed me …
expertly with restrained passion.”
“He talked on about
wanting to have me,” Howard wrote, but “would not undress or go all the way.”
“We like each other very much,” Castro told her, admitting he was having
trouble finding the words to express his reluctance. “You have done much for
us, you have written a lot, spoken a lot about us. But if we go to bed then it
will be complicated and our relationship will be destroyed.”
He told her he
would see her again—“and that it would come naturally.” Just before the sun
rose over Havana, Castro tucked Howard in, turned out the lights and left.
Howard’s trip to
Havana in the winter of 1964 was pivotal in advancing one of the most unusual
and consequential partnerships in the history of U.S.-Cuban relations.
She became Castro’s
leading American confidant, as well as his covert interlocutor with the White
House—the key link in a top-secret back channel she singlehandedly established
between Washington and Havana to explore the possibility of rapprochement in
the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. From mid-1963 to the end of 1964,
Howard secretly relayed messages from Cuba’s revolutionary regime to the White
House and back again; she also used her reporting skills and high-profile perch
at ABC to publicly challenge the Cold War mind-set that Castro was an
implacable foe of U.S. interests. Her role as peacemaker was built on a
complex, little-understood personal rapport she managed to forge with Castro
himself—a relationship that was political and personal, intellectual and
intimate.
Today, almost no
one remembers Lisa Howard. But in the early 1960s, she was one of the most
famous female TV journalists in the United States—a glamorous former soap opera
star who reinvented herself as a reporter and then climbed to the top of the
male-monopolized world of television news. She became ABC’s first female
correspondent and the first woman to anchor her own network news show. Her
influential role in the media empowered her efforts on Cuba, even as it worried
White House officials who were the targets of her ceaseless pressure to change
U.S. policy.
Polaroid photos
taken with Fidel Castro’s camera at his first meeting with Lisa Howard in
Havana on April 21, 1963. | National Security Archive Lisa Howard Collection
In top-secret
reports from the era, those officials speculated about “a physical relationship
between” Howard and Castro and feared she would use her position at ABC News to
break the story of Washington’s secret talks with the Cuban comandante. But
both she and Castro took the secret of their intimate diplomacy to their
graves. Only now, thanks to declassified official documents and, most
important, Howard’s own unpublished diaries and letters, can the story finally
be told of how one tenacious journalist earned the trust of the
legendary leader of the Cuban revolution, and cajoled two U.S presidents into
considering peaceful coexistence with him.
***
See the Original
Documents
The National
Security Archive will be posting a selection of documents related to Lisa
Howard’s secret diplomacy with Cuba on Friday.
Lisa Howard
was born Dorothy Jean Guggenheim to a middle-class Jewish family in Ohio, but she was first known
to the world as TV’s “first lady of sin”—a designation Hollywood bestowed on
her for playing temptresses, murderesses and thieves in forgettable TV programs
and second-rate movies in the early 1950s.
In 1957, she scored
the recurring role of Louise Grimsley in the popular CBS series “The Edge of
Night.” But even as she gained attention in Hollywood, Howard signaled far
greater ambitions. “Though a looker (5’3; 109 lbs; 35-23-35 from bust to
hips),” read a cringeworthy 1953 cover story in People
Today, “Miss Sin prefers to think of herself as the ‘sensitive-intellectual
type’ who is ‘going places.’”
And she was. “I
became more and more interested in politics and world affairs … and less and
less interested about the fate of Louise Grimsley,” Howard would later recount
to audiences on the lecture circuit. “I wanted to talk to people who were
making news. I wanted to be there on the spot when history was being written.” So,
in 1960, while living in New York City with her husband, Walter Lowendahl, and
two daughters, Howard abandoned her acting career, grabbed a tape recorder and
began scoring exclusive radio interviews as an unpaid volunteer for the Mutual
Radio Network. She earned access to major political figures, including
then-Senator John F. Kennedy, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and
even President Dwight Eisenhower. But it was Howard’s lengthy interview with
Khrushchev in September 1960—the first the Soviet leader had granted to a
reporter from the West—that caught the attention of executives at ABC News. In
May 1961, ABC hired Howard, then 35, as its first-ever female correspondent;
two years later, the network gave her her own show—a daily midafternoon
broadcast geared toward housewives called “Lisa Howard and News with the
Woman’s Touch.”
At a time when
women in television news were typically relegated to reporting on fashion,
lifestyle and the weather, Howard’s was the first female face beamed into the
living rooms of America offering authoritative coverage of national and
international events on a daily basis. “Six changes of Puccis and six
politicians in one day are par for the course for Lisa Howard,” read a
1963 McCall’s Magazine cover story about Howard that
described her as “a dead-serious reporter,” as well as “bright, buxom, and
bumptious.” In another profile that same year, Time magazine
wrote that the pioneering female journalist “has achieved this distinction by
scrambling harder than six monkeys peeling the same banana. … Political
leaders, domestic and foreign, have learned that there is no dodging Lisa
Howard.”
Fidel Castro was no
exception.
FROM STARLET
TO STAR REPORTER In
just a few years, Lisa Howard transformed herself from a sultry soap opera star
to a leading TV journalist.
“I wanted to be
there on the spot where history was being written,” she later said of her
metamorphosis. | National Security Archive Lisa Howard Collection; Alamy; ABC
promotional; TV Guide
In the early 1960s,
the Cuban leader was one of the most dynamic, and for U.S. policymakers,
alarming, new figures on the international political stage. The young, bearded
guerrilla fighter had overthrown the U.S.-backed authoritarian regime of Cuban
President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, installing a revolutionary
government just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Initially, the
United States seemed impressed with Castro’s charisma. But U.S. officials
soured on his anti-American rhetoric and his economic outreach to the Soviet Union.
In the spring of 1960, Eisenhower authorized planning for a secret CIA
paramilitary intervention to roll back the Cuban revolution and install a more
compliant government in Havana, cutting diplomatic relations in
January 1961.
Kennedy inherited
the covert operation, gave it the green light to proceed in April 1961 at the
Bay of Pigs, and watched it explode into a major debacle when Castro’s militia
defeated the CIA-led brigade in less than 72 hours. In frustration, he ordered
a new program of covert operations against Cuba, known as Operation Mongoose,
and a full economic blockade in early 1962—aggressive moves that persuaded
Castro, who had recently declared Cuba a socialist state, to accept Soviet
nuclear missiles as a deterrent to another U.S. invasion, leading to the Cuban
missile crisis. For 13 days in October, the world stood on the
brink of nuclear Armageddon until Kennedy offered Khrushchev a secret deal:
pulling U.S. missiles out of Turkey in exchange for removal of the missiles in
Cuba. With Castro furious at Khrushchev for removing the weapons without
consulting him, some Kennedy officials saw the opportunity to entice Castro
back into the Western orbit; the CIA, however, was determined to continue
efforts to overthrow him.
Cuba was a major news
story. But with tensions running high, the embargo in place and no direct
travel between the two countries, few establishment reporters could gain access
to the country, let alone an interview with its fiery leader. Howard
had tried and failed to obtain an interview with Castro twice in the early
1960s, and after the missile crisis she made another attempt. “Considering the
present state of the world crisis,” she wrote Castro, “wouldn’t this be an
ideal moment for you to speak to the American people?”
A Note About
Sourcing Peter
Kornbluh first uncovered the Lisa Howard-Fidel Castro connection in the
mid-1990s, when he discovered a secret file of White House contacts with Castro
held by the Kennedy Presidential Library, and filed a request for its declassification.
Kornbluh then tracked down Howard’s husband in New York, who donated a trove of
her personal and professional papers—including photos, notes, letters and
diaries—to the National Security Archive.
After months of her
cajoling, the Cuban mission in New York finally granted Howard a visa to travel
to Havana in early April 1963. Castro ignored her for several weeks as he
finished negotiations with New York lawyer James Donovan for the release of
U.S. prisoners in Cuban jails and prepared to take a long trip to Russia for
his first summit with Khrushchev. In a bid for his attention, Howard wrote
Castro a letter after she arrived—“I beg you to say ‘YES,’” it stated in
Spanish. “Give me this interview, please”—and passed it on to various
interlocutors, among them Donovan, whom she beseeched to put in a good word for
her. “I told [Castro] there was a beautiful blonde dish of a reporter wanting
to interview him and would he give her some of his time,” Donovan recalled. “I
went about it by whetting Castro’s natural masculine curiosity and vanity.”
Whether out of
curiosity and vanity, or a sense that Howard could become a genuinely valuable
channel to America, Castro relented and agreed to meet Howard at the nightclub
in the Havana Riviera hotel. He arrived at midnight on April 21, and the two
talked until almost 6 a.m., discussing Kennedy, Howard’s personal impressions
of Khrushchev—“a sly old fox” who “would cut you off like a twig”—and what
Howard deplored as “the police state apparatus” under Castro’s rule. Howard was
impressed by Castro’s breadth of knowledge. “Never, never have I found a
Communist interested in the sentiments of Albert Camus,” Howard later recounted
in a letter. “And I certainly have not found dedicated Communists anxious to
discuss the merits of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. But Fidel
enjoyed the conversation immensely.”
Castro enjoyed the
conversation so much that he agreed to a formal interview—the first he had
granted a U.S. television journalist since 1959. In the early hours of April
24, with Cuban Communist Party cameras rolling at the Riviera,
Howard put a series of forceful questions to the Cuban comandante: When had he
become a communist? Did he ask Khrushchev for the nuclear missiles? Why were
hundreds of thousands of Cubans fleeing to Florida?
There were lighter
moments, too. Castro asked Howard whether her bright blond hair color was
natural. “We don’t have to answer questions like that in my country,” she shot
back. And then came the showstopper: Under what conditions might he
support a rapprochement with Washington? Castro cited his successful talks with
Donovan on the prisoner release as a positive step forward. A rapprochement
“was possible,” he noted in halting English, “if the United States government
wishes it.” Coming from one of America’s most renowned Cold War enemies, just
months after a tense nuclear standoff, Castro’s interest in better relations
was headline news.
Within hours of the
interview, Castro flew off to Moscow—but not before he had arranged for a huge
bouquet of flowers to be delivered to Howard’s hotel room. In return, the
journalist left Castro what she described as “a little keepsake”—a deeply
personal letter she drafted in her room at the Riviera. “I wanted to give you
something to express my gratitude for the time you granted me; for the
interview; for the beautiful flowers,” her message began. “I have decided to
give you the most valuable possession I have to offer. Namely: my faith in your
honor. My faith in the form of a letter, which, if revealed, could destroy me
in the United States.”
L TO R: A CIA memo about Howard’s first trip to Cuba,
marked “Psaw” (president saw); a draft of Howard’s letter to Castro dated April
27, 1963. | CIA MEMO: National Security Files, John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library; Howard letter: National Security Archive Lisa Howard Collection
Howard described
her four-page letter, the drafts of which she saved along with other records
from her trip, as “a tribute, a poem to you—the man.” It mixed intense
criticism with sincere praise. “I do not want you destroyed. … You possess what
George Bernard Shaw called ‘that spark of divine fire,’” Howard wrote. “You are
not the ruthless, cynical tyrant [your critics] have depicted. … I do not
believe you have meant to hurt people, though, in all candor, I am both
saddened and outraged that you have destroyed thousands and harmed many more
without just cause.”
Howard beseeched
Castro to find his “way back”—to become the transformational historical figure
she believed to be his destiny. “What you have to offer the world that is
meaningful and universally applicable is not some capricious brand of tropical
Marxism (the world scarcely needs that), but your humanity; your compassion;
your deep knowledge and sense of justice; your genuine concern for the poor;
the sick; the oppressed; the defenseless; the lost; the despairing. … And your
sacred duty, your solemn obligation to mankind is to make that quality ever
stronger, to make it a reality for your people—all your people, every class and
sector. Let flow in the most untrammeled way the goodness that is your
substance and can be your salvation.”
“I feel deeply that
you must be permitted to play out your role,” Howard continued, pledging to do
what she could to ensure Castro’s survival and bring the U.S. and Cuba
together. “I am going to talk to certain people when I return to the States,”
she wrote. “I do not overestimate my influence. But I shall try to help.”
I am who I am and
you are Fidel Castro and for us, at this moment in history, nothing personal
could be realized. … Our personal desires are not important.”
One draft of her
message, typed on Hotel Riviera letterhead, ended “on a personal note.” “We met
and came together and, I know, felt something for one another that could not go
further.
I am who I am and
you are Fidel Castro and for us, at this moment in history, nothing personal
could be realized. No matter … our personal desires are not important.”
Howard crossed out
that paragraph during a revision, big blue Xs cutting through the type.
“Perhaps we shall never see one another again,” the letter concluded instead.
“But I shall treasure with all my heart for as long as
I live my trip to Cuba in April of 1963 and my meetings with you, my dearest
Fidel.”
When “Fidel
Castro: Self Portrait” aired on
ABC on May 10, 1963, it dominated the news cycle. “Castro applauds U.S. ‘Peace
Steps,’” declared the New York Times. “Castro Would Like Talk With
Kennedy,” announced the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “The interview was
a great success, front page of nearly every paper in the country,” Howard wrote
in a private note for Castro. “The entire interview is now being discussed on
the highest levels.”
Nobody Talked
to Fidel Castro like Lisa Howard
In her diary entry
for August 13, 1964, Lisa Howard recorded this candid banter with Castro.
2:00 AM
Collect call from
Havana. It’s Fidel. He asked me if I know what day this is.
“Yes,” I say, “It’s
Thursday.” “But it’s the 13th,” he says. “So,” says I. “It’s my
birthday,” says Fidel. “I’m 38.” Congrats all around. I sing to him.
He wants to know if
I’ll seek asylum in Cuba if Goldwater is elected. I say, yes, if he will let me
do a daily television news show. He says Okay if every day I report Marxist and
Leninist propaganda. I tell him he should write an article for Life explaining
in great detail why Cuba did as she did—why the expropriation—what [Cuba] hopes
to do in the future etc, --
He says: “Will they
pay me a lot of money?” I say: “Ten thousand dollars.” He says: “Great, I’ll
take it.” ….
We talk of
Goldwater. He says: “I’ve been thinking very much about Goldwater and Johnson
& I have decided I’m for Goldwater. I think he looks very nice.” I leave
him with the thought: “Fidel, if Goldwater is elected I will be very sad, but
you will be dead.”
That was only the
public part of the message she delivered. Behind the scenes, as she had
promised, Howard met with CIA and State Department officials to personally
convey Castro’s interest in a dialogue with the United States. She used the
positive news coverage of her ABC interview to argue that public opinion was
not opposed to better relations with Cuba, and even presented a list of
potential intermediaries who could facilitate talks with Castro—including
herself. “Liza [sic] Howard definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government
with two facts: Castro is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself is
ready to discuss it with him if asked to do so by the U.S. Government,” stated
a secret CIA report delivered to the White House.
Howard also typed
out a 10-page brief to Kennedy himself, elaborating on what Castro had told her
during their conversations in Havana and attempting to obtain a
meeting. “I wanted to see you personally,” she wrote, “to impress upon you how
strongly I feel that Fidel’s alliance with the Communists is a precarious one …
[and] that we might profitably fish in those troubled waters.” Castro
was “now ready to discuss everything: the withdrawal of [Soviet] troops; an end
to the exporting of his revolution” to end the blockade and resume diplomatic
relations with the United States, she reported. “And not just ready, Sir, but
positively eager.”
“He was most
interested in you, Mr. President,” Howard continued. “He kept saying to me
‘What is President Kennedy like, what does he want … what does he want of us?’”
She beseeched Kennedy to actually “sit down and negotiate with Fidel.”
Unbeknownst to
Howard, however, the CIA vigorously opposed her message of potential
reconciliation—and lobbied Kennedy to ignore it. In a secret memo to the White
House, dated May 2, CIA Director John McCone recommended that “the Lisa Howard
report be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner” and “that no active
steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time.” Howard’s initial
efforts went nowhere.
But she would not
be ignored, nor denied. As McCall’s wrote about Howard that
year, “Her massive drive is so uncomplicated and single-minded that it usually
carries the day.” “The key to understanding Lisa,” her husband told
the magazine, “is to think of her as a sort of mutation. She simply doesn’t
have the inhibitions other people have. When she goes after something, she’s
completely overt, she has no qualms or second thoughts or reluctance to
operate.”
Getting no traction
at the White House, Howard redrafted her letter to the president into an
article, “Castro’s Overture,” which appeared as a cover story in the September
1963 issue of the liberal journal War/Peace Report. Castro had been
“emphatic about his desire for negotiations” in their conversations, she
reported. She called on Kennedy to “send an American government official on a
quiet mission to Havana to see what Castro has to say.”
‘THERE IS NO
DODGING LISA HOWARD’ Howard
was known for her interviews with high-profile subjects, from Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. At left, Howard is
pictured with then-Senator John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic National
Convention. At right, Howard interviews Che Guevara in Havana in February 1964.
After the cameras
were turned off, Guevara confided to her that Castro had instructed him to do
the interview—more proof for Howard that Castro was “the maximum leader and in
the final analysis everyone must take his orders,” as she wrote in her diary. |
National Security Archive Lisa Howard Collection; Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
At the United
Nations, a U.S. official named William Attwood read Howard’s article. As a
former senior editor of Look magazine, Attwood had interviewed
Castro in 1959 and shared Howard’s view that coexistence with the Cuban regime
was both possible and preferable. On September 12, he called her, and together
they set in motion a plan of action. First, Attwood approached U.N. Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson to get a green light from Kennedy to make “discreet contact”
with Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga. Then, Howard
approached Lechuga in the U.N. lounge and told him that Attwood urgently wanted
to talk to him. A cocktail party at her East 74th Street town house would serve
as cover for the two diplomats to meet.
On September 23, as
members of the New York literati munched on finger foods and sipped drinks in
Howard’s house, the United States and Cuba held their first, albeit informal,
bilateral meeting since the Eisenhower administration. Off in a corner of the
living room, Attwood and Lechuga discussed how negotiations between their two
hostile countries might be initiated. Lechuga “hinted that Castro was indeed in
the mood to talk,” Attwood reported back to the White House, adding that “there
was a good chance I might be invited to Cuba.”
Over the next two
months, Howard’s home became the hub for secret communications between the U.S.
and Cuba. Howard placed a series of calls to Castro’s office
conveying U.S. interest in setting up a meeting, and passed on Castro’s
responses to Attwood. Finally, Howard set up a time for Attwood to talk
directly with Castro’s top aide, Vallejo.
When Attwood
arrived at midnight on the evening of November 18 for the call, Howard greeted
him wearing a lavish dressing gown. As she dialed Cuba again and again,
attempting to track down Vallejo, they listened to jazz, drank bourbon and
discussed French philosophers. In her diary, Howard recorded this dramatic
turning point in her protracted efforts to connect Washington and Havana: “‘D’
Day for the telephone appointment. … We put through the call. No Vallejo.
Placed at least seven calls. … Read Camus out loud. … Me on the bed in a lacey
peignoir—Bill sipping bourbon and shy but dying to slip into bed with me.
And there was that
white phone—mute—tense … our link to our secret and oh-so-longed for mission.
We do have a deep common bond. An inexorable conviction that this can be an
honorable rapprochement between Cuba and the U.S.”
Around 3 a.m., Howard managed to reach Vallejo and put
Attwood on the line to discuss arrangements for the two to meet clandestinely.
This was the moment Howard had long awaited. “At last! At last! That first
halting step. Contact has been established!” she rejoiced in her diary. “I feel
strongly this is only the beginning. A long, frustrating, tension-filled, but
exciting experience lies ahead.”
Three days
later, Howard found
herself covering the shocking story of Kennedy’s assassination for ABC. Howard,
Castro and a handful of U.S. officials knew the assassin’s bullet had
terminated not only JFK’s life, but also his secret efforts to find common
ground with Cuba. “The events of November 22 would appear to make an
accommodation with Castro an even more doubtful issue than it was,” wrote
National Security Council aide Gordon Chase in a Top Secret/Eyes Only White
House assessment. “In addition, the fact that Lee Oswald has been heralded as a
pro-Castro type may make rapprochement with Cuba more difficult.”
But Howard would
not give up. She persuaded her superiors at ABC to let her return to Cuba to do
another TV special—this time on life under the revolution. When she informed
the new administration about her trip, White House staff responded that they
would be interested in what Castro had to say.
Howard and her
entourage arrived at José Martí International Airport on February 1, 1964.
Castro had sent Vallejo to meet her, and “I was taken through customs like a
diplomat,” she recalled. She was a diplomat—albeit a
self-appointed one. While filming the new TV special, she would also be
strategizing with Castro about how to renew his delicate diplomacy with
President Lyndon B. Johnson.
There was another
reason she was eager to be in Havana. “When will I see him?” Howard asked
Vallejo upon her arrival. “He has been crazy to know when you’re arriving,” the
aide replied. “He’s been asking about you all day.” She didn’t see Castro until
the next evening, February 2, 1964, when he arrived at her hotel close to
midnight and the two stayed up until dawn before he tucked her in and left.
Elliott
Erwitt/Magnum
Over the next two
weeks, Howard and her crew traipsed around Cuba with the energetic Castro,
filming him playing baseball, visiting a cattle farm and interacting with
peasants. As much as Howard believed Castro was a dictator, the overwhelming
public adoration he generated impressed her. “They mob him, they scream ‘Fidel,
Fidel,’ children kiss him, mothers touch him,” she wrote. “They are awed,
thrilled … ecstatic, but mostly passionate. There is no doubt in my mind that
the emotion Fidel inspires in all women is sheer undiluted sexual desire. He is
the most physical animal man I have ever known.” The attraction between them
was undeniable. “I sat and stood beside him for five hours and I nearly went
out of my mind,” she recounted.
One night, Howard
returned to her suite and burst into tears, torn between her feelings for the
man and her distaste for his revolution. “This revolution isn’t at all what he
thinks it is,” she wrote in her diary. “How can I tell this to Fidel. And why
do I feel that I must? Yet I guess what keeps me involved is that down deep I
believe that if I could convince him of the truth … of the despair and agony
and chaos he has brought to this Island … he would change.”
Certainly, she
believed, ending the existential threat that Washington’s hostility posed to
Castro would contribute to that goal. During their formal ABC interview in the
wee hours of February 13, Howard posed a question to which she already knew the
answer: “You said at one point after President Kennedy’s death that you
believed that under Kennedy it was going to be possible to normalize relations
between Cuba and the United States. What leads you to believe that?” “My
opinion is that he was in the way of persuading himself of his mistakes about
Cuba,” Castro responded in stilted English. “We had some evidence that some
change was taking place in the mind of the government of the United States ...
I do not want to speak about now.”
It was well after
midnight when the interview finished, and Castro, Howard and Vallejo adjourned
to the bedroom of Howard’s suite. “We were in a wonderful mood,” Howard wrote
in her diary. The Cuban leader lay down on the sofa and put his head in her
lap. “[Secretary of State] Dean Rusk should see us now,” Howard joked, as
Castro roared with laughter. Lounging on the couch, they strategized about how
to entice Johnson to finish the dialogue Kennedy had started. Castro said he
wanted to “discuss a trade” with the new administration: The United States
would stop backing sabotage raids into Cuba led by Cuban exiles in Florida and
halt its effort to roll back the Cuban revolution.
In return, Cuba
would end its efforts to export revolution to other areas of Latin America.
Castro also said he would do what he could to ensure Johnson was elected in
November 1964, rather than face the prospect of a hard-line
Republican such as Senator Barry Goldwater as president. If the Johnson
administration “feels they must take some hostile action for domestic political
consumption,” Castro said he would even understand. “If he was informed,
ex-officio, that this was a political action,” he would refrain from
retaliating.
At 3:30 in the morning,
Howard once again decided it was time for Vallejo to give them some privacy,
which made Castro nervous. “I can’t be alone with you without my lawyer,” he
joked. When Howard announced she wanted to “get into something comfortable,” he
made a futile attempt to keep her fully clothed. “He made a great fuss about my
not changing my dress because it was so pretty and he wanted to look at it,”
she wrote. And when she emerged from the bathroom in a nightgown and pajamas,
he chastised her for disobeying him. “You don’t understand me,” he complained
in a flourish of machismo. “You just want to do what you want to do. Why can’t
you treat me like a man?”
You don’t
understand me,” he complained in a flourish of machismo. “You just want to do
what you want to do. Why can’t you treat me like a man?”
Castro turned the
conversation to their complicated relationship. Nights earlier, Castro had
confided that he used to sleep with many women, but not anymore—“that now that
he is the leader all the women want to go to bed with him, but he thought it
wasn’t him they wanted but to sleep with the leader. This seemed to trouble
him,” Howard recounted. As Castro explained why he was reluctant to sleep with
her, he asked Howard: “What do you want, Lisa? Do you want my body?”
Tonight, he was
still conflicted. “He said he wanted me very much but the conditions had to be
right and we had to be away somewhere where we could forget everything,” Howard
wrote. Nevertheless, “we did get to bed and he made love to me quite expertly
and it was, of course, thrilling and ecstatic—as much as anything I have ever
experienced.”
“Lisa, you are not
simple,” Castro told Howard just before he left. “With you and me it is not
simple. But that is more interesting.”
Howard’s second
interview with Castro on February 13, 1964. | Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
They would engage
in one more conversation on that trip, an emotional tête-à-tête as Howard
readied to leave two mornings later. Castro arrived at Howard’s hotel suite at
5:30 a.m. to ensure she made her flight, and found her drugged from a sleeping
pill, unable to wake up. While she, half asleep, entreated Castro to delay her
flight—a request he refused, telling her “that would be arbitrary”—he managed
to rouse her. “I dressed in front of Fidel like he was a schoolroom mate,”
Howard recalled. Then, “he pulled me over and asked me to sit on his lap, and
then spoke to me very gently, and said, ‘Lisa, you are very dangerous for me. I
could love a girl like you very deeply. You’re very sweet, very pretty, very
intelligent, very sensitive.” If they were together, he suggested, “we would
have many fights, a hundred fights, two hundred fights, but in the end it would
be all right.” He said: “You can teach me very much.”
Howard told Castro
he had “touched [her] very deeply.” But she confessed to being “overwhelmed by
sadness” watching him intermingle with Cuban citizens because “he had such a
genuine belief in the revolution and in what he was doing [when] in fact so
much of what he was doing was truly evil.” He could not see it, “and I was not
capable of making him see it,” she tearfully explained. “Castro said he
understood part of what I was trying to say, and that I must return again and
we must talk and talk and talk for many, many hours and days,” she wrote. He
promised to take English lessons so that they could “understand each other
better.”
***
Once back in
New York, Howard typed up a
six-paragraph memo to Johnson from Castro, titled “Verbal Message given to Miss
Lisa Howard of ABC News on February 12, 1964 in Havana, Cuba.” In the missive,
Howard relayed what she and Castro had discussed in her suite—from Castro’s
offer to weather a U.S. provocation during the campaign to his hope to continue
the dialogue Kennedy had started. He recognized the need for “absolute
secrecy,” and suggested that Howard could be trusted as an intermediary.
With the memorandum
in hand, Howard placed a call to Gordon Chase at the NSC, now her contact in
the new administration, and told him she had a confidential message for
Johnson.
“Lisa Howard wants
very much to give her message from Fidel to the President only,” Chase reported
to the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. Bundy, however, was dubious
of Howard’s dual role as a secret go-between and a prominent journalist. “She
is an extraordinarily determined and self-important creature and will
undoubtedly knock at every door we have at least five times,” he warned other
White House officials. “It is quite impossible that she can see Castro and the
president without writing about her peacemaking efforts at some stage, and I
see nothing whatever to be gained by letting her play this game with us.”
Chase, however,
pressed Bundy for permission to debrief Howard and try to “pump out” Castro’s
message. As “a shrewd, aggressive, good-looking gal,” he argued, “she probably
gets a lot closer to Fidel than most (pure speculation) and may be able to give
us some insights about Castro’s intentions.”
A LOOK INSIDE
CASTRO’S CUBA In
February 1964, Howard traveled to Havana to film an ABC special, “Cuba and
Castro Today.” “It’s impossible to film [Castro] properly, he won’t ever hold
still,” Howard wrote in her diary. She was struck by how much the Cuban people
adored their leader. “They mob him, they scream ‘Fidel, Fidel,’ children kiss
him, mothers touch him.” | Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
On March 7, Chase
traveled to New York to receive a briefing on Howard’s trip. As they pored over
photographs and the transcripts of her interviews, they agreed on a common
mission “to get Fidel to end his Soviet tie and end exporting the Rev[olution]
and announce elections in exchange for a guarantee of American aid, trade, and
official recognition.” Howard offered her services as an “effective emissary”
and affirmed her discretion. “So the young man will make his report to Bundy
and we shall see,” she wrote.
In his
comprehensive Top Secret/Eyes Only report on their meeting—titled “Mrs. Lisa
Howard”—Chase advanced Howard’s message “that we should be communicating with
Castro” about normalized relations. “I regard Mrs. Howard’s motives as mixed,”
he advised: “First, she is a newspaper woman and probably knows she is sniffing
at a highly readable story. Second, because of her influence with Fidel, she probably
regards herself, somewhat romantically, as fated to play a historical role in
helping to bring about an agreement between the U.S. and Cuba. Third, she
probably is a sincere, anti-communist, libertarian democrat who regards the
Cuban scene as a tragedy and who wants to see the island living in the Western
tradition and at peace with the U.S. (To go out on a dangerous limb, my own
estimate is that as long as she can feel useful, the last two motives control
the first.)”
Chase transmitted
Howard’s assertion that she had “a rapport with Castro which a man will not
easily duplicate. I am not certain that there is a physical relationship
between them,” he informed Bundy, “but regard it as likely.”
Sensing she now had
a strong ally inside the White House, Howard began placing evening calls to
Chase at his home, seeking his help to obtain a meeting with Johnson so that
she might deliver Castro’s message. Each time, Chase gently put her off and
tried to persuade her to entrust the message to him, which she declined to do.
In a top-secret memo on these conversations, Chase reported, “She roundly
scolded me and the White House for taking her message from Fidel to the
President as a joke. I assured her we didn’t.”
Stymied at the
White House, Howard turned again to U.N. Ambassador Stevenson. Late in the
evening on June 5, 1964, she went to see Stevenson at his room in the Waldorf
Astoria. The two discussed how to persuade Johnson to continue dialogue with
Cuba. She gave him Castro’s “verbal message” and entrusted him to personally
transmit it to the president.
True to his word,
on June 16, Stevenson sent LBJ a top-secret memorandum, with Castro’s secret
communique—one of the most compelling Castro ever sent to a U.S.
president—attached. Stevenson advised the president of the secret dialogue
Kennedy and Castro were pursuing at the time of the assassination and
recommended that “if it could be resumed on a low enough level to avoid any
possible embarrassment, it might be worth considering.”
***
Three days
later, Howard traveled
to Cuba for the third time—this time not as an ABC journalist but as a secret
emissary. Her mission was to report to Castro that she had finally gotten his
message into Johnson’s hands. But she also carried a high-level warning from
the White House: The U.S. government was concerned about threats Castro had
made to shoot down U.S. reconnaissance planes that continued to overfly Cuba in
the wake of the missile crisis.
Castro arranged for
Howard to stay in one of the confiscated mansions that now served as a protocol
house. The house came with a Cadillac and chauffeur, a butler and cook,
air-conditioned bedrooms and a sunken bathtub. She had come a “long way from
‘Edge of Night’ to guest of the Cuban government,” Howard confided in her
diary.
THE JOURNALIST
AND THE REVOLUTIONARY During
filming, Castro and Howard spent many hours together, talking about everything
from love and death to the workings of U.S. politics. “I like to talk to Lisa,”
Castro remarked. “She is very wise.” One day, as they toured the countryside,
Castro told Howard about his decision to cut off the water supply to Guantanamo
Bay in response to the U.S. Coast Guard seizing Cuban fishing boats. “The U.S.
might attack you,” she warned. Renowned photographer Elliott Erwitt, who traveled
with Howard and her film crew to photograph the trip, captured these more
intimate moments as well. | Library of Congress; Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
Far less luxurious
was their one evening spent together on Castro’s “yacht” in the Bay of Pigs,
which Howard described as a small, battered boat with a broken shower that
slept two. They stayed up till 5:30 a.m. talking about “politics, life, love,
freedom, peace, hope, despair, my family, all of it,” Howard remembered. They
also discussed the U.S. warning to refrain from shooting at any U.S.
reconnaissance planes.
Castro promised to
restrain himself during the 1964 election season. “You are right, Fidel,” she
later confided to him about their night on the boat. “Our intellectual
relationship is the essential one. Though the other one is rather pleasant too
… the frosting on the cake.”
Before she left
Havana, they talked over how their back channel would work: To prevent future
incidents between the United States in Cuba, Castro would rely on Howard to get
messages to Stevenson and would count on his response, passed through her.
Less than two days
after she returned to the states, Castro used this channel to address a crisis
at Guantanamo, where a U.S. Marine had reportedly shot a Cuban soldier. On June
26, Vallejo placed an urgent call to Howard and shared his leader’s message:
“Please call Governor Stevenson and tell him about the shooting, that the Cuban
is in the hospital and Castro thinks he is going to die, that this is the
second time there has been a shooting at the base. He wonders if it is part of
a deliberate plan of provocation or an isolated act.”
Howard immediately
called Stevenson. She told him what Castro had said about reconnaissance planes
and asked for an answer on the shooting. He assured her “there was no plan
whatsoever of deliberate provocation at the Guantanamo Base.” She then relayed
the report to Vallejo. “Fidel was glad to get my message,” Howard wrote in her
diary the next day. “I guess he feels our channel of communications has been established.”
L TO R: Chase’s memo to Bundy after Howard’s second trip to
Cuba; Stevenson’s memo to Johnson after Howard’s third trip; Chase’s memo about
Che Guevara’s visit to New York. | National Security Archive Lisa Howard
Collection
Indeed, the back
channel—known as the “Castro / Lisa Howard / Stevenson / President line” in
top-secret White House documents—between the White House and the Cuban
leadership was now open, and active. In a top-secret memo to Johnson written
after the phone call, Stevenson reported Castro’s message that “there will be
no crisis until after the November elections; that nothing will happen to our
[reconnaissance] planes, and that we do not need to send him any warnings. He
will use utmost restraint and we can relax.” Stevenson also conveyed Castro’s
belief that “all of our crises could be avoided if there was some way to
communicate; that for want of anything better, [Castro] assumed that he could
call [Howard] and she call me and I would advise you.”
***
Howard had
almost single-handedly built
an unprecedented bridge between Castro and the Oval Office. But the White House
wasted no time shutting her out. In a July 7, 1964, memo to Bundy, Chase warned
that the newly established communications “make Lisa Howard’s participation even
scarier than it was before. …
Before this, the
Johnson Administration had relatively little to fear from Lisa since,
essentially, we were just listening to her reports on or from Castro.” Chase
also warned Stevenson’s involvement would mean more media attention if news of
the back channel leaked. “Lisa’s contact on the U.S. side is far sexier now
(Stevenson), than at any time in the past (Attwood and then Chase).”
Extricating Howard
from these secret operations without offending her and risking public exposure
of U.S.-Cuba communications, Chase understood, would be a delicate operation.
“Lisa should relax, stay quiet, and stand at the ready,” was the message Chase
recommended passing to her. “We may want to use her influence with Castro in
the future.”
A Brief
History of U.S.-Cuba Cold War Ties
January 1959: Fidel Castro leads the Cuban revolution to
power.
January 1961: President Dwight Eisenhower severs diplomatic
relations with Cuba.
April 1961: President John F. Kennedy authorizes the CIA-led
paramilitary invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
February 1962: Kennedy declares a broad economic embargo
against Cuba, prohibiting all trade.
October 1962: The United States and the Soviet Union confront
the prospect of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.
April 1963: Lisa Howard travels to Havana and interviews
Castro, the first interview he has granted to a U.S. TV journalist since 1959.
November 1963: The Kennedy administration secretly pursues
talks with Castro, up to the day of the president’s assassination in Dallas.
February 1964: Howard returns to Cuba to film another ABC News
special.
June 1964: Howard travels to Cuba a third time, as a secret
emissary, to advance a dialogue between Castro and the Johnson White House.
It is unknown
whether that message was ever delivered, but after July 1964, the Johnson
administration appears to have cut Howard out of the loop. There are no more
memos about contacts between Howard and Castro—and no more diary entries about
communications with the White House.
As for official
communications with Cuba, U.S. officials turned a deaf ear to Castro’s public
call for “extensive discussions” with Washington, and to an offer from his
brother, Raúl Castro, to meet with U.S. negotiators “any place to discuss
improving relations, even the moon.”
Deeply frustrated,
in December 1964, Howard seized on the visit of Che Guevara, the Argentine
revolutionary who had helped usher in the Cuban revolution, to the United
Nations to renew her attempts to bridge the Cold War gap across the Florida
straits. She shepherded Guevara around town—together they attended a premiere
of a new documentary film commemorating the life of Kennedy—and organized a
soiree for him at her New York apartment. “Che Guevara has something to say” to
the White House, she told Chase on the phone, in hopes of once again using
cocktail diplomacy as a cover for the two sides to confer. “I asked her point
blank whether this was her idea or Che’s,” Chase reported to his superiors.
“She would not answer me directly and kept repeating that she was ‘in a
position to arrange a meeting.’” “Stevenson was all hot to go on this,”
according to a top-secret White House memo, after Howard invited the U.N.
ambassador to talk with Guevara. But State Department officials refused to
authorize a Stevenson-Guevara meeting for fear it would quickly leak to the
press.
Howard did manage
to persuade the progressive senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, to come to
her cocktail party and talk to Guevara off in a corner. “The purpose of the
meeting was to express Cuban interest in trade with the U.S. and U.S.
recognition of the Cuban regime,” McCarthy reported to the State Department the
next day. But after debriefing him, U.S. officials concluded that “the
conversation was entirely Lisa-generated and that Che really had nothing to
tell us.”
***
As Howard lost
her Cuba cachet with
the Johnson administration, she also lost her position at ABC News. In late
September, as the 1964 election approached, the network summarily suspended
her, citing her public participation in “Democrats for Keating”—a committee of
prominent New York liberals who opposed Robert Kennedy’s bid to become a
senator from their state. After the election, ABC fired her. When Howard moved
to sue ABC for violating her constitutional rights to express her political
beliefs, ABC executives let it be known that “her actions regarding the Cuba
show” were among their reasons for terminating her contract.
Indeed, Howard’s
internal struggle to control the tone and content of her April 1964 TV special,
“Cuba and Castro Today,” marked the beginning of her downfall at ABC. According
to Howard, she had waged “a titanic battle” with network executives to keep the
broadcast from adopting a conventional Cold War approach to the complex issue
of the Cuban revolution. “We fought over every inch of the show,” she recorded
in her diary. ABC higher-ups—in particular the executive director of news,
Jesse Zousmer—wanted “to present just one more indictment of Fidel Castro and
his revolution,” she wrote. “I could not do that. I would not do that.” When
the program finally aired, Howard believed she had “won all the major points.”
The broadcast was “not an indictment of Fidel—and he comes off fairly well,”
she wrote. Most important, “I think it will help U.S.-Cuban relations.”
Howard might have
won the battle over her TV special, but in the ensuing weeks and months, she
lost the war. Within the news division, Zousmer became a powerful, and in
Howard’s mind, “brutally vindictive” foe. In mid-April, as the special was
being finalized, Howard twice failed to appear for her daily show, and Zousmer
circulated a memo stating that he planned “to take definitive action” if she
failed to honor her contractual obligations. “You have tried to bully me,
insult me and humiliate me,” Howard responded in a blunt memo to
her boss. “I strongly advise you not to threaten me again.” According to
Howard, Zousmer began chipping away at her job. During the July 1964 Republican
National Convention in San Francisco, she received few assignments, and the
interviews she did were not used on the evening news.
By the time of the
Democratic National Convention in late August, Howard had initiated Democrats
for Keating and was lobbying party leaders not to support RFK’s Senate bid. During
the convention, ABC received two calls from the White House press secretary,
Pierre Salinger, complaining that Howard was creating “quite a stir” by
speaking out against Kennedy. ABC dispatched an executive to the convention in
Atlantic City, New Jersey, to tell her to cease and desist.
Never one to
compromise her principles, Howard escalated her public efforts against
Kennedy’s candidacy. “I can assure you that I am acting in my capacity as a
United States citizen and my television broadcasts will in no way reflect my
personal involvement,” she wrote her superiors in defense of her political
activities on September 16, 1964.
Without warning,
two weeks later ABC suspended Howard from her daily show. Less than a month
later, she was fired. Her efforts to get ABC to reconsider failed, as did her
attempts to get a job at another network. One ABC executive informed her “she
had been marked as ‘lousy.’” A civil suit Howard filed against ABC seeking $2
million in damages to her reputation and career was dismissed by the New York
Supreme Court in early 1965.
And then came the
personal tragedy. In the late spring of 1965, Howard suffered a miscarriage.
Her ensuing depression resulted in a period of hospitalization that, sadly,
failed to relieve her despondence. On July 4, 1965, while spending the holiday
weekend in the Hamptons, Howard altered a prescription for 10 barbiturates and
obtained a bottle of 100 tablets at a local pharmacy; she consumed the pills in
the parking lot and died of the overdose. She was 39 years old.
The FBI would soon
launch a bizarre inquiry to determine whether her death was somehow tied to
Guevara’s disappearance following his visit to New York. (Unbeknownst to the
U.S. intelligence community, Guevara had gone underground to lead guerrilla
fighters in the Congo.) FBI agents interviewed Howard’s former colleagues at
ABC about her Cuba work, her relations with Castro and Guevara, and why she
might take her own life. The FBI also reviewed her case with members of the
NYPD to ascertain whether Howard’s was “a legitimate suicide”—or sinister foul
play tied, presumably, to her work on Cuba.
Howard's Cuba work
is a fundamental part of her forgotten legacy. “I was an integral part of this
fledgling new look at Cuba,” Howard once confided. Her efforts might not have
fully paid off during her short lifetime, but they created the historical
foundation for the back-channel diplomacy that led to the breakthrough in
relations achieved by the Obama administration 50 years later. As Cuban
President Raúl Castro steps down from power in April, and as U.S. policy makers
revisit relations with Cuba in a post-Castro era, Howard must be remembered as
an essential player in the original efforts to bring about what, in her diary,
she called “an honorable rapprochement.”
“She showed us by
her extraordinary sacrifice what moral strength means,” Senator William
Proxmire said in his eulogy at Howard’s memorial service, without even knowing
the extraordinary role she had played behind the scenes. “To live by the truth
as she saw it; to dig out more of what she regarded as the truth than the
establishment can comfortably permit. And to speak that truth loud and clear.”
Castro recognized
her fearlessness, too—and knew what it had been able to accomplish. “You know
no one could come down here and do what you did—with your will and
persuasiveness,” he told her during one of their late-night phone conversations
between Havana and New York in 1964. “No one.”
Peter Kornbluh
directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in
Washington. He is co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Back Channel to
Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.
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