The Last Soldiers of the Cold War by Fernando Morais

Author:Fernando Morais
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Cruz León took heart and accepted the job. He was then coordinating the security for a rock band that was playing in El Salvador, and it wasn’t hard to arrange a week’s vacation. Abarca asked for his passport—Cruz León had already made short tourist trips to Mexico and Central America—and on the night of Tuesday, July 8, the eve of Cruz León’s departure, Abarca appeared at the modest apartment Cruz León shared with his mother and brothers downtown, in the Cuscatlán neighborhood. Abarca was carrying a suitcase with the boots, a ball of the explosive wrapped in aluminum foil and the rest of the paraphernalia needed to carry out the attacks. He laid out on the dining table the calculators, pieces of wire, detonators, batteries and a voltmeter, a plastic gadget little bigger than a cigarette pack, with a small display and two mini-clips to test whether batteries are producing the voltage necessary for detonation. This time he slowly went through the operation he’d done on the deserted beach, explaining the details step by step. As he couldn’t afford another fiasco—for whatever reason, the bomb on the fifteenth floor of the Meliá Cohiba Hotel in Havana didn’t explode—he made a rough diagram in Cruz León’s diary showing where and how to attach each wire and how the detonator should be adjusted. The batteries and wires would travel hidden inside a General Electric radio-alarm clock, the size of a book, and the voltmeter and a small roll of insulation tape would be packed at the bottom of his toilet bag together with his toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor and a bottle of eau de cologne. The detonators would be carried in the core of two felt-tip markers. Before saying goodbye, Abarca repeated the objective of the explosions:

“The people in Miami don’t want to kill anybody, just to show foreigners that going to Cuba as a tourist can mean mortal danger. Here are some of their suggested targets, for you to choose the two where you’ll place the bombs.”

As Abarca dictated, Cruz León wrote down the names of the hotels in his pocket diary—the Meliá Cohiba, Nacional, Capri, Comodoro, Santa Isabel and Tritón (which he mistakenly noted as “Plutón”). Apart from these, the “pals in Miami” had included the two most visited tourist spots in the Cuban capital: the bar and restaurant La Bodeguita del Medio, Ernest Hemingway’s favorite venue for his infamous drinking sessions, and the Tropicana, the country’s most traditional cabaret and nightclub. On leaving, Abarca gave Cruz León $500 in cash and a plastic briefcase from the Joanessa travel agency where his package tour had been acquired, containing the air tickets and two vouchers, one for the airport transfer and the other to cover his daily expenses at the Ambos Mundos hotel, with full board included. The choice of the hotel was Cruz León’s only request to Abarca. He could have chosen a luxury place like the Nacional or the Cohiba, both located in Vedado, the chic part of

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