Under Pablo’s tutelage, the three de Herreras brothers became ever more lethal and sophisticated assassins. Before you killed a man, for instance, you first made him scream and beg. Or, even better, before you killed him, you first killed those he loved most.
Before you raped, you assembled an audience. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers were forced to watch. It was work his two brothers took to with enthusiasm. Manso had far grander ideas.
A very bright and keen observer of things, he saw that the norteamericanos’ seemingly insatiable demand for the Colombian product was rapidly overcoming supply. He sensed that this was only the beginning. The American appetite for coca powder was proving to be enormous. Many billions would be made in the next five or ten years.
The demand was there. How to supply it became increasingly problematic. Pablo even built a fleet of remote-controlled submarines, each capable of carrying two thousand kilos of cocaine from the shores of Colombia to the waters off Puerto Rico. It wasn’t enough. Manso had an idea.
It was obvious to him that Pablo would need ever increasing numbers of pilots to ferry the huge loads of his product north. So, he’d learn how to fly. But Pablo’s pilotos were a close-knit group and shunned the young Cuban hothead. He begged the pilots for flying lessons. But, another pilot meant less money for them, so they resisted.
He finally persuaded one of the younger pilots to teach him to fly by abducting the man’s sister. The man took his case to Pablo, who applauded Manso’s audacity. The next day, Manso was airborne.
He soloed after only six hours of instruction.
Pilots were in fact paid a lot more than the mere sicarios, or paid assassins, that Pablo employed in ever increasing numbers. It was the happiest time of Manso’s life. He was a swaggering piloto in gleaming aviator sunglasses, playing the narcos version of aerial cat and mouse with the government troops on his weekly runs to Managua in his C-123 transport plane.
With his newfound wealth, he purchased an American Cigarette speedboat. When the weather was too bad for flying, Manso and his brothers took to the sea to make their deliveries. Once the product had been delivered, they went in search of isolated tourist yachts, robbing and murdering at will.
The de Herreras brothers had become the deadliest pirates in the Caribbean. But it was not to last.
After an ill-considered midnight run north to Cuba to see their mother, a bloody shoot-out with Cuban gunboats off the Isle of Pines finally ended in their capture. The three brothers were taken to Havana. They were whisked from the airfield directly to the Palacio de la Revoluciуn and brought before el comandante.
Castro stood up behind his massive desk and stared at them, his hand on the sidearm that always hung from his belt.
“Ah,” Castro said. “The three little boys who murdered the Russian diplomat? Sн?”
“Sн, Comandante,” Manso said, smiling. “It was a great pleasure. The man was a pig. He insulted my mother in the street.”
“So, you cut his head off and sent it to the Soviet embassy in a piсata,” Castro said, walking around the desk.
Manso stiffened. Waiting in the anteroom outside the Maximum Leader’s office, under the guns of the elite guards, he’d concluded that they were all to be shot where they stood. “We will die like men,” he had told his brothers. Now, it was simply a matter of waiting for the bullets to come. He’d seen men die badly. He didn’t intend to disgrace himself.
“Sн,Comandante. I used my machete. It was a clean cut! I am a Machetero! So are my brothers. We are proud sons of Oriente!”
Castro walked up to Manso and stared hard into his eyes. Then his face broke into a grin and he embraced the startled boy in his two strong arms.
Manso was too shocked to speak.
“This man you killed. His name was Dimitri Gokov. We suspected the Russian of being a double agent, spying for the americanos. This very morning, another Soviet agent confirmed under torture that Gokov was part of a U.S. group plotting an overthrow of our revolutionary government.”
“Comandante, I don’t—”
“You are a brave boy. And you have an absolutely amazing sense of timing! Had we caught you yesterday, you would have been shot!” Castro said, and laughed. In Castro’s mind, Manso’s piсata had sent a brilliant, if unwitting, message to both the politburo in Moscow and his enemies in Washington. He embraced Carlos and Juanito and handed all three brothers small black boxes. The three brothers looked at each other, grinning. Inside each box was a shiny golden star attached to a red silk ribbon.
In time, he further rewarded Manso with a commission in the Air Force. He gave Juanito and Carlos commissions, too, in the Army and Navy. All three had shown surprising initiative and risen swiftly to the highest ranks.
Carlitos was now one of the highest-ranking officers in the Navy. Both he and Juanito, comandante of the Western Army, had also secretly returned to the lucrative narco trade they knew so well. Manso’s only fear was that Carlitos’s insatiable love of the product was increasing his already frightening instability.
Carlitos was valuable, but he would have to be watched. Pitting brother against brother, Manso gave that responsibility to Juanito.
Castro’s reprieve had been the beginning of a long, profitable relationship for all of them. Those closest to the leader always reaped the largest rewards. As Fidel himself had once remarked, “I bathe myself, but I also splash others.” There were rumors of hundreds of millions in Castro’s Swiss bank accounts. Manso grew adept at siphoning off his share and more.
In time, all three brothers grew immensely rich from many sources. It was far easier to export your product to America from Cuba than it was from Colombia. Juanito, through his vast drug-running operations in the Exumas, got the product into Cuba. Manso and Carlos got it out of Cuba and into the United States. There were rumors, of course, about narco traffic at the very highest levels of the Cuban military. But Manso’s private security force made sure it was all kept very quiet.
Even the leader, if he knew of the de Herreras brothers’ sideline businesses, never mentioned it. El jefe was famously antidrug, and had even been trying to negotiate some kind of crackdown with the U.S. for years.
Manso and his leader had grown ever closer over the years. The leader, who was never able to sleep at night, would roam the streets of the old city with Manso, pouring out his frustrations and fears. Time passed, and the two men became, not brothers, because their age difference was too wide, but something akin to father and son.
Fidel had been born in 1926 at Las Manacas, near Biran, in northeastern Cuba. Manso had been born twenty-five years later in Mayari, the nearest neighboring town to Biran. They shared a common loathing for the gringo imperialists who had exploited the natural resources and the peasants of their beloved Oriente. This had been one of the earliest bonds between the aging leader and the promising young Manso.
He looked at his leader now, red-faced and shaking his fists in the anger he seemed to summon so easily. Manso took a sip from the cup of the warm lemonade and tried to relax. He was going to need every ounce of his courage and strength of mind to do what he had to do.