“Hmm,” Marina said, “we’ll see.” She accepted his going to Cuba, so long as he did it in a legal way, for she knew that he would have to see the country with his own eyes before he could give up his dream. But she was skeptical. It was her guess that no country would satisfy him and that he would be home in three months to a year. And she could not resist teasing him. “If you do go,” she said, “for heaven’s sake take some American soap. It will be dirty there.”
“Okay,” he replied. “You can send me packages if you’re still here.” Then he begged her again to come with him.
“Not to Cuba,” she said, “but Havana—a lovely city.”
Lee promised that she could study free of charge and get a job. Since he was American and the Cubans would be flattered to have an American defector, they would give him privileges—a job and a nice little house.
Marina hated that about her own country: Russians felt that foreigners were somehow better than they were and gave them every privilege. She could not believe the same might be true of Castro, of whom she had heard nothing but good.
“No, no,” she said. “They have real Communism there. You earn according to your work. You’ll have to work for ten years before they’ll give you any privileges. The place is full of poor people already. Besides,” she added, dropping her voice again in mild reproof, “it’s not who you are but what you are that will make all the difference to them.”
Marina had no thought of joining Lee in Cuba. Cuba, China, there was no telling where he might want to go next. Of course she would have to join him if she had no way of living in America. But the wisest course was to wait and see. It was her hope that he would become disillusioned in Cuba as he had in Russia, and that this time he might learn something from it. He would come home, settle down, and live a normal life with his family.
That was her dream. His was that she would join him wherever he pleased—“I go to China, you’ll go to China.” Or more ominous and more likely—“I’ll send you back to Russia. And if I don’t like Cuba, I will join you over there.” He added that while he was in Mexico City, he would go to the Soviet embassy and try to speed up her visa.
Marina did not realize that Lee could not go to Cuba and simply come home when he had had enough. Instead, this time he would face a real danger of imprisonment. Nor was it easy for an American to gain admission to Cuba, even from Mexico City. He would first have to go to the Soviet embassy and apply for a visa for Russia. Then he could go to the Cuban embassy with his Russian visa and apply for a visa to visit Cuba “in transit” to Russia. That was where Marina came in. She was his pretext and his fallback plan. He was going to Russia to join his wife and children. Lee had not changed at all. Russia was still a place of refuge in his mind, the place he would go if he got in trouble or if he ran out of choices elsewhere. Even though he had now experienced life in the Soviet Union for himself, Russia continued to hold the same place in his thoughts that it had five years earlier, during his talks with his Marine Corps comrades.
Once he was in Cuba, of course, Lee counted on the old magic to work. He would do in Havana exactly what he had done in Moscow in 1959: persuade the Cubans to let him stay. He would show them his clippings, his FPCC leaflets, his correspondence with the FPCC and the Communist Party, and all his bona fides as a Castro enthusiast and convince them that he was a believer and not a spy. Maybe they would allow him to join the army and train recruits in guerrilla warfare. Maybe Castro would send him out to help liberate neighboring islands. Or maybe he would stand by to help if there was an invasion from the United States. All he asked was to be allowed to fight for Castro.
Later, if he got tired of Cuba, he might go to China or take his American passport and visit various countries in Western Europe at a leisurely pace on his way to join Marina in Russia. Money, of course, was a problem, but maybe he would have earned some as a mercenary or as a Castro volunteer. Maybe he counted on Cuba to give him a subsidy as Russia had. Or maybe he did not think about money at all.
Lee’s plan bore a haunting similarity to his defection from America to Russia only four years before. Once again he would forsake his homeland and count on a foreign government to take care of him. The plan made no sense, of course. Even if Marina was permitted to return to Russia, it was extremely unlikely that he would be readmitted. There were no guarantees that he would be allowed to visit Cuba in transit, much less to remain there. And if he did succeed in visiting Cuba and was then denied readmission to Russia, he would face prosecution and imprisonment if he tried to return to America.
Real or unreal as the plan might be, Lee before the end of August was studying Spanish again, as he had done in 1958. At the close of each lesson, he asked Marina to give him a little test, especially a pronunciation test, since he had trouble with the Spanish “r.”
Lee appreciated Marina’s acquiescence, or her awareness, anyhow, that it was no use telling him what to do, and that the only way for him to learn whether he liked Cuba was to go there and experience it for himself. After she had given him her consent to go peacefully, via Mexico, he gave her his highest accolade—“You understand me.”
Despite the harmony that presently prevailed between them, there was an occasional sign that it was not a case of two minds with but a single thought. They had always agreed that their next child, a boy, was to be named “David Lee.” But for some time Lee had been turning another name over in his mind, and he cautiously broached it to Marina. He told her, stealing up a little on the subject, that he thought it might be a nice touch to call their new baby “Fidel.”
Marina had been trying to give in, trying to understand and accept Lee, and do nothing to jangle his nerves. But this was too much. Was she, or was she not, about to be the mother of this child? To think that politics, the cause of all her woes and the thing she hated most in life, was to be insinuated into her family, into her very belly, was more than Marina could abide.
She reasserted herself in all her old magnificent asperity. “There is no Fidel and there will be no Fidel in our family.”
— 31 —
Parting
The Oswalds’ neighbors are astonishingly unanimous about Lee’s movements after he lost his job. One of them was out of work, too, and it seems he enjoyed nothing better than noticing Lee’s comings and goings. All the neighbors agree that Lee was “in and out” of his apartment during the day but invariably home at night.[1] After reading at home all morning, during the afternoons he would sometimes catch a bus on the corner headed toward the business section, or walk that way. But he was never out for long. Once in a while he walked to a confectionery store on the corner of Magazine and Dufosset Streets, bought some ice cream, and carried it back to the apartment.[2] The Oswalds did their grocery shopping at the Winn-Dixie on Prytania Street.
The Garners, managers of the building, recall that Lee was never on time with the rent. Mrs. Garner vividly remembers Lee, clad only in a pair of outgrown, gold high school basketball shorts—no shirt—going up and down the street at night stuffing his garbage into everybody’s cans, including hers, because he could not or would not spend money to buy a garbage can for himself.[3]
Lee spent most of the day and the early evening, until the light began to fade, reading on the screened-in side porch of his apartment. As summer lengthened and dusk came on earlier, he carried a lamp onto the porch so he could read a little later. But the seriousness and even the quantity of his reading had fallen off. During the first part of the summer, he had read political books, biographies, and books about Russia and Communism, from one of which he confronted Marina one night with the surmise that she must be illegitimate. She blushed deeply and denied it. But after the beginning of August, most of his reading consisted of a lighter diet of spy novels and science fiction. Marina had no idea what he was reading, but from indoors she could see that sometimes Lee was not reading at all. He was just sitting on the porch looking out on the street. “He’s been inside all day and wants to see the people out walking,” she said to herself.
1
See, for example, remarks by Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Eames in Exhibit No. 1154, Vol. 22, p. 191.