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Once foes, now allies for future of Cuba

The two men were on opposite sides of the revolution. Now, they both want the island to improve relations with the United States.

By DAVID ADAMS
Published December 17, 2006

HAVANA - They once fought on opposite sides in one of Cuba's most historic battles.

One became a revolutionary comandante, and the other joined the exile counterrevolution in Miami. For decades they stood their ground, each doing his bit in the struggle for control of the island.

But on a recent afternoon in Havana, Tony Zamora, who once slipped ashore at the Bay of Pigs wearing camouflage and carrying a rifle, walked casually up the garden path of his former adversary.

"Que pasa, Julio," Zamora, 65, called out cheerfully.

Julio Garcia Oliveras, 75, waited on the porch in a wooden rocking chair. He couldn't rise to greet his visitor because of a shrapnel wound to his hip.

"Welcome. Come on in," he said, before cutting to the chase.

"So, tell me what's going on over there," he said, alluding to the political scene in Miami.

There has been plenty to talk about since Fidel Castro fell gravely ill in late July and ceded power to his younger brother, Raul. But this conversation is rare indeed.

Their highly informal conversations - stretching back four years - are not sanctioned by any government and have no political objective. Rather they are personal encounters between two aging warriors who, each by his own peculiar route, has chosen the path of peaceful reconciliation.

How they met and how they have nurtured their unlikely friendship could in its own small way offer a model for future relations between two governments that have not had formal diplomatic ties in 46 years.

"The willingness of Cubans to dialogue can't be left to the governments alone," said Zamora, a plain-speaking Miami lawyer with a large U.S. law firm. "It's up to individuals as well."

Wisdom with age

Zamora was only 19 years old when he came ashore with the 1,511-strong Bay of Pigs invasion force on April 17, 1961.

Two days earlier, U.S. B-26 bombers had targeted the main military base in Havana as part of a plan to soften Cuba's defenses.

One bomb exploded an ammunition truck. A jagged chunk of shrapnel caught Garcia Oliveras in the right hip.

"Is that you?" asked Zamora, pointing at a photo of a man stretched out on an operating table. Garcia Oliveras said he needed eight operations before he could walk again.

The invasion force was easily defeated, and Zamora was captured. He spent 20 months as a prisoner before a release was negotiated in exchange for $53-million in food and medicine.

Back in Miami, Zamora remained deeply involved in the Cuban cause.

He served as legal counsel to the Cuban American National Foundation, in its day the most influential anti-Castro political force in Miami.

Meanwhile, Garcia Oliveras, who had fought with distinction in the rebel movement against dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, had risen up the ranks of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Ministry. An architect by training, he helped set up the military's engineering corps.

But over time, unbeknownst to each other, the yawning political divide between Zamora and Garcia Oliveras began to close.

Zamora's views began to shift after the fall of the Soviet Union. Like many, he imagined the loss of Soviet aid would force Cuba to open up. However, it soon became clear that the island's Communist Party was determined to resist any change, whatever it cost in terms of economic isolation and hardship.

"I realized I had gotten caught up in this thing called the Cold War," he said. "After it was over, my anger faded away. I turned the page."

Garcia Oliveras had been doing his own thinking too, though his loyalty to the government remained steadfast. After 20 years in the Defense Ministry, he left to pursue a doctorate in economics. In the 1990s, as president of the Cuban Chamber of Commerce, he became an advocate for private enterprise and foreign investment in Cuba.

They met more by accident than design.

Zamora was looking for contacts in Cuba to help him research the Cuban legal system and was told about a magazine edited by Garcia Oliveras, Bimestre Cubana Cuba Bimonthly.

The first meeting was awkward.

Zamora felt he needed to explain his background, including the large gold-plated memento of his service in Brigade 2506 that he still wears on his finger. "He was the one who told me about the ring," said Garcia Oliveras, screwing up his face in simulated shock.

The pair now joke about Zamora's part in Garcia Oliveras' war wound.

"It wasn't him. He's innocent," Garcia Oliveras said with a laugh.

Sacrifices to make

During their recent visit, they talked enthusiastically about Raul Castro's speech a few days earlier in which he seemed to offer an olive branch of dialogue with Washington. Garcia Oliveras had been so pleased he sent a congratulatory note to Castro.

"There's going to be a transformation," he predicted, speaking about a post-Fidel government. "We made the first socialist revolution in Latin America. In military terms we need to consolidate our gains." The revolution, he said, needs to turn its attention to pressing social issues, such as housing, transportation and electricity.

Zamora said the speech had been broadcast live in Miami. Some Cuban-Americans were impressed by the younger Castro's measured tone and the lack of anti-imperialist vitriol. More and more Cuban-Americans question the 4-decades-old economic embargo, he said.

Zamora said issues such as property rights and inheritance will be crucial if relations are ever to normalize between the United States and Cuba.

"It's going to be fundamental," Garcia Oliveras agreed. Doubts over property titles will scare off investment, by both Cubans and foreigners, he said.

Zamora takes a radical position, favoring a sweeping law recognizing all current residents of property as the uncontested owners. Such a law, he argues, is the only way to guarantee stability and avoid legal battles that could tear the island apart.

"I don't care a hoot about my house," he said later as he drove by the five-bedroom neo-classical home where he grew up.

"You have to accept that the revolution happened and it changed Cuba," he said. "Objectively, that's where you have to start from."

In 2002 he organized a legal conference co-sponsored by the University of Florida that attracted more than 80 lawyers from the United States. He planned another conference in 2003, but the Treasury Department rejected his license application, citing tightened embargo regulations.

Even so, he's planning another conference next year.

After he said goodbye to Garcia Oliveras, Zamora stopped by the family's tomb in Havana's sprawling Colon cemetery.

"It's such a peaceful place," he said. He doesn't understand why so many Cuban-Americans refuse to set foot in Cuba while there's a Castro in power.

It might be difficult for families who lost loved ones at the hands of the revolution, he mused. But he, too, lost friends during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and there were dead on the Cuban side, too. Many more, like Garcia Oliveras, were injured.

"What does politics have to do with the tomb of my father?" Zamora asked. "Life is too short."

David Adams can be reached at dadams@sptimes.com or (305) 361-6393.

[Last modified December 17, 2006, 00:22:27]