Page 33 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

CHAPTER THREE

The Queen of Cuba

1.

Let’s take a look at another Cuban spy story.
In the early 1990s, thousands of Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled
together crude boats—made of inner tubes and metal drums and wooden doors and any number of
other stray parts—and set out on a desperate voyage across the ninety miles of the Florida Straits to
the United States. By one estimate, as many as 24,000 people died attempting the journey. It was a
human-rights disaster. In response, a group of Cuban emigrés in Miami founded Hermanos al
Rescate—Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift air force of single-engine Cessna
Skymasters and took to the skies over the Florida Straits, searching for refugees from the air and
radioing their coordinates to the Coast Guard. Hermanos al Rescate saved thousands of lives. They
became heroes.

As time passed, the emigrés grew more ambitious. They began flying into Cuban airspace,
dropping leaflets on Havana urging the Cuban people to rise up against Castro’s regime. The Cuban
government, already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to
a head on February 24, 1996. That afternoon three Hermanos al Rescate planes took off for the
Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets shot two
of the planes out of the sky, killing all four people aboard.
The response to the attack was immediate. The United Nations Security Council passed a
resolution denouncing the Cuban government. A grave President Clinton held a press conference.
The Cuban emigré population in Miami was furious. The two planes had been shot down in
international airspace, making the incident tantamount to an act of war. The radio chatter among the
Cuban pilots was released to the press:
“We hit him, cojones, we hit him.”
“We retired them, cojones.”

“We hit them.”
“Fuckers.”
“Mark the place where we retired them.”
“This one won’t fuck with us anymore.”
And then, after one of the MiGs zeroed in on the second Cessna:
“Homeland or death, you bastards.”
But in the midst of the controversy, the story suddenly shifted. A retired U.S. rear admiral named
Eugene Carroll gave an interview to CNN. Carroll was an influential figure inside Washington. He
had formerly served as the director of all U.S. armed forces in Europe, with 7,000 weapons at his
disposal. Just before the Hermanos al Rescate shoot-down, Carroll said, he and a small group of
military analysts had met with top Cuban officials.

CNN: Admiral, can you tell me what happened on your trip to Cuba, who you spoke with and
what you were told?