says hit the vehicles, hit the limo, hit the bikes, hit one of the Secret Service guys, aren't they sworn to take the shot?"
"Remember Ray Ray, shoot to miss." Mick said.
"But truthfully Mick, in the moment, shit happens and my belief is there is less risk with one shooter. Hell all we want to do is to take a shot that hits the limo, knocks out a light, for Christ sakes 1 have a twelve year old that could do that. You get a bunch of goddamn cowboys out there and it becomes a bar-room free for all."
"But you can't phony this thing up, Ray Ray."
"Any news on the sight?"
"Still Miami."
"Great, every Cuban in the crowd will be armed."
"That's the spot most advisable and likely to produce a motorcade with convertibles, and that is the reason we need those fifty men in the crowd to hack any would be shooter."
Mick asked Ray Ray to stay in touch with Banister, and at the first sign of the kid there would be an immediate need for a thorough debriefing and determination as to his fitness to handle this job. Put the kid and his family in a trailer in a remote spots that he doesn't fly away again, or decide to hurt someone. Have a 24/7 stake-out...get his tacit approval to take the shot.
Banister was like the house manager of a co-ed dorm on a Cuban holiday. The office was always a beehive of activity of every type and size with boom-boxes held on the shoulder and dancing to the music. Guy would find a substitute if the kid stayed out of sight, maybe someone with a better record for shooting the rifle with a high-powered scope. A shooter who could blast a button from a shirt cuff at two hundred yards...or not.
When Mick had gone, Ray Ray sat in the bleachers watching the recruits, and he remembered when he once was in their shoes, he could not remember being so awkward and he would have advised them to depend more on the body balance. But that wasn't his gig now. The sounds of Asian chatter were a reminder that Saigon was once again the hot spot. It was the talk of the base. He couldn't imagine going back to Asia and he thought to himself, let’s take care of Cuba and quiet South Florida. Chopo Montano and Ricky Valdez had gotten the message, and promptly left a job picking oranges in South Florida to drive up to see what their Gringo friend, Ray Ray had in the works. They felt certain that it had to do with Cuba and this was answer to their prayers to give them another shot at Castro and his brutal brother Raul. They would gladly exchange oranges for weapons even with the Bay of Pigs fresh in their minds. They were certain the fuck-up there was an anomaly which wouldn’t happen again because Kennedy was sure to be replaced.
These were men hardened by back-breaking labor, toiling in the fields in the hot sun and they looked the part of migrants. Chopo was a sturdy short man with no neck and weighing about 165 pounds. He had a shaved head with tattoos running from his wrist to just beneath his chin. He had a thin black mustache and goatee. His partner, Rickie Valdez liked to wear a Texan style cattleman’s hat, looking like the wonderful western actor Yuhl Brenner. He was thin but very strong from the work in the Orange Groves. He too was tattooed from the waist-up with prison art for two or three books of stamps. Figure twenty stamps at 15 cents and you have a cheap, permanent piece of art…on the street this job would have taken a month’s wages.
The men had a passion for Cuba and a hatred for the Castro brothers, even though they hated Batista equally. The family in Cuba was poor sugar cane farmers but the family was tight knit and loving. The same kind of emotion which once existed in the United States before communication brain washed the children who had to have someone’s named stitched on their ass and a certain technology stuck in their ear and China White stuffed up their nose.
Chopo and Ray Ray were very close, trusted each other and Chopo remembered each time they met that Ray Ray had saved his life, literally dragging him across a field under fire. Chopo had suffered a seizure in the heat of battle and it was Ray Ray who got his belt into his mouth to secure the tongue while firing at the enemy. Then he placed the 165 pound Chopo on his wide shoulder and carried him to safety. By the time the air cover came in, Chopo had fully recovered and was peaceful. The men had bonded as only a war experience will often do and there after both trusted each other implicitly, even though Chopo lovingly referred to Ray Ray as his uptown Gringo.
Both Chopo and his partner Valdez had been with Castro and Che Guevara, actually they called him “Ernesto” who was the heart and brains behind the origination of the guerrilla style warfare to free the Cubans from the dictator Batista.
Che Guevara was a physician, born in 1928 and died in 1967, and in 1952 at the age of 24 he took part in the riots against Juan Peron in his birth place of Argentina. He then joined agitators in Bolivia and used his skill as a physician to work among the Lepers. In 1953 he went to Guatemala joining the pro communist regime of Jacaba Arbenz Guzman and when Guzman was overthrown in 1954, he fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and other Cuban rebels. Che Guevara became Castro’s trusted Lieutenant soon after the rebel invasion of Cuba in 1956. Che proved to be a resourceful guerrilla and was soon one of Castro’s closest and most trusted friends. As President of the Cuban National Bank after the fall of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, he established financial methodology which was instrumental in cutting Cuba’s traditional economic ties to the United States and in the direction of Cuba’s flow of trade to the communist bloc countries. He served as the Minister of Trade and Industry from 1961 to 1965.
At heart a revolutionary rather than an administrator, he left Cuba in 1965 in order to foster revolutionary activity in other countries. In 1967 while directing a guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was wounded in a clash with government troops, captured, and executed.
He wrote several books while on the field of battle: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Man and Socialism in Cuba (1967 and Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968). Che was thirty-nine years of age when executed.
In the early days of the Freedom Fighters, men like Chopo formed the heart and soul of the effort to free their loved ones from the oppression, the poverty in which they were moribund by an evil dictator supported by the United States. But along the way Castro lost sight of the main purpose and ultimately became more oppressive than was Batista, especially against those who opposed him.
Even as evil and crushing as Batista was, he had to maintain some semblance of humanistic concern in order to continue the support from the United States who had its own brand of bigotry and abuse. Additionally, the Mafia was instrumental in urging the Batista regimes to moderate its abuse of its people in order to preclude a more close scrutiny of the activity by America...and its liberal elite.
"I knew you had something big to pay our way here from south Florida." Chopo said.
"Yes...and Ricky...the wife (Lucy)" The men laughed, "How is the family?" Ray Ray asked.
"Senor, we are blessed." Vesquez said.
"And Chopo my dear friend has no woman turned you into a family man."
"You mean women, Gringo?"
"Oh yes, I forgot you and the Chimichanga, what is it the women see in you?"
Chopo feigned a fist to the ribs and shot out his tongue while making the shrill call of the Banshee Indian on the warpath."
The three men rocked in laughter as Chopo clowned...and the ritual handshake took place in the mind and the men knew all was well...the necessary foreplay between men. It was expected to loosen the men after the long intervals in which they had not seen o one another. They enjoyed the affection that only comes with time and the perilous nature of their business. In the end they knew the subject wasn't roses, wasn't wine, women and song nor
