The breaking  story of Santiago’s assassination came across the teletype machine in it’s usual cacophony of clatter chatter filling the air of our newsroom in New York  with the droning mantra of chunka-chunka noise as it spat out each sentence from our Miami newswire service affiliate describing that day’s events in Havana. You almost became immune to the teletype noise over the years, but when the alarm bell rang we all would dash to it for a quick read of the copy to see what was breaking news in the world around us.

Had the world ended? Did Moscow launch nukes at us? Was the President killed in a plane crash? Important questions? Yes, if humanity was on the brink of imminent destruction, every news agency wanted to scoop the competing newsrooms that we fought with on a daily basis.  We all wanted to be first even if it was the last blast of a nuclear attack.

This was October 1957. There were more important things on our minds.  This is New York after all. We are the world! We wanted to know one thing. Would the Yankees win the ‘57 series over Milwaukee? Hell we had Mickey Mantle, Old Number 7 and the Braves were drunks, and worse, they had Irish roots as the Boston Braves.  Time would tell. Hell, this was New York and the office pool was Yankee Town USA. If the Soviets were gonna nuke us….fine...just wait until the series if over.

The night the Santiago murder broke over the wire service, I was acting night editor that evening. Once a week one of the reporters would rotate that position so Lew Abrams could have a night off after pulling six 12 hour shifts in a row. Could be worse. I could be the night editor.

Instead I was happy being me. Mickey Russo, loose cannon reporter of sports initially,  now covering the local crime beat. Good training and material for “that great American novel”  I would write someday. Getting in the grit and grime of New York’s underworld gutter of organized crime, gamblers, junkies and hookers.

I was hired by our fearless leader and editor, Hymie Bachman, the take no prisoners Jewish journalist with an eye for news as keen as a grifter who can spot a mark at ten paces. In another life he  could have been an exemplary stogie smoking hotel detective at the Waldorf catching jewel thieves and unmasking sexual peccadillos of cheating spouses sweating up the sheets and stealing towels.

I ripped the wire copy from the machine after a quick cursory glance. Oh hell. Another killing in a banana republic. The have political assassinations and coups on a regular basis. Just this year in Columbia, General Rojas was overthrown by his own military with the backing of all political parties. It was fair payback as  he had overthrown the former Gomez administration in 1953 with the same military. Everybody wants be king at one point in their lives. In South America, anyone with enough guns can.

Haiti was now being run and ruined by the Duvalier regime which would make it one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere with a legacy of political murder, executions and a shutdown of a free press and free expression while, Cuba was merely another Caribbean paper hat kingdom run by the thug Batista with the help and influence of the US Mafia spearheaded by Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky.  The Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford of Team Mafia, New Yorik

While the Mob ruled the nightclubs and gambling and prostitution rackets, Batista turned a blind eye and enjoyed the kickbacks and wealth pouring into his private banks accounts. The Cuban people were poor and frustrated. There had been a small revolutionary movement underway and had made little progress since it’s inception in 1953 when a small band of rebels attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The leader of the revolt,  a young Cuban, Fidel Castro was arrested and imprisoned. He and others were eventually released in 1955 when Fidel and his brother Raul went to Mexico City to meet  man with a plan. An Argentine firebrand named Ernesto Che Guevara.

They set sail on the Good Ship Lollipop from Mexico to Cuba 1n 1956 and this year, 1957 has proven that it’s anybodies ball game. The Braves or the Yankees? Batista or the Rebels.

I didn’t keep up on Banana Republic coups, revolts, or civil wars. My beat was the street….until tonight. By mid morning I would be packing my bags and heading into the Cuban maelstrom on assignment from my editor, Hymie Bachman after a meeting with him behind closed doors and a mysterious man with wingtip FBI shoes as I called them.

Within 24 hours I would begin  a two year journey in a tropical paradise as a foreign correspondent and find myself solving the Santiago murder, falling in love with his daughter, (a female revolutionary packing a Russian machine gun) and myself ending up on a death squad hit list by the Batista regime, the US mob and those humorless fellows at the CIA.  

The worst part of all of this is that the Yankee’s would lose to the Braves and I’d be out $200 in a prideful fools bet...