THE LAST
CASUALTY OF THE BAY OF PIGS
By Myra
MacPherson
October
17, 1989
MIAMI --
On a Saturday evening not too long ago, Jose Perez San Roman carefully vacuumed
his two-bedroom mobile home, left his mementos in orderly piles, painstakingly
wrote his last letter to friends and family, then measured out enough
medication to ensure an overdose.
The
former commander, who in times past stood with President Kennedy as throngs
cheered, planned his death as meticulously as he had orchestrated military
maneuvers. His brother, Roberto, found San Roman's body in bed dressed in
trousers and shirt, arms at his sides close to his body. "In position,
like a soldier," recalls Roberto as tears come to his eyes. San Roman's
suicide came last month at the age of 58, but friends and family believe he
died 28 years ago on the beaches of Cuba when he was the 29-year-old commander
of the 1,500-strong 2506 Brigade of Cuban soldiers.
Then, on
April 17, 1961, he watched in horror as his troops were slaughtered in the Bay
of Pigs invasion as they waited in vain for promised support from the United
States. There were many tragedies of the Bay of Pigs assault; the lost life of
Jose "Pepe" San Roman was a consummate sorrow. A cadet and officer
who earned highest honors in his native Cuba, San Roman was picked by the CIA
to command the invasion because of qualities everyone remembers -- steady,
professional leadership tempered with goodness. He was also remarkably
trusting, a man who had "absolute faith in the support he was going to
get," recalls Alfredo Duran, another Bay of Pigs veteran. That is why he
could call on the brigade to salute the Cuban flag as it was raised at sunset
on the transport ship Blagar as they neared the coast of Cuba. The Cuban
national anthem was sung. They were invincible. Liberation was theirs. Roberto,
who fought at his brother's side during the three-day battle, said,
"During our military upbringing in Cuba and through all the barrage of
movies from Hollywood, we always thought the might of the United States armed
forces was such that they would succeed in whatever they got involved in.
As plans
changed from guerrilla warfare to a task force brigade, we thought, 'There is
no chance Castro can win.' "One of the things that always bothered my
brother later was that he never questioned any of the American plans." The
guilt and sorrow and sense of betrayal that haunted Pepe San Roman for the rest
of his life began in those frantic last hours at Playa Giron. San Roman's pleas
for help to the Blagar remain chilling to this day. At dawn: "Do you
people realize how desperate the situation is? Do you back us or quit? All we
want is low jet air cover ... need it badly or cannot survive." An hour
later, 6:13 a.m.: "Blue Beach under attack. ... Where is promised air
cover?" 7:12 a.m.: "Enemy on trucks coming from Red Beach are right
now 3 kilometers from Blue Beach." 8:15 a.m.: "Situation critical ...
need urgently air support." 9:14 a.m: "Where the hell is jet
cover?" 9:55 a.m.: "Can you throw something into this vital point in
battle? Anything. Just let jet pilots loose." The messages came quickly
toward the end: "In water. Out of ammo. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive
in next hour. Send all available aircraft now." In his book, "The Bay
of Pigs," Haynes Johnson wrote, "through all the chaos and despair of
defeat, Pepe retained the calm that was his hallmark. Those who heard him on
the radio that day ... heard the quiet voice, sounding more tired, edged more
with anger and bitterness but still determined and still calm."
The
weary men fought on the cries of the wounded echoing in the broiling sun. Pepe
saw a best friend in a jeep "lying there bleeding all over, as if he had
exploded inside. He was lying there as a person that is going to die very soon
...," he told Johnson, "and he had the courage to tell me, 'I may not
see it but I am sure we will win.' And then he shouted, and I will never forget
it, 'Beat them! Beat them!' " Shortly after 4 that afternoon San Roman
sent his last message before retreating to the woods with what was left of his
brigade: "Am destroying all my equipment and communications. Tanks are in
sight. I have nothing to fight with. I cannot wait for you." In
Remembrance Roberto, at 54, looks like the comfortable businessman he now is.
Warrior tautness has given way to a slight paunch. Wounded in those last hours
of battle, Roberto escaped; but he was 20 days at sea before rescue, thinking
that his brother was dead. Pepe San Roman, in turn, was convinced of his
younger brother's death. Fidel Castro, confronting his prize prisoner in San
Roman's cell, told him a month later that Roberto was alive. Roberto's voice
cracks as he looks back over Pepe's life -- his golden promise, the days of
battle and almost two years of prison. Then fame and obscurity, and the ordeal
of trying to survive the demons of his memories. "If all of this had not
happened in Cuba, he would have lived all his life a happy man," Roberto
believes.
Historical
accounts praise the valor of the Cuban soldiers against impossible odds; blame
for the bungled mission centered on the CIA and the Kennedy administration. But
this was no consolation for Pepe San Roman. The commander was, in effect, a
one-man metaphor for the feelings of betrayal, defeat and survival guilt that
would later haunt a generation of Vietnam veterans. "He took the defeat
all into himself," says Johnson, who spent months with San Roman while
writing the book.
"He
was a sweet, sweet person, if that term can be applied to a military
commander." Says Roberto, "We all felt, and he should have felt, that
we were proud of having hit Castro the hardest with so little supplies. That
was enough for me to survive the betrayal, but being in charge, Pepe just
couldn't." A Cuban Youth San Roman, a bright and artistically inclined
youth, was called by his nickname Pepe. His family was poor, and their bid for
respectability and local prominence came through the army. His father, a second
lieutenant at the age of 18, was a self-made officer. His greatest desire was
that his sons get an education. He insisted that his children study English at
night.
"When
we came to this country," says Roberto, "we learned what a gift our
father had given us." Unable to afford the university in Havana, Pepe and
Roberto went to military school, where they quickly excelled. Pepe ranked first
in his class and became captain cadet, in charge of 250 cadets. "I was
first sergeant cadet," recalls Roberto with a smile. "I was supposed
to be tough and I was." But Pepe's style was different. "Instead of
'you do this' and 'you do that,' first he talked to them, got their cooperation
and always gave a person a chance. Always. Even though he was strict, he would
always let you know what you had to do not to get in trouble." Driven to
excel, Pepe started to work at 15. "But I can remember him helping others,
staying up at night to help classmates with physics and calculus," says
Roberto. For years the younger brother cherished the intricate handcarved toys
-- buses complete with passengers, for example -- that Pepe created for him.
All his
life Pepe clung to pictures of a distant time in Cuba. They were among the
keepsakes given to his family with the suicide letter. His 1953 cadet yearbook
shows a handsome, slim 22-year-old winning a trophy for excellence in horseback
riding. It was a life of fencing, jumping horses, long infantry marches, rumba
dances with men in ceremonial blue dress uniform and their dates in crinolines.
Studious Pepe said his main ambition was to "gain some weight and sell his
Lincoln for $50 and to sleep." He met and fell in love with a neighborhood
girl and they married very young. They divorced about 10 years ago when Pepe
was no longer the man she once knew.
After
training in the states at Fort Benning, Ga. (where he graduated fourth among 81
men in 1956), Pepe returned to Cuba and Fulgencio Batista's army. But the San
Romans, father and sons, abhorred the excesses of Batista's army and were among
a group of officers arrested for conspiracy to overthrow Batista. It was the
first of three times Pepe San Roman would face Cuban jails. "My brother
and I were in the same cell," recalls Roberto. "They tortured us
psychologically -- what was going to happen to our family, how they were going
to hurt our father. Two months later Batista left, and that day we became the
heroes of the same people who had us in jail!"
Although
the San Romans did not side with Castro, they tried to make things work in the
earliest days of the revolution. Pepe was among a group of officers
commissioned to clean up and restructure the army. Roberto was in hiding
because he had been among Batista's troops who fought Castro in the mountains:
"My brother was able to get a lot of friends out of jail; he was the one
who always hid me in different places." Pepe helped many to escape to the
United States until he was arrested, this time by Castro. When released in
1959, Pepe and Roberto left for the United States. Roberto recalls the terrible
"sense of guilt and strain as we left our family behind. We had no promise
of any kind of financial aid to our families. It bothered him and me a lot. But
we were thinking we'd be back in Cuba in a year or six months." Their
parents, wives and children were able to follow them to Miami at the time the
two brothers were training to return to "liberate our homeland" with
the Bay of Pigs invasion.
After
the Debacle For 20 months, San Roman had ample time to brood over the Bay of
Pigs debacle as he languished in Castro's prison. He was often in solitary
confinement and never had a visitor. In a letter to his father, he wrote,
"I had to order the troops to retreat. ... God help them, I told myself,
what right do I have to order my men to sacrifice their honor? What right do I
have to order men to go on building Cuban widows, only for honor. ... Our
purpose was not to kill Cubans, our purpose was to win a war that will bring
peace and happiness to all Cubans, and this war was lost to us." Later he
was to write how he "hated the United States, and felt that I had been
betrayed. ... Many times I had the feeling that we were thrown there to see
what happened, because they were sure that Fidel was going to capture us and
put all of us in the firing squad and we would be killed and there would be a
great scandal in the whole world... .
" San Roman and two other brigade
leaders were placed in the bartolinas, the worst cells. "I thought that
only a pig could live there," San Roman told Johnson. Rats and cockroaches
filled the dark cell; the toilet was a hole in the floor. At one point, they
were allowed to join the men of Brigade 2506 and San Roman immediately assumed
command -- ordering his men to wear black armbands and form honor guards when
they learned that five prisoners had been shot. Castro seemed fascinated with
his major adversary and visited his cell for long talks.
In
Johnson's book, San Roman related how he talked back to Castro, decrying the
acts of a Castro officer who had put San Roman's men "on that trailer
truck and killed ten of them. That was a crime! That was assassination!"
Castro shouted: "San Roman, you don't deserve to live." Replied San
Roman, "That is the only thing that we agree about. I don't want to live
any more. I have been played with by the United States and now you are playing
with me here. ... Kill me, but don't play with me any more." Castro
reportedly walked away. After 20 months of waiting while the United States and Castro
haggled over the terms and the amount of money, brigade prisoners were finally
ransomed for more than $50 million in food and medical supplies.
It was
nighttime in December 1962 when the last planeload of released prisoners landed
in Miami. San Roman was asked to disembark first so that the brigade members
could salute him. Waiting among other brigade members who had escaped was his
weeping brother, Roberto. Taken by bus to ecstatic mobs, Pepe San Roman was
engulfed by brigade members "who tried to take us on their
shoulders." Recalled San Roman in "Bay of Pigs": "Then I
saw my mother and then I saw my wife and I ran to them but the crowd wouldn't
let me get to them. Finally I got to them and I almost killed my mother and my
wife and my kids with the embrace I gave them. It was a very great moment
because I never thought I would see them again."
He heard
the words of praise coming from the microphones, as if off in a distance,
hearing little of what was said "because I was just crazy with
happiness." It was one of the last times Pepe San Roman would feel such
total joy. Beyond the Homecoming At their homecoming celebration, 80,000
cheered San Roman and the other warriors in the Orange Bowl, as Jacqueline
Kennedy spoke, in Spanish, of their bravery and the president stood solemnly
beside San Roman. But all too soon San Roman was left with the lonely ordeal of
trying to forget. For a while, his friendship with Robert Kennedy helped.
For
several months, the Kennedys provided San Roman and his family with a furnished
home near them at Hickory Hill. Some evenings, Robert Kennedy would ride over,
bringing an extra horse for San Roman and they would ride off into the woods of
McLean, Va. San Roman's letters from Ethel and Robert Kennedy, warm and
personal, were among the souvenirs left to his family at his death. The
question is asked, after the sense of betrayal felt by San Roman and so many
members of the brigade, how they could work again with the Kennedys and the
United States. (Many of them joined the Army and the CIA.)
Roberto,
who was sent by Robert Kennedy to Central American countries to seek aid for a
second invasion, says, "There was nobody else in this hemisphere that
wanted to help us. The only open door for Pepe's men, whether financial help or
education or another try at Cuba, was the American government -- the same
government that left us there. And so Pepe ate his words and his pride and went
with them." Roberto believes the Kennedys had a sense of guilt and wanted
to help, but even those offers were slights to San Roman's talents. "Pepe
doesn't know what he was going to do and he told Robert Kennedy he wanted to
work with his hands. He was a beautiful artist," says Roberto, producing a
detailed sketch that Pepe once did of Roberto's daughter. "So what does
Kennedy find for him? A construction job at the lowest pay and the hardest work
-- moving concrete blocks. And then Pepe would come home from work and maybe
find Kennedy waiting to go on a horseback ride with him. What kind of
insensitivity! I could never believe it."
San
Roman decided to join the Army -- "that's what he knew how to do."
Roberto starts pacing the floor in agitation. "Instead of fighting
communism in Cuba 90 miles away, we had to go across the world to fight
communism." San Roman was now a paratrooper, in the special pathfinders
unit, and when he got orders to go to Vietnam, Roberto planted the seed that he
should resign.
"Al
Haig told him he was going to be court-martialed, accusing him of
cowardice," Roberto recalls today. One of the few times San Roman ever
pulled rank, so to speak, was at this moment, in June 1965, when he wrote to
Lyndon Johnson. Bitterness laces the letter as he writes about the United
States' decision to "back off from supporting the 2506 assault brigade
which I commanded, in order to protect the best interests of this big nation
and the world, as the late president told me. ... "This morning I talked
by phone to Colonel Haig ... to explain the situation and tell him I wanted to
resign my commission. Colonel Haig felt he had the right to insult a veteran of
two wars against communism and implied ... that I was in the service just for
the money, and that I was trying to get off now just because of the risks
involved. ... I think you will agree with me Mr. President in {sic} that the
methods of this gentleman are not the best to make friends among allies."
Shortly after, San Roman received an honorable discharge. A pink carbon of his
letter to the president remained with San Roman to his death. Roberto now says,
"so that was another disillusionment, another lack of respect from the
Army to him."
Down and
Out Eventually, San Roman, his wife and four children settled in Miami near
Roberto. San Roman drifted in and out of jobs; boat dealer at 39, truck
operator at 50. He moved to Houston in 1982 and managed three tractor-trailer
combination trucks. During the Texas oil crisis, he closed the business and
returned to Miami in 1986. The last decade of his life was especially
troublesome to family and friends as they watched his depressions and pain.
"He couldn't communicate, couldn't concentrate," says Roberto. His
bitterness toward the United States had subsided but he still "lived the
invasion." Many brigade members, like Roberto, refused to get involved in
the Bay of Pigs veterans association -- "the meetings, anniversaries and
celebrations. Perhaps for me it was an automatic way of survival and peace of
mind," muses Roberto. For others, however, the Bay of Pigs was the
penultimate moment in their lives, to be invoked, even in sorrow.
Brigade
friends toasted their commandante Pepe San Roman this past summer at a tribute
that raised $6,000. But San Roman's depressions deepened. Once again, he and
his brother worked side by side, but this time it was in the world of business,
not battle. Roberto set aside a corner of his marine supply store for Pepe, who
made, sold and installed vertical blinds. "He was doing very well,
compared to before," says Roberto. But 10 days before his death last
month, San Roman began planning his end. He gave some pending business to a
cousin. His sister, Laly de La Cruz, who Roberto managed to get out of Cuba so
many years ago, returned home one night in that last week to find a message on
her machine from Pepe: "My sister, it is very late and you're not home. I
just called to tell you I love you very much and don't you ever forget
it."
His sister nervously dialed Pepe's number, got no answer, slept very
little and called again early the next morning. There was no answer. She went
to the store and told Roberto, who sent her immediately to Pepe's home. As Pepe
greeted her, his sister made believe that she had just stopped by to say hello
on the way to work. Roberto saw his brother only twice that week at work. Pepe
instead visited his grandchildren, bringing trinkets of marbles and small
coins. Then on Saturday night, Sept. 9, Roberto phoned about 8 o'clock and Pepe
told him his leg hurt from a flare-up of phlebitis. "I said, 'On Monday,
let's make a tour of the medical supply houses and find out if there is a
machine, like a water massage, for your leg,' " Robert recalls. He says
his brother replied, " 'Sure, let's do that on Monday.' I asked him what
he was doing and he said, 'I am writing.' I didn't like that, because normally
when he writes, he is depressed, mulling over the same things.
"Late
at night he cleaned the house, put everything mentioned in the letter in sight,
so that we could find them." Then Pepe drove to the home of an uncle and
placed his final letter in one of the cars. On Sunday morning, when his aunt
found the letter, she frantically called Pepe's sister, who called Roberto and
then 911. "When I arrived," recalls Roberto, "the police were
already there." The letter was addressed to his entire family in order -- two
sons and two daughters, sister and brother, uncles and cousins. San Roman
ordered his body cremated and the ashes sprinkled in the Brazos River in Texas
where he once played with his children. The ashes stayed in a closet in
Roberto's home until sister Laly took them to Texas last weekend. He gave his
avocado tree and a book on Cuba to Roberto, his paratrooper jump master wings
to his sons. ‘
The day
Roberto and Laly had dreaded for years had arrived. As he reads the letter now,
Roberto does not stop the tears that touch his cheeks. In his elegant script,
Pepe San Roman wrote, "Great is the sorrow for the shock I am about to
give you. I am sorry but I have to do it. There is no other way. This decision
is taken after 20 years of struggle against myself. You all know that I have
fought back with all my might, with all my will and tried every course
available from the sublime to the ridiculous, to no avail. But I am not
quitting. I am only dying so my death serves a purpose. I am responsible, not
guilty, for my last moments only. These I have done not in a moment of
desperation, depression or self rejection. These I have done talking with God
constantly for the last 10 days in almost complete isolation from others."
"God,"
he wrote, "does not punish guys like me to a life sentence of the
soul."
An
Epitaph An epitaph of sorts appears in Pepe San Roman's most recent resume and
job applications. His "work experience" included "political
imprisonments."
For
previous employer, San Roman listed "2506 ASSAULT BRIGADE." Under job
title he wrote "Brigade Commander.
Annual
salary: none.
Supervisor's
name: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."
And,
finally, "Reasons for leaving: Obvious."
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