Ana Montes - Queen of Cuba
Every war story, every survival, needs heroes. Particularly when these are at the service of the humble and not the powerful. Because there are two types of heroes: the first is in spite of themselves, due to the impossibility of escaping the task of duty. The latter is out of obedience to the top, out of engagement, or out of fury, the flag of convenience beats on their heart.
Two types of heroes are also associated with two models of heroism, opposite and never complementary, to which, consequently, two heroic narratives correspond. What they tell us are media stories, invented by experts, produced by brainstorming for this purpose, built from scratch, and launched everywhere. They are usually the ones we all know, elaborated and mediatized for us, in the search for a consensus: the construction of a convenient truth to be placed on the market for the circulation of ideas finds its effectiveness only when it is possible to turn events upside down own convenience.
If one wanted to look for examples of an upside-down narration of events in order to generate functional heroism, one would find plenty. Literature, poetry, cinema, and journalism abound. One of the best-known examples is the representation of the liberation of Auschwitz, which Roberto Benigni, the Italian filmmaker of the film "Life is beautiful", assigned, in defiance of what actually happened, to US soldiers who landed in Europe. Historical truth instead assigns the liberation of the concentration camp in Poland and several others to the Soviet Red Army. It was the Russian soldiers (and not the Americans) who opened wide the gates of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, who made known the horror of the gas chambers in the scattered Nazi extermination camps throughout Eastern Europe, one of the main tools of the Holocaust. Roberto Benigni's lie was spread right up to the Oscars: by awarding the Americans with unmotivated heroism he won an Oscar, if he had recounted the deeds of the Soviets he would have won nothing.
Frame from the Roberto Benigni’s movie La vita è bella (Life is beatiful), 1997.
Unfortunately, history is full of heroes of the latter; there is no continent that remains unscathed, also because there is no continent that has not known the horror of imperial wars and conquests. The one we will talk about briefly here today is called Ana Belén Montes and she has recently returned free after a 20-year captivity, although she will be subjected to special surveillance for five years. A Puerto Rican nationalized in the United States, born in 1957, the daughter of an obtuse military doctor, she fell in love with the cause of Cuba and for years she cheated everyone: she passed the lie detector, she deceived her brother Tito and her sister Lucy, both in the FBI. For years she passed US data, names and plans against the island to Cuban intelligence.
Entered as a typist at the Ministry of Justice, she makes a career, grows in her role, and, thanks to a recognized competence, she gets to have extremely delicate dossiers in her hands. Approached by Cuban agents, she fakes a trip to Europe but she goes to Havana, where she is trained and trained further. Upon her return to the USA, she manages to be employed in the Ministry of Defense, although her divergent positions from those of the government on policy towards Cuba have been reported. She is good and competent and no meeting about the Cuban situation sees her as a stranger.
Disciplined, and cautious, she learns everything by heart and then copies it onto a floppy disk which she delivers to Cuban agents at restaurant meetings. She receives orders via coded numbers transmitted over shortwave. Sober, without makeup, little jewelry, and no ostentation, Ana sacrifices her private life for the cause.
Her colleagues perceive her as different from them but they respect her competence and the director of the CIA, George Tenet, will personally deliver her in 1997 particular commendation, a Certificate of Distinction of Intelligence.
Ana Montes receiving a Certificate of Distinction from CIA director George Tenet, 1997.
On September 21, 2001 she was arrested thanks to an indirect information from the NSA. the US administration declared that she had revealed to Havana almost all US intelligence operations on the island and was therefore considered one of the "most harmful spies" for American security. Michelle Van Cleave, who headed counterintelligence under President George W. Bush, told Congress in 2012 that Montes had "compromised virtually everything we knew about Cuba and our operations on the island and the government in Havana could use all the information to his advantage".
Ana Belén is tried and sentenced to 23 years in prison, narrowly escaping the death penalty. In 20 years she has no temptation to give in to promises and threats. With an uncommon inner discipline and ethics, she repeats to her jailers that she does not regret what she did, indeed she would do it again. You cannot stand the US terrorist policy towards Cuba and you believe you have done what you could and therefore you had to do.
Now she is free, but somehow Ana Belén, she is free, she has always been free, because she has resisted and shown courage and tenacity, fortitude and perseverance out of the ordinary.
Are you a heroine? Yes, like all those who, faced with the arrogant overwhelming power of the empire, which gets on your skin without anyone being able to do anything to help you, resort to all their energies and their convictions, their sense of justice and to their pride, their belonging and their respect for themselves and their ideals. There is no better way to live or to die. May life welcome you and hug you tight, Ana Belén.
The author, Fabrizio Casari, is an Italian journalist and director of Altrenotizie.org.
He has been dealing with foreign policy for about 36 years, with special reference to the Latin American area but also with attention to the Middle East.
In 2017 he wrote the book Nicaragua, the last revolution.