Janet Ray Weininger holds a photo of her father, U.S. pilot Thomas
"Pete" Ray, who Fidel Castro's government had killed.
By Liz Balmaseda
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Palm Beach Post
Florida
USA
Infosearch:
José Cadenas
Analyst
Bureau Chief
USA
Research Dept.
La Nueva Cuba
January 20, 2007
On April 19, 1961, two young, golden-haired American girls lost their
fathers on the same island in separate strokes of violence. One girl was
5 years old, the other one 6.
For the next four and half decades of their lives, they would wage
individual campaigns to seek justice for the deaths of their fathers at
the hands of the Fidel Castro government in Cuba. Their journeys would
take startling, parallel turns through the labyrinths of Castro's Cuba
and the U.S. justice system
Two months ago, a U.S. federal judge ordered an American bank to turn
over $91 million in frozen Cuban assets to compensate for the deaths of
American businessman Howard Anderson and Alabama Air National Guard
pilot Thomas "Pete" Ray.
These are the stories of the two little girls who vowed to keep alive
the memories of their fathers.
In the name of her father, Bonnie Anderson takes to the sea each day in
waters so turquoise clear they remind her of Cuba. Cuba is where she
learned to fish as a young child. Her father, Howard Anderson, an
American businessman and boating aficionado in Havana, taught her how to
tie a fishing knot.
Four decades later, Bonnie, a veteran journalist and former TV news
executive-turned boat captain, ties that same knot each day as she
steers a 30-foot sport fisher along the flats surrounding Puerto Rico's
Culebra island, where she lives and operates a charter business.
The sea remains her most constant connection to the father she lost.
After a hasty trial marked by the prosecutor's courtroom hysterics,
Howard Anderson was executed by one of Fidel Castro's firing squads on
April 19, 1961. The government accused him of smuggling arms to
anti-Castro militants, charges that coincided with the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The timing proved deadly for the businessman. His executioners drained
blood from his body before taking him to the notorious paredÛn, the
firing wall, Bonnie learned while researching his death. They used his
blood for transfusions for Castro loyalists.
"He refused a blindfold. I learned later from political prisoners who
witnessed his execution that he whistled as the bullets tore into his
body. Though I was only 5 years old when he died, I remember that my dad
whistled when he was mad," she recalls.
Her father's execution left Bonnie, one of Anderson's four children,
with a lifelong mission: to seek justice and broadcast the details of
Castro's brutal treatment of his opponents. That mission took her to
Cuba as a young newspaper reporter in 1978, bringing her to the
nondescript plot on the western tip of the island where her father was
buried, and later face-to-face with the dictator she believes is
ultimately responsible for his death. Her first-person story about that
trip angered Castro and his government.
"Castro wrote two articles refuting me. I was not allowed to return to
Cuba for two decades," says Bonnie, now 51. Even more drastic than that,
the Cuban government dug up her father's remains and threw them out. She
found out when she returned to Cuba during Pope John Paul II's visit to
the island in 1998.
"I added a day of travel to Pinar del Rio to see my father's grave. I
had taken pictures when I went there the first time. But this time I was
just confounded. Where was the grave? All I saw was a deep hole in the
ground," she recalls. "The caretaker was the same old man I had seen 20
years earlier. He recognized me. He was so embarrassed. He told me he
was forced to throw out my father's remains. It was right after my first
trip. I could tell it hurt him to do so."
'We're all still in a daze'
This only strengthened Bonnie's resolve. In 2001, she joined her mother,
Dorothy Anderson McCarthy, and siblings in suing the Cuban government
for the wrongful death of Howard Anderson. As other victims of Castro
have done, the Andersons targeted Cuba's long-frozen assets in this country.
Days before Thanksgiving 2006, a New York federal judge ordered a U.S.
bank to turn over $91 million in frozen Cuban assets to the Andersons
and to Janet Ray Weininger, the daughter of another American executed in
Cuba that same day in 1961.
Once again, the Cuban government would rebut Bonnie's claims, although
belatedly. In Wednesday's Granma, the official Cuban government
newspaper, the Cuban foreign ministry denounced the women's demands as
"spurious" and called the court order "another unilateral decision to
steal Cuban financial assets."
Of the released funds, $67 million was designated for the Andersons.
"We're all still in a daze. Not a penny of this judgment was punitive.
This was all compensatory. It is money that represents the life of my
father," says Bonnie Anderson by phone from her Culebra island home.
Sadly, her mother died just weeks before the ruling.
"If there is any justice or sense of empowerment, it comes from knowing
that Castro must know he's lost a ton of money. This hurts him in the
pocket," says Anderson, who was born in Cuba.
Her family's tragic experience shaped Bonnie's convictions and, as a
journalist, gave her a rare insight into the Cuba story. But this
knowledge also put her at odds with those stuck in a Castro chic groove.
She recalls one tense conversation with Rick Kaplan, the former
president of CNN, where she worked as vice president in charge of
recruiting and training. Kaplan is an industry veteran who has been
scrutinized for his close ties to powerful political figures - Fidel
Castro among them. To Bonnie, he was one of those unfortunate types who
chose to be blinded by Castro's charisma at the expense of everything else.
"He looks at me and he says, 'I know he killed your dad, but he's still
a good guy in my book.' How on earth can anyone possibly say that?" She
never grew accustomed to the photographs she'd see in the offices of
executives, those smiling photos snapped beside a chummy Castro, framed
and cherished as some kind of prized collectible.
"This is so hard for me to understand," says Bonnie, who wrote about her
TV experience in a 2004 book, News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment and
the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcast News.
"People will sell their souls for a photo next to Castro. They think
it's a cool thing to know him, to be seen with this murderous dictator.
Let's get real: This is our Milosevic, our Saddam Hussein, our Pinochet,
our Idi Amin. This is a man who by his government's own admission
executed more than 20,000 so-called enemies of the state and imprisoned
hundreds of thousands of others because they did not support his brand
of communism or because they dared to speak out on behalf of free
speech. It's tragic to watch such a deep level of ignorance."
She was fired from CNN and later sued the network for discrimination.
That lawsuit was resolved out of court. Bonnie left the TV news business
and two years ago moved to a place that reminded her of her early
childhood years in the tropics. She bought a 6-acre property atop a hill
in Culebra, overlooking a bay.
"This is a little paradise. It looks and feels like Cuba to me," says
Bonnie, who runs a fishing operation called Culebra Anglers. She takes
her clients aboard her luxury Pursuit boat. It carries her away from her
most painful memories.
She named the boat the Andy. It was her father's nickname.
'Where is my father?'
In the name of her father, Janet Ray Weininger began writing letters to
Castro when she was a young girl. Her father, Pete Ray, an Alabama Air
National Guard pilot, was executed by Castro forces after his B-26 plane
was shot down during the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was 30 years old; she
was 6.
"Where is my father?" she demanded to know.
The Alabama-born girl was so intent on finding the truth surrounding her
father's death that she rebelled against her family's orders to remain
quiet and launched a campaign for the return of his body.
She traveled to Miami as a young college student on spring break. But
while other kids frolicked on the beach, Janet ventured into the exile
haunts of Little Havana, hoping to find someone who knew her father.
Not knowing a word of Spanish, she distributed slips of paper scribbled
with her father's name.
Her efforts paid off in ways she never anticipated. She not only found
exiled pilots who had flown and befriended her father but also fell in
love with the Cuban people. They became her family, and their island
became her passion.
At 52, she now lives in the greater Miami area. So relentless was
Janet's campaign that the Castro government was forced to acknowledge it
had her father's body.
It had been frozen and stored in a Havana morgue for 18 years. Cuba
agreed to return the body, and Pete Ray was given a burial with full
military honors in Birmingham, Ala., in December 1979.
The recent court order granted her $23.9 million. Janet says it could
never fill the void left by her father's death.
"My children never had a grandfather," she says at a Cuban cafe in Miami
one recent afternoon. "You learn to live with it, and you learn to turn
your life into a pathway of blessings."
She has returned to those dark childhood days in Tarrant, Ala., time
after time. Once, she even recorded her thoughts on a cassette tape,
which she titled "The Secret." Her story and its inevitable sequence of
events always coaxes out the frightened child within her. Listen to her
account of the days surrounding her father's death:
"It was near the end of April and I was at recess at Tarrant Elementary,
across the street from my grandparents, the Haydens, and I noticed this
dark car pull up at my grandparents' house. This was the nicest,
shiniest black car I'd ever seen. And out of this car came two to three
men dressed in suits. You never saw people in suits except on Sundays.
It was exciting, but something inside said something's not right. I
stood there with my fingers latched on to the fence, just watching the
house. The next thing I realized, everybody was gone from the playground
and my teacher was yelling: 'Janet Joy, are you daydreaming?' ''
When school was out that day, Janet recalls rushing back home to find
her grandfather wearing a grim look. She could tell he had been crying.
"I kept saying, 'I want to see Mom.' So finally they let us go in to see
her. And I walked in there and there was a little pink light glowing in
the room. I'd never seen my mother look like that. There were dark
circles under her eyes and she could barely talk. And what I didn't
realize is that it was that day that my mother slowly started to die.
The bright, beautiful woman that I knew that was rated 'most poised' in
her high school yearbook slowly began to die."
After several days passed, her mother told her to stay close to home
because she had something important to tell her.
"Is it a secret?" Janet asked.
"Yes," her mother said. So Janet ran out and told all her friends her
mother had a secret.
"I told them, 'She's gonna tell us that Daddy's coming home.' "
But when she returned home, she found only somber looks.
"Mom started telling us that God had come and taken Daddy to be an
angel, and now he would be in heaven and he would be our guardian angel
to watch over us. I started screaming, 'No! He's gonna come home!' I
just pushed by everybody and grabbed Chase, my dog. I ran out the front
porch and I just sobbed.
"That night my mother said, 'Why don't you kids sleep with me tonight?'
I slept on the side of the bed next to the window, holding Chase. My mom
was in the middle, and my brother was on the outside. Everybody just
started crying and crying."
Janet later learned the reason her mother decided to tell her the news
was because the men in suits, U.S. government operatives, had come to
tell her the story would be released to the press the following day.
"And while the whole world was focused on Alan Shepard being launched
into space, my family wasn't. It was at this point that I came to
understand what pure evil was. It comes upon you like a fog. I saw Fidel
Castro on television and I knew that this was evil. I'd never seen a
military man strike his arms and scream like he was doing."
'It hurt so bad'
Everything changed in drastic ways, she says. The family lived behind
closed blinds. Nobody answered the phone. She and her brother were no
longer allowed to play outside.
Janet didn't want to go back to school because she thought other kids
would make fun of her for not having a father. And, sure enough, one of
them did, causing Janet to grow so queasy she vomited all over her desk.
The sight of the railing adjacent to the school courtyard also made her
queasy - it looked like prison bars. Her mind flashed to something she
had heard about Castro keeping people in jail.
To make things worse, she came home one day to find her best friend was
nowhere to be found. Chase had been her and her father's faithful
companion, as they shared a love of animals. The dog had been a great
comfort to her. That day she searched for him everywhere, but then her
mother gave her the devastating news: Chase had been run over.
After that, she recalls, she would wander away from school. She'd walk
up the hill at the base and climb into a tree, searching the sky for her
father and her dog. One day, as night fell, a strong man in green
fatigues came and scooped her up into his arms. Many years later, she
would learn he was a pilot who had flown in the Cuban mission with her
father. He had come for her after her frantic relatives called the base,
looking for her.
"I just remembered this person picking me up and hugging me and crying.
I knew it wasn't my dad, but he smelled the same way. The concrete apron
smell, the flight line smell. It was a special smell. ... It hurt so
bad. How do you recover from that, from the loss of spirit?"
Janet did so by channeling her grief into action.
She wrote every political and diplomatic figure she could think of. She
carefully assembled the details of her father's death and bombarded the
Cuban government with demands for answers.
Now that some measure of justice has arrived in the form of the court
order, she plans to use some of the awarded funds to honor her father's
name. She says she will establish an educational foundation for the
children of Castro's victims, those whose parents and grandparents never
came home.
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