Cuba Librés with Wilfred Burchett in Cuba cha cha cha.

Wednesday, August 22, 1979: On assignment with Four Corners, ABC documentary unit with David Brill and Ian Macintosh. It’s the Sixth Summit of Non-Aligned Nations, a politically charged affair in Cuba. A hundred nations opposed to America are gathering ninety miles off Key West, Florida. The summit represents nearly two-thirds of United Nations' members and comprises fifty-five percent of the world’s population but it’s hardly known in the West. 

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the early sixties Fidel Castro is still alive and we’re hoping for an interview. U.S. aircraft were not welcome nor allowed in Cuba so we flew via Kingston, Jamaica to Havana on Aeroflot. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen and the Soviet Union still stood tall beside Fidel twenty years after the Cuban Revolution. 

It’s a little over an hour’s flight, and I’m watching the white furrows of trading vessels steaming in the blue-green Caribbean Sea. And soon we descend and take a taxi to the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. It’s shabby, baroque, with a Hollywood and Mafia reputation that lingers in the manicured gardens and decor; a long, wide gravel driveway and uniformed attendants standing ready as we crunch to a halt. I’m in the tropics again and the warm, damp air envelops me and I hear the sea on the Malecón and a Latin beat, and there’s a part of me that yearns for this and I inhale deeply.  

The Hotel Nacional overlooks Havana’s harbor and the Malecón esplanade, the great seawall that curves around Old Havana and the Spanish forts protecting the harbor entrance from the Atlantic Ocean and pirates. Broad-spreading Ceiba trees and Cuban Royal Palms shade verandas and colonnades and creeping Bougainvillea along the avenues where the wealthy lived in mansions before the revolution of 1959.  U.S. export of automobiles ceased immediately and that moment is frozen in time.

Havana is a panoply of automobile peak tail-fin extravagance, chrome, two-tone, American post-war optimism in Communist Cuba; Havana and Cuba in a time warp stuck in the nineteen-fifties, and the ghosts of Hemingway, Fidel, and Che Guevara infuse the air and the moss and the mould that spreads across the humid green walls and in shady gardens. And the never-ending soundtrack of Rumba, Mambo, Cha-cha-cha.

Macintosh and I shared a surprisingly spartan black-and-white room with a cool tiled floor and casement windows overlooking the harbor and the Atlantic ocean and in the distance we saw the tropic clouds swelling and darkening and there was talk of a hurricane. We went downstairs and found the bar. David already had a seat and told us he’d seen Wilfred Burtchett in the lobby.  We ordered Cuba Libres, Havana Club rum and coke with a wedge of lime. 

Brill often spoke of Wilfred Burtchett who’s life spanned some of the great events of the twentieth century. He was the first Western reporter in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb and wrote the headline for the London Daily Express: “I write this as a warning to the world”.

Burtchett was vilified by the Western establishment including the Australian press corp who branded him a traitor and a communist. The Australian government confiscated Burtchett’s passport and essentially ran him out of the country. Fidel Castro personally gave him travel papers, literally an A4 folded stiff parchment-like paper with the Cuban coat-of-arms embossed at the top. Brill admired Burtchett’s  courage and tenacity. 

I don’t know where they crossed paths, perhaps in Hanoi or Shanghai, North Korea, or somewhere in communist Europe, for both traveled widely reporting the other side of the political spectrum. Both were great international reporters. Burtchett was his own man. He reported unencumbered by convention. He was born in 1911 in Poowong, a small farming community in Gippsland, Victoria, my home state. Like many Australians he went to London before the Second War but as war loomed he returned to Australia and took up reporting for the London Daily Express. I looked forward to meeting him. 

The next day, Ishmail our driver, a shining black smiling man with a chauffeur’s cap and no English, drives us to Casa de Prensa, the government press center. It’s a former exclusive country club, mid-century modern and shady in every respect. The Cuban officials are slow and press accreditation takes three days, and we miss the first day of the conference. Fidel’s speech is piped through Havana, echoing in the narrow streets and archways, off the buildings’ technicolor paint peeling memories of the past. 

That night we film the Ballet Nacional de Cuba at the Teatro Garcia Lorca performing Swan Lake. The theater is as large and grand as any opera house in Europe. It’s  rehearsal with live orchestra in the pits and  almost empty and the cold spotlight captures the dancers and you can hear the wind whistling outside. I return to the hotel. Hurricane Fredrick is roaring in now and they say it’s ravaging the western end of the island and Soviet naval vessels lay at anchor protected in the harbor. 

Next day when I look from my hotel window I see only as far as the seawall, the lighthouse and the entrance to the harbor are obliterated in heavy cloud and rain. The room is flooded and we paddle around moping up gallons of water. The flash of the lighthouse bites through the mist. I have an interview with Wilfred Burtchett today.

At One PM sharp I go to room number 611, and Wilfred opens the door. He offers me Havana Club and fills two glasses. His wife Vessa, a striking woman said to be a Bulgarian Princess, takes a sip from a small bottle of liquor that looks like cherry brandy. She is typing a letter on a table in a corner and Wilfred takes two gulps and doesn’t flinch and slaps the bottle down. We sat to do the interview as the wind whipped and the rain splattered on the windows. I am shocked and humbled by what I heard that day. 

As the war was ending, Burtchett was in the Pacific and shipped north with American and Australian troops to cover the Japanese surrender. It would be signed September 2nd., 1945 in Tokyo Bay on the battleship Missouri by General MacArthur, the Allies and Japan. And six hundred of the world’s press were invited. 

But there were rumors of “some big bomb or something” that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Burtchett was curious. He feigned sickness that day and lay in his bunk as the world press gathered their gear to record history. 

Wilfred looked down at the floor for a few moments and now Vessa turned to listen. 

“Of course the press were tightly controlled by MacArthur’s press cordon enforced by the military. But I knew something big had happened in Hiroshima and I had to find out, so I called a mate who worked at the Chicago Tribune, Bill Keys. I told him: ‘Bill I want to go to Hiroshima’. He said I was crazy because it was five hundred miles by train but he gave me his army-issue forty-five and some ammo and I stuffed it in my pack with a few cans of bully beef.  I told him if I get a story, I’ll get it back to you somehow, and I told him how to get in touch with my editors back in London.”

Wilfred walked over to the window and looked out at the gathering storm, the scuttling clouds and tall palm trees bending as the wind was strengthening. Once again I was immersed in the mythos of the bomb with an eye witness. It had become a gestalt and a shadow in my life. 

Wilfred turned and faced me from across the room: “When I got on the train that day and asked for Hiroshima, they looked at me like I was mad. I was carrying my pack and a black umbrella and there was not another European in sight. And on the train, they looked at me with hatred in their eyes and I knew they were angry and I just kept on asking in my broken Japanese: ‘Are we in Hiroshima yet?’ Are we in Hiroshima yet?’”

When Burtchett got to Hiroshima, it was three weeks after the bomb. He described a desolate, flattened landscape and people still wandering dazed and confused. He found a hospital outpost and patients laying and dying and he described halos of hair on their pillows: “I called it an Atomic Plague because there were so many and I looked around for some piece of concrete or something to rest my Hermes typewriter on and I wrote that headline: 'I write this as a warning to the world’.  And then I had to find a way to get the story back.”

Burtchett found a Japanese signalmen and bribed him with cans of bully beef and sent the story to Tokyo by Morse code. It was passed on to Bill Keys, the Chicago Tribune reporter and he got it to London and it was published on the Fifth of September, almost a month to the day after the bomb was dropped.

Burtchett described returning to Tokyo and attending a press conference. He stood at the back of the room as an officer announced: “No radiation found at Hiroshima”. Burtchett raised his hand: “And everybody in the room just whipped around to see who was speaking and I still had the dust of Hiroshima on me and I told them what I’d seen.”  

As the press conference ended, Burtchett reached for his bag and camera and they were gone. “Lucky I got a good memory he said”, and took another shot.  I went downstairs to swim laps in the tepid rain and  leaves scattering in the hotel swimming pool. Hurricane Fredrick had passed.

William Burtchett was right about an Atomic Plague; it turned out to be radiation poisoning. But when the embedded New York Times science writer, William Laurence, announced the ruin of Hiroshima and Nagasaki front page news August 12th, 1945, there was no acknowledgment of radioactivity.  

Laurence was embedded inside the Manhattan Project for months as the enormous experiment unfolded across America in universities and research centers culminating on the edge of a massive volcanic caldera, fifteen miles wide, in the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico; Los Alamos, named after the cottonwoods. It was here the scientists worked with Robert Oppenheimer to build the bomb and Laurence, sworn to secrecy watched and scribbled in his notebook.

When Commander Paul Tibbets assembled his 509th bomber group on Tinian Island, fifteen hundred miles from Japan at midnight August, 6th, 1945, Laurence missed  the bombing of Hiroshima. But he woke up in time for Nagasaki three days later and filed his story of the Atomic Bomb. 

When I met Charles Sweeney in a Boston diner over coffee forty years after he flew his B29 Superfortess and bombed Nagasaki, he told me: “We were told to avoid the mushroom cloud and get out of there ASAP because there might be radiation. But I must have been ok because I had nine kids.” 

It was more than a month after the bombs were dropped before the word radiation  was used; New York Times, September 13, 1945: No radiation in Hiroshima ruin. What our Superfortresses did to Japanese Plane Production Center.

William Laurence won a Pulitzer Prize  which became controversial when, many years later,  journalist Amy Goodman, a WBAI protégé  reported Burtchett’s story on her program, Democracy Now. 

We never got the Fidel interview.