Whose Man in Havana? Adventures from the Far Side of Diplomacy

Front matter

d v Ce Ww 7. fi E ANY A i V a gus | -' omm y e.

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Adventures gsmeem fromthe B. |

BOOK ONE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Voyage to a Different Planet - 3

Leopold’s List - 6 Darkness at Noon - 8 The Dictator’s Sarcophagus - 16 “Down with Those who Rise” - 19 Navidad con Libertad - 24 Meatballs, Moose Piss, and the National Day - 25

CUBA

The Thames, Bunnies, and Bicycles - 53

JAPAN

Sake and the Advancement of Cultural Diplomacy - 59

GUYANA Caviar and Christmas Trees - 63 The Phantom Saboteur - 67 Alcide - 70 Three-Piece - 74 Maynard - 76 “Will the Dynamite Explode if I..." - 79

The State Funeral of the Honourable Linden Forbes Burnham - 82

SURINAME Clothes Make the Man - 85 Jewels of the Forest - 88

Me, Mick Jagger, Jungle Fever, and the Legion of Evil - 93

Pierre Trudeau and the Embarrassment of a Full Scale American War against a Very Small Island - 99

HAITI Le Chien Est Mort - 111

Go by Boat: Travels with Allan MacEachen - 115

PANAMA

The General and Margot Fonteyn - 121

CENTRAL AMERICA

Fireworks and Foreign Policy - 125

VENEZUELA, HAITI, AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC A is for Aristide - 131

Between Brazil and Venezuela: Caipirinhas, Trestle Bridges, and Formula One Bus Drivers - 143

Beauty and the Official Beast: The Miss Venezuela Contest - 150

WHOSE MAN IN HAVANA?

BOOK TWO DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Stepping Back from the Precipice - 157

HAITI “The Pencil of God Has No Eraser” I - 177 “The Pencil of God Has No Eraser" II - 180

BOSNIA Black Past, Grey Future? - 183 Sex, Sports, and Diplomacy - 193 The Psychologist, the General, and the Beauty Contest - 197 More Generals and the Ice Cream Men - 200 The Road to Srebrenica - 207

PARAGUAY

El Supremo - 217

Boiling Toilets and Fermented Mare’s Milk - 221

GUATEMALA San Marcos and the Election of 2003 - 231

VENEZUELA Hugo Chavez: Much Loved, Much Loathed - 243

Night Train to Ternopil - 247

Contents xi xii

Good Elections, Bad Judgments - 255

The Jaguar Changes Some of Its Spots - 261

EL SALVADOR

Off the Beaten Track - 269

HAITI Goudau-Goudau: Return to Haiti - 275 Lou Quinn: A Profile - 280

Afterword - 285 Notes - 289 Index - 297

WHOSE MAN IN HAVANA?

Foreword

John Graham’s memoir is a joyous guide to a life in the Canadian foreign service, and reassuringly he also shows that there is a life after bureaucracy. Graham joined the foreign service when becoming a Canadian diplomat was thought to be a Good Thing. Canada’s Department of External Affairs managed to look glamorous from the outside, and proved to be interesting and often strenuous from the inside. Though the foreign service had its share of clunks and incompetents, and ran a few posts that competed with Devil’s Island for isolation and discomfort, it was usually much better than that, and there were real rewards - not the least of which was to join an international profession that required its members always to understand the other point of view and not simply to parrot instructions from head office in Ottawa.

Diplomatic life could be pleasant. There were indeed parties and receptions and dinners. Other diplomats from other countries could be, and often were intelligent, good company, and sometimes lifelong friends. It could also be stressful, as Graham shows, hair-raising, and occasionally tragic - as he also shows. Life abroad with allowances was mitigated by home duty: ice and snow in Ottawa, and quite often a modest lifestyle. It was (and is) the equivalent of the slave riding in a chariot with a Roman conqueror, whispering in his ear, “Remember, you are but mortal.”

Canadian foreign policy when Graham was a diplomat was run from a smallish ministry that had been originally attached to the prime minister's office (with a lower case “o” at a time when it had not achieved the grandeur and size it has today). That meant it was located in a neo-Gothic pile, the East Block of Canada's Parliament buildings, where prime ministers xiii could keep an eye on it. Indeed for almost forty years the prime minister was also styled “Secretary of State for External Affairs" to distinguish him from the "Secretary of State," who handled patents and other forms.

In the 1940s, “the Department” (all such entities were called departments before ascending in nomenclature to be “ministries”) acquired its own minister, and two of them, Louis St. Laurent and Lester B. Pearson, went on to be prime minister: it seemed a natural step. Pearson even collected a Nobel Peace Prize as he passed Go.

Under the minister came the under-secretary, the deputy minister. The under-secretary was a homebody, minding the store, running errands (“interfacing” today) between the political and the bureaucratic, rewarding, punishing, stretching budgets and generally keeping his fractious brood in line. He (for they were all male in Graham’s period) occasionally had to suppress bad ideas from ambitious ambassadors. “For the son-ofa-bitch,” one under-secretary growled when an ambassador in Cuba produced a plan for harmony between the United States and communist Cuba. In that case his staff calmed the enraged deputy minister, but sometimes diplomats found themselves abruptly yanked and returned to Ottawa to contemplate life from within the department’s Historical Division.

It was understood that ministers, and more broadly the cabinet, made policy, and the diplomats executed it. It was also their function to give advice, as practically as possible, for ministers to adopt or disregard. As a general rule, however, the advice bore some resemblance to the policy adopted, and the policy, in turn, helped shape the advice. For that to be so, there had to be some common ground or at least mutual confidence.

Most day-to-day work sailed comfortably under the ministerial radar. Readers will find very few ministerial irruptions in Graham’s volume, and rightly so. Diplomats on post had considerable freedom to conduct their work as they saw best, disturbed only by very infrequent visits from superiors from headquarters or sorties by ministers in search of trade and publicity. An ambassador or high commissioner could address the local Drones Club or Meathead Society and nobody in Ottawa would be any the worse - in fact, better for not following up on such mundane details.

Common ground and mutual confidence also applied to relations among foreign missions in a given capital. Sometimes this was necessary for survival or more usually comfort, pooling supplies, or shopping at the same commissary. This shared cordiality even applied to contacts xiv WHOSE MAN IN HAVANA?

with officials from one or another of Canada's official enemies, such as the Soviet Union. But even Soviet ambassadors might have opinions, and sometimes social charms, which were worth harvesting.

Graham represented "Canada" - the combination of geography and demographics and economy and strategy that made up the country. "Canada" was not just a projection of domestic politics, though ambassadors were assumed not to contradict the explicit policy of the government of the day. Diplomats from other countries often admired the ability of their Canadian counterparts to sail past political tests and witch-hunts. One very senior American diplomat wished he could have moved: “I would have felt comfortable serving in the Canadian Foreign Service, and I felt I knew enough people that it was a conceivable thing."

Canadians in the eyes of other diplomats had a characteristic negotiating style. According to the same witness, “There is something special about the Canadians which you cannot transpose to many other situations, and that is at a point where we would appear to face irreconcilable difference over something, the Canadians were people you could sit down with over a cup of coffee or a beer and talk and say, 'Now come on. We've got to find our way through all this.’ They have a nice genius for knowing when to move on from total hard-line position to search for a compromise that's palatable to both sides, and they showed it many times."

Reading Graham is to contemplate many good beers - fine ales, to be sure. It is reminiscence not only of a career well spent, but of a foreign service and a Canada that deserve commemoration and if possible replication.

Robert Bothwell September 2015

*George Vest, stationed in the US embassy in Ottawa, 1951-54, desk officer for Canada in the State Department, 1954—57. Vest later became Inspector-General of the Foreign Service.

Preface xv