Our Woman in Havana: A Diplomat's Chronicle of America's Long Struggle with Castro's Cuba

By Vicki Huddleston and Carlos Gutierrez

A top US diplomat’s compelling memoir of her years in Cuba and the tumultuous relationship between the two countries: “Unparalleled insight.” —Culture Trip
 
After the US embassy in Havana was closed in 1961, relations between the countries broke off. A thaw came in 1977 with the opening of a de facto embassy in Havana, the US Interests Section—where Vicki Huddleston would later serve under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.
 
In her memoir of a diplomat at work, she tells gripping stories of face-to-face encounters with Fidel Castro and the initiatives she undertook, like the transistor radios she furnished to ordinary Cubans. Along with inside accounts of dramatic episodes such as the Elián González custody battle, Huddleston also evokes the charm of the island country and her warm affection for the Cuban people.
 
Uniquely qualified to explain the inner workings of US-Cuba relations, Huddleston examines the Obama administration’s diplomatic opening of 2014, the mysterious “sonic” brain and hearing injuries suffered by US and Canadian diplomats serving in Havana, and the rescinding of the diplomatic opening under the Trump administration. She recounts missed opportunities for détente, and the myths, misconceptions, and lies that have long pervaded US-Cuba relations. Our Woman in Havana is essential reading for everyone interested in Cuba, including the thousands of Americans visiting the island every year, as well as policymakers and observers who study the stormy relationship with our near neighbor.
 
“Anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of policy-making in Washington, and any young foreign service officer intrigued by worldly adventures will thoroughly enjoy.” —Ambassador Joseph Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781468315806

Book preview

FOREWORD

I WAS BORN IN HAVANA IN 1953. SEVEN YEARS LATER, MY FAMILY LEFT Cuba for the United States, one of many families who fled Cuba’s communist revolution. In 2006, when I first met Ambassador Vicki Huddleston, I was serving as US Secretary of Commerce, charged with implementing President George W. Bush’s Cuba policy. Vicki and her colleagues at The Brookings Institution, who were developing a blueprint for restoring relations with Cuba, were convinced that as long as the US threatened Cuba there was no hope for positive change in the relationship. By the time Vicki and I next saw each other at the Meridian International Cultural Diplomacy Forum on Cuba in 2016, I had joined other Cuban Americans in supporting President Barack Obama’s opening to Cuba. I felt strongly, after having visited Cuba for the opening of our embassy in Havana on August 14, 2015, that a policy of engagement was in the best interests of the American and the Cuban people.

In thirty years of doing business around the globe, I have found that a vibrant private sector often has an uplifting effect on communities and whole societies. Since Cuba was opening its own private sector when President Obama pursued normalization, it seemed that for once in almost sixty years the stars were aligning. When I visited Cuba again during President Obama’s historic visit to the island in March 2016, it was clear to me that the time had come for a new relationship between the two countries. As Vicki reveals in this engaging book, policy towards Cuba is often not a product of the foreign policy process but of domestic politics. In 1991, with the Soviet Union imploding, many Cuban Americans were convinced that Cuba would collapse without the five billion dollar annual subsidy from the recently defunct Soviet Union. Yet it did not collapse. Both President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, candidates for President in 1992, endorsed legislation that expanded and extended the embargo. When Bill Clinton defeated the incumbent Bush, gaining more votes among Cuban American voters than any recent Democratic candidate before him, the Cuban diaspora imagined he would carry out policies that were largely acceptable to them. He did so until the final years of his second term, when his administration returned Elián González—the five-year-old boy found floating on an inner tube in the Florida Straits—to his father in Cuba. This international imbroglio—described from Vicki’s perspective from her experience on the ground in Cuba at the time, with valuable firsthand knowledge—contributed to Al Gore’s pivotal loss of Florida in the 2000 presidential election.

When President Obama initiated his outreach to Cuba I hoped it would be the beginning of a long process of reconciliation among Cubans—those on the island and those abroad. But, powerful conservative Cuban-Americans have found in President Trump an ally; once again domestic politics have trumped US interests. The tightening of travel policies has had a devastating impact on new Cuban entrepreneurs. Furthermore, a health incident, caused by the strange and still unconfirmed term sonic attacks endured by US diplomats, has pushed the relationship back to almost Cold-War depths. In the meantime, China has stepped up trade and investment in Cuba, while Russia has moved to replace Venezuela as one of Cuba’s strategic partners.

In Ambassador Huddleston’s revealing memoir, which shows a resourceful diplomat at work, Vicki illustrates with stories and an insider’s knowledge the myths, misunderstandings, and false statements that have characterized our relations with Cuba. For more than forty years, the US and Cuba have had diplomatic relations. It is a myth that diplomatic relations started with President Obama’s push for normalization; the reader discovers that they actually began under President Carter. Although prohibited from flying the Stars and Stripes, the American diplomatic mission in Havana—known as the United States Interests Section—had long been influential.

Vicki is a realist and not naïve about the complexities of this relationship. In fact, she describes, in fascinating detail, her often-tense relationship with Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader denounced her and the US government, threatening to close the US Interests section, and then to underline his intent he organized a protest rally of 20,000 that she dared to attend. During her three years as the Chief of our diplomatic mission in Havana, Fidel seemed to have a competitive relationship with her. She describes how he seemed to be interested in her every move, from the dog show career of her prize-winning Afghan hound Havana, to her collection of exile art that she displayed in the beautiful residence of our former ambassadors to Cuba. Their relationship, albeit complicated, had its benefits: after 9/11, Vicki persuaded the Cuban Government to decline to denounce the incarceration of unlawful combatants at Guantanamo base.

I lament the fact that relatively few women diplomats have written their memoirs. Vicki’s approach to diplomacy is creative and courageous. She doesn’t sugarcoat her own mistakes and writes very candidly about the challenges of representing the United States in Cuba. In reading Vicki’s book, one can see that our relations with Cuba have too often been a story of what might have been.

This is a book for anyone interested in Cuba. Americans will find a comprehensive guide to what has happened to prolong the unrelieved animosity. Cuban Americans will be fascinated by the details of the Elian Gonzalez case and model relations worked out after 9/11 between our two militaries. Academics will discover never-before revealed accounts of espionage, alliances, and betrayals. Our European, Latin American, and Canadian friends will come to better understand the influence of domestic politics on US Cuba policy.

As CEO of the Kellogg Company and then US Secretary of Commerce, I saw firsthand that our private sector is truly the best ambassador for American values, especially the power of free enterprise to raise living standards. I hope American entrepreneurs and companies will again soon have the opportunity to bring their best to Cuba. This important and personable memoir gives everyone invested in Cuba’s success something to think about and aspire toward. It informs readers of much that they should know about US-Cuba relations, the unique beauty of Havana, and the graciousness and charm of the Cuban people, all through the eyes of a gifted diplomat.

Secretary Carlos Gutierrez

Washington, DC

January2018

PROLOGUE

IN THE LATE 1980S JAMES MICHENER AND JOHN KINGS WROTE A wonderful book titled Six Days in Havana, in which Kings noted, I may go back again one day, but it will never be with the same feelings of exhilaration and utter surprise that this first visit engendered. I recall feeling this way during my first visit to Cuba’s capital, and I imagine this sentiment was experienced by the hundreds of thousands of Americans who visited during President Barack Obama’s short-lived opening to Cuba. That period began in December 2014 and ended in June 2017, when his successor, Donald Trump, announced that he had canceled Obama’s national security directive, which had initiated a process of normalization between the United States and Cuba. President Trump’s decision to reinstate a punitive policy advocated by a small group of Cuban Americans was nothing new. For over a half century, US policy toward Cuba has been dictated by Cuban Americans who were forced from their country by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959. Since the failed CIA-organized Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, the premise of this policy has been to bring about regime change, initially through the use of force and then through a comprehensive, unilateral economic embargo. Yet despite the successive hardening of sanctions against Cuba, we have failed to oust Cuban leaders Fidel and Raúl Castro or alter the course of Cuban politics. Nor has our policy enabled its advocates to recover their forfeited property or recover to their country.

The history of US-Cuba relations is filled with myths and contradictions that are principally designed to help Cuban Americans regain the country they lost. Latin America and much of the developing world watch, appalled that the most powerful nation on earth continues to isolate and castigate its small neighbor of eleven million people who live on an island that is smaller than the state of Florida. What they fail to understand is that our Cuba policy is actually domestic policy, not foreign policy. The Cuban American voting bloc in Florida has seduced Democrats and Republicans alike. In 2000, el voto castigo (the punishment vote) against Al Gore—in retaliation for President Bill Clinton returning a Cuban child to his father—pushed the Florida election as far the US Supreme Court, which then awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. Republicans have always bowed to the demands of the Cuban diaspora, but so too did Presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, who aggressively courted Cuban American money and votes.

With Obama’s opening of relations with Cuba it seemed that our country had finally given up this charade of a foreign policy and would bring Cuba back under our sphere of influence through a policy of active engagement. Over time, both countries would benefit from closer cooperation on terrorism, crime, and the environment, as well as from mutual trade and investment. As affinity started to grow, there was hope of reconciliation between Cubans in the United States and on the island. But with Trump’s recent policy reversal, normalization is once again impossible. By treating Cuba worse than some of our most dangerous enemies, we are pushing it into the arms of the Chinese and the Russians, whose economic and military influence is steadily increasing.

I am writing this book because I believe we must put an end to this punitive policy and restart an opening that appeals to the better angels of our nature. It is well past time that we stop making Cuba a glaring exception to the way we engage with countries around the world whose political systems we oppose. Cuba is the only country against which we maintain a comprehensive unilateral economic embargo and the only country in which we occupy part of its territory against its wishes. By doing so we undermine both countries’ political and economic interests, deprive our country of a potential strategic ally, and create unnecessary division among our allies. Ironically, now is the best possible time to mend relations with Cuba. Fidel Castro is dead and his brother Raúl has announced that he intends to give up the presidency in February 2018. For the first time in fifty-nine years, a Castro will no longer rule Cuba.

My relationship with Cuba began as the Soviet Union curtailed its financial and strategic alliance with the island. It was then that I first encountered Fidel Castro, who feared that he might not hold on to power. But he did, even as the Soviets withdrew five billion dollars in annual subsidies and the US tightened its embargo. During my first four years working on Cuba policy within the State Department (1989–93), first as the deputy and then as the director of Cuban affairs, I endeavored to keep US policy from becoming overly confrontational. The powerful Cuban American lobby, led by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), seized every opportunity to denigrate Cuba in the hope and expectation that it would lead to a confrontation with Fidel Castro. I mostly succeeded at maintaining an even keel, but when I failed, US policy and I came under attack.

In 1999, I was delighted when President Clinton asked me to lead our diplomatic mission in Havana. (Despite the general perception that the United States and Cuba had no diplomatic relations, our two governments have in fact maintained diplomatic representation in each other’s capitals—housed in our former embassy buildings, but called by different names—since President Jimmy Carter reestablished relations in 1977.) Clinton hoped that I might assist in building upon his initial opening with the island, but it was soon overtaken by the fevered custody battle between Cuban exiles and Fidel Castro over little Elián González, a five-year-old Cuban child, who was found floating on an inner tube in the Florida Straits. In this case the culprit for destroying the possibility of improved relations was Fidel Castro, who could not resist the opportunity to taunt Cuban Americans and walk the world stage yet again.

Surprisingly, for eighteen months (January 2001–May 2002) President George W. Bush continued the moderate policy of the Clinton administration, which permitted cooperation between our governments and people-to-people travel to Cuba for cultural, humanitarian, and religious purposes. At the US Interests Section my staff and I created an outreach program that supported Cuba’s civil society and dissident movements. The result was the blooming of the so-called Cuban Spring of 2002—the most open period in Cuba since the revolution. But a hard-right lobby that had broken away from CANF, the Cuban Liberty Council, which had supported Jeb Bush’s reelection campaign for governor of Florida, demanded that President Bush revert to a hostile policy. Bush did so after this lobby rejected his New Cuba Initiative, which he had laid out for them in a speech in Miami on May 20, 2002, the one hundredth anniversary of Cuba’s independence from Spain. I left Havana in September 2002. Only six months later, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, Castro arrested and imprisoned seventy-five dissidents. The Black Spring of 2003 descended on Cuba, along with the strictest sanctions ever imposed on the island.

For three years, from September 1999 until my departure in September 2002, Fidel Castro and I competed for the hearts and minds of the Cuban people. Cubans loved our active policy of outreach and engagement, including the little AM/FM/shortwave radios that my staff and I distributed to the Cuban people, but Fidel did not, and he threatened to throw me out of the country. In diplomatic parlance, I would be asked to leave because I was no longer welcome, a persona non grata. At the same time, US-Cuba relations were improving: hundreds of thousands of Americans were visiting the island, Cuba was for the first time purchasing millions of dollars in US agricultural products, and it was even cooperating with us in the fight against terrorism. Not only did Castro refrain from denouncing the US incarceration of unlawful enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, but his military cooperated with ours to ensure the safety and security of the base.

Havana still beckons to Americans who for nearly six decades have been denied the city’s charms. Having spurned Spain and then the United States in the expectation of becoming truly independent, Cuba slipped into the arms of the Soviet Union. During the height of the Cold War, Cuba brought us to the edge of nuclear Armageddon with the Soviets, sent armies to Africa, and attempted to ignite revolution in Bolivia, Columbia, and Nicaragua. But Cuba had chosen poorly, the Soviets withdrew their subsidies, and the United States tightened its embargo. The Cuban people suffered great deprivation, but again were revived in the 1990s through the oil-fueled largess of Venezuela under the late Hugo Chávez.

When the United States again came courting in the form of an opening by President Obama on December 17, 2014, it seemed that our natural ally and third-closest and smallest neighbor would willingly, if not enthusiastically, accept our proposal of mutual respect and friendship. Most Cubans certainly desired this outcome. But many Cuban Americans who had watched Cuba’s slow decline from across the Florida Straits remained stubbornly unwilling to accept reconciliation. In lingering bitterness, they found in President Trump a willing antagonist who slammed the door closed on Obama’s opening. Rather than becoming a strategic ally through whom we might build closer and stronger bonds in the Caribbean, Central America, and across the Western Hemisphere, Cuba once again seeks a patron who will help it confront the United States and resist the tide of animosity coming from the north. Will the latest patron be China, or Russia? Or will both Americans and Cubans finally be convinced that we are too close and too linked by the bonds of family and friendship to continue this destructive relationship?

PART I

1989–1993: CUBAN AFFAIRS,

US STATE DEPARTMENT;

PRESIDENTS GEORGE H. W. BUSH

AND BILL CLINTON

CHAPTER 1

I AM THE DIRECTOR OF CUBAN AFFAIRS

WHEN HE GLARED ACROSS THE ROOM AT ME, IT WAS A WARNING sign of things to come. The year was 1991, the place was the Palacio de la Revolución in Havana, Cuba, and my glowering interlocutor was Fidel Castro, one of the most consequential figures of the twentieth century.

A member of the US Foreign Service, I had recently taken a job to manage US government relations with Cuba. It was a politically sensitive position reserved for senior officers, but many of my fellow diplomats avoided it because a powerful lobby—the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF)—dictated a punitive US policy toward Cuba. If you got on the wrong side of exiles ousted by the Castro regime, they could ruin your career. During the past two years as the deputy in the US State Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs, I had become adept at getting along with the lobby. Still, it wasn’t going to be easy; there would certainly be critics and naysayers, I didn’t have the rank required, and I would be one of a very few career women in an office director’s job. What probably tipped the scales in my favor, however, was the ongoing legal challenge on behalf of women Foreign Service officers, which claimed that the State Department discriminated against women in awarding high-ranking jobs. Whatever the reason, I was delighted and thus seized the opportunity despite the risks.

To me it was a tremendously important job. In the early 1960s, US-Cuba relations had shaken the very foundations of world peace. Fidel Castro and his rebels’ triumphal entry into Havana on New Year’s Day 1959 turned Cuba—if not the world—upside down. President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a destructive unilateral embargo after the rebels seized American oil companies. In the early days of the administration of President John F. Kennedy, believing that Castro’s revolution could be destroyed in its infancy, the CIA organized an exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs that became a disastrous failure when the administration refused to provide additional air support. A year later, in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Soviet Union brought us to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. In the 1970s and early 1980s, with the backing of the Soviet Union, Castro was at the peak of his power. A major player in Africa, he was admired by leaders of the developing world for standing up to rich, white governments—notably South Africa and the United States. In Ethiopia, Cuban troops helped defeat the invading armies of Somali dictator Siad Barre. In southern Africa, Cubans fought alongside Angolan and Namibian troops against South Africa, losing as many as five thousand troops over thirteen years. Nelson Mandela, one of the most admired men in the world, said, The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled for its principled selfless character. He was right; it was Cuban generals, troops, and air power—all underwritten by the Soviet Union—that had defeated the South African Army at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola.

Presidents from both parties had tried to improve relations. Jimmy Carter had briefly lifted the travel ban, but Ronald Reagan reinstated it again in response to Castro’s African adventures. Nevertheless, Reagan authorized the State Department’s head of African Affairs, Chester Crocker, to find a way to remove Cuba from Africa. He and his Soviet counterpart played a critical role in brokering the Tripartite Accords among Angola, Cuba, and South Africa. By the summer of 1991 Cuba had completed the withdrawal of fifty thousand troops from Africa.

President George H. W. Bush authorized a US delegation to attend the ceremonies in Havana that would recognize the completion of the accords. The head of our interagency delegation, Jeff Davidow, was a career diplomat from the Africa Bureau. I joined the delegation to reassure CANF that no insidious goodwill would creep into the two countries’ antagonistic relationship. They were right to be concerned. The Africa Bureau—like most of the State Department—thought that our Cuba policy was a pawn of Miami’s Cuban American community, who ardently believed that isolating the island would force Castro from power and allow them to return.

I was pleased to be on my way back to Havana. I enjoyed visiting the lovely but languishing city, and I liked to uncover its architectural treasures, ravaged by time and neglect—the beautiful lines of the cathedral darkened by mold, the lovely mansions overtaken by vines climbing up walls and over once-elegant entrances, and the Malecón—the seawall built by the US Corps of Engineers—where Habaneros sought relief from their constricted lives as they imagined life beyond the wall.

Our delegation’s first and only meeting with Cuban government officials was at the Palacio de Convenciones de la Habana, an impressive conference complex built to promote Cuba’s standing as a leader in the developing world. Our delegation met the Cubans in a small room, away from the principal building, a massive white structure in Havana’s beautiful suburb of Cubanacan, where the country’s former wealthy elite once lived, and where the revolution’s hierarchy now dwelled. We exchanged greetings, and the Cubans seemed pleased that we were there. But nothing of importance was discussed. Perhaps there was little to be said, or the Cubans were under instructions not to raise their concerns about the economic disaster the country was facing with the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was all rather stiff; we smiled and shook hands, and there were no warm abrazos (hugs). The Cubans didn’t know Davidow, the delegation lead, because a new team had replaced those who negotiated the agreement. Reagan had been replaced by President George H. W. Bush, who was in turn wary of the Cubans, in part because his younger son Jeb’s political base in Florida was founded on the support of conservative Cuban Americans who wished to ensure that Castro’s Cuba would not outlive the dying Soviet Union.

During the thirty months it had taken Soviet transport vessels to return the Cuban troops from Angola and Namibia, the Castro brothers had lost a little of their luster. General Raúl Castro had tearfully sentenced General Arnaldo Ochoa, the popular hero of Cuba’s successful African wars, and three other high-ranking officials, to death by firing squad. Other officers were given long prisons terms for allegedly participating in drug trafficking. Their trials were part of a purge led by Fidel Castro to ensure the loyalty of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior’s police and secret service. His timing was impeccable, as the trials occurred just a year before the Soviets began reducing their military and financial support to the Cuban armed forces and eventually terminated five billion dollars in subsidies to the Cuban economy.

Ochoa’s crime was most likely that he was a young, handsome, and charismatic general who posed a potential threat to Fidel. Every Cuban leader who—if even briefly—was a possible replacement for Fidel had been demoted, exiled, imprisoned, and/or executed, beginning with Fidel’s fellow revolutionary leaders. His two principal commanders died in the early years after the revolution. Camilo Cienfuegos, age twenty-seven, perished in the suspicious crash of a small plane, and Ernesto Che Guevara, age thirty-nine, was killed during an attempt to lead a peasant revolt in Bolivia. More recently, potential successors such as Ricardo Alarcón, Carlos Lage Dávila, and Felipe Pérez Roque had all lost power, though they had avoided imprisonment or execution.

Castro must have believed that relations with the United States might improve or at least that the administration of President Bush wouldn’t punish him. He had complied with the Tripartite Accords and brought home fifty thousand Cuban troops from Africa. To celebrate the occasion, he invited delegations from Angola, Namibia, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the entire diplomatic corps to celebrate the successful completion of the Tripartite Accords at the Palacio de la Revolución. The massive white building sat behind a huge four-sided tower and memorial dedicated to Cuba’s national hero José Martí. Its 1950s style and the iconic visages of Guevara and Cienfuegos on the front of the two principal buildings gave the impression that this imposing complex, where Castro held massive rallies, had been built by the Communists. In fact, the dictator Fulgencio Batista had ordered the construction of the Plaza Civica, as it was initially named. Before it could be completed, Fidel’s revolutionaries stormed into Havana, forcing Batista and his government to flee.

In Havana, I was staying with Alan Flanigan, the principal officer of our diplomatic mission, which was known as the US Interests Section. This rather cumbersome name was simply an artifice for what was in fact a small embassy. Use of the name began in 1977 when Carter and Castro reestablished diplomatic relations. American diplomats returned to Havana and began operating out of the old embassy building. The Cubans returned to Washington, DC, to install themselves in their old embassy building, which was located on Sixteenth Street. But to mollify the Cuban diaspora, the agreement stipulated that neither mission would fly their national flags and the level of representation would be less than that of an embassy. Thus, Alan’s job was like that of an ambassador, but at a lower level. He represented our government’s views to the Cubans and managed the work of the Interests Section. As the coordinator or director of Cuban affairs, my job was to back him up and provide policy direction from the State Department. This made me the bad cop, the overseer of our policy of isolating Cuba.

As Alan and I neared the Plaza de Revolución in his official car, we were directed to a narrow road that circled behind the hill on which stood the tower and statue commemorating Martí. There, partially out of view, was the palace from which Castro and his aides ran the country. Once inside, we were directed to take the elevator to the first floor, where Ricardo Alarcón, then the presumed number four in the Communist Party hierarchy, and president of the National Assembly, greeted us in a spacious ballroom.

Among the two hundred guests there were only three women: Castro’s young, beautiful interpreter, the Soviet ambassador’s spouse, and myself. It seems surprising now, with women in all spheres of diplomacy, but in the early 1990s there were very few senior women diplomats. There were no women ambassadors present, which implied that there were none in Havana. Spouses had not been included, except for the Soviet ambassador’s wife. It seemed as if Africa and Europe weren’t doing any better than the State Department when it came to placing women in high positions.

This was my first in-person view of Fidel. He fit the legend, with his green fatigues and beard, but this night had no cigar—a cancer scare had persuaded him to give up smoking. I’d read about him, of course, and knew some of his secrets—his affairs and vanities—as well as the bizarre methods the CIA had deployed to attempt to assassinate him, which included the Mafia dousing his scuba suit with poison powder, and even recruiting a former lover to do the deed (though she was found out by Fidel).

Castro stood behind the ministers from Angola, Cuba, and South Africa as each signed three documents, one for each government. As the signing dragged on, he began to fidget, adjusting his fatigues, and occasionally making a funny face. He didn’t like being a bit player because he was accustomed to a starring role. It was then that we made eye contact. Fidel, recognizing who I was, glared at me, then frowned slightly. I smiled but, not wanting to be caught staring, quickly looked away. I was surprised to note that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. I couldn’t imagine that there was any danger from these diplomats. Could he be worried about his own people, or was it that the vest appealed to his vanity because it