Havana The kidnapping, 23–⁠24 February 1958

A year before

The first Cuban Grand Prix, a race for sports cars on the Malecón, was run on 25 February 1957. Fulgencio Batista’s government staged it to promote the city, and paid its stars well: Fangio’s fee, by two accounts, was US$7,000. He won, in a Maserati 300S that the Brazilian Scuderia Madunina had entered, and Batista gave him the trophy. That year, too, the young men of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement first thought of kidnapping him. Faustino Pérez, who ran the Movement’s clandestine operations in Havana, told him afterwards that he had escaped them only because he had gone out to see a Gary Cooper film. Cooper himself had come to watch the race.

He came back on Friday 21 February 1958 for the second race. This time his car was Temple Buell’s, a Maserati 450S entered by the Denver oilman himself. He set the fastest time in practice, in a car he did not like: it was ungovernable, he said, and his mechanics found a difference of five centimetres in its track between one side and the other. In practice a local driver, Diego Veguillas, was killed.

Twenty-seven hours

The first stop, by his account, was a house reached by a fire escape, where a woman asked him for an autograph for her small son; he wrote a dedication, the date and his name. One of the kidnappers remembered it differently: that the gunman, usually named as Manuel Uziel, known as Manolo, took him to his own home to meet his wife and son.¹ Later, after a change of cars, he was taken to a house at No. 42 calle Norte, in Nuevo Vedado, where he spent the night. It carries a plaque now.

They never blindfolded him. When he saw how tense the young men were, he told them: “Congratulate the man who kidnapped me — he did it very well.” (attributed) Once they were easier with one another he said that he was hungry, and they ate fried potatoes and eggs in the patio.

Pérez had planned it, and a commando led by Oscar Lucero carried it out. The Movement wanted headlines, not ransom: with the race’s star gone, Batista’s showpiece would be an embarrassment. One of the commando, Manuel Núñez, told a Brazilian magazine in 2011 what their orders had been:

Éramos sete, com três armas. Manolo Uziel se aproximou de Fangio. … Na verdade, a ordem era arriscar nossas vidas, mas não tirar um fio de cabelo dele

There were seven of us, with three guns. Manolo Uziel went up to Fangio. … In fact, the order was to risk our lives, but not to harm a hair of his head.

Across the city the police guarded the foreign drivers’ hotels. Stirling Moss, who had married Katie Molson in 1957, was kept under guard, with a watchman knocking every three hours. Moss remembered Fangio’s part in it: “It was a very disturbing night … Fangio told the rebels, ‘You mustn’t take Stirling because he’s on his honeymoon’ – which was a lie of course, but nevertheless was very decent of him.” (attributed) The United Press reported an appeal from Andrea Berruet, whom it called his wife.

In the morning the newspapers came with his breakfast, and Pérez came to see him. He apologised, and promised that Fangio’s family would be told he was safe.² The young men told him why they fought. The Batista government had killed a brother of one of them, and a relative or a girlfriend of another.

The race without him

Batista ordered the race to be run on the Monday, 24 February, the anniversary of the Grito de Baire, the Cry of Baire, of 1895, to show that nothing was amiss. Maurice Trintignant drove Fangio’s Maserati. The drivers were angry, and Masten Gregory spoke for them, as the United Press reported it: “We’re furious with that Castro gang. This kidnapping is a stupid thing.” (attributed) The start was late, by one account about 90 minutes late, and each driver was escorted to the grid by a secret policeman.

Moss and Gregory fought for the lead on a road made slippery by oil from Roberto Mieres’s Porsche. On the sixth lap, by most accounts, a Cuban driver, Armando García Cifuentes, lost control of his Ferrari near the United States embassy, and the car went into the spectators. At least six people were killed and many more were hurt.³ Race control could not see the accident, and Phil Hill and Bob Said stopped to tell the officials to show the red flag. Moss, who knew that only the clerk of the course could stop the race, passed Gregory just before the line, was declared the winner and offered Gregory half the prize money. Two days later García Cifuentes was charged with manslaughter.

What Fangio knew of the race is told three ways. The United Press reported that he turned down a radio: “It doesn’t interest me, because I’m not going to race.” (attributed) Richard Williams writes that he followed it on the radio. And years later, for El Gráfico, he remembered watching it on television: “I saw all of it, even the replay of the accident that caused it to be stopped.” (attributed)

The embassy

Letting him go was the dangerous part.

En realidad ellos temían que una vez libre, me encontraran los hombres de Batista y me mataran para echarles la culpa de mi muerte. Querían dejarme en una iglesia, yo sugerí que mejor era la embajada argentina.

Actually they were afraid that once I was free, Batista’s men would find me and kill me so as to blame them for my death. They wanted to leave me at a church; I suggested the Argentine embassy would be better.

The journalist Carlos Lechuga helped to arrange it. Late on the night of 24 February, about eleven by one account and close to midnight by another, two young men and two young women, armed, took him to the Argentine ambassador’s representatives in Vedado. Arnold Rodríguez Camps, one of the commando, was in charge of the hand-over. About 27 hours had passed since the pistol had appeared in the hotel lobby.⁴ They left him, he said, with a letter to the government of Argentina apologising for having used him for political ends.

Free

The next day the Argentine embassy announced that he was free, and he met the press in his room, No. 810, on the eighth floor of the Hotel Lincoln. He identified no one. He had talked with his captors in the friendliest way, he said:

Me trataron como si hubiera estado entre amigos. … Hubiera podido estar en ese choque, así que mis secuestradores me pudieron haber salvado la vida. … gente que tiene ideales y quieren darlos a conocer de cualquier manera

They treated me as if I had been among friends. … I could have been in that crash, so my kidnappers may have saved my life. … people who have ideals and want to make them known in any way they can

The crash did not involve his car, which Trintignant drove, and the thought that the kidnapping had saved his life was a feeling, not a finding; but he always held to it. The United Press also reported a note he left, signed and in his own hand, that called it a kind kidnapping, in which he had been treated like one of the family.

Within days he flew to New York, where he was paid US$1,000 to appear on Ed Sullivan’s television show. He said later: “I had won the world championship five times and I had raced and won at Sebring, but what made me popular in the United States was the kidnap in Cuba.” (attributed)

About two months after the kidnapping Oscar Lucero was arrested by Batista’s police and died in their custody; Joe Saward writes that he was tortured.⁵ On 1 January 1959 Batista fled Cuba, and the revolution took power.

His friends the kidnappers

He never named any of them, and in later years he spoke of them, as a matter of habit, as his friends the kidnappers. In London in June 1979 he told Nigel Roebuck the story as he remembered it:

Well, it was one more experience, you know. At the time it was not very pleasant because I was taken away by some men with machine guns. The Movement of July 26. That was their name. it was a Castro political organisation. They treated me very well in fact, and spent all their time trying to justify their reasons for kidnapping me. They apologised all the time. We eventually became quite friendly, and they made it clear they did not want to hurt me, but merely to stop me racing so that their actions would get into the newspapers. In fact, they told me they had been looking for me the year before and they never managed to find me! When they released me, their leader told me he was very sorry for having inconvenienced me. Probably in today’s world such a thing would be very different. As it was, I was very sad to hear some time later that their leader had been shot by Batista’s regime.

In 1981 or 1982 he went back to Havana as president of Mercedes-⁠Benz Argentina, to sell trucks, and met Pérez, by then a minister, and Fidel Castro himself. How much Castro had to do with the kidnapping is disputed. Several writers say that he ordered it; Rodríguez Camps’s own book does not name him among the planners, and some of the participants say that he learned of it only when it was already under way, and disliked the risk. In private, years later, Castro told Gabriel García Márquez and Guillermo Angulo that the Movement had done it for publicity, not for money.⁶

For his 80th birthday, in 1991, the kidnappers sent him a message. In 1992 Rodríguez Camps visited him in Buenos Aires and in Balcarce, and at the funeral in July 1995 there were wreaths in the names of Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement. Rodríguez Camps died in November 2011, aged 80, having told the story in a book of his own, Operación Fangio. Of the kidnapping itself he said, as Richard Williams reports:

Our purpose was not to exchange him for money. We just wanted to prevent him from driving and to get maximum publicity for the revolution out of it – nothing else – and we certainly got it. … I am very proud of what we did and of the fact that Fangio was not harmed. If that had happened, it would have been a catastrophe for the revolution.

At the Hotel Lincoln a plaque names Oscar Lucero as the leader of the commando, and the hotel has kept room 810, where he met the press.