February, 1964
Lisa Howard had been waiting for him for more than two hours in a suite at the Hotel Riviera, enough time to bathe, dress, and apply makeup before taking it all off to get ready for bed when she realized he hadn’t arrived. But, at 11:30 p.m. on that night in Havana, Howard, an American correspondent for ABC News, finally heard a knock at the door. She opened it and saw the man she had been hoping to see: Fidel Castro, the 37-year-old leader of the Cuban revolution and one of America’s most vexing Cold War adversaries.
“You may be the prime minister, but I’m a very important journalist. How dare you keep me waiting,” Howard declared teasingly.
Then, she invited Castro and his chief assistant, René Vallejo, into her room.
In the following hours, they discussed everything from Marxist theory to the treatment of political prisoners in Cuba. A few months earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. They reminisced about him. Castro told Howard about his springtime trip to Russia and the “personal attention” he received from the “brilliant” Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Cuba’s oppressive government was criticized by Howard. “To make an honorable revolution … you must give up the notion of wanting to be prime minister for as long as you live.”
“Lisa,” Castro queried, “you really think I run a police state?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I do.”
Early in the morning, Howard asked Vallejo to leave. Finally alone with her, Castro wrapped his arms around the American journalist, and the two lay on the bed, where, according to Howard’s diary, Castro “kissed and caressed me … expertly with restrained passion.”
“He talked on about wanting to have me,” Howard wrote, but “would not undress or go all the way.” “We like each other very much,” Castro whispered to her, admitting he was having trouble finding the words to express his restraint. “You have done much for us, you have written a lot, spoken a lot about us. But if we go to bed then it will be complicated and our relationship will be destroyed.”
He assured her that he would see her again, stating that it would be inevitable and natural. Before Havana’s sunrise, Castro tucked Howard into bed, turned off the lights, and left.
In the winter of 1964, Howard’s visit to Havana was instrumental in advancing one of the most unusual and consequential partnerships in the history of U.S.-Cuba relations. She became Castro’s top American confidante and his secret government communicant with the White House, establishing a top-secret back channel between Washington and Havana to explore the possibility of reconciliation following the Cuban missile crisis.
From the middle of 1963 to the end of 1964, Howard relayed communications from Cuba’s revolutionary regime to the White House and back. She also used her reporting skills and prominent position at ABC to publicly challenge the Cold War belief that Castro was an implacable foe of U.S. interests. Her role as a peacemaker was based on a complex, little-understood personal mutual trust she forged with Castro himself — a political, personal, intellectual, and intimate relationship.
Almost nobody remembers Lisa Howard today. She was a glamorous former soap opera star who reinvented herself as a reporter and rose to the top of the male-dominated world of television news in the early 1960s. She was the first woman to serve as a correspondent for ABC and to host her own network news program. Her prominent position in the media bolstered her efforts on Cuba, but alarmed White House officials who were the targets of her unrelenting pressure to alter U.S. policy.
In top-secret reports from the era, lawmakers speculated about “a physical relationship” between Howard and Castro and worried that she would use her role at ABC News to expose Washington’s secret discussions with the Cuban comandante. However, both she and Castro buried the secret of their personal diplomacy. Thanks to declassified official documents and, most importantly, Howard’s own unredacted diaries and letters, the story of how one gutsy journalist gained the trust of the legendary leader of the Cuban revolution and persuaded two U.S. presidents to rethink a peaceful coexistence with him can finally be told.
At a time when women in television news were typically relegated to reporting on fashion, lifestyle, and the weather, Howard was the first female face to provide daily authoritative coverage of national and international events. “Six changes of Puccis and six politicians in one day are par for the course for Lisa Howard,” read a 1963 McCall’s Magazine cover story describing Howard as “a dead-serious reporter,” who was also “bright, buxom, and bumptious.” In a different profile published the same year, Time magazine stated that the trailblazing female journalist “has achieved this distinction by scrambling harder than six monkeys peeling the same banana. … Political leaders, domestic and foreign, have learned that there is no dodging Lisa Howard.”
In the early 1960s, Castro was one of the most vibrant and unnerving new figures on the global political scene, according to U.S. policymakers. On January 1, 1959, the young, bearded guerrilla fighter deposed the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista and installed a revolutionary government just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Initially, Castro’s charisma appeared to impress the United States. However, American officials became dissatisfied with his anti-American rhetoric and economic outreach to the Soviet Union. Eisenhower authorized planning for a secret CIA paramilitary intervention to reverse the Cuban revolution and install a more compliant government in Havana in the spring of 1960. Diplomatic relations were severed in January 1961.
Kennedy inherited the covert operation, gave it the go-ahead to proceed at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, and watched as it exploded in a major disaster when Castro’s militia defeated the CIA-led brigade in less than three days. In early 1962, he ordered a new program of covert operations against Cuba, known as Operation Mongoose, and a full economic blockade—aggressive moves that convinced Castro, who had recently declared Cuba a socialist state, to accept Soviet nuclear missiles as a deterrent against another U.S. invasion, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis. In October, the world was on the verge of nuclear Armageddon for thirteen days before Kennedy offered Khrushchev a secret deal: the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of missiles from Cuba. With Castro furious at Khrushchev for removing the weapons without consulting him, some Kennedy officials saw an opportunity to entice Castro back into the Western orbit, while the CIA was determined to continue its overthrow efforts.
Cuba was a significant news story. Few establishment reporters were able to gain access to the country, let alone an interview with its fiery leader, due to escalating tensions, the embargo, and the lack of direct travel between the two nations. In the early 1960s, Howard made two unsuccessful attempts to obtain an interview with Castro. After the missile crisis, she made a third attempt. She wrote to Castro, “Considering the present state of the world crisis,” she wrote Castro, “wouldn’t this be an ideal moment for you to speak to the American people?”
In early April 1963, after months of her persuasion, the Cuban mission in New York finally granted Howard a visa to travel to Havana. Castro ignored her for several weeks as he concluded negotiations with New York attorney James Donovan for the release of U.S. prisoners in Cuban jails and prepared for his first summit with Khrushchev in Russia. After her arrival, Howard wrote Castro a letter pleading for his attention: “I beg you to say ‘YES,’” it stated in Spanish. “Give me this interview, please”—and passed it on to a variety of interlocutors, including Donovan, whom she asked to speak well of her.
“I told [Castro] there was a beautiful blonde dish of a reporter wanting to interview him and would he give her some of his time,” Donovan recalled. “I went about it by whetting Castro’s natural masculine curiosity and vanity.”
Castro relented and agreed to meet Howard at the Havana Riviera hotel’s nightclub, either out of curiosity and vanity or a belief that Howard could become a truly valuable channel to the United States. He arrived at midnight on April 21, and the two discussed Kennedy, Howard’s impressions of Khrushchev as “a sly old fox” who “would cut you off like a twig,” and “the police state apparatus” under Castro’s rule until almost 6 a.m.
Howard was impressed by Castro’s knowledge breadth. Howard later recounted in a letter, “Never, never have I found a Communist interested in the sentiments of Albert Camus,” Howard later recounted in a letter. “And I certainly have not found dedicated Communists anxious to discuss the merits of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. But Fidel enjoyed the conversation immensely.”
Howard pleaded with Castro to find his “way back” and become the transformative historical figure she believed was destined for him.
In her diary, Howard wrote, “Perhaps we shall never see one another again,” the letter concluded instead. “But I shall treasure with all my heart for as long as I live my trip to Cuba in April of 1963 and my meetings with you, my dearest Fidel.”
Howard had created an unprecedented bridge between Castro and the Oval Office almost single-handedly. But the White House shut her out. Fearing her relationship with Castro, they cut her out of the loop within weeks of a now infamous broadcast interview.
She had used that interview to further put pressure on the White House to further peace resolution talks with Cuba, but it was to no avail. As Howard lost her Cuban cachet with the Johnson administration, she was fired from ABC News.
During the fury to the upcoming 1964 elections, Howard had initiated Democrats for Keating and was lobbying party leaders not to support RFK’s Senate bid. During the convention, ABC received two calls from Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, complaining that Howard’s criticism of Kennedy was causing “quite a stir.” ABC sent a representative to the convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to tell her to stop.
Howard, who never compromised her principles, increased her public opposition to Kennedy’s candidacy.
As the 1964 election approached in late September, the network abruptly suspended her for her participation in “Democrats for Keating.”
Two weeks later, ABC abruptly suspended Howard from her daily show. After less than a month, she was fired. Her efforts to convince ABC to reconsider were unsuccessful, as were her efforts to obtain employment at another network. In early 1965, the New York Supreme Court dismissed Howard’s civil suit against ABC, in which she sought $2 million in damages to her reputation and career.
When Howard filed a lawsuit against ABC for violating her constitutional rights to express her political views, ABC executives cited “her actions regarding the Cuba show” as one of the reasons for terminating her contract.
According to Howard, she fought a “titanic battle” with network brass to prevent the broadcast from adopting a standard Cold War approach to the complicated issue of the Cuban revolution.
Late in the spring of 1965, Howard suffered a miscarriage. Her subsequent depression led to a hospitalization that, sadly, did not alleviate her sadness.
On July 4, 1965, while spending the holiday weekend in the Hamptons, Howard altered a prescription for 10 barbiturates and obtained a bottle of 100 tablets; she overdosed and died in the parking lot. She was 39 years old.
The FBI would soon launch a bizarre investigation to determine if her death was connected to Guevara’s disappearance after his New York visit.
FBI agents questioned Howard’s former colleagues at ABC about her work in Cuba, her relationships with Castro and Guevara, and the reasons she may have contemplated suicide. The FBI also consulted with members of the NYPD to determine if Howard’s death was “a legitimate suicide” or if there was, presumably, foul play connected to her work on Cuba.
Howard once confided, “I was an integral part of this fledgling new look at Cuba,” Her efforts may not have borne fruit during her brief lifetime, but they laid the groundwork for the back-channel diplomacy that led to the breakthrough in relations achieved by the Obama administration fifty years later.
Castro also recognized her courage and understood what it had enabled her to accomplish. In 1964, during one of their late-night phone conversations between Havana and New York, he lovingly told her, “You know no one could come down here and do what you did — with your will and persuasions. No one.”