The Press: Hot Tip from Havana

The Miami Herald’s mysterious visitor, who called herself Evelyn Hill, produced a news tip that made city-room ears prick up: the Havana whereabouts of Austin Frank Young, 38, Miami-based adventurer who, sentenced to 30 years for conspiring against the Fidel Castro regime, had broken out of a Cuban jail in Pinar del Rio province less than 24 hours earlier.

While the plumpish, corseted blonde doled out details (she was a “friend” of the escapee, who had phoned her from Havana for money), the Herald put in a quick call to Miami International Airport. There, by luck, the paper had a man waiting for the next plane to Havana. What’s more, Reporter James Coe Buchanan was just the man for the story. On previous Cuban assignments, he had hidden out with Castro rebels, filed eyewitness accounts of the bloody skirmishing. And last summer, when Castro troops trapped a tiny invasion force from the Dominican Republic, wiry, 43-year-old Jim Buchanan was the first U.S. reporter to reach the scene.

The Man Upstairs. Within hours, Buchanan was in Havana and waiting for a rendezvous with Evelyn Hill, who took a later plane. She escorted him to a tourist hotel called the St. Johns. “I registered.” said Buchanan. “So did she. At about 8, we went upstairs to see Young.”

Equipped only with a fuzzy wire photo of the escaped prisoner, Reporter Buchanan could not be sure that the man he listened to until 1:30 in the morning was Austin Frank Young. But he looked the part—bruised, scratched and haggard. And he had a hair-raising yarn to spill. Scribbling furiously, Buchanan took it all down, airmailed home the fugitive’s own account of his escape, which was promptly copyrighted by the Herald and splashed all over Page One. It made vivid reading: the ordeal (“I didn’t know which was worse, the horrible crawl across the yard or the swamps, the muck and the rocks”), the ride to Havana in a farmer’s truck, the friend there who supplied fresh clothing, the hideout at the St. Johns.

By next morning, Herald Reporter Buchanan was through, and preparing to goback to Miami. But he had one more mission to perform: “Young had asked me to get him a bandage for a swollen ankle, and a straw hat and dark glasses. I was willing to get the bandage—I’d do that for anybody—but nothing else, since I didn’t want to get involved.”

The Men Upstairs. Buchanan ordered a limousine for the ride to the airport, picked up some gauze bandages at a drugstore, knocked on Young’s door—and walked right into the arms of three Castro intelligence agents, who had tracked Young to his hideaway. It was only then that Buchanan was certain that his man was really Austin Frank Young.

Reporter Buchanan was jailed on suspicion of “involvement” in Young’s escape—although the reporter did not reach Havana until the day after it happened. After bannering the arrest, the Herald sent Assistant Managing Editor John McMullen to Havana, retained a Havana law firm to secure Buchanan’s release.

But at week’s end Jim Buchanan, hungry although not mistreated, was still behind bars, and Evelyn Hill, safely back in Miami, was being kept under wraps by the Herald. Clearly Fidel Castro, who ordered the arrest of three other newsmen last week,*was making a point in his own theatrical way: “foreign” reporters are not welcome in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

*The others—two NBC cameramen and Ian Aitken, New York correspondent for the London Daily Express—have been released.