Day in the Five: Who was Fabio Di Celmo?
by Stephen Kimber on September 4, 2010 | No Comments
Havana
September 4, 1997
11:00 a.m.
Fabio Di Celmo
Fabio Di Celmo was apologetic. Another day perhaps, he suggested into the telephone. The person at the other end of the line was a representative of Biconsa, a division of Cuba’s Ministry of Domestic Trade with whom he hoped to make a deal. But not today. Their appointment was for noon, but Fabio had a more pressing commitment at that time. Enrico and Francesca Gallo Argelia, his two best “buddies” from his school days in Italy, had been honeymooning in Cuba and were flying home this afternoon. Fabio, who’d suggested the newlyweds’ honeymoon destination, had promised to have one final lunch with them before they left.
Perhaps, Fabio suggested into the phone, he could meet with the Biconsa representative next week. He really did want to do some business. Of course. Yes, yes, that would be fine.
Fabio hung up the telephone, explained the new arrangements to his father. Giustino nodded. While Fabio met with his friends in the lobby bar at the Copacabana, Giustino would return to his room on the fourth floor to rest for a while. Perhaps later, he said, he’d join them for a drink.
Fabio was feeling good. About himself, about business, about life. At 32, he senses that he was finally emerging from his father’s business shadow. Although he was now 77 years old, Gisutino Di Celmo still cast a long shadow.
Giustino had been—still was—a natural-born salesman, a larger-than-life figure who could peddle anything to anyone. But that did not, his oldest son Livio would be quick to insist, make him a capitalist. “My father’s motto was to treat everyone fairly. Capitalism was OK if the profits benefitted everyone equally,” he would explain. “Otherwise, capitalism was the big enemy.”
After World War II, Giustino had left war-ravaged Italy for the promise of a better life in the new world. His wife Ora joined him later. They’d settled in Argentina where Giustino could weave his selling magic—at one point he bought a boat to travel up the Rio Parana to buy fish from the native Indians to sell in Buenos Aires—while Ora would raise their two young children, Livio and Titania. (Giustino, who was a Roman history buff, named all his children after famous Romans.)
But Giustino’s friendships with anti-government union leaders soon brought him into conflict with Argentinian strongman Juan Perón. After some of his friends wound up murdered, Giustino packed up the family and returned to Italy.
Fabio—in Roman times, a name given to a “special person”—was born in 1965.
From his new base in Genoa, Giustino developed a thriving export business, selling much-needed furniture for hotels as well as fine Italian jewelry to outposts of the Soviet empire like Czechoslovakia. In the early 1970s, he also began travelling to Canada peddling stylish Italian jewelry in Montreal. By 1976—the year of the Montreal Olympics—the family officially became permanent Canadian residents, allowing them to spend part of the year in Montreal and part in Italy.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s threatened Giustino’s own small empire, but he quickly parlayed an old friendship with the Czech trade minister into an introduction to Cuba’s minister of domestic trade.
The loss of its Soviet benefactor had plunged Cuba into sudden economic freefall and forced Fidel Castro to turn, reluctantly, to tourism to generate desperately needed revenues. Attracting visitors to the island meant building world-class tourist resorts. And that, of course, meant a sudden need for beds, furnishings, carpets, cleaning supplies, everything.
Giustino Di Celmo was more than ready to supply those needs.
In 1992, Giustino and his youngest son Fabio flew to Havana to meet with Cuban Domestic Trade Minister Colonel Manuel Vila Sosa. Fabio was impressed, he would tell his older brother afterward, and not just by the fact the first thing Vila Sosa did was to pick up his cellphone and call Czechoslovakia to make sure the Di Celmos really were friends of the minister, but also by the fact that the minister, a colonel in the Cuban army, dressed for work in jeans and a T-shirt. Fabio was going to like doing business in Havana.
Fabio, who hadn’t been especially interested in pursuing academic studies, had joined his father in business after high school. He liked the independence that came with selling. At first, he’d just been his father’s assistant, listening and watching while Giustino spun his salesman’s web. Over time—although his father continued to handle the business’s financing and accounting—Fabio had assumed more and more responsibility for finding the products they sold and for maintaining quality control over them.
Thanks to competitive prices, on-time deliveries and quality products, sales had been brisk. One of their first big jobs was a contract to supply Italian furniture and carpets for renovations to the venerable Hotel Nacional. There always seemed to be more opportunities. Cuba, as Fabio liked to say, needed “everything.”
Recently, Fabio had finalized the first two contracts he’d negotiated completely on his own. One was for sewing machine needles. For some reason, no one in Cuba had been able to find a supplier for the machines. Fabio had. The deal had been a personal breakthrough, Fabio explained to his older brother in a phone conversation two days before, because he’d accomplished it all by himself. Fabio encouraged Livio—who was then living in Montreal and had just lost his own job with an airline there—to abandon his life as “an office rat” and come work with him in Cuba. “We’ll have fun together,” he’d said.
Though Fabio still flitted frequently among Cuba, Canada and Italy, he had clearly become more enamoured with life in Cuba. While he hadn’t been particularly interested in politics as a child growing up in Italy and Canada, he’d recently developed such an obsession with the speeches of Fidel Castro his friends had begun to tease him about it. After watching Castro deliver one of his famously spellbinding three-hour orations, he told friends he’d never heard anyone speak so passionately about anything. After that, he’d read every Fidel Castro speech he could find, and had even begun to read books of Cuban history.
Fabio now also had a Chinese-Cuban girlfriend and there was talk that he and his father might buy a condo in the Monte Carlo Palace, a proposed condominium project for foreigners in Havana’s elite Miramar district. Since it had been impossible for foreigners to buy real estate in Havana when they’d first begun coming to the city five years before, Giustino, like many other outside entrepreneurs, had turned a room in the Copacabana into his local hotel room-headquarters. He’d chosen the Copacabana, a Brazilian-themed waterfront hotel that had been among the first to be renovated in 1992, because he liked its tropical ambience, its friendly staff, its convenient location—although it nuzzled up against the Atlantic coast, the hotel was still in the middle of the city, an easy commute to almost anywhere—and, of course, its natural saltwater pool that filled directly from the ocean. During their visits to Havana, Giustino had been staying in the hotel while Fabio rented a room in a nearby casa particular to save money.
By 1997, they were spending close to four months a year in Havana. That, in part, was a reflection of their success, but also of the nature of doing business in Cuba. Cuba was not like other countries, Fabio had confided to his brother; in Havana everything took twice as long. Giustino and Fabio began their routine of sales calls at 8 o’clock each morning and scheduled meetings, one after the other, until noon. There were few formal meetings after lunch. That was just the Cuban way of doing business, Fabio explained.
Today, with their last meeting of the morning put on hold, Fabio was eager to hear how Enrico and Francesca had enjoyed their honeymoon in Cuba. He’d already been talking with Enrico, who was worried about his bride. She’d become obsessed with an irrational fear that something “bad” was going to happen to them in Cuba. Fabio would be happy today to remind her that she’d been wrong.
He turned the corner, saw Enrico and Francesca seated at the glassed-in lobby bar waiting for him. He made his way past the tan couches, the high-backed rattan chairs, the potted palms, a canister ashtray. It was time for a drink, a celebration.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, collected research and other materials for an in-progress narrative nonfiction book about the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber.
The Cuban Five were members of "La Red Avispa"—the Wasp Network—spies Havana dispatched to Florida in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant anti-Castro exile groups that Cuba believed were plotting terrorist attacks on its soil. The Cuban Five were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms in the United States.
In the United States, they are virtually unknown. In Cuba, they are heroes.
That’s the short version of the story. The long version is… well, more complicated... Stay tuned.
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