One-Man War

The waters off Key West were smooth and serene one morning last week as a 38-ft. patrol boat, manned by two of Fidel Castro's navy lieutenants and watchfully escorted by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter, sailed away to Havana. But behind his huge desk in Miami, an advertising-agency president named Erwin G. Harris, 40, was boiling mad. For by order of a state court, that patrol boat was his--even though it had just been swapped away from him by the U.S. Government.

The patrol-boat incident was a setback for Miami's Harris in a one-man war he has been waging against Castro's Cuba. In the past five months. Harris has seized ten Cuban planes flown to the U.S. by defectors--five C46 cargo planes, three Piper Cubs, a DC-3B and a Cessna 180--as well as 3.5 million lbs. of lard purchased in the U.S. by Cuba and intercepted in Florida. He has sold these items for $200,000, is thus nearly halfway through his drive to recover $429,000 due him from the Cuban government because of a 1959 advertising contract.

Not So Charming. Curly-haired, high-powered Erwin Harris runs an agency that has annual bookings of about $3,000,000. A New York University advertising graduate who served four years in Army Intelligence in World War II and was wounded twice while in the European theater. Harris moved to Miami in 1947. By 1957, his clients included two of Havana's better hotels, the Nacional and the Riviera, and his firm was a natural to win a $1,600,000-a-year contract from the Cuban government in the summer of 1959 to attract tourists to Cuba.

Before long, impressive, two-page ads stressing Cuba's charm and conviviality ("If Cuba could be said to have one predominant art it would have to be the art of living") were appearing in U.S. newspapers and magazines. But Harris began to doubt his own copy when Ernesto (Che) Guevara became Economics Minister of Cuba and early in 1960 cut off Harris' monthly checks. Harris flew to Havana, saw Castro, and "had to listen to 20 minutes of demagoguery." He tried again, waited 82 hours in Guevara's office. Guevara just laughed in Harris' face and asked scornfully: "Do you really think that I'm going to pay you so you can pay the American newspapers?"

Infuriated. Harris took his case to the U.S. courts, finally won an order granting him the right to seize and sell Cuban equipment up to $429,000. Harris took to flying around in airplanes to spot boxcars of lard on remote railroad sidings, seized the very plane that was to take Castro home from the United Nations sessions in New York last September, set up his own private intelligence system to detect planes and boats arriving from Cuba.

Lost Sale. Two weeks ago. Harris seized a patrol boat that had been sailed to the U.S. by three defecting Castro navymen. By last week he had a buyer ready to pay $55,000 for the vessel--when the U.S. State Department suddenly announced that the boat was protected by diplomatic immunity and must be returned to Cuba. Although the State Department claimed that no "swap" was involved, it was hardly a coincidence that that same day Castro released an Eastern Air Lines Electra valued at $2,500,000, that had been hijacked and flown to Havana on July 24th. Harris reluctantly released the boat. Said he, in a formal statement: "We recognize the paramount responsibility we have as American citizens, and in an effort to demonstrate national unity, we are relinquishing our equity in the Cuban gunboat." But he insisted that his legal rights had been overridden: "You can't knock out due process of law by a press statement from the State Department." In a land of law, he had quite a point.

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