Earlier this year (see “Gizz-ette,” February 27, 2006), I wrote a review of The Last Playboy, Shawn Levy’s fascinating biography of Porifiro Rubirosa. Although “Rubi” was best known as an international playboy whose wives included Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton (the two richest women in the world at the time they were married to the dashing Dominican), Levy’s Robert Caro-like research unearthed another unknown side of him: how, as an official of the Dominican Republic’s embassy in Paris during the German occupation of France in 1940, Rubirosa hired card-playing friend and painter Fernando Gerassi, who feared retribution from the Germans for being on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. But Rubirosa’s giving him a title and position permitted Gerassi to have diplomatic immunity and in turn give more than 8000 passports to Jews and other refugees, thus saving thousands of lives. When Gerassi came to the US himself, he joined the OSS, was a key operative in Latin America and Spain, and was a key player in making the Allied landing in Africa happen.

“Thousands saved, Nazis frustrated, a painter becomes a humanitarian hero,” notes author Levy, and all because Rubi helped a friend in need. It was almost a hybrid of Schindler’s List and It’s A Wonderful Life.



This month, I gave two copies of Last Playboy as gifts to friends. As I began to wrap the gifts, I recalled another little-known side of Rubirosa discovered and delineated by Levy (who graciously signed both copies of his book to my friends): with the mounting headlines that Fidel Castro may be near death, I thought, did Rubi fire the first shot against the Communist strongman shortly after he seized power in Cuba forty-seven years ago.

At the time Castro and his men marched in Havanna on New Year’s Eve in 1959 and pro-U.S. strongman Fulgencio Battista fled into exile in the Dominican Republic, the DR’s ambassador to Cuba was none other than Porifiro Rubirosa. To Castro, Rubi was a curiosity, and the new man in Havanna once sat quizzing the Dominican ambassador about his country’s strongman Trujillo about how he held onto power. In the weeks following the coup, Castro supporters threw grenades at the Dominican embassy, began shooting through the windows and shouting that Rubirosa was a murderer. As the ambassador’s fifth wife Odile recalled to Levy, “We couldn’t go out any place. For four months until we broke relations with Cuba, it was very hard on us.” A bomb went off at the embassy in April of 1959 and, with Trujillo’s Dominican Republican breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba, the Rubirosas left for good.

In March 1960, the freighter Coubre, loaded with arms purchased from Belgium for the Castro militia, arrived in Havanna and exploded. Nearly 300 sailors, dockworkers, and passersby were killed in what Castro charged was a CIA plot against him. As Levy recalled, “many historians would come to see the Coubre incident as a decisive turning point in the Cuban decision to ally with the Soviet Union. But the American government denied stridently any involvement with the explosion.”

But there might be another explanation. As Levy notes, it may well have been Trujillo -- an ally of the US and friend of Battista -- who, nervous about his revolutionary new neighbor, may have seen that the ship with Belgian arms (which sailed from France) had been booby-trapped before it crossed the Atlantic. As Levy later wrote me, “There were two sources I found in the FBI and Department of State records who indicated that Trujillo was complicit in the explosion. One was Arturo Espaillat, who served Trujillo at the UN and in the intelligence service. The other was [Rubi’s ne’er-do-well brother] Cesar Rubirosa, who had a tendency to build up his brother’s involvement in this, that, and the other as a means of increasing his own stature.

“Both of these men pointed to Rubi’s brief term as a diplomat in Belgium [he was named ambassador to Belgium one month after leaving Cuba] -- which coincided with the loading and sailing of the Coubre -- as something more than a coincidence. It’s certainly plausible that if Trujillo was involved that Rubi was. But it’s also plausible that Trujillo had nothing to do with it.”

As Castro appears to be finally fading from the scene, it would be timely to re-examine the Coubre incident. Quite possibly, a journalist might even ask acting Cuban President Raul Castro if they believe Rubirosa was involved. As author Levy noted, there are a number of contradictory stories about the then-ambassador to Havanna’s activities in the days following the New Year’s Eve coup, including “spending an afternoon a few days later in a café, drinking and chatting amiably with Fidel Castro’s brother Raul.”

As Levy concludes in his book, “[Rubirosa’s] fingerprints were nowhere on the operation. But, then, the new Cuban regime couldn’t get its hands on him to fingerprint him.”

A FOOTNOTE: To those “Gizz-ette” readers who shared my enthusiasm for The Last Playboy, Shawn Levy wrote to tell me that it may soon be a motion picture. According to Levy, “John Malkovich’s film company owns the movie rights and has just recently renewed its option for a second year. I don’t know what sort of progress they’re making, but I met with them and they’re keen on Javier Bardem in the lead.”