Until her death in Havana at the age of 108, and although confined to a wheelchair, Canadian-born Mary McCarthy got dolled up daily in the finery befitting the multi-millionaire she was. Along with vivid lipststick and heavy rouge that fought a losing battle against the inevitable wrinkles, she wore a fuchsia satin gown, a glittering tiara and her pearls.
The only problem was that the tiara and pearls were phoney. Her real “trinkets” – gold, jewellery and countless family heirlooms – have been gathering dust in a bank in Boston, Massachusetts, for nearly half a century, along with the fortune she never got to touch – millions, probably tens of millions of dollars after interest. Under the sanctions imposed on Fidel Castro’s communist regime in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, her funds were “frozen” and have remained so ever since, despite her protestations to successive US administrations.
Had she moved back to Canada or the US, McCarthy may have had a chance to reclaim her fortune but she had lived happily in Cuba since 1924, felt it was her home and refused to leave “these very nice people, very generous, who will help you at any hour”. Even after Castro’s 1959 revolution took over the profitable leather factory set up by her late husband, and almost all of her wealthy friends fled to Miami, McCarthy stayed put. In recent years, to enter the now-dilapidated mansion her husband built for his young bride in the then-upmarket district of Siboneh in 1924 was to enter a timewarp.
There was Mary herself, looking like a 19th century ballerina, playing Chopin on a Steinway grand piano as old as herself, beneath chandeliers and surrounded by candelabra, furniture, mirrors and sculptures from the Napoleon III era. On her terrace, her pet peacocks would loiter among the mango and royal palm trees while her 1950s Cadillac rusted in the driveway for lack of spare parts.
Behind the framed telegrams from the Queen and Pope John Paul II to mark her 100th birthday, only the flaking paint on the walls revealed the truth – that the millionairess was living on only $96 a month begrudgingly granted to her, from her own account, by the Bush administration in 2007 after the intervention of the Canadian government.
“The only thing I want my money for is medicine for my respiratory problems and to fix my house up,” she told visiting reporters. “I don’t even want to buy candy out of it.” Under Castro’s national health system, she was offered free treatment but insisted: “I’m not going to start taking charity now.” Medicines are another matter. Mostly as a result of the US embargo, Cubans rely on relatives to send or bring medicaments from the US, not an easy process.
Mary Conception McCarthy was born in St John’s, Newfoundland, on 27 April, 1900, daughter of Thomas McCarthy, an Irish immigrant who sold supplies to the town’s mighty fishing fleet, and Anne Burke. Both parents were devout Catholics and they sent their daughter to a school run by the Sisters of Mercy before she moved south, aged 18, to Boston, Massachusetts, to study music.
It was there, at the age of 23, during an interval at the city’s Opera House, that she met and fell in love with a handsome Spanish businessman, Pedro Gómez Cueto. They married the following year, 1924, and moved to what were then the bright lights of Havana, Cuba. These were the Roarin’ Twenties and the city was thriving on the wealth of sugar barons. Pedro opened a factory to make clothes and shoes for the affluent from imported Spanish leather while Mary taught music to the wealthy’s children on the Steinway. She co-founded the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra and set up an orphanage called La Ciudad de los Niños (the City of the Children).
When Cuba’s pro-US regime took the allied side after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour, Pedro Gómez made his fortune, estimated at the time as $4m – worth about $29m today – by making boots for the Cuban army, although the latter never got involved in actual combat. After he died in 1951, his widow ran the factory.
They were heady days. Under US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, Havana became the playground of the rich and famous, the Hollywood stars and the New York mafia, who frequented the Cuban capital’s mafia-run casinos, brothels and night clubs. Frank Sinatra considered room 225 at Havana’s Hotel Nacional his second home, often shared with actress Ava Gardner. Down the hall might be actors George Raft and Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller, as well as top mafiosi Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.
The widowed McCarthy met them all, including writer Ernest Hemingway, at the Country Club close to her home, and at the élite Havana or Miramar yacht clubs, where Cuba’s black majority could enter only as serving staff.
Then, in January 1959, down from the mountains and into Havana came Castro, Ché Guevara and their motley guerrillas. Batista fled the country, as did most wealthy Cubans. It was only in 1962, after Castro declared himself a communist, that JFK imposed the embargo that remains in place today. McCarthy opposed communism but avoided criticising Castro personally, even though he ordered her orphanage to be taken over by Soviet military personnel during the 1962 missile crisis. “He has his ideas, but he’s a good man,” she said.
Every day until her death, after afternoon tea sipped from her finest china, McCarthy fingered her rosary and prayed to Cuba’s spiritual patron, la Virgen de Caridad, the Virgin of Charity. Although the old Steinway was woodworm-ridden and badly out of tune, she gave lessons on it, often free, to local children until she broke her hip at the age of 102.
Mary McCarthy, who died in Havana on April 3, 2009, had no children. She is survived by her godson, carer and heir, Elio García.
