Hans Miller.
The Cubana Airlines DC-10, fully booked with German tourists returning home after a holiday in Cuba, had been delayed at José Martí for four hours due to mechanical difficulty. Grünewald was glad he’d booked first-class,
clase tropical
in Cuban aviation-speak, although it was nothing like first-class on Lufthansa. The seats were narrower, the overhead bins smaller, and the food not to Grünewald’s liking. He’d been in Cuba for two years but had never taken to the island’s native cuisine. He’d found a few Havana restaurants that pretended to serve German food, and tended to take most of his meals at these, although business dictated joining associates in a variety of Cuban eateries. At least beer was plentiful; he bought imported Heineken by the case, and had developed a taste for Cuban rum, particularly seven-year-old Habana Club, which he had delivered to his apartment each week by Casa de Ron, located above El Floridita. This was the restaurant where the daiquiri was made popular, and where Ernest Hemingway’s bronze bust looked down on his favorite bar stool that was kept unoccupied as a shrine to the bully-boy author.
Grünewald knew he drank too much. He often rationalized it to himself. What was he to do? His wife and children were back in the town of Eberbach, a suburb of Heidelberg, comfortable in their wood-beamed house on the cobblestone street, enjoying their friends and family who lived close by, enjoying being German in Germany. When he’d been asked to undertake a special assignment in Cuba two years ago, Grünewald told Dr. Miller that he needed time to think about it. But he knew what his answer would be the minute he left Miller’s office. He didn’t have a choice because his tenure with Strauss-Lochner Resources had become tenuous. After twenty-five years,all of them spent at corporate headquarters in the Heidelberg Technology Park, he could sense his lessened stature within the company through little things—not being invited to meetings in which he used to be routinely involved, being slighted in the routing of important memoranda, overhearing younger colleagues joke at lunch about the “dinosaurs” still with the company—little things that added up to a big reality.
Also, he was not part of the company’s medical research team, the largest division and its reason for existence. Strauss-Lochner was a relatively successful developer and manufacturer of drugs developed in close cooperation with Heidelberg University and the famed Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum Cancer Research Center, DKFZ, founded in 1964 and now an acknowledged world player in cancer treatment and research. But of late the company’s fortunes had been shaky. Competition had become cutthroat in the race to develop effective anti-cancer drugs.
But Kurt Grünewald did speak Spanish. And he had achieved a reputation as an effective negotiator, particularly in past labor disputes in which the company had been embroiled. His degree from the esteemed university at Heidelberg was in international affairs, and he had gone on to earn an advanced degree in labor relations. When Miller dispatched him to Cuba, Grünewald was told that the company needed a man of his experience and knowledge to help pave the way for a deal with the Cuban government to allow Strauss-Lochner to buy a controlling interest in the state-owned cancer research institute. He was instructed to establish relationships with the appropriate Cuban officials in a position to influence Fidel Castro, with an eye toward obtaining the dictator’s cooperation in the sale of the research institute to a foreign investor. He was given an almost unlimited expenseaccount with which to wine and dine Cuban officials. Should direct payoffs be necessary, he was authorized to spend up to ten thousand dollars without having to seek permission from Heidelberg.
It wasn’t until he’d been in Cuba a year that he learned through an errant “secured”
The Cubana Airlines DC-10, fully booked with German tourists returning home after a holiday in Cuba, had been delayed at José Martí for four hours due to mechanical difficulty. Grünewald was glad he’d booked first-class,
clase tropical
in Cuban aviation-speak, although it was nothing like first-class on Lufthansa. The seats were narrower, the overhead bins smaller, and the food not to Grünewald’s liking. He’d been in Cuba for two years but had never taken to the island’s native cuisine. He’d found a few Havana restaurants that pretended to serve German food, and tended to take most of his meals at these, although business dictated joining associates in a variety of Cuban eateries. At least beer was plentiful; he bought imported Heineken by the case, and had developed a taste for Cuban rum, particularly seven-year-old Habana Club, which he had delivered to his apartment each week by Casa de Ron, located above El Floridita. This was the restaurant where the daiquiri was made popular, and where Ernest Hemingway’s bronze bust looked down on his favorite bar stool that was kept unoccupied as a shrine to the bully-boy author.
Grünewald knew he drank too much. He often rationalized it to himself. What was he to do? His wife and children were back in the town of Eberbach, a suburb of Heidelberg, comfortable in their wood-beamed house on the cobblestone street, enjoying their friends and family who lived close by, enjoying being German in Germany. When he’d been asked to undertake a special assignment in Cuba two years ago, Grünewald told Dr. Miller that he needed time to think about it. But he knew what his answer would be the minute he left Miller’s office. He didn’t have a choice because his tenure with Strauss-Lochner Resources had become tenuous. After twenty-five years,all of them spent at corporate headquarters in the Heidelberg Technology Park, he could sense his lessened stature within the company through little things—not being invited to meetings in which he used to be routinely involved, being slighted in the routing of important memoranda, overhearing younger colleagues joke at lunch about the “dinosaurs” still with the company—little things that added up to a big reality.
Also, he was not part of the company’s medical research team, the largest division and its reason for existence. Strauss-Lochner was a relatively successful developer and manufacturer of drugs developed in close cooperation with Heidelberg University and the famed Deutsche Krebsforschungszentrum Cancer Research Center, DKFZ, founded in 1964 and now an acknowledged world player in cancer treatment and research. But of late the company’s fortunes had been shaky. Competition had become cutthroat in the race to develop effective anti-cancer drugs.
But Kurt Grünewald did speak Spanish. And he had achieved a reputation as an effective negotiator, particularly in past labor disputes in which the company had been embroiled. His degree from the esteemed university at Heidelberg was in international affairs, and he had gone on to earn an advanced degree in labor relations. When Miller dispatched him to Cuba, Grünewald was told that the company needed a man of his experience and knowledge to help pave the way for a deal with the Cuban government to allow Strauss-Lochner to buy a controlling interest in the state-owned cancer research institute. He was instructed to establish relationships with the appropriate Cuban officials in a position to influence Fidel Castro, with an eye toward obtaining the dictator’s cooperation in the sale of the research institute to a foreign investor. He was given an almost unlimited expenseaccount with which to wine and dine Cuban officials. Should direct payoffs be necessary, he was authorized to spend up to ten thousand dollars without having to seek permission from Heidelberg.
It wasn’t until he’d been in Cuba a year that he learned through an errant “secured”
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