The full story of Vesco’s 12-year exile in Cuba remains a mystery. Early speculation that Castro would offer Vesco up to hasten the Clinton administration’s modest relaxation of U.S. trade sanctions proved premature. Nixon’s account, however, offers a glimpse into how life under one of the world’s last communist dictators can resemble a carnival funhouse. A key to the recent Vesco mystery, Nix-on suggests, is a struggle for control of the “miracle” drug Trioxidal.
Cuba watchers think Vesco’s troubles are a lot more complicated than that, but it is true that Cuba is the perfect place for anyone peddling a medical miracle. For decades, Castro has been obsessed with wonder drugs. And in the early 1980s, Castroset out to make his nation a world power in biotechnology. Along with production of interferon and vaccines, the Cubans produce a drug called PPG that’s urged on tourists as an anti-cholesterol agent that also stimulates sexual potency. Nixon says he turned to Cuba–and to Vesco–three years ago, after being rebuffed by U.S. drug companies in his efforts to test a compound derived from the citronella plant that allegedly helped his wife recover from cancer. Nixon claims Vesco arranged to make Trioxidal in Cuba for clinical trials. “He had the whole country wired,” says Nixon.
The deal was greased politically, according to Nixon. He says the Cuban drug company developing Trioxidal is directed by Castro’s nephew. And Cuba was to manufacture the new drug in return for all the Trioxidal the Cuban people needed. But two weeks after the lab finally mass-produced pure samples, Nixon says, Cuban counterintelligence agents stormed into the house where he was staying with Vesco and took the fugitive financier away. Nixon was held in a seedy hotel and subjected to a series of 22-hour interrogations until he signed a statement acknowledging he had bottled, labeled and distributed Trioxidal from Vesco’s home, he says. He claims he’s positive the Cubans double-crossed him and Vesco because they got greedy. (As for the possibility Nixon himself was breaking the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba, the Feds say only they are “checking into it.”) For his part, Nix on is unapologetic. Acknowledging a reporter’s skepticism, he furrows his eyebrows, thrusts out his hands in a double peace sign and exclaims: “I am not a crook.” And smiles.
