In Havana, A Page From McCain's Past

He said he kept the article about the interview tucked away for decades, most recently stashing it in the small living quarters behind the six-table restaurant he runs inside a creaking mansion in the Playa neighborhood, 15 minutes from downtown Havana.

After hearing of McCain's campaign about six months ago, Barral said, he hung the clipping in his restaurant, an archetypal Cuban paladar -- a small, privately owned restaurant sanctioned by the state -- with dining tables in the living room, arched wooden doors, wrought-iron grates and tile floors. Hardly anyone noticed the clipping until a few days ago, he said, when a reporter spotted it among the Che memorabilia.

Barral, who shuffles slightly when he walks and entertains visitors with a gruff sense of humor, said his route to the 1970 encounter with McCain winds through pre-Civil War Spain, Argentina, Hungary and Cuba.

His grandfather was a Spanish anarchist and his father was a socialist killed in the Spanish Civil War. He immigrated to Argentina with his mother when he was 11. There, he said, he befriended the young Guevara, who was the same age.

Barral was later expelled from Argentina because of his communist activism, he said. He fled to Hungary, where he studied medicine. Shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, he served as interpreter for a Cuban delegation visiting Hungary.

Barral sent greetings to Guevara and soon accepted the revolutionary icon's offer of a home and job in Cuba -- a copy of the invitation is on Barral's restaurant wall. Barral -- who said he speaks Spanish, French, Hungarian and Italian, and understands English -- said that in those days "Cuba represented this fresh vision, where everything was possible."

In 1967, he won an essay contest with a piece about "The Revolutionary Attitude." He keeps the yellowed telegram announcing his victory in his archives. First prize was a 40-day trip to North Vietnam for what he called "scientific research" about the North Vietnamese and their ability to resist U.S. forces.

"In that time, North Vietnam was the tops in our eyes in Cuba," Barral said. "It was the best example of a country confronting imperialism."

The trip was delayed until 1969, he said. Once in Hanoi, he conducted field research, eventually concluding that U.S. forces were underestimating the North Vietnamese. That's when he had the idea of interviewing a U.S. POW -- to "find out," he said, "how the enemy thinks."

Cuban diplomats in North Vietnam told him to say he was a Spanish psychologist, even though he hadn't lived in Spain since he was 11. At that time he was not a Cuban citizen, though he is now, he said.

The interview lasted between 45 minutes and an hour, Barral recalled. He said the men met at the offices of Hanoi's Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations, while McCain said in his book that the interview took place in a hotel.

McCain was escorted to the interview from the infamous "Hanoi Hilton," a prison where American servicemen were tortured and lived in miserable conditions. Barral said he does not know why his North Vietnamese handlers chose the cultural center as the site for the interview. But the location did not bother Barral because he wasn't interested in the conditions of the prison, merely in finding out what "the enemy" was thinking.