‍Journalist and TV star Lisa Howard has dinner with her lover Castro

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‍SHE WAS one of the most famous female TV journalists in America, a glamorous former TV soap opera star who reinvented herself as a reporter and climbed to the top of the male-monopolised world of TV news.

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‍And one of Lisa Howard’s biggest scoops was going to bed with 38-year-old Cuban warlord Fidel Castro.

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‍“In the early hours one morning as we lay on a hotel bed, Castro slipped his arms around me and kissed me with restrained passion,” she wrote in her diary. “He kept on kissing and caressing me. 

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‍“He talked about wanting to have me but would not undress or go all the way. We liked each other very much.” 

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‍Castro admitted to her he was having trouble finding the words to express his reluctance. “You have done much for us, you have written a lot, spoken a lot about us,” he told her. “But if we go on then it will be complicated and our relationship will be destroyed.”

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‍He told her he would see her again and that it could all come naturally. Just before the sun rose over Havana, Castro tucked Lisa in, turned out the lights and left. But he was to return and embark on an affair that was in her words “a thrilling and ecstatic sexual relationship” that would interest the US Government and the CIA.

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‍It had begun that night when Lisa, 38. had been waiting to interview Castro for more than two hours in her suite in Cuba’s Hotel Riviera. Two hours went by and she thought he wasn’t coming. But at 11:30 p.m. on February 2, 1964, there was a knock at the door. 

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‍Lisa, working for ABC News, opened it to find the 37-year-old leader of the Cuban revolution and one of America’s leading Cold War antagonists, smiling at her.

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‍“You may be the prime minister, but I’m a very important journalist, how dare you keep me waiting,” Lisa joked. She then invited him in. 

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‍Over the next few hours, they talked about everything from Marxist theory to the treatment of Cuba’s political prisoners. And they reminisced about President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated.  

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‍Lisa scolded Castro for his repressive regime “Do you really think I run a police state?” Castro asked.  “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”

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‍Lisa was ABC’s first female correspondent and became the first woman to anchor her own network news show. She interviewed major political figures, including John F. Kennedy, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, President Dwight Eisenhower and even Soviet leader Khrushchev.

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‍But Lisa was finally fired by ABC because of her work with the CIA behind the scenes to bring Castro to the negotiating table. The TV news company said her behaviour was contrary to its unbiased news policy.

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‍Depressed and pregnant, she committed suicide at her home in East Hampton, Long Island, on July 4, 1965, taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. She was 39.

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‍THE LAST WORD:

‍Did you know that the last words of Roald Dahl were: “Ow, fuck!”

‍The Press reported that he was buried with his favourite items: HB pencils; a power saw, his snooker cue and a bottle of Burgundy on November 23, 1990, aged 74.

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‍Author Mark Twain in his study 

‍writing on his new typewriter

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‍MARK TWAIN LEADS THE WAY WITH THE ‘NEW-FANGLED’ TYPEWRITER

‍WHEN THE typewriter was invented by an American newspaper editor in 1868 it was to change our working world and even the way we lived. But it took years to be accepted. 

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‍It was seen at first as a feminine machine for women to type business letters. The men would retain the more creative task of pushing pens through ink. Even though it was so slow in comparison.

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‍Editor Christopher Sholes who invented it, missed out on millions of dollars in royalties because he didn’t believe in it enough, and only took a lump sum of $12,000 for his work, worth about half a million dollars today. Estimates say he could have pocketed $42 million. 

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‍The first machine typed only caps, and it wasn’t until 1874 that Sholes, editor of the Southport Telegraph in Wisconsin, and two colleagues, saw his brainchild go worldwide with Remington, when a shift key was added for upper and lower type.

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‍Remington was a gunmaker at the time but saw the potential of Sholes invention, bought the rights off him and the millions poured in.  

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‍Called the Remington 2, author Mark Twain was fascinated by the ‘new-fangled machine’ as he called it and became the first author to submit a book manuscript on it: “Life on the Mississippi”, although he later wrongly claimed it was ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

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‍Scientific magazines called his machine it a “literary piano”.—

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‍Sholes and his colleagues made the biggest breakthrough in their invention when they came up with the QWERTY keyboard, which stopped common keys from jamming together, and it has remained the standard for English-language keyboards across the world.

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‍I found a wonderful piece on the arrival of the typewriter in Britain, written in 1880 which extolled the new dawn of a machine that would revolutionise the lives of women.

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‍The article in The Girl’s Own Paper says: “Just now, the typewriter is attracting particular attention. And though its use in England is far from being general, we feel quite safe in professing that even in our conservative land, the pen will be superseded by this ingenious machine. 

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‍The average penman writes at the rate of 15 to 20 words per minute. This rate cannot be maintained for long. A competent typewriter operator can write at the speed of 40 and over words a minute for hours. 

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‍Many business letters are received with grumbles about illegible writing, which angers businessmen. There is no such illegibility with type. And on the matter of health the quill writer bends over his work. The typewritist sits upright giving the chest and lung free play. The stoop of the shoulders so noticeable in clerks who write vanishes.

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‍In America, lady typewritists are an important body commanding large salaries and as the machine grows in popularity here in Britain, girls who are trained on it, will have no trouble finding remunerative employment.”

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‍American soldiers lost in Hurtgen Forest

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‍LOST SOLDIERS FIND FRIENDSHIP

‍IN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE 

‍I CAME across a wonderful war story last week after I dug into the Press archives of the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. 

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‍It didn’t surface until 1973 when it was published in Reader’s Digest, and it was referred to by President Ronald Reagan addressing reporters when he visited Germany in 1985.

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‍It symbolised the shared humanity between America and Germany and needs to be told, he said and was revealed by Fritz Vincken, a 12-year-old German boy at the time of the battle. 

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‍Fritz had moved with his mother to a small cottage in the Hurtgen forest, north of the Rhine, after their hometown of Aachen was destroyed in an American offensive.

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‍“Indoors we could hear the incessant booming of field guns and planes soaring overhead,” he later said. “At night searchlights stabbed through the darkness.”

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‍On Christmas Eve, 1944, Fritz and his mother answered a knock at the door to find three American soldiers, one badly wounded, standing in front of them. 

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‍Fritz said: “We learned that the stocky, dark-haired fellow was Jim; his friend, tall and slender, was Robin and Harry was the wounded one.

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‍“They’d lost their battalion and had wandered in the forest for three days, looking for their outfit and hiding from the Germans. 

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‍“They hadn’t shaved, but still, without their heavy coats, they looked merely like big boys. And that was the way my mother began to treat them.”

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‍Fritz’s mother made a meal of potatoes and a chicken. And as she cooked, there was a second knock on the door: “Expecting to find more lost Americans, I opened the door without hesitation,” said Fritz. “There stood four soldiers, wearing uniforms quite familiar to me after five years of war. They were Wehrmacht – Germans! I was paralysed with fear. 

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‍“Although still a child, I knew the harsh law: sheltering enemy soldiers constituted high treason. We could all be shot!”

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‍The corporal leading the German patrol told Fritz’s mother: “We have lost our regiment and would like to wait for daylight … can we rest here?”

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‍“Of course,” she replied, “you can also have a fine, warm meal and eat ’til the pot is empty. We have three other guests, whom you may not consider friends. But this is Christmas Eve, and there will be no shooting here.”

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‍The corporal demanded: “Who is inside? Amerikaner?” 

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‍Fritz’s mother replied, “Listen. You could be all be my sons. This one night, this Christmas night, let us forget about killing.” The corporal warily agreed.

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‍The soldiers tense at first sat down and shared dinner. Germans Heinz and Willi, both from Cologne, were 16. Their corporal was 23. 

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‍From his food bag The corporal drew out a bottle of red wine, and they all clapped. Heinz managed to find a loaf of rye bread in his kit, which the mother cut it in small pieces for all.

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‍Fritz added: “She said grace and there were tears in her eyes as she added: ‘May Jesus be our guest.’ As I looked around the table, I saw tears, in the eyes of the battle-weary soldiers, boys again, all far from home. 

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‍“Just before midnight, my mother went to the doorstep and asked us all to join her to look up at the Star of Bethlehem. We all did and the war was a distant thing none of us wanted. On Christmas Day we parted friends.”

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‍Within hours, the new friends were trying to kill each other again.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍23 February, 2026 

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