The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

I was sitting and waiting in Djakarta Bali, an Indonesian restaurant a few blocks from the Louvre, when an elderly woman came zooming toward the front door. I couldn’t see her feet, so I was confused how she was going this fast. But then she hopped off a Razor scooter and walked in. It was Nury Hanafi, the daughter of Sukarno’s ambassador to Cuba. This restaurant is her family’s, opened in Paris after they came here from Cuba. On the walls, there are photos of her father with Che, and with Fidel, back in the days when they thought they were building a tricontinental movement. We had the excellent daging sapi rendang, one of my favorite dishes from Indonesia. She told me the scooter was her “Harley Davidson.” It might have looked strange, a white American man and an old Asian woman speaking Spanish in Paris. After years in Bulgaria, she came back here, and was reunited with her family.