Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  Most of the diners around us are young, my age. They are powerless to put away their beepers even for a meal, checking them between bites. “Yuccas,” my father says, settling into his chair while the mozo decorously pours chilled water into our glasses from on high. “You heard of them? Like yuppies, but Cuban Americans.”

  The waiter shows up immediately and asks, “¿Algo de tomar?” My father orders a cerveza Hatuey. Habana Vieja, second wave, Hatuey—my head is spinning. Is it a coincidence, or does my father use filial instincts when he says, “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it”? He asks, “You want a suggestion? You like steak?”

  “Sí.”

  “¿Estilo criollo?”

  “Cómo no.”

  “Let me get you the ropa vieja.”

  My father orders picadillo, and the waiter, a mulatto who does not look Cuban, but is possibly Venezuelan or Puerto Rican, takes our orders to the kitchen.

  The clock on the wall reads 11:35—the same time of day less than a week ago that the young Italian staying at the Copacabana with his father was murdered while eating lunch.

  Despite more than two decades between them, my father’s resemblance to Tio Manolito is certainly there in his jaw and thick black hair, in his gestures and pauses. Instead of muscles from years of farm work and climbing the tope de Viñales, there is a luxurious layer of cellulite from decades inside an air-conditioned pharmacy and sauntering along Calle 8. I wonder if he shares Manolito’s bloodshot eyes when he removes his dark sunglasses. My father surely feels as nervous as I do, but he brushes off intimacy and awkwardness with efficiency. “Did my old records get saved?”

  He has switched the subject so abruptly that I have to say, “¿Cómo?”

  “Los discos. The LPs.”

  “Yes, and the record player.”

  “¿Todavia funciona el tocadiscos?” He leans forward, incredulous.

  “Sí. Still working.” Remember to speak of Cuba in the past tense. “Some days I would open the French doors to the balcony and put on Pérez Prado.”

  “Y el Bola de Nieve?”

  “Still there, but most mornings I chose Beny Moré.”

  My father sits back in his chair and smiles. He looks around as if he might see 1960s Havana here in the dining room of restaurante Habana Vieja. He says, “I saw Aurora one time, you know.”

  “When?”

  “More than ten years after she came over. She never looked me up. I think it was ’90.”

  “That’s when the letters stopped.”

  “Yes, she was near the end of her life. I bumped into her at Costco, where she was buying groceries for the family she worked for. She spoke of you as if you were still a child, but she told me you were already done with medical school. I was proud of you.”

  I think, But not proud enough to write.

  The drinks come. The waiter pours half the beer in a short glass, and my father quenches his thirst with it in three swift gulps, his greedy Adam’s apple bobbing through the folds of flesh at his neck. My Coke comes in a tall plastic cup filled to the brim with ice. It is the sweetest soft drink I have ever tasted. The carbonation is delirious when I raise the tumbler to my lips, stinging my eyes and tickling my nose, making me wince. Looking past my shoulder, hoping the food will come and interrupt the uncomfortable pause, my father says, “This is strange, isn’t it, meeting for the first time over ropa vieja and a Coke?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have much in common.”

  I was thinking the same thing. I look at his hands—elegant hands, not rough like a man’s. The fingers taper subtly like dinner candles, and he trims his nails carefully. They are surgeon’s hands. They are my hands.

  When the food arrives, it is not on two plates, but on eight: the ropa vieja and picadillo arrive in their own boats with ample sauce, and each of us gets separate life rafts of platanos, arroz, and frijoles. And the bread: beautiful, white pan Cubano bathed in garlicky butter comes in a big basket. My eyes tear up at the sight of it, and I look at my father as a child might, for permission. “Go on,” he says with a mouth already half full, “take all you want. They’ll bring more.”

  The dishes are piled high and every taste is delicious. In Vedado this much food would feed a dozen neighborhood kids for a week. My father and I eat in silence, and I understand that despite the similar mannerisms, common speech cadences, and familiar fingers, there are many innate differences between us. He eats fast, attacking his plate with relish and treating the waiter, who dizzies me by returning three, then four times to ask if everything is all right, with cool contempt.

  I chew slowly, savoring each bite. My father makes his disappear in ten minutes, washing it down with a second beer, and orders two flans. I can’t eat this much or this fast, and my stomach rebels noisily, making somersaults at the awkwardness of this encounter.

  My father does most of the eating and all of the talking. He mostly talks about the pharmacy. He is the sole owner of the business, although he does not own the building the pharmacy is in. He pays rent to the landlord, whom he calls a friend. My father characterizes himself as an irreplaceable tenant who makes his own decisions about property management, maintenance, and improvements. I do not ask any questions, noting privately that by landlord he means Mendoza.

  I take what I can’t finish of the ropa vieja in what my father unsarcastically calls a “doggy bag.” Dogs in Miami eat better than people do in Cuba. The waiter even lets me take the remaining bread from the basket. In Havana the camarero would have removed it to the kitchen and served it to the next customer.

  The flan comes accompanied by café Cubano: dark, strong, sugary, and delicious. I finish the flan. Without a block of ice to keep it from melting in the Miami heat, it would never do to try to take it to go.

  My heart is pounding and my voice quavers, but the meal is over, so I must say it now or never. “Listen, I don’t expect anything from you, but I would be grateful for a little advice on how to get the process started.”

  “Which process?”

  “Permanent residency.”

  Abruptly he says, “¿Que es lo que tú quieres, Manolo?”

  To buy a little time, I repeat his question back to him: “What is it that I want?”

  “Yes, coming here now.”

  I am a little dumbfounded by the brusqueness of his question. “To get residency. To work as a doctor. To practice medicine under suitable conditions for a change.”

  “No, I mean, why now?”

  “What exactly do you mean?”

  “Mira,” he says, “you know that it is something of an anxious time in Miami.”

  They briefed me for this at DSS, and I have been practicing under my breath from the time I boarded the plane. My answer is an automatic “How so?”

  “Some people believe last year’s killing of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots was an open declaration of war. They might wonder about you.” If there is a trace of suspicion in his word choice, it does not permeate his tone. “After all that time in Havana, why did you choose to come now?”

  “The conference invitation made it possible. It took me years of planning to get cleared for a visit.”

  “Yet, in the end, your salida got approved. How come?”

  “They decided I was no longer a flight risk.”

  “But why now? No wife, no kids. Why did they think you would come back if you didn’t have to?”

  “The house in Vedado. They figured I would never let it go.”

  My father is silent in a way that says, This is plausible to me, even if I do not decide I believe it. A house is worth something, and so is a clinic. He knows this. He says, “You didn’t waste any time declaring your intention to stay.”

  I was prepared for this. It is the first thing that comes up among los recién llegados: ¿Qué pasa con la Inmigración? ¿Cómo andan los trámites? ¿Cuando llegará el permiso de trabajo? “I did not want to delay the process for even one day.”

  My father nods app
rovingly. “You could get your green card in a year.”

  “In the meantime, I’ll request un permiso de trabajo. I should be able to get a job in ninety days.”

  “Yes, three or four months, unless you mean doctoring. The work authorization won’t do you any good without a chance to take the medical exam. Did you bring your official transcripts?”

  “No, but I will request them from the medical school.”

  Bitterly, my father mutters, “Good luck.”

  I take the photocopies out of my bag. “I do have these.”

  My father pulls a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his guayabera to examine the papers. In an instant I appreciate the importance of Pérez giving me these, how they bolster the part I have to play. And I also understand how cynical Caballero is—to have known I would need them, but letting Pérez do it unauthorized anyway. A just-in-case for Caballero. As los Americanos say: a CYA.

  “They don’t have the cuño?”

  “No. They’re copies.”

  “Nevertheless, you may have something.” He hands back the papers, adding, with his seasoned knowledge of under-the-table work, “De alguna manera consiguerás un trabajo.” You’ll find yourself a job somehow.

  “Do you think I will be able to practice medicine?”

  My father lowers his sunglasses and I see into his bloodshot eyes. “If you’re really decided, I can talk with someone I know on the state medical board.”

  “I am decided,” I tell my father.

  “Oye, Manolo, you might have a preconceived notion about me from the influence of your mother and years living in Communism, but I make a living, which stands for something here, and I have earned the trust and support of powerful people who can just as easily make it very difficult for a person to get by in Miami.” Before I have time to respond, he leans back to relieve the tension of an abrupt closeness long postponed, and with a grandiose gesture that is our common doctors’ manner, he hands me a slip of paper with a phone number. It is different from the number that was in the phone book. It must be his mobile phone. “Let me make a few calls. Meanwhile, I need you to think about if this is what you really want.”

  “Okay.”

  We walk out into the Miami heat, fiercer for all the new steel and glass and concrete rising up from the streets. On the sidewalk, there is one comforting reminder of the real Havana: la cola. The line of perfumed, bejeweled gusanos with their beepers, cellular phones, and overlapping chatter winds out the door and into the parking lot. It occurs to me: our waiter’s busy, bustling fussing was all a capitalist-consumerist tactic to push us, the unctuous customers, along from the trough faster so they could strap the feed bags on some other porcine-in-a-Porsche and double the boss’s profits during the lunch-hour rush. The profit margin is an engine that runs on the hurried dyspepsia of obese malcontents.

  I walk my father to his car in the parking lot. It is a boxy Buick, dark brown, which strikes me as odd for my father, because the only pictures I have of him from Havana in the sixties show him sporting always-white suits and guayaberas. The seats are real leather. The one time I have seen upholstery like this was in medical school when we visited a prerevolutionary mortuary.

  Through the driver’s-side window my father says, “Call me around four o’clock.”

  “Okay.”

  He drives away. It’s Tuesday, I say to myself, Martes, the day named after the god of war. I am twenty-eight years old and I have just met my father for the first time.

  * * *

  Midafternoon I consume the remainder of my ropa vieja from the doggy bag. Now I can finally enjoy it, because my stomach is no longer doing somersaults from meeting the man who is technically my father and whom I will have to betray if I am to complete my assignment. Yorki and my cousin placed their orders for magazines, Nikes, and whiskey, and now they will tell themselves I will never be bringing it back. They will hear I renounced Cuban citizenship, and they will say to each other, We knew it. Just like his father, he gave up on us.

  At four p.m. I find a pay telephone to call the number my father gave me. I put in the coins and when I am done pushing the buttons, my father answers after the first ring.

  He says, “Have you thought about what I asked you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any hesitation about your decision to defect?”

  “No. I am resolved.”

  “Are your principles compromised in any way? Because if they are, please leave me out of it.”

  “Listen,” I tell my father, “I am not going back.”

  “I always knew this day would come,” he says. “Gusano como yo.”

  No, I reflect privately, never a worm like you. I could go into the rumors that no doubt he has heard in Miami about how, now that we are the better part of a decade into the Período Especial, Habaneros are getting their properties appraised for the waves of speculators expected from Europe, the US, and Latin America. Or I could repeat the part about being an excellent physician in a corrupt system, frustration with the poor state of the hospitals, blaming this on Communist Party graft. But I do not have to, because he does something that strikes me as very typically Rodriguez. Doctor Juan Rodriguez, likewise resolved, gives me the address of his pharmacy in Little Havana—this is how my father offers me a job.

  * * *

  It is a short walk to the pharmacy in Little Havana. On Calle 8 there is a faux-deco storefront that has been preserved since 1970. Neon tubing that hasn’t been ignited for some time still spells the familiar code, a salivary stimulant to OTC junkies and other aficionados of chronic pain, so to speak: Rx. Signs for Farmacia and Mercado in Spanish, advertisements for local brands of milk and eggs, specials painted with soap in the windows. I crane my neck to look up the side of the building at the second floor’s apartment windows.

  This is what my father gave it all up for. Well, at least he has something. I do not pity him. He needed a place to put his energy, and it makes sense that it was another business. All that effort to get the clinic open in Havana, just to have it nationalized. Start from zero at age thirty, with a few favors from some other exilados who got their head start in ’59 and ’60, and twenty-seven years later he’s able to make a decent living. If the storefront seems stuck in the fifties, then it should console the viejitos who come for their consultas. This vestige of prerevolutionary medicine could be as much at home on Calle 23 in Vedado as it is on Calle 8 in Miami . . . if this were 1959.

  My father is waiting for me in front of the store. We shake hands. “There’s an empty one-bedroom above the pharmacy,” he says. “I’ll ask the landlord if you can get in there this weekend.”

  “Thank you. What kind of work will I do?”

  “Inventory, shine up the windows and mirrors, take the trash out for a while. If I don’t start you out as his assistant, Coroalles will have a fit.”

  “Who’s Coroalles?”

  The corner of my father’s mouth curls into a lopsided smile. “You’ll see.”

  We go inside the air-conditioned store. It is not enough to just be a medical dispensary, so the cramped and crowded bodega also sells breakfast cereals, school children’s notebooks, and shaving supplies. There is even a place to drop rolls of photos for developing at the front of the store; a courier from the processing lab retrieves them and returns prints twice every day. This is what I would write home about, if I had somebody besides Emilio to write home to: the farmacia with the film-developing business inside, and fat little exile children running in to drop off a roll and picking up a one-dollar ice cream bar from the freezer on the way out.

  There are freezer chests full of ice cream in every grocery store, gas station, and pharmacy in Miami. My father’s store also sells vacuum-packed bricks of café Cubano, candles in glass containers with prayers and pictures of saints on the side, bottles of cheap cologne, and something called Florida Water—the whole spectrum of Caribbean specialty items. It is impossible to compare this to the same universe as my paltry
dispensary. At the clinic in Vedado, I have a dusty cabinet with empty shelves above the faded surgical tape marked Aspirina. Here, the drugs are kept behind a blasted-bright counter high above where the patients wait with mirrors and cameras all around.

  My father introduces me to Coroalles, his shopkeeper. “Coroalles takes care of everything this side of the pharmacist’s desk,” he says, and I see through the bald man’s solemn nod that he accepts this dignity with great diffidence. “Well, I’ll leave you two.”

  “Adelante, doctor.”

  It catches me off guard to hear Coroalles address my father as a doctor. Those credentials have been no good for decades. But should I be so dismissive? I find myself questioning my own judgment. What makes this man, who went to medical school and practiced in my same clinic for ten years, any less a doctor? A piece of paper from the state?

  My father returns behind the pharmacist’s counter and Coroalles right away begins my training: “Coffee, milk, bread, and soft drinks—that’s how the store makes money. We could sell beer, but with prescription drugs in the same store it draws too much crime.” The meds are a slim margin, and this is the man who makes sure we make the money. It hits me that this man is the reason my father told me to call him at four when we were done with lunch. After he checked me out, the next step was to check with Coroalles.

  “You will keep the aisles tidy and rotate the stock,” Coroalles says. Just the concept takes some getting used to, when in Cuban peso stores the stock consists of one or two items. Here, someone picks a gallon of orange juice from the refrigerator in back, and you have to make sure that the next jug comes forward in the glass-front case.

  “Mira, amigo,” Coroalles explains, “always check the date to make sure the nearest date expiration is right in front. The date closest to the actual day, including today, always gets sold first, with later dates behind. We have to sell the older stuff first. It’s very irritating when products expire on the shelves, especially in the refrigerators.”