Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  “Don’t customers check to get the freshest?” It is incredible to me that someone spending three dollars on a half-gallon of juice would not make sure he’s getting the freshest.

  Coroalles’s smile shows the weary bemusement of almost thirty years of this. “Only the viejitos and newcomers. Americanos and Yuccas are in too much of a hurry, too much corre-corre, to stop and check and get the freshest stuff. You’ll see, amigo.” In a few days, he says, he will teach me how to manage the electronic cash register. Meanwhile, I am to keep the coolers bursting with milk, juice, and soft drinks. Mostly the soft drinks, from Coca-Cola to coco agua.

  I am beginning to feel good, although it makes me uncomfortable, about this little victory on my first day in the United States. Last week I found a young Pinareña a job at a hotel in Havana, and now my long-lost father in Miami takes me in. After closing the pharmacy at eight p.m., he invites me to get in his Buick. “You can sleep on my sofa until we get you in that apartment.” This is how my father welcomes me to move in with him, temporarily.

  I tell him, “I appreciate this.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. Some people helped me get on my feet when I first arrived. It’s what gusanos do.”

  Although it is less than a mile away, we drive to his apartment in Little Havana. People’s lives center around intersections, and on my father’s corner there is an Eckerd, one of the big chain “drugstores,” with the actual pharmacy in the back, selling nearly everything except prescription drugs. Every aisle is as big as an entire store in Cuba, and there are twenty aisles. In Havana it would be like visiting twenty separate businesses. The diamond-bright lights shine above, making it a perpetual daytime where you may spend some time in Pueblo del Cereal, some more en Ciudad Pizza. If behind every mirror in the ceiling crouches a spotter with binoculars looking for shoplifters, so be it. I am a documented applicant for immigration with special classification, and I am here stealing nothing but secrets. Your store detectives don’t have anything on me.

  “What kinds of things do you like?”

  “You don’t have to buy me things, I have a little money.”

  “Save it for cigarettes. We’ll put these on la cuenta and you’ll pay me back eventually.”

  My father loads up on potato chips, milk, and coffee, sliced meat in plastic packages. He throws in canned spaghetti and plastic bottles of mayonnaise and mustard. How much is all this going to cost? In the cereal aisle, he gestures toward a brand called Raisin Bran.

  “I’m not sure about the raisins,” I tell him.

  “Wait until you try these.” There is a small box, a large box, and then the biggest of all is emblazoned with the words Family Size. He picks that one. Does this make us a family?

  There is an entire beer aisle: a section the size of a whole store in Havana lined with refrigerators full of beer. Other men walk out of there with cartons full of cans, but my father drinks from six-packs of bottles with the foil on top. He chooses two. “One for each of us.”

  Near the intersection outside the Eckerd, I note the location of a pay phone booth. It is not exactly what I would call a quiet location, but it is recessed against the side of the building, and although the sidewalks in Little Havana all glow with the lights off Calle 8, the alcove with the phone is in a gap between two bright streetlights. If I am nimble inserting the coins and pressing the buttons, I could complete a call in less than a minute on the walk back to my father’s house.

  We return to his apartment, both exhausted. For dinner we make sandwiches. The plastic packages he bought contain ham, turkey, and roast beef. I take two slices of the fluffiest white bread I have ever touched and delicately insert one cut of ham. My father pushes my hand out of the way and takes over. He layers on generous wads of all three meats and shows me how to squeeze mustard and mayonnaise straight from the plastic bottles without dirtying so much as one fork. We eat on paper towels for plates.

  For the second course he opens the box of cereal. He fills one bowl and I get another. It is more food than I would see in a week in Havana. He pours in milk and gives me a spoon.

  I try the Raisin Bran. “¡Dios mio! These aren’t raisins at all. This is candy.”

  “I told you.” He goads me and I eat one bowl, and then another. We make it to the bottom of the family-sized box.

  For dessert we start on one of the six-packs. Bohemia, a Mexican beer, delicious like the dark Hatuey they serve at the hotels in Havana. So far my father has had beers with lunch and dinner, and it’s only Tuesday. But he is too old to be lectured on his drinking, and besides, who am I—neither his personal physician nor his proper son—to lecture him? Who is anyone?

  Then he shows me the sofa where I will sleep on my first night in America, and he tells me good night.

  MIERCOLES, 10 SEPTIEMBRE

  On my second day in America, I see that Coroalles is right: 90 percent of customers are in too much of a hurry to check the expiration dates. It is impressive to me, the conversion rate: five, ten, twenty dollars per transaction. Laborers younger than me with money. Children with money. Kids with “allowances” from their parents­—so that they’ll “take care of themselves”—for the most part buying chips and sodas at our store instead of eating nutritional meals cooked at home. Kids with fives and tens and twenties crumpled in their pockets, smoothing them out at the cash register to see what they have, never thinking about paying four dollars for an eight-ounce bag of chips—and with every price, the ubiquitous .99 on the end, one cent shy of next dollar amount, deceiving them that they are only paying four instead of five.

  The one population that does not seem to have money to throw away is the senior citizens, again: they-who-check-the-dates. Only the viejitos look at the prices and count their change, Cubano or Americano, their children and grandchildren too busy to check in on them except for birthdays and holidays and maybe the occasional Sunday afternoon. They live like castaways in the materialist system of the most capitalist capital of Latin America. Life has become a perpetual shipwreck.

  Nobody warned me about the dogs. It is not that they are particularly vicious, like the feral mongrels along the beach in Miramar. That is not what merited a warning. Instead, it is their domesticity. I should say infantilism. Breeds of every variety get walked, carried, and pushed in strollers into the store wearing little tailored clothes. Rich ladies share licked kisses with poodles and pugs whose tongues just seconds ago were probing their own butts. It makes me dizzy to see it. I overhear some customers joke about it: “My little Chula’s food is more expensive than a meal at a fine restaurant!” I do not find this funny at all. I watch them walk their pampered pets back home past old women pushing all that they own in stolen shopping carts down Calle 8. If anything, this is the most aberrant perversion of capitalism’s extremes: dogs living better than people. Martí, I am glad you did not live to pass through this particular intestine of the beast’s belly, but I do wonder whether you could have turned it into poetry, and if so, how.

  Coroalles extends his address of my father as doctor into the public. Doctor Rodriguez, although appearing nowhere on the signs inside the store or on any of the pharmacy’s printed materials, is frequently heard in the aisles and around the counter, and emanating nowhere more than from the mouth of Martín Coroalles. He calls me amigo. Is it sarcastic? He does not pronounce it with the least overtone of irony, but the word selection alone makes me wonder. It sounds to me like the choice of someone who would rather not remember my name, rather not decide whether he wants to assign me a name at all, hedging that I might not be around long enough to matter, not just betting but baiting: wish fulfillment. Amigo. Could Coroalles really see me, in any sense, as a friend?

  Las consultas make up the bulk of my father’s work. Viejitos come to see him for a variety of conditions and with a spectrum of explanations for choosing him over a licensed physician. Either their Medicare is not active or up-to-date, or they don’t like that new doctor who pronounces their name wrong down at
the clínica, or they don’t have six weeks to wait for the next appointment at the public clinic, or—and this seems to be la clave, the key, to brisk business at this Calle 8 pharmacy—for certain ailments my father will dispense a prescription without the need for anything written; no scrip, with perpetual refills. How convenient, qué cómodo, in this America of limitations and regulations to just get what you need by asking for it!

  There is an old woman who cannot pay for her prescription, and I hear my father tell her, “Next time, Gilda. Next time.”

  “El doctor is a great man,” Coroalles tells me. “He says that every time.”

  “¿Qué?”

  “Next time, Gilda. Next time.”

  Sometimes my father goes away for an hour or more. It is Coroalles’s job to say, “Drop off your prescription. Doctor Rodriguez will fill it when he gets back and you can pick it up later this afternoon.” It’s like he knows my father’s patterns. Even when my father says nothing and slips out the back, Coroalles’s estimates for when patients can pick up their prescriptions is never off by more than a few minutes. Coroalles does what he’s told. He does not make waves. He clearly sees an opportunity to advance by keeping his mouth shut.

  We are stocking the bottom shelf with coffee when Coroalles undertakes it to educate me in the ways of gusano communication. The store is quiet for a moment between customers, and he tells me he is going to show me how to grind the coffee. He sets me stocking coffees that come in vacuum-sealed bricks: Bustelo, Goya, Caribe, Pilon, and La Llave. Beside these shelves is an industrial grinder, because the store also sells cheap pounds from sackfuls of roasted beans they buy in bulk. Most of the customers will pay an extra fifty cents for the convenience of not having to grind it themselves, so we have a daily ritual of measuring scoopfuls from the sack to make preground pounds.

  Coroalles flips on the grinder, and while the machine whines he leans in close to me, shelving bricks. He speaks beneath his breath in a soothing undertone as if he is talking to a convalescent or a child. “You know, you have to be careful what you say around here.”

  I modulate my tone to match his. “You mean in the store?”

  “The store, the street, the neighborhood. Anywhere in Little Havana. This place draws a certain amount of attention, and they are paying attention.”

  “They?”

  “El FBI y la CIA.” Coroalles pours in another scoop.

  I wonder if I should risk asking, and I remind myself that any reasonable person would ask, especially a new arrival meeting his father for the first time in twenty-eight years. “Why would they be interested in listening to what goes on in my father’s store?”

  “They don’t know who to watch, so they watch everybody.”

  “You mean people are listening who are informants? Or are you saying this place may be bugged?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe both. I behave the same either way.”

  “Should they have good reason to listen?”

  Coroalles looks at me. “Are you asking if I’ve seen anything suspicious?” I am flustered but Coroalles continues, “Not me. But you know what? They don’t really want to catch anybody. They just want to say they were watching, so that when something happens, the director can claim that they tried but that the Cubans were too tricky. Not devious—tricky. Everyone wins.”

  Did I say the right thing? Did I say the wrong thing? Here in Miami you have to cool them down before they get too hot. They’ll lure you in with their doublespeak of talking not-politics, and before you know it you’re paralyzed in a snare of you-started-it.

  Coroalles pours in another pound and says, “Miami is a little crazy, know what I mean?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m only saying that other cities are much more tranquilas for a Cubano. In New York and Chicago, nobody gives a shit about Fidel.”

  Equivocation is an art I learned well in the national medical service, and I decide that I can tell Coroalles the cover concocted by DSS: “When I get the approval from the state medical board, I might try to get in touch with the doctors in Tampa.” I think this might be the time to insert a small word of deferral to let Coroalles know I am on his side, that I do not mean to replace him, in case he is concerned. “I just feel lucky my father is here to help me get a start.”

  “No you don’t,” Coroalles says.

  “¿Cómo?” I reply, taken aback.

  Coroalles pours in one more pound. “I just mean that you shouldn’t feel lucky. Or if you do, you’d better wake up. This place is a hornet’s nest. You’d be better off if you’d gone straight to Catholic Relief Services.”

  JUEVES, 11 SEPTIEMBRE

  On my third day in the United States, I meet Mendoza.

  A big, exquisitely waxed, late-model SUV pulls up outside the pharmacy. It is hot as hell outside, but a fat man emerges in a dress shirt buttoned at the collar, the sleeves gold-cuffed at the wrists. How does he survive in there?

  When he enters the store, my father greets him at the door and introduces us. Mendoza holds both of my shoulders in hands bedecked with gold rings and exclaims, “¡Hijo de Rodriguez es hijo mio!” I am anxious for a chance to practice communicating the criteria for my immigration request, and Mendoza does not let me down. “What were the hospitals like, hijo de Rodriguez?”

  This is a good start. Just that he asks me in the perfect tense would intimate that we share an epistemology of pastness to that life. They buy it, that I want to defect. I cultivate a contained bitterness: “Getting worse every day. They expected me to conduct outpatient treatment with no painkillers. Even the anesthesia was rationed.”

  If this last statement was too far a stretch, my interlocutor’s expression does not betray any skepticism when he goads me further: “So the Communists at the top take all the money?”

  I capitulate: “The director lives in a posh apartment, and the physicians can’t even get new scrubs.”

  A slight flaring of Mendoza’s nostrils accompanies an unconcealed sarcasm of the perpetually suspicious. “You should write a booklet about this, hijo de Rodriguez.” It is apparently too much for him to learn my first name. “Maybe la Fundación will publish it, ¿no?”

  I catch my breath at this reference to the CANF. They published the autobiography of Juan Pablo Roque, now known to be an elaborate front for a Cuban agent sent to spy on them. I do not know how to think like a Florida Republican, but I do know Cuban irony, so I reply, “Don’t you think I could find a better publisher than that?”

  “Hahaha!” He smacks me on the back, his big Rolex worn loose and dangling conspicuously outside his shirt cuff. “Sure you can! Simón y SHOOster, ¿cómo no? Call it Doctor Defector.”

  I should not be surprised that Mendoza displays the canny Cuban charisma. I remind myself: this man kills. This is the monster from my nightmares. Less than a week ago, a young man was alive and enjoying his vacation in Havana when a bomb exploded. A shard of metal pierced his carotid, the young man died in front of me, and Mendoza is responsible. I notice that Coroalles has made himself scarce stocking the coffee.

  Mendoza tells my father, “Maybe the Riveras can show him around Miami?”

  Two young men have emerged from the big man’s SUV and entered the store. They both have short, scruffy beards that do little to improve their acne-scarred faces. The older one is Eusebio, “pero call me Yuyo,” he says. Yuyo, sociably aggressive, goads me, “You happy, huh? You the lucky one, mang!” He pulls a rice cooker off the shelf in the small kitchen section of my father’s store and puts his other arm around my neck halfway between brotherly hug and choke hold. “You should be happy: couple of days you could own your own rice cooker! Your own wallet with diez fulas inside! You could have it all!”

  Yuyo introduces the younger one. No cute name, no smile. Just: “Y éste es mi hermanito Carlos.” Carlos keeps his distance and holds his tongue, but even as he mutters, “Mucho gusto,” he cannot conceal a pent-up rage that has misshapen his face around a jaw clenched like a disq
ualified Olympian’s. It is apparent that he looks forward to the possibility that Mendoza might someday find an excuse to unleash him on me.

  We talk a little longer about the bad conditions in Cuba, and I find that I am beginning to feel comfortable with the rhetoric of exile resentment: the monotony and exhaustion of treating such a heavy caseload of patients for a cafeteria-worker’s salary, all the while knowing that anyplace else in the world I’d be living like a king with half as much work. I am learning the persona that needs to be played, because in fact it is not far from the truth. There is an opportunism, a materialism, that these Rolex-wearing, cologne-smelling gusanos would be only too happy to accommodate.

  Mendoza and the Riveras go upstairs. Their offices are accessed from the back of the store, by the double-padlocked doors at the bottom of the stairs I assume are off-limits to my father, and certainly to me.

  * * *

  Back home that night, my father heats the spaghetti from a can. The sauce is so good. As it says on the can, Boy-o-boy. He opens two beers. I tell him, “You’ve done very well for yourself here. The pharmacy is so opulent compared to Cuba.”

  “The main problem is derelicts coming in to steal painkillers.”

  “What kind?”

  “Codeine and other opiates.”

  “Do they have guns?”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes you can’t be sure—a bulge inside the pocket of a hooded sweatshirt. We keep a small bag of pills aside just for the hold-ups, to try to get them out of there quickly.”

  In two days I have learned more about my father than I ever knew about him for more than two decades. I have noticed that he is always in a rush, breaking off conversations, behaving like he has somewhere to be when in reality he is running from something he’ll never escape—at least not this way. Pain. He is in constant, chronic back pain. This makes him cranky, but it also makes him pitiable. His state of permanent hurry, coupled with a gusano’s reflex mistrust, cause him to be jumpy. He will self-medicate whatever it takes. When he drags on his cigarettes, he is sucking on heated nicotine rather than savoring the smoke.