by Lia Matera
“I guess I’m wondering if she might have struck a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Work for the Cubans in some way.”
“No matter what, she’d have let me and my father know she was all right. She wouldn’t put us through this, even for the revolution.”
He led me to a short wall separating a nearby building from the sidewalk. When we sat down, he said, “I know you don’t want to go back to the women’s prison. But we’re not going to just run into your mother on the street. And the island’s too big for a dragnet.”
“But you told—”
“I’m just acting like they think I should. But we’re here to be smart, not to run around. God knows Edward Hershey did enough of that when he came down—”
“Edward came to Cuba?”
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“Right after that business in San Diego. He spent about ten days here, looking all over the island, asking around. He tried again about a month later. I guess he didn’t want you to know. I guess he thought it would just take away whatever hope you had.”
I was throbbing with shock. Edward had come here looking for Mother, and I’d never suspected. I felt tears spring to my eyes. I hadn’t wanted to suspect, more likely. But considering how long Edward had known Mother and how fond of each other they were, it made perfect sense.
“You do seem to inspire continuing loyalty in your men.”
“My…?” Was he putting himself (never mind Edward) into the ranks of “my” men?
“You know I’ve been crazy about you from the minute I first saw you, the minute you started giving me shit when I questioned you about those murders at your law school.”
Talk about clashing impulses: I wanted to object that I hadn’t given him shit—on the contrary, he’d been the unpleasant one. And the married one.
Perhaps perversely, I found it difficult to make the obvious declaration. Maybe if I hadn’t carried a torch so long. “Let’s not do this now.”
“Not your idea of a romantic evening? Here I brought you all the way to socialismo heaven.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I promised. “I’ll take you to the Nixon library.”
“You don’t have to go to the women’s prison. We can stop a few miles short, have the driver pull over and—”
“You’ll go on without me?”
“I just don’t … I don’t want to do nothing.”
I didn’t want to do nothing, either. But doing something foolhardy seemed an even less attractive alternative.
“I remember you’ve got a thing about jails,” he continued. Years ago, I’d freaked out in front of him, complaining about a lawyer whose grandstanding had landed me a seemingly endless two-month sentence. “Something about the matron making you sew curtains.”
“I don’t like to sew.”
“I gathered.”
“Okay, we’ll drive toward the prison.” I really couldn’t promise to be any stupider than that.
29
An hour later, Don became the antithesis of Prince Charming. Rather than hand me into a coach to his fairy-tale castle, he helped me into a car bound for Women’s Prison West. Since it’s never easy for me to trust someone else’s judgment (any more than it’s easy for me to trust my own), I remained unconvinced of the wisdom of our course. And because we found the car parked right in front of the hotel (odd behavior for a “bribed” driver), it seemed we were to be publicly stupid.
We again drove along the Malecon, past the embassies and diplomats’ houses. The driver didn’t speak to us, and we didn’t speak to each other.
Outside Havana, Don finally said to the driver, “I know you speak English.”
“A little,” he admitted.
“You want to do us a favor and let us know what to expect up there?”
“I will drive until you wish me to stop. That is my only part in this.”
“Who’s going to be waiting for us?”
“I have agreed only to drive you.” Not, You have paid me to drive you. His agreement wasn’t with us.
Don didn’t press it. “Stop the car when we’re five minutes from the prison.”
All too soon, the driver pulled over.
Don climbed out of the car. With a sigh, I did the same.
The night was close and muggy and moonless. Up ahead, a faint glow lit the horizon—the women’s prison apparently had electricity. We walked toward it.
Don took my hand. “Not exactly the Emerald City,” he commented.
“Too bad. We could certainly use a brain.”
“They have all the labor they need,” Don said. “Students work on farms for their tuition, and everyone’s pressured to do quote-unquote ‘volunteer’ work, field work—five days’ worth a month. I read that they truck as many as two hundred thousand people at a time out of Havana to cut cane.”
“You’re saying, they have no need for prison labor?”
“They certainly don’t need your mother.”
“Just her money. And she has no access to that, not from here.” We’d been over this a few thousand times already.
“Does she have any hidden bank accounts, property, CDs, anything like that? Anything someone could be draining with her okay, or without your knowledge?”
“God, no. If Mother hears about anyone in need, she immediately empties her pockets. She’d never be able to keep any kind of personal fund intact. She’d spend it in a hot second, as soon as she saw a homeless man or heard about a hungry Chilean.” I wiped away tears, hoping I hadn’t just delivered her eulogy.
“She’s a good person,” he commented. “There’s been a lot of water under the bridge. But I’ve always thought so.”
Under the circumstances, the testimonial could hardly be construed as empty. I wanted to thank him, but the words seemed paltry.
We walked on, listening to the chirp of insects in roadside grasses.
I added, “Mother throws her heart into things, but that doesn’t make her foolish. If she wanted to funnel money into Cuba, she’d go home and do some fund-raising.”
“Unless she’s helping to set up some project here. She’s got no particular expertise? She hasn’t run a third-world health clinic or anything like that?”
“She knows as much about the U.S. prison system as anyone I’ve ever met. She’s definitely done her homework on Cuba and Latin America.” I’d once lived in a house she’d filled with Salvadorans fleeing the poverty and mayhem of guerrilla war. “She … just between us, okay?”
“Of course.”
“She’s run safe houses for illegal aliens, refugees from El Salvador, Chile, and Peru, mostly.”
“Safe—” He stopped in the middle of the road. “She’s been part of underground railroads out of Latin America and you haven’t mentioned it?”
I was surprised by his exasperation. It hadn’t occurred to me to mention it, any more than it had occurred to me to mention her myriad other projects, some merely radical, others downright felonious.
“It’s just one thing on a long list. She’s almost pathologically active. She makes the Berrigans look like slackers.”
“But this isn’t just spiking redwood trees, this is relevant.”
“How? She doesn’t see Cubans as needing a safe harbor. She believes this is an impoverished version of socialist perfection, that all it needs is money. She might have some compassion for the people who leave here, but she’s got no respect for them.”
“The point is, she knows where to put people who come into the United States illegally and don’t want to be found.”
“Yes, but like I said—”
“They don’t have to be gusanos, you know. They could be members of the Interior Ministry.”
“The ministry? What would those people be doi
ng in safe houses?”
“Being safe. Being inconspicuous. And fundraising for Castro. Rounding up contributions. Or arranging caravans of goods. Look how bad things are here. They’ve got to be trying desperate measures. Things they don’t want their people to know about.”
“Like General Ochoa, selling drugs to raise money to feed his troops in Angola.”
“Ochoa went too far off the reservation. But rule out drugs, rule out going behind the government’s back. They’re starving here. Hard to blame officials for getting creative about soliciting cash.”
Oh god, put that way, it almost sounded like something Mother would do. “If it were true … she wouldn’t be in Cuba, she’d be back home. Setting it up, making it work.”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “Which would explain why no one’s found her here.”
Oh no: “And why the State Department hasn’t made a fuss?”
“Yes.” His voice was low, grim. “If that’s what she’s doing, and they’re setting her up to bust her. It would explain why they haven’t turned this into an incident.”
The air stirred, bringing the smell of cooling plants, a tropical tangle of them. Banana trees and palms were visible as swaying shapes, black against the deep blue of the night sky.
“But, Don … even if she had to stay underground to do this, she’d let me and my father know she was okay.”
She had put politics above family too many times to count. But she loved us too much to put us through this. I had to believe that.
“She could be working with someone who’s not getting the messages to you.”
“Ernesto? The Cuban boy? The CIA agent?”
“Obviously, she wouldn’t work knowingly with the CIA.” He sighed. “But they might know what she’s doing, their people might have infiltrated. If not Ernesto, someone like him.”
Except where the U.S. government was concerned, Mother was a trusting person. She might have asked a recent acquaintance to deliver messages about her whereabouts and welfare. If Don was right, she hadn’t chosen her confidant wisely.
But then, wisdom would have brought her home with her tour group.
“If the Cubans have been sending people to the U.S. through Mexico, and if Mother’s been hiding them …” I didn’t even want to finish the thought. Every word of it hurt. “Then they wouldn’t say any more than they had to about her. Only that they couldn’t find her.”
“If that were the case, they could have put her aboard a Cubana plane to Mexico anytime,” he agreed.
“But they wouldn’t, if she was helping them. They’d keep quiet because it’s their plan. And the U.S. would keep quiet because they’re onto it, they wouldn’t want to tip anyone off. They wait to find all the links along the route before they moved in and made arrests.”
“They’d be looking for bigwigs, people in the Cuban government—that’s basic police work,” he agreed. “Played right, it could net us some very big fish. I suppose it could even lay the groundwork for us to swarm Cuba, get rid of Castro like we did Noriega.”
“So everybody would clam up, and no one would really be looking for Mother. Because everyone would already know exactly where she was and what she was doing. And it would suit them all to have her keep doing it.”
“If they nail her for this, they’ll call it treason,” he said.
We stood in the road, looking ahead at the glow of lights from our waiting mousetrap.
My chest ached. My head pounded. This was more trouble than I could get Mother out of. This had been my worst nightmare since I was four years old.
Don said, “What do you suppose they’ve got waiting up there? Not information—they could have given us that in Emilio’s office, in General Miguel’s office. And not an arrest. If they’re trying to keep a low profile with this business, the last thing they’d want is another American …”
“In prison,” I concluded. “An American in prison is nothing but trouble. Reporters trooping through to make sure she’s okay, tour groups with nosy acquaintances of her boyfriend. Myra Wilson’s too much trouble. Maybe they want us to break her out.”
Castro had executed General Ochoa, a Hero of the Revolution, rather than appear to sanction drug smuggling. So he could hardly pardon an American who’d supposedly committed the same crime. But that didn’t make it any more convenient to keep her locked up and ready for impromptu inspection.
I visualized the dull-eyed woman jailed here. Was she sitting somewhere now like a bride-to-be awaiting elopement?
“We’d have to get her out, get to the airport, pretend to bribe a bunch of people there. If they want her out badly enough, they’ll let it work.”
They’d let us play cat’s-paw, pulling a red-hot chestnut out of prison for them.
“We could be wrong,” he pointed out. “There could be news waiting up the road, news about your mother. If we turn back, we’ll never know.”
And if we didn’t turn back, he could be walking into a setup. I didn’t want him to do that, not even for Mother.
I said, “Let’s just get out of here.”
If our driver was surprised or disconcerted to see us return alone and so soon, he didn’t express it. He dutifully turned the car around, and drove us back to Havana.
We had him drop us at the Malecon, not far from the hotel.
We strolled for a while, watching the ocean and rehashing what we’d just discussed. It was like twisting and turning a Rubik’s Cube: when one part of the pattern worked, the flip side didn’t.
A voice behind us said, “Do you need assistance?”
We turned to find a tourist cop motioning us toward his car.
“No, it’s okay,” I said in Spanish. “We’re just getting some air.”
“It is very late, and I fear you may be bothered if you remain out of doors.” His smile was friendly, but his tone wasn’t. He shone a flashlight into our faces. “Please allow me to return you to your hotel.”
We weren’t completely sure we had a choice.
When we climbed out of his car, he did, too. He accompanied us into the hotel like a chaperone. But he didn’t expect the reception we got.
General Miguel was slumped in a chair, legs splayed, puffing on a cigar and looking very bored. The man I’d met months ago, Mr. Radio Havana, he of the white jacket and layer-cut hair, sat beside him. Rounding out the party was our driver, sitting beside our minder, Teresa.
When we entered the graceful room, Teresa jumped up, looking outraged. The general sighed deeply, straightening in his chair. Surprisingly, it was Mr. Radio Havana, in a blue sweater now, who spoke.
“We have been extremely concerned,” he said in English. He walked over to meet us. Except for a desk clerk, the lobby was empty tonight. Or rather, this morning.
“Apparently,” I replied.
“Please come and speak to the general.”
The general stood wearily. “So you have returned. Do you always climb from the vines beneath your hotel window?”
“Only when you put us in a room that invites us to do it,” Don replied.
“And did we also invite you to bribe our driver?” Cigar smoke curled through the scraggles of his beard.
“Yes,” Don nodded emphatically. “Yes, you did. But why call it a bribe? I hired him, that’s all.”
“He works for us.”
“Then he should have turned me down.”
The general sighed again. “I am not a young man. It is very late. Having invited our concern”—a brief flash of cigar-stained teeth— “can you tell us where you have been?”
“We took a walk. Then we took a drive. Then we—”
“A drive to the women’s prison?” The general scowled. “For what purpose?”
“For the purpose of getting away from listening devices. Like the one in our room. Like the one in the restaurant.
” Don scowled. “We’d been to the prison, so we knew it was on a lonely road. We wanted to be someplace private, to talk.”
“You cannot talk at the Malecon?”
“Without getting picked up by tourist police? No,” I finished for him. “As you can see. We understood that we were free, within limits, to look around.”
The general was grinning, looking at Teresa and Mr. Radio Havana as if to lament the bad manners of children today. “Of course you are free. This is Cuba, not one of America’s little fiefdoms. Here, you are free to do as you wish.” He bowed ironically. “But like a parent who has lost a great deal of sleep worrying because his little ones have climbed from the window without so much as a note, I will now say good night and return to my bed.”
He strode past us. Teresa and the driver rose to follow, Teresa casting us a deeply annoyed look.
Mr. Radio Havana remained behind. “You are free to walk where you wish and do as you wish. But if you are discovered to be leaving from a back window and are gone many hours, you must expect to create much concern.”
“How do you know we went out a back window?” I asked him. “How do you know we didn’t walk out the front door?”
He hesitated. “That is what I have been told.”
“Did someone go to our room looking for us?”
“I do not know. I was given a message.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have cost you any sleep,” I lied. I hoped he recalled rousting me out of bed and depositing me on a middle-of-the-night flight to Mexico. “But as you can see, we didn’t get into any trouble.”
He met my eye, looking a little confused. “May I ask truly what you have been doing?”
“I’ve been trying to give my friend a feeling for Havana. Since we’re hoping to find my mother here.”
“And the reporters who gave away their passports, you are hoping to find them, also?”
Was he offering me information? “Do you know any more about them? You never found them?”
“No.” But a slight squint told me he knew something.