Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  I tuned in to 95.1 FM, a rock station that played “Layla,” and “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, and lots of Dylan. Manolo tuned in to 87.9, a classical music station that played Albinoni’s Adagio, and the Lacrimosa movement of Mozart’s Requiem, and the Poco allegretto movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony. And all of that volcanic lava mixed with the coconut work, and the coconut work mixed with our anonymous B movie, wearing out the benefit of such a soundtrack.

  Once in Miami, willing to leave baseball, Arocha only became convinced that he was good enough to make it to Major League Baseball when one of its representatives invited him as a spectator to a game between the Oakland Athletics and the Yankees. Like all Cuban ballplayers of his time, he thought that the Major League players were extraterrestrials. That if they, as Cubans, had a hard time beating college kids, what would happen when they were faced with the highest-level athletes? But that day, after seeing a couple of innings proving that the Major Leaguers were not Martians, Arocha commented to a friend that he thought he could make it. And he did. Manuel Hurtado, a former Cuban pitching star, began to train him. They contacted an agent and in 1992, after a thousand obstacles (they even had to wait for an okay from the State Department), René Arocha signed with the St. Louis Cardinals for $109,000.

  After a very successful first year on the Cardinals’ AAA farm team, on April 9, 1993, he debuted in the Major Leagues against the Cincinnati Reds. He pitched two sweeps in eight innings, struck out three batters, and achieved the first of his eleven wins that season. The Cardinals’ fans began to love him. Joe Torre managed him. Ozzie Smith was his teammate. Arocha felt, at that time, something akin to happiness.

  “It was what I wanted to experience in Cuba. And I wasn’t earning millions, let’s make that clear.”

  He stayed in St. Louis until 1996, the year he transferred to San Francisco, where he played for only one season. In 1999, he went to Mexico. In 2000, he came back to the United States and entered discussions with the Mets, but the Mets didn’t offer too many guarantees and Arocha, who has never beat around the bush, decided to retire.

  “What are the differences between Cuban ball and the Major Leagues?”

  “Many. Abysmal ones. I thought I knew, but I learned how to pitch here. To pitch close, to throw a sinker. It’s not pitching close and hitting them with the ball, it’s knowing how to throw the ball less than an inch from your elbow and then getting it out, a strike.”

  “Your repertoire was famous in Cuba.”

  “In Cuba, I learned how to throw many things, but in reality, it was the same thing, different ways. A slider like this [he opens his arms], a slider like this [he closes them a bit], or a very short slider or against the floor. But a slider. And my curveball was good, especially my big curveball at the beginning, before my injury.”

  “So what did you learn here?”

  “The slider itself, for example. I ran my fingers over the side of the ball and here, I learned to run them over the top, what Americans call ‘staying on top of the ball.’”

  “Is it more effective like that?”

  “Of course. That way, the slider goes down, it doesn’t float. Before, my slider floated. When the slider floats, the batter sees the ball here, he sees it there, and he sees it there. When it’s not floating, he sees just one point. When it goes out and later when it falls, it’s over.”

  There were hundreds of houses and, except for two incidents, I only remember pleasant moments. The teenage gringo whose paternal grandfather was Cuban and who helped us, in the middle of a rainstorm, to carry the almost one hundred coconuts he had gifted us. The decrepit woman who lived with another elderly woman, frugal retirees, who wouldn’t allow us to leave before we tasted the dessert she had made. The forty-something homosexuals who saw my way of fielding as an example of extreme skill. And Mañi Gorizelaya, a haughty eighty-year-old who ended up being from my hometown and, to boot, had flirted with my maternal grandmother. My grandmother, although she liked Mañi, could not accept him because he was mixed race.

  Nonetheless, the morning of June 25, 2015, was particularly intense and contradictory. We were traveling through the south and were still floundering in that indecisive zone in which a stroke of luck could determine our day. We knew from previous experience that if we took too long in getting it right, the bad signs would become irreversible: if, by a certain hour, you haven’t been able to engineer your fate, providence tends to abandon you. Manolo had found a coconut tree in an area outside a house and, once again, we were unsure whether it belonged to the city or a private owner. We decided to take the risk, but a hysterical scream immediately stopped us.

  On the other side of the street, behind the fence of the house, an Indian man was yelling and raising his arms. He wasn’t speaking English. He was threatening us with a closed fist. We couldn’t stand up to him because, although no one bothered us, knocking down coconuts from public trees was an illegal activity, and if someone made a complaint, the police could arrest or fine us. Manolo called the Indian man a faggot and we went back to the Ford and drove away. The man, we assumed, wanted the coconuts for himself, but didn’t have any way to get them down. After a while, we went back and he was still keeping watch. Despite the fact that that coconut tree could have changed our day, I thought we shouldn’t persist, but Manolo went back a third time. The place was clear. We took out the tools, knocked down a couple of coconuts, trying to make the least amount of noise possible, and suddenly, that beast’s shriek sent chills down my spine. The man crossed the street and began to smack us. He knew we couldn’t do anything to him. Manolo tried to talk to him, but the man just kept yelling. He took out a cell phone and took a picture of the Ford’s license plate. Manolo was saying, why, listen, why are you doing that, son of a bitch. My muscles turned into knots. I could have cut that man’s throat with the knife from the rod, as if his head were a coconut.

  “Why does this bother you?” Manolo was saying to him. Who was he talking to? Was he talking to the man or was he talking to himself? What didn’t my father understand? Gratuitous wickedness, perversion, treachery just because?

  A man has a quota of justified blows to distribute throughout his life, and he shouldn’t waste them, but he shouldn’t hold back either, because that can backfire. We left and the man stayed beneath the coconut tree ready to chase away any trespassers. I can still hear him screeching.

  Fifteen minutes later, still shaken up, as we got out at the corner of 119th Avenue SW and 188th Street, a small medic’s van parked just behind the Ford and the driver came over to us. We looked at him skeptically. He greeted us, we returned the greeting, and then he told us he lived two blocks away, right on the corner, that he had coconuts outside and that we could take as many as we wanted. Manolo looked at me, surprised, but I vaguely began to recognize the driver. And, when I at last thought I understood who he was, I felt the open blow of an epiphany in my chest.

  “What is your name?”

  “Me? René,” he said.

  “René?”

  “Yes, René.”

  I thought, frankly delirious, that that man was humoring me by saying what I wanted to hear.

  “You know,” I then said to Manolo, “this man is Arocha, René Arocha.”

  Manolo, surprised, said, “How is this Arocha? I didn’t recognize him.”

  “And how did you recognize me, when you’re so young?” he asked.

  “I like ball,” I said. “I’ve seen videos of you.”

  Manolo, who had seen him pitch, took over the conversation. I started to organize the mess of coconuts around us; I didn’t listen to anything else, and then I heard this:

  “I’m a doctor and here I am, knocking down coconuts.”

  “And I’m a pitcher. And here you see me, as a driver.”

  “That’s how it is.”

  Then they hugged and said good-bye. The following week, on the evening of Thursday, July 2, I arrived at Arocha’s house. He met
me at the door and pointed out his coconut tree.

  “You didn’t end up taking any after all.”

  “They’re no good. They’re yellow and already dried up. They won’t buy them like that.”

  “What are all of you looking for in the coconuts? Water?”

  “Yes, water.”

  “Then you two don’t know anything about coconuts. I knocked down two the other day and they had water, I could hear it.”

  “No. When you can hear it, they have little water, and that’s why the water moves. When you can’t hear the water and the coconut is heavy, it’s so full of water that the water has no room to move.”

  “Ah, so you do know about coconuts.”

  “Yes. You’re the one who doesn’t know about coconuts.”

  Arocha smiled. Then he invited me to choose between the living room and the yard. He was wearing plastic sandals, a dark pair of shorts, and a light-blue tank top. His broad shoulders both had tribal tattoos, like vines. His hair, thinning, had not completely fallen out. His voice was powerful and his opinions were convincing. His ideas were deeply rooted. His gestures were pleasant.

  At a West Palm Beach hotel, we asked the gardener for permission to scale two trees. He said no. No one had ever said no to us at a hotel. The gardener was Latino, Central American. Small and evasive, with dark spots on his arms and a round face. We asked him if we could knock down the coconuts from the trees across the street, and he told us that they also belonged to the hotel. He was grooming the lawn with a weed whacker and watching us out of the corner of his eye, as if we were his enemies or as if there was only room for one poor person here. I wanted to tell him that misery is poisonous and those who have been mistreated are the meanest, but I understood that I was only poisoning myself, and that, besides, Manolo would have replied with some superhistorical theory, exonerating our Central American brother of responsibility and blaming usurious capitalism.

  We moved on about a quarter of a mile and, amid the mangroves on a very small and almost virgin beach, we found another coconut tree. When we finished working, a character from the hotel came in a golf cart, said a few things we didn’t understand, put the coconuts in his cart, and threw the ones that didn’t fit in the water. Manolo didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We stayed, watching the coconuts, how the tide dragged them, the way the sea devoured them. We left in silence. Behind the hotel wall, spying on us, we made out the tattletale gardener. I still had a month left in Miami, but that was the last day I accompanied Manolo on his job.

  “You keep a very singular distance from baseball.”

  “Because I have other hobbies now: cooking, spending time with my family, taking care of animals.”

  “Almost twenty-five years without going back to Cuba. What’s left of your country when you spend so much time away from it?”

  “I cut the cord from day one. I began to miss it, of course. My grandfather, my mother, my daughter, and my only sister were in Cuba, but I had many friends here and the rhythm of my life seemed to have stayed the same.”

  “That’s a start. But today, what’s left today?”

  “If I get to Cuba, I won’t get lost, but I will no longer be able to place certain streets. That has happened without my willing it. I have been living here for almost the same number of years that I lived there.”

  “You’re not nostalgic for certain things?”

  “Of course. Friends, my town, the house where I was born and grew up.”

  “Have you dreamt of Cuba?”

  “I’ve had dreams, yes, but it has been a while. I dreamt that I got to Cuba and couldn’t leave and I was telling myself, So now how do I leave, when I live in Miami? René, are you crazy, how are you going to go back now?”

  “Was it a dream or a nightmare?”

  “A tragedy, yes, a tragedy. I had that dream a couple of times.”

  “You’re not thinking of going back at any point?”

  “I can’t say yes or no. Until now, I haven’t taken the first step.”

  “But in the documentary Out of Their League, you’re eloquent. You say, and emphasize, that you are Cuban, and that you’re dying to sit down with a bunch of your guys to shoot the breeze in Havana’s Central Park.”

  “Because those are the things that I miss. Because behind everything there is a political situation that perhaps no longer exists or that I’ve invented, inside myself, and because of which I have not wanted to return. Perhaps it is fear, I don’t know. Everyone is telling me to go, that things have changed there, that nothing is going to happen, but I’m afraid.”

  “In the case of ballplayers, some have already gone.”

  “Ballplayers who have never made any statement against the government. I always said from day one that I came to this country in search of freedom. I’ve also talked about everything we athletes went through, the lodging where they put us, the mosquitoes that ate us up in the stands—because in Guantánamo, we had to sleep in the stands—and many other things. I hope that when I decide to go, it will be like they say and nothing happens. But, for example, one of the ballplayers who went told me that two minutes in, someone was pointing out the places he couldn’t visit. If I go to Havana, how am I going to not be able to go to the Latin American Stadium? Why not? It’s not like I am going with any political placards. If I go, I’m going to enjoy my game of baseball, period.”

  “There is, I fear, a distance in you that doesn’t only apply to baseball.”

  “Yes, there is. René has this problem—he’s removed, he’s stuck in his house. Some people see me on the street and say I look like Arocha and I say, yes, I’ve been told that many times. You can’t imagine the number of interviews I’ve turned down in recent years.”

  “Why?”

  “I got tired of being used.”

  “Do they do that?”

  “Of course. I got tired. At the beginning, they used me so much, because I was young and had the desire to let out everything I had brought from Cuba. All the TV shows called me. Every time something happened in Cuba, it was ‘René, come here’ and ‘René, go there.’ René the only Cuban ballplayer in the Major Leagues at that point, René the symbol.”

  “And when did you realize they were using you?”

  “When I stopped playing, when I picked up and went home, and there wasn’t a call or anything. That’s when I realized it.”

  “So you don’t go on TV anymore?”

  “I’ve gone, but, you know, the last time I went, I got to thinking. To come home from work, shower, head out to Hialeah, to talk for two minutes there, because it’s two minutes—no way, that’s not my carnival anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “In other words, I value my time today much more. Come to me with a song, but leave with your song, because I won’t do this anymore.”

  “So I was lucky. In the way we met, I mean.”

  “Yes, the way we met. I’ve been talking to you now because I saw you knocking down coconuts. Fighting for your life, just like I am fighting now.”

  Later, a millionaire cousin from my mother’s side showed up and invited me to spend a weekend in Fort Myers, two hours from Miami. He showed me his three-story mansion, the movie theater in his house, his Maserati, his Mercedes-Benz, his wife’s Audi 5. We went out fishing on his yacht. We had dinner at a Texas Roadhouse.

  He lived inside an exclusive gated community, on an islet surrounded by a saltwater canal lined by coconut trees. I estimated that, if Manolo and I knocked down all of the coconuts around that complex, we could easily make more than six hundred dollars in one go.

  My cousin was very generous. He made up a room for me that had a fridge and its own bathroom. He bought me clothing, shoes. He told me about my grandparents and great-grandparents.

  On the last day, a few hours before he took me back to Miami, I placed the MacBook Pro he had lent me on the bathroom shelf and played “Forever Young” on YouTube, sung by Joan Baez. I turned on the hot shower and got under it. I felt
stiff, orphaned. And at some point, without knowing how, I began to cry. I cried for three or four minutes, without stopping, without feeling ashamed. I wasn’t crying for anyone. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. The hot water dissolved my tears and burned a little. Was I thinking about my father? I don’t know. I felt saved, as if that millionaire’s house was an armored capsule to protect defenseless flesh. Later, I wasn’t sad or hanging my head. Nor was I euphoric. It had been like a graduation-day cry.

  CUBAN CAPITAL

  TRANSITION (TO WHAT?)

  IN SEVEN PARTS

  BY IVÁN DE LA NUEZ

  TRANSLATED BY LISA CARTER

  1.

  In Cuba, everything that moves can be a taxi and everything that doesn’t can be a rental property (either a restaurant, bar, hair salon, gym, or clandestine store). This is the new face of a private economy that is growing in real time, and through online ads, in plain sight. Welcome to the “primitive” accumulation of Cuban capital—with its own laws, its own tricks, and its own emerging classes, though not yet any sort of standardized capitalism (if there even is such a thing).

  This new Cuban capital has both a symbology around money and a combination of agitprop and advertising that now goes beyond the old iconographic pact between Che Guevara and American Cadillacs; between the indestructible icon that sustains mythological life and the indestructible automobiles that sustain day-to-day life. Along this continuum, there is also a place to bring revolutionary tourists together with the last of the old combatants who now rent them rooms in their homes, with epic stories included.