by Jose Latour
Latin American history abounds in utopians who seized power to straighten things up and became dictators in their own right, she reflected next. The rich people who exert power and authority fail to see the limit of social victimization. Revolutionaries make out the limit, promise to rectify what is wrong, and by peaceful or violent means seize power. Then the new ruling class gradually turns myopic and the cycle repeats itself.
Now the screen showed a smiling and waving Chaviano as he returned to the Presidential Palace for his third crack at power. The narrator, keeping his voice neutral, directed the attention of viewers to the security detail surrounding the man and commented on obvious flaws. Victoria couldn’t judge the technicalities of protecting a president, but the haunted faces of two white men in their thirties looked familiar to her. Cubans from the Chief’s security detail, probably. She wasn’t surprised, though. The man was obviously and openly doing all he could to help Chaviano.
Fully aware that, after the Cuban fiasco, a communist revolution was unthinkable in Venezuela or any other South American nation, the Chief nevertheless realized that his ardent disciple had ended his isolation in the Latin American corridors of power. He had secured the daily supply of fifty-three thousand barrels of vital oil on favorable prices and credit terms. And the Commander’s hands were clean. His admirer had been elected in fair and free elections. For these reasons, several thousand Cuban doctors, nurses, teachers, and sports instructors had been shipped off to the most miserable and remotest regions of Venezuela to care for, teach, and train the destitute. Chess-board pawns, she sadly reflected. She, her boss, the ministers, and the generals were all chessboard pawns manipulated by the all-powerful at the pyramid’s vertex.
“What do you think?” whispered Col. Enrique Morera, crypt-onym Bernardo, in Victoria’s right ear. She returned to reality. General Lastra and his six closest collaborators were sitting in the first row of seats. To Victoria’s left, Col. José Manuel Campa, cryptonym Paco, twiddled a cigarette between his fingers, desperate for a smoke. Victoria hated Campa because, since getting married, he was the only man she would have loved to mess around with. It made her mad to feel so attracted to a sonofabitch who only eyed broads who had hooters and hefty behinds.
“A victory of the people,” Victoria, after turning her head, whispered back. “United, the people shall never be defeated,” she added. The slogan—a rhyme in Spanish—was coined by Chilean socialists during Allende’s tenure. The only epigram she could think of to call Chaviano fainthearted. Morera, nobody’s fool, permitted himself a smile. Allusions such as Victoria’s were much appreciated in Cuban officialdom. The party line had been toed, nothing improper had been said, and yet the sarcasm was perfectly clear.
“Rumor has it that, on Saturday morning, Felipe called Josep to see if José María would grant Rufo political asylum,” Morera commented.
“Really?” a surprised Victoria said.
“It’s a rumor.”
“I see.”
Victoria’s mental wheels turned fast. Labeling the news a rumor meant that it was in the public domain everywhere except in Cuba. Felipe was the Cuban minister of foreign affairs, a hysterical zealot; Josep was Josep Piqué, his opposite number in Spain; José María was José María Aznar, the Spanish president; Rufo was Chaviano’s first name. So, the Chief had crossed off Chaviano on Friday night, after he was arrested. Amazing. Well, Victoria mused, the Chief had to be inured to the hardships of power. Probably no other living head of state, aside from perhaps Saddam Hussein, had seen a greater number of his favorite presidents, prime ministers, and other highly placed officials fall from power or die on him; more of his ministers, generals, and party bureaucrats fail him somehow. She recalled the day when the chief of the Cuban air force landed his private plane in Miami and filed for political asylum. At the time, she had felt humiliated.
Yet, the Commander liked Chaviano enough to arrange for his exile in Spain, thus owing big to Aznar, a political right-winger he would love to see ousted from power. Once again she had to admire the Chief’s cunning. A less experienced helmsman would have provided safe haven to Chaviano in Cuba. However, the Commander had figured out that such a move would compromise his disciple’s future. Should the man spend two, three, or more years exiled in Havana, he would be reviled, labeled his puppet. On the other hand, no European country under a right-wing administration could be accused of aiding and abetting Chaviano.
“Have you heard any rumor about José María’s response?” Victoria whispered.
The subalterns in the second row of seats strained unsuccessfully to overhear the big shots.
“Word is he said he would consider it if Rufo himself asked for it.”
“Well, luckily the people prevailed. Now we don’t owe a thing to José María, provided the rumor is true.”
“Oh, yes, we do owe him. Just by agreeing to consider it, we owe him. One of these days, before the end of his term, he’ll ask us to discourage a Basque Nationalist from flying to France to plan terrorist attacks, or he’ll seek a pardon for a counterrevolutionary serving a prison sentence.”
Victoria held Morera in high esteem. Chief of the USA Department and her superior officer, he had always treated her as a friend. Rigid implementation of The First Sacred Rule prevented her from really knowing how good the man was, but the respect with which his superiors treated him made her suspect he had performed outstandingly well during the lifetime he had devoted to Intelligence. His lugubrious manner reflected something that she had not been able to pinpoint. Dashed hopes? Disillusionment? Sexual frustration? He had the deepest lines she had seen in a forehead, the result of many years of worrying and repressing his feelings.
Rumor had it that he was not promoted to brigadier general in 1995 because his only son led a notoriously debauched lifestyle. It was also said that Morera was being nudged into retirement after the jewel of the crown, the DIA agent he had personally handled, was arrested seven months earlier. Only five people had known about her: the Chief, his brother, the minister of the interior, General Lastra, and Morera.
After her arrest was made public, though, Morera had taken Victoria into his confidence and given his version of why she was nabbed. Carelessness had been his diagnosis. He had instructed her to go to the WIPE program and destroy the file every time she got a radio message or a disk and warned her not to leave prepared information that was not ciphered in the house. But from the shreds of information he’d been able to compile, it seemed she’d had a lapse, or two, or three, nobody knew how many. And this was in Washington, where the FBI was best equipped, Morera had reminded Victoria. Not forgetting that humans tend to disclaim responsibility when things go wrong, Victoria thought nonetheless that Morera was probably right. Most spies get overconfident.
Considering a two-minute pause sufficient, and as though bored stiff by the Chaviano report, she leaned to her right and changed the subject.
“Any sign that the Gypsy has let up?” she whispered. The Gypsy was Cuban Intelligence’s name for David Szady, chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. After his people broke the Wasp cell and three years later rooted out the most highly placed Cuban agent in the United States, his Cuban adversaries schizophrenically admired the man in secret and hated him in public. They suspected Szady felt the same for Cuban case officers. It was the ultimate mark of professionalism.
Morera tilted his head right, left, and pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Not to my knowledge. I assume he’s doing his job; I’m certainly trying to do mine,” he said.
“How soon can I wake up a few sleepers?” Victoria asked.
“Not yet. Maybe in a few months.”
“How about broadcasts?”
“Only those authorized.”
“One day the Commander is going to ask if this is as good as it gets.”
Morera just smiled wrily. Victoria knew he would not say one more word. She decoded the smile as: “He knows we are in very deep shit.”
The
postmortem was almost finished. The captain operating the VCR froze a close-up of a joyful Chaviano on the screen. Lights were turned on. Lieutenant Colonel Mario stole a look at General Lastra and was pleased to get an approving nod. A captain who after several years still had not shed the suspicious expression of rookies ranted: “Viva Chaviano.”
“Viva,” mumbled the other participants before they started to file out.
…
Returning to Santa Cruz del Norte after so many years turned out to be quite an experience. Before anything else, Elliot visited three homes: In the first two lived his aunts, in the third roomed his uncle. Exactly the same happened at each dwelling. Someone young opened the front door of a poverty-stricken yet shipshape household, eyed him curiously while he asked for his relative, then bawled, “Grandma [or Grandpa], a comrade is asking for you!” Almost a minute after he had been shown in, one of his aunts or his uncle, in well-worn clothes and scuffed shoes, came into the living room adjusting their glasses. Brows were knit, an instant of hesitation ensued. “No! Is it you?” was gleefully screamed next. He was hugged to the point of suffocation. He hugged them tightly, too. Then came the shouts: “Run, Elisa! Run, Jaime! Run, Ernesto! Hurry! Elito, the son of Carmita, is here!”
The older women wept and unusual mist could be seen in the eyes of those hombres who had retired or worked the afternoon or graveyard shifts. Elliot’s eyes clouded somewhat. He was then steered to each home’s best rocking chair and forced to sit in it. Somebody turned off the blaring ancient radio, another turned on an old fan, a third hauled chairs from the dining room and bedrooms. The youngest among the women (someone who had been six or seven the last time he’d seen her, years before leaving Cuba) was ordered to brew coffee as the rest of the family sat around him and gabbled away a hundred questions that he tried to answer no less precipitately. Within ten minutes or so, the delectable girl who had been exiled to the kitchen presented him with a timid yet dazzling smile and a demitasse of very strong aromatic coffee that tasted delicious. For the first time in many, many years, Elliot Steil felt at home.
That same day he had to muster all his willpower to refuse the numerous glasses of fragrant rum waved under his nose. Boasting that he had been on the wagon for eight years was out of the question; in Santa Cruz that’s considered weakness of character, AA a club for sissies. You have to be man enough to indulge in drinking bouts when you feel like it and to turn down invitations when for some reason you cannot touch the stuff. Teetotaling there is almost as insane as celibacy. Hence, he concocted the story that he had been diagnosed with a fatty liver five weeks earlier and the doctor had ordered him to not touch a drop for the next six months. This brought nods of understanding and looks of commiseration from all.
Meals were disappointing. Although he was served the best available, fresh herbs did not counterbalance the lack of spices and cooking oil. Lacking pork sausage and bacon, a red bean potage was tasteless. A red porgy short on onions, red pepper, garlic, and basted in sunflower oil rather than olive oil lost half its allure. Was good Cuban home cooking to be found only abroad? Perhaps the kitchens that cooked for certain comrades were well stocked, he mused.
Next morning he started asking for old friends and acquaintances in an updating process that proved full of surprises. Apparently, none of those who emigrated had settled in Miami, or even Florida, which was amazing. Roberto Molina, a classmate, the son of a fisherman, became a mechanic on a Cuban fishing trawler, jumped ship in the Canary Islands, and now owned five camels that he rented to tourists in the sands of Fuerteventura. His father showed Elliot snapshots of his buddy proudly parading his beasts of burden. Manolo, still living in town, was assistant manager at the Havana Club rum distillery. Somewhat embarrassed, he declined the invitation to chat with Elliot, maybe because as a member of the Communist Party’s Municipal Committee he was not supposed to. Rosa, a pediatrician mother of three who had sat next to him in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, drowned in Guatemala while crossing a swollen river to attend to an infant dehydrating from diarrhea. Etelvina entered a convent at the age of thirty-eight. Evelio resided in Brooklyn, had married an Algerian woman, fathered two boys and two girls, and earned his bread and butter giving thorough maintenance checks to the escalators of the city’s subway. Due to a serious back condition, Pedro had taken early retirement from the sugar refinery, where he operated a centrifuge for thirty years. When last heard of, Ricardo was playing maracas for a Japanese orchestra in Kobe. The once incredibly beautiful Carmina, now an overweight and gray-haired woman in her mid-forties, sold homemade ice cream from the front door of her wooden house. Miguel, Fernando, and Roberto sailed the small boats their fathers had inherited from their grandfathers and made a living by daily casting lines a mile off the coast.
The topic of illegal emigration, although painful, surfaced repeatedly because everybody had been led to believe that Elliot had fled to the United States on a raft. As in every other town on the island’s northern coast, young people were acquainted with the rudiments of sailing and knew how to swim. Low salaries averaging ten dollars a month and unemployment made many sick and tired of suffering serious privations. To compound the problem further, scores believed that after a couple of years in the Florida Keys or Miami, they would be driving brand-new Jags and living in three-bedroom houses with pools.
According to Fernando, Samuel Timoneda, the town’s historian, began keeping a tally in 1980. Since then, 137 residents of Santa Cruz, Hershey, and the immediate surrounds had illegally sailed northbound. Of these, 115 had either landed safely in one of Florida’s counties or been intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and returned to Cuba. The missing twenty-two had left fourteen families in the most macabre corner of limbo, unable to make up their minds on the absentees’ birthdays whether they should rejoice or weep.
By Thursday morning, townsfolk had grown accustomed to seeing Elliot walking around. He sniffed the air to enjoy the fragrance of molasses blowing from the south, the smell of the sea from the north or the east, or exhaled hard to get rid of the stench from nearby oil wells blowing in from the west. Downtown Santa Cruz, although clean and tidy, had remained pretty much the same. In the outskirts, new influences were to be found by the score. Ugly, four-floor concrete boxes had been built to house the families of the managers, engineers, technicians, and plain workers who operated a huge power generating plant erected a few miles to the west, on the shoreline, in the late eighties. The staff of the new paper factory, and those in charge of the oil wells drilled and laid pipelines all over the municipality, also lodged in those apartment buildings. The expanded rum distillery, allegedly the biggest in Latin America, was preeminent. The sleepy, neighborly Santa Cruz del Norte that he yearned for no longer existed.
Upon hearing that the wandering outsider who had been born there was now living in Miami, a few newcomers eyed him distrustfully. He returned their stares. What were they doing in his hometown? Their shoptalk dwelt on turbines, generators, boilers, steam, megawatts, tons of oil, cubic meters of gas, and qualities of paper, whereas native Santacruzians talked sugarcane, sugar, molasses, rum, and fish. A little cigar-rolling and tourism had been added to the local economy of late. Elliot sensed that although the recently arrived and the old-timers were trying to adjust to circumstances, underlying mistrust survived. They would intermix, like everywhere else in the history of mankind, for sexual reasons. Electric-oil-paper boys and girls would be marrying sugar-and-rum girls and boys, begetting sugelectoilrum boys and girls.
After delighting in the forgotten pleasure of napping in a hammock, Elliot spent Thursday afternoon at the dollar store at Fourth and Thirteenth buying presents in which sizes were not a requirement. Three oscillating fans, a dozen queen-size sheets, a dozen pillowcases, a dozen mosquito nets, six air-pressure kerosene lamps, a dozen flashlights, two dozen batteries, three blenders, six pressure cookers, assorted cutlery, nine bottles of perfume, fifteen bottles of nail polish, ten brushes, ten combs, almost a pound of hairp
ins, five dozen disposable razors, six cartons of cigarettes, two boxes of cigars, a dozen bottles of rum, six pair of sunglasses, and two dozen handkerchiefs for a total of $1,257.85. After helping him load everything in the trunk and backseat of the rental, the store manager said the luscious brunette at the perfumes counter had asked him to please tell the client she’d be delighted to have dinner with him. Steil just clicked his tongue, shook his head sadly, and turned the key in the ignition.
That evening, as he watched his wide-eyed aunts, his uncle, and other family members opening boxes and gasping in surprise, shaking their heads in dismay, and deploring that Elito had spent so much money, Elliot reflected that the innocence, candor, generosity, and honesty displayed by people born and raised in rural Cuba had to be perplexing for those who live where scheming, distrust, and suspicion are essential to survival and success. If in his childhood part of their kindness had rubbed off on him, only traces remained.
Twenty-five people dined on fried chunks of pork, the combination of rice and black beans known to Cubans as Moors and Christians, fried green plantains, and lettuce-and-tomato salad. Dessert consisted of boiled and sweetened halves of guava. After coffee, rum began to flow.
Politics briefly became the topic for the first and only time when a blackout wet-blanketed what over the course of time had turned into a boisterous party. A collective moan was heard before everyone, kids included, ranted about the government, the system, and the Chief. Elliot just smiled in the dark. Two of his cousins explained to him that when one of the Chief’s interminable speeches was being broadcast, at no time was the power cut. Plants postponed scheduled maintenance, the oil reserve was tapped, breakdowns were fixed in a jiffy. As others slid the new batteries into the new flashlights, Elliot told his cousins that it had always been the same, dating from the time when he was a teenager: speech, power; no speech, it was anybody’s guess. The air-pressure kerosene lamps could not be lighted because there was no kerosene at Aunt Carmina’s, so the rest of the dinner party took place by romantic candlelight, with many sitting on the floor. When in the dead of night, laden with presents, Aunt Tatica and Uncle Eusebio doddered out for their homes accompanied by nine of Elliot’s slightly pickled cousins, seven sleepy children of the cousins, and three dogs wagging their tails, flashlights were made unnecessary by the trillion stars and the full moon that softly illuminated the packed-earth trail, the surrounding fruit trees, and the tall royal palms. Seldom had Elliot slept sounder.