Days of Awe

by Achy Obejas

  In Cuba, Santiago was a particularly difficult place for Jews. It had been the only city besides Havana to have an official tribunal of the Inquisition; it was in the plaza before the city’s grand cathedral that Jews and other nonbelievers had been publicly humiliated and “relaxed.” Indeed, traditions lingered: When holy week came around, Catholic priests prepared effigies of Judas to burn—stuffed straw figures they called judíos. Ytzak and the other anusim kept quiet, sometimes even torching the figures themselves.

  After the Easter eve burnings, a tradition in Santiago called for the stoning of Chinese businesses, an exercise no one—not even Moisés Menach, who claims to have witnessed it himself—could explain except to say the santiagueros were confused about who or what was really a Jew. But for Ytzak, the message was clear: Being a Jew in Cuba was dangerous, not at all like being American, French, English, or even the wretched Haitians.

  In the years after the war of independence, during the U.S. occupation, Ytzak met a few American Jews in the hospital where he was rehabilitated for his war injury. He liked and envied them but they struck him as different, not at all Jewish in the way he understood himself to be. Years later, he met a traveling salesman from Havana who wore a thin gold Star of David around his neck the same way Ytzak himself had always worn a Christian cross (for protection not from evil spirits but from other Catholics). The peasants called the salesman El Moro—The Moor—but the man just laughed and said, “No, I’m a Jew.”

  An old woman who was becoming one of the man’s regular customers—she had in fact introduced him to Ytzak—paled when she heard him admit it. “But you’re human!” the old lady said, and the salesman laughed again.

  To Ytzak’s surprise, it made no difference in the end: The old woman bought some undergarments, a beautifully embroidered linen shirt for her husband, and a pair of leather shoes for her son. The salesman kept coming back, still called The Moor by the stubborn citizens of Oriente who were nonetheless happy to add to his profits.

  One night, Ytzak approached The Moor at the boardinghouse where he always stayed and asked him how he dared be so bold. The young Lebanese man, whose family had survived generations of turmoil, couldn’t fathom Jews like Ytzak and looked at him askance. “It’s who I am,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, counting his earnings. “At the end of the day, no matter what else has happened, I give thanks to a Jewish god.” (He also explained to Ytzak that the Americans he’d met were most likely Ashkenazi, Jews indeed, but different from the two of them, who were Sephardim.)

  A few years later, while Cuba was still struggling with being a republic and Ytzak could no longer bear his life in Oriente, he decided he’d be a Jew, a real Jew—even Ashkenazi if necessary. He left his wife, Leah, who refused to consider revealing herself, and his daughter, Sima (who was only eight then and as a result forever infused with the idea that desire for revelation meant tragedy), in the countryside, relocating them not far from the grounds of the sugar plantation where he’d once had a job running a grinder.

  Ytzak headed for Havana, where he now knew it was possible to be both Cuban and Jewish out in the open, to let the light glint off his own gold Star of David. The Moor became a friend who, with a stirring letter of introduction, got him a job in one of the Jewish-owned shoe factories in the city. He also got him a room in the home of a well-to-do American Jewish family with the improbable Irish name of Corwen who were somehow connected with the American embassy.

  For a short while, Ytzak lived his dream in Havana: His very first public service was the night before Simchas Torah. The loose, mostly American congregation was full of hilarity and light. And when the Torah was passed up to him for a kiss, Ytzak let free a torrent of happy tears. When he pronounced aloud the first few words of Genesis, he felt it was his very own life that was being renewed.

  In the grainy black-and-white photos Moisés Menach gave me of the 1914 opening in Old Havana of Chevet Ahim, Cuba’s first Sephardic society and synagogue, Ytzak’s blue-gray eyes twinkle as he grins from ear to ear, proudly leaning on his peg leg in the middle of the group of founders, his white linen Dril 100 suit flapping in the wind, his right hand holding a stylish straw hat in place.

  Many years later, when I found Chevet Ahim in the ancient city, I discovered it on a narrow street called Inquisidor, so-called because a commissary of the Inquisition once lived and menaced the populace from there.

  According to Moisés Menach, the real reason my father was not baptized was not because Luis and Sima consciously decided against it, or because they took any kind of stand for Judaism. It didn’t happen because Ytzak, who had moved back to Oriente the minute he heard Sima was pregnant, concocted a way to make sure it could never occur without revealing that they were, at least first, Jews.

  As soon as Enrique emerged from between Sima’s legs, Ytzak bundled him up and headed straight for Santiago on horseback (his dark, wooden peg leg dangerously tangled in the stirrups), then switched to the American-owned Cuba Railroad, which rammed its way through the bush with both efficiency and stubbornness. They traveled the length of the country in five days, through Oriente, past Camagüey, through the heart of Santa Clara’s sugar district— right by Dos Hermanas, Andreíta, San Francisco, San Agustín, and Caracas, all splendorous mills whose output had the power to tip the global market. Everywhere there was lush tropical green, banana groves sprouting between scraggly rocks, and thickly wooded hills that opened up to expansive sea coasts blue as the sky.

  I can see them: Ytzak holding on to my father, a feverish red slug who smelled of sour milk, drooling and crying, all his screaming swallowed by the huffing and snorting of the locomotive as they raced through the Cuban countryside.

  Back in Oriente, Sima and Luis waited in anguish. Ytzak had left a note explaining his intention to give Enrique a brit milah, “to initiate him into the covenant of God and Abraham.” He wanted to have it done at Chevet Ahim, surrounded by Jews who lived as Jews, something he’d discussed with Luis and Sima and which they’d roundly rejected as unnecessary and risky. Now they felt helpless and betrayed, Luis pacing in their tiny house, Sima cursing loudly in all the languages she knew. Leah, ashamed of her husband, condemned Judaism, blaming it for his obsessions and constant escapades.

  There were, of course, no mohels in Oriente—there weren’t any rabbis either—no one there dedicated to snipping the foreskin of the young converso and anusim boys. But crypto-Jews had managed somehow, from father to son, to do what was necessary, to jot down in their crumbling family Bibles the rituals, the methodology, the results of their efforts—right there on the inside pages next to the elaborate family trees, each dating back to 1492. Luis had had every intention of circumcising Enrique; it had never occurred to him to do otherwise. But he would baptize him first, and he would do it their way—not by removing the foreskin but by scarring it.

  But that Ytzak had kidnapped the baby—that’s what they called what he’d done—infuriated Luis. In a fit, he took the family Bibles—the one belonging to him as well as the one belonging to Ytzak—and, with Leah egging him on and Sima crying and pleading with him, hurled them into the gentle currents of the Mayarí River. The books spilled their rare ink into the waters, and with it our family history.

  Back in Havana, on the eighth day of his life, my father was circumcised by a Portuguese mohel visiting Cuba from Panama. There was solemn song and joyful celebration as the baby boy was cradled in Ytzak’s arms. He was given the Hebrew name Elías, as chosen by Ytzak, who surprised everyone by skipping right over Luis and Sima in the naming ceremony: Eliahu ben Ytzak.

  According to Moisés Menach, who heard the story many times from Ytzak himself, my father stared straight ahead as the blade touched his foreskin. And even after the blood, he never, ever cried.

  XV

  When Americans first meet Cubans, they always ask: What do you think of Fidel? The question is invariably poised jovially, as if in anticipation of some terribly clever punch line.

  For mo
st Cubans, there is only one answer: Fidel is the devil. This is said both in hatred and love, in derision and admiration.

  In Miami and other exile communities, he is called by his first name as if he were family: Fidel, the black sheep; Fidel, the bad seed; Fidel, that son of a bitch. In Miami, everybody wants to break his fingers.

  In Havana and the rest of the island, he has no name. People indicate him by pulling at invisible beards or tapping make-believe epaulets. On TV, the announcers say El Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz with an unnatural formality that suggests when the camera turns, they quickly glimpse behind them and breathe with relief. “Ay, Fidel,” they sigh.

  On both sides of the Straits of Florida there’s a story about Fidel’s first victory speech in Havana. Sometime shortly after he began, a white dove perched on his left shoulder, leaving everyone breathless. This is Fidel’s voodoo: He does the impossible.

  He gets that bird to pose with him, whether through strategy or sorcery doesn’t matter. In one case, it’s divine intervention; in the other, a stroke of theatrical genius; in both, he wins.

  Fidel makes a joke out of the CIA and its poisonous shoe polish and explosive scuba gear. (According to his own count, the agency has tried to kill him 637 times, which is surely some sort of record.) He survives—some even say thrives—long after Eastern Europe falls to history and chunks of the Berlin Wall are sold off by amateur capitalists. Fidel banters in Harlem, throws a mean pitch, gives up smoking cigars and Cuba’s tobacco industry flourishes anyway.

  As a dictator, he is peculiar. In Cuba, there are few photos of him on the thousands of political billboards all over the island. Nothing is named after him. No one knows exactly where he lives. When something goes wrong—and in Cuba everything goes wrong, from the belching buses to the collapsing bridges to the weightless peso— Cubans curse, then carefully reconsider.

  “If Fidel only knew . . .” they say, as if then the buses would run, the bridges magically repair themselves, and their wages suddenly be enough. “This is so only because of his assistants, his corrupt associates, the people around him who want to protect him and empower themselves,” they conjecture, spinning dark, ornate conspiracies. “He’s not an economist!” they protest.

  When Fidel speaks, his message has resonance because he absolutely believes every word he says. When he rants against the U.S. embargo, he feels the injustice in every twitching nerve. Even in a crowd of hundreds of thousands, he pierces every individual spirit, contaminates them with rage and rapture. When he talks about dignity and honor, he touches the optimism inherent in every human soul; he squeezes the possibility of hope out of the most cynical of hearts.

  Indeed, Fidel’s enemies are so vociferous, so rabid, precisely because he is so irresistible. Like former cult members, they know the kind of resolve it takes to undo his spell.

  Fidel has educated entire generations of Cubans to believe they are entitled to more luminous, broader horizons, and that they will change the world—all the while seemingly unable to grasp that it is that same knowledge and ambition that hurls them out of his island purgatory, makes them dream of a life different from the one he offers.

  Fidel likes to talk about history and, especially, the future, always the future. He cannot discuss the here and now with much comfort—the scarcities, the boredom, the silences—so he revels in revolutionary mythology and what will be: the advances of Cuban medicine, how it is close to discovering a cure for skin cancer and AIDS; how tourist dollars will build marvelous new schools and hospitals; and how socialism will, in spite of everything, triumph. Everything is absolute; there is nothing conditional. Every speech Fidel gives is a lesson, an exhortation to create utopia, to build a tower to heaven.

  Fidel, like the devil himself, is an invention of necessity. He is the mirror onto which Cubans project their heroism and betrayals, their sense of righteousness and valor. Without Fidel, there would have been no golden age, no paradisiacal past, no lives in the subjunctive.

  There was a time when, whenever Fidel talked, the island would turn to him as if he were the messiah. Every TV would feature his flickering image, every radio his cascading tones. A walk in Havana would reveal empty streets, entire families sitting before the TV or radio, clusters of citizens thoughtfully rubbing their chins or nodding their heads at the local CDR. Sometimes there would be a chat afterward in which Fidel’s wisdom would be affirmed.

  Today Fidel talks and no one much listens except the functionaries who have to meet with him and need to let the old man hear his words echoing, or the foreign businessmen who believe they get extra points if they can make one or two references to Fidel’s latest speech in their dealings with the criollitos (Fidel’s word), the second and third generation brats who are now in positions of authority throughout Cuba’s nascent capitalist system and will undoubtedly, and without giving much of a damn, inherit it all—the transcendent history and the glittery new hotels, the untapped markets and the desperation.

  There was a time when Fidel talked for hours and hours, waving his hands, using his index finger as a strategic pointer, leaning in and out of the podium. People stood through heat and downpours, through clouds of mosquitos and brain-numbing static from the enormous loudspeakers in the Plaza de la Revolución.

  Now, when the tireless patriarch gets going, shirtless young boys sigh. “Is he still talking?” they ask, and then everybody starts complaining and the streets fill up with people on their way to the movies, the farmer’s market, or the discotheque.

  When I return to the island ten years later, in 1997, a weary Ester, Moisés’s wife, and I decide to take in a movie one day. The Madness of King George, a British import, is playing at the Yara Theater and we take refuge in its meek air-conditioning, Ester dabbing at the slick crevice between her ample and very visible breasts with a threadbare white linen handkerchief.

  At one point in the movie, when the king is at his most extreme senselessness, he lets himself go and sprouts a peppery beard that makes him look uncannily like Fidel, and which causes the entire theater to titter and murmur. Even Ester begins to look around, giggling nervously.

  When he talks, Fidel says cuida’o, with that swing so particular to the island, not cuidado, like all the American-educated despots and dolts before him who spoke with precise diction and a quasi-Iberian airiness. Whatever else he may be, Fidel is quintessentially Cuban.

  And as such, he is exactly what the movie Ester and I see suggests: stark, raving mad.

  Fidel’s insanity does not manifest in personal capriciousness, in palaces or affairs with movie stars, in whimsical flights to Madrid or Paris for quick shopping sprees, a chestful of bloodstained medals, or the ostentatiousness of celebrity parties with Chinese lanterns and security helicopters.

  Fidel’s insanity is collaborative, collective. He voices the wildest ambitions of the people, and because he has the unconditional power to manifest his will, brigades of Cubans set out to make his and their wishes come true.

  Orlando, Moisés’s son-in-law, calls this phenomenon los caprichos. On my return to Cuba in 1997, we sit on the Malecón on an eerily cool, still night and he recites to me from an endless list of Fidel’s lunacies.

  “Once upon a time,” Orlando says, “there was something called ‘the green belt of La Habana’ . . . Fidel’s master plan to increase coffee production by having everybody plant a moat of java beans around the city.”

  That was in the spring of 1968, when all sorts of regular citizens—teachers and lawyers and bus drivers who knew nothing about agriculture, and cared even less—trampled up and down the hills outside of the capital, aimlessly seeding the earth with ten million coffee beans.

  “He”—Orlando signals with a quick tug at an invisible beard and a glance over his shoulders—“had plans for a rice belt, a dairy belt, and a vegetable belt, but when the coffee refused to sprout as planned, when the earth defied his best intentions, he focused back on sugarcane and never mentioned surrounding Havana with anythin
g again.”

  Orlando then tells me about Fidel’s promise to erect giant, architectural windbreakers all over the island that would tame the force of any gale so effectively that a citizen might calmly sit under a tree and read a newspaper during a hurricane.

  And he tells me, too, about Fidel’s idea for air-conditioned cattle ranches (with piped-in classical music), so that the animals would be spared the discomfort of the tropics and produce more milk and muscle, enriching Cuba’s dairy and beef industries.

  “Everybody was jealous of the cows,” Orlando says. “Another time, he”—and again the unseen beard—“asked Cuban scientists to develop pork and poultry that tasted like seafood.”

  None of this, of course, ever materialized as anything more than one disaster after another, no matter how grandly announced and anticipated. And no disaster was greater than the proposed yield of ten million tons of sugar in 1970—a feat Cuba had never even been close to accomplishing.

  But everyone was so committed to the ten million, so much had already been invested in money, human power, and propaganda, that the harvest had taken on a life of its own. On the streets, Cubans were actually asking each other, “What are you doing toward the ten million?”