by Achy Obejas
“He is your friend,” I told my father, as if that should give him permission, or perhaps more precisely, imply obligation.
“No,” he said, his finger in the air as if he were in the middle of one of his lectures, “he is not my friend—friend is not the right word. He is my brother, if not in the literal filial meaning certainly in spirit.”
“Well then.”
“Yes,” he said, almost smug now.
We were at a standstill, my father silently stirring the lentils, me watching him. His fingers barely touched the wooden spoon, creating a slow vortex in the middle.
“Then, do you want to know, or not, what he had to say?” I asked.
“Like I said, I’d happily listen if you choose to tell.”
20 February 1988
My dear Alejandra,
Your letter brought much joy to this house. Your friend Estrella, the interpreter, delivered it the day after she got back to Havana. She had many wonderful stories to tell about her visit to Chicago and about working with you again. (The world is so small—who would have thought you two would run into each other like that?) She said Seth is very handsome—and that he is so much in love with you, he is learning to speak Spanish!
I was particularly happy to hear that he is a Jewish boy, although in the end, it is really only love that matters; that is what I tell my children, that is why I was so happy when Angela married Orlando, because that he is not Jewish could not be a criteria when what is really important is that he is a good person and loves my daughter. (Some members of my community used to protest his not being Jewish to cover up their real objection—that he is mulato—but having felt the sting of that kind of racism myself, however erroneously, I find the whole idea of judging a person this way simply repulsive. It’s what’s in the heart that counts.)
We had already heard from Félix, Celina’s brother, about what a terrific time he had with you and Seth. It helped me imagine you in your own space, instead of just here with us, and made me feel closer to you.
I loved the photograph of your parents that you sent. It has been a long time since I have laid eyes on them and their faces were both new and familiar. Your mother, of course, is as radiant as ever. She looks energetic, just like in her youth. But your father! He was always big-boned, but I can hardly believe that he has become such a large, robust man. He looks Russian, with that beard and that hair and that long black coat!
Everything here is going well. We appreciate the vitamins and the jeans for Deborah and Yosemí but, honestly, we do not need anything. Save your pennies and come visit us instead. We are well taken care of.
Un abrazo,
Moisés
“Why don’t you write Moisés?” I asked my father. I was slumped on the couch in front of his big mahogany desk, reading up on some new immigration cases, preparing for a series of hearings the following week, and my father always had the best, most complete dictionaries and reference books.
“I did write him,” he said, his stare fixed on the yellow notebook in front of him.
“One letter, that’s all,” I said.
He said nothing, just sighed and continued to bend into his work. I watched as he scribbled a few more notes, scratched out whole lines. His reading glasses hugged the tip of his nose.
“Why not write him again?” I implored. “He’s your brother, after all.”
“Alejandra,” he said, gazing at me over his glasses with a vaguely condescending air, “he did not write back to me, but to you.”
“So?”
“So you write to him. It’s as good as if I wrote to him. Better, probably. You have more to say. All I could tell him is that I spend all my time here, amid books and papers.”
“I can’t imagine that he’s all that interested in the particulars of my life either, Papi. He has his own children, he doesn’t know or care about life in the United States. He’s a revolutionary, remember?”
My father laughed and finally sat back in his desk chair, relaxed. He lit a cigar, one of those sweet, stubby ones from Cuba that made their way to him via his writer friends. “Yes, yes, he is, from way back,” he said. He savored the smoke, let it ease out of his mouth on its own. “He was a Communist before anybody else was a Communist. He was a Communist before Fidel, that’s for sure.”
“And you?” I knew the answer, I just wanted to keep the conversation going.
“I could care less about politics, really.” He leaned back into his desk, stared at the yellow tablet again.
“But Moisés says he first read all that Communist stuff with you.”
He nodded. “Yes, but we responded differently. I just wanted to keep reading, to enjoy the words. He wanted to go to Spain and fight against Franco.”
I knew this story already; how, on one of Moisés’s visits as a young man to see his uncle in Havana, he and my father argued so heatedly a crowd formed around them at the café where they’d been sharing a soda. They were both so alarmed that they ran, leaving the throng screaming and fighting among itself. As they turned the corner, squad cars pulled up, ready to beat and jail the agitators.
“A man like that, what can I tell him? That I spend all my time by myself scrutinizing letters, doing exactly what I’ve always done? He likes action, gestures even if they’re small. Besides, we haven’t talked in a very long time. Better you write, Alejandra. Your voice is fresher.”
As my father returned to his writing, I burrowed deeper into the couch. The window from which I’d spied on him as a child was just above me, now completely covered in impenetrable black plastic. Somewhere in this room, I knew, were the well-worn ancient leather straps, the tiny boxes containing prayers. I was sure they were cherished, expertly hidden but easily accessible.
“Can you imagine,” my father said suddenly, as if coming out of a trance, “wanting to go to Spain to fight? As if there wasn’t enough of that in Cuba. . . .”
13 August 1988
My dear Alejandra,
It’s El Comandante’s birthday, and your father’s, too. I think of this and chuckle. Certainly there can be no truth to astrology, otherwise how could two such different men share the same day of birth?
The best gift for El Comandante, I believe, was the victory two days ago of our Olympic baseball team over the Americans. For your father, it is hard to say, perhaps a book of poetry, one he does not already own, which would be, I suppose, very difficult now that he is a literature professor.
You could, however, write him a poem. It would be a great family tradition: It is what he did as a child to honor his parents, whether on birthdays or anniversaries or any other important occasion. His were always very short, just a few lines, often borrowing from other writers, much too sentimental, and very bad. I used to change the lines now and again, to make them funny, but he stopped showing them to me because I made fun of him. He was always very defensive. Perhaps that has changed now that he is older, and presumably wiser.
There is a lot of talk here about negotiations between El Comandante and an American Catholic cardinal. I listen but it doesn’t bother me. People say Cuba is antireligion, but I have found that it is simply wary of Christians, especially Catholics. El Comandante, as you surely know, attended Catholic schools; I suspect he knows something the rest of us may not.
In any case, it is not like you’ve been told. And as a Jew, I can’t complain. It’s true there’s not much of a community here, that almost everyone left in those first few years after the revolution, but I firmly believe that was hysteria, nothing more.
The truth is that Jews were allowed to leave freely after the revolution if they were making aliyah; permitted, in fact, to take their furnishings and money. The truth is that, although property was nationalized, it was not just the Jews’ that was nationalized but everyone’s, and that no one was forced to leave. We’ve always had a kosher butcher in Havana (it’s where I’m assigned in my ration book). We have religious classes at the Sephardic Center, small, yes, but that is no one’s fau
lt but our own.
In one of your last letters you asked how I could reconcile being a Jew and a revolutionary. For me, there is no contradiction. Jews are revolutionaries, the very first real revolutionaries. Jews—who have always been a small nation—changed the world, just like we are doing here, on our little island. For me, as a Jew, justice is the highest calling. Because of that, it is my duty to be here, nowhere else.
Besides, have you noticed the parallels between Marxism and Judaism? In both, there is first a state of innocence, then a fall into a period of social chaos (I think we can agree this is where we are now), and then, finally, harmony. I don’t believe this is a coincidence. (Remember that Karl Marx himself was Jewish, however lax.)
Cuba is not a perfect place. Ours is not a perfect revolution. But if everyone left, who would stay to keep it on course? The world is changing so dramatically, so unpredictably. How would I know what to do anywhere else? Who would I be anywhere else? I was born here.
Un fuerte abrazo,
Moisés
P.S. Do you ever talk to your father about any of this?
XX
It came out of the blue one fall day, it seemed, after a long, torturous summer: The Berlin wall—that hideous stretch of murderous concrete between the German people, the line in the Cold War sand— emerged as a riser for dancers, a wailing wall, a fortune for those with a pick and a shopping bag, gold nuggets strewn on the cobblestones on a cold autumn night.
It appeared the whole planet was watching Berlin in November 1989, when harmony and goodwill seemed to reign. In Chicago, as everywhere, coverage dominated every channel, every station, every solitary conversation. It was a world away from the summer’s news about Arnaldo Ochoa, the Cuban general executed in Havana over drug trafficking charges that no one could believe; those headlines had been buried, wire stories on the inside pages, or ignored.
“Remember, Ale, what you do tonight,” a friendly lawyer told me after we finished a deposition early, eager to rush home and turn on the tube to watch the drunken, jubilant revelers in Berlin. We already knew how even the border guards, those notorious Stasi wanna-bes who’d been cold-blooded assassins just the day before, were now happily unified Germans, carried away by the wave of emotions. “This is history. You’ll want to be able to tell your children where you were when the Berlin Wall fell,” my client said all misty-eyed. “It’s a nice little Christmas present, don’t you think?”
By that time, the city was already flushed with holiday decor, twinkling lights, plastic reindeer, and swarms of shoppers that seemed to suck all the air out of the sky. We stood on a corner waving aimlessly for a cab for him. I was feeling proletarian and wanted to take the train, but I’d driven in and would have to face the solitude of driving out.
“It is kind of marvelous,” I said, allowing myself to be awed by the wall’s fall.
A taxi pulled up to the curb, its braking tires tossing slush at our shoes. “Yes, imagine the lawsuits!” my client said, laughing as he got in. “My god, as soon as those West Germans start claiming all their lost property in the East, it’ll be a gold mine!”
They had the wall’s collapse on the tiny black-and-white TV behind the cash register at Cachita’s, a barren little Cuban bodega up on Berwyn that I thought looked an awful lot like the empty-shelf groceries on the island. The old man who owned the place, an exile named Santiago with thick glasses held together with white tape, had been talking for months about selling it, thinking about moving down to Miami with his daughter and her new Puerto Rican husband. He was sure with Ochoa’s execution, an uprising was bubbling right under the surface in Cuba, and he wanted to be as close as possible when all hell broke loose. There was a huge sign outside Cachita’s door, right under the Cuban and Puerto Rican flags, which advertised the Realtor’s name.
Every time I stopped by—it was usually on the drive up to my parents to pick up a last-minute can of guava shells and a packet of cream cheese for my father—Santiago would joke around with me about taking it over.
“You have come to give me money!” he’d yell whenever I stepped through the door. There was usually a handful of Cuban men loitering around the cash register, talking politics and trash, smoking cigars and thinking up new combinations for lottery tickets. I knew a few of their faces from my father’s domino games. They’d welcome me with huge smiles and say, “Ah, the new owner!” It was all a big, sweet joke.
“Alejandra, isn’t this incredible?” Santiago said, pointing at the TV, his eyes like huge freak house distortions behind the thick lenses of his glasses. His face was inches from the too loud screen behind the register. The crowd of men nodded and murmured.
“It’s unbelievable,” I concurred, setting my father’s can of guava shells and a slab of cream cheese on the counter. I had refused to let my client’s comments about lawsuits and property depress me; I had kept Ochoa’s ghost at bay.
“You know who’s next, don’t you?” one of the men around Santiago’s cash register asked.
When I didn’t answer right away, another guy piped in: “Fidel!”
“Oh, he’s a goner, a real goner!” exuded Santiago, rocking back on his heels, rubbing his hands together.
“They’re on their way down—finally!—those Russians!” exclaimed still another.
“And then Fidel, and then Fidel!”
“You know how much money he takes in from those Russians? A million dollars a day! He can’t survive! He’ll come down!” cheered Santiago.
“Abajo Fidel!”
I finally grinned at them, shaking my head. How long had they had that cry in their throats? How many times had their hopes been raised like millions of festive balloons, only to deflate within days? Maybe this time, with Solidarity raising the ante in Poland and Vaclav Havel drawing the spotlight to Czechoslovakia, Fidel might finally stumble—so many people thought the stage had been set by Ochoa’s execution.
Then one of the men, a man I didn’t know, turned to me. “Are you Cuban?” he asked.
“Of course she’s Cuban!” Santiago shouted.
“Well, I don’t know, I can’t tell,” the man said.
“She’s Enrique San José’s daughter!” Santiago exclaimed, as if that were obvious—or as if my father, the Cuban called down so patriotically at that moment, could testify to any love but for Spain.
“Oh, my, yes, Enrique San José,” the man said, stepping back, genuinely impressed. “He’s brilliant, very decent. You must be very proud.”
“Of course she is,” Santiago chimed in as he collected the can of guava shells and the cream cheese and put them in a little sack. “She’s a translator, too—she’s following in his footsteps.”
“Well, not exactly . . .” I tried to explain. Up on the TV screen, a young woman danced with a soldier, the wall’s vulgar graffiti in the background, but transformed: Even in black-and-white, it looked fluorescent, psychedelic, like paisleys now.
“No, no, Enrique San José’s a genius,” the man said. “With all due respect, you can’t possibly touch the sole of his shoe, but it is a noble thing to follow in your father’s footsteps. Do you have a brother?”
I fixed my eyes on the man, who was exactly my height, balding, and dull-skinned. “Excuse me?” I snapped, in English, deliberately, and with a sharp, cold edge to my voice.
A flustered Santiago waved his hand in the man’s face. “What do you know, huh? What do you know? She is the pride and joy of Enrique San José—even he says she is a better translator than he is, okay?” He turned to me with the little sack of groceries. “Give this to your father as a gift. In honor of a free Germany, you don’t pay tonight.”
I protested. “Santiago, you don’t need to . . .”
“And a free Cuba—that’s what’s important . . . a free Cuba,” added the man who had questioned me, his lecturing finger in the air just like Fidel—and my father.
“Next year in Havana!” Santiago shouted, making a tense power salute.
“Next yea
r in Havana!” echoed his chorus of cronies, who stood at anxious attention looking at me.
“Yes . . . next year,” I responded, then quickly exited Cachita’s into the bitter cold of Chicago.
At my parents’ house we sat in front of the television, little portable TV dinner tables before us. I spread out on the couch with my mother while my father sat a few feet away in one of his Cuban-style rocking chairs. My mother, her hair up in a glorious bun of black and sparkling silver, nervously switched channels with the remote control while my father stared dumbfounded, his guava shells drowned in their own syrup, the cream cheese covered with beads of perspiration.
“Why don’t they say something about Cuba? Why don’t they say something about Cuba?” my mother asked, overwrought, her hands rolling the channels up and down in futility. Since Ochoa’s execution in Havana, she’d been obsessed with the island, checking the temperature every day in the Tribune’s weather page, spending hours on end with her ear up to the undulating sounds of short-wave transmissions. “Don’t any one of these newscasters think something’s going to happen in Cuba? Why don’t they have correspondents there?”
I cleared my throat. “Journalists need Fidel’s permission to report from Cuba, Mami, you know that,” I said.
“Even at a time like this, when he might be falling, just like the wall?” She clicked and clicked, the TV a smear of color and light.
My father sat motionless, his hands beached on his thighs, heavy and useless. He stared, just stared, his eyes red, his skin flushed. Every now and then I’d see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
“Papi, are you all right?” I had asked already several times.
“Yes, yes, of course, quite fine,” he had responded, never taking his eyes off the screen as the images of celebration—grown men weeping, families reuniting, the barbed wire like confetti at their feet—continued scrolling with my mother’s wild channel flipping.