Fidel's Last Days

by Roland Merullo

  The man tapped her on the shoulder and she turned. He introduced himself as Jose, said he had seen her as soon as she came into the room, smiled, and asked her to dance. The band was playing rumba, and she twirled and touched Jose and let her eyes run across his face. DGI certainly, she thought. So they knew who she was.

  They danced two numbers, and when the music slowed, in spite of what she knew she should do, she stayed on the floor with him and let him hold her loosely and close. He put his mouth near her ear and said, “You dance well. What is your name?”

  “Angelita,” she said.

  “And you are an angelito.” He pulled her closer.

  At the end of this dance, she would find some excuse to get away from him. What a foolish plan it was, not totally controllable. She’d get away from him and let Ulises find some other way to contact her. She wondered if the phone call had been from another conspirator, warning her about this man, warning her away. She cursed Volkes and his excess of confidence, tried to move one hand down and casually brush the pocket of her skirt to be sure the lipstick was in its place. But then, just as the song was ending, the man put his mouth to her ear again and said, “Jose Ulises de Madrid, at your service, angelito.”

  So she danced two more numbers with him, and let him accompany her back to her mango juice. She talked to him over the music, about nothing, trying to listen behind the words, but he might have been any Latino romancing a pretty woman in a bar. He was handsome in the rough, unpolished way she had always liked. His laugh was quiet but sincere, seductive, as if, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, he himself found life to be a happy adventure. She sipped her drink and cautiously observed him. There were two possibilities: He was the real Ulises, the contact to whom she was supposed to pass her lethal dose of lotion; or he was from State Security and they had broken the conspiracy and were playing her for more information now. Either this man would accept the dose from her and disappear into the Cuban night on his treacherous errand, or he’d find a way to get her away from the group and they would arrest her, cart her off, torture her, and then, eventually, kill her.

  But something else was going on. From the beginning of her career, from the first days of her CIA training in a windowless room in northern Virginia, she had been taught the most essential lesson: People are human beings first, and spies second. Human beings first, and soldiers second. Human beings first and government officials second. The greatest of mistakes was to forget the fact that in addition to their official duties, men and women were motivated by their individual psychological makeup, their need for sex, love, admiration, money, revenge, protection, security, approval. Bush, Clinton, Castro, Hussein, Kennedy, Mussolini, Hannibal, all the way back to Pontius Pilate and the Old Testament kings—there was the title and the office, and then, beneath that, buried in the mystery of the human personality, something else. History was the sum total of these “something else’s.”

  And now she felt it in herself. She was there to do a job, and she would do it. But she was a person, a woman, not just an employee of the Orchid, and during that half hour in the bar something was rising up in her from beneath the layers of her own history. Jose Ulises was a bit on the macho side, a bit overly confident. His mannerisms—the sweeping hand gestures, the way the eyebrows and mouth worked together, even the sound of the beautiful language on his tongue—it all reminded her of the boys of Little Havana in Miami, so full of sexuality, so smooth, and yet, where women were concerned, so easily threatened. But he was smart, and tender with her, courteous, respectful. The kind of man who would not feel less of a man because of her career successes, her abilities with a pistol, her courage.

  She decided to trust him. And then it seemed to her during the half hour after that decision was made, that she understood her whole life in a different light. Her attraction to and repulsion from the Cuban culture floated before her in the loud, warm room. If Uncle Roberto wanted the Cuba of his imagination, a place of family warmth, money making and music, then she wanted the Cuban man of her imagination, masculine but yield-ring, confident in himself but allowing her the freedom to be who she was. Oscar had almost been like that. Almost.

  Jose asked her to dance again, and by then she had made her decision. There was more than one way to pass on lipstick to a man.

  She pressed herself gently against him. She let one hand slip down just beneath his belt along the back of his trousers. It was all right: To anyone watching she would seem like just another European tourist letting herself go in the tropics, having her fling before heading back to the routine of home. But she was serving two masters now.

  When the band took a break, she held onto Jose’s hand and tugged him in the direction of the short stretch of hallway where the elevators were. There, for appearances’ sake, and for the sake of something else, she put a hand behind his head and pulled his mouth down to hers. Jose seemed surprised, but only at first. It had been a very long time since she’d kissed anyone; years, a lifetime, since she’d been kissed like this. When they separated, she saw her neighbor from the bus ride walking past, trying not to look at them, and then looking, catching Carolina’s eye and offering a conspiratorial smile.

  Perfect, she thought.

  Then she and Jose were alone in the elevator. Carolina rubbed the seat of his pants—there were cameras trained on them, perhaps. They said nothing. Upstairs at last, she fumbled with the key at her door. Inside, she wondered again about cameras, about microphones, so she whispered to him when they were in the room with the door locked: “Quiet.”

  “Sí,” he said. But his voice was thick. He had not expected this kind of good fortune.

  She kissed him again and he unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall. She put her hands inside his shirt, took off his pants, pushed him toward and then onto the bed, and sat on top of him, moving in a slow rhythm, without haste, without violence. She pretended to herself that this was going to be the last night of her life, the last man she would ever make love with, and that he was her dream lover, future husband, father of her as yet unborn angelitos. He seemed to be pretending, too, turning her into someone else in his imagination. Or perhaps not. When her shirt was off and she leaned down so he could take her breasts in his mouth, he kissed and sucked as though they had done this together many times. There was fire there, but not the harsh flame of lust.

  When it had burned itself out, she was surprised to notice that a deep warmth remained. She lay down on top of him, then beside him, and he turned and put his mouth against her ear and said, in that beautiful language: “Una cosa hermosa.” Something beautiful.

  “Sí,” she said. “Something beautiful in the midst of pain.”

  “I cannot stay,” he said, after some time had passed, enough time. “I want to.”

  She rolled over on top of him and kissed him, the damp skin of their chests pressing together. She dropped her mouth close to his ear and said: “In the pocket of my skirt. On the floor next to the bed. A lipstick container.”

  He squeezed her against him. He said: “Acuerdate de mí.” Remember me. And then she lay there alone with her face in the pillow and listened to him sit up and rustle the cloth of her clothes for a moment in the darkness. He went into the bathroom, used the toilet, quickly washed himself, and dressed. He touched her once on her bare back before he left, the touch that had been missing from her life, and then the door clicked quietly closed and it was done.

  It was done. But a sadness washed over her. She could still feel the warmth between her legs, and something else. The steel shield she had set up around her heart wasn’t working the way it usually did. She had seen too much of the evil of the world, too much deceit. It had infected her, but the touch of Jose’s skin had been like a cure for that. The lotion that killed all pain.

  She drifted along on a sea of memories, not quite awake and not exactly asleep. She did not know how long she lay there like that, half an hour perhaps, before the phone rang next to the bed. Another hang up, she thought.
More treachery. She did not want to answer it, did not want to be pulled back into that world. It rang again, then a third time. She rolled over and lifted the receiver to her ear. Jose’s voice. “Get out,” he said. “Now. Immediately.” And the line went dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Carlos ate his first meal of the day alone in the apartment, just as darkness fell. He did not know how he was going to get through the night and the following morning. He believed now, after his hour with Fidel, that he would probably be able to do what it was he had been instructed to do. Shoot the man, no, he could not; he did not think he could ever shoot anyone again, after what had happened with Ernesto in the Montefiore Prison. Certainly not at close range like that, in the head. But rub lotion on an old forehead, knowing it would kill the person who had once been his hero, knowing what that hero had become, how he had failed his people? Yes, now he believed he could do that. He just was not sure he could live through the hours that led up to doing that.

  For a time, he paced the four rooms of his apartment, but the memories there—of Teresa, of Elena—haunted him. He took a cigar out of the box on his bureau and smoked it, something neither woman had ever wanted him to do in those rooms. He paced, smoked, felt the visions rise up around him like a circus of demons: Rincon would be the new president, and he, Carlos, the great national hero . . . or he would remain in his current position in anonymity; or the plot would fail and he’d become a national disgrace, imprisoned, prodded with electric shocks in the Havana Psychiatric Hospital until he gradually lost his mind. Elena and possibly even her son would be thrown in jail, the grandchild taken by the state so that it would have a proper upbringing. Jose would save him; Jose would betray him. Fidel Castro would prove to be immortal. Olochon would somehow twist things around and become president for life and the island would sink into despair, another Haiti. The United States would invade, again, or the change in regime after Fidel’s death would mean only a return to a different kind of slavery in which most Cubans would still be living in poverty. They would be serving a different elite, democracy on its lips, and a chosen few, a different chosen few, would have every imaginable luxury.

  These images swirled around him like acrid smoke. When he thought they would suffocate him, he went down the three flights of stairs and out onto the street. He heard sirens in the night. A child crying through an open window. Music. He walked to his car and opened the door, thinking, at first, that he would only sit there, and then, that he would only drive around the city for a while to calm his nerves.

  But once he was actually behind the wheel and moving, he knew where he was going. Elena’s son lived in Matanzas, an hour east of Havana along the northern coast. He did not know if she had gone to denounce him, to ask her son whether she should denounce him, or just to get away from him, but she had been the only real warmth in his life these last years, and he could not do what he was about to do without seeing her one final time.

  In order to get to Matanzas, he had to drive along the road that led to the Oriente Hotel. That could not be helped. In the event that he was stopped, it would be natural enough to say that he was going to pick up his woman, who was visiting her son and grandchild. The Revolution had not yet outlawed such gestures of familial love.

  He drove through the dark city—men and women and a few children on the corners talking, playing music, having a simple meal outdoors in order to escape the heat of their homes. Such things had not yet been outlawed.

  Soon he was in the country, the moon rising amid a wash of stars in the black sky, dark little huts by the side of the rutted road, shadows of palm trees, and banana fronds waving like arms warning him to go back, go back.

  As he was passing the access road to the Oriente Hotel, he saw a twinkling of lights there, the famous pale blue lights of the National Police. His stomach tightened. He drove on. He thought he saw something large moving in the dark foliage by the side of the road, just a flash of something, he could not be sure, a soldier on patrol, a beggar ducking into the shadows, a peasant selling mother-of-pearl, a thief. He slowed for just an instant, but the shadow disappeared. There was nothing to do but drive on. If the plan had already failed, they would soon find him. If he knew they were looking for him, he would tell Elena to denounce him, save herself. Perhaps it was already too late for that gesture.

  Elena’s son, Julio, lived with his dark-haired wife and their infant son in a two-room flat on the outskirts of Matanzas. Carlos had offered, more than once, to use his influence to get the family a larger apartment, closer to Havana. But Julio was as idealistic as his mother. He’d become an architect with the intention of improving the living conditions of the poor, designing buildings that weren’t ovens in the middle of the day, that didn’t start falling apart the moment they were completed. Julio and his mother were real revolutionaries, real communists. They were, Carlos thought, what he had been at the beginning.

  He parked a block away from the building and sat there, staring through the windshield, waiting to see if State Security had followed him, or anticipated him. But the street was quiet, only a radio playing a rumba faintly in the distance. If Elena had revealed anything about the conspiracy to Julio and his wife, then Carlos would be the devil walking in on them, a kind of deadly plague threatening their calm lives. He thought back to the years when he and Teresa had been idealistic and newly married. He’d gone to medical school, the way Julio had gone to architecture school, with the intention of treating the poor. He’d spent two years on a sugar plantation in Nuevitas, near Camagüey, where the Party leader had been a woman—a good woman, not one of these ubiquitous officials out to line their pockets, but someone who wanted to make the lives of those who labored a bit easier. This woman, Liliana Morro, had encouraged him to become active in the Party. People liked him, she said, admired him. He was a natural leader.

  He worked hard. Teresa, a nurse, had worked hard beside him. They’d turned the tragedy of their childlessness into a passion for helping others.

  Because health conditions at the sugar collective improved so dramatically after his arrival, someone in some director’s office had new statistics to boast about, and a newspaper reporter had been sent to do a story on the young, idealistic doctor-and-nurse team. The story had caught the eye of Alejandro Fernandez Lella, who had then been in charge of health for the province of Camagüey. Fernandez Lella had offered Carlos a job as his assistant, convincing him by telling him how much good he could do and by creating a position for Teresa. After a few days of doubt, Carlos had accepted. They worked hard, they believed in the principles of the Revolution—sharing, helping the workers, defending the nation against outsiders who wished them harm; they believed Fidel Castro was a kind of Latin saint. When Fernandez Lella took his pension, Carlos—only thirty-three—had been promoted to the head position. The health of the province became a national bragging point. There were more newspaper articles, more awards, accolades, even international attention. Fidel visited the area and asked for an interview with the young doctor who was doing so much good. On that day, during a visit to Nuevitas, the Maximum Leader had been troubled by a stomach virus. Carlos met with him, accepted his praise as modestly as he could, took the small risk of prescribing ginger tea and boiled tapioca, an old folk remedy. Fidel had trusted him and the remedy had quickly gotten rid of the symptoms. A few weeks later Carlos was summoned to Havana to work in the Ministry of Health, a midlevel position in charge of overseeing the web of rural clinics. Little by little, without especially trying to, simply by working well, causing no trouble, and developing an instinct for office politics, he had climbed high up on the government ladder. So high that the ladder itself began to wobble beneath him.

  It was then that the first seeds of doubt, planted long before, began to sprout. From his high post he had a clearer view of what he had not allowed himself to see earlier: how Party officials and members of the National Police lived, and how most of the workers lived. In some places there was not even enough
painkiller for the simplest procedures. All this was blamed on the blockade, naturally—what North Americans called “the embargo.” And the blockade was, in truth, partly to blame. But there was blame to be spread everywhere. Carlos began to think of approaching Fidel directly, personally, telling the great man what he had seen. But he was saved from this error by the first assistant minister of health, a man named Baleste, who did exactly that and for his efforts was reassigned to Niquero for ten years of giving injections to prostitutes near the port there. Carlos was promoted to first assistant in the outspoken Baleste’s place. He did what he could. He kept his mouth closed. He watched Fidel in the meetings, talking and talking, grandiose, charismatic, tireless, sly, shrewd. He started to become aware of the steady tone of falsehood behind everything the man said. His naïveté was replaced, day by day, meeting by meeting, with a nagging cynicism. He had heard of Olochon, of course, but now he came to know him well.

  Then Teresa fell ill with breast cancer. And nothing, not even the best care the nation afforded, could save her. He watched her wither and die in front of his eyes, and his thoughts were only personal then; everything was secondary to this slow, agonizing decay. It wasn’t until she had been gone for more than a year, it wasn’t until after he’d met Elena, that the slow-building anger in him reached a boiling point. He heard about the dissidents being arrested, then starved or beaten in prison for a few words of criticism. He saw what happened to the balseros, the raft people, desperate enough to risk dying of thirst, drowning, or shark-bite in the Straits of Florida.