Fidel's Last Days

by Roland Merullo

  And slowly, gradually, unstoppably, all of that had brought him here, to the dark front seat of a car on a street near Matanzas.

  Wearily, fueled only by the anger now—he felt sure he’d wasted his life—and by a desire to see Elena’s face one last time, he stood up out of the car and knocked lightly on the door of Julio’s apartment. Elena herself answered, her cheeks streaked with fear. She stepped out, closing the door behind her, and walked away from him along the street, quickly, her shoes tapping in the night like a song of omens. Carlos followed her. She turned down an alley. They passed a pair of lovers there, the man pushing the woman into a doorway, kissing her forcefully, almost violently. Elena went on, out behind the buildings to a dusty playground where the faint moonlight illuminated broken swings and a sagging metal fence.

  She stopped by the set of swings and whirled around. “How could you come here?”

  “I had to.”

  “How could you put us at risk?”

  “You’re already at risk. I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you that if it seems like I will be caught before it happens I will try to get you a message, through Jose if I can, through the clinic. I want you to denounce me.”

  “Denounce you! I couldn’t denounce you. Never! How could you think that?”

  She burst into tears and turned away from him. In the darkness he could see the curve of her back, and he remembered, in a rush of feeling, all the things he loved about her—the tireless efforts to heal, the deep warmth, the brains, the beauty. He put his hand on her shoulder blade, currents of guilt running up and down his arm. He thought: This is what they do to us. “I’m sorry. Sorry for everything, Elena. I thought . . . I wanted to see you before . . .” He moved his hand up to her shoulder and turned her around so that her tear-soaked face was close to his. “I am supposed to do what I am going to do tomorrow,” he said in a whisper. “I am supposed to kill him. I wanted to see you first.”

  “How can you?” she whispered back, but the whisper was a shout in his inner ear. “A man of healing. A man who loves to garden. How can you do such a thing?”

  A thousand words of explanation leapt to his lips. The things he had seen that she had not, the hypocrisy, the opulence, the special fruits, meats, and canned goods for the military, for Party officials, for factory directors, for the likes of him. The jails. Olochon’s cells. He wanted to tell her about Ernesto but she would be disgusted by it, and with him. He said, “When it is over, tomorrow night, please come back. What do I have to gain for myself from doing this? Nothing. I have no ambitions. I don’t want any luxuries. I want the same thing I have always wanted: I want some measure of truth in my life, some measure of goodness in my country. Is that impossible to understand? Does that make me evil?”

  “Killers are killers,” she said. “You can’t kill in the name of goodness, in the name of healing. It rots the soul.”

  “Tomorrow night, come back. If my soul is rotten, you heal me. If things don’t get better, leave me. But don’t curse me yet. I need you not to curse me. I have no one else close to me in this life.”

  She turned away, turned back. He moved to embrace her but she put the palm of her right hand flat against his chest and pushed him firmly away. “It will be the same,” she said in a hoarse, angry whisper. “Whoever is leading you to do this, don’t you see, they will end up the same, or worse. We know what we have now, we can function, we can do some good. Later, afterward, we don’t know. Go. Go away from me. Don’t come here again and put my child and grandchild in danger. Go!”

  Her hoarse, awful “¡Lárgate!” rang in his ears all the way back through the alley, where, in the smell of rotting garbage, the lovers were still half wrestling, half kissing in the doorway. Who was with him now? Who was close beside him? Rincon? Jose? Who were Rincon and Jose? He drove back into the city through a moonlit Caribbean darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Carolina had her clothes on and was out the door of her hotel room within thirty seconds. She found the staircase, sprinted down two flights, pushed through an emergency exit (the alarm sounded for three seconds, then stopped; that was communism, things not working) and slipped across the sandy stretch of brightly lit decorative foliage between the back edge of the hotel and the beach. Staying in the shadows, she circled slowly around to the front side of the building, giving it a wide berth, stopping in the protection of a breadfruit tree or banana plant and then scurrying sideways again into the next patch of shade.

  She had taken only the lipstick tube—lighter red—with the transmitter in it, some money, and the cyanide tablet she had been given, all safely stowed in her skirt pocket now with a handkerchief pressed down on top to keep them in place. As she slipped through the darkness, she tried to step away from herself and analyze things calmly, as she had been trained. The fact that Jose had had a chance to get to a telephone and call her must mean two things: first, he’d gotten safely away from the hotel with the lethal dose; second, to some extent at least, their cover had been blown. State Security had information that had led them, if not directly to her, then at least to the Oriente Hotel.

  Then, as she crouched in the foliage watching the front of the hotel, other possibilities arose in the darkness: Jose was working for State Security but the lovemaking had given him a fleeting moment of sympathy for her. Or it was some neat trick he was playing so she would be apprehended outside the hotel, away from the eyes of the hard-currency-paying tourists. Or he himself was running now, and the dose would be thrown out the window of his car as it sped along some dark coastal road, and Castro would survive again, and all of this—the incredible risk, the expense, the sacrifices of dozens of people on both sides of the Straits of Florida—would have been for nothing.

  She stayed in the trees near the hotel only long enough to see the telltale blinking blue lights of the National Police as the lopsided-looking small trucks pulled up to the front door. When uniformed figures leapt out and hurried along the walk—so much for protecting the tender sensibilities of their foreign guests—she was gone like a deer in dancing shoes.

  She wished only that she had a weapon. They should have thought to let Jose pass a pistol on to her. But, most likely, carrying such a thing into the Oriente would have been almost as problematic for him as carrying it through the Barcelona airport would have been for her. And what would she have done with a handgun anyway, left it as a tip for the chambermaid? Made her living by giving shooting lessons under a new identity in the Havana suburbs? Still, a weapon would have given her some comfort right about now.

  She’d gone only a few hundred meters when she realized that the shoes were going to be a problem. She thought of taking them off and moving along barefoot, but decided against it. Keeping the hotel to her back, and angling away from the access road, she moved deeper into the jungle, swatting at mosquitoes and banana fronds, letting the voices and engine noises fall away behind her and be replaced by the sounds of the Cuban night: a soft wash of surf, the sharp calls of birds she had no name for, the rustle of dead leaves beneath her feet.

  The moon rose. She could not see it yet, but she could sense it. To her right, east, the quality of the darkness changed, making it a little easier to see the large, sharp-edged leaves before they slapped across her face. The western promontory of the Bay of Guanabacoa, the abandoned fishing pier there, the transmitter—in the safety of the Barcelona airport it had all made sense. Here, it looked like a plan riddled with trouble. The pier was five and a half miles away, for one thing, and she had no shoes for walking in the underbrush. And the police were surely in her empty room by now, though they might waste some time searching the rest of the hotel before deciding she’d fled. They might also have had only a general sense of the plan, not tied it to her specifically. Which would be nice.

  She came, abruptly, to a road. It might have been the road from Havana or it might not have been; if it was, it meant she’d already moved too far away from the coast. The headlights of a car surprised her, a
pproaching fast around a curve. She ducked into the trees and dove flat on her face in a musty, soft bed of decayed tropical flora. When the car passed she stood, brushed herself off, then changed direction slightly, using the moon as a guide, keeping it just off her right shoulder, adjusting as well as she could for its steady swing south.

  The going was very slow, exhausting. The footing was uncertain; branches and brambles scratched at her, holding her back, as if they, too, had been charmed by Fidel Castro. Every few minutes she stopped to catch her breath, check her bearings, listen for any sound of pursuers. Her shins, ankles, cheeks, and forehead were already badly scratched. Her dancing dress was torn. Her underwear lay tangled in the hotel sheets. For a moment during one of these pauses, it occurred to her with a sharp stab of pain that if she failed to make it out of Cuba alive, she would not be especially missed. Her parents had passed on; her uncle would know she’d deceived him and would feel a wave of sadness, but the sadness would probably be overwhelmed by his bruised pride and by the sense that he had been correct, that she should have listened to him from the start; the people at the Orchid would replace her with only a little more trouble than it had taken them to find a body double. A few girlfriends in Atlanta might grieve for a while, but there would be no memorial service with teary tributes, no children at her grave. Despite his claims of enduring love, Oscar would quickly move on. Assuming Jose lived, and assuming he wasn’t in the employ of State Security, she’d be nothing more than a wisp of sweet memory in his brain cells, fading month by month.

  Her life—all that education, striving, risk, all that inherited beauty and brains—would amount to one quick exhalation of the universe, one grain of sand among trillions. A quiet sadness wrapped itself like a climbing vine around the fear on her skin. She told herself that if the dose reached Fidel, if she had played a role in ending his reign, then it would have been a good life all the same. Not the worst thing, to die quickly of cyanide poisoning on a beautiful beach, having sacrificed yourself so that people wouldn’t be tortured and enslaved. Not the worst way to go.

  She plowed deeper into the trees, startled once by a flock of birds screeching in the night with a madman’s hilarity. The humid, dense landscape seemed endless, a place that existed beyond the eyes of the Maximum Leader, a secret place known by no one but the native people who had hunted and fished on this soil a thousand years before it was called Cuba. At one point she was slapped on the shoulder by a dangling mango. At another point she heard something crawling or slithering close to her, a low rustle that came within a meter of her ankles, and then, when she scuffed her feet, hurried away. Jutia, lizard, rata, she couldn’t know. If she could get to the pier before sunrise and activate the transmitter, her chances would be slightly better, but as she stumbled along, fighting the dense undergrowth, she grew tired very quickly. It was one thing to train on a track in early-morning Atlanta; something else to work like this in Cuban humidity, with the fear pushing her heartbeat up and the unpredictable earth shifting beneath the wrong kind of shoes. The mojito and the lovemaking and the jet lag didn’t help either. Her breaks—to rest and to listen—began to last longer.

  She wondered if it would be better to stop here, where no soldiers would follow, sleep as best she could, get her bearings by the sun, and make it to the pier by midafternoon when half the island would be at rest.

  After another hour—it was the heart of the night now, three or four A.M. (she never made love with a watch on, that was one of her rules, and she had left it on the bedside table)—she saw a glint of light through the trees. She took a few quiet steps and could see that it was a metal roof touched by the tropical moon. She crept closer. No lights on, no car, no road. It was some kind of fisherman’s hut; maybe she was close to the shore and could work her way along it to the bay. But as she moved toward the hut she heard a small dog start to yap inside the house, then a voice. She waited a few minutes, then crept farther off to the right, north she hoped, toward the water.

  Soon she heard the sound of the surf grow more distinct. The moon had climbed high and begun to tumble off toward the opposite horizon. She was completely exhausted, bloody blisters bubbling out on the soles and sides of her feet, mosquito bites on her face, neck, and arms. A faint light, first whisper of the Latin American dawn, touched the sky above her head.

  She felt as though she could not go another hundred yards. She scooped out a depression in the cool matting of broken leaves and stalks, broke off three banana fronds to use as a kind of blanket, then lay there curled up like a fetus, covered in green and a cool layer of fear, to wait for what the morning would bring.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Carlos did not sleep but lay twisting in the too-large bed, tormented by the enormity of what he was about to do. Every second, the deed seemed to grow more real, its edges sharp, its center a dark purple-black, a monster gnawing at his soul. To keep himself from going completely insane, or letting the fear chase him back into the safe shadows, he thought of Ernesto’s mouth, the man struggling desperately to speak a name that might rescue him. “A-ah. A-ah.” Who was A-ah?

  Eventually he dozed in a fitful, unsatisfying way, his rest torn into strips of horrifying dreams.

  He awoke at the usual hour, bathed, shaved, dressed. At exactly nine o’clock, Jose pulled the black Volga up in front of the building. As usual, he looked as if he hadn’t slept the night before, and Carlos wondered if he’d been spending all these months conspiring, sitting up late with Rincon and the others, whoever those others might be. The stubble on Jose’s cheeks resembled a darker version of the cane stalks after they had been cut and rained upon. The scar on his chin glistened like one loop of river in a jungle, seen from above.

  “Buenos días, Ministro,” Jose said, as he always did, but aside from those words, the driver did not speak until they had driven several blocks. There, just as they were crossing the Río Al-mendares, he turned on the radio, loud music interrupted by government reminders to participate in the Great Victory by keeping the rats out of the apartment houses and old-age homes.

  “Boss,” he said, at last. “The plan has changed again. I have a present for you.”

  “Good. I could use a present.”

  “You didn’t sleep well, I can see.”

  “Hardly at all.”

  “I have just the thing then.” Jose reached inside his sport coat and brought out a large cigar.

  Carlos frowned. It was not exactly the kind of present he’d hoped for at nine A.M. on the morning he was going to assassinate the man millions still thought of as a hero. Jose was smiling at him, glancing back and forth between his boss’s sour expression and the road. “It’s a good cigar,” he said.

  “This morning I can’t joke, Jose.”

  “A fine, a special cigar. Look.” He took his hand from the wheel for a second and pointed to the thin slits down each side. “See?”

  Carlos took the cigar out of his friend’s hand and turned it this way and that. He examined what appeared to be two hairline cracks running on either side of it.

  “You can smoke it, but only a few centimeters down, then put it out. Open it up when you are alone, and you will find the present.”

  “Claro,” Carlos said. His hand had started to tremble. He looked up at Jose, who was not smiling. “Everything went well then?”

  “Not exactly. Someone at the Oriente was arrested. I don’t know who, or how high up. But someone.”

  “That someone will give them someone else, who will give them someone else, and so on.”

  “Exactly,” Jose said, not the smallest trace of optimism in his voice now. His eyes stayed on the road ahead of them, the craziness of the Havana morning spelled out there in the desperately overcrowded, Czech-made, red buses and an odd fleet of old, half-broken cars, some of them well-cared-for cacharros, Fords, Chevies, Studebakers, built in American factories in the fifties; some from Soviet factories in the eighties; some, part of the newer fleet of Italian Fiats.

  �
��How long do you think we have?” Carlos asked him.

  “Long enough.”

  Their route took them not far from the Torture House. Neither man looked in that direction. When Jose pulled up in front of the Ministry, there were a few more soldiers there than usual, but otherwise the place looked the way it always looked—men in white shirts holding briefcases and mounting the stairs, the guards, the star of the Cuban national flag barely moving in the warm morning air. Carlos could not make his hand rise to Jose’s shoulder, could not force even one note of good cheer into his voice. “We have to be at the old residence at noon,” he managed to say.

  Jose moved his eyes so that they rested on him, the weight of the world there. “We will be.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Just before dawn a hard rain fell for ten or fifteen minutes, huge drops smacking against the leaves and palm fronds, waking Carolina from a deep, messy sleep in which she had dreamt of her mother. She scrambled to her feet and tried to take cover against the wide trunk of a breadfruit tree, but it was a tropical downpour, and within seconds she was wet to the skin and shivering. When the rain passed, the air was cool for a short while, then it took on the temperature and consistency of steam. She stopped shivering, but her dress and hair did not dry. She tugged the damp handkerchief out of her pocket and found the cyanide and the lipstick tube and the Cuban bills. Undamaged.

  She drank some of the water that had pooled up on the wider leaves, and found a not-quite-ripe mango for breakfast. Eating it, the sticky juice on her fingers, she thought back to her meal at Mandarin with Uncle Roberto, the texture of the fine tablecloth and napkins, her uncle’s cuff links and starched shirt, the waiter pouring water with a studied deference, the spices of the sauce so perfectly balanced. Such luxury seemed a thousand miles away now, the colorful flickering of a lost world. She was living, at the moment, closer to the way Castro and his tiny band of Sierra Maestra revolutionaries had lived. They had survived on the locals’ generosity—beans, rice, and water—a ragtag, starving, ridiculous group that would, by some improbable twist of fate, chase a strongman dictator off to Santo Domingo.